Satho Undead

[Lauriert]

This discussion may have been made before but one thing is becoming pretty clear. The Sathos can't be trusted to play fairly with their undead. Today I found and died to two giant ghouls with twohanders and a revenant directly south of Bimok. This is a heavily travelled room with many people, most of which who would instantly die, going through it. This is obviously an insanely unfair place to put them and the fact they have twohanders means the person responsible was interested in cheaply killing as many people as possible. This isn't the first instance of this either. They've put undead in the following unfair locations in recent memory.

At the beginning of death valley and/or the canyon east of Elvandar, both of which are exits you cannot scout
Right at the Elor transport stone, south of the gate
On the road south of Elvandar's gate
At the crossing where Jessi is

The ability to place aggressive and highly powerful mobs wherever one pleases is insanely powerful, and should not be something any player is capable of. The only way this works is if every single player of a Satho is a good person who wants everyone to have fun and is willing to be fair. This is obviously not the case and it really shouldn't be an expectation. If something can be abused, it will be. Someone absolutely will come along and abuse it. Game mechanics should be made to expect the worst kind of people to use them, so that when it happens, there are measures in place.

My two suggestions would be to either remove their ability to raise undead or set certain rooms they can be raised. Such as rooms with some sort of special conditions that allow for the raising of undead.

This happened within 1 second of entering the room.
The skinny stinking neuter giant ghoul attacks you.
The skinny stinking neuter giant ghoul attacks you.
The ghastly mutilated male giant revenant starts to make some strange
gestures.

The skinny stinking neuter giant ghoul snaps with its ichor-dripping
teeth at your torso, bites through your jacket and drills it into your
torso.
Your wounds start to bleed.

The skinny stinking neuter giant ghoul snaps with its ichor-dripping
teeth at your torso, bites through your jacket and drills it slightly into
your torso.

The willowy green-skinned male wood sprite thrusts his left fist at the
ghastly mutilated male giant revenant's left leg, but fails to cause any
damage.

The skinny stinking neuter giant ghoul swings its heavy twohander at
your head, cleaves through your cap and cuts deep into your head, down to
the bone.

The skinny stinking neuter giant ghoul thrusts its heavy twohander at
your torso, pierces through your jacket and drills it into your torso.

My CON is halfway to epic, for reference.

[Delia]

Yea, not very cool. Best means of avoidance is not logging in.

Just the tip of the iceberg though. Dunno. Times change, games change, players change. I know I have changed. Ten years ago I would have seen that as a challenge. Now it feels just like tiresome griefing.

All the harshness and focus on pvp pwnage coupled with players not really getting along makes Geas generate sad and depressing feels. Could be just me though? Maybe I am just getting too old.

[Melendil]

Hmm. Would it be possible to have summoned creatures, like undeads, go into some sort of standby mode when their creator is offline? Essentially have them "log out". Maybe undeads could claw their way into the ground (rather than becoming a statue) and burst out of the ground when their creator logs back in?

[ceinna]

My alt once died to this situation when on the road to elvandar. The worst part was being told by the sath that my main (Ceinna) was to blame. Which left me in a position where it was pretty much impossible to roleplay through without touching on multiplaying. It generally left a poor taste in my mouth.

I think that the sath undead can be a fun addition to the game. I have seen them placed purposefully and seen them bring a lot of (good/fun) tension to the game.

I think avoiding putting them where lowbies/midbies (lets be real - even 10 days of playtime when newbie protections wear off is not enough time to get strong enough to survive 2 undead giant ghouls wielding 2 handers and a rev) is just bad form. It definitely succeeds in alienating a good portion of the players, and not just the players who want to have nothing to do with pk/conflict, but even those of us who do.

There used to be some pretty understood unspoken rules, I miss those.

Purposely placing undead on a road where newbies can die is skirting the ideas found in help fairplay in my opinion. Placing them in places like the tundra gorge, etc., those are fair game. I can chose to interact or not - even knowing I might die. But just walking into one (especially in places where newbies start or log out/log in) is a quick way to get people not interested in the games. Because losing all ones stuff can be pretty detrimental to the desire to log into the game.

I dont want to see undead removed. I would like to see a situation where they are not created and left till someone big enough to kill them comes along, where newbies do not have to worry about dying to them without realizing, or where other guilds would get protectors of their own in similar fashion - since what the undead amount to is actually PK without consequence for the creator, which I do find to be a badly balanced tool.

(just my 2 cents, and to be honest, I don't play as often anymore right now because I deal with enough bs in my real life and do not want to log in and play with people who play the game to "win")

[Lauriert]

The playerbase has changed, I believe the game needs to change too. Gone seemingly are the days where undead are used as a tool to enhance the world in a fair way. Now they seem to be used strictly for getting cheap and easy pvp wins. It seems pretty apparent the current Sathos cannot fairly handle having such a powerful too.

[ceinna]

I dont think its fair to make such a wide ranging determination. Fact is, the undead can be placed pretty cool and can actually do some good things. I think that maybe adjusting some things about them might be in order but I would not go so far as to just downright say that those days are gone. One of the issues you run into when you have large amounts of older players quit playing and new players taking over who don't learn from the older players is that the "rules" of engagement are lost. And so new ones are created.

A lot of us older players have seen the mud go through this on both sides to be honest. I've seen the goodies absolutely destroy the evils and I've seen the evils absolutely destroy the goodies. What I can say, is that when I have personally had the most fun (and therefore wanted to take the most time out of my life to play this game) is when both sides are either somewhat evenly matched or when the bigger side is willing to purposely lose sometimes and make sure that everyone is having fun. Sometimes that means purposely getting captured, sometimes it means taking a deal or treaty you might not think is in not in your favor, sometimes it may mean just letting yourself be killed, or letting the tower be opened/closed, etc.

We have to all remember that on the other side of the screen is a player who is trying to have fun. For whatever their reason is, they are chosing to log into the game and escape from the stress/boredom/etc. of real life. And so we owe it to everyone to remember that the other player is not their character and that if we want to continue having fun (because the more players to interact the more fun the game is) we have to make sure that everyone is enjoying themselves. This means restraint and maturity is a necessity.

[Lauriert]

It's great when both sides are out to make the game fun for everyone, but unfortunately that's not always the case. The specific mechanic in question is suspect because it's extremely powerful and abusable when given to players. The goods don't really have anything similarly abusable.

It's nice to talk about the ideal game and how everyone plays with everyone else's fun in mind. But the fact is, toxic players exist and some people just play to win and nothing else. Undeads enable this playstyle by letting someone wrack up tons of player kills without actually doing anything. The toxicity of where the undead get put as well as the resulting frustration far outweighs any possible positive to letting them have them.

I'm sorry, but placing traps along the road that can kill a char as strong as Lauriert in mere seconds just should not be allowed in any context. Or past an exit you can't scout. Or at the Elor stone which prevents anyone who resurrected in Elor from opening the gate and leaving. Point is, bad far outweighs the good. The undead should be either removed, heavily nerfed, or only allowed in a select few locations.

[Lauriert]

The skinny stinking neuter giant ghoul thrusts its heavy twohander at
your head, pierces through your cap and drills it very deep into your head,
causing a nasty, deep wound.
The skinny stinking neuter giant ghoul pierces its heavy
twohander deep into your head and splits your skull.

This was the first attack launched and I was in a massive group too.

[Lauriert]

The red-haired slender female elf says with a quiet, soft spoken voice
in Common: Probably Ananth.
The hairy small-handed male elf gracefully leaves northwest.
Cahavir gracefully leaves northwest.
The red-haired slender female elf says with a quiet, soft spoken voice
in Common: He had me killed last week.

A few stars can be seen through the clouds on this winter night.
Some wind blows from the north.
appraise slender elf

You study the red-haired slender female elf carefully.
She is physically feeling very well and mentally in full vigour.
She is extremely alert.
You are much stronger than she is.
You are more dexterous than she is.
You are much more agile than she is.
You are much healthier than she is.
She looks adolescent for an elf.
You know she will bore you if you fight her.
You know her weight is 68 kg, her volume is about 72 liter and her height is
about 172 cm.
>
say He killed you?
You say in Common: He killed you?
>
The red-haired slender female elf says with a quiet, soft spoken voice
in Common: His undead.
say Oh
You say in Common: Oh
>
The red-haired slender female elf says with a quiet, soft spoken voice
in Common: He had a giant ghoul outside the gate and a ogre zombie.
@say Which is the big problem with undead in this game... lowbies with no involvement die because
of them
<OOC>: Which is the big problem with undead in this game...
lowbies with no involvement die because of them
>
The red-haired slender female elf says with a quiet, soft spoken voice
in Common: Then had more ghouls down the road when I tried to run.

[IamEz]

I think one thing that might help with this is if undead crumble when the player who raised them logs off. Leaving traps is well and good, but you shouldn't be able to log in for 5 minutes, leave a trap, and then have multiple people die to it over the next several days while you spend your time watching football and eating Cheetos. (Yes I know most undead crumble over time anyway, but that doesn't invalidate my point.)

Another option would be if the proximity of the person who raised it determines its strength. With weaker undead, if you go more than x rooms away, it could get so weak it crumbles on its own. Stronger undead would allow a greater distance, but even a revenant should be weakened if the player who summoned it goes clear on the other end of the map. It could be calculated in a similar fashion to how star amulets become less effective at greater distances.