EE questions and concerns.

[Sockss]

Increase the DM team size a little, and/or advertise & implement channels to admins and DM's specifically to deal with this behaviour.

I suspect after a week of release it'll calm down anyway - especially given that EE will presumably deal with infinite cd keys.

While I disagree with painfully slow leveling too for the reasons above, I'd like to point out it doesn't work. The vast majority of players being murdered are fresh off the boat and slow leveling will not aid that.

You also want to put your best foot forward with new players or they'll leave, so increased activity from the team in the first week will go down very well. Not to mention I'm sure the playerbase will keep vigilant, and as equally welcoming and helpful as they were to me when I started.

[Improv]

Fear of new players is more unhealthy for the server in the long term than any harm a few trolls could do. This place desperately needs new ideas and playstyles and enthusiasm from people free of existing cliques and baggage. I'll take a griefer a day in Cordor if it means ten new arrivals who actually want to be here join as well.

Besides sounds like there is the option for a completely separate starting area, so if there is a massive influx they could be more or less quarantined.

[Irongron]

This is something I had already discussed extensively with the team, and I do have plans should it come to hordes of barbarians at the gates of Cordor and Andunor. As Action says it is hard to make a solid prediction of what the impact will be before it happens, and there's plenty of time left to prepare.

One thing I have already said I would consider (if it came to it) is limiting new players to the low level new EE module, until their RPR is raised, or they are approved for Cities and Planes/Surface.

Though hoping it doesn't come to that, and either way we'll almost certainly be needing more DMs when the time comes.

[BegoneThoth]

I don't think restricting new players to an area is the best idea, but I do think some restrictions for bran new accounts that are low level are out of the question. I don't really think it's out of line to set that at a low-ish level requirement, before PLC's can be bashed/stolen or pickpocket/disarm are able to be used. Just as a safety precaution.

I'll just say it again here too, disarm, right now, basically isn't used. But if a new wave of people show up, and realize how easy it is to just take equipped items from people, it's going to be a really really awful time for anyone <70 discipline. I've heard before the only reason it hasn't been changed was because nobody really used it, but I really think we ought to look into 'disarm drops to disarmed players inventory' change before we open the flood gates. There was a DM event a bit ago with mobs that disarmed, and I know that caused a lot of frustration over lost items. But when it's players, and it's that easy, it's rife for abuse.

[DM Always This Late]

Well,

I think we could probably make a thread that is very long with maybe situations and speculations on potential mechanical abuses that might happen. But some of the issues, if they crop up, we can deal with. Like any other situation.

Not saying Disarm is an abuse? But in general... I think we'll be good, and can adjust as we need to. If something becomes silly and abused just like now we can adapt.

[frightnight]

this is NwN folks..lol..not EQ... just look at all the empty servers on EE headstart and the ones actually up just have 1/2 players idling and that's their DMs keeping player count so people will log in..



since when has griefing ever been an issue on arelith? and 90% of it is level <10s...and when that does happen they just get reported by 3-4 people and the epics start logging in

all arelith needs is more scripts & rules

(devil's advocate)

[One Two Three Five]

see sig

[frightnight]

that's a scenario that happened to me tho

im of the opinion EE will give arelith a good +20 players..

[High Primate]

since when has griefing ever been an issue on arelith? and 90% of it is level <10s...and when that does happen they just get reported by 3-4 people and the epics start logging in

Back in the days of Gamespy it was more frequent. But yeah, it's always been low-levels, or occasionally people with hacked characters, which I think doesn't happen anymore. But random griefing has never been a major problem on Arelith.

[BegoneThoth]

When EE takes off, Arelith is going to be in the forefront.

All I really want to be sure of, is that the server is going to be prepared to handle the dregs that come with the kind of people being high in the Steam Top Sellers list is going to bring.

[frightnight]

the DM staff has never been more active than it has now.. one need only look a couple of posts below to see how shameful and cringeworthy some of the playerbase has become..directly outting pcs (in all caps) and naming names.. on the forum of all places

im confident the current staff will have no problems with a few griefers who know nothing of nwn mechanics

furthermore the Be Nice rule has turned arelith into a carebear society.. ill happily redact anything ive said but i think some of us should “suck it up” a bit..i mean this isnt a hardcore perm server

[High Primate]

one need only look a couple of posts below to see how shameful and cringeworthy some of the playerbase has become

When did criticizing the playerbase ever become relevant to this thread? That's totally off topic.

[frightnight]

bc its this kind of carebear mentality thats turning arelith into the sims

...

just out of curiousity..if most of the griefing is done below lvl 10..what is the worst that can honestly happen that justifies reporting someone?

someone got pvped in bramble woods and lost 125 exp and 300 coins?

i mean destroying placeables..somethinf along those lines i can understand but its the exception and not the norm

[High Primate]

bc its this kind of carebear mentality thats turning arelith into the sims

This, too, is totally irrelevant to the thread at hand. It has nothing to do with the topic of this thread, and you're using the opportunity to hijack this thread as a platform for your own negative feelings about the server and people who play on it. Since I want to see this thread continue because up until now it has been constructive, I ask that the forum mods kindly intercede and re-route this into constructive and respectful territory.

[BegoneThoth]

the DM staff has never been more active than it has now.. one need only look a couple of posts below to see how shameful and cringeworthy some of the playerbase has become..directly outting pcs (in all caps) and naming names.. on the forum of all places

This was the last post in this thread when I saw it, what post did you mean to refer to?

