AMIA ARCHIVE • View topic

LedaMarie wrote:

My saying I lik the gold drops is stemming from having a top CL of 18. I have no 30s, no ability to -get- boss loot. I started all my chars but Yeke-Chinua after the gold drops were removed, and I -hated- levelling them.

Personally, I had a lot of fun levelling my characters. I had to come up with ways to earn gold, instead of it just passively accumulating. Scarce resources promote RP. And purely on the gaming side of the issue, I can't imagine anyone would disagree with me that a game is only worth playing if it's difficult. If there's no challenge, there's no game. And Amia is not just a sandbox for creative writing, it's a game too.

It's not a huge issue either way. I just think Amia pampers its players too much. Adventuring should be a difficult and dangerous chore, and you should be terrified and experience real adrenaline when things don't go your way.

I detest levelling. I also imagine I'm an extreeeeeeeme minority, and I can deal with that.

If I could gain XP exclusively through RP, as fast as I get it through grinding, I would never grind again, save to occasionally get some gold or items.

Thus, not having to grind twice as much to get gold and XP is, to me, a huge benefit.

LedaMarie wrote:

I detest levelling. I also imagine I'm an extreeeeeeeme minority, and I can deal with that.

If I could gain XP exclusively through RP, as fast as I get it through grinding, I would never grind again, save to occasionally get some gold or items.

Thus, not having to grind twice as much to get gold and XP is, to me, a huge benefit.

The point could be made that being of a high level isn't a necessity. I mean, my level 30 character is very poor and I don't mean in the only a few million sense... I mean less coin then my level 12. This ismostly because I don't grind with her... I don't boss hunt and the few epic items I have (very few) I gained mainly through RP.

If Rp is your thing then not being aa super death machine can work in your favor(I know the job system is great in this regard).

Most of my chars are very basic builds that couldn't hope to contend in the PVE arena. But when you're a level 4 mage, around epic magi, you feel....well....inadequate. You aren't useful for much, and there's not much RP, in my experience, to be had.

Just like being a lvl 5 fighter leaves you feeling a little limp-dicked when a single person comes back from the Spires with $3 million in epic lootz.

LedaMarie wrote:

I detest levelling. I also imagine I'm an extreeeeeeeme minority, and I can deal with that.

No, you're not. xD A lot of people hate it too! There's a level range that most of my characters have gotten stuck in since it's doable until you hit that point. And you're strong enough you have enough HP to run away from most normal area-to-area mobs you could potentially encounter in your travels without being mauled in a single hit.

Leveling in PvE can be a bore at times, yes, but that doesn't stop people from going up in level. That's what the Job System is good for, an alternative to leveling (and making gold, too!). So really there's no excuse ;p

I don't like leveling when I can't find people to party with. When I do, then I usually don't mind. It's fun unlocking new goodies at each character level, and watching my characters grow and evolve not only through RPing and partying but as their build fleshes out and they mature (so to speak).

Naivatkal wrote:

Leveling in PvE can be a bore at times, yes, but that doesn't stop people from going up in level. That's what the Job System is good for, an alternative to leveling (and making gold, too!). So really there's no excuse ;p

Wait, your answer for grinding is to grind an even more boring part of the game?

I like the job system a lot. But it is a lot duller than combat in NWN, obviously. (The job system can be more fun, when you have people to RP with. But then, hunting is also more fun and a lot easier.) I doubt the job system can seriously influence your XP past the first few levels, unless you grind specific jobs in specific locations.

Regards
Ts

The 'hunter' jobs are a great combination of the two. You have to kill thinks to reach your objective and then you get a nice little gold/xp boost... and depending on the job you get something cool to sell on.

TBH, the characters I have that are the least fun to level have rp-accurate jobs that are just not that lucrative, XP speaking. Sure, I -could- make her an orcharder. But I'm thinking that wouldn't fit with a weak little wizard who can barely sling an apple.

yes it does... he's also an alchemist and needs to make pure alcohol and Medicinal Wine to sell.

Dark Immolation wrote:

Dieu_Le_Fera wrote:

How doesn't it make IC sense though? I agree it shouldn't be per kill, but per mob that you get some gold. In PnP what is the first thing you do after you kill an Orc warband? Look for loot!

It's the per kill thing that I'm talking about not making sense. Yeah, you kill an orc here, a beetle here, maybe somehow they have a few coins on them. Just like that might have an odd item they picked up from some unwary traveler(read: lootdrop).

