TOA

[Etaew]

I'd like to see what popular opinion would have on this subject.

[Graveen]

definitively yes, the shard's population do not allow to divide players.

btw we could make artefs mobs and MLs calibrated for 4 peoples, through an adapted AI.

[Low]

Voted yes due to my love of all things "Cross Realm" and PvE.

Yes, I'm a serial care-bear.


EDIT: Thought of something but bear with me as I frame the question.

I was in a cross realm group in a Midgard zone (Ramaurik (sp?)) last weekend and the group leader was Hibernian. All of the armor that dropped told me that I had no skill in wearing it even though it was cloth (I was on my Bonedancer). The group leader mentioned that it might be due to the armor being classified as Hibernian.

How would that be prevented in an area such as TOA if it were slotted to be PvE Cross Realm?

[Tolakram]

The unique object generator should be looking at the group and randomly picking a realm to use, so some items should be usable. I'll review that section of code and see if it can be improved.

As for armor, everything but helmets / caps can be cross realm, but head gear is all realm specific. We'll probably need to add some special checks to get cross realm gear working. On live you can also substitute certain skills for others. Sword, Slashing, and Blades will all give a bonus to each of those skills, for example. We aren't close to being able to support that yet. Perhaps we can create an item tansmorgiphying npc that will convert items meant for one realm into another?

There are also weapon model problems with certain races that make the weapon look goofy when held. In short it's a difficult problem.

My other concern s far as armor goes is quick identification in RvR. Mids look like mids, etc. due to the different armor styles. Hib cloth is different from mid cloth which is different from alb cloth. So even though you could wear it, and except for helms it would look correct, we might not want to enable this. Unique armor styles is something new to the unique object generator to make it more like live.

[Etaew]

I'd suggest we change the realm calculation in the ROG if CurrentRegion.IsRvR == false then we set Realm = 0, which allows all realms.

[Low]

Thank you for the info Tolakram!

I thought that I should have been able to wear the items but honestly, there are more important things and they still sold to the hand-dandy Merchant scroll people so I didn't wonder too much about it.

The "Item Converter" NPC sounds like a solid idea and maybe it would be an easier solution to cross-realm group loot? I don't have the knowledge to know if it would be or not but whatever is workable and easiest for the Dev team.

OR.....

Maybe in TOA just remove the loot completely and have the monsters drop:
1. Coin only
2. Tokens | Seals | Gems | Etc.

The "coin only" might not be a very exciting idea but could be a temporary thing until a better solution is put in place.
The "tokens/seals/gems" thing could work like DF and have 1 NPC from each realm located somewhere that the players could turn in those items for realm specific loot. ex: Hibernia Storm Token

Just a couple thoughts.

[Mash]

oooh no please, toa...omg

[Nerull]

Any news about some features of ToA?

[Etaew]

Artifact database is about 20-30% done, the developer who was doing it stopped working on it, I approached Bobster to see if he would like to continue the work. Although encounters would still have to be written properly, we can't give you these kind of nice items easily

[cutcha]

but you should make the artifacts buyable like on live

[Elrondas]

Don't know - the thought of doing ToA again scares me.

[Batlas]

Hrm.. I'm not too sure how I feel about ToA.. In case I love the gear that comes from ToA, MLS are rather nice too. However what is going to suck about ToA is the fact that the RvR pop is going to be sparce at first due to everyone farming Arti's Levi etc and not RVRing

[IStandAloneToo]

but you should make the artifacts buyable like on live

I don't think we're going to do this. We may make just a few of the artifacts available for farming (who knows). Maybe make them PvE only I'm not quite sure. But I'm not happy to let it have the same effect it had on live.

[loen2]

Personally I had never had fun doing any of the ML steps. TOA really hurt DAoC look at US live servers classic servers with out TOA always has the highest population. TOA imo is a bad idea. Never liked it way too much pve to gain one thing. Even on my home sever Nimue I don't bother with any MLs and I still do fine.

[bluraven]

Well, I think it would still be a good idea to create the encounters and items the same as live, and you can make several server rules/properties regarding TOA, if the zone should be available at all, or if the items can be worn/used in rvr, and a server property for the difficulty setting of TOA encounters. Maybe the encounters that were meant for more than a group (large scale/raid sized .10 steps etc) can be configured with a server property with three difficulty settings, raid sized Encounters could be set to: easy (all raid sized encounters can be done with about 1 full group or less), medium (all raid sized encounters can be completed with two full groups or more) or hard (all raid size encounters require three groups or more). Or maybe even allow for setting the difficulty for individual encounters, so if the server admin feels one encounter is too easy they can raise it without affecting other encounters or if one is too hard, he can lower the difficulty without affecting other encounters. This could also be good for allowing the admin to ajust his TOA according to his server population. You could code the encounters to behave differently depending on the difficulty setting. Mobs could have less or more hit points, certain steps in the encounter could be turned off or on making it more difficult or less difficult, etc. And shard admins could decide to put more teleporter dijjin stones to make it even easier if they wanted. Just some thoughts.