Questions/Comments from someone new

[severe]

Greetings,

I just recently learned about this game (today, actually) and have read the FAQ and the 3 Interviews at RPG Vault. I have also looked through quite a few messages on these boards. However, I still have several questions that I either could not find any answers too, or incomplete ones at best. If I missed any answers, please forgive :)

Here are my questions/comments:

*I assume there will be a night/day cycle. How long in real-life hours will the night be? How dark will it be? Will characters with unaided vision be able to play at night, or will they be blind? My first character in EQ was a human Monk, but I changed to an infravision race because I couldn't see anything at all at night.

*How will one log out of the world? Will it be like EQ where you must sit down and "camp" for 30 seconds before you safely log out? Will your character stay in the game when you are logged out, or go *poof* until you log back in again?

*How well funded is this project? I realize you believe you can put out the game, or you wouldn't be doing it...but...I have seen nothing anywhere about where you are getting the funding from.

*I have read that there will be no skill caps, just be harder and harder to improve a skill the higher you are in it. I have also read that you can unlearn a skill. Will there be skill atrophy? For example, say you learned some melee combat when young, but have done only magic for the past 6 real life months, are you just as skilled now in melee combat as you were when you were still using it? If there is no skill atrophy, how will you prevent people from near-maxing all the skills? Time barriers alone are not enough, people will make the time.

*Will the game be ALT-TABable? Can you run it in a window? Will 3rd party programs be supported (Roger Wilco, ICQ, etc)? What about macroing? Sounds like skills are partly raised through use, so macroing is an issue.

*What steps are you taking to make the economy viable? Will there be money sinks? How will you handle inflation? I have read you do not plan on items wearing out, what prevents the situation like in EQ where high quality items become worthless because they never break? The supply just keeps growing and growing.

Thanks!

[Su'ulMorda]

Well thought out questions...Welcome to the Game, Severe.
Personnally I'd like to see it dark at night, but not so bad as pitch black. Just enough shadow to make identification difficult and surprise attacks easier.

[Edited by Su'ulMorda on 12-26-2000 at 06:37 PM]

[BelDragos]

Foggy days should be run the same way.

[Lordosis]

Welcome to the boards, severe.

I'll answer your questions the best I can, and defer some of them to Rolfe, who knows more about the skill system than I do.

(1) We haven't decided on a night/day cycle length yet. Probably between 4 and 12 hours, I would wager, for a full cycle. Night won't be as dark as EQ, that was just rediculous. You had to crank the gamma up on your montior to see anything. And he light sources didn't work correctly, making matters worse. It will be dark in Arcanity, but not TOO dark.

(2) Not fully decided yet, either. This will probably be worked out in beta, when we can test how different strategies work. Most likely, there will be a camp delay of about 30 seconds (maybe varying depending on if you are in a fight or not). If you don't want to wait for the camp, delay, you can just log out and your character will go into a defensive mode for 30 seconds. And then *poof*, gone.

(3) We are fully self funded. We don't have any outside investors, nor do we want any. We don't believe it takes $8 or $12 million to make a world class MMORPG and we intend to prove it.

(4) Rolfe know more about skills than me. All I can say is that there will be diminshing returns on how fast your skill goes up with practice. It would be very hard to master several very diverse skills, and impossible to master all of them. Some of the cool things you can do will require a very high skill level in a particular skill. So you won't want to waste all your time trying to master evey skill. It's more effective to specialize to some extent.

(5) It is alt-tab-able right now, and will almost definitely stay that way. If you're playing at work and your boss walks in, you want to be able to get out NOW. Yes, that also means you can run ICQ, winamp, or whatever you want while playing Arcanity. But that's not our business. It's your computer, not ours. In fact, I often run Arcanity in windowed mode because it makes it easier for me when I'm programming.

I really don't think we are going to have macros, so macroing won't be a problem. We debated this a long time ago on our message boards, and there were more cons than pros.

(6) The economy is another thing that will be tweaked a lot in beta, since we can't predict how thing will work until we test it. Basically, we will have a control center on our end where we can tweak different economic factors to control what goes on. Call it Greenspan 1.0. Other than that, we are considering a system where money isn't constantly "printed" like it is in other games. So the only way a mob will drop money is if he got it off a player or another mob. That would take care of rampant inflation. And there are no static spawns that drop the same item over and over again, so it's hard to compare the item economy to EQ. We'll have to see how things go in beta.

(7) I noticed from your web page that you are pretty involved in Anarchy Online. How's that going?

[severe]

Hi Rich,

Thanks for the reply :)

(1) Personally, I prefer fast day/night cycles. Glad to hear it will not be as dark as in EQ!

(5) I didn't mean in-game supported macros, my concern was on 3rd party macroing programs. If it is alt-tab-able, how will you prevent the abuse of those programs? I played UO the first 6 months it came out, and the rampant 3rd party macro abuse was a major factor for me leaving.

(7) I'm pretty excited about Anarchy Online. While I enjoy fantasy, I'm at heart a Sci-Fi fan. Funcom (the developers of AO) appear to have a firm handle on most of the issues that plauged the previous Big 3 MMORPGs. Time will tell if theory holds up to reality though, heh. Notification of acceptance to Phase 3 of Beta will be sent out to 6,000 people via Email, immediately followed by CD mailings, so exciting times are ahead. Projected release date is Q1 of 2001, again, time will tell.

