Brand new Dev journal out "In the Rabbit Hole"

Zultra

This is potentially one of the most feature rich and contentious journals out, it is great. 

Here it is

Zultra

Nyctelios said:

"Down the rabbit hole..." **

So let me get this right...

With their short amount of money and few developers they are going back to review features were suppose to be done in terms of design?

It's called adapting and being open to potentially better ideas. 

Zultra

Nyctelios said:

Zultra said:

Nyctelios said:

"Down the rabbit hole..." **

So let me get this right...

With their short amount of money and few developers they are going back to review features were suppose to be done in terms of design?

It's called adapting and being open to potentially better ideas. 

It's called poor project management. You are reviewing basic core features used to sell your idea.

That's like selling a car and saying you'll think again about it, maybe you'll deliver a skate.

Not really, it is keeping an open mind to what would make your product better, shutting yourself off from that is silly. 

Vucar

Nyctelios said:

"Down the rabbit hole..." **

So let me get this right...

With their short amount of money and few developers they are going back to review features were suppose to be done in terms of design?

What specifically did you read that sounded like they were qualitatively changing the product they advertised on kickstarter?

Slapshot1188

Wow.. I wonder where it was proposed that they had a "time" issue and needed to re-examine their plans:

http://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/450835/major-issue-with-the-flow-of-time/p1

It would be interesting to go back through that thread (and the sister post on the official forums) and see which people were ardently defending the time flow and shouting down everyone who pointed out it's flaws and see which of those same people are now complaining to CoE about the change and which ones are now miraculously defending what they fought against a few months ago.

Zultra

No, the change is good actually the timeflow discussion has been going on for over a year which predates that talk on this site.

Burntvet

Seems like something of a "bait and switch" to me, potentially.

"Donate money: we are going to make THIS..."

"Oh wait, nevermind, we don't have the resources for that.. we are going to make this other thing instead..."


My skepticism was already very high with this title, and it only goes higher with announcements like this (and yes, it does stink of poor project management skills).

Archlyte

Did the years actually get shorter? Wasn't it four days per year before and now its 1 day? I may have read it wrong. 

Vucar

Archlyte said:

Did the years actually get shorter? Wasn't it four days per year before and now its 1 day? I may have read it wrong. 

Here is the TL;DR Recap 

• One Elyrian Year is now seven days instead of four

• Children are now present in the world from birth to death, living as NPCs until either you, a friend or a stranger you've given permission, chooses to take control of them.

• A new screen is being added to character creation to allow you to select an NTC instead of a Ward or a Family

• A new screen is being added to character creation to allow you to select a member of your dynasty as your next character

• The family/dynasty view is being updated to allow you to lock children and grandchildren, as well as see the NPC code of any NPCs in your family which have not been locked by other family members

• NPC marriage is being added to the game, along with mechanics to woo your chosen

• If you take over a married NTC, you can lock their spouse, preventing them from being similarly taken over by a player

• New mechanics are being added to player-to-player marriage to make them more valuable than player-NPC marriage

• All characters you create will require some amount of story points, even if that's zero. The more famous/powerful the character you want to create/take control of, the more Story Points they'll require

So they

-increased the length of time in real life of an in-game Elyrian year,
-added children as tangible npcs in the game,
-added two additional Character Creation options,
-added an anti-griefing measure by locking your own heirs,
-added NPC marriage and another anti-griefing measure for NTCs,
-added value to Player-Player marriage,
-and prevented abuse of players keeping themselves perpetually in power.

I'm seeing a lot of things added, but I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what fundamental, game-breaking design change was made that CoE is now unrecognizable compared to that which was seen in KS... 

rodarin

Slapshot1188 said:

Wow.. I wonder where it was proposed that they had a "time" issue and needed to re-examine their plans:

http://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/450835/major-issue-with-the-flow-of-time/p1

It would be interesting to go back through that thread (and the sister post on the official forums) and see which people were ardently defending the time flow and shouting down everyone who pointed out it's flaws and see which of those same people are now complaining to CoE about the change and which ones are now miraculously defending what they fought against a few months ago.

Yup and I think a few of us in that thread (or maybe another) mentioned how 7 days would be more mathematically correct.

However by making it seem better they actually potentially made it cost more money than it would of the old way. For people looking at cost of buying additional lives. Because while they did extend lives in real time (seemingly getting better 'value' for your money, they also made growing older a detriment to gameplay itself. So if you try and go the cheapest route possible your lives going forward will be stunted versus  people who play an 'optimized' life but are willing to spend alittle more money.

Now I wont go as far to say semi pay to win, but it definitely brings up an interesting debate on the subject.

I havent taken the time to run all the numbers or decipher all the semantics but I suspect that even after a couple 'detailed' explanations and re addressing of some of the major issues people have it might in fact change again.

As for them not being very organized, things like this can get a pass because it was an obviou flaw in their system, while this does make the 'math' work it also raises its own  issues.

Morwynn

Caspian clarified today that you will still be playing the same lifespan of 30-50 weeks of gameplay (7-12 months), but lengthing the year in game will just cause your character to age more slowly. So instead of living to 100 years you now only live to 75-80 in the same amount of time. They did not change the amount of playtime you get, it's just the ingame clock that was adjusted.

I do not understand where you are getting this P2W idea. Your gameplay life has not changed at all, you get the same amount of play time as you always have. Now they have adjusted the max age for having children and around that same time your attrbites start to wane but nothing else has changed.

Here is a follow up from Caspian (about half way down).

