Foscadh's page

Urman wrote:

I sometimes get the no skill to harvest message under the following conditions:

1. I have just left the settlement hex.
2. The "pyramid" settlement icon still is visible on the edge of the minimap circle.

If I get that no-harvest message, I can continue deeper into the new hex, until the hex-type symbol changes. I can then return to the node and harvest normally.

Hmm. My guess is you may not have gotten fully transferred to the next hex, so it's trying to pull resources from the hex it thinks you're in (the settlement hex, which has no resources) rather than the one you're standing in that spawned the node.

I'll ask around tomorrow to see if they've ruled that out as a possibility.

I ran into one of the unharvestable nodes last night and as directed moved until the icon showed I was no longer in a settlement then went back and harvested the node with no problem.

Yep, you did say you had a warranty, but it's gone if you modify the computer....

That very much depends on the store where you bought it. The store I deal with has no such provisions.

... I also feel compelled to say that my preference for Nvidia is largely historical/intuitive/emotional. If you find tech professionals recommending something else specifically to avoid problems, it's worth reevaluating your preferences.

I've found that the recommended video card company does change over time. One will hold the lead sometimes in both price, quality, and performance for a while then the other will supplant them. The last couple of cards I've bought were not NVIDIAs and that was on the recommendation of a couple different people. Things could well have changed sense then though (I think there was some sort of problem with NVIDIA in the last couple of years that some are holding against them now). Tom's Hardware guide is usually a good place to look to see how the various video cards stack up price to performance wise. How well they hold up and how often and easy it is to update drivers is another matter and equally important.

I like dealing with a local store by the way. Packing things up and shipping them back to a manufacturer just isn't the way I like to operate. I'd rather take it back to a local store and actually talk to real people in person.

A beta build is feature-complete but not fully tested. PFO will never have such a build.

But won't the "minimum viable product" by definition be feature complete, at least as a minimum viable product?

Assuming this game is using Agile Development the terms Alpha and Beta are somewhat meaningless and should never have been used as they are misleading.

I disagree. At least in some senses of the word the purpose for Beta testing is to see what happens when a bunch of users start actually using the product. In a very valid sense you simply can't skip beta testing. Either it is a planned and intended phase or it happens after launch.

Schedim wrote:

Alpha/Beta - it is just semantics, not laws or fixtures on the crystal sphere.

Move along, nothing to see here :-)

No it is not semantics.

It absolutely is semantics. That's why I was careful to define what I meant by Beta in my first post. Other definitions are certainly possible and indeed do exist and are being used in this thread.

Agile Development never has a Beta. ...

Hence at no point is there ever a "complete product" for testing that could be called a Beta. The Beta concept is a hangover from old-school development cycles and management.

One could argue that very few programs are ever really a "complete product" at least until they are obsolete or abandoned. As I said I think a strong case can be made for us being in a beta testing phase right now. If not of the final product certainly of the MVP. Of course if you don't like my definition then until we can agree on one we don't have a common ground to discuss it.

I'm not an expert but was told somewhere that windows 7 personal 64 bit could only access 16G of RAM and you needed to step up to one of the higher priced editions to access more memory. 16 is enough for almost any personal use from what I can see (we've got a program or two at work that can use more) so this might not be too important but ...

I've had really good luck with microcenter but part of that is they have a store in town with good salesmen (i.e. they know their hardware and will help you get what you want if you let them) They will also build the machine in house and even put the OS on it although that does cost around $120 I think.

Tiger direct also has some pretty good prices. Waiting for the upcoming sales as was suggested has a lot of merit.

(One of the systems I use for Pathfinder is built around one of the AMD CPU's that has on board graphics and it does a pretty good job not quite as smooth as an older system with a devoted graphics card that ran me around $100 but close)

At least as I understand the terms. I.e. Alpha testing is done mostly in house by members of the development team and possibly a few carefully chosen others. Beta testing is done by a fairly large and usually somewhat random group most of whom are not on the development team.

My understanding/opinion is that with a piece of software like this one really can't avoid beta testing. From some of the comments made early on I expected this to be during EE (and was OK with that). Arguably since Alpha invites became widely available and certainly since the stress test invites went out I think Pathfinder Online now qualifies as being in Beta testing and EE may either be an extension of that or as was suggested a post Beta rapid evolution phase.

When thought of in these terms I'm actually even more positive about where it is than I was before. I'm willing to hear arguments both ways though.

A Lady I know made an SCA dress starting from raw wool and no electrical machines. Of course it was her master's thesis project as well as something she could wear in the society. Maybe we should start a thread on how many of us there are here and what kingdoms.

Nothing should prevent any or every character from putting xp into say hp skills. However it will likely not make sense to do so. HP skills for instance will likely be skils that also give some advantage in physical combat (I'm guessing that the skills are complex and don't just enhance hp or P(H)with weapon a). Even if that's not the case if you want you charcter to be a magic wielder then putting some xp into learning spell, uping intel, and such are going to be if not required at least highly adviseable.

I assume that weapons and armor will always be threaded because that's the stuff you'll need if you want to do a corpse run and try to recover the rest of your inventory. Realistically most people will not want to enter the world without defense or offense. So realistically most people will thread their arms & armor.

....

Won't that depend to a significant extent on how close one can store items to the res point? How and where we can store things is an area that hasn't been talked about much yet that can have considerable impact. Probably one of a vast number of such. It would also depend on whether or not you consider any item that grants a significant defensive bonus as armor or an offensive one as a weapon or go with a more traditional definition.

... From what I understood, you needed to pick one or the other, you couldn’t train for both (unless you paid more).

From how I read Destiny’s Twin is you were able to raise both your main (and an alt) at the same time skill-wise (without paying extra besides the initial DT cost). ...

I think you have highlighted a very good reason that the destiny's twin option won't be available after the game begins. They have a very good economic reason not to make it available and little or no reason to do so.

... But they key difference here (with Destiny’s Twin) is you can have two characters raising at the same time, where with alts, you need to choose. ...

That's not my understanding. If you have an alt that's a separate account then obviously both can train at the same time. If you have an alt on your regular account I believe as long a you pay for the training the alt can train at the same time. What isn't clear yet is just what the cost and periods of such training will be.

In another forum it was pointed out that if high level armor and weapons are relatively cheap due to surplus of production then people may thread other more expensive items. There will be a balance it's just not clear where it will be.

...

Crowdforging - one of the main rewards offered for the MMO itself was the ability to be part of the crowdforging process and have a voice in the development process. It was implied that we would have the ability to influence the world during the design phase. After release it was revealed that all we get is the ability to pick and choose the order features GW has total control over with no real influence or input from us will be implemented. ...

To anyone keeping up with these boards it is very obvious this is wrong. The developers are clearly reading the conversations here and reacting to what is being suggested and discussed. It's also worth pointing out that they aren't really sure who is even a backer at this point on the boards.

Indeed one of the areas that seems to have been modified/refined the most due to input from the people here is the bounty system. The one you are complaining about changing so much.

It's likely that someone who did participate in the KS will also be able to up his/her pledge to include this once the fulfillment system is in place. I suspect that the daily rewards and some of the pdf's and such may be off the table but memberships will likely still be available.

The above is strictly my guess but it is based on reading these boards and the way the demo KS and Reaper miniature KS were run.

...

There is (what I understand to be) a period called "Fulfillment" where those of us (me included) who missed the Kickstarter and the bonuses that went with those contributions may be available, but at either a higher cost or reduced bonus.

Ryna stated these "extras" would be removed over time, so keep an eye out. Not sure when the Fulfillment period will begin, but expect it to be after all the KS rewards have been completed....

