First, thank you for having this discussion. I appreciate it, because you're giving clear actionable comments.
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PVP, Crafting, and Economy is the bread and butter of this shard. This was already nearly perfected, what many players don't understand is why it is being changed. The problem is staff is focusing on the wrong things to change which is what's upsetting us.
I think the core disagreement is that people believed we were balanced beforehand. This is reinforced because, relatively speaking, the bulk of the balance changes(some of which were merely bug-fxies that people had gotten used to as usable pvp bugs) happened near the extinction event of the original time-stop bug, which is what cost us most of our original playerbase. So people associated the two. We lost 70% of our playerbase between when the timestop bug hit, and when it was "fixed" the first time.
I will also point out, the required upgrade for time-stop forcibly altered obsidian's balance, as we left 51a and therefore a lot of hardcoded formula and how combat worked changed. I did my best to put it back as close as i could, but it never got exactly there. 51a had some quirks. Those who were around remember the royal PITA it was with tournaments daily trying to get weapon swings right again.
To me, my personal definition, is that in a balanced PVP situation (excluding overworld ganks), you have a varied amount of builds, and a varied amount of playstyles, that all run a decent chance of getting to the top. In obsidian pvp, around when the timestop hit, we had 7 effective builds in pvp. That's it. Every single tournament winner could be put into one of those 7 templates. The deviance of it was usually less than 50 skill points across the whole template. That to me says things were imbalanced, because there were too many "must-have" skills. After the changes started, before population dropped below 100, we were up to 12.
Crafting and Economy was a similar situation. It had worked up until that point, explicitly because it had a steady influx of new players, and the age bonus hadn't gotten extreme. The problem is obsidian's economy was never future-proof. It relied on people not being maxxed out, not using secondary accounts (which was always a cat and mouse game) and not macroing (another cat and mouse game). Once more people were maxxed out than were coming in, the economy was stagnating. So we had to introduce new craftables, and new uses for old ones, to keep it moving. Which upset the balance by definition, because the balance was now untenable.
However when you put in new craftable items (or drops) it upsets pvp balance, as there's now new things to take into account. Same with new skills. New combinations pop up.
So, with that in mind, lets look at the pillars.
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Personal list of how we could improve.
1. Bring the old system back that what we all loved and cherished. (Consists of Item drops as normal. Balance pvp by reverting dispell. Etc..)
Item drops as normal, elaborate on this one. Are you talking the luck system to prevent rng-screwed but keep total drops the same, the rework to fix a few monsters who were rediculously over-looted that people farmed exclusively, or the gold drop adder to ensure low monsters drop at least something worthwhile?
Re the pvp, covered in other sections how no single change exists in a vacuum, and balance inter-depends.
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2. Content, with the pillars in mind.
Example of great content you added was bosses/drops. They drop unique items that can give you that extra edge in battle vs someone who doesn't. The bless deeds are great because you can bless those boss items for 3 months. However even though they wont drop in pvp the boss items break quickly people have to decide if its worth it. (This content should be tested to perfect durability of items)
Anytime you add new content, it changes the balance of pvp. Case in point, lightning weapons became one of the de-facto targets. Not saying this was bad, just that pvp will constantly shift balance a bit as you add in new items, even if they're PvM only, because of how ultima pits PVP vs PVM.
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3. Events and in depth lore. Get creative create some lore and fun quest lines that drop unique rewards. For example once you have a ship ingame you can find a shipwrecked pirate crew. You end up helping them and at the end you are awarded with a cool pirate hat.
The most fun, and sadly also the one we get to do the least. Until most players are content, I stopped putting more than 10% of my time into lore stuff, which sucks because there's more fun quests i had that would take people awhile, but balance comes first.
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-Like venom stated much of the content was removed by echo ingame. I believe echo told me it was in anticipation of adding new content. There should be a rule implemented among staff that projects need to be nearly complete prior to implementing it. Meaning the only thing left to do is add stuff in.
Not to contramand echo because I don't know specific situations, but I will say at least part of those removals were probably world decay and bugs nuking shit, that he was being polite and convering until i could manually restore them from the backups. The world literally falls apart.
If you can let me know specifics i can look into and restore things that are missing or broke.
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-I like the idea of making all the skills relevant. Combining the skills with new content how you have been doing is a great mix.
This is an important statement to explore.
The problem is, part of the way to make all skills relevant, is by nerfing overpowered ones.
This is an age-old debate. People tend to argue, "Buff the weak skills, don't nerf the strong ones". But you can't do that all the time.
The reason being, is if you only buff, then you get power-creep. Content becomes easier/trivial/worthless.
The world (npcs, areas, drop rates) are all set to one balance baseline. Eventually, if the baseline creeps up enough, you have to re-do all of it.
Which isn't bad every once in a while, but on average you want to avoid it.
Likewise, if you buff one skill, sometimes other skills become overpowered now in combination. Which again upsets the balance and requires a nerf that you were trying to avoid in the first place.
Especially in ultima, where combination and skill mixes are everything.
Dispel, alone, was not a big issue.
Dispel + weapon drops + necromancy + stone potions was, and was just one of many.
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-Lastly, just something I've always wanted to see in game. We should utilize hues. There are so many in game but we are so limited. It would be cool to have some sort of daily task enticing players to get on by rewarding them with a currency spent on unique hues. Maybe a random hue potion with potential of rare ones.
That's been on the to-do list, but part of that goes back to getting someone who wants to tackle not only obsidian's buggy data files (literally have some crashable things in the muls that need fixing), but also the patcher. Which was very low on the to-do list while people still had major balance concerns.
So, for your pillars, you have two majorly conflicting goals:
Keep things the same <---> Add new stuff
The only new stuff that allows you to keep things the same is purely cosmetic things (and those still alter the economy).
Even informational items like the Akashic Record end up changing balance in small ways.
Gorge cloak, for example was something i never could have added in the old T2A, it would have been rediculously overpowered in the older system, due to interactions.
That's not to say we don't have overpowered things. Most of the vampires have at least one ability that needs a rework/rebalance/removal. The veteran age bonus, even though I capped it, is now near insurmountable vs a new player and makes for really unfair pvp.
So at the point, i guess it goes into a discussion of, "What changes specifically do we want rolled back, and are we willing to do something else to fix the issue it was put in for". Or else all we'll do is return to the 7 template pvp we had before where everyone was the same and most of the skills in obsidian are never used.
Which is great for a couple years, until everyone gets bored. Did you know during our peak playerbase our our retention metric was only 7% after 1 year?
But again, these are just my thoughts, 1 vote out of many, not the end all be-all.
Fixed the damn style finally, dear god that other one was unreadable.