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Should the Gem of Cloaking artifact be changed or removed?
Razmael
Administrator, Immortal
Hi all, we'd like to hit you with a quick poll about the Gem of Cloaking artifact. I want to open with a disclaimer that nothing about this indicates any sort of promise that the artifact will undergo changes, but this poll is just to serve as an information-gathering resource.
Gem of Cloaking hides you from the WHO list. This is problematic because it gives the impression that the game is a lot smaller than it actually is. To veterans, this isn't too much of a problem because you're generally familiar with the artifact and the real population counts. A new player isn't going to have this information or familiarity with the game. In fact when I use a mortal shell for testing, I'm often struck by how empty the QW/BW list looks, compared to what I see what I'm on my admin shell.
To this point, we're taking a serious look at the artifact and how it affects the game's health. This was likewise recognized as a problem in Achaea, and they changed the effect of their Gem of Cloaking to the following as their solution (as taken from their help file):
Thanks!
Gem of Cloaking hides you from the WHO list. This is problematic because it gives the impression that the game is a lot smaller than it actually is. To veterans, this isn't too much of a problem because you're generally familiar with the artifact and the real population counts. A new player isn't going to have this information or familiarity with the game. In fact when I use a mortal shell for testing, I'm often struck by how empty the QW/BW list looks, compared to what I see what I'm on my admin shell.
To this point, we're taking a serious look at the artifact and how it affects the game's health. This was likewise recognized as a problem in Achaea, and they changed the effect of their Gem of Cloaking to the following as their solution (as taken from their help file):
So the question we need to ask, do you all think Gem is as problematic as we do? If so, how would you like to see it changed? Please let us know via the poll, and comment if you have more to add.
- When activated, removes you from the who, clwho, and bw/qw lists.
- Also removes you from the help city and house induction lists.
- Lasts for 10 minutes when activated, after which it cannot be used
again for an hour. You may freely deactivate and reactivate the gem during
its 10 minute duration without affecting the cooldown.
- Ownership of a gem removes your location from being visible via
THIRDEYE on the who lists even if the concealment power is inactive.
- While on Treacherous Planes, the gem's concealment power is permanently
in effect. This does not require activation and incurs no cooldown.
Note: This does not remove you from HWHO, or CWHO. Similarly, it
does not remove you from TRADEWHO for mutual allies, friends,
citymates, and housemates.
- Examining the gem will reveal the method of activation.
Thanks!
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
THIRDEYE on the who lists even if the concealment power is inactive.
- While on Treacherous Planes, the gem's concealment power is permanently
in effect. This does not require activation and incurs no cooldown.
I think you should still be visible on WHO, just your location is absent.
You should still be visible on HWHO, CWHO, GWHO, HELP files, etc.
Treacherous plane is fine as is.
If I dont want to be seen I go to a hidden room or to my haven. (hiddenroom) or one of the BILLION(kind of an exaggeration) other ways to hide yourself (insert list here)
Personally, i'd rather be around and visible for interaction, and its easy enough to say, ((OOC: Hey im just checking in from work, not really here))
If I am not able to interact, I feel thats an appropriate response and I have never had any complaints.
Edit: Im not of the mind to fully refund/delete, because maybe theres some fun things we could do, so give the option to keep the changes or tradein once its been fleshed out, I think there are some cool potential ideas that could be done with the gem.
I voted for the Achaea version, and I would probably still buy one. I would support deleting them entirely as well.
While I am all for creating conflict, this game thrives on both the ability to have conflict but also the ability to disengage from it and enjoy everything else.
I believe that there is a difference between conflict and toxicity. The reason why so many good people quit the game in the past and still do today is because of certain kinds of toxicity which are only marginally related to PK situations and wholly related to other situations stemming from stalking, rumors, stealing, etc., general bad morals.
So I vote to change it to help the health of the game as I was always conflicted about being a GM and not being visible on QW and HELP SENTAARI but I also don't care for people who spend their time doing nothing but: "Oh, look at where they went, look at who they sat with."
It creates a way for someone to find information about you without ever engaging with you - not a good thing.
It's these things that make people tired of playing and want to leave.
My suggestion would be to convert the THIRDEYE skill into an artifact and delete it from Vision while having the Gem of Cloaking remove your location only and keep you visible on WHO. Among all the other Achean listed changes to it, of course.
A note, though, that since this gem is really the ONLY arti more powerful than divinesight. (hidden rooms not withstanding) so, maybe Improve the artifact version of Chameleon to also keep your true identity concealed from divinesight.
The Achaea version of the arti solves these problems by removing your location from the WHO list, merely showing your name.
Personally, I have this gem, and I enjoy being able to use it. It's super handy! I LOVE being able to be a ghost if I want to. But, I honestly think the game would be better off without it. The Achaea version seems okay, but I would prefer to see people's names showing up on WHO*with* their location except for during those active ten minute periods.
I wouldn't mind having the power be replaced with a 'scrambling' effect. Similar to chameleon, this would change your name on WHO/QW, though with this version, you would have a different name every time someone checked. This makes it a lot harder to pinpoint who's who. You could do the same thing with the thirdeye concealment, or just keep that invisible. Since all cloaked people would have access to the same internal pool of names, you wouldn't be able to say 'Oh, only Bene has that name in their system, so he's definitely online' or anything like that - plus with how popular the artifact is, there'd be enough cloaked people around at any time that it would be impossible to figure out who's who.