My understanding is that "Fulfillment" is the finalization of the KS rewards. At that time people who pledged to the KS will also be able to increase their pledges for increased rewards I'm pretty sure. The Reaper miniature KS went this way. There's a good chance this will include much of what was offered during the KS. After that there has been some talk of letting more in on things. Whether this will be another KS or just a sales program is not clear. They will probably decide based on the responses to the KS and based on where they are and where they want to go at the time. Since I think they are projecting the KS fulfillment system to go operational around the middle of this month I wouldn't look for any details until mid April. Scheduling it right after tax day when most collect refunds would have some merit from a business point of view.

@Foscadh, That depends on whether or not collision blocking is enabled. If they can physically surround him and he can't move through them, it's very possible.

Certainly it's possible. However it isn't likely unless there are huge numbers against the experienced player and they are faster than him. How easy it is is indeed a function of how they implement moving, terrain effects, collisions and such. However the comments about timing being important and some of the other descriptions of how they are implementing things lead me to believe that they will be implemented in such a way that players have a lot of control of where they are relative to other players and to terrain features. Now if you are talking a mass of archers that's another matter but as I stated if you have 6 new fighters with melee weapons vs one experienced on the neos will be lucky to get 3 on 1 at any point in time.

Foscadh wrote:

One problem with this is if weapon range and movement are important to combat a high level character in most cases should be able to limit the number of low level characters attacking him. Likewise he should have a higher player skill which has been stated will be important.

If they use a hex system, then 1 player could be surrounded by 6 close range characters, and 12 characters with spears for a total of 18.

or 42 bow men in range in a circle around him, so they wont friendly fire each other.

That there is the space for that isn't a question. The thing is a practiced fighter simply won't allow you to do that to him. Indeed I would expect that with 6 new fighters vs 1 experienced fighter you would be lucky to get 3 on 1 most of the time and that's with terrain favorable to the new fighters.

One problem with this is if weapon range and movement are important to combat a high level character in most cases should be able to limit the number of low level characters attacking him. Likewise he should have a higher player skill which has been stated will be important.

... 9 months of forced pay to beta test thats now stretched out to 18 months?...

For one thing it's been stated that you don't have to use your kickstart time during Early Enrollment. Indeed it was a benefit that they gave to lower pledges to enter EE. You get the game and can start playing pretty much whenever you want with EE as the earliest possible date. The longer run time of EE actually makes me feel a bit better. It means that they realize that there will be bugs, exploits, and "features" that were unintended and take a while to both surface and fix. If that process gets rushed it often produces even more problems.

... Every roll is only itself. Each of the three d200 rolls can provide any number in that 200 range. The tiers do provide greater likelyhood for low/medium/high values yes, but the low/medium/high values can as easily all be under 50 or over 150.

Let's look at the numbers. This is assuming all rolls are uniform from 1 to 200.

That's also assuming I remember my stats correctly. Rolling over 150 would be the inversion of the above. I.e.
T1 rolling over 150 ~1.6%
T2 rolling over 150 ~14%
T3 rolling over 150 ~42%

All destiny twins allows you to do is to train to characters at the same time.

You can buy two accounts or buy extra training time for a second charter on a single account and it has the same effect.

After reading the blog one thing that I notices was the importance of timing. That suggest that you will need a good internet connection or a very low overhead for the combat process. Lag spikes could be a real problem.

We don't presently have a concept for a complete miss/block for the same reason we don't have critical hits that double damage: it introduces an element that can make combat extremely unpredictable, and which are unfun for the person on the other side. Nobody wants to pull out an expensive attack only to see MISS and no effect. We don't want people to be in a position to have to decide whether they're actually outclassed, or whether the random number generator is throwing them a string of unlikely misses.

High-defense and block-type effects are getting incorporated as an across the board mechanism, but our actual balancing takes them into account the same way we would a miss/block chance. If we had a binary miss/hit system, the same defense that would give you a 10% chance to take 0 damage on any given attack (and full damage for all the others) will just let you take 10% less damage overall on every attack. It's less exciting for the guy that got the perfect block, but he's taking the same reduced average damage overall while keeping the other guy from having a very frustrating moment.

