Last night’s experience with Marsup pointed out how bad the current mud alignment system is. Up front I will admit that Marchessa became an amoral thug for a large part of her career - a significant fall from grace for a character that was an early templar and supposed good witch.
However, the present alignment system is worthy of four letter appellations. Consider the case of marsup - a fast aggro who screams that the characters are scum. Good?
“Good” mobs should not fast aggro good aligned (Marchessa was at +10 at the time) characters. That’s what good is about isn’t it - protecting and defending the good isn’t it?
If they are in combat with characters “Good” aligned mobs shouldn’t be hysterically shouting insults.
If the gods are serious about having an alignment system, then it should bear some passing resemblence to good judgement, so that character can, by applying said good judgement, generally keep on the right side of their alignment. Consider that many evil mobs do nothing but sit in their rooms, and aren’t even fast aggro, while many “good” mobs are fast aggro or are corpse looters.
Perhaps the hallmark of this problem shows up in two autoquests. Marsup sits in the way of one. People who are on a mission from Narmer, a supposedly good Paladin, should not get massacred by Marsup. More over, if Narmer is supposed to be good, rather than lawful neutral, then his quest should have him doing “the good” rather than enforcing a shotgun wedding.
An alignment system is a good thing - one which randomly promotes as good corpse looting artifact stealing guards like the sash (that’s in game info) - who don’t even hunt down invading kobold mercenaries - well, that’s starting to not make sense. I will avoid drawing parallels to odious real world individuals…
On an even larger scale, if the gods want people to take alignment seriously, then there should be xp, coin and eq runs for those who decide that they are going to maintain an alignment. Said mobs should have in game characteristics that back up why they should be considered evil. The ettins rate as evil - even though they seem to be going about their business, backing things and not bothering anyone who isn’t in their village. It’s simple to add description which makes it clear that say, the ettin baker is using unacceptable ingredients etc. But even better would be to have said mobs be aggro corpse looters and occassionally wander in and slag small innocent mobs in town - nothing says evil like butchering some 1K xp civilian mobs in your spare time.
More over - players should be able to do something other than kill mobs who are described as “slaves”, “prisoners” etc. in evil areas. The mechanics might be that we have to beat them down to subdue, and then deliver the subdued mob to some other mob, or that killing the guarding evil mobs will proc them to follow (as with an autoquest) slowly and reaching a certain point gets xp that is worth the trouble.
Right now the alignment system is reaching the implosion point of being amoral and just plain creepy, since it seems to consists of arbitrary assignments to some mobs and not others. Why is Marsup good? Because he calls people scum and attacks other good people on sight? This makes no sense what so ever.
Well Akasha’s post did say the castle was taking measures against bh constantly attacking it, the well armed group of invaders Marsup’s attacking seem rather more evil than him, as for him calling you scum, I think it takes a little more than that to make him an evil mob.
When you think about it, players could allmost allways be considered “evil” when they run through an area and kill everything in sight, pretty much depends on what side you’re looking from (not to mention that it’s arguable the intention to kill a good mob in the next few minutes would make you evil before you actually do it).
Good mobs should not attack good characters on sight.
It’s kind of in the definition of “good”.
Also in the definition of Good is following the orders of your superiors. The king doesn’t like his subjects being repeatedly slain and issued orders for all intruders to be killed on sight. If he failed to follow those orders and someone was harmed because of it, he would be Evil… not good.
If you have issue with it, you might wish to take it up with the King, not Marsup.
-Also in the definition of Good is following the orders of your superiors.
That line was added after the fact by people in positions of power.
Their goal was to turn the mortals of Sloth into sheep.
No, not like donkeyitis.
Dissent!
Dissent!
“Also in the definition of Good is following the orders of your superiors. The king doesn’t like his subjects being repeatedly slain and issued orders for all intruders to be killed on sight.”
No, that’s lawful. Good people don’t follow bad orders.
But I note that Marsup has been moved to make the quest possible, and Elwin is reporting that the fighters didn’t go after him while he had good alignment.
This, if true, would make sense. The orders would be “kill evil people on sight” and that way if characters don’t kill the inhabitants, the fighters won’t bother them.
For however long that lasts.
And personally, if there were another BH area that filled the ecological niche of the castle in getting groups going - I would happily say good bye to castle runs.
I’ve killed hundreds of elites and alchemists, in three incarnations of this mud, and am more than willing to move on….
