Am I the only one that doesn’t like the Slothmud Spellbook system, i.e. these books and manuals that magically imbue you with abilities and then vaporize after you read them?
For example, where is the fun or skill involved in killing Tephanis the King of Quicklings several hundred times to get a high level mage ability?
The system just rewards peeps who work in a cubicle somewhere and can plop their character at the inn and check back in every half hour or so to frag the mob and then go afk again.
Autoquests and quests could be used more expansively for abilities. For example you could have to complete a long multi part quest for a mob to teach you the ability in question.
Since this is a pretty fundamental piece of the mud, I anticipate your flames:
Stfu Rub you noob, you don’t know what you talking about.
Stfu Rub, you can go play another mud if you don’t like it.
Stfu Rub, I have a cubicle and a pc and I love this system.
etc, etc, etc…
If you immort and make the quests in question yourself, we would welcome the replacement of any and all spellbook pops with quests of equivalent difficulty.
There’s things that I do and don’t like about it. I never really understood the old practice system. Type ‘prac backstab’ 8x in 5 seconds and you magically know the skill. The spellbooks at least has some basis in the original game where, depending on the rules you played with, you could find a spellbook and scribe spells from it to yours.
Of course, each spellbook usually had more than 1 spell in it and it didn’t matter if that spellbook belonged to a NPC or a PC.
Splork has been doing a remarkable job adding new skills to the game. Unfortunately, it just adds to everyones unlearned list. On the positive side, it also adds a little variation to the game since people actually have unlearned spells and don’t just know everything.
It’d be cool to have a skill that allowed you to trade spells with people though. I think the overall fear is that it would be overused. I know there’s some skills, such as the recent ‘atonement’ that are set on a timer that prevents you from using them too often, perhaps similar could be used for a training/trading skill. I think it would definately add a cool dimension to the game though.
You ask Autolycos ‘about slight of hand’
Autolycos tells you ‘You cannot learn slight of hand.’
You ask Autolycos ‘about crippling strike’
Autolycos tells you ‘I have not yet mastered this skill.’
You ask Autolycos ‘about shadowwalk’
Autolycos tells you ‘Let me educate you.’
Autolycos demonstrates shadowwalk.
You clumbsily attempt to mimic his movements.
Autolycos continues to demonstrates shadowwalk.
You becomes slightly more proficient.
Autolycos demonstrates a final time and watches you intently.
You show Autolycos what you have learned from him.
Your proficency in this skill has increased!
You ask Autolycos ‘about shadowwalk’
Autolycos tells you ‘Class is out until next week, try again then.’
If it was set up similar to the raise dead system where the trainee had to pay the trainer xp for skills, I think it’d be a very workable system.
Of course, I’m only talking about what would be cool. The current system is what it is.
If you immort and make the quests in question yourself, we would welcome the replacement of any and all spellbook pops with quests of equivalent difficulty.[/quote:12veaups]
You’re serious?
hmmm… it’s nice to know that 12345 is as enamored with me as I am.. :shock:
oh and btw..
crippling strike - Lvl: 1, Learned 85% :twisted:
*snicker
I’m afraid people won’t pop sbs at all then :)
hmmm… it’s nice to know that 12345 is as enamored with me as I am.. :shock: [/quote:2nocbspp]
Amusing, but not possible. :wink:
If you immort and make the quests in question yourself, we would welcome the replacement of any and all spellbook pops with quests of equivalent difficulty.[/quote:146tg9av]
You’re serious?[/quote:146tg9av]
We’d probably still want to leave some random pops. But, overall, I think Kjartan speaks for the rest of the admin loud and clear on this.