But it's foolish to think that every creature you slay is carrying a handful of coins at their time of death. That's my IC trouble with it, not the fact that they can, but that they all do. IMO, gold drops would be better handled just like loot drops, I.E. you find gold from spawns the same way you do as items, in their invo. Likely at a higher rate than the 5% for loot though, maybe 10 or even 15%. What's done is done though, and I'm willing to live with it.

Well then if they each shouldn't get gold drops, then let me loot the armor and axe, or the double headed glowing mace, or whatever weapon the monster was using...I can see it right there, but I can't pick it up.. I envision the gold drop as something useful the enemy had. Not that I want a Diablo II or Oblivian style game where I carry EVERYTHING back to town to sell...but if that is all I gather...so be it.

What if you break the weapon when the block? What if their armor is ripped to shreds or beyond sellable repair? That's the problem with looking at it like that. I'm not saying it's always like that, but you can't count on having something worthwhile every time.

It is possible to make a very realistic loot bin with a lot of work. Rats only drop rat fur to exchange for gold, goblins only what ever type of armor and weapon they use, and other spawns what ever is appropriate for them (80% drop rate to reflect damaged ones). Keep the current lootbin as an addition for creatures who can have something special on them to mix it up. Then you could also script an on death script that would give a chance for gold, but only if appropriate for the spawn.

However, you would practically need to look at every hunting area on both amia a and b. It may upset the balance of spawns in the gold aspect, and then you need the creature balancers to correct something that worked well before. It could also lead to a change in the game economy. While it can be very nice for atmosphere, it will reduce our server space, as it would likely mean new item blueprints of the size the server likely has at the moment. Additionally, it would take a lot of time from the design team that I think can be spent on projects that will be a lot more fun for the playerbase.

On the topic of the jobsystem: It has a group of jobs that you can level with quite well. Burglar, Herbalist, Orchader, etc. What would I like to see is that:

- Academic jobs (Arcanist, Engineer, ...) get an xp rate of dripple what it is now to make them more useful.
- Hunter jobs (Big Game Hunter, Exorcist, ...) get an xp rate of twice their current one.
- Service jobs (Physician, Teacher, ...) get an xp rate of twice their current one.

I doubt they would be as good as orchader, but the change would allow encourage people to use them and less people take orchader when it does not really fit their Banite Overlord to be picking apples all day.

I also think the jobsystem is where the playerbase can do a lot of work, and put their money where their mouth is. But I am only assuming here, and a member of the staff should correct me if I am wrong. I know when it was added, players were encouraged to write up descriptions for the jobs. If the arcane players like Grymia and Nivo work on some nice new ideas for the arcanist (leyline book?) and druid players like Amarice nice research material for Botanists (fancy hippy lore), the academic jobs can also be a lot more fun. Old players like Gers and Lutra could help with the archeologist + historian job, to have nice old lore of the server history uncovered with it.

Re: Job system

I think you got it backwards. The jobs that give grind-worthy amounts of XP should be nerfed, not the other ones enhanced. Quoting myself from the job system FAQ, that I volunteered to write:

http://www.amiaworld.net/about/ds_j_faq.php wrote:

The general idea is that adventures make you an adventurer, not a full-time job as a tailor.

More on topic: The job system can already give enough money to help a struggling low-level character buy a few potions after a streak of unsuccessful PvM attempts. Some starting positions are better suited to this than others, of course, but in general it's possible even without investing in any job.

So I guess we could do away with gold drops. I like Amia's difficulty level as it is, though ... Low-level PvM is already dangerous because the random effects are much stronger felt than in higher levels. (A single crit can kill you, a tiny bit of lag can kill you, a few unsuccessful runs and careless spending mean you ran out of money ... )

If this is all about raising the difficulty of the game, I would rather do so in the level 10+ range where players actually have some control over the randomness. By then, having enough gold for buying a few bandages isn't the most important thing anymore, of course.

Regards
Ts

If you lower the xp amounts on the high xp jobs, or you up the xp on the low xp jobs does not make a great difference to me personally. I would like to see the jobs as a whole have less great gaps in their use to leveling. So if you make the level 3 burglar get 75 to 150 xp, the academic jobs 225 - 450 xp and the hunter and service jobs 150 - 300 xp, or if you make it 25-50, 75-150, 50-100 is only a question of how xp effective they will be as a whole, but the ratio changes still would make them more competetive towards one another.

