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ReplyI seriously believe the Adventurer's Guild is not only one of the best single best things to happen to the game in the last decade, but possibly ever. I don't say that just to start a thread asking for changes so my proposed changes are viewed with a favorable light. I've said this elsewhere, too. It also is meant to indicate that the I think the guild is, overall, very well designed and implemented. This implies that we must be careful about any changes to a system I think has, by-and-large, worked out so well.
However, I think it is time for a review. I think about one decade is always a good time to do this kind of thing, both between player experience and game evolution itself. Perhaps it shouldn't be considered an "overhaul" since mostly I want to focus on task assignment (BOUNTIES). However, this is hardly limited to tasks themselves, but also the mechanics tasks may employ, or where or how the tasks might be completed.
Given how many systems the guild touches, for the purposes of my post here, I want the flood gates open. I'm happy for anyone who argues which ones should be shut or why, particularly with a sense for balance or diversity. Any mechanical systems the guild touches should also be considered up for discussion, as well as any systems it doesn't deal with that you think might be worthwhile to include.
Criticisms
| Skinning tasks |
These are at present the only tasks which make a skill check to determine what should or should not be assigned. I think the idea of skill checks are interesting and worthwhile to continue. However, I dislike that this is the exception to the rule at present. It's always the counter-argument to anything someone thinks their character cannot do. Let's either do away with skill checks on this for consistency, or implement possible skill-checks (etc) to other systems. I am more in favor of the latter, but I can accept the former.
| Foraging tasks |
These would be less of an issue (for me) were it not for the arbitrary professional modifiers to foraging across the board. There are skills, spells, and profession-specific abilities to deal with this, and we don't need rather arbitrary modifiers here. I'd say put everyone at zero except maybe give rangers another +10 on top of their Foraging spell (and if it's felt they need more, put more blessing lore benefits to 603). Argue for empath foraging all you want, but most of what can be foraged now are not healing herbs! Plus clerics and empaths have Minor Sanctuary (and bards Song of Peace, wizards Haste...). This is probably a point I'm willing to argue harder than any other as far as replies may go.
Foraging tasks that ask for more than 5 things for an item that grows in only one room in the assigned area are dumb. Ensure there are at least two rooms to forage in for each item, or limit tasks to 5 items when there is only 1 room to find them. The re-spawn rate is sloooooow, and this is assuming only one character wants to forage that room at a given time! We could discuss re-spawn rate, too (or the max 5 foraged items at once), but I'd be satisfied with the solutions I mention.
N.B.: My level 22 warmage has nearly 50 foraging bounties completed. I think the character helped for about 2 of them. So yes I understand very well how to get around this, but not everyone is married to the player of a ranger in real life.
| Culling creatures |
Welcome to the thread that inspired me to make this post: http://forums.play.net/forums/GemStone%20IV/Wizards/Wizard%20General%20Discussion/thread/1709562?
Generally, I don't have many personal issues on this one. However, magic-immune creatures like vvrael destroyers and I believe constructs, and perhaps to a lesser extent krag dwellers and other creatures, do raise an issue sometimes. Destroyers are one of the prime examples of how the guild is broken, since pures with no weapon training can be assigned to kill them which, they cannot do and receive credit under most normal assumptions.
I wonder how undead bounties and having a blessed weapon (etc), being in Voln, etc, might be brought into this. We don't need to nix these assignments for everyone, but we could allow players an option to increase or decrease their chances to get an undead creature bounty in several ways (be in Voln, hold a blessed weapon when ASKing, etc). I've heard it sucks to be in River's Rest and get an undead bounty, without a bless, and no one around to help (no, they don't sell pure potions). We can extend this idea: perhaps characters in GoS can have a way (or inherent) to toggle bounties for hated foes. Dunno what to do with CoL here but okay I didn't set out to do a full society review! An easy in-game justification is characters that complete certain kinds of bounties or are good at them would be better people to assign the task!
