Shattered Kingdoms

You've just given an example of how you can know something as a player and use that to give your character a positive experience in-game without it seeming OOC. That can be done regardless of whether you learned something on a past character or read it in a guide. It is up to the players to maintain the roleplaying environment of SK even if they can learn about IC information through OOC means, and players who fail to do that should be punished, just as they are today.

Your example is what others have called "going through the motions" where you still get your advantage for having learned something on your previous character, but you get to feel good about yourself for not technically multiplaying. Why should veteran players continue to have this advantage? New players or non-explorer players are just as capable of staying in character while "learning" things that the player already knows.

Right. I left that in there to spark discussion - I was quite up front about potentially just being an elitist and didn't want to portray my thoughts as anything other than just that.

I feel strongly that the best players are those who work to learn things, and I believe this is not limited to gamertype. If you are not an explorer, so what? Want to be a socializer with interesting things to talk about? Better do some exploring. Want to be an effective killer? Well, you can either roll MR Barb and AON people, or do some exploring and tinkering with different builds/setups to learn effective ones. Achievers - 2 types here, those who want to achieve things themselves, and those who want to just check boxes - the first type's going to be exploring already, and the second type can take a hike in my opinion.

I do not believe that a newbie to SK, who hadn't spent time learning how to play in this very heavy RP environment, would treat game information appropriately. I know I would not have when I started. I only stopped cheating about 2 years ago myself. I do believe that there is a class of RP-heavy-permanewb on this game who would probably be able to treat game information appropriately (perhaps theDrifter fits in here?), and also that there are PK-heavy-permanewbs who would abuse the hell out of it. I use the permanewb classification to mean those players who have been around forever and understand what SK is about but for whatever reason know next to nothing about game mechanics or game information.

I understand that it is not particularly nice to say that I don't think new players or people who can't be bothered to learn things for themselves are not as trustworthy when it comes to being custodians of game info. That is however my opinion on the subject.

Ultimately, I do not understand why not providing for OOC knowledge sharing is "unfair" to someone who has only a few hours a week to play. It does not take more than a few hours to explore a zone. If it does, and you are a talented player, you will remember what you did the first time and come back better focused. Yes, someone playing 40 hours a week will discover things faster and will have more opportunity to snap up loot when it is located by virtue of being around more. However, the joy of area discovery is not something that to me is very hours-played-dependent. Let me know if I'm missing something big here - otherwise I'm content to agree to disagree and leave this discussion for TPTB. I'm not going to quit SK because my hoarded secrets get found out by other people.

Not sure why everyone is so opinionated about this. The thread is called "what would excite you to play", not shoot others peoples ideas down because I don't like it.

Either post a new idea, or quit whining.

This thread does seem to be playing itself out rapidly. Stay tuned for one or more poll threads over the weekend.

I wonder what it would be like to be able to start your characters in other cities - maybe this feature would not be available to newbies. Craeftlin, Ch'zzrym, Everclear, Garazul, Seaside, Krychire etc. There are inns in all of those cities and you could easily implement (smaller, less involved - think old school practice dummies, no quests or instant weapons) training zones there. There are inns in all those cities that could be used as recall zones.

I think that would make things a lot more interesting, a lot more background potential, and give people more chance to run into random people for PK, and give vets a more in-depth look at smaller cities.

Love this.

Eliminate NPC wars.

I have been keeping this to myself for months, but your post motivated me to bring this up: I've had wizi immortals tell me to "go study more" on lowbie characters while trying to roleplay. I've had players tell me to seek cabal membership after I'd reached journeyman. I thought I was just annoying, but I'm kind of relieved to hear other people get the "go level some" line.

I'd love it if we didn't have to have levels for the game, but if I wanted to roleplay a caster without actual spells ... well, a MUD wouldn't be the game for me, now would it? If I'm supposed to be able to enjoy playing SK as a MUSH, I'd like some of the MUSH comforts to be there, too, like more support for customizable equipment, communication, and -- flame on, I suspect -- protection from PVP.

I'm going to make a well-intentioned bitter statement for the sake of voicing what I think isn't too stark of a minority view and say that it sort of hurts to get the vibe that the potential throng of facebook users is more valued than casual veterans such as Kaylia and myself. I don't mean this in an aggressive way, but the way this thread's played out makes it feel like Dulrik is selling some of us out for a swarm of lolcatting Farmville players.

What if SK ran multiple servers with different takes on some of these "maybe" or "meh" ideas with strong player support and see which winds up getting more users?

Pretty sure multiple servers would be a nightmare and thin the population even thinner. I tried the rp thing and got bored so leveled some more. I do think a chunk of the issue is being master plus in 20 hours. You lose quit a bit of development. I remember yana my first real character on the mud and being like 360 plus hours and only master, there was much more character development there.

Completely disagree. The reality is that we need less starting cities instead of more. Dropping to 3, 2 or even 1 would make it much more likely to run into more people for conversation, grouping and PK. Adding even more than we have now would just guarantee a game that feels like a solo experience. And solo MUD is not compelling.