Review, from Taishita, with love...

[Hazamishi]

WELL LET ME START BY TYPING IN CAPS LOCK.

Now that that business is handled, we can get on to the pressing matters at hand.

I've been coming and going here for quite a long time now, I think. I come back because I love the mud, and then I usually end up leaving a few days later for reasons later explained. The good is going to be pretty short summaries of a few things, but each thing is longer in my head. The bad, I will go into detail.

Good:
-The mud is unique in every way. You can pretty much make any build you want from any village, and have fun with it.
-The immortals. From what I've seen of them, they're always helpful and cool people in general.
-The RP atmosphere is awesome.
-LSC

Bad:
-Grinding levels pretty much from the starting gate (this is pretty much my main dislike, everything else is pretty good). It's horrible. I made a new character the other day and got to level 6, I think, and then experience gains dropped from about 100xp/damage point to 25xp/damage point. That is a terrible turn off for me as a new player somewhere, especially if I want to RP something. The way its set up here, you grind for hours and hours and then you're at level 100, then you grind and grind and grind and grind for hours and hours and hours, and you're at level 125, at which point, you're probably about 15 years old codely and you can start RP whatever you want. I can't even fathom how bad it is for the super high level people. You can add all sorts of bonuses that offer increased exp amounts, but it still boils down to you having to continue the horrid grinding. I can understand that you don't want it to be really easy to become super powerful like you can on a lot of DBZ muds, which I don't think is even possible here with the way stats and all that are set up, but you're kicking yourself by running people off because they don't want to devote hours of their life to monotonous leveling.
-RP, and the lack there of. The RP here -is- amazing, when you can find someone else to do it with (who isn't grinding levels), anyway. We need more players. Players that will actually stick around (cutting the head off the grinding monster might help get some wet noodles to stick to the walls for a while).
-LSC, while it's an awesome idea, is another boring grind-fest for some of the stats. If you didn't have to grind levels, it wouldn't be too bad. It's a way to make your character stand out and be different, depending on which stat you want to devote yourself to to train, but with the way leveling is, it just makes becoming a decently built (Yes, build is important, because I feel like you should have the actual build to back up what your RP is) character more difficult.

There are a few things I'd like to talk about, outside of the good and bad, as well. There are a lot of things here on the forums in the dev section that you've been working on, but haven't put in yet. I say you -should- put them in, be they bug-less or not. You don't have to have perfected pieces of code to put them in. Let the players catch the bugs to help you out, instead of having to bear the entire burden yourself.
-
I might add some more stuff, but for now these are the main things I can think about. I'll have to poke around some more.


Your love, forever and always,
Taishita (read: Hazamishi)

[Gatz]

Thanks for taking the time to write this. A couple questions:

1. Recently, there have been some changes with how experience works and removing the previous 'dips' that had been in place. Did you do your play time before or after this change?

2. Did you do any Newbie Missions? It was my hope that with the newbie missions you could skip a lot of grinding and get to a point where you'd be somewhat close to taking the Genin Exam.

3. Does all of LSC seem slow, including commands like Kata and things like Chakramold and Shadowbox?

4. What could be done to improve LSC? Shotgun question, I know.

5. If I make it easier to gain stats via LSC, what mechanism would you put in place to prevent people from abusing it to max out their stats quickly?

Again, thanks for the review. I do think you raise a lot of super valid points. You've been a dedicated player for a great deal of time and it is wonderful to see you step up and post.

[Musashi]

Hey! I don't want to hijack this thread but I wanted to toss in some of my input for your questions Gatz, if I may.

2. Did you do any Newbie Missions? It was my hope that with the newbie missions you could skip a lot of grinding and get to a point where you'd be somewhat close to taking the Genin Exam.

Two questions: What level do you have to be for the exam, and are you talking about the quests given out near the newbie bindspot? I did those quests around level 10 or so and it took me about an hour at most to complete them before I was told to go take the exam, which I was then told I was too weak when I tried to take. I'm probably assuming a lot but if those are the quests you're talking about then I don't think they put you anywhere near the level to take the exam. I don't think I even leveled while questing and I'm still spending most my time IG grinding.

4. What could be done to improve LSC? Shotgun question, I know.

I'll be honest, I have mixed feelings about all the LSC methods that require your input. Chakramold was very confusing to me at first and shadowboxing seems too fast, especially when the input is a long string. Still, it's neat that you can mess up but I think having to input commands is tedious.

One idea that comes to mind to improve it would be to somehow make the LSC gains occur on a much faster scale with degeneration staying about the same. The catch is, training one stat assumes that means you are neglecting the others it is causes a random stat to start dropping at the same rate you're gaining. This would really encourage specialization IMO.

5. If I make it easier to gain stats via LSC, what mechanism would you put in place to prevent people from abusing it to max out their stats quickly?

I guess I just answered that lol. Another idea would be making gains much easier, like I mentioned above, but really limit how often people can train. For example, you train a stat until you gain one point and then you have to wait a RL hour before you can train another (you get a message saying something like "Your mind/body is too tired from your last training session!"). You'd still have to factor in how stat degeneration would kick in but something like this though.