There are also several known situations and cases where kill credit is not given. The following spells come to mind as possible candidates: Evil Eye (717); Torment (718); Immolation (519). There's also the case when creatures walk away and promptly bleed out. Someone else slays your creature after it runs away? With Animate Dead (730) I have slightly more flexible feelings, since I'm not sure this should be like Voln where only witnessing a kill should count, though I don't hesitate to say I have no problem with real numbers and we need not track this by integers. Regardless of how we decide if a character can receive credit, I'm going with a quote from the film Jarhead: "If it's my kill, IT'S MY KILL!" My thought is coupling the tracking to the experience system is probably the best option here. (We can receive experience kill credit without being in the room.)
| Dangerous creatures |
Ibid many comments on culling creatures, though perhaps not all of them. This gets a little trickier.
An additional point here is that, since dangerous creatures can spawn +5 to the level of the creature (not sure exactly how it's calculated, but it can be) and BCS creatures have a span of levels, and guild assignments can be 5 levels over a character's head, maybe we don't need a task that potentially assigns a character to kill a creature 15 levels higher!
Simple solution: put a half modifier on the creatures that can be assigned, so it's more like 2 or 3 levels above instead of 5. It's not a big improvement, but at least the character would be more confident hunting the base creature than some creature already nominally much higher level.
See also: child rescues and max kills.
| Child rescues |
Not much to say here. I've seen or read a variety of comments about which conditions kids will and will not be attacked but observed no clear rule myself. One night my paladin went from 3 failed rescues to 7...boy that sucked.
Some thought might be required for certain kinds of puzzles that are just annoying trying to solve with kids trailing. The Darkstone iron maiden comes to mind, but the Miasmal Mazes as well. Anyone can tell me "deal with it" (I have), but the fact is, my most frequent joke about kids in-game is that they should stop teaching the kids how to swim across Maelstrom Bay and they'd stop getting lost over there. If the kids got into this insane maze, do they really need to make my life harder getting them out of it worse? I don't mind it too much, but let's at least admit the design is presently sadistic!
Simple solution: We can tell kids to WAIT. K thx. Brats need to listen to us.
| Intermission |
God how many more bounties do I have to go, and why did I think making a comprehensive post was a good idea?!
| Heirloom looting |
My main complaint here is statistics suck. I'm sure I've read a post from a GM saying like "if you searched more than 30 creatures and didn't find it, file a bug etc so I can check." My understanding is that the percent chance to find the heirloom increases asymptotically to some fixed percent (or continues increasing). Let's just truncate it to make the probability 1 (100% for lay people) after 30 kills. People who are stubborn have killed 40, 50, even 74 creatures (highest I heard about, assuming it was right). We don't need to get buggered by statistics that badly in a game.
There are some minor issues with Implosion or Eye Spy (and perhaps others...see Creature culling). My main request for that would be to bump the percent-chance-to-find for each counted kill. If there's no corpse to loot, there's no corpse to loot. But we can still tally the kills, and finally get to 30 where the chance to find hits 1.
Another personal complaint, although mostly I've had people disagree with me about, is that LOOTING bounties are assigned for creatures like tree spirits. Please ask me if you'd like me to make a comprehensive list of such creatures I am aware of, but it is not just two or three! Can we consider shifting these to SEARCHING bounties?! Or maybe they can be "hybrid" bounties where as soon as someone searches the right area, or loots the creature, the type of bounty is determined. This situation just gives certain classes, like pures, a major advantage. If we consider issues of magic-immune creatures like under Culling Creatures, it's only fair we give non-pures a break on this one.
| Heirloom searching |
Due to the graces GM-Vanah (I recall and hope since I named her), we now know that one must search up to at least 3 rooms in a cycle to be successful. That is, the first room could be successful, but subsequent searches in that room are useless until at least two different rooms are searched. Iterate this process for the second and third room. Let's give players messaging to tell them when they cannot find an heirloom by searching once again just now, but make sure the messaging is clear so they don't think they can never find it in that room!
| Escort |
Someone who gets these tasks with any regularity (I live in River's Rest mostly) can please fill in here. I suppose it can be similar to any issues with bandits
| Bandits |
In my experience, bandits are much easier for non-pure characters. I don't really see a clear reason that some swindlers cannot be spell casters rather than obsessed with CMANS, laying traps, ambushing, etc. For general balance, I'd think a variety of some kind is nicer here. My sorcerer just started turning all these down. Maybe I'm alone, but maybe not.
