[Arilou]

Originally Posted by Frosten

1.) Death ray. obviously. Just a cheap spell in general, very demotivating after purchasing 6 pieces of plat + dpro and still getting 1 hit. Would plat have been able to be enchanted after the enchant fixes, making it possible for immunity?

The idea was that you'd never be able to obtain full immunity. The purpose of death protection items was to decrease your chance of dying if accidentally hit, but if you were a meleer, and you saw a Reaper, you needed to run. We very much wanted there to be monsters that were only beatable by certain classes of players. It's actually a foundational aspect of the game that was not properly developed. Since the early days you had things like greater air elementals and diamond golems, the latter of which actually came with its own controversy because people did not understand this "not everything can be killed by everyone" concept.

Reapers, meanwhile, were meant to be beaten mostly by mages. If you were fighting one from a distance you had time to see death ray coming and, since it's a bolt spell, you should've been able to dodge it easily if you were on top of things. Conversely, if you were not fighting it from a distance, you would not be able to see if coming and your chances of being randomly hit were good, thus making it stupid to fight it in close combat.

Unfortunately, there was a mentality issue where people thought they should be able to kill everything as meleers so they would run up next to Reapers, do their little dance around it, get hit with death ray, die, and then complain that they died. If that situation is familiar to you, you are solely to blame for what happened.

Having said that, I understand that the game was in a state where they were a common occurrence and we still needed to do a lot more in the grouping department. As I mentioned already, Reapers were going to be made into a rare spawning boss monster, so you would have had a much less likely chance to run into them and, thus, they wouldn't have been such an interruption if you didn't have a mage with you.

To avoid accidental run ins the idea was that you could use your lifesaving/phoenix amulet, employ wizard's eye, (I know, they don't work well in dark maps so obviously that was on my list of things to look into improving) have someone in your group who had a tracking ability once that was introduced, (that would be the ability to get information on what monsters were in a map before encountering them) or group with a fodder account (someone who didn't care about losing experience and could therefore act as a scout). We also might have done more with death ray protection. Something I suggested was that if we ever got full armor bonuses going, perhaps platinum armor could come with an X chance of deflecting death ray entirely. In which case it wouldn't even hit you, but it would be sent in a different direction where your teammate might be standing. It was just an idea, not something that we agreed upon, but the point is that we would have been working on creative features that would have helped.

2.) Available training spots for 25+ players. This goes along with the RDing complaint, which was the exclusive spot post 25. What else is there besides RDs? Macabre, Har'Oloth, Tehur, AV? AV starts to fall into a similar issue as RDs in the interim with beholders. The others are quest areas that end up being less rewarding in terms of XP/GP per hour.

Absolutely. Our dungeon situation was underdeveloped and we definitely wanted to, well, develop it. The problem was that we didn't have a proper wizard base. Teshuvah and I were supposed to primarily be map makers who worked in a middle management type of role that allowed us to assist the arch wizards, but not eat up so much of our map making time. With Rhialto gone, the work load structure was wonky, so we ended up being stuck with all this other work and we weren't able to find solid replacements for ourselves. That meant less maps from us (and thus less maps overall) while we were working on balance. Nevertheless, I had a three stage plan. We were nearing the end of stage 1. Stage 3 would have saw us focus on new content/features.

However, we took a break for the anniversary. Because it was a long road that had been hard on you guys I wanted to spend some time away from balance and just give you all as much new content as we could. On my end, I made a high level dungeon one of my priorities and so you ended up with the Magetown Graveyard dungeon which was reasonably popular. Multiple people commented that they were pleasantly surprised to find it to be a good place to train and I would regularly see people in there, both because they liked the XP and because they found the puzzle aspect fun.

More of that was in the pipe. If you've read my blog post about the anniversary you should have seen that my plan for the graveyard from the beginning was to make it a 9 dungeon area. You'd be able to train in 8 of them normally or you could have teamed up with people to collect 8 keys and enter the 9th, mega group dungeon. That was a long way off, but I figured I could work on a dungeon here, a dungeon there, maybe find someone willing to fill a dungeon or two for me, and build the place up as time allowed.

Once we got to stage 3, the mandate for mapmakers would have been to focus on dungeons (both single player and group). My time still would have been split on game design work since I would have had to work with Contrare on what coded features we wanted to introduce, but I imagine it would have been less intense. Also, the plan for stage 3 involved trying to build up the playerbase. That's important because more players equals more people wanting to be wizards so we planned to work on efforts that would have helped to repopulate our wizard base as well. The problem is, as always, that this was dependent on being able to convince Rhialto to do something about the server, which we now know wouldn't have happened.

3.) Scorelists. This was the main thing that used to keep me going, especially when getting Glacio to 30. after the giants got nerfed and RDs were gutted, I simply couldn't compete anymore with the likes of Dioxide, Betty, and Slowlight. Talks with a lot of my friends generally resulted in us being in favor of a stat wipe even before the server shutdown.

Yup, we were far from oblivious from about this (we had long talks focused just on the state of the score lists due to old players from the wildly unbalanced days and we discussed many different options on how to handle it). Stage 1 was balance, stage 3 was new features, and since the game went down I admitted that stage 2 was a stat wipe for exactly the reason you pointed out. Rhialto gave us the go ahead to do a stat wipe if we thought it necessary and because of all the bugs and unbalances it needed to be done once we got through all the balance work. Obviously, we wanted this to be the last stat wipe we ever had to do, so we were working very hard to get the game as balanced as possible before doing that.

That, by the way, ties into why you got suggested playing hours. Since you all were having difficulty competing with players on the score lists who got there due to unbalances and since we still had more work to do before we could get to a stat wipe, we wanted to give you a way to have a little edge on those who had retired. As I explained at the time, it was not a permanent feature.

It served two purposes. The first was to make it easier to find people to group. We were pushing group play, but it was difficult to group when there weren't enough people around and you guys had been very patient with us so we wanted to help you out in that department while we continued to wait on a server fix and worked our way to a better balanced game. With suggested playing hours you knew when the most people would be on and could come on then and try to get a group going. The second was to let you gain a bit on the old, unbalanced high score listings. Once the stat wipe happened, the score lists would have been archived, so whatever position you gained on it would be immortalized. Thus, this was one opportunity to shake things up a bit.

As the stat wipe approached I also wanted to announce it and just give you a bonus XP week or month to try to cement whatever position you could. Some would have whined us to death and so I don't know if I could have gotten Teshuvah and Contrare to go along with putting up with that. However, I thought it would be worth it on our end. Normally a stat wipe is met with only anger, whereas if we did this we'd have an increase of people, both past and present, playing to cement their positions despite their annoyance and I hoped that increase would carry over and we'd have more people stick around after the stat wipe than we otherwise would have.

And, not regarding balance, 4.) My statue. Arilou. Pls. All i wanted was a Then statue in MMA. :P

*chuckles* Sorry, I know I was the one who came up with the idea and promised it to you, but it was out of my hands. Only Contrare could work out the problem to determine who deserved their statues so I was waiting on him as you were waiting on me. It either would have worked out or we would had to do a do over (Contrare led me to believe it would have been the former, but you never know).

Ideally, we would've had another week or so to work on it and we would have rolled it out slowly by inviting people to come help us test it. Shockingly, when you have 50 million things you're trying to rush to get done by a deadline, things don't always work out as planned. I tested that arena so many times, but without someone else concurrently testing it there was just no way I could have discovered that people would end up in the same maps. Ah, fun times.