Well, I Bought a Wakabi in Dairuchi. My character felt sorry for it, since the Wakabi seemed to be rather enslaved and pitiful looking. He named it Toki Toki, which means 'Go go' in Mugwumpi, and it has become a staple in the Character's roleplay. He'll yell out Hyah!, and has an emote clicking his heels to push the bird on.

I got to thinking. I'm poor, and can't afford 500 credits, much less 500 credits to blow on a pet when I can just buy a mount for the same purpose. Perhaps there should be a method of personalizing mounts, to make them something more than an Achaean dragover? I don't know if there should be a price for it (as it'd be hard to just accept the hundreds of requests that pour in if it was free), or what the price should be, but a couple of options for mounts, that would make people think twice about losing them once they have them. Possibly after a certain time with the mount, one can opt to purchase these minor details with gold, while in a stable. (Since mounts CAN die, I think it'd be crazy to spend 50 credits to name/customize, and have it keel over on you) If the ability to do this is beyond the coders (as I know most the stuff I think up is insane to code), perhaps some Divine would be interested in per-case roleplay, payable with gold to shrines or something...I don't know.

Mount Name

Allows for your mount to have a name. Due to the limited intelligence of most mounts, the name may only be 10 characters long. The mount's basic name will remain, with the inclusion of the name given by the character.

I.E- Toki, a tame wakabi.

Descriptions that change based on the amount of time your mount has been with you. Again, I use the Wakabi as an example. Upon first purchasing the Wakabi, it looks all depressified, having been in bondage long enough to be broken, tamed. After the mount stays alive and in a character's possession for a certain amount of time, perhaps the description could change? Keep a set of descriptions for each mount at 2, 6, and 10 years.

Mount random emotes. I think these can be mass-applied to denizens, like the nexus keepers random emotes to their respective nexus. Camels spit, horses whinny, wakabis...caw? I dunno, something like that. Not too often, but often enough to give the mount some life, not just when you pet it.

Saddles, mount-blankets, etc available to tailors.

Little ideas to increase the personality of something with so much potential, give the riding skill a purpose.

Offer up your own!

Riding is a great addition to any game. As I come from Aetolia, we never had anything like that, so there is still somewhat of a thrill.

Having things like this would give so much character to a game. It would let cooks make mount food, tailors made saddles, forgers make armor, etc.

I know... the coders are busy. Especially since I'm going to have them make me my pet, and I want the ravenwood back -some- day.

Giddiyup!

Customizing your mount may be going too far, but I agree with Richter on the food, saddles, and armor. You could have things that a mount is wearing show in their description when probed. Drape a saddle over your mount for decoration or forge some armor for him as added protection. That would be very cool.

In Achaea, you can name things for 1000 gold. I had thought you could do the same in Lusternia, no?

You may name pretty much any denizen that is loyal to you. To do so, have one
thousand gold in your hands and type:

NAME

For example:

NAME horse13124 Silver

If the denizen is indeed loyal to you, and meets certain other restrictions,
then you will be relieved of one thousand gold, and the denizen will have a new
name!

As most of you know, Riding is the only skillset that hasn't changed at all, really. Doesn't mean it won't in the future, though.. its just not a priority at the moment. How can we make Riding more interesting, or more realistic? Please share your thoughts, as we would really like to Lusternia-ize the Riding skillset to make it different from Achaea.

Makeover all the abilities. If you're going to use Jousting, which looks fun, make actual championships.

Since Planar is a new feature for Lusternia, maybe add something to do with Planes? I dunno what.

To be honest, I don't know if you can have this in Achaea, but different speeds of running which exhaust your mount more rapidly/slowly? Using special mount herbs to make your mount healthier and able to run further?

Putting saddlebags on mounts, and putting items inside the saddlebags. Much safer than being in packs.

Allowing two people to ride at once. MOUNT ALLY <>, so the person is able to ride your mount. Say, if a friend direly needs to reach Celest fast...he can borrow your steed!

Also, different speeds/types of movement depending on race of mount. Bird-like mounts may be able to gallop but flutter at the same time to make them a bit faster.

Oh, and of course a new element for Mount Contests.

This tall wakabi is very nice. It is blah blah description here.
3
Completely exhausted.
Fairly healthy

Health would be dependant on how the person treats the mount, for instance if you frequently over-exhaust it, it would grow very unhealthy. If you frequently feed it bad herbs, it might grow sick.

