Arelith

Xerah wrote: Mon Nov 02, 2020 6:45 pm
Some of these things you need to look at with the eye of the central idea rather than what is explicitly stated/recommended. For example, not allowing people in factions to not own other quarters is not the goal, but limiting it to people who have membership in factions with large guildhouses is the goal so that they fill the spaces (there are other ways to do this rather than explicitly restricting purchasing which would be a more likely implementation should something like that happen; i.e. can't refresh guild house unless 75% full or exponential growth of rent based on empty space, etc). This doesn't mean it is easy to implement or something that is going to be implemented but another way to look at it.

My point was not that was your intention. I just think we need to be aware of what the passive consequences of these choices could be. I think that seeing where things will go wrong will help everyone come up with a better solution. I will give an example of ways we could improve upon the idea put forward by some about limiting quarter purchases.

Instead of saying that people who are in factions cannot own personal quarters, you could say, "To own a large guildhouse you must have x number of individuals in your guild who are active. If the number drops to a certain level then you will receive a notice that you need to gain more members within the next tenday to retain ownership of the guildhall."

This would improve the idea in several ways. It would encourage large factions to be actively bringing others into their fold. It would encourage them to provide good roleplay so that people wanted to stay in the faction. It would not harm smaller factions. It would make it where guild leaders who are already spending their time roleplaying with their members could continue to focus on positive roleplay vs grinding for gold.

As many have said quarters are often a status symbol. The change I proposed would likely make it where people will see factions as a climb in guildhalls. You can start with a very small one and slowly climb the rungs of power. As you do so you gain the ability to have an increasingly nicer guild hall for your faction. I think this has the potential to be a good thing but I could also see where it can go wrong. It would depend on how the admins wanted this climb to be. It could be made with a low floor and then everyone is allowed to get a guild hall once you reach a certain level or it could be a steady climb towards greater and greater things.

Summary of ways my idea improves upon the previous proposal and passive negative consequences that come with it

• Positives
  + Encourages faction roleplay
  + Does not harm small factions
  + Encourages roleplay that involves others outside of the faction (recruiting)
  + Guild Leaders benefit from making their factions more enjoyable to more people.
  + Greater turn over of guildhalls brings new roleplay

• Negatives
  - Could encourage cliches to form.
  - Less stability of which factions are prominent and apart of the Arelith world ( its the same point as the last positive but looked at from a different angle. Its good for there to be more change but it also does make it harder for people to see where they would belong etc.)

• Neutral
  Likely a large change in the meta around guildhalls and the goals of factions.

I've read the thread mostly, but I might have missed some points.
I also preface, that my comment, comes fully from playing characters that..
1. Are in factions with no faction guildhouses
2. Do not have much money (At highest, I've held 500k to my name)


I believe one thing would be bigger storage. Trust me, I hear the "No, absolutely not", but I believe it'd help. I believe some guilds and factions buy several houses and stuff, because their storages are just so full. And I get this: I share house with one person, and it's already way too full, so are settlement storages etc. I highly believe 20 spaces is very little storage, and there should be some solution to get more storage (Either by having two names on one lease add it up, or, you can buy extra storage to the room, but it costs more or so.)
Same goes for shops, I think. Faction-shops and multiple-people in one shop could have more space. Or you could, again, upgrade it, but for extra cost.

I genuinely don't think one faction should be allowed to own several houses and shops if they have guildhouse. There are factions that own one guild house, that doesn't have *any* of the inside rooms occupied, because other members own other quarters elsewhere for the Faction name.
Same goes for shops: I get that you want your faction to sell a lot of stuff, but I feel it's a bit distasteful from the players to hold 5 shops for their faction name, because there are a lot of players and factions who would kill for one shop. Or quarter.

I'd just want quarter for the faction to have faction RP in, and a shop that can provide for the faction. Singular term for both, and if it happened, I'd love to enforce that if it was a guildhouse, members would occupy the rooms inside first, before seeking elsewhere.

Just my two cents.