My website that deals with the Engineer profession in AO that I started/created/maintain has had a few problems of late. I don't know if you are familiar with the now defunct GameGlow network, but my site used to be hosted by them. Supposedly, my site was one of the few that the prior owner of GameGlow was going to continue to host...but I have been unable to FTP into my site for over 3 weeks now :( I have recently started to seriously look into other hosting options, but he owns the domain name (I own the content though).

I played EQ for 15 months, and quit about 4 months ago. Had a level 52 Troll Shaman on Bristlebane named Mebe Spiritbringer. Had a lot of fun, but the annoyances finally started to out way the fun factor, so I left. I felt pretty burned out on Fantasy then, and swore I would never play another Fantasy MMORPG again, or at least not anytime in the near future. Hence my interest in Anarchy Online (btw, Atriarch sounds *very* interesting as well). However, I have found myself being more and more interested in some of the Fantasy MMORPGs that our coming out this coming year.

Probably more than you wanted to know ;)

[Lordosis]

We'll do what we can to prevent macro programs. First by defensve programming against that sort of thing. But the second and more important way is by making the game play such that it's not advantagous to use computer generated macros, but rather it's better to just use your brain to figure out what you should do. That's what will set us apart from older MMORPGs. It's a tall order, but that's what we're going for.

[Su'ulMorda]

Stupid question:
Just what is this Macros business? My main experience is tabletop... Is it a form of cheating?

[Rolfe]

There probably won't be skill atrophy. I think if you read the skill section all the way through, you'll get a better idea of how the skills should work. You can't max out all the skills because there's no max to max out to. Also, if you're really strong but not too smart, it's going to take you a hundred years to become a master magician.

You're a warrior and you just got enough experience points to add one more skill point to one skill. You can try and max out all the skills and put that point into Wizard magic and then spend the next 10 hours practicing magic to try and push your skill up to fill that extra point you just put in, or you can put that point into something you're better suited to, like wrestling or swordplay, and then spend the next 20 minutes practicing fighting to push your fighting skill up.

I think time WILL become a factor. It's just a matter of tweaking the numbers.

[BelDragos]

I also don't know what macros is.

[severe]

Greetings,

"2macro noun pl macros [short for macroinstruction] (1959)
: a single computer instruction that stands for a sequence of operations
(C)1997, 1996 Zane Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved."

There are programs you can download/purchase that allow the user to "record" events. For example: You could type in a series of characters, like your signature line, and only have to hit one user assigned hot key (like CTRL+S) to activate it, and the macro will type out your entire signature for you.

You can also record mouse events (movement, clicks, etc) and a macro can duplicate it, and through looping it, you can do it over and over and over and over again. You don't even have to be at the computer, just press the hotkey and go to sleep. While you are sleeping, the macro performs the tedious business of, for example, smithing armor in UO, or increasing your hide skill in UO.

Macros in Ultima Online allowed people to increase their skills while not physically at the computer. This allowed everyone to be GMs at hiding, bard signing, or practically any skill at all, all without actually playing.

[BelDragos]

Sounds very unbalancing. I have to agree with limitations.

[Rend]

Wow i never played UO but that just sounds ridiculous. Macro's should defintely limited because of people that do that.

[BelDragos]

Keyboard tricks shouldn't be allowed if they can unbalance the game.

[jnjapex]

Some thoughts,

4) Skills with diminishing returns sounds much like
the way they worked in UO. All I can remember hearing
for the first year or so about UO was all the ways
to "max out" the mathematical formulas used to compute
how high your skills get. Not having skill atrophy may
help in that but getting those formulas right before
the product is launched is my concern here... IE no
all powerful tank mages :)

5) From my other thread - I will heartily congratulate you all if you come up with a use based skill advancement system that can outwit a 3rd party macro program and a smart
programmer/player :)

6) I like that idea about having a set amount of money that
just changes hands! Should help a lot with the price inflation of high level items. However it still won't prevent the price *deflation* that occurs over time if
there is no way items ever can decay or are destroyed. Take EQ in that when servers are new even low lvl items are
expensive. As the server matures (3 months with powergamers
and all :) ) powerful mid lvl items ge for almost nothing.

Just a thought - I don't like item decay, but it would be nice if upon death you have a chance of permanently loosing 1 or more items. That would keep demand up for even low level items and in conjunction with the set amount of game money would make for an interesting economy.

-john
Please save us from EQ!

[Su'ulMorda]

That sounds like cheating, pure and simple to me. Is there a way that can be developed to counter such things? It seems very unfair to those of us who like to do things without resorting to the "easy way". Just use a program to build a super-character... That just riles me.

[Dyson]

Though I never liked Macros in UO, I think their power is a bit overstated on this board. The nature of macros effectively only allows them to be used for skills that require doing the same series of clicks literally thousands of times- I knew someone who used a macro to have his Tailor character make hundreds of Hats. Why? Because he really didn't want to spend 11 hours at the computer performing the same three mouseclicks. Skills that affected people directly- ie, fighting, weren't feasible to do with macros. If you wanted to be really good with a sword, you had to go out and find something to kill, then chase it around and hit it 'till it died. You couldn't do that with macro programs.

Personally, I think if someone has the ingenuity to amass a large enough amount of money to buy a house, arrange a huge number of raw materials close enough to them to be useful, and set up a macro so their character Knits scarves all day, more power to them.