This post is a goodie complaint about alignment!

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Crumar
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This post is a goodie complaint about alignment!

Postby Crumar » Sun Jun 29, 2003 11:33 pm

Ok whats up with these zones out there that take like 200-300 alignment points everytime you do the zone? If I am at 1k alignment and I do a zone like clouds and seelie in one day I will be almost at neutral what gives? I can understand the reasoning behind a goodie killing a good aligned mob but its kinda of a stupid system if you think about it. The way its set up now is its like saying well... I can murder some really good natured folks but if I go about killing some really evil shady beings perhaps I can make up for killing all those really good people who did not deserve to die. Then I can feel good once again and look good in the eyes of others and the gods above.

Its hard to play a good aligned character and thats why we are so rare. I am not sure if evils have this same problem but I notice more good players complaining about this. Would it be possible to look into reducing some of the alignment points you lose in these zones? It takes me almost a week of endlessly killing evil mobs to get back or near to 1k alignment. I dont want to have to refuse doing a zone based on alignment but I am now because I know that 4 hour trip will cost me days of endlessly killing low level evil mobs. Please dont suggest I should go do evil aligned zones to fix alignment because I like to zone for fun not to go zone just to fix alignment. If you think I dont have a valid point please post it I like critisism. Thank you.

Crumar.

P.S It takes me a long time to check BBS so dont mind me if I dont respond right away.
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Postby Lilithelle » Mon Jun 30, 2003 1:09 am

I tend to agree with Crumar, Seelie and clouds are nice zones but I feel bad inviting rangers/paladins there because I know it'll just hose their alignments. I'd feel sorry for clerics too but they chose to suffer when they decided to play clerics :wink: Losing multiple points of alignment per kill and having to kill multiple evil mobs just to gain one back is only part of the problem. Good aligned people also have to wear worse eq than evil aligned, there's barely any reason at all to play good aligned. Would be nice if there were reasons to pick good aligned over evil, its particularly vexing for people like me that play elves. I don't have the choice to play evil unless I want to be killed in my own hometown. Most of it isn't even gatable/relocatable and there are guards everywhere, so I'd be stuck at my death site. Lets see some good only items for casters that are better than other alignments. Why should people get easy to maintain alignment and better eq?
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Postby Mitharx » Mon Jun 30, 2003 1:46 am

This isn't fixing a problem that exists, but it is a temporary solution: Come with Azerost to SS. All good aligned warriors are welcome to go, just gimme a tell and we'll start a train. I feel the alignment hurt w/mitharx and I usually just end up asking people who area to help me:P So anyway, volunteering my services.
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Postby rylan » Mon Jun 30, 2003 1:30 pm

I agree about the align hit. I've had to turn down going to clouds because I was busy repairing my align from a seelie or clouds run the previous night and didn't want to turn neutral (even though I'd only lose 1 piece of eq, lol).
It is a huge pain and pretty dull to sit around SS suffer through the lag of casting holy word while trying to kill stuff for align. As Crumar said, doing something like clouds or seelie is a good 400 pt align hit, which takes me even with holy word quite a few hours to fix.

Could you look at reducing the align hit from killing good mobs from the current 4 or so down to 2 or even 1? We only get 1 align (if that) from killing evil mobs.

Thanks
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Postby rylan » Mon Jul 07, 2003 12:54 pm

Bump!

Spent over 3 hours in SS last night getting align back to 1000 after losing over 320 points from doing Seelie (and wasn't even there for the whole zone).