Clink
I’m afraid people won’t pop sbs at all then :)[/quote:3nu9e1x3]
NOOOOOOOO!!!! :shock:
Shyla will go out of business!!!!
think of the noobs.. THE NOOBS!!!
without spellbooks… they will be all gossiping for us to pop eq and stuff for them.. oh wait.. they already do… :twisted:
drinks poison
If you immort and make the quests in question yourself, we would welcome the replacement of any and all spellbook pops with quests of equivalent difficulty.[/quote:1xxx70ls]
You’re serious?[/quote:1xxx70ls]
Sure I’m serious. I would much rather see people doing some interesting quest than killing the same mob over and over and over. It’s just that making an interesting quest is a lot of work, and there’s about a billion spellbooks.
[b:m60407ka]SLOTH IIII[/b:m60407ka] :!:
[b:3psl7hsm]SLOTH IIII[/b:3psl7hsm] :!:[/quote:3psl7hsm]
Newbie, it’s Sloth IV
EDUMACATION!!!
sloth fore :)
Being a four legged animal, one would guess you would know how to spell :)
I never was good at my roman numerals.
:twisted:
geeeze ull thfree uf ewe idgitz ar phawkun stoopuhd..
[i:1woh24h3][b:1woh24h3]
Sloph phore!![/b:1woh24h3][/i:1woh24h3][/color:1woh24h3][/size:1woh24h3]
…and there’s about a billion spellbooks.[/quote:1d0l4p9v]
Funny you should mention that…. we pretty much feel the same way.
…and there’s about a billion spellbooks.[/quote:1htk9k8m]
Funny you should mention that…. we pretty much feel the same way.[/quote:1htk9k8m]
HAHAHAHA CHECK!
Ur move KJ :)
snicker :twisted:
hey Kj, go cycle a few bro… start with firestorm :evil:
Well, I tried, but they always pop immediately for me. Weird. Don’t even have to kill the mob, he just hands it over.
Anyway, I don’t think we’re in disagreement here - the limiting factor is someone to make the quests. The only requirement I have is that the quests take approximately as long to complete as it takes to cycle that sb now. I think it would be much more enjoyable to cycle five mobs sequentially each for 1/5 as long than to cycle one mob for the full length.
Heck, if someone knowledgeable didn’t want to imm, but just wanted to suggest quests, that would be cool too - I might implement some of them (I’d say - write up one, give me that, and see if I put it in before you do any more). What I would want is:
a plain-english description of the quest
a step-by-step sequence of what you need to do in what order, including definite identification of all of the mobs and items involved
which spellbook it’s for, and where that spellbook pops now (and give me the full name of the sb please unless it’s listed in the helpfile, not just “firestorm sb”)
If someone is so inspired, email me your quest at kjartan@slothmud.org.
When I say “knowledgeable”, I mean you have to come up with reasonable mobs, don’t leave it up to me because I don’t know jack.
Oh come on, storm pops much better than a dumb slow spell.
I have one. Osrics Super SB Quest
Provide Osric $50 USD wait one month, get one spellbook of you choice! :)
You can do that one without any support from me.
Awww KJ that was just my spoiler mode quest. I am feverishly working on one right now to send to you. No need to take the piss! :roll:
I think this is great and I just submitted one. But I wanted to get some people’s thoughts on how these things should work.
My thought is that we use existing junk items as much as possible and that the quest in question should send the player to some level appropriate areas, assuming that the quester is a prime in the class of the ability.
But can we also make new items similar to the ‘head of the cockroach’ that u pop for the asyum chef quest?
Also, what is the name of that bard ability that enables the singer to get information from locals? Its not listed on the website and I’m not sure how it works. How would that ability play into finding out more about these quests as they are introduced. I figure the easiest way to introduce them would be to give some information to the mob that originally popped the spellbook and you could ask ‘mob’ about ‘spellname’. But I suppose this doesn’t work very well for aggro mobs.
Cheers
Can potential quest spellbooks be made to where only the person that completes the quest can read them? Can they be set for just a set number of reads other than 1? Can they be set to dissolve when dropped or transferred? Just some questions I would like to know for some of the spellbook quests I have been considering putting together.