I could see a colossal slide from one side to the other (either way) depending on who/what you killed. If its the pope, the president, the mayor, or a cop…you might slide hard…however, there should also be gradual inclinations, such as when you kill someone who happens to be on the fbi’s most wanted list, I have a feeling there not gonna take it too hard…I havent seen marsup, or know what his position or ‘occupation’ he has in that area…but it seems that a dial would make more sense, then say a light on your dashboard that comes on when your OUT of gas…
Good people don’t follow bad orders.[/quote:xnzqgghu]
Bad orders? The castle isn’t exactly a town. Granted, the occasional person passes through on a quest or for a forge, but the vast majority are there to kill and slay. You pointed out yourself that this becomes a killing ground when groups become too small for MH, cano, dmount, ect… Those would technically be ‘good’ people too after killing all that evil.
You’re also forgetting Chaotic Good… which takes the stance that the ends justify the means. If a few innocent strangers are killed to defend family and friends, so be it.
I thought originally the castle fighters and knights were aggro. The elites were also aggro? I guess the main complaint is that you cant easily go in there for good corpses, because this argument about groups is nonsense. Unless your soloing this area it doesnt make a bit of difference.
Mike
Okay.
First things first. How does mister, “Im a warrior hired to defend this castle” KNOW that your a ‘good’ character. He doesn’t have any sort of detection. He has his job, fend off intruders. Your not royalty. Your not a guard. You don’t belong there. He attacks. Its his job.
Have you ever killed anything in Castle, ever? If so, he’s got just cause.
[quote:1i9xco4d]No, that’s lawful. Good people don’t follow bad orders.[/quote:1i9xco4d]
Well, now your going elsewhere. There is no lawful/chaotic alignment system in Sloth. But a Lawful Good Character WOULD be bound by oath to fufill his servitude, even to unjust orders (which these arnt).
I think an in depth alignment system like you want would be far to difficult to code, since ‘intentions’ can’t be tracked. An evil character killing evil things for his own personal gain isn’t a ‘good’ thing. He shouldn’t turn good. But it’d be too hard to script to think ‘why a character is doing what they are doing’. Just like you can’t say Marsup isn’t good because hes defending his castle, just because your good.
Marsup should be good, and if you don’t wanna kill him, then don’t. Its been anounced to stay out of the castle, so one should :P.
This guy is “paid” to protect the castle - his home. Just to let you know if I come home and find you in my house I really don’t care if your a good or evil person I will shoot your ass. I consider myself a good person but if your in my house(my castle) uninvited be prepared to get your ass kicked.
Alias
just my point of view of course.
“Well, now your going elsewhere. There is no lawful/chaotic alignment system in Sloth. But a Lawful Good Character WOULD be bound by oath to fufill his servitude, even to unjust orders (which these arnt).”
Even that is debatable. A Paladin in the old system lost his status by doing evil deeds, not by doing chaotic deeds. If a Paladin had orders to kill an innocent peasant or a baby, that would present just the sort of crisis of faith that makes for interesting reading. Anyway, my opinion: most Paladins would break the oath before committing an actively evil act.
All this aside, if you search the forums for alignment you’ll see that we had these arguments in the past. What it comes down to is that noone will agree what consists of good behavior and what consists of evil. Opinions about alignment are like assholes: everyone has one. (Pardon the curse word, I’m not evil, really!)
The old D&D had a great conflict between LE (devils) and CE (demons). There’s this eternal war…but you don’t see any devils turn into angels suddenly after they’ve kill a hundred or a thousand evil demons. The fact is, morality depends on motive. If you kill something for personal gain, that’s (arguably) evil, whether the mob is good aligned or evil aligned.
Similarly, it’s easy to conceive of a situation where a good person might be forced to kill another good person. It happens all the time in real life. I sure hope that noone here believes that all of the infantry soldiers in WWII were inherently evil.
Most alignment systems in games are inherently broken, for various reasons. Ours is just as broken. It’s an interesting feature to add to a game and it can make the game more varied / interesting / enjoyable, but it’s not going to make sense to everyone.
[quote:1th6bnvb]You’re also forgetting Chaotic Good… which takes the stance that the ends justify the means.[/quote:1th6bnvb]
[quote:1th6bnvb]Just to let you know if I come home and find you in my house I really don’t care if your a good or evil person I will shoot your ass.[/quote:1th6bnvb]
[quote:1th6bnvb] The fact is, morality depends on motive.[/quote:1th6bnvb]
All very valid points. Unfortunately, the coding/platform required to incorporate that kind of intelligence into the system would be unfeasible. Since we cant take into account pre-meditated thoughts, intentions, or motive, we need to fine tune the system within reasonable perameters. Like someone said in another thread, If you knew the inner workings of the mud better….you’d know which battles to pick and choose. Some of us who’ve played awhile already know for the most part, whether something is doable in a way that flows(hence the more linear approach to a solution). At this time, my biggest concern is having a little more influence in how slowly/quickly your align changes, as apposed to the ‘one mob drop’ and needing 50 others to get it back to what it was…in any event, it seems that any real solution will involve more focus on the ‘good vs. evil’ without the lawful/chaotic persuasions, otherwise having it removed–which isn’t going to happen any time soon.