[Gatz]

Thanks for your chiming, I'd still like Taishita to put his thoughts in here, but let me answer your questions:

What level do you have to be for the exam, and are you talking about the quests given out near the newbie bindspot?

You can take the Genin Exam at level 25. The way we balanced the newbie missions was if you started at level 1, every other mission would level you up.

I guess I just answered that lol. Another idea would be making gains much easier, like I mentioned above, but really limit how often people can train. For example, you train a stat until you gain one point and then you have to wait a RL hour before you can train another (you get a message saying something like "Your mind/body is too tired from your last training session!"). You'd still have to factor in how stat degeneration would kick in but something like this though.

Hrm, I guess that is one way of doing it. Ultimately, I think the flaw in LSC and stats in general is that most players by level 100-150 have almost all their stats at 20, and a few at 25. I try to curb this with making auto-commands fairly slow and active commands a lot faster by comparison. I'd be interested to see other's take on this. Just having a timer that stops you from being able to train anymore for a period of time or some other way to curb people form just banging on their stats. While I don't mind that, if it is too easy everyone is walking around with stats nearly maxed. If it is too hard, people still do it but just get burnt out.

[Musashi]

You can take the Genin Exam at level 25. The way we balanced the newbie missions was if you started at level 1, every other mission would level you up.

Thanks for the reply. I just wanted to point out that I completed all those missions and I'm still around level 13 or so...I can't really see how anyone could level so well just off those few missions unless I really, really, messed up.

[Gatz]

Thanks for the reply. I just wanted to point out that I completed all those missions and I'm still around level 13 or so...I can't really see how anyone could level so well just off those few missions unless I really, really, messed up.

The case is probably you started them so late, the experience you gain didn't level you up much by level 10. if you started them around level 1, you would have probably had more gains.

[Hazamishi]

1. Recently, there have been some changes with how experience works and removing the previous 'dips' that had been in place. Did you do your play time before or after this change?

2. Did you do any Newbie Missions? It was my hope that with the newbie missions you could skip a lot of grinding and get to a point where you'd be somewhat close to taking the Genin Exam.

I made a new character the other day, actually, and I did the newbie missions with less than ten levels. After doing all of them, I had gotten about 1 and 9/10ths levels and some ryo. On my other new character, I leveled the old fashioned way, and when I hit level six, exp tanked on me, as I said in my first post. I went from getting good experience that was letting me level every dozen or so fights, to having to beg on my hands and knees to get a little bit of exp. Maybe there's a dip after level five that you missed on accident? I'm not sure, but it definitely takes a big hit. I got on Taishita and started fighting some stuff that he can level off of (Omg it's a nightmare now that I have even less HP due to the decrease in stat points >_>) and exp gains were pretty good, which was nice (even though everything I can fight for exp eats me alive [also, shouldn't doroku gaeshi absorb normal physical attacks, like bladed weapons?]).

3. Does all of LSC seem slow, including commands like Kata and things like Chakramold and Shadowbox?

-From what I remember-, strength was the biggest pain. Pushup/situp were pretty awful for training strength. Everything else seems okay to me, I suppose. The interactive ones are a looootttt better than the automatic ones, imo, but at the point I'm at on Taishita, I can't tell the difference between katas and shadowboxing because they are both PREEEETTY slow, lol.

4. What could be done to improve LSC? Shotgun question, I know.

I'd really like to see more katas go in, since there are a few styles that could have them... but I don't know if that really answers your question... >_>

5. If I make it easier to gain stats via LSC, what mechanism would you put in place to prevent people from abusing it to max out their stats quickly?

Softcaps on how much lsc training you can do per level, perhaps? Something like, for each level, you can get x% of a stat.



Edit:
Something that just crossed my mind is that the leveling from level six until whenever needs to have more than one good opponent. You can gain off of a lot of opponents in the same area, but you get the bogus exp gains, instead of the sweet 4k that you get from the Rookie.

[Ichiro]

LSC: The problem with LSC currently is that everything that's not LSC 3.0 is really slow (except kata) and that there hasn't been any real movement on adding new LSC 3.0 stuff. The few (sort-of) LSC 3.0 things that are recent (like sudoku) give an unreasonably small amount of gain compared to the time/effort required. Shadow box and chakra mold are a little confusing at first, but once you get the hang of them, they work extremely well. I wouldn't mind seeing the current LSC stuff removed/upgrade to 3.0, but it needs to actually be worth doing when it is.

I also don't really like the idea of punishing a person's stats for doing assorted LSC. (Most) People will naturally specialize into something anyway, but why punish the people who want to have a balanced character.

The problem with capping how much LSC you can do is that we're encouraging players to not be around (especially high level players). Some of the times that I was most social on the MUD were when I was doing LSC and talking to people while my chakra/stamina was recharging.

Finally, katas should -not- be the default for LSC. They should be there to help raise proficiency with a style, and maybe even have some additional effect....but their current role should not be continued especially should not be enlarged.

Stats: I'm not sure I knew of anyone who had all their stats at 20 -before- the trains decrease.