Heyo!
Because the new play system is fairly large, I wanted to go over some of the more common questions I've been getting from Platinum and Prime.
Question: What is the best way to learn?
Answer: Experience is based primarily on two factors -- how challenging the music is for you, and how long you play the song. For best training, you want to find a song that provides just the right challenge. How do you know what this is? The start-up messaging is the best guide. If you are fumbling, you need to find something easier. If you are sounding very good, you need something harder.
Question: Okay, so I need something easier/harder. How do I know what is harder and what is easier?
Answer: Assuming you are staying on the same instrument, finding the 'sweet spot' for learning isn't hard. The song types are in order for easiest to hardest. Play them -without- any styles/moods. If you are struggling, drop down a notch. If you sound too good, step up one. This will let you pin down which one teaches you best.
Question: What about moods/styles? Are those in order from easiest to hardest too?
Answer: Unfortunately, no. Why? Because a style that makes a dirge easier may make a jig harder. Most of the song / style combos are going to be PAFO, and are mostly for performance and role-playing, but if you have a favorite song type you want to train with, you can probably extend it if you find the right styles for your skill.
Question: What about off-key, halting, confident, and masterful?
Answer: These are the exception to the rule above. Off-key and halting both reduce the difficulty of a song, off-key more than halting. Confident and masterful, on the other hand, always increase the difficulty. You can always count on these four if you want to play around with pushing difficulty up or down and are too lazy to test all the various options.
Question: What are the requirements for being able to make an area into a dance floor?
Answer: You must be a Bard, first of all. The area must be an area designated for Playact use. You will also need a minimum amount of Music Theory skill. How much skill? Not going to say, except to say that it's under 200 ranks.
Question: How does the experience work? I've been playing for 3 pulses, and haven't learned much at all.
Answer: Assuming you are playing something that is reasonably challenging for you, you will gain some experience for each pulse after the start-up message. However, instead of the old timer that cut off experience completely after a certain number of tries, the new system uses ramping experience. Each pulse will teach more than the last, until it hits a cap or the song ends. This means that it is in your better interest to play the song to the end if you are trying to train.
Question: Okay, I understand that, but why do it that way?
Answer: It is in everyone's better interest to keep people from restarting songs as much as possible, since each time someone starts a song, it checks their injuries, their armor, their instrument condition, the weather, and a bazillion other things. The old system had people training music restarting songs every 10 seconds on average, which put a lot of stress on the game. By switching to the new system that only requires restarting a song every 2 minutes, a lot of that stress should be relieved, and by making the experience ramp, it should encourage people to play the song through to the finish rather than try to start-stop after each pulse. The secondary benefit here is that the room now only gets one message per musician every 30 seconds, instead of two (start/stop) every 10-15 seconds on average. This should reduce scroll issues a bit, especially in bard hangouts. Last but not least, this makes people have to put some time into training instruments while allowing me to remove the former experience timer so that folks with higher mentals or skills can continue to train effectively.
Question: I can't get the new dance verbs to work. Whassup?
Answer: To use the DANCE options, you need to have someone successfully playing a dance song in a playact area. The syntax is...
DANCE <NAME> <ACTION>
To initiate dancing with a partner, you need to DANCE <name> DANCE first. Sorry, but due to the way dance floor mechs work, this was necessary, at least for now. Once the invitation is given, you can use normal dance floor verbs as your action. For example...
DANCE <NAME> PUSH or DANCE <NAME> TURN
A full list should be available on the play.net verb list under Dance. If not, I'll see about getting it there. Yes, you can dance with yourself for some neat messaging as well -- ie DANCE DARTENIAN BOP.
Question: How much skill does my cleric need to play a Hymn or Psalm for devotion?
Answer: If you are playing on the easiest instruments, you will probably need somewhere around 100 ranks in that instrument to play well enough. Exactly how much you need depends on certain stats, the condition of the instrument, your own health, and various other minor variables, as well as your choice of styles, if any. The key thing is that you need to be able to play the hymn/psalm at least fairly well, and you can't use Off-key or Halting -- the gods aren't impressed by bad music played in their honor. Psalms are much harder than hymns, and will take a significent investment in music skill to master.
Question: Why didn't my guild get any neat special perks?
Answer: Because there are bards (and a few non-bards) in all three instances that were at the learning caps for instrumental skills (learning pretty much dropped off around 350 ranks previously), and bards at least have minimum music reqs. While I wanted to make this as cool as possible, I had to draw a line and just get it done so people could start learning again. With that said, I very much want to include several more music-based feats like gaining devotion or making dance floors. I've got a couple more approved and on the drawing board, and have been negotiating with two guilds for some more fancy guild-based feats. If you have ideas of neat things your guild might do with music, feel free to post 'em! The goal is to give some small perks for investing some time in training music skills. Nothing particularly fancy, but cool things your non-musical friends won't be able to do.
I'm sure I'll have more Q&A in the next day or two, but this is a start. Thanks for the feedback and testing, folks!
- GM Dartenian
"You ain't seen nothin' yet!" - Al Jolson
LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/dartenian/
DR-DARTENIAN
DR-DARTENIAN
Re: PLAY 2.0 FAQ
06/26/2006 06:45 AM CDT
Heyo! Some more FAQ coming right up!
Question: Can any style make a song more difficult than Confident & Masterful, or easier than Off-key & Halting?
Answer: Masterful is as hard as it gets for styles. Off-Key is as easy as it gets for styles. Some other mood/styles may be as hard or easy, but they are the extremes.
