Arelith

This would be a nice change for Skal, ironically, seeing as the lone island doesn't have any portal destinations, and will relieve travel fatigue.

I feel the opposite way, feels like some areas would benefit from less portal destinations. Sibayad as an example might prosper more if it wasn't so easy for a army to invade it to kill people who hide there.

Reallylongunneededplayername wrote: Tue Apr 02, 2019 9:00 am TL;DR

I would ditch the lense from npc shops, and put the recall rod in its place.

Why even necro the thread? This discussion was over 3 and a half months ago.

Cause I read some of it, Formed an opinion and didn't noticed that is had been that long since the last reply?

I am agains it...
Its allready hard to travel for my character when I cant use boats and caravans....I allready spend like 1/3 (or more) of my time runing from portal to portal, pendling between UD and Surface...instead of doing RP with my felow players...

I am agains using lenses to run from PVP or unwanted RP....people should embrace every experience and enjoy it...

I am for more easy out of combat, out of RP travel.....

give lenses cooldown....give them like 1 turn cast time even....Just please dont take them away from us...

Did we really have to necromance this thread?

Portal lenses are one of the dumbest mechanics in arelith along with -yoink in their current state. They create impossible scenarios in which players get far too trigger happy to avoid the 1 round lens animation, or the roundless instant cast -yoink.

I cannot count the number of times an excellent tense situation was ruined by the use of -yoink or portal lenses. The responsibility should be on the players to craft a fun scenario, not the abuse of an overpowered escape mechanic to avoid when they do not.

If these mechanics were adjusted so that they say, had a 3 round cooldown, it would greatly improve the roleplay quality during antagonistic scenarios for both sides. No more trigger happy slavers. No more suddenly loading a new transition and clicking a button before anyone else can load in.

Sometimes bad things happen to characters. That's part of the setting. I've never seen a yoink or a portal lens creature a situation where it's improved a narrative. Nobody wants to tell a story about 'that time I had a thrilling escape because I clicked a portal lens.'
There are other ways to opt out such as death.

Dagonlives wrote: Thu Apr 04, 2019 7:30 amThere are other ways to opt out such as death.

And this aggressive PvP trigger-happy attitude is exactly why people prefer to have a lense at hand. Some people simply do not find enjoyment in being instantly corpse-bashed simply because their build isn't optimal - and that's OK. Not all of us built our characters for PvP.

As for player responsibility, this goes both ways, and no one should be forced to PvP if they don't want to. Unfortunate circumstances, enemies made, hostilities exchanged and the likes will always happen in-game, but to say that conflict equals PvP is a bit short-sighted. Conflict can be plenty of fun without having to resort to killbashing player corpses. PvP can and does happen in good conflicts, but it is not the epitome of conflict that some seem to believe.

Player responsibility, as I mentioned, goes both ways. It's not up to the victim to simply adhere to the narrative that someone who favors PvP forces upon them.

Sorry Evelyn. You are wrong in this instance.

It's not about being 'forced into PvP.' That is like saying you are forced to play on arelith. The reality is that when you clicked that button that said 'Enter our World' you agreed that other characters would have an influence on your character, because you are sharing the Arelith world with them. You effectively consented to having bad things happen to your P.C via interaction with other P.Cs (As well as good things too!)

'Nobody should be forced into PvP if they don't want to' is an unenforceable and erroneous statement. This is a player world you share with 100s of other people. At some point, something is going to happen that you do not like. Everyone should take responsibility for each other's mutual enjoyment and make an effort to ensure each side is having fun or mutual gain, but saying you can opt out of the features of an open world is just wrong. Otherwise Arelith would not permit open PvP. It does. It's part of the gameworld. Therefore, consent is implied when you login to the gameworld. Otherwise there would be an 'opt out' rule.

If these mechanics were adjusted so that they say, had a 3 round cooldown, it would greatly improve the roleplay quality during antagonistic scenarios for both sides.