Two characters, one with Gift of Crasftsmanship, fully utilize three chests and their bank storage just to have materials on hand for their professions and running festivals, with a precious handful of slots left over for sentimental memoirs. I fully understand why large guilds absolutely hoard quarters. Storage needs to be much more generous.

Xerah wrote: Mon Nov 02, 2020 5:00 pm It is absurd and way too much gold. No one needs to horde that much and actively damages the economy.

I would again disagree with that statement. I'd find more absurd the idea of capping a characters wealth arbitrarily. If you try to do that then people will just invest gold into items that are easy to carry about and you end up with the same result. But worse. With people investing in goods and hoarding them as a way to accrue wealth. The ways past such a thing are many.

Liquid gold is also an integral part of keeping things running in the economy, as well as furthering RP. Arbitrarily limiting how much someone could amass in wealth would likely damage some characters RP. What about merchants with a high inflow/outflow of gold daily doing deals? Suddenly being unable to handle transactions for fear of wasting gold/hitting some cap would kind of defeat the purpose of rping a merchant.

As is we recently had gold cap raised to 20 million personal from 15 million. And afaik there's no cap on how much a faction can have in their account. Taking those capacities away or capping how much a single character can own/access just seems stifling. If someone wants to be warbucks rich in character then let them. As such still takes time and effort and can lead to good RP at the same time.

Lexx wrote: Mon Nov 02, 2020 7:35 pm

Xerah wrote: Mon Nov 02, 2020 5:00 pm It is absurd and way too much gold. No one needs to horde that much and actively damages the economy.

I would again disagree with that statement. I'd find more absurd the idea of capping a characters wealth arbitrarily. If you try to do that then people will just invest gold into items that are easy to carry about and you end up with the same result. But worse. With people investing in goods and hoarding them as a way to accrue wealth. The ways past such a thing are many.

Liquid gold is also an integral part of keeping things running in the economy, as well as furthering RP. Arbitrarily limiting how much someone could amass in wealth would likely damage some characters RP. What about merchants with a high inflow/outflow of gold daily doing deals? Suddenly being unable to handle transactions for fear of wasting gold/hitting some cap would kind of defeat the purpose of rping a merchant.

As is we recently had gold cap raised to 20 million personal from 15 million. And afaik there's no cap on how much a faction can have in their account. Taking those capacities away or capping how much a single character can own/access just seems stifling. If someone wants to be warbucks rich in character then let them. As such still takes time and effort and can lead to good RP at the same time.

I've recently been toying around with the idea of creating a faction similar to the Iron Bank from Game of Thrones or the banking house of Valant and Balk from the First Law series. To have that kind of roleplay you need funds. I agree with what you are saying.

If you only increase settlement storage slots, I don't believe that will really fix the problem. Reason being, most factions or at least the ones I've been part of, share resources. You can not do that if all your craft supplies are in people's vaults because you are trying to only own one quarter for the entire guild.

If the storage could expand, inside the quarter no matter the type of quarter that it is, per name on the lease/door/etc, and make those names not able to own a separate location, then the group would have their storage and be able to share access to all the group and still have their settlement storage for personal pieces.

I know people think the settlement storage more secure and put valuables there, but factions tend to want access to all materials. If the smith of the group keeps the ingots then the tailor can not make anything till the smith logs on. Sadly, with timezones, that is not the easiest thing.

I think viewing the base price of a shop/quarter as being relevant is a naive (non-derogatory) viewpoint. The real economy for the 'premium' properties has for a long time been massive sums of gold (multi millions to tens of millions for the most precious) and connections, this world of 'too cheap' property only exists in the low demand property markets and all that increasing costs on that front is going to do is penalize less established players. That said, I do think improvements could be made to the current system but I think most of that effort should focus on things like mechanics to discourage ooc shuffling of properties within the same group and epic level squatters who log in mostly to refresh their doors.

Also certain properties are just flat-out priceless. Try to offer 5 million in a Dis anti-scrying room or a Sibayad manzil room and nobody will get back to you and some people have signs out saying their lease isn't for sale. Meanwhile, there's about six stories of safety vaults available in Dis and plenty of deposit vaults available in the Sharps but nobody wants those properties. No, they want the abyssal citadel.

We've plenty of property available but people want what they can't have.

ReverentBlade wrote: Mon Nov 02, 2020 7:32 pm Two characters, one with Gift of Crasftsmanship, fully utilize three chests and their bank storage just to have materials on hand for their professions and running festivals, with a precious handful of slots left over for sentimental memoirs. I fully understand why large guilds absolutely hoard quarters. Storage needs to be much more generous.

Ironically, the people with absurd storage to begin with tend to not even have enough space as it is. My guildhall has a "coal box" that perpetually burns through coal and I know someone else's storage that has six full bags of different types of gem dust that just sits there because you never know when you need gem dust (topaz) in large quantities.

Here's a thought: Have storage available up to 100 slots per chest in a guildhall. It just bills you out at a premium through the rental system like upgrading traps/locks does since it seems like we're never going to do bags of holding on this server.

CorsicanDoge wrote: Wed Nov 11, 2020 12:10 pm Here's a thought: Have storage available up to 100 slots per chest in a guildhall. It just bills you out at a premium through the rental system like upgrading traps/locks does since it seems like we're never going to do bags of holding on this server.

Why not give this expanded storage space to everyone through citizen storage?
Guild houses are scarce and exclusive. Owning one can be very advantageous.
The benefit that they represent needs to be reduced, rather than amplified!

-XXX- wrote: Wed Nov 11, 2020 1:04 pm

CorsicanDoge wrote: Wed Nov 11, 2020 12:10 pm Here's a thought: Have storage available up to 100 slots per chest in a guildhall. It just bills you out at a premium through the rental system like upgrading traps/locks does since it seems like we're never going to do bags of holding on this server.

Why not give this expanded storage space to everyone through citizen storage?
Guild houses are scarce and exclusive. Owning one can be very advantageous.
The benefit that they represent needs to be reduced, rather than amplified!

Agreed. If the devs undertake any efforts towards increasing player storage (which I highly doubt for reasons of hoarding), I would strongly recommend making those changes universal, rather than tied to specific properties or something like that. Making guild halls or other rare properties more valuable is just going to exacerbate the problems of players holding onto them for extremely long periods without much use, making those multi-million gold real estate deals even higher, etc. That's a 'rich get richer' scenario, which doesn't help the server at large.

Aradin wrote: Wed Nov 11, 2020 1:21 pm(which I highly doubt for reasons of hoarding)

I dunno... hoarding and (borderline tedious) inventory micromanagement seems to be heavily incentivized by both the crafting system and the way classes are balanced out in general (even mundane classes are regarded under the assumption of constantly operating fully equipped with wands, scrolls and potions - they even introduced an entire custom class that is literally all about crafting, peddling an hoarding!).
A great chunk of all updates could be translated as "farm/hoard more of X".

I admit that automated looting, loot/resource conainers and key rings are tremendously beneficial to alleviate the above, but still...

Hoarding is necessary for characters to operate. Storage space is a scarce resource and I would even go as far as saying that having extra storage space can often equal to an unfair advantage.

Sure, if the DEVs want to double down in this concept, that's all great! After all, items and crafting resources can be a great catalyst for character interaction!
However, if that's the case, why should the idea of more available storage space be so far-fetched?

Sure, extend expanded storage to everyone. I've no problem with that either.

But right now storage space is a commodity and that (unfortunately) is a thing that gets factored in when considering properties.

The crafting system makes it needed too and here's an example...
These chests aren't just being filled with player skulls because we've nothing else to put in them. It's being filled with crafting items for recipes and sub-recipes.

I have played here for some months now and i can say i have no idea how to get a house.

Everywhere i go the houses are already occupied. Shops are occupied.
My brother has a house in Sencliff because he bought it sometime ago and i am using it because he lets me.

And it is really funny how i can only have one chest in that entire house. For my blacksmith alone i have to keep a lot of high weigth ore on his chest. As i cant find a vendor to keep my stuff being sold i cant craft anything.