I didn't really think about this bounty, but wizards can be invisible! There's room to expand here in a way that might make things more interesting and balanced.
| Gem bounties |
I love these! Sell 50 count jars more often? Oh yeah, and stop being so stuffy about which shells fit in jars and which don't. Seriously, stones (aka rocks) weigh no more than a small diamond and fit in jars. Why do some shells need to weigh a lot and be big? I get that jars were made for alchemy and stocking gems is a sort of spin-off tactic. But in my Preface I stipulated that the game evolves, which requires re-analysis. I just don't see what's gained by disallowing some bounty gems from fitting in jars and weighing more. The shells are already unique to a couple realms. Did we need more flavor.
A really minor point here is how a character in WL could be assigned Solhaven-specific gems owing to the fact that the character is in the level-range of, say, large ogres which are on the Solhaven trail, and that large ogres are legitimate foes for WL tasks. Let's go ahead and ease these constraints, so that the taskmaster only assigns "local" gems and doesn't do some insane calculation based on what the character could possibly find based on the taskmaster's definition of the realm (requiring the character to essentially move towns or buy the gems for completion...even stashing gems wouldn't be a very viable option since the character is unlikely to hunt that specific creature dropping those gems "near" their realm.) I presume this example may extend to other cases at present, but I'm not sure. It's janky anyway.
| NEW BOUNTIES |
Most of my concept for "new bounties" involve ways to further encourage how players can interact with each other via bounties. Many of them may not be direct interactions, but still. Not only do I like the following ideas, but it could be argued some of my above tweaks decrease the amount of player interaction by making things easier in some ways.
Allow players to issue bounties. Players can ask for gems, herbs, skins, alchemical ingredients, etc, via the bounty system. This should have some kind of diminishing aspect which I am unsure the best method at the moment, but definitely prevent abuse like me asking for 10 blue essence dust, a friend being assigned them for me, giving my friend the dust, and bounty done. It can range from limiting bounty assignments per week, tracking items, tracking characters, etc. But if F2P has taught me anything at all, it's that staff and GMs are often much more clever than I am to prevent abuse. So, I'll assume staff can think of a way to prevent abuse, and that I like the idea that characters can request their own bounties beyond SERVICE. This would surely entice more people to help alchemists, to say the least!
| Misc. |
Stop assigning the exact same bounty twice in a row. I think this is a much more minor change than some people think, given statistics. Perhaps we can stop assigning declined bounties until a bounty is completed, and then reset the tabulation. Don't want A? Don't want B? Don't want C? Okay you got D! Next time...don't want A? Lucky you, try D! (This example here is suggesting how statistics fundamentally work. See the next paragraph for how we might change the way how statistics normally work!)
We could also add a general weighting system here, too. This is in reference to a point I have put in bold for Culling Tasks. To a point, I think it's okay to weight the bounty assignment system towards what bounties characters complete. I don't want it to finally get to the case where say, Kaldonis can get only gem bounties. But a little weighting for what we like and are good at isn't a bad thing. If we we keep coming back to the crack rock, I mean rock crystal, maybe the taskmaster will give us more. Some diminishing return here is also acceptable for me as far as experience and bounty points, again, to a point. Diversify less and you are rewarded less.
Conclusions
This post has nearly exhausted me (yes, that can happen!). But I did intend to make a summary but, okay no.
PS: The grammar on this forum folder appears wrong. Isn't it the Adventurer's Guild?
PPS: TLTR; please post any ideas you have on the bounty system. Regardless of if I agree, I would like this discussion to be extensive!
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>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p