Roleplay quality depends on the players involved, not the mechanics, and you know this. If players don't want to play out what you offer them, so be it. Perhaps they're not interested in your villain, or perhaps they think mechanical PvP on Arelith is barely enjoyable. You don't need to take it personal, and opting out is always an option.

If not by portal lens, they can always just Alt+F4, especially if they're alone anyways. Because of this and the above, the casting time of the lens is irrelevant. Making it longer won't magically make the player experience better, and a good player experience is all that matters.

Dagonlives wrote: Thu Apr 04, 2019 9:28 am
'Nobody should be forced into PvP if they don't want to' is an unenforceable and erroneous statement.

But the logical opposite is that everybody should be able to force PvP on someone else, which isn’t in the spirit of good cooperative storytelling either. That whole can of worms is far greyer than absolutes like these.

Good cooperative storytelling reads the other player’s needs and tries to make sure everyone has fun through it. A tense situation that one author pushes into a fight no matter what is a poorly done, and not coorperatively minded encounter. Please bear in mind, I’m absolutely not saying you do that, Dagon. Heck, it even sounds like we agree on the importance of a good cooperatively written story. It’s a concern people have, though, and it happens often enough that it keeps those lense fingers itchy.

I’ve never used a lense to escape a hostile situation, and my characters have instigated, won, and lost their fair share. I can understand why some people might want an escape button, though.

The idea that inevitably someonething will happen that someone’s character doesn’t like, and the end result will be them being forced to fight in PvP is an absolute in what should be a situational grey area. I’m not expecting an armed surfacer shouting insults at the gates of Andunor to be given the same options as, say, a person going walking in the woods who happens to get waylaid, but if we don’t give each other reasonable alternatives (surrenders, ransoms, robberies, leave or die instead of just die) to armed conflict, it should come as no surprise that people use an item to accomplish what isn’t otherwise offered. On the flip side, if there’s conflict RP going on and your character doesn’t want to fight, but is being given these alternatives, stay and play it out, please!

Yeah, Arelith allows for PvP - you cant have good conflict RP if there’s no chance of it ever coming to blows - but I see a lot of attitude changes about conflict with other characters, and flexibility about helping your fellow players’ stories be fun, that needs to change before a mechanical ability to escape is removed. Is it abused? Yep. It’s also used to remove people from abuse, though, so any changes need to be done carefully, and without making things worse.

Zapnl wrote: Thu Apr 04, 2019 12:05 pm If not by portal lens, they can always just Alt+F4, especially if they're alone anyways. Because of this and the above, the casting time of the lens is irrelevant. Making it longer won't magically make the player experience better, and a good player experience is all that matters.

Not really true since logging off to avoid consequences is against the rules.

Only as a part of 'poor gamesmanship'. Just logging off is not forbidden. So that rule is subjective to interpretation. If I was the one to initiate PvP but am losing, sure, logging off would be a rules breach.

But what if someone initiates PvP without roleplay? What if someone whacks me while I'm trying to lens out, to keep me around? That's exploiting game mechanics to cancel the conversation I need to mechanically access to teleport away. In either case I would then be justified in just giving them the middle finger and quitting.

And in the edge case where I don't believe the other player is planning to make this a fun experience, they can file a report if I log off. The investigating DM would then get to hear my concerns and be the judge of whether it was an acceptable action, or not.

My only problem with the argument is, the logic in the design choice. Should people be able to escape pvp with a lens? The answer on the forums generally is. "Sure." However, should people have a /right/ to lens in pvp? In that answer it becomes a little convoluted. Because ideas like the 3 round charge of up lenses would still make a lens still function mostly the same. Just it would be open to much more aggressive counters in pvp. Some people feel that shouldn't exist on the grounds that people have a /right/ to escape PvP.

That's all peachy, but my problem comes in the Abjuration spell school which exists to prevent the use of a portal lens. Meaning somewhere in the logical argument it feels like there is a disconnect.