Would make the chameleon racial power useless, but it allows for anonymity without shrinking the who list. My 2c.
Owning the gem will remove your location ONLY from the who list.
Example:
Baroness Antheia E. Ashaela-Storm CIJ's Snow Tigress (Atop the Eleusian Gatehouse)
Mycen Xanatov
Lupinox Storm, Librarian of the Court (The Crossroads)
If you owned a gem, to someone with thirdeye, you would be like Mycen. When you activate the power, you disappear ENTIRELY. So the above would become:
Baroness Antheia E. Ashaela-Storm CIJ's Snow Tigress (Atop the Eleusian Gatehouse)
Lupinox Storm, Librarian of the Court (The Crossroads)
No Mycen (for 10 minutes).
---
People have wondered how hoods interact with gems of cloaking. In Achaea, they decided that hoods were counter-productive to the goal of fostering conflict via their ability to hide people, and so their effect was changed to the follow:
The Veil wearer will also gain access to FULLSENSE! This allows you to detect the presences of all adventurers in the same area as
you. If you are a class that has Fullsense already, the balance cost for using this ability will be reduced.
In Achaea, both the gem and hood changes came in at the same time, so there wasn't any issue of, 'well, how will new gem interact with old hood?'
Not everyone wants to be so easily found by everyone all the time and artifacts like the gem and hood make that possible for those who care enough to spend the credits.
Also, sure, there's a number showing how many are there, but the list of names might entice more people to stick around and seek some special people out rather than logging out. That would add to the list!
- Delete Hood
- Change Gem of Cloaking (Delete is a better option tbh)
I don't like the Achaea change at all. @Steele's idea of scrambling seems like an interesting direction but in case that's not an option another solution could be to replicate the old grove ability (I think it was the Druid...maybe it was old Sentinel... whatever. Oldbies remember!) where you mark a location with the gem and you'll always appear at that location on the who list. You could also make it upgradeable so that if you're actually IN the room you marked, you gain additional benefits like that of the hood artifact and the gem's current effect of who removal. Another upgrade could be allowing you to change marked rooms once per howling. Regardless - this way Chameleon can still be useful and people can still have agency on how easily they can be tracked but if they are going to go off grid for whatever reason they have to actively dedicate themselves to a specific location.To be honest though, there are enough room options out there to satisfy needs for privacy and what not that these artifacts aren't needed and ought to be deleted.
/.0002 cents, but I would imagine I may not be the only one that runs into this same kind of scenario.
i dislike both the hood and gem personally - both for the reasons stated above regarding population perception, but also because the mobile invisibility field is a huge advantage in group combat.
Omei gives the corpse of a headless cadaver to you.
Omei offers you a quick wink.
While there are a lot of things to engage in, one of the core things about this mud is that it's a roleplaying game. Anything that exists to circumvent interaction for long stretches of time, and allow you to go about your daily routine without being noticed, really detract from this core function.
Those are my 2 sovereigns.
However, the division between 'change it' and 'delete/refund' is very evenly split. So here's what we're looking at doing:
1) We will offer a full credit refund for the Gem of Cloaking to anybody that wants it.
2) The Gem of Cloaking will no longer remove you from the who-list, but instead conceal your room on it against those who are using the thirdeye defence.
3) The 'Tulahuar' passphrase will work to turn off or back on the room-concealing effect.
4) The room feature "HiddenRoom" that does the same effect as Gem will also now only conceal your room name on the who-list, instead of removing you from it. No toggle will exist for the room version.
From the comments in the thread, most people who voted to change it wanted the who-list room-cloaking effect. None of the other of Achaea's changes really seemed to appeal much based on responses.
There was a few other ideas and comments in the thread I want to touch on:
- We don't think the name-scrambling (aka chameleon effect) was appropriate for the Gem since there's a couple of different artifact versions of the chameleon tattoo already (arti tattoo, and the relic). We understand the idea was for it to change each time QW is checked, but that just honestly sounds like it'd get obnoxious for the frequent QW checkers.
- Hood of Elusion and Gem of Cloaking interaction remains intact with this change, as Elusion only prevents seek skills from discerning your location, and your room still showed up on the who-list if you didn't have Gem. We know Hood is a hot topic for some of you, but would like to request any discussion of this to be made in a new topic. It's currently not something we have plans to look at.
- There was a suggestion to let you mark a room with the Gem so it showed your room always at that marked location. This unfortunately overlaps with an existing auction artifact, and the similar Shapeshifter skill.
We'll let that sit for a few more days to allow comments before we implement the changes, but we'll be looking to have this done by the end of the week (if not earlier).
Can we remove room features for a full/partial refund? I have never tried
I did discover while looking into that, that HiddenRoom was bugged and duplicating ObscuringFog's effects in addition to its own. And this code seems to have been in place for at least 8+ years now. Yikes!
With that in mind, we'll approach HiddenRoom in the following ways:
1) Rooms that have both ObscuringFog and HiddenRoom set on it will have HiddenRoom removed and refunded appropriately.
2) Rooms that just have HiddenRoom on it will get set to ObscuringFog. If you decide you don't want this, you can contact us for an appropriate credit or gold refund.
Hi.
And done!