Question: Okay, that answers that, but how exactly do styles/moods modify difficulty? I'm getting odd results sometimes.
Answer: Let's examine play difficulty completely. Instrument difficulty provides the base. If an instrument requires 100 ranks to play well, then you'll need to have 100 ranks to play a bonus-neutral song/style on it and be challenged. So far so good?
Song difficulty is simply added to instrument difficulty, so if a song has a difficulty rating of 100, then you'd need ~200 ranks on the previously mentioned instrument. Still with me?
Styles/Moods, on the other hand, are a percent modification, which may be why people see some unexpected results. In fact, I'll be specific. Off-key reduces the difficulty by 40%, Halting by 20%. Confident raises difficulty by 20%, and Masterful raises difficulty by 40%. The rest will raise/lower the difficulty by -40% to +40% varying from song to song, depending on the style.
What this means is that in our original example, we have a 100 rank instrument playing a 100 rank song, for 200 ranks total difficulty. If we play that Off-key, it is reduced to 120 ranks. If we try for Masterful, we raise it to 280 ranks.
Make sense?
Question: Is it possible to play along with others?
Answer: Not yet. The hooks and a lot of the mechanics are already in place, but since group mechanics is handled by SING, and SING itself needs an overhaul, we won't be seeing this feature until singing is tackled.
Question: What about playing Song Scrolls?
Answer: Same as playing with others. The hooks and a bulk of the mechanics are in place already, but the song scroll system itself needs to be updated to support it. In short, not yet, but it's coming.
Question: What impact does the rewrite have on enchantes?
Answer: Right now, very little. When Magic 2.0 was written, Enchantes basically got their own unique handling for PLAY and SING. That means many of the new features of play don't apply to enchantes. This will be changing at some point in the foreseeable future. One of our goals is to try to get more things using the same utilities and commands, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel. Many of the utilities made for the new play were made with the intent of having enchantes plug into them as well once I can get deeper into core magic.
Question: Why /perform and /dance? Why not just PLAY PERFORM <message> or PLAY DANCE WALTZ?
Answer: Those of you who use SING a lot can probably guess why if you think about it. SING has long had some issues with parsing because it will check for song scroll titles, enchante names, and emotes before it assumes the rest is messaging. This leads to some annoying situations where the first word in lyrics will be assumed to be an emote, enchante, or song scroll title. To get around this, we'll be moving to /commands for emotes and qualifiers so that they aren't confused with song or enchante names. In addition, I just wanted to keep things as consistant as possible between the new PLAY and the new SING once we get to that.
- GM Dartenian
"You ain't seen nothin' yet!" - Al Jolson
LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/dartenian/
Question: Can any style make a song more difficult than Confident & Masterful, or easier than Off-key & Halting?
Answer: Masterful is as hard as it gets for styles. Off-Key is as easy as it gets for styles. Some other mood/styles may be as hard or easy, but they are the extremes.
Question: Okay, that answers that, but how exactly do styles/moods modify difficulty? I'm getting odd results sometimes.
Answer: Let's examine play difficulty completely. Instrument difficulty provides the base. If an instrument requires 100 ranks to play well, then you'll need to have 100 ranks to play a bonus-neutral song/style on it and be challenged. So far so good?
Song difficulty is simply added to instrument difficulty, so if a song has a difficulty rating of 100, then you'd need ~200 ranks on the previously mentioned instrument. Still with me?
Styles/Moods, on the other hand, are a percent modification, which may be why people see some unexpected results. In fact, I'll be specific. Off-key reduces the difficulty by 40%, Halting by 20%. Confident raises difficulty by 20%, and Masterful raises difficulty by 40%. The rest will raise/lower the difficulty by -40% to +40% varying from song to song, depending on the style.
What this means is that in our original example, we have a 100 rank instrument playing a 100 rank song, for 200 ranks total difficulty. If we play that Off-key, it is reduced to 120 ranks. If we try for Masterful, we raise it to 280 ranks.
Make sense?
Question: Is it possible to play along with others?
Answer: Not yet. The hooks and a lot of the mechanics are already in place, but since group mechanics is handled by SING, and SING itself needs an overhaul, we won't be seeing this feature until singing is tackled.
Question: What about playing Song Scrolls?
Answer: Same as playing with others. The hooks and a bulk of the mechanics are in place already, but the song scroll system itself needs to be updated to support it. In short, not yet, but it's coming.
Question: What impact does the rewrite have on enchantes?
Answer: Right now, very little. When Magic 2.0 was written, Enchantes basically got their own unique handling for PLAY and SING. That means many of the new features of play don't apply to enchantes. This will be changing at some point in the foreseeable future. One of our goals is to try to get more things using the same utilities and commands, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel. Many of the utilities made for the new play were made with the intent of having enchantes plug into them as well once I can get deeper into core magic.
Question: Why /perform and /dance? Why not just PLAY PERFORM <message> or PLAY DANCE WALTZ?
Answer: Those of you who use SING a lot can probably guess why if you think about it. SING has long had some issues with parsing because it will check for song scroll titles, enchante names, and emotes before it assumes the rest is messaging. This leads to some annoying situations where the first word in lyrics will be assumed to be an emote, enchante, or song scroll title. To get around this, we'll be moving to /commands for emotes and qualifiers so that they aren't confused with song or enchante names. In addition, I just wanted to keep things as consistant as possible between the new PLAY and the new SING once we get to that.
- GM Dartenian
"You ain't seen nothin' yet!" - Al Jolson
LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/dartenian/
