What would make you come back to Geas?

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ferranifer
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What would make you come back to Geas?

#1 Post by ferranifer » Tue Jun 17, 2014 11:36 am

Hello everyone!,

Geas has been running for 15+ years now. That's a very long time for online videogame standards and many things have improved, evolved and changed in the game during those years. Wars have been fought, relationships have been stablished and destroyed, heroes and villains have emerged, clashed and disappeared into the limbo of lost memories. In one way or another, the game has touched many of us and shaped a large portion of our lives.

I want to celebrate that. This game is voluntary work and it's trully awesome that we can still enjoy it as much as we do. Thank you wizards and players of future, present and past.

I also want to throw a question out there for all of you old time and new time lurkers.

What would make you come back to Geas? Be it a new feature that the game needs, or some sort of conflict, or the presence of certain players or something else altogether! What is the most important thing that would make you log back into the game and enjoy your time in Geas once again?

P.S.: if the thing is an actual game feature, please give Allalltar some love at viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2366

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luminier
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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#2 Post by luminier » Thu Jun 19, 2014 2:12 am

players
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Delia
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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#3 Post by Delia » Thu Jun 19, 2014 2:58 am

Huge amount of personal free time. I do not count myself amongst those not playing anymore but in practice...well... I am not around much. Last time I had the chance to play was when I had almost forty degrees celcius worth of fever.

I rarely log on if I have only an hour or so(I do check mail and news sometimes, like 5 mins in and out), or if I feel tired and mentally exhausted which usually is the case after work and hobbies. Geas fares poorly in my books when it comes to casual play as many activities are rather time consuming. One can do very little in an hour and accomplish even less. I feel bad about having to quit some long talks abruptly or some other rp-esque scene simply because I do not have the time as it is not uncommon for a talk to go on for an hour or so. And I have not even had the chance to get to the "character maintenance" part yet. I think I simply should accept the fact that Delia's fate is simply to slowly wither and fade into the background.

Well, this is merely me observing myself.
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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#4 Post by ferranifer » Thu Jun 19, 2014 10:38 am

luminier wrote:players
So how do we get more of those? What needs to happen to get players back? Because if all we need is more people to interact with... well... everyone just come play? :)

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Eluriel
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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#5 Post by Eluriel » Fri Jun 20, 2014 3:48 am

Honestly, right now I don't really have the time to play, so I can't say a change would bring me back. But, a lot of why I left had to do with how difficult it was to make any progress with my characters. Once I got to a certain mediocre point, I just kind of reached a lull, and I ended up spending all my time just doing the same things over and over, trying to improve my skills. It was hard to really get involved in anything when my characters didn't have the skills to match up. Not necessarily just pvp-wise, but in other ways as well.

It was fun rping with the people I did rp with. And that's one thing I loved. But just social chatter is only so interesting for so long. There was a time when Eluriel was garnering the Crusade's suspicion, but again, without any skills to back it up, it's kind of hard to openly cause trouble without getting your arse kicked.

I don't want to take anything away from the players that have put years of work into the game to get their awesome characters, but having to spend so much time to get your character to a decent level just kind of made me lose interest.

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luminier
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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#6 Post by luminier » Fri Jun 20, 2014 11:55 am

you do need a lot of time to do well in this game, but, on the other hand I don't think thats a BAD thing. Geas is kind of like real life. you have to be realistic about the type of goal you want to achieve sometimes you just don't have enough time to do absolutely everything you want to do or even become the best at what you want to do.
ferranifer wrote:
luminier wrote:players
So how do we get more of those? What needs to happen to get players back? Because if all we need is more people to interact with... well... everyone just come play? :)
If only the answer were that simple, but as seen here, everyone has different reasons for not playing.
The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.

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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#7 Post by isengoo » Fri Jun 20, 2014 6:54 pm

Free artifacts :lol:

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luminier
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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#8 Post by luminier » Sat Jun 21, 2014 3:55 am

isengoo wrote:Free artifacts :lol:
Ehh, they aren't that great. :P
The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.

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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#9 Post by glorfindel » Sat Jun 21, 2014 8:14 am

Thought a bit of what is quenching my motivation for this game (even though I still play rather regularly), in no particular order:

- The way recruits for guilds are behaving (I decided to make a separate post about this
today, which I'll write right after this one), because, seriously.
- The unwillingness of people to get involved with things that are slightly out of their
way / gaming the system (example: mage creates a _hailstorm_ on elvandar market.
Nobody cares, because the system does not punish you, you don't need to react.. ).
- The 'one-themedness' of the conflicts that happen and the lack of disputes. Seldomly
I did ever find myself in any conflict that did not get solved by a call to arms and was
not related with violence. It gets boring after a while.
- Coded feature wise, I think IC communication improvements are pretty high on my
list (being one of those who really hate WHO but don't see much an alternative right
now).