How is cycling one mob for a spellbook different from cycling another mob for a cp to make that spellbook? Am I missing something here? Coders have already said they wont make it any easier than the current method, so… :shock:
..seems to me we’d just be making it harder on ourselves.
maybe not easier, but perhaps less boring? I’m certainly getting sick of cycling tiny little mobs (ice lichs, firemage, agox, etc etc etc) that have atrocious poprates - at least doing it in quest format (with higher poprates for cps or whatever!) give you a bit of a sense of accomplishment (assuming these quests are all soloable - if I have to group to get a spell, well, I’ll probably just do without)
Well, one thing I’ve noticed about the books that pop on larger mobs is that they’ve got really good percentages. It’s almost easier to get an xp group together and pound the area than it is to endlessly cycle the smaller mobs. It’s a tactic I’ve been trying to use more and more since it helps get some of the more annoying spellbooks out of the way and doesn’t slow down my quest for iron skin.
As far as the quest idea, I’m trying to get some more info on that too I guess. A quest that gives a spellbook isn’t much good unless you can read it and automatically get learned, since running quests 2 or 3 times doesn’t really seem to be an option.
The next best option seems to be something like a quest library. ie. If you complete a spellbook quest you gain a library card that allows you to check a certain book out of a library. Book is nocrumble and can’t be dropped, given, sold, stolen, etc and has to be given back, and as long as it’s out of the library you’re max hps are reduced to 10% of normal. Anyway, something like that.
Anyway, that’s what I have for ideas from the quest angle. If it comes down to brewing books… well, I guess it depends on the book… but I think that’s just making things worse.
Does anybody here have ‘demon touch’ spell learned? I think the way you learn it is good quest idea. The only thing we need is just fix this fuggin tome to stop it from flying away without any read.
Not I. No chars with high mage. Anything like the paladin in shadow keep?
I learned demon touch a while back.. bit of a mission alright.. took a number of attempts.
nod I read dtouch years ago… at the time, you could forge one key, and any number of people could read the book, if they got to that one room in time… altho I understand it’s since been changed, and since I never used it, I haven’t bothered learning it for any chars I’ve made since… that wouldn’t really work for this case though, last thing we need is have other people being able to read books someone else did quest for… then instead of newbies begging for sbs in their title, we’ll have them begging for help on whole series of mobs, or infinite gossips of ‘any1 reading xxx sb right now? plz i need help with it!!!1!’
I suppose you could do something whereby you learn say 30% of spell for each portion of a quest you complete, with no reading involved - that will ensure everyone has to do the quests for themselves, and will give you something to point at to feel like you are accomplishing something (as if anything in an online game can be called an accomplishment… but still…)
Well, you could do a lot of things that could preclude cheating.
For instance, for the quicken spell. It’s a mage spell, so you know whoever’s after it should have the locate object spell.
You ask the Archmage about quicken and he loads the book in a random location on Sloth and tells you that only the quick can learn the spell.
Book is crumble and set to dissolve in 15 minutes. In that time you have to locate where the book is, sail/run/whatever, pick it up, get somewhere safe and read it.
The pop rate would be great, getting to whereever it is in time mind be a definate challenge though.
Here are some disorganized thoughts on this:
instead of giving you the sb, a quest could be set up just to crank up your percent-learned a certain amount. You could make the amount small enough such that you were doing several quests to fully get the spell.
if it did give you an sb, the sb could be made personal. I don’t know if it’s currently set up so that others cannot read a personal sb, but it certainly could be.
the reason that a number of sbs require cycling tiny mobs with atrocious pop rates, and I’m not saying it’s a good reason, is that the sb usually has to be on a mob that someone who can learn the spell can kill, but when we add a new spell it’s mostly avatars who are going to be cycling for it. So to make it non-trivial we give it a bad pop rate. That’s my guess, anyway.
