Quote:1. hero has been here for almost 3 years? 0 god items. it takes a ridiculously huge amount of time and even more effort to make 1 (proven by the fact that there are still none today aside from the lame sungod hat). does the guild that one day might succeed in making a god item (if it EVER happens) deserve improved brewing rates and the like? i sure hope so.
This is very important, and I think this kind of thought is thought of a lot. I think the reasoning isn't fair. I mean, if we accept for a moment that effort does deserve god items, we have the problem of population. There are so few guilds that pretty if we projected the current way guilds hold castles, it's a simply inevitable matter of time until each guild gets a god item. There's no fierce competition. There's no needing to pump up different castles in each of 4 zones against a large amount of competiting guilds. There's no full 70 person 3 guild alliance per guild likely to ever see a god item between them. There's a ragtag bunch of maybe 20 people per guild, each almost guaranteed a castle, watching the clock tick as god items practically form themselves in the guild's hands.
However, all that is irrelevant: I suggest that no amount of time to get an item makes it fair. This is why even mvp cards are extremely limited and come with weakness along with their strengths. GTB is the most accessible powerful mvp card, and you could farm it for months without getting it. Then you get it, and it's obscenely good but still the equivlant of "+30% physical damage received" in woe. As an example, if there was a system that let you make admin rings (+3000 all stats? I think? or +300? either way.) would any length of time justify it? I would argue that even if it took a decade to make one, this would not be a good idea for the server. The items
Quote:themselves
must be balanced. Time to get them is simply a measure to dilute their numeracy in the population.
Quote:3. the mention of older guilds getting too strong for new players to compete in is always a problem in RO. probably even more so in official servers. i cant imagine how hard it is to start fresh n iRO these days. it would take years just to create a decently geared character without help. the solution has always been to just join a guild. when heRO gains a greater population, there will be more opportunity for newer guilds to rise. this problem isnt only heRO.
This is kind of a side venture, but it's important because I don't think you understood my point. The kind of effort it takes to get 99/70 and good gear is a different sort of difficulty from getting god items, and one that can't be bridged outside woe. 99/70 and good gear you can do just by fighting pvm, which is always stable. Getting god items takes beating established guilds. Given that, as time ticks on, each guild will inevitably get god items (the competition only influences the time it takes), this means eventually each guild can shell out for double megs. How does this new influx of players get megs? By taking castles. But now they have to beat guilds that have an advantage you can only get by winning at woe... this specifically shuts them out.
As a side note, and less important, I take issue with the needing a guild thing. I've went to servers with just 10x rates on exp/items and in 2 months had a 9X sinx with slotted infil, some decent +7 woe gears and I was all on my own. Joining a guild is only necessary if you don't know what you're doing - it helps when there's a vibrant always selling everything that you can earn zeny and make your way of course, which is not as much the case on hero with our very limited selection of vends.
On point 4, I totally agree. The god item quest does release crazy influxes of ice picks! I don't think that makes things any more balanced by removing all the work the quest entails (including the part where you have to GvG in guild dungeons to get to the blacksmith before another guild leader makes an item and you have to re-open the seals to even get a SHOT at making god items again). The difficulty of the god quest cannot be overstated due to the competition involved. While removing the 'several hundred icepicks' aspects is certainly good, I don't know if just dishing out competition-free god items is a balanced conclusion.
5. I think you are hugely understating the value of megs, especially double megs. I remind everyone not to say 'double megs? Don't be ridiculous!', because as I've said, it is a mere ticking of the clock until every guild has double megs - you have to think about the server's long term life, not just what will happen soon. So double megs then. Just to give you an idea, they basically create a character that can oneshot any non-swordsman even if they are specifically geared to survive EDP SB from an optimally geared sinx. They go over the top of the options you reasonably have with 90% of characters and simply oneshot you no matter what - as opposed to 130 str EDP SB which is survivable by properly geared wizards, albeit not easily. Don't forget the impact it has on grimtooth, emp breaking, etc. This is just to take the easy example of sinxs. My hallmark of balance is that there's no option that everyone would take if they could. There is no person that would not use double meg sinx, it eclipses most damage classes and leaves room just for a few niche things like support roles. No one would ever make, for example, a sacrifice paladin to kill people when double meg sinx was an option. This is in stark contrast to right now where you can make either because they have different roles and values, and do well vs different kind of characters. Double megs throw that out the window. I could go on and on, and start on other str classes, but I'd reccomend go to a test server and go SEE what double megs can do.
The sinx wont just die in the same way, because half of killing a sinx is being alive around it. And about mjolnir, bre rates were just one thing, there's a whole host of terrifying builds around it, and try testing a well build whitesmith using one as a weapon - terrifying. Now mix it with double megs and... etc
I'm sorry for the overly long examples, it's just how it goes. If I came off as having a go too, then sorry, just trying to illuminate what megs are like since I've seen them first hand, used them first hand, and don't see how hero can contain them reasonably.
To ex, I will take your post in reverse order:
Quote:Feel Free to say i'm wrong, just correct me and tell me where it is "wrong" and Why.
And vice versa! That's the point. Come to some sort of conclusion over this.
