Evoras said:Did very little on a PvP server.... but
... would casting a DoT on a Monk stop him FD'ing?
(apologies, but know very little about FD as i never played Monk or Necro - or SK for that matter)
Getting hit by an attack/spell would break Feign Death, if you saw somthing casting on you, had to wait for the spellcast to finish before using Fd.
Yeah,when a DoT would tic it would break your FD :( Any dmg would break your FD or at least had a chance to......... exciting :) !
Greattaste said:OakKnower said:My thought is if someone is deliberately training into others or other groups. As long as the other group or player chooses not to engage, then the trainer maintains all the hate until they zone out, get pulverized by their own train and the mobs reset.
No. Mobs leashing or "resetting" is exactly why most games since EQ have been feel-good vending machines that are mediocre at best. I can hardly recall anything significant or noteworthy from any of these "modern" MMO abominations. However I regularly recall the glory days from EQ with the people I actually met playing EQ 13 years ago.
The greatest MMORPG ever (EQ) had trains. Pantheon should have trains too.
Keep the environment dangerous. Limit the hand holding. No built in mechanics to put kid gloves on the environment.
Let the mobs agro whoever is close. If a "Rabid Undead Tiger" loses agro on someone and strolls past your sitting character, it should agro. It HAS to agro. If not, the environment is just weak and doesnt command respect. I want this game/environment to be dangerous and unforgiving. Most of all, I want it to be memorable.
Suspend players who take it too far on PvE servers.
PvP servers can handle it internally. Suspensions for those who take it too far.
After some thought, and going through the comments, I'm inclined to change my initial position on this topic. Since one of the central concepts of Pantheon is the establishment of a strong community and a focus on improved social elements, I think the player-base should have the capacity to manage griefing through marginalization of poor gaming etiquette and all-around numbskullery. Redirecting the capacity for the community to engage in social elements counters that concept and diminishes the communities empowerment.
btw.. training the Zone line without giving a shout out was not considered "bad form" on the server I was on in Everquest. The "shout" was courtesy if possible, but hanging at the Zone was at your own risk. Hanging at the Zone line AFK was just foolish.
Many people do not type fast, do not type while running, did not know how to make a hot key, and were running for there lives. We would hear people complain about getting trained at the zone and more often than not the chat would respond with several "well wtf you doing AFK at the zone?" (like I said in an earler post... I learned it the hard way, but I learned it well)
I seem to remember, sitting at the entrance of numerous dungeons, waiting with all the others that had not yet got a goup or a camp. Waiting on that inevitable "train to zone line" call. If there were enough of us, we would simply clean up the train, possibly even getting a named drop. It was kind of a nice bonus surprise in the sometimes long monotony of waiting for a group at the zone line.
And btw, if rude people training folks is the worst problem Pantheon has, I will call the game a mad success and be happy with the trains.
Reading this thread made me think of a post I was about to make awhile ago and here seems like a good place to put it.
Sorry for the wall of text, I hope people find it interesting enough to read and make sense of it.
So I was reading one of Brads posts here: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/blogs/151/174/old-ideas-and-features-to-address-potential-problems
Specifically, these tenants stood out:
From my early days in EQ, and any EQ community I've been a part of since (P99 for example), the community does generally police itself very well and shows mutual respect for each other. Of course there are always a few that disappoint us. And this is one of the places that EQ didn't handle well, in that while we could all work together to make our server's community a good one we had no way, as a community to handle troubled players. This invariably led to GM intervention or perhaps not and we just had to learn to tolerate whatever disturbances this person(s) brought to the game.
Sometimes these troubled souls would take to training people and it would just slide downhill from there. Short of not grouping with or as communities do, shunning these folks; which I did see happen occasionally, there is really nothing that the community can do to enforce (strong word) or perhaps promote (better word) a community in which we all want to live. Maybe somewhere in between those two words is what I'm shooting for.
Don't get me wrong, I believe in trains being possible, but when someone is abusing this emergent ability it of course creates a disruption in the game world that is heavily frowned upon. On the other hand eliminating trains makes the game less fun. Emergent game play is crippled to a degree.
In other words, this is where the concept of reputation matters came from and one of the core tenants we have lost over time. So, what to do?
We need some way for community to police themselves in a meaningful way without abusing players to accomplish that goal. So if a game such as this requires the notion of Reputation matters, then why not make a reputation system and really make your reputation matter?
How it might work.
EQ had this pretty cool system called Faction. Which from a game play perspective, added a bit of depth with many points of view for the player to experience the game, even from the same identical content. So why then do only NPCs get to have faction?
We've seen this in use in some smaller sense on social sites like Facebook. Unfortunately you only get a like button. But what if players could generate statistics on each other, through their interactions with others, perhaps not even consciously doing so at all times? For explanation lets just say every player has a vote up or down button and so does the game engine itself.
A simple example I can think of:
Community Rep, Personal Rep or Guild Rep come to mind. I think reputation could be a multi value. Such that every player would collect stats in one of these ways:
Second example:
This data could be used to filter down to appropriate actions. So lets say Player B, they just have real bad issues, and their reputation has tanked. Its TRENDING downward at a phenomenal rate as they take to the open air ways to vent their frustrations/trolling etc onto the general public. Their player ignored rate is through the roof, so the system hits a tipping point at which players ignored rate is high enough that they just go on auto ignore for the entire server for some period of time.
So time passes they get to talk again. And then lets say Player B begins to turn around, they get into the spirit of things and start to be friendly and helpful etc. So they quit generating negative votes and maybe even get some positive ones, the trend becomes positive. They eventually are as positive as player A and enjoy a much better game experience, as do all the people they interact with.