Take that all with a grain of salt before you feel like flaming back, thank you.

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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#10 Post by Trysnyx » Sun Jul 20, 2014 11:03 pm

I personally think that a good thing to do would be that the wizards would make a thread to see what features or lost features drove people away. People would write down what drove them away (if, of course, it was an addition to the game as it is very possible). A good example would be what would have happened if the 'who' mechanic was not changed a second time. Some people would have quit completely, and I personally almost did but stuck around to see if it would change again. Since it did, I, and many other players, stayed which saved the player base a hard hit. I think that changing or compromising features such as this would be a good way to bring people back to Geas and perhaps make a thriving community.

Of course, there are some people who quit for RL reasons and can't be brought back through such means. But the people who were driven away by a bad feature or change of feature may be happy to see that their problem was reversed or compromised :) .

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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#11 Post by illiad » Wed Aug 13, 2014 8:35 pm

For me, the biggest difficulty in returning after a prolonged absence is my difficulties with skill rot.

I have tried logging on a few times and I know that if I don't start doing a bunch of things right away, my skills are going to start rotting pretty soon. To be honest, I have been through so much in the last six months or so, it is a challenge just to remember how to play.

I would rather go to each city and see what is new, then try and catch up with old contacts and acquaintances and stop by my guilds, but I am stressing about skill rot.

To be honest, that has always stressed me out about this game. I am sitting in the middle of the town square or a tavern, chatting with people, but I can never relax, because I know that behind the scenes, I am always on the verge of forgetting something. I know I should worry about it, but I do. It is just how I am wired.

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luminier
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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#12 Post by luminier » Thu Aug 14, 2014 1:16 am

Never understood why that bothered people. I love forgetting skills. Makes room for new ones.

I could maybe see if you were a bookbinder and your skill dropped from 100 to 99 you would be a little sad about that. After a few more books made in your industry I am sure you wouldn't have a problem getting it back there.

Especially the useless skills. UGH. Why did I learn all the god damn appraisal skills. Useless.
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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#13 Post by Delia » Thu Aug 14, 2014 1:27 am

Hopefully you will eventually develop a routine, a style of play that naturally selects your skills as you simply do not have time as a player to do everything. I ended up discarding 90+ spear and missile skills, to name a few, simply because maintaining the skill scores ended up being up being too much of a chore. Life was much sweeter after that :)

Now I am in the process of forgetting some more skills but those mage mentals do not make it easy...

As your character should have some sweet, still increasing mental stats you should have easier time with skill degradation. As unless I am terribly wrong here, good mentals affect both the amount of skills you can easily have and improve and how fast you forget them. Then again, I think the forgetting process might have been slowed down a bit in the past. Lots of speculation here from my part here...

Anyhoo, forgetting a bit does not mean much, you can lose 10 points of theory until your practical value begins to go down. Of course you cannot improve decreased skills but then again, you should not try to improve all of your skills at once with an experienced character.
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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#14 Post by louis » Thu Aug 14, 2014 6:56 am

illiad wrote:[...] I have tried logging on a few times and I know that if I don't start doing a bunch of things right away, my skills are going to start rotting pretty soon. To be honest, I have been through so much in the last six months or so, it is a challenge just to remember how to play.[...]
Hi! We have - somewhen in the last 6 months - slowed down the speed of skill decay quite decently, so, unwanted skill decay (and the frequent need to mantain your skills) should according to our opinion not be such an issue anymore.

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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#15 Post by Skragna » Tue Sep 23, 2014 1:03 pm

I'd like to see a little more spice available for tshaharks. As it stands, to my knowledge, only one guild has tail-specific armor for them, possibly two and at maximum three. The only non-guild armor is chainmail, which is hard on those who want to play light-armor characters. In addition, many, many things are forbidden to them. They can't join many guilds (some of which I agree with, some I do not, but I won't get into that rant here.) and they're generally seen as little more than dumb muscle. What I want to see, more than /ANYTHING/ else, is a little more support for Geas' original, and, in my eyes, iconic race. There's nothing like the 'harks in any other MUD (including backstory, obviously.) And it's just a bit sad to see them sort of... downtrodden. I don't mean that in a bad way, I expected and enjoy a bit of oppressed-because-of-species RP, but there's that... and then there's straight-up ignoring what the player says because they're just a stupid tshahark.

