These ideas come up a lot, usually bits and pieces here and there. I try my best not to whine and complain. It's counterproductive. I love Lusternia and spend a lot of my time here, so obviously it's doing well enough by me that I'm still willing to play (and pay, as it happens).

But.

It bothered me a lot to see Gaudiguch and Hallifax released while bugs and balance issues remained. It's too late to do anything about that... they're out, and guilds are coming out for those orgs. Eh. I can live with it, even had Eldanien join Halli to see what it's like. Play with what's available or leave, right?

Meanwhile there exist guild skillsets that are severely broken (Dreamweaving?), or so vastly underutilized that it must be obvious that there is a problem. That there is existing game content that's faulty but being ignored in favor of bringing out new content is disturbing to me. I don't think I'm the only one who has an issue with this. In addition, I'm not at all convinced the player population can accommodate the new orgs. There are too many guilds with just barely enough active members to maintain a presence, and in some cases even this doesn't appear true.

Anyhow, minor soapbox rant aside, I would like to see time put into:

1) 'Useless'/'pointless' skills in guild skillsets. I'm sure everyone can point to skills in their guild skillsets that are a waste of time and code, and probably quite a few in the common skillsets as well. If a skill never gets used, you may as well delete it, because meanwhile it's akin to false advertising. Better yet, change them and make them desirable. Best yet, do that and add more to existing skillsets.

2) Balance of existing guild skillsets, primary/secondary AND tertiary. When a guild skillset is relegated to 'RP-only' or novelty use, I see that as a problem. Perhaps the administration doesn't. But given that players are going to be attracted to an available skillset for various reasons, there exists responsibility on the part of the game to ensure that each skillset is worth having and spending time/lessons/credits/dollars on.

3) Additional options and variety for Bards and Monks. And for that matter, most guilds. We're seeing new skillsets enter play. Why aren't we spending that time on guilds that have much fewer options than the others, rather than making new guilds which will also need to compete for development time?

4) In the same vein as #2, tradeskills and common skills. I put these last, as they tend to be secondary to most characters after guild skills. Regarding tradeskills... there's nothing wrong with choosing a tradeskill for purely RP reasons, but the combat and personal benefit reasons should be essentially equal between them. Artisan has needed a serious bit of work for a while, now. And I see (and have my own share of) complaints about Tailoring versus Forging on a regular basis. Poisons is a skillset that very few people take simply because of the limited market AND mediocre trans skill. Tinkering has at most a handful of worthwhile skills - far more exist in the base Enchanting skill, despite the disproportionate lesson costs between the base skill and the specialization. As for Common skills, they tend to be less of an issue. But you still find a few abilities here and there that just don't see use. Look at Aethercraft. Since weakenings went away, do we actually see aetherspace battles? Who here has actually used sluice beyond 'trying it out'? Dramatics stories... why would anyone actually use these?

5) Step by step, look at constructs, colossi, and all the other underused elements of the game. It's a shame to see all that code effort put in only to say 'yeah, it was neat when it worked'.


Is it the Envoy process that's keeping this stuff from happening? What's the feasibility of shunting all development into the Envoys and increasing the rate for a while? Perhaps with a third of them being required to be out-of-guild reports, so the rest of these details get looked at?

You didn't even mention Bookbinding

Not for lack of caring. If I went through the past few months of forums and culled all the complaints, I'd need multiple posts. And at that point, someone would point out that X complaint was just someone wanting more than the next guy.

Here, I'll spare the admin the time, because the response is always the same:

Give a full list of all specific things you want addressed with ideas on how to change it. They can discuss it after they see that.

Unfortunately, what I want is a full rework of dreamweaving, comprehensively re-writing it so that it no longer possesses the terrible bug-scourge.

'd. By an hour and 30 minutes.

For some odd reason, people seem to think that 5 coders = project can be done 5x faster.

One project, one coder, generally. Anything that's worked on by a large(ish) group of people tends to become nightmarishly confusing. Right now we have a big project floating about (endgame review) along with the monthly envoy reports, the half-finished guardians of the new cities, among other things. And not so many coders. Some of us also still do building work (like the new villages, or helping with events) - and other stuff that's going to come out one day for you all to enjoy (hopefully).

That said, Xavius has the right of it - you say, 'Fix the 'useless' skills' - great! We'd love to know which skills are completely and utterly useless, what skillsets they're in, and, personally, why your envoy(s) have not been envoying them. Because, really, that's part of what they're there for - to tell us when skills seem to be useless/undesirable/ineffective and to propose fixes to them.

And dreamweaving is a nightmare of a bug, and rewriting it from scratch probably won't fix it. I think Roark's talked about it before. I wince every time it comes up, heh.

REPORT LIST CROW.



Edit: Unfortunately, unless it gets something comparable with the sweetness of Nightkiss it's always going to be a bit subpar and thus the "random other" choice, but hey. No weapon auras or generic DMP for Crow, we're told.

We've come up with some fun other stuff, but it's really tough to find things on the same level as Nightkiss with its own unique flavour. I'm still trying to kick around ideas using Dark Spirits (since they're underutilized in the skillset really). If you want to give me ideas though, by all means!

Why do people think that I'm an endless font of ideas or something.