<Chaos>
When you make one enemy, make one friend.
When you make one friend, make one enemy.
I totally agree Shazuko.
Just FYI, in case you haven’t seen it, there is a cleric spell “atonement” that can help with the ‘one mob drop’ situation. There is a large “cool-down” time required between castings, so it can’t be used often. If that cool-down time were tweaked, it might be possible to fit one good-aligned mob into a run without totally ruining your day.
Also, neutral alignment pretty well stinks as-is. It’s odd the being good or evil brings benefits, but being neutral is worth nothing. It seems to me that neutral could have a few supps, or maybe some supps could be available regardless of alignment.
A neutral supp would be cool, however with that alignment would need to be changed a bit to fit that. Right now if you kill a good align mob you are instantly evil, on the other side you have to kill 10 extremly evil mobs just to pinch the goodnes. So becoming and balancing neutrality is basically impossible.
How about some sort of time margin.. ie: you kill a good mob (whether it be on purpose or accidentally) and your alignment changes to evil. Instead of immediately losing your sup, a game generated message could say “you have 5 minutes to revert back to good alignment or your supp is gone”.. yes? no? maybe?
I like both of those ideas, and I hope the imms are watching :)
For neutral, I was thinking the range from -3 to +3 could all be considered neutral. It seems to be the range where you can’t summon good or evil supps. It seems quite possible to balance within those boundaries…at least it seems like my characters frequently wind up there when I’m trying to supp.
We aren’t going to add neutral supplication servants.
We aren’t going to adjust things so that you can have a good mob in your run and still maintain a good supplication servant.
The topic of letting you maintain a supplication servant for a few minutes while you went and got an atonement spell because you had screwed up and attacked the wrong mob came up earlier, and I thought the conclusion had been “this hardly ever happens, it’s not worth changing”. However, if that happens frequently and it’s a great burden to lose your supplication mob while you get an atonement cast, I could add that. For instance, the mob could follow you around haranguing you and refusing to help until you atone.
It happens quite a bit actually. I’d like to say its usually intentional, but it almost never seems to work out that way.
Personally, I really don’t understand why you would want to continue running the bh castle day after day. I would prefer reading the tv guide, myself. There are plenty of other areas that can be run for xp with the same size group. Venture out young ruffians! There is a whole world out there…
If it can’t kill you back, it ain’t worth killing.
Good mobs should not attack good characters on sight.
It’s kind of in the definition of “good”.[/quote:22pp0w0m]
I’d take issue with this, good is being true to you’re own moral code, if you believe that all kobolds are evil child eating devil worshipping tory voting scum then killing them on sight would seem a (not the) ‘good’ thing to do.
Whether or not kobolds are that or kitten loving rainbow jumper wearing guitar playing hippies is neither here nor there.
good or evil is always relative to your own stance
We aren’t going to add neutral supplication servants.
However, if that happens frequently and it’s a great burden to lose your supplication mob while you get an atonement cast, I could add that. For instance, the mob could follow you around haranguing you and refusing to help until you atone.[/quote:25626km9]
Losing a peri, a eudaemon, or any other low, (single corpse) supplicants are not that big of a deal. However the larger ones, Like the Valkarye, Pit Fiend, Angel, however are. They require much greater effort to get corpses etc.
Personally, I have had a Valkarye in a group, the group mistakenly hit a good aligned mob, and the Valkarye was gone. This does happen frequently when leaders are “learning areas”.
On the Valkarye, it seems that it has been changed already. It was mass healing for 140-150 hps greater heal basically. It seems that its proc rate was dramatically reduced and now it is casting a mass cure serious (40 hps)
The auto assist is nice, however, in a group they still steal kills. Maybe a toggle could be added to not have the beast AutoAssist? Similar to the juju’s starve option.
If the healing is going to be reduced down to the point it is now, the Valkarye seems useless in groups. It is nice soloing with the three attacks though.
For a 4x40x 30 tard supplicant, I would think mass heal (100 hp) or greater heal (150) should be used. It does run out of mana quickly enough anyway so I’m not sure why it was adjusted so soon anyway.
