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The Grind
This is inspired from a lot of opinions I read in this thread, http://forums.lusternia.com/discussion/1679/the-foolishness-of-overbuffing-kits/p11 but I've been thinking about it for a while.
That the grind itself exists in a positive way, is itself necessary (especially for those who do not want to cough up a lot of cash immediately) I do not question. But just how much of a grind is a good thing?
Anecdotally, even when I was unemployed and otherwise had nothing else to do, I still didn't have enough time to grind out a lot of the stuff people who have simply played before me already had. Very many of us aren't children. We have real lives, relationships, and jobs to maintain. How much time is reasonable to expect from people, if not choosing the "pay" route when looking for their win? If it has become too high, I think that honestly has the potential to seriously threaten Lusternia.
To even form my own opinion, I would like to know what the actual numbers are. To those of you who have reached the top tier, especially, but anyone, really: How many hours of grinding will it reasonably take you, under the current conditions, to achieve everything you feel you need to to even enter combat, let alone excel?
It will take somebody who knows a lot more than I do about all the stuff you need. Do you know?
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Comments
Excelling takes way longer as it should, but being generally useful doesn't take much at all.
Everything else helps a lot.
The problem I see is that you can speed up the levelling process a lot but you need the right conditions. Either you have someone with the capacity to tank Icewynd and other top tier areas who can boost you through the latest levels, or you have a competent aethercrew. Then through stacking of xp buffs you can gain absurd numbers because everything is additive. Tonics, lips, various achievement buffs spring to mind. There is a similar problem in the game with buffs like the ability to obtain absurd levels of health or dmp through stacking the right things. I actually have a lot of admiration and respect for those who min/max like this, but I do also look forward to the overhaul eventually addressing this because it can create a divide so big you can't really continue to justify it with "but they invested so much in the game they should be allowed to see some return for it". This is why diminishing returns and even hard caps are generally considered a good idea. We don't have as hardcore a community here as in say WoW, but that isn't a reason to leave things be. Someday someone is going to do it, and if not careful that might have some dire consequences. And nobody would like for the admin to have to scramble and put in emergency patches or anything like that because someone suddenly is pretty much immortal. And I'm not even talking of exploits here.
There is a public bashing system out, which does level the field. One could do reasonably well by combining lips and tonics and hope that nobody else decides to farm UV + a few other areas for backup that day. Still, it takes a credit investment plus you need to clear a day in your schedule for it. This is why I've unsuccessfully suggested we should have lips that don't expire while offline, but this was deemed too OP. Honestly I think for an added cost they could be reasonably implemented, they'd appeal to working people who might have more time than money.
Personally, even for someone who earned a decent income in the past, I find credit costs for most items to be very high. Any microtransactions above 25 euro make me feel uncomfortable. I suppose it is because I feel that for 50 euros I can buy a single player game that will last me a good long while. Then I look at what that in credits can get me and really it's nothing. I don't know who these people are who throw thousands of dollars at the game, but they're not me for sure. And I feel sometimes that this was also perhaps not intended, that artifacts should be really rare, but somehow we do find ourselves in a situation where beginners are casually told to get a ton of stuff or go home. And since I care and worry entirely too much, that leads me to fearing some hapless newbie will be misguided into spending a lot of real life money on the game, and who knows what their real life financial situation is. Sure, each their own, but I actually know players whom I think should be saving their money yet they are happy to spend amounts that make me break out a sweat and hope that disaster does not hit them because they've literally no buffer
I think at the end of the day though we should acknowledge that this is a pay to win game, and so not taking the pay route in some way is setting yourself up for defeat. You either spend money, time, or become good at bardics. And best cough up that IRE Elite subscription, too. Which I will say I do feel is very fairly priced, just like the lesson packs. If we had more low hanging fruit like that, I'd be inclined to throw additional money at that too, and I wish there would be experimented more with that. But then again I know from numbers from pay to win games there is like a very minor percentage of the player base who is actually responsible for a big amount of income (wish I could quote some numbers now). So it may not be 'worth it'. And Lusternia / IRE is not a charity. I think we perhaps should just be grateful that we have things that are cheap, and stuff like tonics and ikons which do improve the situation somewhat from what it once was like.
That said, I too would be interested in some numbers! What I can share is that I've found a Divinus whip, RoA, crit and health rune all to be worthwhile investments for those who enjoy bashing. Skills like bodyguard, maxing resi and so forth also make a difference, and so do buffs and tattoos. It can be a bit fiddly sometimes to get it all sorted and maintained but honestly you do get back what you put into it. Especially if you avoid deaths in the later levels.
As a final thought, learning how to code so you can at the very least write yourself some basic stuff and install existing scripts and even modify them a bit is something I'd recommend for everyone to do who wants to play on a somewhat serious level. I've found that has made a major difference for me. It may not appeal to you, but honestly it is to Lusternia what learning how to operate a computer and maintain it is to life. Lua makes for an excellent first language, and while Mudlet doesn't come with a lot of bells and whistles to help you debug stuff, we do make up for it by having a supportive community. It may seem daunting at first but honestly I'll say I find learning combat is more daunting and difficult :P But I may be biased because I have an IT degree and thus eased into coding quite easily as I already knew all the basic principles and just had to learn how to code for a client and the syntax and functions of Lua and Mudlet. In a society where everything becomes more technical though, I do believe an understanding and basic aptitude in coding will help future-proof you. So it is a worthwhile investment in yourself to make, and there are lots of great beginner resources out there, not just for Lua but for very basic coding principles.
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You have received a new honour! Congratulations! On this day, you have shown your willingness to ensure a bug-free Lusternia for everyone to enjoy. The face of Iosai the Anomaly unfolds before you, and within you grows the knowledge that you have earned the elusive and rare honour of membership in Her Order.
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Of course, you don't need omni-trans to begin combat, or even to bash or influence decently. A large part of the game becomes accessible to all players once they invest a few hours into the game (hit level 70 or so). However, there's also a lot of things that are literally out of your reach unless you get hold of a large amount of credits in the game. There are certain aspects of the game that can be achieved with a reasonable amount of hard work and grind. For example, I spent months figuring out and grinding out enough charisma buffs to be a decent influencer as an Illithoid - it required raising Cthoglogg, for obvious reasons, and that alone took a great deal of effort (including the fact that I couldn't do the whole quest alone), but it was possible and perhaps even fun at times. However, there are other aspects of the game that simply can't be done unless you actually have certain artifacts, which can cost up to hundreds, nearing thousands of credits. Before I got Demigod, I survived Muud because illithoid and psymet made a super tanky combination for bashing. But I still died plenty, and I was always highly neurotic after finishing the outer circle (the inner circle was mechanically impossible for me to bash at that stage). Non illithoid or non psymets would have probably found it impossible, (not difficult, impossible) to bash Muud pre-demi without a RoA. They might even have found it impossible even with a RoA. There might be other race/class combinations that afford the same or better survivability, of course, but illithoid psymets are definitely pretty high on that ranking.
Combat is actually less extreme in that sense - even without artifacts, it's possible to be a successful PKer, especially since 1v1s almost never take place in out-of-arena combat. Theory and teamwork are actually far more important than credits (and grinding-prowess) when it comes to combat - you do need to hit certain "minimum requirements" (getting a system might fall under here?), but they are generally far lower for combat than for other areas of the game. Still, it is pretty clear that the game has content which is not available for everyone.
Now the big question is, is this good or bad? And where is the line we draw the limit at, if we should draw one? I might not be looking down from an Ivory Tower, but I'm probably halfway up there, so it's easy for me to say, "yeah, it's fine. I'm having fun with the grind, and it's good it's not going to run out any time soon, or I'd have nothing else to do in this game," but from the perspective of casual or new players, the grind might seem a little too much to be considered reasonable. A lot of it has to do with perspective - it probably seems more difficult than it actually is, but that perspective is what matters. The game isn't going to be fun to people who always have the idea at the back of their minds that they're never going to get anywhere because the grind is too much.
I hate the grinding part of Lusternia. I consider it the worst part of the game by a fairly gigantic margin. I do not think this will come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. I say this as somebody who has a decent number of bashing convenience artifacts. (Full disclosure: I have never spent money on Lusternia. Everything I have comes from bardics/city credits, although I did swap some credits to someone to have them buy me a lesson pack.) These are the RoA, a divinus whip, and a fire whip which I bought purely because it was better than divinus for Frosticia. I put enough lessons into discipline to get damage shift, of course, and I don't ever bash without a tonic, bought with credits.
As someone who gets tons of bardic and culture credits, I cannot comment on bashing for wealth (a term which I'm going to use to refer to gold, esteem, and credits since you can convert between them) and everything I say should be taken to refer to the experience grind, which I honestly think is the worse of the two because you can lose XP, unlike credits.
It wasn't too terrible up until level 85 or so, since it felt like progress was being made. It was tedious, but it wasn't awful. After that, everything slowed down horribly and that feeling of progress started vanishing. At this point (marginally less than a third of the way through titan) I bash if somebody is holding a big astral group, since that's fast enough to feel like progress, or if I'm sick and too incoherent to do anything that requires brain power.
I do not do combat because I am unwilling to grind to recoup death losses. It looks fun, but not fun enough to be worth the cost in grinding.
Bashing is tedious. It's an unfun mechanic that you have to do as a price to get access to the fun parts. And it can take a lot of it to get to those fun parts! You need to bash to get tough enough to survive a lot of quests, you need to do it for combat. The only things that don't require it are culture and RP. Guess which two parts of the game I do.
If I had not been introduced into culture and RP (mostly via Phoebus, Zvoltz, Isune, and becoming librarian very shortly after starting with Lusternia) I would not have stuck around. I would have concluded that bashing was the main feature of Lusternia, and would have left because just bashing is a terrible game.
You can't do the XP grind by doing the fun parts of Lusternia, either. No XP for culture, negligible amounts of combat and questing. The grind problem would go away for the most part if you could reliably advance by doing the things you actually want to do, instead of having to do a tedious side activity to advance.
Dying means more grinding. This means that even if you grit your teeth and hit demi, you have to keep doing the boring stuff if you want to do any fun part with a meaningful risk of death. Grinding isn't just a progression mechanic, it is a tax on doing fun things. The XP grind would be significantly less terrible if it was purely progression and you didn't have to keep doing it to do other parts of the game. That way, you'd at least have an end goal.
Shortlist of things that I think would improve this:
1. Add meaningful progression from doing the good parts of the game. If a player of normal skill (Someone who dies roughly as often as they get kills, for example. I have no idea about the actual validity of that value, but it probably expresses the idea ) could reasonably expect to have a net gain in XP from combat, that would be a good thing. You have advancement potential from competing. I'd like to see it on culture things too, but that's not as big a deal because culture is fairly divorced from grinding type things in general. Similarly, add decent XP on for completing quests. Karlach had a good system in the ideas somewhere. This also helps reduce grinding by allowing progression through good parts of Lusternia.
2. Add a way to negate the death penalty to XP. I'd love to see it go away entirely as a toxic mechanic, but lots of people seem to think it adds a good kind of consequence to things. So if you wanted to go this route you'd want to add in a cheap artifact (1-2 credits, probably) that negates the XP loss from a single death. All of a sudden, you can apply the wealth gains from grinding to negate the XP cost of dying. This keeps the consequences, but lets you shift them over to wealth instead of XP if you'd prefer to lose that. Plus, it gives a way for the people who do culture things (who I strongly suspect tend to be a fairly antigrinding demographic) a way to use their payouts from that to reduce the XP grind without making it a way to advance purely off of culture. Assuming they can either do well in bardics or that their org gives reasonable culture payouts, of course.
3. Make bashing/influencing interesting. This removes the problem of grinding being a cost that you pay to do the fun parts by making it a fun part itself. I have no idea how to do this.
I also very much support more xp for quests. Maybe have a choice if you want an xp or a gold reward if both would be too much. I think xp for quests would in itself already make things more interesting.
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That doesn't retain the limiting factor on suicide tactics in combat for people who have all the powers they want, but I think there's probably more interesting ways to do that than through XP loss anyway. Add a temporary stacking debuff for each death or something along those lines, and that way you have something that might add strategic depth.
As far as I can tell, there is no low or moderate-entry technique for building wealth totally IC. A new player's best bet for getting rich is to land in an org with good credit reward programs, and take part in contests like bardics, artisanals, and tiered hunts.
Grinding to demigod via bashing is horrific without astral hunts or aether hunts.
People keep saying to nerf influencing boosts,
but I say just buff bashing exp.
You buy veneration with 75 million personal essence, after which point your patron can give you a cult at no additional price? If you leave the order you lose the cult but you don't have to buy veneration again?
To advance veneration and pay the essence cost for most powers you use your cult's essence, not your own, which is generated as a percentage of all offerings of cult members?
Veneration has some combat utility but is mostly RP type skills?
Do I have all of that right, more or less?
It's much faster to use personal essence to increase veneration level from what I've heard... that is provided you do bash. Cult essence comes from 10% of the cult members' offerings.
Veneration has a lot of RP type skills, but yes, it does have some combat utility too.
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- An Individual is expected to be tri-trans their class, I consider this a norm and viable concept, as any dedicated player will receive the needed lessons over time to do so.
- The player is then expected to Trans: Discipline for advanced curing, Combat for advanced parrying & stance techniques, Resilience for extra defense and avoidance of poisons, Beastmastery for support-capabilities, their Trade skill for an upgrade such as splendors. Additionally, they expected to at least reach up to Green/Gedulah in their Magic skill.
- A player without the necessary 'enhancement' artifacts specifically tailored to their class, are seen as inferior. A mage/druid without a Demesne rune is seen as 'wasted potential'. A warrior without warrior runes is seen as a blind man flailing. Guardian/Wiccan and Bard dont suffer as much by this.
- A demigod/Ascendant that doesnt have the bixes to the Aetherbubbles, is unable to compete as effectively for Domoths as those that do. Can they use flashpoints? yes, but that requires near trans in Aethercraft, additionally they would have a hard time attempting to transport players supporting back to the location if they dont have a simple bix.
- Scent (or any skill of the same type) is seen as a near must to combat. If you cant feel out who is in the area, you're gonna get screwed.
For combat, you'd still need a respectable amount of credits, just for lessons to reach certain abilities if nothing else. As already mentioned, though, non-artifacted combatants definitely have the ability to compete reasonably with artifacted ones, the edge offered by artifacts in Lusternia generally speaking are not the be-all and end-all of combat. It makes life much easier, and lets the combatant have more room to make mistakes. You'll also find your options limited when you're going toe-to-toe against such an opponent, but you certainly don't need them just to "have a chance" against an artifacted opponent. Much less so when we're talking about group combat, when your contribution as a part of a team is more in properly coordinating the right target to hit. Pre-demi combatants are definitely viable as well, maybe not so much in the arena when you're going head-on against someone with the hefty demigod stat bonuses, but in group combat, definitely.
Naturally, you won't be able to be the tanky guy everyone wants to kill first because you are so threatening, because that requires more grind to achieve, demigod being one of them, certain defensive artifacts being able to contribute to keeping you alive as well. You won't be able to be the go-to guy who brings people back to a fight, running distances using pyramid puzzles and cubixes, getting the jump on the opposing team and thus giving your team an advantage, that sort of thing. To earn those artifacts purely via in-game grind would take a great deal of time and effort, perhaps more than is reasonable, perhaps not. But you don't need to be able to do all those things to make an actual difference in combat.
You have received a new honour! Congratulations! On this day, you have shown your willingness to ensure a bug-free Lusternia for everyone to enjoy. The face of Iosai the Anomaly unfolds before you, and within you grows the knowledge that you have earned the elusive and rare honour of membership in Her Order.
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You have received a new honour! Congratulations! On this day, you have shown your willingness to ensure a bug-free Lusternia for everyone to enjoy. The face of Iosai the Anomaly unfolds before you, and within you grows the knowledge that you have earned the elusive and rare honour of membership in Her Order.
Curio Exchange - A website to help with the trading of curio pieces in Lusternia.
First, there are two ways to get credits from culture things. There's bardics, and there's city rewards. These are independent of each other.
You can get a ton of credits from bardics if you win frequently, and you can get a pretty good win rate if you learn what sorts of things the judges like. There have been 11 bardics in 2014, and I have 5 wins, 2 runners up, and 4 merits. That comes to 1400 credits, plus the credits from advancing bardic ranks. Those are where the real money is, and you'll get those over time even if you only ever win merit. Getting a merit isn't that hard, although runner up and winner are pretty competitive most months.
Then there's city rewards. If you're really grinding culture instead of producing just a bardic entry every month, this is what matters. It varies from city to city by a huge margin. Hallifax's rewards are very significant, whereas Gaudi's and Seren's are pretty negligible. A person who writes at a reasonably fast rate can do pretty well off of Hallifax's rewards and could reasonably grind out some artifacts (or skills, more likely) with them. Doing that in Seren or Gaudiguch would be a lost cause.
Now, for scale. Hallifax gives credits equal to the library weight of every book it publishes, so 1000 words gets you 5 credits. Additionally, the Institute and Aeromancers give bonus credits for culture things. You'd have to ask an aeromancer to explain their system, but I have experience with the Institute's.
If you are in the Institute, the best word:credit ratio is in 1000 word scholarly books. One of those will get an Institute member 11 credits total. I can churn out an adequate one in about an hour if I need to, or more plausibly an hour and a half if I'm not trying specifically for speed. Assuming I went for max speed all the time, that would put a RoA at about 45 hours and a maxed magic damage rune at about 150. Most people won't be writing that fast, so you could easily double those numbers to get their expected time commitment.
Then there's prestige. This is a competition with limited entry slots, so you can't count on getting it very often. Plus, the extra writing time to try and improve your book to make it more competitive will reduce your efficiency on weight credits. Because of that, I'm not entirely sure how optimal it is to try and aim for prestige, but if you get it it's equivalent to about 4.5 hours for me.
So that's still a pretty long time and people in most orgs can't do it, but it's way faster than bashing for those that can.
Even with all that, I still don't consider myself viable at combat or really able to excel, without putting in the time to code/tweak perfect a system. I think I would have to invest in a laptop with a different keyboard setup even. It's really very daunting
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.