Can we pleeeeease have good align mobs only lower align by 1 or 2 points instead of the current 3-4?
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Postby oteb » Mon Jul 07, 2003 1:11 pm

I agree that something should be done about align. Most my chars are of evil align for the sole reason that i dont have spent hours in ant farm/ss. I dont think it is good the game mechanics so punish thoe who picked other align than evil. There is is no zone in game that would do same to evils what clouds do to goodie ppl. Cafter doing whole CC my align rises like 2-3 points and its fixed after first non evil kill. Why do goodies have to suffer so much?
Maybe we should switch concept of changing align via questing?
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Postby belleshel » Mon Jul 07, 2003 2:09 pm

I actually can't do seelies and clouds back to back. The last seelies I did was for over 500, clouds is over 300 usually. Skipping on zones to join rylan in SS is uber fun. Although laughing at him when the level 10 orcs shrug off holy word, _almost_ makes up for it. I can deal with clouds, Seelies is just dumb.
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Postby Yarash » Mon Jul 07, 2003 11:09 pm

For those who are only familiar with certain alignments, I would like to point out that players of Neutral alignment have the same hardships of those with Good alignment. As a Neutral aligned mage, I deal with the problem of turning Good aligned in zones. While clouds turns Good aligned players Neutral, it turns me Good (with the goodie camp having little to no effect on me). As a Neutral aligned player, I also spend hours fixing my alignment.

With that said, it is my own opinion that having to deal with alignment problems is the price we pay for using equipment that is, or should be, better than non-aligned equipment. I know that every aligned item that I have has better stats than the non-aligned equipment it replaced. Alignment has its place.

Currently I would agree with Crumar that alignment changes too fast while zoning. I'm not sure what the answer would be though. While I don't want my alignment changing quickly while zoning, I do want it to change quickly when fixing my alignment; simply slowing the rate of alignment change across the board would not have much impact.

Although, one possible solution would be to have the level of the mob affect how the players alignment is changed when the mob is killed. Since most mobs in zones are of high level, and align fixing mobs are low level, this might work. For example, a level 1 mob might affect the player's alignmen exactly as it does now. A level 50 mob, on the other hand, might only affect the player's alignment at 25% of the current rate of change. (A level 50 mob that reduced a plerson's alignment by 4 would thus only reduce it by 1.) I think this would only require a small change in the code, rather than changing hundreds of mobs.

- Mike

Subliminal message: Evilrace cleric alt
rylan
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Postby rylan » Tue Jul 08, 2003 2:40 am

Well that brings up another discussion about align restricted eq. You mentioned that the align restricted eq you have is better than the non-restricted eq. Thats true for neutrals and evils, but for good align players it isn't. The majority of us stay good for RP reasons, or because some have to, such as rangers. There is honestly no eq incentive for me to stay good align. I know neutrals have to do some align fixing, but from what I've seen of druids doing alignment, it is much easier to drop back to 0 from say 250 than it is to climb back up to 1000 from 450, which is what happens now from doing some of the big good-aligned zones... and I really feel for rangers and warriors trying to recover align after that, since they don't have area spells to help go faster.
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Postby Yarash » Tue Jul 08, 2003 3:13 am

rylan wrote:There is honestly no eq incentive for me to stay good align.


It is my personal opinion that equipment that is aligned should be better than unaligned equipment. If the staff agrees with me, they should look into this if it is a problem.



rylan wrote:I know neutrals have to do some align fixing, but from what I've seen of druids doing alignment, it is much easier to drop back to 0 from say 250 than it is to climb back up to 1000 from 450


Um....as neutral alignment tends to creep upwards, getting to 0 alignment is just getting half way finished. So yes, a Neutral player fixing their align half way is faster than a Good player fixing their align all the way. If I really want to do a thorough job of align fixing, I will get to around -300.

- Mike
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Postby Lazus » Tue Jul 08, 2003 2:06 pm

I'm a good align cleric currently sitting at 352 with little to no desire and/or time to go to SS for 8 hours to get my alignment back to over 900. Now I believe this was over 2 clouds runs with no align in between, but I could be wrong. It could have been a long time coming. What I can tell you is that on June 1, I was at 1000. I know that for a fact. Now, I could take the easy way out and go neutral, but what's the fun in that?