My thoughts,
Madmax
Good mobs should not attack good characters on sight.
It’s kind of in the definition of “good”.[/quote:2gk4vge5]
I’d take issue with this, good is being true to you’re own moral code, if you believe that all kobolds are evil child eating devil worshipping tory voting scum then killing them on sight would seem a (not the) ‘good’ thing to do.
Whether or not kobolds are that or kitten loving rainbow jumper wearing guitar playing hippies is neither here nor there.
good or evil is always relative to your own stance[/quote:2gk4vge5]
I’ll leave aside the arguments of depraved indifference and negligence - that is simply “doing what you think is right” is only good if you don’t have any way of knowing any better, but wrong, and illegal, if you ought to.
On the mud, however, there is an arbiter of good and evil - the mud alignment system. That is, it is possible for good mobs to detect good characters, and evil ones, as well as the converse. The problem is how to make game behavior match game mechanics. Today I was twice attacked by a mega-good mob, that is killing it immediately made me “evil”, even though I was running at +10 and had a supplicant.
This kind of action is a hack - the mob isn’t particularly good or evil, merely that it is defined as “walking into the room with this mob in it gets rid of your good supplicant”. As such it calls into question whether alignment is anything other than another number to track and arbitrarily work. The more often the gods put alignment screws (like aggro good mobs that attack good players) the more often players will look at alignment as something to be hacked in return.
Marsup seems not to attack good aligned characters - though I haven’t engaged in destructive testing of this notion. It’s far better. Good characters who have legitimate business - forges for example - with the alchemists should walk through. Evil aligned characters should have to worry about Marsup, and people with evil intent should watch their backs.
[quote:wdylzg4h]Bad orders? The castle isn’t exactly a town. Granted, the occasional person passes through on a quest or for a forge, but the vast majority are there to kill and slay.
[/quote:wdylzg4h]
Which will be proved out by their attacking things. The in game solution is to set every mob in the castle with the flag that instantly drops you to evil for killing it. That way, people who are there for “good " reasons have nothing to fear, but as soon as you drop one of the inhabitants - the defenses are alert.
And I’m already working on my “evil castle replacement” proposed area - because if the castle is to be declared good, and thus off limits as a hunting ground for groups that want to keep good alignment - eg pets of various kinds like mounts, supplicants and so on - then there should be a area that fills the same niche in xp and game terms, but which consists of evil mobs.
This is where good and evil ought to differ - while few good mobs should attack good characters on sight - there is nothing wrong with evil characters attacking other evils on sight.
I’ll also note that there is no “lawful” versus “chaotic” division of the mud alignment system, though I often think of the alignment system in those terms because it makes more sense than good/evil. I am not sure that Narmer is good with his attitudes, but he sure is lawful alright…
I thought originally the castle fighters and knights were aggro. The elites were also aggro? I guess the main complaint is that you cant easily go in there for good corpses, because this argument about groups is nonsense. Unless your soloing this area it doesnt make a bit of difference.
Mike[/quote:24b7pd11]
When we first went into the new castle the fighters were aggro. Once uppon a time knights, elites and fighters were aggro, and squires were wimpy aggro. At this point it seems that only Marsup and the vault are aggro, and Marsup is aggro to evil characters.
Hope that clarifies current experience with the new castle.
As for myself - the changes make it different, but not that different. One needs to dispel more mobs to debuff them, marsup is a pain but can be managed and finally defeated, and the mobs do hit harder, but give out more xp.
Harder for smaller groups, but not really that much more difficult once the group gets going. Marsup is a nasty mob, but largely because he is a blast mob in an area filled with chop mobs, and people were used to going in and chopping in the castle.
I’ll leave aside the arguments of depraved indifference and negligence - that is simply “doing what you think is right” is only good if you don’t have any way of knowing any better, but wrong, and illegal, if you ought to.
[/quote:1ijt28vd]
If you do what you believe to be good then then you are doing good. You can only perform an evil action by knowing that the action is evil.
Good and evil are matters of perspective and can only be so.
Your idea that you can be doing evil by not knowing any better because you ought to know better is quite frankly a nonsense, what if we talk about something where the right course of action is in question?
Mud example of this: you’re a ‘good’ knight in the castle, someone walks in and kills your gate guards, the squires in the courtyard, the crocodiles in the moat and is walking toward you waving a big sword, is the good thing to do:
A: To attack them first and try and save your life?
B: To open negotiations by telling them asking them not to kill you?
C: To run away, desert your post and hide with the kobolds?
D: To build a coalition of the willing guards and swarm the char?
E: To depose the king and declare the char dictator for life?
