A few responses:

SIMU-LYNEYA:
>>"... it's industry standard in both software and gaming specifically to announce upcoming changes/projects at a convention or conference and then not say anything more until marketing for those projects starts. Some fans go to the conferences expressly to report about what's announced. It's far from inappropriate, it's industry standard."

just because it may be an industry-standard does not make it a good idea to leave a player to post and then have no response from your company shortly after that.. sure let someone post about it and then come out with a well-worded post to explain the company position on why you feel this is necessary. you had to have known someone would post about it given that you prepared the meeting agenda.. a response should have been drafted and waiting to be posted after the player post if you, for some reason, felt the need to let the player post it first.

LCAMP2:
>>GMs have recently been focused on emphasizing PvE group play and cooperation as the direction DR should be taking. Making stats less easy to come by incentivizes working with others to hunt together or provide each other with buffs.

That's nice for you, i guess because i play in Plat i'm outta luck since the population here doesn't always support this type of behavior, give some thought to other instances when you make this sort of statement.

>>GMs have been even more focused, and for longer, on characters not being able to max out everything such as with spell slots and crafting. This change is very much in alignment with this, and has been floated for years. so it was inevitable in my opinion.

again, simply because it's been an idea that's been around for a long time does not make it a good idea.

DR-ARMIFER:
>>The first is changing.
The second one might change but not necessarily.

SIMU-LYNEYA:
>>It's a big topic and we expect to have a lot of conversation before any final decisions are made.

These two statements from Armifer and Lyneya seem at odds, a final decision was made, one that says that the TDP earning method is changing. Now, what's left, is for the children to argue with the adults on the details. but this is how it generally feels when SIMU makes decisions.

Tying TDP generation to guild and race is about as far from flexible as things can get, the reason i enjoy this game is because of the flexibility it allows me, wear any armor, train any weapon, as many or as few as you want.


Damian, a voice from the distant and long-forgotten past.
AIM:DamianDR

Option 1 seems appealing to me. I never really paid much attention to TDP except when I circled, and even then I forgot to train using them sometimes.

---

Inside each of us, there is the seed of both good and evil. It's a constant struggle as to which one will win. And one cannot exist without the other. Eric Burdon
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/evil

This is a terrible idea. Your guys practically lucked into a system that is insane but keeps people playing. You are seriously going to upend it all?

- Buuwl

Just to echo some of this, it is very disappointed that there wasn't a GM response ready and waiting to go dealing with the proposed TDP change.

<<We're working on compiling some information and past forums discussions to further facilitate that discussion.>>

Why are we waiting until now to do this? Why wasn't that information and a statement ready to go as soon as you knew you were going to be announcing this change at simucon? It's this lack of preparedness that makes me doubt you can pull off a change to such a fundamental aspect of the game. You guys are coming off as disorganized and randomly reactive. I mean come on guys you just had a combat update release, unannounced, at random, that makes it so you have to do a damaging hit to generate exp. That was a project approved years ago that gets released at random like that? It's not a great look coupled with starting this conversation with unprepared staff.

And that's assuming it's a good or even necessary change. It's not.

~Nexty

The GMs are getting blamed for doing the same they do every year, which is also an industry standard. Everyone has complaints, but i'd rather focus on the positive aspects of this conversation.

While sure, i have plenty of complaints about the current system, I am just looking forward to more skills being useful as time goes on. I'm personally interested in the idea that you get TDPs/stat points based on circling.

It would be simple to just take the max amount of TDPs that can be earned, and split them up among circles 1-150 in an increasing amount. Then from 151-200 they exponentially increase, until you hit circle 200 and max your TDPs. you don't lose TDPs, and might be in the negatives for X number of circles. however, circling would become more important. If anything, if you are circle 200 and all of your skills are not maxed out, you will gain TDPs, and if they are already maxed, you don't lose anything.

Now for stats, if the number you could train changes, i would still hope there's some wiggle room and not strict stats like you see in newer RPGs that focus on level and not stats. The other thing i would hope, is that stats a little more meaningful. I like being able to increase my stats to do more damage, swing faster, and carry a crazy amount of stuff. All of that stuff is noticeable, but some that aren't would be Saving Throws or resistance to spells/skills.

In the case circling becomes more important, it would be nice if the almanacs had a higher chance to learn from skills you are using to circle, but only to reinforce it's cost versus the changes. it would devalue if it still treated every skill equally, so just a boost to the chances it increases circling skills would be nice.

>>When the time comes, Stats will be refunded. To recognize everyone’s efforts in the previous system, there will be new rewards created to spend previously earned TDPs on. Other affected systems such as stat contests, creature stat distributions, and other things are being considered. This is a massive evolution to DR, so Simu wants to get it right.

Ahh yes completely forgot about this statement too. If you want to get it right, don't do it!

Question: Stats refunded, as in refunded to show the effort I put into them in the previous system? Or refunded at the current system of 0 amount given for 0 circles?

Another Commoner primary here. This game shines as a skill-based game, not level-based. Option 1 is not desirable, because it turns this game into a level-based game and it nerfs Commoners. I would hate to see Rixie's stats wiped with no way to bring them back up. At least consider an option that keeps Commoners stable.

-Rixie

Never considered the Commoner aspect. Good thoughts.

So the monster has been created because of the SvS PVP aspect of the game. Maybe that should be reconsidered. "Let's solve a problem of our own creation." Woo hoo! The only people that suffer in PVE are those that train stats unwisely, wear no armor, can't type fast enough, refuse to use scripts (not knocking those as it's admirable), ...

Rhadyn da Dwarb - Blood for fire!

Barbarian Guild Suggestions
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h4L5hAxR1-VLDegDNZBIhGdo5bMgnCtm84Icm2E0utU/edit#gid=0

I don't care to read this whole thread and everyone's opinion. Someone just tell me how many TDPs I'm losing so I can decide to cancel all my accounts now or not.

Age: 60 Circle: 200
You were born on the 9th day of the 10th month of Nissa the Maiden in the year of the Crystal Snow Hare, 370 years after the victory of Lanival the Redeemer.

Your birthday is more than 3 months away.

Strength : 104 Reflex : 112 +26
Agility : 130 +30 Charisma : 100
Discipline : 130 +31 Wisdom : 100
Intelligence : 100 Stamina : 102 +20

Concentration : 371 Max : 621

This is TF btw, which shouldn't follow the same stupid rules, we don't care about your RP.

<<Someone just tell me how many TDPs I'm losing so I can decide to cancel all my accounts now or not.

tl'dr version: We don't know. I think it is too soon to make any type of decision like that.

Long version: The only thing we know for sure is that TDPs and stat allocation is changing somehow, and they asked us to tell them what we thought about two possibilities for replacement systems that were presented in the most general way possible. This, I think, is a large part of the reason people are in such an uproar. There's so many unknowns that it is easy for people to imagine worst case scenarios and freak out. I'm of the camp that doesn't really care and am willing to wait and see what happens. I think it is way too early to be jumping ship over something we know so little about. I definitely don't like option 1 that was presented which scraps TDPs entirely in favor of automatic increases tied to race and guild with the ability to allocate roughly only 20% of our stat increases. There's a reason I don't play GS and it is mostly because of their leveling system which functions in a lot of ways like that option.

From Discord:

LyneyaToday at 11:41 AM
From the chat channel with my SGMs:
The more I listen to players talk, the more I feel we are way off the mark with the TDP plans.
I understand the reasons this has been in the overall plan, and if Evan were still here it would have been done years ago ... but he’s not here anymore and maybe we’ve gone in different directions than he would have since then. Maybe that plan doesn’t fit with what we do now anymore.
I need to think more about it.

I am paying attention, guys. I'll still share the reasons we have (will make the time to post that tomorrow), and read through them again myself with that lens.



Necromancer. Scholar. Gentleman.