I have played ultima online where people can have storage anywhere and even build more storage with the crafting system and that gets to a big economy to flourish. Anyone got a house and in that house plently of space to put stuff.

Dont know what is the hard problem on people having unlimited chests to put stuff. Sure it will take some memory to have permanent itens stored in a higher quantity. But memory is not the main issue often on servers, as probably the network is.
Is it a problem on the nwn engine itself that limits the amount of storage?

torugor wrote: Wed Nov 11, 2020 3:47 pm I have played here for some months now and i can say i have no idea how to get a house.

Everywhere i go the houses are already occupied. Shops are occupied.
My brother has a house in Sencliff because he bought it sometime ago and i am using it because he lets me.

And it is really funny how i can only have one chest in that entire house. For my blacksmith alone i have to keep a lot of high weigth ore on his chest. As i cant find a vendor to keep my stuff being sold i cant craft anything.

I have played ultima online where people can have storage anywhere and even build more storage with the crafting system and that gets to a big economy to flourish. Anyone got a house and in that house plently of space to put stuff.

Dont know what is the hard problem on people having unlimited chests to put stuff. Sure it will take some memory to have permanent itens stored in a higher quantity. But memory is not the main issue often on servers, as probably the network is.
Is it a problem on the nwn engine itself that limits the amount of storage?

It seems to be a deliberate decision. If I understand correctly, storage is intentionally kept scarce to encourage people to trade resources amongst each other instead of just hoarding it away so everyone doesn't have a full stack of every single resource. The idea is you'd trade anmal sinew to someone for gp and use that gp to buy coal or something or just trade relevant resources amongst each other.

Is there a mechanical reason that storage for houses is capped to 20 instead of say, 40?

As a player who runs and takes part in a mercantile/craft/tradesman based faction, storage absolutely is critical and runs at a premium due to all the resources required to craft many of the things we try to make and sell. As such, members of the faction use their own, personal dedicated quarters/chests as storage for the faction to help store all of these things.

Imposing further limits on storage or imposing RL time limits would be really harsh and discourage this type of roleplay in my opinion.

Sorry to say it...but it is kind of silly on my opinion.

Players will have to buy stuff from each other no matter how many storage you have in your house. Because a single player cant produce everything they want.

If someone gets too profficient in a single crafting area he will lack on other areas...needing to buy it outside.
Anytime i need to get something new is not because i dont have a place to keep stuff...its because i cant produce on my own or get it from loot.

Actually i think the fact we are constantly looting potions and rings and other stuff from npc monsters make much more damage to the idea of hoarding than having a place to keep stuff. Cause the only reason i dont buy potions all the time is because its so easy to find them on monsters...or on npc shops as well.

Want to stop hoarding is easy. No npc shops (only player shops) and no monster drops of high end crafted stuff.

If you take off npc shops and allow users to storage material so that they can craft...and make sure any player has a shop available for him to put his crafted stuff for sale....you will have a great economy.

I am a player and i would LOVE to have a shop and sell armors. The current system just make it impossible for me. Cause i cant keep the ore i need to craft and even less i dont have a shop to sell the stuff. The current system on my view is for the old players who bought a house and a vendor long ago and will never let go.

CorsicanDoge wrote: Wed Nov 11, 2020 4:24 pm
It seems to be a deliberate decision. If I understand correctly, storage is intentionally kept scarce to encourage people to trade resources amongst each other instead of just hoarding it away so everyone doesn't have a full stack of every single resource. The idea is you'd trade anmal sinew to someone for gp and use that gp to buy coal or something or just trade relevant resources amongst each other.

While I love the crafting system, every time there is an addition, it compounds the problem.

I don't know what the technical concerns/limitations are on expanding a chest from 20 to 50... but at first glance it would seem that if you bumped the monthly fee 10-50x what it is now, and expand chests from 20 to 50, we'd see a lot more sharing of homes. right now, we have factions of 8, owning 8 homes and 8 bank accounts, and people bitching in discord because we don't have enough storage

source: This isn't far from the truth with my faction.


The REAL commodity here is storage. Find a solution to this, and you fix -everything-

Alright, this seems to have derailed a little... the actual problem at hand is people holding on to quarters for too long. It's not the scarcity of storage.