I think the quote is to a degree misleading, even if it is a staff written one. It is very true that making hats will not make you stronger as a warrior, priest, or mage, but if you take the arcanist job or the burglar job that will improve your skills as a mage or a rogue. The same can be said for many other ones. The job system was meant to give an alternative to leveling, though never one just as effective or even more effective.

Totally agree with HoneySnuggle in that it is nice when having a job that fits your character nets you good xp. If people want to abuse the system by making fruit juice then it's their loss. That said, when you're not in a party, the job system allows you to still get a good xp gain without risking a nasty xp/gold loss from solo man death.

Note, I might be completely out of touch with Amia because I had this year-long break ... But the job system, I feel confident to comment on unless it has changed entirely since its introduction.

Honeydew Snugglepoof wrote:

I think the quote is to a degree misleading, even if it is a staff written one.

To clarify: The FAQ wasn't written by someone official, only me. Disco didn't complain though.

Honeydew Snugglepoof wrote:

if you take the arcanist job or the burglar job that will improve your skills as a mage or a rogue.

True, up until you are a rogue that breaks into normal houses routinely. That's far from epic.

If you want more difficult things, you probably have to RP them. If you get DCs from this (I know, DC gain is another can of worms ...), you can spend them on leveling or other benefits for your character.

Honeydew Snugglepoof wrote:

The job system was meant to give an alternative to leveling, though never one just as effective or even more effective.

Was it? This time from the more official page:

http://www.amiaworld.net/about/ds_j_system.html wrote:

It was made to give characters more depth and to negate the drawbacks of the IC irrelevance of most NWN character classes.

That's what it was made for. It's about RP.

There is this, though:

http://www.amiaworld.net/about/ds_j_system.html wrote:

You will (probably) gain gold and xp and some simple items.

Read that carefully. Does it sound anything like "alternative to leveling" to you?

The job system makes sense for RP. It has some minor game-benefits. That also makes sense for a low-level struggling to make a living like a commoner. Should it matter mechanically to an epic character at all? I don't think so.

The current job system can obviously be abused (I've been an orcharder, too), but I would rather see it be more abuse-proof in higher levels. For lower levels, I really like its mechanical benefits as they are now (with the exception of the grind jobs, which should just have an XP/gold cap per reset or some such).

But oviously, this is all just my opinion.

Regards
Ts

I see the job system as more an alternate way of getting gold at early levels rather than a way to gain xp, even though I have leveled my rogue on several occasions only using the burglar job.

That aside, I did really like the change of doing away with gold drops. It did make teh game more fun, the leveling less of a boring chore and more of an exciting and very risky way of increasing a bolds character wealth. Here are some of the observations I made for instance:

1) When gold spawns were taken away, the usage of potions dropped significantly in the parties I were in, and consequently IC interaction during runs increased because the characters had to coordinate because of increased vulnerability for all party members. More time was spent discussing tactics, which also made characters come more alive in their own right

2) It was easier to find a party, people now realized that there is safety in numbers. Another reason for this, I believe, is that gold drops from monsters are divided on each character in party, so that while a soloer would get f.ex. 25 gold per Trog slain, a six man party would only get around 4 each

3) The atmosphere was better, because things were harder. Leveling is still easy, way to easy, but removing gold helped a lot in terms of making loot drops a pleasent surprise and something for chars to be joyous about. Now I don't even need to use the job system. A single run trough the trogs and I have enough to buy all the potions I need, and thus even less reason for interacting with others.

As the DM Team gets the other changes into place, I hope the gold drops will be removed once again. It was a good change, and I already miss it. It actually induced me to create several new characters.

I agree that the removal of gold drops made things more fun, exept for low-level characters. I leveled 3 characters, one a rogue to about level 12 during the time of no gold drops, and it was pretty difficult. New players trying out Amia won't want to stay if they can't aquire gold at low-levels and they probably don't know where to buy the best equipment when they need to. The low-levels really need something more if the gold drops are removed again.

At least to me the gold drop removal was a good thing precisely because it hit the worst at low levels. Amia is the only server I have played on that give gold drops for each kill, so I highly doubt that is going to scare away new players

QPR wrote:

At least to me the gold drop removal was a good thing precisely because it hit the worst at low levels. Amia is the only server I have played on that give gold drops for each kill, so I highly doubt that is going to scare away new players

But it did.

I've never understood the mentality of quantity over quality, to be honest. Oh well.

IronAngel wrote:

I've never understood the mentality of quantity over quality, to be honest. Oh well.

Wait, so if you like gold per kill, for whatever reason, you're not a quality player? I'm not sure how else you are supposed to interpret this statement.

