Game Mechanics: XP loss (update)

[Eiffel]

ofcourse, being able to die and losing poo is fun... but for a new player that is going to drive them away. thats why EJ dosnt get many new customers.

im just saying, i dont want to be level 40 and have worked my bum of for a omni leather then not be able to leave sq because bags dont exist and i dont wanna lose my leather.

kinda a tough situation but one the less.

[thadiusofx3]

Well new players should be protected, but once you get higher level you should be able to lose stuff, this isn't World of TeddyBears (warcraft)

[Eiffel]

thats what im saying, at a higher level... fine do w/e the hell ya want. poo happens, but at the low levels... lets have some compassion.

[Delurium II]

you should have a question when you create a new account saying something like "are you an old xenimus player?"
if yes = create a char on server 1 (pk)
if no = create a char on server 2 (anti-pk)

ofc have to be possible to change later on. but it will atleast help some of the new players to be more "safe" in the beginning.
also maybe have some experienced players write a help you can either have as a popup in the game or as a read-through before you play.
much like the f1 screen in xen, only people should read it and not being one of the most annoying hotkeys you can have when u misspress it.

also you should try to get in contact with some of the old "noob-helpers" like elsa and hear if they would want to play it.
elsa made alot of money for ej, helping noobs to actually understand the game and again playing for longer then the free trial lasted.

[Vitriol]

we already agreed on this. There will be bags but they will save 4 or 5 RANDOM items. You cant choose.

[thadiusofx3]

Well at this point nothing is set in stone.

[Vitriol]

we really should make some key decisions early on before all these kids who have played xenimus since like 2003 or 4 come in and think the game will be too hard, then complain to get things changed.

[Eiffel]

your goal should be making it fun. not hard.

[Serenity]

I agree with ces, games should be fun but not so mind blowingly easy that every one and their grandma have a lvl 209172098eleventyone char. just enought to make it so that its a challenge.

[Eiffel]

i thought that was you brando. <3

ya, im down for making the gamr hard, but vitroil wants to go way back in the past, lol.if ima work my bum of for gear and lose it all in one death i'd rather not try at all.

maybe its just me though, but that might also cut down pvp by alot and lrts face it. pvp is one of the best things in xen.

[Serenity]

yes it is, but it will also make teams and links/clans more help. get a team of 15 lvl 12s and watch whoever before you fall. and also I liked the fact if your link owned a castle you can hunt whatevers in there and not get owned and it made lvling semi easy, when you get a lvl 2 in an omni axe wailling away at the back of a hell knight

[Vitriol]

you guys just dont get it.

[Serenity]

nor do you, in order for a game to be seccessful you want poeple to come and not leave, and if someone does leave 2 more come and take their place, you dont want to turn them away immediatly. and most people dont want to lose what they worked for, and some people like the idea of having some security to their investment.

[thadiusofx3]

We don't want a teddy-bear game, but we don't want something just too extremely hard.

This will be somewhere in between.

THERE WILL BE CHANCES TO LOSE STUFF, THOUGH

[Serenity]

I sure as well hope so, cuase I dont like conquer i pwn some fool you dont get anything hes wearing just a portion of his inventory, I dont want a teddy bear game I just dont want to have to be on uard 24/7

[Vitriol]

nor do you, in order for a game to be seccessful you want poeple to come and not leave, and if someone does leave 2 more come and take their place, you dont want to turn them away immediatly. and most people dont want to lose what they worked for, and some people like the idea of having some security to their investment.

You are a fool.
This game is not being made to be popular. it is being made to capture the original feel of xenimus. Thats what its going to do. Its going to be hard, its going to be harsh. Its going to KICK YOUR A$$. and that is EXACTLY why it is going to be sucessful.

[thadiusofx3]

We will figure out the difficulty when we get there, theres really no need to argue about it at this stage in development.

[Joe M.]

the "more levels, less power" idea is one that Karl and I have kicked around for a while. It actually works out very well, if you think about it.