As I see it, the problem with asking people to list each potentially defective ability and suggest possible solutions to its deficiencies is this: There's no guarantee that the player didn't just waste two (or five, or ten, or twenty) hours of their time laboriously brainstorming and detailing solutions that will never be implemented, or even momentarily considered, for that matter.

I think it's fairly obvious that at least 95% of the ideas that come through this section don't make it into the game. I know why that is, don't get me wrong, but it hardly seems reasonable:

"Instead of saying something is broken, please explain in detail why something is broken, and put a great deal of thought into proposing solutions for fixing it. However, there's an excellent chance this effort will be in vain."

I can tell you generally that no one bothers to use or purchase the vast majority of horns or music boxes enchanted through Tinkering, and that everyone giggles and nods when I ask them if that stuff is considered useless. It's up to you whether to believe me or not, and in fact I'm too new and ignorant of the game to actually propose solutions. Maybe later.

Wait, you aren't?

The key question here is why this isn't an issue for envoy reports. Usually the answer is that there's not enough slots for the envoys to ever have one to spare for something like this. Which is entirely true. Thus, people think, 'if the problem is we don't have enough envoy slots to ever spare one for this, let's find a different vector by which to submit it'.

The flaw in that reasoning is that the number of envoy slots we have corresponds to the amount of coding resources Lusternia can invest in doing this sort of thing. If we added extra envoy slots, or added another method for "special review" of things, that wouldn't actually change how much could get done. Nothing comes from nowhere. If coders spend more time on X it always comes away from Y. There are only so many slices in the pizza.

I have long advocated that envoys should be strongly encouraged (by which I mean "forced") to spend, say, one slot out of 10, on non-combat-related things, just because that's the only way they'll ever get done. That way, some envoy would eventually suggest ways to make your music box usable.

But as much as I agree with Eldanien's original statement that everyone's got skills that are useless, there's no reason the envoy report process can't deal with it. The real question is, why do the envoys not deal with it? Do we have envoys that are too obsessed with tweaking primary combat skills and ignoring everything else? Or do they feel that every time they branch away from those central skills, the admins are more likely to reject their submissions? I can see a case for both arguments. What we really need, perhaps, is to address those two points. That's the core of this issue. Any other approach is just dwelling on the fantasy that you can get an extra eight slices out of a single pizza.

It's not really true that envoys won't envoy things that don't preserve their place in the envoy arms race. It is true that it's rare, but that's usually a symptom of uncompelling ideas. I know that Talan was looking for common/trade skill ideas very recently. Palm sigils came from an envoy report. A few cooking skills were. You just need a good enough reason and the willingness to ask an envoy assigned to a strong guild.

I disagree with this actually, we were able to pass through more non-combat-stuff when we had more slots (in the old Wiki format guilds could put up 2 ideas each, then X amount were merged from the pool based on envoy support and / or votes). Thus the stuff that went was things that the envoy-group in general agreed upon (I kind of miss that, actually, since nowadays ideas are sent with no support whatsoever), but that's just part of a different format.

It's pretty tough to not get these miscellaneous things a broad basis of envoy support, actually, so with that format they really weren't all that rare.

It would be nice, actually, if there was the odd month where all envoys agreed (or were forced >_>) to envoy only trade/common/utility abilities. How about May?

May bad. New guilds.

How about November? They'll be coded right around Christmas. It'll be like gift giving!

I know.

Putting it off indefinitely is probably part of the problem... Did anyone say yet today that there should be a regular envoy for common and trade skills? Because there should.

It's been suggested and shot down

If someone had told me during my first day of playing Lusternia that non-combat envoy concerns are shoveled off to the side 99% of the time in favor of combat issues, I wouldn't have doubted them one iota. In this genre, that's the way it is in every game featuring PvP. Anything else would have shocked me right out of my seat and into a stunned silence.

So it's not an unexpected development, but I agree that non-combat stuff should not be swept under the rug indefinitely. Occasionally, combat concerns should be made to wait, so that a trade skill or three can be tweaked, or various bugs can be squashed.

I realize combat is a huge part of this game and the bulk of Lusternia's cash income, but neglecting a bunch of other stuff in perpetuity hurts the bottom line. No one (except possibly wealthy veterans of other IRE MUDs) becomes a big-time combatant in the first three or four months of playing. Today's disgruntled player who quits because they transed a trade skill and later found out it sucked, could have been next year's combatant spending $500 a month on credits.

The sad thing is that no matter how many years you spend "balancing" PvP, no one will ever think it's balanced and no one will ever be satisfied with it. It's just change after change after change, a never-ending arms race. I know without a shadow of a doubt that this is the case, because I've personally witnessed it happen in MUDs and graphical MMOs since the middle 1990s.

Ergo, there is no harm (and potentially quite a lot of good) in making this endless arms race pause occasionally.

Something like a poll for "top ten useless non-guild skills" might be helpful for the envoys.

That said, everyone thinks something they have is useless at any given time The envoy system seems to work fairly well in the IRE games because it makes bias very obvious when it occurs, but if you open it up to everyone, that advantage could be lost because of the sheer number of opinions to wade through confusing things, so it is probably best to keep a "time out" to general skills.

Else we'll end up like Imperian, my ruined homeland