If you have a forge-like quest for an sb, then you could have a bunch of items on different mobs with relatively higher pop rates, e.g. instead of 1 at 1 in 50 you could have 10 at 1 in 5. That would be acceptable to me as far as difficulty and would be less boring and also doable more efficiently - you can run through the list and maybe by the time you’re done the first one has repopped, so you don’t have to be waiting so much.
This is a good way to get people going to some of the other areas - putting cps there. Also, note that you can put hints as to the area and mob to find a cp at in the quest messages, so it doesn’t have to be wealth & glory for everything. Some of the hints can be fairly blatant.
Making it personalized is a bad idea imho - that’s just going to make the sb impossible to ever get for some classos…
ack, if you have to go through with this, I hope the option still remains to get spellbooks the old (existing) way too.. personally I’m starting to see this idea as quite possibly making things a lot worse for ourselves.. yes, existing poprates can really suck, but think about what is being proposed here.. and now you have to locate not just 1 book but 5 cps (for example) for every spellbook, and hope that you don’t get a run of bad luck on ALL of them, not just 1 item.. dunno.. it sounds like a case of out of the frypan and into the fire.. people dislike having to spend so much time already cycling spellbook mobs.. it’s stated very very clearly by coders - this will NOT be easier than existing methods, just different.. and chances are that equates to harder..
At least this way you and several friends could run different mobs each and not have to queue up on one or two mobs.
I’m sure you and your best friend Auto could pop the cps fast enough. :twisted:
SLOTH IV, THERE :evil:
This would be fun. :twisted:
The arena master gossips ‘I am now holding a quest for the spellbook ‘haste’. All interestes parties report to the arena.’
The arena master gossips ‘Arena quest will begin in 5 minutes. Arena doors will lock in five minutes.’
The arena master gossips ‘I have place a spellbook for the spell haste in the arena. Arena doors are now locked. The doors will open in 10 minutes, whoever escapes with the spellbook wins. Good luck.’
We could make more spellbooks pop in specific areas rather than on specific mobs, so you could run the area and get a lot of chances at a pop without having to wait a long time for one mob to reappear. We would probably make the pop rate somewhat lower than it is on the mob in this case. It depends on the area and the sb.
Oh, and regarding Weasel’s earlier comment on the odds of having a streak of bad luck: if you have to hit ten 1 in 5 chances, or one 1 in 50 chance, it will take on average 50 tries. But: the 1-in-50 pop will take 100 or more total tries about 13% of the time, while the 10 1-in-5 pops will take 100 or more total tries only 0.2% of the time. (The converse is also true: you’re much more likely to get lucky and hit the 1-in-50 in <20 tries than you are to hit all ten of the 1-in-5s in 1 or 2 tries for a total of <20 tries.)
practice shadowwalk
you practice for awhile…
practice shadowwalk
you practice for awhile…
practice shadowwalk
you are already learned in this area…
damn how’s that for a new spellbook idea!
am i on to something slothlike yet?
why hasn’t anyone ever thought of this?
brand :idea: :twisted:
I’ll take a tongue-in-cheek approach to summarizing Weasel:
I don’t like things the way they are and I’ll complain about it.
I fear change and I’ll complain about it.
Cheers,
Clink
I’ll take a tongue-in-cheek approach to summarizing Weasel:
I don’t like things the way they are and I’ll complain about it.
I fear change and I’ll complain about it. [/quote:2vkh7mem]
Clink ya maroon.. you just described Merlin/Corwin not Weasel.. decribing Weasel would have more of a scratching snorting sound to it..
for example.. a constipated cat with OCD in a litterbox :twisted:
- the reason that a number of sbs require cycling tiny mobs with atrocious pop rates, and I’m not saying it’s a good reason, is that the sb usually has to be on a mob that someone who can learn the spell can kill, but when we add a new spell it’s mostly avatars who are going to be cycling for it. So to make it non-trivial we give it a bad pop rate. That’s my guess, anyway.[/quote:2plm2o3n]
i really hope that is just a guess and not the truth because from a game design point that means you don’t want anyone (high or low level) to have the spell and are trying to justify it as being better for new players later. instead of just realizing what it is. that is… being lame for everyone right now.
postscript: not saying i would want no new spells, it is really nice to have all the new stuff going in.