With all due respect Saragos, you've not read the responses right here, in the forums, if you think Lyneya only took into account the responses from that discord server. Seems like the majority of the responses here are the same. ANd I'm one of them. I dont think the changes should happen and its nothing to do with scripting or whatever. These changes add nothing to the game and actually just by being proposed have lost several players. Thats a fact.

There is a lot of overlap between posters ITT and people in the Discord. Which there should be because this is the place to give feedback.

Mazrian

I personally wish that stats would have stopped at 100 and tdps were used for different things.

<<And yet I see people flying off the handle, threatening to quit over... what? I don't know. A resistance to change? Ulterior motives? The one thing we know for sure that it can't be is the merits of the proposal because there basically isn't one.>>

I mean the reasons to be against it are really, when you boil it down, the same as last time this came up. Or the time before that.

TDPs are a fundamental aspect of how people have built their characters. It has very little to do with power or some fear of change.

Ok, changing TDPs would be like the GMs decided to retcon Necromancers to have always been a-ok with the Gods. Not oh they did a thing so now we can be friends, but they always have been friends. All that character building that you've done for years, the interactions with NPCs and other PCs, poof totally invalidated. That's what many players feel when the GMs want to make changes like this. That's why they don't want it to happen. And no amount of oh it'll be better, oh it'll save the game, oh it'll bring in new players will change that. Some people place a very high value and connection on RP experiences they've had with their characters. Some people have that value and connection on how they've grown their character mechanically. Almost everyone falls into a spectrum along those two points.

So you tell me. Would you be ok with your characters RP growth and experiences being totally wiped out for some nebulous promise that it will make the game better?

<<First, we need to build the game that we want to exist,>>

For most people the game that exists is the one they want to play. I don't play any game in the hope it becomes some other game. Who does that?

<<that we think will be attractive to the customers we want to be in the game. Catering to current customers is also important, but if that's all we ever do, we'll end up with just the dwindling population we already have.>>

If DR is banking on there being a resurgence in the MUD gaming space...I just...I don't know what to say. This isn't a restaurant that needs to change its menu so people start showing up again. It's more like trying to sell a rotary phone in 2019. I mean really? People don't play DR because of the TDP system? And change TDPs to any other system, our magic system, our stealing system, our x system.

It has nothing to do with catering to current customers. There is, even in DR, a point where you are alienating and pushing out old customers in hope you'll get new ones. And not just enough to replace what you lose, but to end up with an even larger playerbase. That sounds like business suicide 101 to me.

<<Trying to tell new people that this is the way to "win" is a prospect I don't relish, as I suspect it mostly would drive people away. Even if we can gloss over the "train all" paradigm at first and get noobs going with just a couple of weapons and armor, they will eventually discover the truth and then -- even worse -- they have to backtrain to catch up. It's not fun, and it sends the more casual players away.>>

When I've tried to get people I know interested in DR or new players in general that I've helped I have never told them they need to "train all". I've told them there is an advantage to doing so, but that it's really not a big deal. I don't feel like I'm glossing it over either. I don't train everything and I do just fine.

Is the TDP system a reason some new players have not stayed. Sure. Others have not stayed because the game doesn't have a built in map. When I try out other MUDs if they don't have a built in map I rarely last an hour in it. Some leave because it's too command heavy, some leave because casting magic is too weird and not like the last game. Some leave because they find the gaming boring. Some leave because someone said something mean to them not realizing they where new.

We can pretend any of those reasons are The Problem and changing those things will suddenly open the floodgates for all the players who are turned off by x y or z.

Or we can acknowledge that people play DR because they like DR. They like the game that exists today. We all want more. We all want more mobs to kill, weapons to swing, ball gowns to wear, places to explore, RP opportunities and so on. But we want all that added to DragonRealms. We want to play DragonRealms not some other game wearing it's skin.

~Nexty

<<Ok, changing TDPs would be like the GMs decided to retcon Necromancers to have always been a-ok with the Gods.

This is a silly comparison. A better example is that changing TDPs would be like the GMs deciding to overhaul all of the skills by getting rid of a bunch, combining some and creating brand new ones. We've lived through that well enough, complete with all the worry and angst before it happened.