The two aren't separable in this context, I think, Iron. I know at least two other players who I think are decent RPers who play on Amia because they saw that the player count was consistently higher than everywhere else. That's why I'm here myself: when I was looking for a place to play, I just logged into the server with the most people logged in at that moment. I didn't know anything about any of them, other than player count. That's what brought me to Amia: the suspicion that having more people around would result in a better chance of finding some fun and decent RP. I've never played anywhere else, before or since.

The point being, you can't dismiss quantity as irrelevant to quality. The correlation between the two isn't perfect and direct, but there's definitely a correlation.

I'd like to see the gold drops removed again if there is a little something to help out starting characters.

Well, my point was that Amia has always been too heterogenous and uncertain of what it wants. In trying not to drive anyone away, it fails to do great in any one aspect, too. Some people want to play a challenging adventure game, others want a sandbox. So let's make the grinding easy; nobody gets a fun challenge, but they still have to do the boring grind. By sitting on the fence you crap on both sides.

But yes, I do think that if you don't like to adventure, you're probably not the ideal type of player for an adventure server. That's my personal, not-responsible-for-anything, opinion. I wouldn't say "go away" but I would say "deal with it."

I'm not trying to be overly critical, though. There's no easy answers to maintaining a stable playerbase, let alone choosing which way to take the server. I have no doubt that if all my ideas were implemented, Amia would lose many of its players. It would also become more fun, but that's not a price many are willing to pay - especially without a unanimous agreement of what "fun" is.

It strikes me that there are players who don't care at all for the actual game- they just want to role-play, and may as well be playing a different game without any combat involved. There are many of these players, and they have a loud voice, ...but they are not the majority. Obviously there is no pleasing everyone with any new change, but I think this server should be more difficult, because it makes it all more fun. Personally, if you don't enjoy fighting monsters- you should play a different game.

I want to play on hard mode.

Murex wrote:

I want to play on hard mode.

Trashcan all your gold. Only use items you find. Trashcan stuff you can't use, don't sell it. Play without using some item slots. Use a deliberately crappy build. There, hardmode without irritating people that don't have an interest in grinding a decade old game.

We al know however, that the same mentality that likes "hardmode" would never deliberately handicap themselves, because the difficulty threshold makes it easier for them to be the "top of the pile", and thus wouldn't have the bragging rights to get their rocks off with.

NinjaClarinet wrote:

We al know however, that the same mentality that likes "hardmode" would never deliberately handicap themselves, because the difficulty threshold makes it easier for them to be the "top of the pile", and thus wouldn't have the bragging rights to get their rocks off with.

Ahaha!

You hit the nail on the head.

As for playing a different game if you don't enjoy fighting monsters though, saying that is completely grazing over everything else that NwN makes possible. The game is still played today simply because anyone can jump into the toolset and make an immersive, unique universe to roleplay in, then open it up to the internet with only some hassle. The dated nature of the combat mechanic is just something to stomach along the way, though personally I've grown quite fond of it, like it is a familiar old friend.

NinjaClarinet wrote:

Murex wrote:

I want to play on hard mode.

Trashcan all your gold. Only use items you find. Trashcan stuff you can't use, don't sell it. Play without using some item slots. Use a deliberately crappy build. There, hardmode without irritating people that don't have an interest in grinding a decade old game.

We al know however, that the same mentality that likes "hardmode" would never deliberately handicap themselves, because the difficulty threshold makes it easier for them to be the "top of the pile", and thus wouldn't have the bragging rights to get their rocks off with.

= Sillyness

I enjoy the use of strategy and tactics when a game is difficult, not how easily I can die over and over. Better tactics should provide better rewards, even in a difficult game. In this game, it's how you build your character, how you mythal their gear, and how you fight. I shouldn't have to say more, but nice try. Your way of making a point is both childish and idiotic.

Bini wrote:

As for playing a different game if you don't enjoy fighting monsters though, saying that is completely grazing over everything else that NwN makes possible. The game is still played today simply because anyone can jump into the toolset and make an immersive, unique universe to roleplay in, then open it up to the internet with only some hassle. The dated nature of the combat mechanic is just something to stomach along the way, though personally I've grown quite fond of it, like it is a familiar old friend.

1. I'm sure there are more virtual spaces out there that don't require detailed game mechanics that would be better for role-playing than NWN.

2. Why worry about xp at all if all you want to do is role-play?

And with that... I believe this thread has run it's course.

Gold drops

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