This breaks with just about all my understanding of how combat works with sword, shield, armor, and bow. It also breaks with all the combat modeling I've seen in RPG's. It may still be succseful but I think you have an uphill battle with this.

... If you don't need to train to be approximately equivalent in power to the strongest player on the server, then you have all you need to grief anyone as long as you have enough pals or don't run out of email accounts. ...

I'm not quite sure how you got that idea. It's been stated a number of times that a new character won't have much chance against one that's been around for any significant amount of time much less an old timer. What has been said is a number of new characters will have a chance at defeating an older character. Of course if the older character has better equipment and more importantly friends that's going to be considerably harder.

That's a valid way of looking at it as well. They did say something about using better materials in a recipe to end up with a better end product so might even fit with what is planned.

Well I'm not expert but my impression is that if it's in house it's Alpha testing and our of house it's beta testing. They can't have completed either at this point as there's still a lot of code to write at least that's my impression. Beta testing is a lot like blind play testing for PnP games. If you don't have a formal phase for it your players/customers are going to be the ones doing it.

... Japan was iron poor in that they had little of it, but what they used for katanas was very pure (i.e. QL300 ish).

Not form what I've read. Although we may be haveing a bit of a semantics problem. The iron ore in Japan was of poor quality. Furthermore when smelted it produce low quality steel. Now whether this was due to low iron content in the ore, missing alloy elements, and/or the wrong alloy elements I'm not sure. The way in which the katana was made was esentially an additonal refinement proces removing some of the unwanted material and adding carbon which resulted in a higher grade steel in the final product.

In game terms they started with approx 100 pounds of QL300 iron ore and ended up with 15 pounds of QL300 iron and 45 pounds of QL280(+/-15) iron.

I would argue that in game terms they started with QL100 or less iron ore. The craftsman who made the weapon though was of high enough skill (at least in some cases) that it resulted in a high quality weapon. This simply doesn't fit the game model unless the craftsman is also an enchanter.

As to using a lot of QL50 iron to make a tiny amount of QL100 iron, and eventually a microscopic amount of QL300 iron. If GW went that route QL300 wouldn't be rare anymore (after a sufficient amount of time). In the end it would cheapen what a QL300 product meant.

Thant's not at all clear. It would depend on how much low level iron one needed to produce high quality iron and how long it took to do it. If designed properly it could be easier and faster to find it in the wild although perhaps more risky.

Which does kind of bring up the question of beta testing. If early enrollment isn't beta testing then they will need beta testers prior to that.

I think they also mentioned coin and starter gear as possible drops. Now I think about it that was for creature drops. I'm not sure what they have said about dungeon drops.

I wasn't saying that the threads are permanently attached to an item, but that if you buy a new thread with xp it will be permanently available for you to use.

From:

Players will have discretion in tying threads and can reassign threads without losing them:

...
As a player advances, she can purchase more threads. However, items of higher quality and tier require more threads. A starting character with starting gear has sufficient threads to protect all the gear she is likely to carry (one weapon, a set of armor, and a half dozen or so miscellaneous items). A character that has reached level 20 in a role and has all top-quality gear, meanwhile, may only be able to protect her armor and one weapon, three weapons and a miscellaneous item, or some other combination (but she could protect a larger amount of gear if she were willing to use weaker items for some of her slots). And a new player given a top-tier weapon may not be able to bind anything else but that.

From the responses both here and in the developer blogs it's obvious they are looking and listening to what goes on here. Hopefully it's helping but it can also be a trap. The griefing problem may be an example. There was and is a lot of concern. What will help or hinder is not completely clear. Furthermore as the game opens up what worked or didn't work at one point may or may not later. For instance I would expect few griefers among the early enrollment players. Crowd sourcing has it's own pitfalls given the right people it harnesses a lot of creativity and experience but the trick is keeping it under control.

This may not mesh with some of your ideas, but I find this helps me with characterization of my PCs and NPCs:

Lawful characters follows their head. They think things through and decide what they should do.

Chaotic characters follow their heart. They follow their gut and do what they want to do.