I’ll take a tongue-in-cheek approach to summarizing Weasel:
I don’t like things the way they are and I’ll complain about it.
I fear change and I’ll complain about it.
Cheers,
Clink[/quote:1zcjvcfk]
Everyone in sloth complains about poprates - I don’t have a monopoly on it dude, and change is fine if it’s not to our detriment - changes SHOULD be improvements, not sideways moves that MAY make things worse, but if not, they are (in this case) guaranteed by a coder to be just as tough to complete, so why point the finger at me and call me a whiner? It’s helping absolutely nobody and just pissing a regular player off.
If I took that too personally, sorry, but almost every time I contribute I get much the same treatment. The usual result is I just don’t log in for a while and don’t contribute a damn thing. Is that what you want? The fact I take it personally should be an indicator that I DO respect what you guys do.
Or to be more tongue-in-cheek, I’ll summarize up a few immorts this way:
if you want to help sloth, make suggestions.
if you make suggestions, we’ll ridicule you and call you a whiner.
if you make suggestions, we’ll tell you to go do it yourself.
later we’ll blame you for any issues because you didn’t bring them up.
:twisted:
That was just funny Weasel…
I don’t think he meant it to be insulting, but it is funny how close to the mark it is. And I know for a fact that they’re at least looking at way to improve the whole endless spellbook thing.
And honestly Weasel, you’d make a great imm. You could trade in that regen time for some building time. I originally started coding because it’s easier to do something yourself and ask them to add it than to endlessly beg them to do it for you. I think you’d benefit from it as much as Sloth would. :)
I joined just a few months ago and it took me a while to figure out that weasel wasn’t an imm because his posts are usually authoritative and right on the mark.
As for being a constipated cat with OCD in the litterbox, I think that accurately describes how we all feel trying to pop these spellbooks.
Cheers
I’ll take a tongue-in-cheek approach to summarizing Weasel:
I don’t like things the way they are and I’ll complain about it.
I fear change and I’ll complain about it.
Cheers,
Clink[/quote:23g5yd59]
I totally agree, Weasel [b:23g5yd59]is[/b:23g5yd59] a little bitch.
I totally agree, I [b:185224f5]am[/b:185224f5] a little bitch.[/quote:185224f5]
I couldn’t agree more…
Or to be more tongue-in-cheek, I’ll summarize up a few immorts this way:
if you want to help sloth, make suggestions.
if you make suggestions, we’ll ridicule you and call you a whiner.
if you make suggestions, we’ll tell you to go do it yourself.
later we’ll blame you for any issues because you didn’t bring them up.
[/quote:1pjvj3en]
touche’
My only suggestion would be to alter #2 to something more like:
- if you make suggestions, we’ll ignore you and not do anything about it.
For the record, I wasn’t personally attacking you. You would definitely know it if I were.
Cheers
Clink
I totally agree, I [b:yrqzsnz0]am[/b:yrqzsnz0] a little bitch.[/quote:yrqzsnz0]
I couldn’t agree more…[/quote:yrqzsnz0]
damn, thats some funny zhit :twisted:
For the record, I wasn’t personally attacking you. You would definitely know it if I were. [/quote:2n2um4aw]
btw Weasel, you shouldn’t break a thought about this nonsense..
Clinkiepooh and I had a little fun the other night. His firewinds are weak didn’t even cook my marshmellow, frostbolts made me a nice little strawberry/kiwi shaved ice treat though. But best of all, my eudaemon heals for more then his pathetic stab attempts are :twisted:
*cackle
Juggleblood submitted a spellbook quest, and I put it in. In this case I left the old method of popping it in place as well. See ‘help sanctuary’. The quest method has the advantage that it doesn’t require the repeated slaughter of innocent bystanders.