Fallen Age Info Digest: March 18, 2001 - March 24, 2001
The following list of statements are the highlights of issues discussed on
the forums over at 'The
Official Site' over the past week by Savant and Drysart.
Drysart: As stated earlier in the thread, there are open-PvP areas (and servers),
and there are consentual PvP areas. If you go into an open-PvP area, you
are implicitly giving permission for people to attack you and kill you.
People can attack you in consentual-PvP areas, but if you didn't want to
be killed, you can report them.
Drysart: Your kill count does NOT go down when you die until its three or greater.
Dying after every other victim won't reset your counter back down.
Drysart: If you have over 3 kills, when you die, you lose your PK flag, so you only
suffer the penalty once. However if you run out and start killing again
after getting out of jail, you'll end up being flagged again before too long.
Drysart: We'll definately at least be trying a Pure PvP server at release. We were
actually discussing the ruleset it would get earlier today (3/24/2001). Then
we'll see how things boil out. Existing games have seperate PvP servers
because PvP wasn't really factored into their design from the start, whereas
it was with Fallen Age, so having a Pure PvP server might be slightly
redundant. We'll see. We've got a lot of leeway we can use to make servers
unique.
Colony PvP
Savant: We're mulling around one of the board suggestions on letting the King
decide upon how much he wants to tax each conquered colony (with the
30% cap still in place). It'll definitely add for more political
strategy... now the only questions is if we all agree to do it, and then
if it can be done quickly enough.
Jail
Savant: Did you think Jail would be a safe place? Especially on this strange
new earth? :) Jail will have monsters roaming in it... which makes it
virtually impossible to go idle (and of course those monsters give 0 EXP)
... but now, beyond the 30 minutes, you also have to complete a quest.
Something simple (and random) like "Kill X amount of creature Y" --
Like jail labor.
Drysart: Jail is NOT a subgame, it's a punishment for antisocial behavior. ...
Someone that wants to kill as the main style of their play, those 30
minute chunks are going to add up quickly and make that style of play an
unworkable one.
Nation Flags
Drysart: We'll be able to handle pretty much any common image format, as we're
going to have to convert it and add it into the game database either
way. BMP and JPG were both mentioned since they're pretty ubiquitous.
Player Wipes
Drysart: In response to "Maybe a server dedicated to automatic player wipe
each 12 month.. no?" - If anything, that'd be the route we take. I'm
against regular player wipes as a normal feature of the game, as they
destroy the intrigue, relationships and politics that give a server
character.
Drysart: In response to "if a king can't be dethroned due to excessive power",
I wouldn't be too surprised if somehow the scales somehow got tilted
in favor of the people trying to overthrow the king. But we're going
to try our best to balance things so that situation never comes about.
Interface
Savant: We will have an in-game messageboard
Critters
Drysart: Our critters are more of the "unusual variety", across the board.
Nobody wants to bash bunnies and snakes as a newbie (I mean, you get your
butt kicked by a bunny? How degrading is THAT?), we've got some more
interesting newbie creatures.