The idea is that each level doesn't mean much, but they add up. It prevents the problem of a huge amount of time hunting with nothing gained from it until suddenly, *bam!* you get a host of new powers that make a huge difference--it's more realistic and more fun, eases out the jumps and differences between the levels.

Along with this is an idea on the dying: the xp loss is negligible, but items drop easily. This makes dying unpleasant and a setback, and the xp loss is a slap on the wrist, but it doesn't make a gigantic difference in the long run. This encourages people to be adventuresome in exploration and in battle. When you play Xen, you are not encouraged to try new things, and it takes a lot of the fun out of it.

Fast-paced is the goal, and you put these things together and it helps a lot.

Vitriol: please keep things civil. Not everybody is going to agree with you, but you could probably learn something by listening to what they have to say.

[Skitari]

I really wouldn't have any interest in playing xen again where level 25 was godly.

Want to know why level 25 was godly back then? Because there were no good hunting spots and made it painfully slow and boring.

I like the system now where there are higher levels. Most people aren't content hunting level 2 east dungeon for xp. It keeps the game more interesting if you can actually...you know... progress.

I'd actually prefer it if XP was much easier, because xenimus leveling is the most brain numbing crap ever. I like to try different classes out in pvp, which just isn't possible in xenimus because of the time devoted into leveling characters.

I don't quite understand why people would want to time warp everything back a few years. Yes, some of the mechanics back then were nice, but he's made a ton of improvements since then. I also don't think it will work anymore. Part of the magic of the game back then was inexperience. Nobody knew if there would be new spells at 30 etc. Now we're past that. We want high levels and pvp and hardcore mobs that shoot beams the size of a river. Hunting ogres as a highlevel? no thanks...

[Karl G.]

I agree, there's no real point to limiting people for the sake of equality in levels. There will be plenty to do and explore.

[Vitriol]

when I joined xen, there wasnt anybody who had even gotten to level 16. That was godlike power. By the time I actually succeded in getting a character to that high of a level, people were calling it midlevel, and before long level 16 was considered "newbie"

That pisses me off.
I dont want Project Volucris to end up as a game where similar things happen.

[Skitari]

finding a balance between those who play alot and those who hardly ever play is pretty hard/impossible.

I think it would be better to cater towards those that play more, as that's who the game would be made for... what's the point of making a game that people hardly play?

There are ways to make it easier for those who don't play as much. One common thing in games is something like rest exp. Where you get a second exp bar that fills up as you are logged off and caps at some arbitrary number. When you log back on, for each mob you kill, it will subtract the exp you gained from the kill and add it to the exp you gained, so you can get 2x exp or whatever for however much rest exp you have accumulated. I like that system quite a bit.

[Vitriol]

I played obsessively.
Old xen was hard. It took a long time to level.

[kuba]

As Skitari said, part of the magic of classic Xen was inexperience. This is true for any game that one begins to play. You cannot recapture this sense of adventure and excitement unless you revamp the game entirely-- that's not what this project is aiming to do. This project is actually quite simple: Reintroduce some of the old game mechanics, reverse the spell update, and from there just adding new content. Everyone should still have a very enjoyable experience as hopefully, come beta, Volucris will have some new items, dungeons, quests, spells than did Xenimus.

Vitriol, it's great your giving a lot of input into this project but please understand some people don't want to take a trip back to the archaic days of Xen. There were many gameplay faults that just naturally should not have been in the game to begin with, and although you may feel these were attractive to the original game they most likely had little to no influence on the actual gameplay.

[Thargor]

"Eiffel, you are missing the point. Old Xen was HARD. harder than a priest on a playground. It should be practically impossible to level past 35 or so."

It was hard to lvl in old xen because of how much exp per lvl jumped past I think it was 18 or so and the fact there wasn't many good places to hunt. Well that and getting PKed quite a bit. IMHO the only hard part about lvling should be getting ganked randomly and havning no way to save your gear unless you caught you pker before he put you gear in storage.