Lazus
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Postby Daz » Thu Jul 24, 2003 6:42 am

alignment ranks high in the top ten of stupidest things that are hard coded to sojourn. why bother with alignment when you are supposed to ROLEPLAY your alignment? my mage had a -1000 alignment and wandered around helping children and saving the damn world

stupid, redundant, pointless
Shevarash OOC: 'Muma on Artificial Intelligence - Muma OOC: 'someday the quotes really will just become AI and then i'll talk to the AI and be like, hey you come from me, but it will get angry at me and revolt and try to kill me or something heheheh. like in the movies''
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Postby Crumar » Tue Aug 19, 2003 9:28 pm

There is good constructive questions and answers on this topic and I am glad that most of you agree that there is a current problem with the alignment system from the player perspective. Perhaps if a immortal could look into this matter for us and maybe discuss this issue with management something could be done. I don't expect things to change overnight, but it is apparent that something needs to be done in the future to get this issue in the forefront when time permits for code changes.

I know that coding is a very difficult undertaking but as you can see in these posts thus far perhaps some changes are needed. I would rather help out newbies and other players with zoning or leveling then take the time to fix alignment on a constant basis. Instead I have to refuse to help out others because I have no choice while I am working on alignment. If a immortal could please respond to this post and at least let us know that perhaps something may be done in the future we would all appreciate it. Thanks for your time.

Crumar.
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Postby Dalar » Wed Aug 20, 2003 1:15 am

Just another timesink gods should can, so people can spend time having fun
It will be fixed in Toril 2.0.
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Postby rylan » Sat Aug 30, 2003 4:50 am

Bumping because a bunch of us just spend a couple hours in Seelie only to have the mud crash as we were 80% through (which happens a LOT with that zone), so all we got out of it was the loss of over 200 align.
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Postby Branthur » Sat Aug 30, 2003 6:07 am

OK, it's not so much that there's a complaint that there IS alignment..not even that we have to fix it after a zone such as this. However, with how much you lose from the zone, and then how little you get from spamming holy word over and over again in SS or UF or whever you go to kill small evil mobs.

Example..few weeks ago went to seelie. Crashed half way through (as rylan said, as it apparently likes to), and we tried again a second time, successfully completing it. During 1.5 trips to seelie, I went from 948 align to 344. That's 604 alignement that I dropped. Total, the zone took approximately 5 hours...that's for both trips. The next 2 days, it took me 4 hours of constant align fixing to repair. That turns a 5 hour zone for every one else into a 9 hour zone for anybody going in there who's good aligned.

I'll disagree with Dalar that it should be canned..I _like_ alignment in the game...to an extent. It's fun watching orcs blow up in SS. Or whatever. But this is a bit silly....b'sides, if the faeries in seelie are SO good..why are they attacking anyone who wants to come and visit? :P

Drop the faeries to 500 align or somethin..
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Postby Stamm » Sat Aug 30, 2003 8:17 am

Sprites, which are the closest I can find in the monstrous manual to faeries (faeries are actually grey elves) are neutral alignment. Which seems to fit...

I'd say that the mobs in Seelie are the wrong alignment.
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Postby Thilindel » Mon Sep 01, 2003 8:01 pm

What I haven't seen is if you are evil align, there are no mobs that rush you towards good. Seelie and the other zones are just not being promptly responded to or regarded as a priority. I feel badly for people I know dumping hours into align fixing after these zones. Not fixing the problem tends to push people away from these zones, outright. Paladins as a best example, just are screwed because unless a group choses to need a zone that is evil, there's no zoning at all for poor paladin. Good aligned warriors/clerics are just the same. It's as annoying as flee failure, search lag/failure, global agg mobs in good hometowns, etc. I pray these are for once put on 'important to do list' instead of being brushed aside. The improvements like new spells from Shar and so forth are great! But please consider current issues as well as creating :)
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alignment spells

Postby irta » Tue Sep 02, 2003 4:42 am

I think a good solution would be for clerics to have 10th circle alignment spells that reset others alignments to theirs (perhaps even with a few minutes of "alignment fx" to reflect time needed to meditate and reflect on their new alignment and penance (knocked down to 1 hp to suffer for their previous misdeeds (or good deeds if they were evils getting too good). And, like ress, they can't use this spell on themselves but need to find another cleric to do it for them. Call it repentance or something like that.

the Irta
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Postby Gyrx » Tue Sep 02, 2003 6:56 am

Quiet an interesting idea Irta :)

However I feel that's merely avoiding the core problem with more unnecessary code, spells, and lag time for clerics. I don't feel the align pain, but i can sympathize guys. If i had to go through that i'd just roll a new char.

I really hope someone fixes this for ya'll.
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Postby Lilithelle » Tue Sep 02, 2003 8:38 am

What are the alignment of the mobs in seelie? If they're set to +1000, maybe they could be set to 350 or 500. Would this lessen the amount of alignment gained? But the alignment lose really is insane, or could alignment loss be lessened for killing good aligned mobs that are agro? It is self defense...
Lil
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Postby Ashiwi » Tue Sep 02, 2003 3:01 pm

Seriously, good clerics need a spell that absolves sins and raises alignment.
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Postby Crumar » Fri Sep 05, 2003 7:35 pm

*bump*

Keep the feedback comming on this topic, I like the ideas so far maybe the immortals will too.

Crumar.
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Postby Osil » Fri Sep 05, 2003 8:42 pm

I think the easiest solution would be the spell Atonement. Make it give you +100 align per casting and of course you would have to consent.

Or you could make this spell a buff that increases how much align points you get back from killing evil stuff. So Holy Wording Split Shield orcs would take much less time. This way you would still have to do that weird cosmic penance but it just isn't super time consuming.

I think ditching alignment, changing a bunch of mobs in two different zones etc. would be too labor intensive for the gods. A new spell like Irta pointed out would be the quickest fix.
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Postby Bilraex » Fri Sep 05, 2003 9:45 pm

I think Atonement would be the easiest way to go, just like getting rejuvs but for alignment.
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Postby Branthur » Mon Sep 08, 2003 7:06 pm

Normally I'd be against the idea of "give us a spell to solve this problem!", especially since clerics just got divine purification (a spell which is SO nice)..but an atonement spell makes sense.

I'd also normally be against having to do another quest spell, especially after having to do resurrect. A quest spell makes sense for this...in a role-play sense, good clerics SHOULD be able to atone other's sins, but they should have to do a quest to gain the right to do that in their god's eyes.

Fact is, it is _very_ easy to go evil...very easy to get to -1000 alignment. Once you're there, what's the danger of accidently going neutral while in a zone? Essentially it's go evil, never worry about alignment again. Neutrals do have a bit of a hard time sometimes maintaining their alignment in zones, but that is countered by the fact that they are immune to Un/Holy Word. A fair trade off.

It's been stated many times...there is _NO_ reason to be good aligned unless you are a Paladin, Ranger, or for RP purposes (or if you're just stubborn like me). Now, this may change to an extent with the eq changes going in soon..but maybe not. It's idle speculation, and the arguement may change afterwards. However alignment changes on equipment would have to be very drastic for there to be any reason to struggle to stay in good alignment.

Now, as I said..personally I think if this spell were to be implemented, it would absolutely have to be a quest spell. Normally in a D&D setting, someone recieving an atonement from a priest would have to first undertake a quest, or be gaesed to undertake a quest after the atonement. Quest would probably fall under the difficulty of, say, Shadow Walk, but that's just IMO. Atonement would be not castable on self, and the target must be good aligned already...eh, maybe not. Maybe castable on all alignments..dunno if there'd really be a balance issue pertaining to helping neutrals gain alignment. *shrug*

The only real arguement that I can see against it is along the same lines of Un/Holy word...good clerics get a new spell (though I agree, can't cast it on themselves), but evil clerics get nothing...in this case, as they shouldn't. What, you're going to cast a spell to have your god agree that someone's evil? Maybe let evil clerics cast a non-self rejuv spell or something. I don't know..and certainly don't want to step on the toes of any necroes or anything...just tossin it out there. Honestly I don't think that there really needs to be an evil cleric spell to balance the gain of a new spell that's good cleric only.

In a game play sense, a spell like this would be good. In an RP sense, it just plain old makes sense.

As far as the good aligned zones such as Seelie go..I still think that, especially the seelies, the alignment is off..I'm sorry but they're just not that good. ;) Love the zone though.

Ah well..enough ranting for now.

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