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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#16 Post by Osiron » Wed Sep 24, 2014 4:37 pm

Players 1st and conflict 2nd.

Players means more interaction.
More slice of life.

I think an old friend once told me if geas had such and such # of players online he'd have never left.

Conflict. Doesn't have to be PVP oriented even.

I'd have been happy with Wizards continuing and heightening the pace of npc monsters causing trouble around cities. (I did enjoy the ghouls coming out of the sewers, insects/demon attacks, undead sieges)

Kinda needed a DM around consistently, someone creative.

Some of the best memories were NPC monsters holding hostages.
Funniest little creatures making strange demands and dozens of them.
Troll things apparently sieging the crusader castle.

Hard to have an interesting protagonist without any good antagonist.
Give us a reason to take up arms.
Give us a reason to try and rally others to our causes.

I loved it when Villains were around. What is Star Wars without the Empire and Darth Vader?

People enjoy the minecraft sandbox crafting style of Geas thats fine. To be honest though I'll start playing minecraft and build things with my friends if thats all people wanted geas to be.

It just wasn't for a lot of the players I knew when it became like that.
glorfindel wrote: - The unwillingness of people to get involved with things that are slightly out of their
way / gaming the system (example: mage creates a _hailstorm_ on elvandar market.
Nobody cares, because the system does not punish you, you don't need to react.. ).
- The 'one-themedness' of the conflicts that happen and the lack of disputes. Seldomly
I did ever find myself in any conflict that did not get solved by a call to arms and was
not related with violence. It gets boring after a while.
You have to remember that miracles were already a huge part of the system. A hailstorm in the elvandar market isn't gonna make anyone raise their eyebrows if they are used to seeing fiery birds smash into people or lightning striking people or resurrection happening.

It's like a guy using a big gun at a gun range, fancy & loud but the likelyhood of it being something I should care about is null. Who am I to complain if they are using a legal activity? Do I have any reason to ask them about their gun?

I think when you look at the medieval themed mud... one thinks to them self... these people did not solve things through rhetoric primarily. I think you have a valid point. By the end everyone made pacts with everyone of my Geas days, everything was solved with peace routinely. I agree there needed to be both solutions peaceful and not peaceful.

Thats just my thoughts. Flame away.
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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#17 Post by glorfindel » Thu Sep 25, 2014 3:01 am

Let me clarify that hailstorm example. I watched a fire elemental being summoned and people not caring. The point is, the summoner was not a cleric and thus something known. High magic is nothing people are used to in geas. They are used to miracles by the gods, not magic by the common man.

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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#18 Post by Dax » Sat Sep 27, 2014 11:12 am

glorfindel wrote:Let me clarify that hailstorm example. I watched a fire elemental being summoned and people not caring. The point is, the summoner was not a cleric and thus something known. High magic is nothing people are used to in geas. They are used to miracles by the gods, not magic by the common man.

That would actually require people to believe that not everything
is acceptable. Then they would have to get angry at their friends.

Then people would get their feelings hurt. Then everyone couldn't all be friends.

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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#19 Post by lili » Sun Oct 12, 2014 11:37 pm

For me I had a lot of issues going on in my RL that I simply couldn't play for a while. But when I was able, I came back because I missed the fun Rp that I had been involved in. I have been mudding for years and have played many different games, but I never felt to pressured here to grind hunting to be the best because most things could be settled RPly one way or another.

When I first came to this game, it was because the website said there were druids. I've always been a sucker for nature/druid guilds and their RP. I was really sad to see that at the time the guild was pretty much broken and unable to gain entrance to. I nearly left and went on to look for another game. But you know how it is, You start to have fun and you play a little longer until you are hooked.

There are a few things I wish were better, I wish the player-base was big enough that people could be priests of any religion. I would play all the time for the chance to be either a priestess of Evren or a druid. Just saying.

I wish the newbie tour was a bit better, its confusing and spammy. I wish it didn't take me 20 minutes or more to kill a thilden/gremlin first starting out- which is why i rarely make new chars.

I'd surely like it better if there were more consequence for doing something bad as a certain religion. Or an IC way to report bad behavior to your NPC priestess, so that an Rp solution can happen, instead of people just running around rping they are good, keeping good favour, karma, and doing bad things with nothing keeping them in check.
(= You guys need to vote =)

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Re: What would make you come back to Geas?

#20 Post by Sairina » Mon Oct 13, 2014 2:55 am

There are a few things I wish were better, I wish the player-base was big enough that people could be priests of any religion. I would play all the time for the chance to be either a priestess of Evren or a druid.
I haven't played much lately, but weren't the druids active again a while ago? Just out of curiosity, because I would love this as well.

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