Justin, Everyone is entitled to their opinions. I'll address some of my own responses to yours below. Sometimes, it's a matter of your play style or your expectations. Coming from a long term roleplaying game background like Dark, a mud is never going to live up to my own personal standards of what i'd like from this style of game; but that said, I feel that alter does better than a lot of muds I've tried.
I'm going to quote and respond below: Jeremy, I get that Alter is staffed by volunteers and that Dentin and Shadowfax have real-life issues to deal with. I get it, I really do, but some of the recent changes/skill additions have been mind-bogglingly awful. (Jeremy: A lot of awful is very subjective. One change that has angered a lot of people is the charisma changes for clerics. It has made charisma an important stat for now five classes. However, because charisma was everyone's dump stat, it has caused issues. The ability to swap stats has alleviated some of this problem, and some other issues with other awful changes are answered in similar ways. I wouldn't want to pay for a stat swap either if I could help it, so I sympathize with those who don't see that as an option, but saying this change is awful because there's no recourse just because you don't like the recourse is probably not the way to procede.) Take, for instance, the change where lightcatchers will now have a chance to break when they are used. Why? Why has Dentin felt the need to make this adjustment? There is no call to do this? On the other hand, (Jeremy: I disagree. Druid is the youngest class in terms of development, and this is part of limiting the class' power and making it more in line with other powers and abilities on the game. Light catchers and spell staves make druids one of the most dangerous classes, and causing these abilities to possibly have other repercussions helps to limit that power. To build new staves or sun catchers takes gold a limited resource, mana and time that the character might have used elsewhere. It makes sense. Necromancers run into this problem when soul stones are sucked down to the underworld with a summoning etc.) Warriors and Thieves need some serious overhauling as there are entirely too many stat dependencies, (Warrior and thief require at most four stats like any other class. Primarily either strength or dexterity, constitution and charisma. If a thief is to be successful intelligence is important, but since any sane person will want spells, intelligence will be one of the stats being trained fourth, fifth, or sixth anyway. I don't get this particular argument, but i'll attribute it to play style.) but most of all, the equipment selection is not terribly strong? (When I first started playing, a super powerful warrior could hit 40/40 and was limited to hitting. Now, a super powerful warrior can expect to hit 50/50 without intrinsic hitroll or damroll and more than likely regens mv, has intelligence or wisdom on their hit gear so they can cast mor e of their own spells, can carve many pieces or have a druid friend carve them, and can often do other things while hitting. Again, I am not sure I follow this argument. In terms of gear, I honestly think warrior and thief have it far better in many ways than other classes. No, most hit gear does not carry mv regen which would be a warrior equivalent to the manaregen on caster level gear but refresh is a second level spell requiring only a wisdom of 14 or 15 and a chr of 11 or 12. Again, i'll have to attribute this one to difference in play style and expectations.) With the various spellcasting classes, as a direct comparison, the latter's equipment is fairly straight-forward in what is optimal. (Hmm, i'm not sure i'd agree. All casting classes have to decide whether to go with cast level or regen. Necromancer is the only class where the two often are conjoined nicely and even there, many necromancers can increase their regen by going full bore regen set. However, iagree with you that most of the casting gear is easier to understand once you learn the differences between cast ability, caster level, mana regen, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma boosts, aging, age, and how all of those interact.) Warriors and Thieves, on the other hand have lousy selections. (Why? There are a number of 3/3 pieces in the game now, there's a number of lower power pieces with str/dex on them. Ther'es pieces with mv regen and hit or dam. I'm not seeing this one, i'm sorry.) If Dentin/Shadowfax are being overwhelmed by the workload involved, they can always reach out to veteran members of the community and enlist their support. (Yes, if they are willing to deal with the possible fall out and issues with how changes are implemented. Dentin is very careful who has access to and is able to change the code and how much for a reason. He has a vision for the game and how it should be balanced, and past issues with coding are one reason there aren't more people doing it.) It is a simple problem with an equally simple solution. (As with most simple solutions, the problem isn't quite as simple as it appears:).) I am willing to concede that my entry into Alter, and subsequent opinion of the game, is colored by my experience with mainstream role-playing games, i.e. games that sighted people have access too. (Such as? I know my experiences were heavily colored by my playing of Dungeons and Dragons, Rolemaster, and other similar games. If you're meaning World of Warcraft or similar online things, since they evolved from muds, there's a lot of overlap in terms of how they work, and there's also a lot of differences in terms of business model. When you have 2 million subscribers all paying 10 dollars a month to play, you can afford more coding, more elaborate setups, and more rapid change.) Perhaps I have grown accustomed to a higher level of quality/balance, (Quality is subjective. I have the impression from your other critiques that a number of these issues are different from my own issues with A.A. and probably result from play style and approach. Balanced? I'm not so sure about that. A.A. is one of the best balanced games I've seen in terms of no one class being dominant. When I first started playing mage was clearly the most superior class and far outstripped all others hands down and with no question. Nowadays? While many people feel that necromancer and druid are overpowered, they are frankly new classes. The other four were balanced over a period of 20 years. Necromancer has been out 6 years, druid only 3 assuming i'm remembering correctly. Neither is a significant amount of time compared to the other four. The light catcher change you noted earlier, and the changes two or three years ago to necromancer minions that caused such an uproar are signs of those classes being brought into tighter balance.) given my background. If this is indeed the case, then I recognize my failing and will work to correct it. (I'm not sure it's a failing necessarily, but a lack of full understanding. That tends to be the source of most criticisms of the game. I played for 7 years before I ever started building on A.A. and it wasn't until I started building that I truly began understanding parts of the game that had always flummoxed me. It's an amazingly complex interaction of stats, skills and spells, equipment, and other factors that make monsters and players the way they are. Dentin himself a lot of times has to ask players how things work in actual play because he's not directly familiar with every bit of code all the time. It seems like to me that some of your criticisms are based on misapprehension of what the powers and roles of warrior and thief are versus caster classes. Also too, equipment is built by world builders and takes time to catch up with actual needs and changes in the player base, play style, and game changes. A lot of cleric gear has been updated to include bonus chr now instead of bonus intelligence for one example. A lot of newer warrior and thief eq is far superior to what was available in older areas, and some of hthat is being updated slowly but surely. Players want the game to reflect what they see as weaknesses, but the game has something like 600 or 700 distinct areas or racks, new ones are being added to keep up with player demand, and with the limited volunteer staff there's not enough time to update every piece of eq the way it should be as fast as it should be. In the case of main stream rpgs for the sighted, most of the ones that I see people cite most often are pay to play set ups or are table top games. Both involve a huge cash investment and require a lot of fiddling with at the design level. The players do not see that fiddling the way they do with a small mud like A.A. because it all happens invisibly and is paid for. There's no volunteers, there's people being paid to do grinding work. It's an important point to keep in mind. For many points in A.A.'s history there's been less people operating full time. At some points there was more. Dentin has made a real commitment to keeping the game playable as a free game. I like that, and admire it, but it means that people do have to have certain expectations different than with mainstream games. Also too, one last thing: Alter is, was, and continues to be designed just as much for sighted people as for the blind. Making a distinction between it and mainstream sighted games struck me sort of mfunny. Dnetin's catering more to blind players as we make up the majority of the player base now, but the game didn't start out that way, and only slowly has evolved that way. When I first started playing, it was a different thing ieentirely to play on the telnet clients and to have to react at speed with no triggers to a changing environment. Mush has so much ambient sound, and msp sounds have added so much, that the game is hardly recognizable in those terms.) Take care, Jeremy --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