Additionally I don't think stopping level 3 new accounts from smashing fixtures is 'care bear' anything.

[Maladus]

I think they are referencing the locked threads in this subforum.

[BegoneThoth]

Ah.

Lets keep it on topic. I don't want this to get locked as well.

[Cortex]

Technically, it is on topic.

When a new player comes see the forum, the posts/threads they see will give them a specific impression of the players in the server, its troubles and its traits. Were I a new player and saw numerous threads with inflammatory, stupid, disingenuous content, I'd be less inclined to invest my time on it.

I joined a discord of a game mod not long ago, with moderators and the main dev in it, and I was not largely impressed, a few snippets/examples:

"X AND Y ARE TROLLS KICK THEM EVERY GAME"
*generic asdf spam*
*meme spam*
"im done with this garbage game"

This goes both ways, to players and moderators/admins, the impression they give is important. Undermoderating and overmoderating are both problems.

[frightnight]

the bottom line is that arelith just like any other server is like a delicate ecosystem

im seeing suggestions like making low leveling like it was before, scripts to prevent low level pvp, nerfing disarm, making pp unuseable at <7 lvl...expanding DM team.... all in the forseeable event that someone brand new to nwn is gonna go nuts?

we dont need all these complex mechanisms that will just be snuggybear all to balance.. all we need is a competant dm staff which we have

...

why not just let the playerbase deal with it rather than nerfing the poor rogues into oblivion and making low leveling the same abyssmal task it was years before..not one likes constricting limitations..all this will amount too is that the rest of the playerbase will have to suffer when a dm could have just stepped in off a complaint and remedied some sporadic behavior

[frightnight]

as a side caveat(sp?) i played a low lvl never do well on EE test getting into numerous ic pvp hijinx with some low lvl dwarf and locking a paladin into the grainery and let me tell you...no one complained..no one cared..we had two somewhat opposing low lvl factions vying for control of n00b town

and let me tell you

it was an absolute blast..it was the most fun ive had on arelith in years and the other guys felt the same way...

[BegoneThoth]

If you tie the anti fixture destruction script to rpr 20+ or level seven, it won't stop any of those things, except perhaps for a brand new player's first few hours.

Just enough to make fixture griefing a big pain.

As for disarm, I still don't know how that's meant to be dealt with. If you disarm someone, and they die, you're sort of screwed. If you touch their body you loot their gold, and that's your one stolen thing for the day, you and your gang cannot then loot their moonblade and have to let it sit on the ground. Likewise if you take their item you can't touch their corpse. This gets more complex if you disarm someone while using fists and they equip a new item, you can "steal" from them twice. I don't like how disarm acts with the stealing and 24 hour rules.

But it's a different issue. Disarm was only brought up due to how easy it is to steal something valuable, and how once you get it, you never ever have to give it back, unlike mechanical pickpocket which allows you to snag it back.

[Seven Sons of Sin]

Technically, it is on topic.

When a new player comes see the forum, the posts/threads they see will give them a specific impression of the players in the server, its troubles and its traits. Were I a new player and saw numerous threads with inflammatory, stupid, disingenuous content, I'd be less inclined to invest my time on it.

I joined a discord of a game mod not long ago, with moderators and the main dev in it, and I was not largely impressed, a few snippets/examples:

"X AND Y ARE TROLLS KICK THEM EVERY GAME"
*generic asdf spam*
*meme spam*
"im done with this garbage game"

This goes both ways, to players and moderators/admins, the impression they give is important. Undermoderating and overmoderating are both problems.

I'm glad this is being said.

[One Two Three Five]

Yeah, one of the barriers to me coming back after a relatively long hiatus was the weird morphing of forum/discord culture into the weird 4chan-lite memes-trolling-and-harassment problem. Of course, occasional jokes are fine, I think, else we'll all explode from unreleased stress and start calling each other losers or something over a decade+ old game where we pretend to be gnomes and warlocks, and gnome warlocks. Were I coming back from a hiatus this week and I saw the, uh, edgelord junk that got the other EE thread locked? I would've stayed away.

I guess at the time that sort of stuff was exacerbated by the off-site 'Arelith' forum, you know the one, and I guess some people never got that (and reddit/chans/etc) out of their system.

Griefers might be a problem if BegoneThoth is right about how steam works, and frankly I'm sure there's more to griefing than players see that DMs deal more with than you'd think, and in the past we've had some incredibly dedicated jackanapes spend an almost embarassing amount of time and effort trying to ruin people's good time (targeting specific players to do so)- so I don't know if caution is unfounded.

At the same time? The culture we have is the culture we're going to get, most likely- new players will copy old players to fit in. So if the forum looks like /tg/ or r/incels, that's what we're going to get. You want people on their best behavior, be on yours.

tl;dr we all love trolling but maybe we oughta stop

[Madukthedoppelganger]

Has the Steam family sharing concern been brought up with Beamdog? A quick googling says that the Steam Web API has a method for getting the original owner's SteamID if the game is shared, so preventing this particular abuse might be relatively simple.

[BegoneThoth]

I don't know I'm not in communication with them.

But if they generate a new public key for each steam account, as basically every game does, it becomes a problem. It's why so many games either check new ppl joining to make sure their Steam account is legitimate. Usually via api or a forum linking thing.