Another example:
Reputation can be applied through weighing. Thus those players with a high reputation (respected players) could have more weight on the outcome applied to whichever counters they are affecting on Monk A / Player B's account.
So having a good reputation means the system will respond to you more quickly than for someone who has a mediocre to bad reputation. Thus I could see guild leaders wielding actual power with this, assuming their reputation is strong enough and their player base is big enough. (Side thought, maybe guild leadership would also mean good reputation to maintain it)
So when a well respected player votes you down it means more than if some one with very little reputation or perhaps even negative reputation votes you down. Plus other factors like having a toon that is banned on your account can increase the weight applied to a particular instance of a vote + or -.
Thus the players policed themselves, this Monk A person was delt with, everyone goes to their separate corners to continue having fun and Monk A still has a chance to turn it around should they choose to.
If you base it on a trend of data in one or more counters over some time span, then negative (and positive) ratings falls off over time. If a player is gone for a very long time, their data would fall off but they would retain the last overall value they had when they last played. Thus preserving the ability to generate new trends from a previous starting point.
So if you had a good rep when you left, you still do but you will have to maintain it. I guess the key to the reputation system then would be TRENDS in one or more counters that can be generally positive (grouping experience) or generally negative (player gets ignored), maybe even player made counters (Player helps our guild do X) (though I cannot think of a use case for it right now) The data collected can then be fed through function X to determine if a condition has been met and therefore trigger some type of appropriate action.
Actions which can be either positive to a player or negative. IE: Player qualifies to be a guild leader or player qualifies to be muted.
I could even see one item in your guild setup being, we only accept people of a certain reputation level from applying.
If you want to get fancy do some machine learning on the data to categorize it and then trigger on that. The end result is the same, you get a system that reduces GM interaction except in the most serious of circumstances and still gives the general community the ability to police itself by turning bad behavior into a game mechanic that groups of people can interact with. And probably more importantly that you can use to track how players are responding to things in the game.
Another side thought, what if you needed a specific reputation type with another specific player in order to get married and change your sir name? I could see all kinds if interesting social interactions with this type of system. Perhaps they didn't even know they had earned this by grouping together more exclusivly than anyone else over a long time? To that end, perhaps a player could pre-load another players reputation with themselves (say if a couple starts playing together).
TL;DR:
Allow faction(or reputation) points to be applied possitivly or negativly via events that occure in the game or via player vote. Use the trends created from these reputation points to trigger one ore more systems both positive and negative for a given player; IE: Qualify to be a guild leader (good repuation) or Qualify to be muted (bad reputation).
Use reputation to allow the community to police itself, lower the need for GM interaction/intervention and instead turn it into a mini game within the larger system.
-Az
People will do whatever they think they can get away with. When I played last year on EQ progression I chose an evil race and was camping a weapon in an area with nearby good-faction guards that I had earned faction with thru questing. A good race player wanted my camp but instead of starting a conversation they pulled a guard and rooted it next to me and then zoned to lose their own agro, when they returned to inspect their handiwork I was still there, the guard has wandered off, I laughed at them and told them we could share or I would let them know when I was finished, point is...their first line of approach was road-rage, not diplomacy.
The tone of what is to be expected needs to be set from the beginning and stay consistent, change will not only be seen as punishment but will positively reinforce testing boundaries and negatively reinforce respecting them. I also agree with no name changes.
WellspringOr do you think there should be in-game mechanics that prevent trains from killing other players all together?
NO.
Do not let the actions of a few cause sweeping game-wide changes to nerf the environment. I need to be in danger to be fully immersed.
Give habitual trainers a 1 week vacation to think about how much they miss Pantheon. Double the penalty for each offense in a 6 month period. Bad behavior is usually repeditive, it wouldnt be too hard to find out who trains.
Short answer is nothing should be done about it. I have rarely seen this be an actual issue. Sure it happens in certain places often but its not usually intentional. If it turns out it is then report it if its the same guy over and over etc. If its in PvP, track that asshole down with your possy and wreck him, then broadcast it , then shun him.
Prindan said:I think trains created some of the most hilarious situations in EQ so I would vote that we don't ask for any regulation or game mechanic to stop it. Smart groups move away from zone lines or learn to deal with troublemakers by not inviting them to a group in the future. I just don't want this to become a slippery slope where whiney people report everyone who dares to interrupt their gameplay in an MMORPG.
Agree wholeheartedly with this. Just let the players handle it for the most part. If it becomes truly egregious the GM's can step in. I remember the first trip I made to Blackburrow. I had just barely entered and suddenly I see TRAIN INC! flash across my screan, I look up and see what appeared to be every damn gnoll in the place barrelling towards me led by this scrawny little wood elf. Everyone else was high tailing it for the exit, but it just looked so dang funny that I started laughing out loud. Needless to say I died pretty quickly. My point is that the memory of that moment sticks with me after all these years. So let the trains roll on. Memories, some good and some bad, will be made. Isn't that part of what makes mmo's great?
An evil monk (sorry monks) who is purposefully or repeatedly FD training a ton of mobs onto an unsuspecting group so he can prove how manly and tough he is or so he can try to steal a spawn is somthing that there should be the capacity to request some sort of GM assistance for, if it cant be sorted out by the players involved. But just some dude / group struggling with a fight and running in a mad panic to the zone is just life in a dungeon and i would hope the GM's don't police this. Like Zork said earlier sitting at the zone line without the aid of FD or invis is risky business and you should stay behind the safety line at the station if you dont want to get hit by a train!