We shouldn't argue about all these petty details and ask ourselves if people should have a /right/ to lens out of situations to avoid conflict. If they do, we should probably examine the abjuration -ward teleport ability. If they do not, we should probably consider looking into adding a cooldown to portal lenses. Because people who like to pop them through a transition while they are in combat to escape are extremely common.

However, I will not doubt plenty of situations exist where you are stuck in a dark alleyway with someone who is just looking to kill you to feed your head to his pet slime or something else ridiculous.

Dagonlives wrote: Thu Apr 04, 2019 7:30 am I cannot count the number of times an excellent tense situation was ruined by the use of -yoink or portal lenses. The responsibility should be on the players to craft a fun scenario, not the abuse of an overpowered escape mechanic to avoid when they do not.

If these mechanics were adjusted so that they say, had a 3 round cooldown, it would greatly improve the roleplay quality during antagonistic scenarios for both sides. No more trigger happy slavers. No more suddenly loading a new transition and clicking a button before anyone else can load in.

Generally speaking, if the opposing party is enjoying RP with you, they'll stick around to see what happens, win or lose.

Fact is, the lense is usually used to escape encounters that you, as a player, know are not going to be enjoyable, IC or OOC.

Lengthening the wind-up time for lenses will do nothing except make it easier and more likely, rather than harder and less likely, for people to successfully gank eachother, and push PvP mechanics to higher priority over RP. If a fast working lense is the only thing between your PC and 3 heavily warded PCs who you fully know are just going to killbash your PC(for IC or OOC reasons), you can expect the same short one line emote to satisfy the rules before the combat. Making the lense take longer to work will not improve the quality of the conflict. It'll only make the mechanical end result more one-sided.

Basically all of what Kriegos said holds true. The lenses work the way they do, and are used the way they are, because people have proven, time and time again, that cooperative storytelling and ensuring that a defeated opponent player has fun, are not ubiquitous to arelith's PvP culture.
We all know people who are a pleasure to conflict with.
We also all know people who have a well known track record for not being fun to deal with in any capacity, and there really isn't any point in engaging with certain people, in RP or PvP, if all it leads to is being made to respawn and dead-ending from there. Being forced into one-line PvP by changing the lenses isn't going to improve the situation for anyone except the one intent on forcing their PvPeen mechanical-build-driven-narrative down another's throat whether they like it or not.

The cultural overreliance on PvP to drive narrative is what pushes the message that RP begins at 20. If RP is king and levels don't matter, this is not something we should be encouraging.

I thought RP began at 30? That's certainly the impression the veterans I've spoken have given...

The cultural overreliance on PvP to drive narrative is what pushes the message that RP begins at 20. If RP is king and levels don't matter, this is not something we should be encouraging.

1, this
2, I'd be willing to see heightened restrictions on lenses/other escape routes if we also saw heightened standards on what 'rp before pvp' meant. So, no more one-liner killbashing, at a minimum.

Fixing/creating a subdual system that allows for input, RP, and a subdual system that works would go much, much further towards helping fix any PvP issues than touching portal lenses would.

TimeAdept wrote: Thu Apr 04, 2019 7:20 pm Fixing/creating a subdual system that allows for input, RP, and a subdual system that works would go much, much further towards helping fix any PvP issues than touching portal lenses would.

Now that’s an interesting idea. One definitely worth exploring. I personally think that might be worth a new suggestion thread itself to brainstorm how it might work.

I rarely engage in PVP, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but using non-lethal damage for PVP combat, resulting in a character being incapacitated (from everything except speech) when defeated sounds awesome!

I think it would slow the aspect of PVP play to a halt and would allow for cooler heads to prevail. This would especially be useful in situations where one side is outmatched and there’s no way to truly tell until blows are traded. I’ve had a couple situations where I’ve hit an opponent once and killed them outright and it certainly wasn’t satisfying for me. Can’t imagine it was much better for the other party. The roles have also been reversed for me.

I believe this would be of tremendous benefit, especially to players who don’t optimize or have much experience with the rigours of PVP.

