Goblinworks Blog: I Shot a Man in Reno...

[Gintigael Gemweaver]

Here's the new blog.

goblinworks.com/blog/

I love it. Its a benefit to all sides and creates a new level of play that I haven't seen before in MMORPGs. This blog has given me an idea for my second character... an idea that I'm sure will change as we get closer to launch.

[Nymerias]

I am home sick today, so I'm finally getting to catch up on things. I like most of what I'm reading on the new blog. I am sort of bothered by one thing though. One of the benefits of the Assassin flag just seems to encourage griefing.

Attacks by an Assassin have a chance to sever a link to one of the target's respawn bind spots, meaning they may have not have access to their preferred respawn point if killed. Targets killed by an Assassin have a dramatically higher chance of this happening. So assassinating someone may take them out of the action for a while as they work their way back to their original location over a longer distance.

Maybe I'm not understanding it correctly. It sounds like they intended it to just be added punishment for being the target of a bounty. But if someone can afford to endlessly refresh the bounty on some one the Assassins could quickly make the game extremely un-fun. One bad decision to kill the wrong person shouldn't ruin the game for anyone.

[Dario Tashavan]

I think it's a mistake to conflate the Assassin flag with the bounty system. Yes, assassin's can get a rep boost out of killing someone on a bounty, but that's really the only tie between the two systems.

And really, all it does is make you respawn further away so you can't zerg back into a fight.

[clannagh]

I am not a huge fan of alignment creeping up to Lawful Good if you do nothing, it makes no in-world sense at all, but at least they have clarified you can reject that automatic change if your alignment is something else.

[Dario Tashavan]

You'll only drift toward lawful, not good. And I agree, it's kind of silly.

[Lorhayden]

What if your a Barb? Drifting to law is annoying.

[Dario Tashavan]

You can turn the drift off.

[Drake]

Hmm, it seems it is easy to "loose" good and move toward Evil, but virtualy impossible to "gain" good. They only listed "But demons, supernatural evil, and people with the Heinous flag are totally evil and you should kill them." And I assume this means that killing them will result in gaining Good, but they list no other method, and don't say anything about Drift like with Law/Chaos and Reputation.

[Gintigael Gemweaver]

They stated that killing is an evil act, or at least not a good act.

"Killing is by nature a non-good action, but that does not mean it is not sometimes a necessary action or that all killings are equally punished. "

So, I can't imagine that they would give you G/E alignment boosts for killing someone/something. But, other than this weird drift mechanic, there should be a way to gain good alignment.

"Effectively, paladins have to go to confession eventually, or perform some comparable act. "
This statement alludes to the fact that they are planning on having some kind of mechanism for this, including religious atonement.

"But demons, supernatural evil, and people with the Heinous flag are totally evil and you should kill them."
This doesn't mean they plan on giving you alignment boosts for killing these kind of characters/creatures, but that you won't take an alignment hit.

*I use the word 'boost' to mean good and 'hit' to mean evil only because they use + to denote good and - to denote evil, not because I think one is better than another.

[Drake]

If you look under Champion it says "The player earns extra good vs. evil for each character with Heinous killed up to a daily max."

It says EXTRA good, which implies that even if you arn't a Champion you will gain Good for killing a Heinous character.