Hold on a minute this isn;t real life and thats a bit ridiculous … since when did we start questioning the consistency of the moral code within a computer game?
“Good and evil are matters of perspective and can only be so.”
That’s kind of a philosophical response, and I tend to agree with it. On the other hand, most religions (real-life) would not approve of this opinion. Typically, a religion has certain rules and behaviors that they consider “good” or “evil”. There is a term “Ignorance of the law is not an excuse” that would apply to most religions as well.
“since when did we start questioning the consistency of the moral code within a computer game?”
On the other hand, this seems like it should be the goal. Games (books / movies / etc.) typically have some level of internal consistency. So, we might say things like spaceships don’t make much sense in relation to sloth, while magical swords do. The alignment system (or any of the rules systems) should have some level of internal consistency too. So, there is some value to pointing out or suggesting that certain specific things don’t follow some consistency that the rest of the game follows. Of course it’s up to the imms to evaluate and determine which to change or not change, but bringing up specific topics for discussion seems to be encouraged by the current admin.
I haven’t noticed any arguments that Sloth’s alignment system is inconsistent, just that it’s not good-evil symmetric. I don’t see any reason it [i:1hwo3dbl]should[/i:1hwo3dbl] be good-evil symmetric; that’s what dikus do by default, I guess, but I don’t think any real-world moral or philosophical systems claim that good and evil are symmetric.
You can maybe find some in fantasy, e.g. the law-chaos system of the Elric books (which was really just law = good and chaos = evil) was pretty symmetric.
Let’s look at Catholicism, that’s a popular system. We can map Sloth’s good, neutral, evil alignments to “going to heaven”, “going to limbo then heaven”, “going to hell”. There, the system is
one really evil deed (mortal sin) makes you evil
there’s a large set of mildly evil deeds that make your alignment creep evilwards (venial sins) but they can never push you past neutral to evil
good deeds make your alignment creep good-wards, but they can never push you from evil to neutral
the only way you can get from evil back to good or neutral is via an atonement spell or equivalent
there’s no limit on how often you can cast atonement spells
Sloth’s system is basically like this, except we have more restrictions on atonement spells, and you can compensate for mortal sins with a LOT of good works. If you view a good work as the conjugate of a sin, then I would say we’re a bit more symmetrical than Catholicism.
The issue at hand with sloth alignment is not how you define it, but that you can’t play the game very well and remain one alignment. Quests require you to cycle good and evil mobs, to get a good set of EQ you have to cycle good and evil mobs. One example, the jjd is all evil or neutral mobs except the dragon. (although maybe this changed recently, I didn’t lose peri last time I killed him.) Buying EQ doesn’t solve any moral dilemma as you are at least financing the wrong doer, or right doer. And there are no long term benefits for remaining one alignment so what’s the point beyond losing a supplicant every now and then?
I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing in the game. It gives players freedom to go anywhere and do anything without worrying too much about alignment, those who depend of supplicants excepted. And if you are trying to match it to any real world moral system or ideology, don’t bother. The entire game is based on killing. Try to level past newbie stages without killing something. Unless you are a firm believer in the crusades I don’t know how endless killing can ever be morally justified. The whole mud would be evil.
I view the alignment as nothing more than a feature of the game which adds interest and really has no basis whatsoever in actual good or evil, and I kind of like it that way. Makes things simpler.
I’ll make an addition to that. Good mobs might let good players pass unmolested eventually.
As far as forges in the castle… The Philo Stone requires killing Uyp, Vicar, Geber and the hound for cps. The Thundery Gaunts require killing the smith, Wu, Uyp and hound. So if you’re forging, you’re a past offender or bought bloody cps.
A couple quests pass through the area, but its a fair bet that at least half of the people that undertake it have killed in the castle at some point.
The only really genuine way to code it would be to see if you have received first kill xp for being in the castle. If no, then let you pass. After that, attack on sight. All your other arguments are completely bogus.
That’s a good summary Hobbes.
Overall, I don’t mind the alignment system. It does add an extra dimension to the game and when more mobs / items / spells etc. are “alignment aware”, it could be very nice.
There are two points that I still dislike - one is that clerics lost animate dead and supplication was supposed to be the replacement. Well, for various reasons I think clerics got the short end of some stick. The second is that alignment as-is just isn’t fun. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, now that I see the basis of the alignment system is a model of the catholic morality system. (kidding!) Seriously, as a cleric you’re not just managing your character alignment, you’re managing corpses, the size of your corpses, the alignment of the corpses, multiple corpses per supp (for good ones) and the supps don’t last very long.