<<For most people the game that exists is the one they want to play. I don't play any game in the hope it becomes some other game. Who does that?

Head over to the suggestions forum of any game and you will see many examples. And in a way, DR's entire GM staffing model is based off of the premise of players joining staff to help build the game they want to play. If DR had never changed it would be a very different game than it is right now.

<<Would you be ok with your characters RP growth and experiences being totally wiped out

This is where the disconnect I'm seeing is. We know nothing about what is actually going to happen (or even if at this point, based on the quote from Lyneya above) so the whole idea that someone's growth is being totally wiped out is hyberbolic right now. TDP generation was mentioned to be changing with two possible options presented with no mention of how much stats would cost to train or when/if they would be capped, and various systems would be looked at to make sure that whatever stats ended up at would still make sense. If someone wants to doom and gloom that, fine, but it's hyperbole.

<<Basically, the fewer skills you're training at once, you gain a bonus to your pulse rate or pulse size or what have you. Maybe even add some other sort of bonus or perk that builds up over time as you train fewer skills. The goal is simply to make it so that training more narrowly seems like a valid option, instead of handicapping oneself.

I want to say a mechanic like this exists already but I can't quite remember if it was a planned thing or actually implemented. Something like if you have less than 10 skills actively moving then your pulse sizes are slightly larger. It's not large enough of a bonus in the current TDP model anyway, since the TDP generation from keeping as many skills as possible moving at the same time trumps slightly better exp in a handful of skills.

Regarding "adding additional incentive to train narrowly". Thats actually in place right now. Rested exp is its name. You only use up your rested exp timer if you pulse set collections of skills. Training narrow is now the optimal way to train, if you have the hours to spare. If you can be online for 8 hours a day, you want to pulse only 5 of the 10 boxes of skills, then your 4 hours rested exp pot lasts for 8 hours. You gain 3x experience in those chosen skills for 8 hours a day, rather than spreading the load for 4 hours a day.

I also don't think we should be so negative towards "train everything". At the rate people are now flying up the levels with rested exp, we'll all end up training everything eventually.

<< If you can be online for 8 hours a day, you want to pulse only 5 of the 10 boxes of skills, then your 4 hours rested exp pot lasts for 8 hours. You gain 3x experience in those chosen skills for 8 hours a day, rather than spreading the load for 4 hours a day.

This is a case of sounding great on paper, but not being that great in practice. There isn't a way to split the groups in a way that lets you ignore half of them without hindering your characters effectiveness significantly. E.g. of the 4 groupings with weaponskills, the first one has parry, the third one has melee mastery and the fourth one has missile mastery which will all train by default, and you would have to forgo using any blunts or aimed missile weapons. The same can be said of other exp groups too. This means that eventually you're going to want to train some skills in whatever groupings you didn't select so you'll end up just trading the longer exp bonus on half the skills now for no exp bonus on those skills later on. At best this would mean you could use this to focus train certain skills if you really want to push for a circling requirement or have some other goal in mind, but you wouldn't get ahead of the curve overall by doing this.

So, I am a new player to this. And while you seemed to generalize that 'TDPs are not what brought most of us to this game' they are what brought Me to this game. To me, TDP's represent a break from the normal shackling of power to some 'level' system. By removing TPD's, and placing your stat gain in the hands of your Circle and your Race, you are directly changing the nature of the game. You are saying to the players that their rank in a guild, determined almost arbitrarily by the guild master, is more important than any hard work they put in outside of training the specific skills to jump through the hoops that said master lays out.

That is what removing TPD's is to me. It is altering the very nature of the game, the very nature that drew me in. Not drew me back after 20 years, but drew me in, as a completely new player, in 2019. I Like TPD's. They are an elegant means of allowing players to have control over their statistic growth. This control allows them to choose in what way their character is strong at what time. And I don't mean 'at circle 20' or 30, or 100, or whatever. I mean at actual time. At 'I have spent 3 months playing this game, this character has aged 3 years'.