Scarcity of storage is merely an underlying issue that results into people sitting on quarters (that they would have otherwise released) solely because of the storage chests.

Irongron already stated in the suggestion subforum that they would not be removing storage chests from quarters because it would have been too much work. Approaching the problem from the other end would mean making storage that is available to everyone (regardless of whether they own a quarter or not) abundant enough to make quarter chests less relevant - so yes, making storage less scarce might seem like a viable solution to the actual problem, but it's not the real goal here. The real goal would be to incentivize better quarter ownership circulation.

ATM quarters seem to change hands only for one of the following reasons:

• player rolled the character

• character got evicted

• character managed to acquire a better quarter and the "one quarter per player rule" kicks in

• player failed to log in before the quarter expired

^3 out of 4 of these reasons are OOC and the remaining one that is IC is involuntary.
There needs to be at least some incentive for players to release IG quarters eventually so that someone else can use them for a change. Currently doing so only equals shooting oneself in the foot - no wonder that people aren't so keen on doing it.

Again, the problem isn't that players of tinkery characters need more storage.
The REAL problem is when they hold on to an otherwise underutilized quarter for unreasonably long periods of time simply because they WANT to retain the extra storage that the quarter offers.

Actually, the more that I think about this...

Increase citizen storage limit to 30 items
Subtract 20 items worth of citizenship storage limit IF the character owns a quarter (hey, you have a mansion with a big lawn now, need to put that lawnmower somewhere...)

This would even the storage playing field and ensure that players keep quarters only because they need/want to use them for their RP and/or because multiple players are using one quarter and have an actual need for a shared storage space.

Arelith struggles to be a roleplaying-first experience when the crafting systems, storage requirements, and gear progression mirrors that of a typical MMORPG - without any of the luxuries of that genre.

Part of me wonders why we need 10+ materials for 1 item, per Doge's list.

This top-down design incentivizes and prioritizes space (and thus property).

I think Gift of Craftsmenship should be cut, recipes streamlined, Commoner class abolished, and anything that is meant to lean Arelith towards an MMORPG gotten rid of.

Unless that's what the server is heading towards, which is fine, I guess, but it's not Arelith anymore.

That doesn't make any sense. You can still RP if you completely ignore those mechanics.

Seven Sons of Sin wrote: Wed Nov 11, 2020 8:09 pm... anything that is meant to lean Arelith towards an MMORPG gotten rid of.

Unless that's what the server is heading towards, which is fine, I guess, but it's not Arelith anymore.

Isn't Arelith already a MMORPG by definition of MMORPG: A massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a video game that combines aspects of a role-playing video game and a massively multiplayer online game.

Or are you saying that Arelith is departing from focus on role-playing and is turning into just a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG)?

There's nothing "massive" about Arelith. Peaking at 250 players isn't massive compared to actual MMORPGs. Arelith is a MORPG and probably only one of the very few where "role playing" actually means something.

The crafting system has only seen tweaks (some huge, most small) since I first played in the mid 00s so I don't see how it's an indication we're headed in any direction.

-XXX- wrote: Wed Nov 11, 2020 6:56 pm Alright, this seems to have derailed a little... the actual problem at hand is people holding on to quarters for too long.

I don't see a problem here. Players want to play their characters with a quarter for as long as they want to play them.

The problem is that there are too few quarters. I'm not sure what the reasoning is not to have enough quarters for most if not ever player at any given time. Quarters are still restricted to one per player, so there should be no problem there.

To say that some Arelith characters should not be able to own quarters because not every PnP character gets to own a quarter in a PnP campaign is not a good enough reason. Arelith is not PnP. Almost every Arelith character is played as a borderline immortal demigod compared to PnP characters. Every single Arelith character is already different than any commoner or even well off NPC IG.

I'd just say increase the number of quarters (even if they are just low end quarters with storage) and a lot of these complaints will go away. Sure, not every character will get a chance to own a large guild house, but at least they will have a place where they can store things and have a moment to themselves.