Link:  https://chroniclesofelyria.com/forum/topic/10387/i-really-dont-like-this-change?page=8

rodarin

Morwynn said:

Caspian clarified today that you will still be playing the same lifespan of 30-50 weeks of gameplay (7-12 months), but lengthing the year in game will just cause your character to age more slowly. So instead of living to 100 years you now only live to 75-80 in the same amount of time. They did not change the amount of playtime you get, it's just the ingame clock that was adjusted.

I do not understand where you are getting this P2W idea. Your gameplay life has not changed at all, you get the same amount of play time as you always have. Now they have adjusted the max age for having children and around that same time your attrbites start to wane but nothing else has changed.

Here is a follow up from Caspian (about half way down).

Link:  https://chroniclesofelyria.com/forum/topic/10387/i-really-dont-like-this-change?page=8

It has changed. Its buried in there but its possible still for players to live to over 100 in game years, BUT living that long now comes with the penalties I mentioned (and probably more). They just made a median counter argument, but it is possible to still last much longer. Which obviously also means a longer real time life span as well. By making the 'norm' 75 years they effectively made someone who can last 100 years in game a 25% increase on their sub/spark time over what it was when people thought 100 years might be the norm.

I am looking at this solely from the stand point of people who want to play the game for as cheap and buying as few sparks of life as they possibly can. Which this most definitely increases. You can in fact play cheaper now than you could before.

But as I also said (as outlined by him) there are 'penalties' for living longer now. They are also probably worse than he let on but maybe less than what people speculate, he did not address them nearly as specifically as he did the time stuff. But he acknowledged they existed.

But whether its stats or attributes or skills or a combination of all 3 that dont transfer to the new life or heir or however its going to be done in the same way for old people as a 'normal' aged person then that enters a grey area. They says its because in old age you deteriorate and obviously dont hold the same power you did, and go through a whole demographics thing. Problem with that (citing real world data) is that men start deteriorating at around age 29. They produce less testosterone and many other things. Not going to get into a whole kinesiology debate but he stated clearly that living older would be a detriment for passing on things to the next generation. So while you can play cheaper it will have a diminishing return effect on each generation which will obviously stack. So if you play 5 generations(characters) in 5 years they will be MUCH weaker than someone who played 8 generations. Because each generation of "old" player passes on lesser "whatever" (not fully defined yet) to their next generation, while a person who dies in what they (the developer) determines as a non deteriorated state passes on stronger (and maybe even more options). The one guy spent 75 bucks (assuming 15/yr) the other (whose players dies in their prime or in a median age group) paid 120.

One caveat to that last paragraph is he said (currently) aging/time only effect attributes and some regional skills. His answer to the issues uses two key words, currently (before these changes that he is talking about have been made) and 'we have a solution for it at some point'. With no details given, or will be at a later date. But since theyre still connected even lowering attributes will also lower ones ability with a skill which will in effect lessen the skill overall.

They are (as I said in the original post) keeping their window wide open.

They get credit for changing the obviously broken time system (everyone who said it was wrong in that original thread was banned so that was nice) but they have also found a way to make it less attractive to play characters for too long a period of time.

I said it in that other thread, it will all work itself out, but theyre going out of their way to close the loopholes a few people find in a system to get everything super cheap. What these guys dont realize or havent learned is those types of players are short term so changing a mechanic like that and then adding safeguards to it is effecting too many people. if the game is fun and give people what they want they wont be focused on making sure their guy last 350 days instead of 280 days.(real life days) nor will they be concerned it might cost them a few extra bucks to play. Although the break down of time could be an issue if it isnt in a good ratio. Which it isnt right now.

The time and age factor was game breaking. I said it months ago and this change shows they figured that out too. so its going in the right direction, now they just need to have it fit everything else and then ultimately figure out their pricing model. They at least fixed the right thing first (even with its redundancies) as long as they dont get caught up in trying to make it with that price point in mind (as I alluded to) they will be fine. But it does seem like they are trying to keep that in play with those things he mentioned.

RPGMASTERGAMER

Vucar said:

Archlyte said:

Did the years actually get shorter? Wasn't it four days per year before and now its 1 day? I may have read it wrong. 

Here is the TL;DR Recap 

• One Elyrian Year is now seven days instead of four

• Children are now present in the world from birth to death, living as NPCs until either you, a friend or a stranger you've given permission, chooses to take control of them.

• A new screen is being added to character creation to allow you to select an NTC instead of a Ward or a Family

• A new screen is being added to character creation to allow you to select a member of your dynasty as your next character

• The family/dynasty view is being updated to allow you to lock children and grandchildren, as well as see the NPC code of any NPCs in your family which have not been locked by other family members

• NPC marriage is being added to the game, along with mechanics to woo your chosen

• If you take over a married NTC, you can lock their spouse, preventing them from being similarly taken over by a player

• New mechanics are being added to player-to-player marriage to make them more valuable than player-NPC marriage

• All characters you create will require some amount of story points, even if that's zero. The more famous/powerful the character you want to create/take control of, the more Story Points they'll require

So they

-increased the length of time in real life of an in-game Elyrian year,
-added children as tangible npcs in the game,
-added two additional Character Creation options,
-added an anti-griefing measure by locking your own heirs,
-added NPC marriage and another anti-griefing measure for NTCs,
-added value to Player-Player marriage,
-and prevented abuse of players keeping themselves perpetually in power.

I'm seeing a lot of things added, but I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what fundamental, game-breaking design change was made that CoE is now unrecognizable compared to that which was seen in KS... 

let be clear they added their ''promise'' nothing got done anywhere, they promise something new now

papers and dream... let see

LynxJSA

Zultra said:

This is potentially one of the most feature rich and contentious journals out, it is great. 

You are more correct than you realize.  :awesome: