Shattered Kingdoms

I hate the new familiarity system, but I have to say this is the one gripe I've griped over and over and might help the whole thing substantially and even make me quit griping.
Teron, I think someone already mentioned it, is the source of this complaint for me, or at least how I first noticed. We're talking about an area where alot of people get from amateur to apprentice, then come back again numerous times at other levels. But after you've exhausted the goblins, and know the area like your hand, or god forbid live there...

yeah.

The most popular idea stemming from this thread seemed to be having familiarity lapse over time, an idea I still support. I can't recall if Dulrik ever commented?

Peace,
Bux

I really am not a fan of the familiarity system. It's essentially put the grind back into levelling; ironic, given that I thought it was supposed to do the reverse.

In the last x months, I've levelled two characters up into the upper 40's. The first was pre-familiarity, the second was post.

Yes, my most recent character has probably discovered more new areas than any single character I've had previously. But set against that, he's taken significantly longer to level, which has meant that I've had to keep half an eye on keeping some momentum on the process at all times, typically to the detriment of other activities, whereas with previous characters "levelling" has always been something that I've used to fill in the gaps when nothing else is going on. That's now been reversed.

But more significantly, levelling has become positively anti-social.

The playerbase is spread out over a much wider area, spending less time in any given spot which means you're much less likely to form an opportunistic group from a chance meeting, or meet anybody else at all, in fact. And from about Apprentice through to Mentor the typical response to a suggestion to form a group and go and explore somewhere is "Oh, I'm saving the Orc Hive for later" or "No, I've already exhausted Morea" or "You're not Champion yet? No, you don't want to come with us and waste the Outer Planes too early or you'll never GM". And so on.

And with good reason.

The consequences to the levelling process of "using up" an area too early or leaving it too late is to add dozens and dozens of hours to the necessary grind required to progress.

And this is the experience of a player that's been around a while now and has a reasonably adequate feel for the mechanics of the game. I can't help but feel a degree of pity for anybody truely new to the game.

The idea of having familiarity lapse over time, whilst it wouldn't address all of these issues, would help considerably I suspect. At the very least it would reduce the impact of having a flawed out of character levelling strategy that resulted in your wasting an area too soon.

I could not agree more with Area Familiarity gradual decrease.

There are more than enough areas that have NPCs to fight at two or more different level status. You go to kill the smaller ones, then when you return for the bigger ones 11 levels later, you are still penaltized.

I think area familiarity should slowly but steadily decrease.

See? Even Nimolthar agrees with me.

<FLAME REMOVED>

Maybe I am too niave to see what the big deal here is.

The point is to go out and explore areas, not level in the game in the fewest number of areas. I type area and there are dozens of places out there to train. I've gone to a few that I haven't ever seen anyone at, and I have gained my levels. There's not been a point I'd say 'the grind' has been too slow/difficult. I think I'd be incredibly bored if it only took 3-5 areas to reach GM. In fact, if that was the whole concept behind levelling each character - the same limited number of places, hours and hours to get to GM without knowing the game, I'd say that was a broken (and exceptionally unbalanced/boring) system.

The only point I've seen the familiarity go a bit awry is if those on the game in my level range have exploited an area I'm not yet familiar with or vice versa. It makes people a tad bit more reluctant to stay in a group and level in a place if they have nothing left to gain. Still, even knowing things like that back of your hand isn't the largest of penalties.

I am satisfied with the system overall. With the group thing, just keeps me out there looking for new places. I just hope there is some more inidication of where some of these places are. The game has a lot of areas, but not a lot of history/direction in finding them. Maybe that would help.

First of all, I work in the in Construction industry so I sort of know what the hell I am talking about. I am speaking of the overall learning curve. A new person is going to learn how to build a house X100 faster then that of a person that has already build one. The person who has experience is set in their ways it takes a lot more effort on the experienced person to change but if you are new then it is a lot easier to changed because you are not set in your ways. You cant teach teach an old dog new tricks. You are mistakening the gerenal stuff with more techical items. Sure a person with experience knows more, but a young person can learn the gerenal stuff and more techical things faster.

Instead of familiarity fading, how about making the experience check proportional? If you've 10,000 total experience, 5,000 from a single area is sure to get the penalty. But by the time you're up to 50,000 experience, 5,000 is a much smaller proportion, and likely only at the familiar level.

Time-dependent familiarity just sounds so awkward. Does that mean if you make one visit to an area, you reset the timer? That'd do more to stop group adventuring than what we have now.

That said, I think concerns about group adventuring are overblown. First, the familiarity penalty isn't that big in the first place. Second, don't forget the grouping bonus, which I'm confident is bigger than even the greatest penalty.

I grant though, that you're less likely to find a spontaneous group if you visit a zone. I'm not sure what can be done about that, except suggest a little more time in the inns meeting people.