Except that the next eight fire-breathing dragons aren't patiently waiting on the sidelines for you to finish your lesson before they attempt to clean you and your student's bones of their fresh meat.

Then how can you pay attention to targeting, blocking, parrying, slicing, and evading the 8 other fire-breathing dragons while paying attention to a debilitation class? Just get rid of all combat teaching then because none of it makes sense under your scenario.

So if being lore tert means my teaching is less effectov I think it's only fair that weapons terts have their weapons be less effective and so on and so forth.


Excellent point. I should be able to hide, evade, skin etc IN COMBAT better than other guilds. Barbs should be better with weapons, Palies batter defending and such. How about some "Weapon Consistency, "Armor Consistency" and "Survival Consistency" to go along with "Lore Consistency".

I think we're done here.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

And that's why we're done here.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

>> If some guilds are going to be penalized in combat gor being X tert then so should all guilds be penalized something in their tert skill. IE weapon, armor, and survival skills. Why should a Bard be able to hide in combat as good as a Ranger if a Ranger can't teach in combat as well as a Bard?

This already exists.

Magic primes get more spell slots and improved attunement regeneration. Weapon primes can use heavier offhand weapons. Armor primes have improved armor hindrance reduction. Survival primes get shorter hiding roundtimes. Etc.

---

Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

<So, let me suggest again,

Open up the ability for Bards to teach more skills in combat as they progress...

Able to teach a given list of skills from a given skill set dependent upon scholarship, intelligence, charisma, circle.. or anything else your heart desires to curve the learning curve...

Simply yanking it was absolutely uncalled for.

>>> listen warmageman
Warmageman's experience differs too much from your own for him to be an effective instructor!

::squints::

Sorry about that - squished that bug. I hope. Starting to go crosseyed from the code at this point.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

Heya. Lilwea here. I main a Bard. And I won't lie... I feel a little bit picked on and hurt here. It wasn't an ability that I had continually rolling... but the whole teaching anything in any situation was definitely my favorite bard ability. I thought it subtle, social and fitting for a class that traces it ancestry back to basically the first magical teacher, Taliesin, father of Merlin in Arthurian legends.

I am not going anywhere. This isn't the hill I die on. I am just curious.. why this? It seems like you took something that wasn't really all that broken, and created a rift in the community. (I am not the highest circle bard in the game. But Lilwea is up there. And I promise you. My AIM has been a steady blinking light since this change rolled out.)

If something had to be fixed for the good of the game. My suggestion would have been the whole ocean going/ship thing. Fix that. Put a bunch of ship skins/specialized ship furniture and cabins and what not in the SIMUCOIN Shop and watch happy subscribers whine that you are not taking their money fast enough.

I am not trying to troll nor am I beating up anyone here. The last time I saw this level of feedback in a game was when EVE Online rolled out Ambulation. It may be worth doing a little research on how that situation resolved itself. Again. I am not going anywhere. I doubt you lose a single high circle bard on this hill. But I am telling you. Just from my AIM alone. The bard community is very unhappy about what they see as 'our bard thing' being taken away.

Hope we can come together as a game, Coders, GMS and players alike and be just a little bit better to each other. Cause honestly, the draconian tone of the moderators and GMs AND the rudeness of some of my fellow players is making this sad little grey gnome just a little bit sadder.

Lilwea

At the risk of removal, I'd recommend your fellow bards post up their concerns.

This really seems like the sort of change that was considered minor on one side of the fence, but not so much on the other.

I'd say there's no problem with rolling back the teaching changes and allowing some discourse here, if the GMs are interested in hearing it.

I dunno. Just seems like the perception could roll "This is a minor change, you guys are giving us too much crap over it" or "Wow, the players really don't like this, maybe it's not so minor after all"

Is either response right or wrong? Depends on your perspective, I guess.

I'm not really impacted, other than the loss of teaching TM in combat, which I rarely if ever do. Whatever I'll get over it. I do feel bad for the bards though.