While a more engaging subdual mode would be awesome, I do worry that many would cling to it out of a desperate sense of character ego preservation. I'll explain what I mean by that with an analogy. If I decide to roleplay a doctor, but don't know vith-all about basic first-aid practice? I don't get a free pass. If I do a lazy emote along the lines of, *Does first-aid stuff.* That's just poor roleplay. In the same way, so many of the arguments I see related to PvP sound like folks who don't like that they lost. The Dev team has honestly done a great job to bring many of the subpar classes closer to the level of the others. There's a way to make just about any concept PvP viable. If you don't know how to build a PvP viable character, or choose not to, don't expect a free pass. It's the writer's responsibility to research their role. And y'know what? For some characters it makes more sense not to be PvP focused. GET FRIENDS, BE SOCIAL. It's a multiplayer game.

In this same vein, I feel like Cerk hit the nail on the head. Many try to claim that others have a 'right' to escape PvP but really, if that was the case, why is there a mechanic that explicitly nullifies this 'right'? There's clearly a disconnect. If -ward is okay, then there is ZERO issue or downside to implementing a change to how lenses work.

People just need to be willing to roll with the punches.

viewtopic.php?f=37&t=22165&start=50#p176720

My statement remains exactly the same.

CosmicOrderV wrote: Thu Apr 04, 2019 11:39 pm People just need to be willing to roll with the punches.

Correction, players need to be reasonable, all of them. Regardless of whether they are "aggressor" or "victim".

CosmicOrderV wrote: Thu Apr 04, 2019 11:39 pm Many try to claim that others have a 'right' to escape PvP but really, if that was the case, why is there a mechanic that explicitly nullifies this 'right'? There's clearly a disconnect. If -ward is okay, then there is ZERO issue or downside to implementing a change to how lenses work.

Fair point. However, this also means that if -ward is okay to prevent teleporting out, then people do, mechanically speaking, have the right to teleport out when not -warded. If it were all this simple, though, we'd have easy answers to address it. Poorly implemented solutions could very easily have a downside to more players than a change could help. I mean, that's why we're discussing it trying to figure out how to improve the situation, right?

I won't rehash my thoughts on cooperative storytelling, respect, and player attitude, but I still believe that's a bigger issue than making a mechanical change, albeit far more difficult to address.

I'll just add this question for those writing villains: When it's clear a person isn't into the narrative you're presenting, is it really that terrible for you to allow them to escape? (note: actually going and escaping, not continue on like the villain was never there)

TimeAdept wrote: Thu Apr 04, 2019 7:20 pm Fixing/creating a subdual system that allows for input, RP, and a subdual system that works would go much, much further towards helping fix any PvP issues than touching portal lenses would.

A subdual system that actually works for ALL weapons, without penalties for using it, would do wonders for the current issues. As is, the system is a bit buggy, and very rarely used due to the limitations on what weapons even work for it. This needs fixing.

Durvayas wrote: Fri Apr 05, 2019 2:21 am

TimeAdept wrote: Thu Apr 04, 2019 7:20 pm Fixing/creating a subdual system that allows for input, RP, and a subdual system that works would go much, much further towards helping fix any PvP issues than touching portal lenses would.

A subdual system that actually works for ALL weapons, without penalties for using it, would do wonders for the current issues. As is, the system is a bit buggy, and very rarely used due to the limitations on what weapons even work for it. This needs fixing.

Not to mention that it's also 'buggy' enough that people can get out of being 'subdued' and quit the scene at the slightest provocation. The only time I saw the subdual system ever used the player being subdued ended up fuging themselves instead.

i think the development team did not change/add anything in this regard for a reason. Maybe they want to leave things as they are for now or maybe some time in the future a Rod Of Recall would replace the lenses in the shops, leaving the lenses a craftable item only, and I believe Irongron already said he likes this idea. Means lesnes are STILL a thing. Pre-loading lenses is forbidden. Logging off to avoid IC consequences is also forbidden. Lets just wait and see. Maybe the decision is not to change anything at all. It's been 3 months+
. . .