Circle is your rank in the guild. As the game currently exists, it is a rough, at best, estimate of your skills, because it is a representation of your character's minimum skill levels in circle relevant skills. This is a good thing, because it fits with the concept of a realistic in character setting in which knowing exactly how skilled someone is is something that is difficult to measure in certain terms. It adds to setting in a way that helps with immersion. It allows assumptions that some people make on arbitrary measurements to be wrong. Which is something that happens in real life often.

This disconnection of power and circle is bad because it can make it more difficult for GM's to fine tune encounters to be challenging without being too much. As long as they look at circle and assume that players are going to circle every time at every opportunity always, then they continue to look at circle as if it's supposed to be a meaningful measurement for them to use in balancing encounters.

Therein lies the problem: These assumptions and balancing efforts are balancing for the minimum end of the spectrum of skill and ability. Instead of using the fact that they have computers at their disposal, that can log information from player's characters with impunity, they base balancing assumptions around minimum requirements to gain rank in guild, or, perhaps guesstimations? Would it not make more sense for them to just log character stat growth over time and chart out where characters actually tend to wind up at particular circles, if they intend to continue using circles as their balancing point?

But there's a second problem as well: I intend to stop circling my character well below 150. Not because I intend to stop playing, but because I don't want to roleplay as some grand high cleric of the church. I want to roleplay as a middling functionary of the faith. Capable of the fine art of raising the dead, and potentially even quite competent, but not chasing the materialistic recognition of the guild by seeking higher circles until he feels ready for them. Ready for the added implied responsibilities and burdens. This, of course, would throw off assumptions of character power based on circle. Which is a good thing.

Why is this a good thing? Because it helps an organic story structure with emergent roleplaying to develop. That's the point of Dragon Realms, isn't it? Roleplaying? Because it feels like a lot of the arguments in this thread have come back around to 'I don't want to be gimped in pvp for not broadly training'.
It's also a good thing because it helps Dragon Realms to differentiate itself from the guts of other RPG's. WoW, at it's heart, is a game that has terribly few choices for a player to make, and from what I've heard, they've been cutting down on how many abilities characters have, which...again, remove how many choices players have to make. For me, it's the main reason I don't play that game. Every cleric, every mage, every fighter, every etc in that game is the same cookie cutter build that's been stamped out. Their numbers are intrinsically linked to their level in such a way that you, the player, make almost no choices when you level up. You can't be stronger than average on your own, the only way to differentiate characters is with Gear. And when you center the game around Gear being the sole determining factor of power, you incentivize a toxic environment to grow.

What does this have to do with Dragon Realms? I don't want to see Dragon Realms being slowly transformed into a crappy WoW knock off, and it feels like removing tpds and linking character power directly to circling in the way one of the proposals laid out is the first step on that path. I don't know about the rest of you, but I've already seen a plethora of much better funded games knock off wow and then burn out and fail. There's even the example of Star Wars Galaxies abandoning what made it unique to try and shift to being more like WoW, and that only wound up gutting the game of most of it's playerbase and causing it to be knocked onto the equivalent of life support until it was shut down to make way for TOR, the game that wholeheartedly knocked off WoW's mechanics from the start. The game might have persisted for years after NGE, but it never had the same vibrant player economy and social structure. Those very things which made it great.

How then, is Dragon Realms supposed to balance end game content for players? It might help to recognize that players are allowed to over train themselves for end game content. It's okay. If they've spent so long making their characters extra fried butter with a side of bacon and cheese so they can heart attack combo the very hungry lich to death, that's okay. If they've spent a minimum amount of time to circle their way up to 'endgame' and want to take on the content as a lean side of beef and feel challenged in doing so, that's okay too. In essence: tweak the content for the minimum circlers and then let the players find their own fun. It's certainly the easiest solution (and doesn't require any statistical analysis of player's characters, but you could still pull that off if you were curious. Just log player stats, the date, and time each time they log in, it's not like you don't already do part of that to effect rested xp).