---

"Game balance is sobbing over in the corner as it considers the ramifications of AoE Blufmor Garaen. Your spell slots send their condolences." - GM Raesh

I don't personally care about much with these changes. I play mostly a one player game. I do laugh at the way that you so vehemently say we can't teach skinning however. I first learned to skin game by listening and watching. I didn't skin a kill till much later. That makes FAR more sense than teaching armor in combat, but whatever.

I feel too many times GMs make systems and have no idea how the actual process really works. They are quick to use thuer own version of realism or whats magic or mundane. Or some are quick to argue something as magical or realistic for the sake of playability while leaving other things by the wayside. You all need a chart with all skills and abilities listed in columns. Magical, mundane, magically mundane, magical for the sake of playability, and so on. Then realize that you have given players these things and when you take them away or move them to different categories that there needs to be a consensus of all GMs. Because in 5 years the next gm is going to say "well its silly that we ever acgually did X, so we are going to do Y". And then don't get upset when the player base who is used to one thing that was supposed to be gospel, is now being changed. And no this wasn't snark.

Beast Elec Drister

"You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat you with until you understand who's in ruttin' command here."
―Jayne Cobb

MM1 (EXW) -USN 1999-present

>>And then don't get upset when the player base who is used to one thing that was supposed to be gospel, is now being changed.

Believing anything is gospel and unchangable in this game is just setting yourself up for disappointment. The fact that this is game is going through the level of changes it has, and still is, after almost 20 years should make that obvious.

I believe in this crop of GMs to do right by this game. All the changes in the last few years have been for the enjoyment of the players or the betterment of the game. The two don't always line-up, and this change is one of those examples. With the explanations provided by Raesh over the loss of skills that characters shouldn't have been able to learn in the first place, to the flexibility shown by making the teaching changes less restrictive after the initial release, show that this is about making things more consistent, and them not just screwing players because they can.

Anyone who says that the teaching system did not need this update, and that the skills that could be learned by guilds who could not, and never would be able to, use them was ok just wants easy ranks and TDPs. Getting TDPs for the sake of getting TDPs will never be something that is made easier by game changes. I think this has been made clear by every Red Name that posts on these forums.

Also a bard.. but these two summed it up.

However I will be dropping my account after these changes.

I will open a F2P account if I decide to come back and mess around occasionally.

>>Maybe I'm just misunderstanding, but that doesn't entirely make sense to me. You say that this is the primary way the student's scholarship comes into play, but is it also the primary way the teacher's teaching is used? Because I wasn't just giving my student a scholarship boost; I was also giving myself one. What you're describing means that the boost to my student's scholarship was irrelevant, but unless that's the only place the teacher's teaching is used, shouldn't the boost to my own still have made a difference? And if that is the only place the teacher's teaching is used, that means that teaching effectiveness decreases with skill, which seems like particularly perverse design.

I over simplified a bit, and also had an slight error in my explanation.

Essentially it's like this*:

Your skill as a teacher (inclusive of stat bonuses) lets you get teach X bits.
(This is where scholarship/stat bonuses to the teacher increase pulse size)

This is increased by some multipliers Y (same guild/race/etc) so we have X * 1.Y.

This is then adjusted up or down based on the ratio of teacher scholarship / student scholarship (again, inclusive of stat bonuses). This is where the cap is coming in that I described above.
(This is where scholarship/stats bonuses to the student could increase pulse size. In this case they aren't because the ratio is still below the minimum cap.)

Finally, this whole mess is capped based on how much the student knows of the skill being taught. This is what I missed in my earlier explanation.
(Ultimately, this is what's reducing the pulse sizes to the same in your example. I missed it because no one ever added debug messaging to that particular step...)

Again - I don't think this is a particularly good formula or way to go about doing things, but it has the non-trivia perk of having not horribly broken in years and years of use.

-Raesh

*I think. I'm digging through several hundred lines of complex math I didn't write and no one cared to document when they were written 10-20 years ago, depending on which update the code is from)

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose