Modeling tweaks and system notes
Posted by Apostate on 12/01/18
First I do want to note that often when Tehom and I discuss a system, we knowingly allow for some edge cases that it might be broken because we want to see how realistic of a danger it is, rather than spending an extra month around coding around something that never is a realistic problem. It disappoints me a great deal if I ever see players upset at another player just because they happen to be an edge case. We need those; they are very important to tweak the designs in seeing how often they can realistically happen. So please don't ever give any players grief about them, and I'm generally more interested in hearing from people about areas they think are unrewarding relative to the investment in them, than I am about hearing what they think is disproportionately good. I think it's more helpful for people to say what they think is being overlooked than get worked up about something that might need to be tuned down. As a side note, like yeah haggling is extremely good with high prestige, but only like 3 people in the game use the haggling command often so it would be nice to get more feedback on it.
Now for modeling, I do think the bonus for very large scenes that we introduced recently was a little too high, in that it was outweighing other factors by too large of a margin. With 35 percent decay, someone making a big splash in fame once in a long while doesn't really alarm me that much, but there were a couple side effects that did concern me.
Fame in particular is intended to be a metric of how frequently talked about someone is currently and how much their positive impression is currently lingering. This does, by design, have a very Versailles-in-Arx fifteen minutes of fame effect. That is fine. What I didn't think was working with that is we had a 1% legend gain along with fame, as long as the amount of fame exceeded legend. That wasn't actually that big of a problem for smaller fame increases since it often wasn't going past the benchmark, as we wanted single large gains of fame to be relevant, but as we changed modeling to funnel towards single large impact models around outfits and big events, that was going to become a real headache to balance. So we went ahead and removed automated legend gains, because we want that much more tied to GMing and titles going forward, and have legend be a metric more around specific GM controlled events and not changed in an automated way. I won't be going through and hand removing legend or resetting it back to honorifics since we had already been giving a lot of legend rewards for actions and so on, and it would be a nightmare, but we'll probably be doing more with it in the future.
Now for modeling, I do think the bonus for very large scenes that we introduced recently was a little too high, in that it was outweighing other factors by too large of a margin. With 35 percent decay, someone making a big splash in fame once in a long while doesn't really alarm me that much, but there were a couple side effects that did concern me.
Fame in particular is intended to be a metric of how frequently talked about someone is currently and how much their positive impression is currently lingering. This does, by design, have a very Versailles-in-Arx fifteen minutes of fame effect. That is fine. What I didn't think was working with that is we had a 1% legend gain along with fame, as long as the amount of fame exceeded legend. That wasn't actually that big of a problem for smaller fame increases since it often wasn't going past the benchmark, as we wanted single large gains of fame to be relevant, but as we changed modeling to funnel towards single large impact models around outfits and big events, that was going to become a real headache to balance. So we went ahead and removed automated legend gains, because we want that much more tied to GMing and titles going forward, and have legend be a metric more around specific GM controlled events and not changed in an automated way. I won't be going through and hand removing legend or resetting it back to honorifics since we had already been giving a lot of legend rewards for actions and so on, and it would be a nightmare, but we'll probably be doing more with it in the future.