That's exactly, or almost, how I interpret it. Lawful = logical, Chaotic = emotional. Obviously though not everyone agrees.

Neutral is conflicted. They know what they should, but that isn't always what they want to do and so they let the situation dictate.

Not necessarily conflicted. Some decisions are more amenable to logical solutions some are not. Some a mix is good.

In the crafting Blog Ryan mentions that most people will thread their arms and armor. He also says that as a consequence people will likely accumulate arms and armor as they play and upgrade. That rather implies that it is not permanently attached to a specific item.

Actually, color blind people generally mix up green with red. I mean, I'm sure they mix up blue, too, but green and red are the main problems. I can pretend to be an expert on this because I know a guy who's color blind.

There are a number of different kinds of "color blindness", most are partial from what I recall. Also, from my sometimes fallible memory, Red-Green is the most common. It's not so much a matter of them mixing them up as they simply look the same. Sometimes a clue will allow them to differentiate such as the position on a traffic light. The sideways ones must be a real pain if you are red green color blind.

Not a lot of experience with MMO's but played Neverwinter Nights quite a bit.

In regards to memorable characters on most of the servers I was on high level characters were well known.

As for enhancing natural spawns. That was a problem there but mostly because spawns were triggered based on character level. A high level character moving quickly through a map could spawn some very lethal encounters for lower level characters. It wasn't considered "griefing" but it was considered good form to clean up our spawns. Of course they weren't persistent so not sure how this will work out here. Depend a lot on how NPC's are generated and how they grow.

Maybe a mater of semantics but, ...
I don't think we need any bad players. We do need some good players playing evil characters.
I also don't think that all PvP even hostilities needs to be good vs evil or law vs chaos. In fact I'd be surprised if there weren't few CG vs CG battles.

I am a SCAdian in the awesome kingdom of Trimaris!

Valinar

I've only been to one tourney down there and it was back when Trimaris was still part of Merides. I do have a good friend down that way though (Merawald). If you make it to Pennsic we should get together. I camp with the Pentamere Free Company just off the NW corner of the battlefield.

Well if you look at the OP in that thread it states:"All listed Guilds are credited with 6 "members" via the $500 Crowdforger Guild pledge. The person who pledged at that Reward level should not vote in this poll. Your participation is already being tracked."

The land rush was specifically for guilds/charter companies that want to found settlements ASAP from the way I read it. I.e. if you are going to form a merchant company in one of the neutral settlements or in one of the settlements controlled by a large guild then you shouldn't have listed your guild there.

I know it was just an example but since the thread is talking about the about crafting done right...
The following made me cringe:

... cut the bloodgroove, etch the blade, and inscribe the crossguard? ...

Only in modern industrial times would a fuller (blood groove is a rather inaccurate and misleading term) be cut into a blade. If it were to have one in a smith crafted blade it would be forged at the time the rest of the blade was. As for etching or inscribing those are purely decorative functions as oppose to say polishing which can help keep the blade cleaner and less susceptible to rust.

Back to the OP. After thinking about this some more I am even more confused. Where did the OP get the impression that there were guilds "of 1"? If it was the land rush thread it specifically states that the individual who payed for the guild and it's 6 memberships shouldn't vote. That means a guild of one should be at least a guild of 7. Of course not all the memberships may be spoken for yet but that's pretty much guaranteed to change if the owner wants it to.

Ryan Dancey wrote:

Why do that?

Because we tried reasonable dialog and you told us we didn't know anything about game theory or are just wrong. ...

Would you mind pointing out where this occurred? While I haven't read everything Ryan has written about PFO I certainly don't recall seeing anything like this.

Chain isn't particularly effective vs arrows. Depending on how where it is it can be quite effective vs blunt weapons. Of course that doesn't mean the same applies in game.

Thanks.
You aren't in the SCA are you by any chance? I end up getting called that a lot there as well.

I just applied for membership. Take it I need to wait for some approval process before I can post anything? My nickname on this board has been changed to coincide with the one I posted on there. I think.