Now on the matter of megs weighing a lot, this is true. It's less of an issue to the classes that will use it, mind, as they will automatically be packing 99 str. Use of efficient weight:hp/sp ratio items largely minimises that. Also note that hero's battles are very short and fast paced. I used to try to carry almost 200 c.whites on my hwiz, then I realised the most I'd get a chance to use before either an emp was broken or I was killed by a large team gank was hardly enough to warrant taking more than 50. There's no toiling through super long battles/seiges, so resupplies are common.
So, onto the other stuff: A large part of your post says that people put a lot of effort into god items. I wouldn't dispute that, it's true. I'm not sure that's a reason to hand them out though, so we can safely ignore that. Even if you put hundreds of hours specifically into god items, is no reason to keep them - the god items themselves must be balanced. If this is hard to understand, imagine that if you got so and so number of god items, you could trade for an admin ring. Everyone would be trying hard to get them, but I think the GMs would be right to rescind the policy - the rings just aren't fair. So there's some line between 'Admin ring' and 'skeleton ring' where we draw the line of 'fair WoE gear', and we need to find out what it is, not just say that it's hard work (since, as we've established, it's a ticking clock until EVERY guild gets god items because there is very little competition on hero. The only difference is how FAST you get them, based on econ. There's no question that behe/DD/LW will just accumulate god items as time goes on, bit by bit, just by virtue of holding *a* castle.)
Quote:In the way of Balance of the God Items, First off it Has it's Extreamly Heavy weight and If you Work For Something with your freinds and allys making effort after effort and manage to hold a Castle with high Eco, i dont really think it will make that big a diffrance that one single person that has a "God Item" because there is a hell of alot more then just one Person Coming at you to Kill You if they Have worked that Hard to EARN that Gear, No One is Invincable and everyone can die, it just depends on how you Deal with that fight.
Again, this works off the assumption that hard work justifies any end. What I'm proposing is that the item themselves are unbalanced. But let's go to the second half of your point - that one person will have the god item, and they will be fighting more than one person. Now, I touched on this in the first post: Are god items 'diluted' enough amongst the population? Like, if one out of two players had god items, that'd be crazy. If 1:10,000 has it, that one person probably wont swing the difference. Between those two numbers somewhere lies the magic balance number where it's fair.
So, this is hard to do as an exact science but we can certainly talk about hero's average population: 170 in woe, with maybe 30 merchants? I'd say I think 120 people is roughly right. What I will say is that at a high population you would be right: There would be too many people for the god item player to break things, they'd just have a good advantage. But what about here? Well:
Machivaeli (sp?) would often break the LW + Behemoth precast by virtue of having GTB and ghost valk armour. One player making a huge difference and tanking through a precast! I often make a game winning difference, and I'm sure most well geared 95+ chars have seen many situations where one player decides the outcome.
So when you say that no one is invincible, you have to stop and consider I didn't SAY anyone was invincible. My claim was that god items my make one character so disproportionately strong as to ruin the game balance - when you say that people will die anyway, you are basically saying that the impact of the god item will be insigificant in the larger picture due to everything else going on.
Okay, I feel I am getting abstract and mathematical without showing anything. Imagine a bar graph where the Y axis is 'guild's overall power' and the on the X axis we have each guild. So let's say each guild has 1 person in it. The one guild with god items will have a HUGE bar compared to the rest, because that one person is so so much better than the rest. Then we have 2 people per guild, and the power is averaged out a little, but not much. We keep adding people, and eventually at say an alliance of 280 people you can hardly see the impact any more (but it's still there!).
What I'm worried about is that if you had this graph with hero servers, that the guild with god items would get an unfairly large boost that would make the server worse off overall.
My evidence comes from the max 20 people per guild on, max battle size being about 40 people in a room. That makes 2.5% of the total players god equipped, which is crazy lots and I predict would swing battles in the same way as players with less powerful than god items but still good gear can sway battles (one person with a GTB, which is worse than a god item, turning the tide of a whole battle, or one instacast wizard making the difference in a precast break, etc etc which I've seen happen a few times each.).
So to those reading, maybe I look full of it and pretentious - Ex and teox made relatively short posts, why do I have to waffle on and on? Well I apologise, but I am trying to convey very difficult value claims about god items and explain what is BEHIND the arguments. Ex said, essentially "God items are hard work and don't make a big enough difference to matter". I'm trying to explain the issue BEHIND that claim, because I doubt he'd be satisfied by "They're not hard work and do make a big enough difference to matter". I ask that people pro god items could please explain the reasons behind their argument, and not just restate the positions I already went over in the first post.
I hope people can see what I'm getting at, I worry I'm bad at explaining these things.
Edit: I would like to clarify very briefly my points in the post:
"God items are an inevitability due to lack of server competition, getting them is nothing more than a waiting game, this is blatantly true. Single players can swing the whole tide of battle with items worse than god items already, or even just by being a very good player. When ONE very good player can swing a large difference in the outcome of a fight, then one very good player with a pair of megs will swing a difference that will be dtrimental to the game's balance."
And my extension would be
"And as god items trickle into the game, slowly, inevitably, due to lack of competition, players will be winning advantages that must be earned by playing WoE ONLY. Then, if one day, 500 people joined and castles were highly contested, these new players would need to fight against an advantage that they can't overcome in a way every other obstacle in the game can be overcome (by pvming). This would feel radically unfair and possibly drive people away, because it's an advantage they can't simply pvm their way to equalisation".