Stables who you can pay to look after your mount, if you're going away for a long time, or it's sick and you have no idea how to cure it. I always thought this was a logical idea.

I actually love to ride mounts in all MUD's I play. I agree with the ideas of clothing and amrour and food and such, as well as the health and such. I also think that you should get a level 1 endurance regeneration while riding a mount, since you are resting while beind mobile, and your body's energy actually goes into healing itself instead of moving or supporting it's weight, etc. I also think that mounts should have special abilities. now, i havent got deep intot he skillset, but let's say you get a firebird for a mount. And there's only one firebird stable in the whole land. then the firebird can spit flames at your enemy? i dont know........I'll think a bit more and post ideas.

I agree with Iggy, let your allies be able to ride your mounts and/or have multiple people be able to ride at once (only bigger mounts, obviously). Also..perhaps character size could impact riding ability? It seems unlikely that a faeling could manage a war stallion, for instance, or that an igasho could fit on a pony.

I agree with that.

There's apparently a "Mountswap" ability in Riding that sort of allows others to ride your given steed. Unfortunately, I think this works more to transfer a mount than loan it; the other party would also need Mountswap to give the dang thing back. I will honestly state that my information is second-hand and therefore fallible.

I'd love to see more on the guildhall "creature daycare" idea. How exactly does that work? Given that the -mancer types can summon mounts, I'd like to see how other guilds handle this sort of thing before offering my own ideas on wyrm kennels and the like.

I think its just obvious, but there should be some good integration with warrior archytpe and riding.

Something else you can do , is make more options for riding to be used for traveling, perhaps create planar creatures that you can ride at higher up levels, that allow you to use plane gates if you don't allreayd have that ability. Or it allows you to instantly go to the plane you captured that animal from without the need of a special gateway.
Like a pegasus that takes you straight to Celestia or some sort. and ofcourse you can't capture that mount if your enemied to that plane.

I never learnt Riding in Achaea because all the mounts looked so boring. Giant golden eagles and pegasuseseres... (pegasii?) were cool, sure, but so expensive! If there were a few more interesting mounts at lower, and less costly, levels, i'd be way more interested. Stuff like a giant spider, seahorses, that type of thing. Okay, even if they were way expensive, they'd be cool.

Also perhaps some could have special qualities too, as Daganev mentioned, though not just planar travel. Maybe an octopus that lets you waterbreathe or walk on water, a salamander to walk over lava or through firewalls?

Wakabis are like chocobos. And what did chocobos do? Race! Have races every once in a while, and code it so that *racer* has to go through certain checkpoints, so you can't portal to all of them and cheat. Make it start at, oh, Magnagora, go up the mountains, around the world, and up to Avechna.

Chocobo racing made FFVII, the greatest game ever made, just a little more fun.

I knew there was a reason for silly chokoboberries

As to more realistic: Add special weaponry skills into the riding skillset, in the medieval times, the two most used weapons for mounted knights were the lance and the flail, the lance was mostly used for fighting other mounted opponents, but could be used to charge on unmounted opponents as well, just slowly, charging at someone unmounted with a lance is very slow, but very lethal as well, IF it hits. The flail on the other hand was used to crush the footfolk while mounted, they'd charge through and swing the flail around to crush heads. Against other mounted opponents, the flail was mainly used to dismount them. Everyone would be able to use these skills, but the knights would use 'em more effectively. So yeah, riding skills using flail and lance to fight mounted and unmounted opponents.

I agree with that as well. I think all guilds should have stables where they sell specific mounts of each type. For example, the ur'guard stable would sell undead mules.

Instead of a mount coming with an ability, what if you purchase and raise a mount and grows abilities and stronger the more time you spend with it?

not a bad idea. In a game i used to play, called well of souls, you can catch and tame wild monsters that learned new spell abilities and grew in power as they got stronger. the weaker they were when you caught them, the stronger they would get. for example, a level 99 newt would be mor epowerful i n terms of abilities than a level 99 bear, as the newt had more room to improve than the bear.

I had suggested that somewhere I thought.....maybe that was on my other game but a great example of something like this is Final Fantasy XI's Beastmaster....the thing was, the beast sapped experience too making it difficult for them to fit into party situations as they are drawing double experience....

I don't think it's feasable to make mounts able to attack players. Although they should be able to kick with their hooves, (I always thought it was weird how they would just stand there waiting for someone to finish killing them...that wouldn't happen in real life). But ORDER MOUNT KILL person is going too far. Kinda not what they're there for.