Tremir

I'll agree with that point. However, the current system actively rewards those people with a high loss counter. They're not even trying to recover, because by staying at a high loss counter makes it easier to gain honor. The game urges you to have a balanced win/loss ratio, but the system encourages having far more losses then wins. A player can't possibly stay balanced in this system, because he'll fall to negative honor, which will prevent him from attacking anyone who doesn't give positive honor. And since he's balanced, he won't find anyone giving him positive honor and will have to start gathering losses.

How would it promote more losses? You don't gain honor from fighting people with more losses then wins. You gain honor from fighting people with a larger difference between their wins and losses then your difference. So if you have a huge amount of losses, you'll start losing honor, and if yo have a huge amount of wins you'll start losing honor, but if they're balanced you'll be gaining honor against both the people with lots of losses AND people with lots of wins I'll admit that my idea is flawed, and that people with a lot of losses will have a hard time getting back to balance, since they'll start losing honor, but the current system is completely broken, and SOMETHING needs to be changed

This idea is a possible solution to the whole win/loss system, which is, at least in my opinion, severely broken. At this time I have about 80 more losses then I have wins, and can gain honor from fighting about 1 third of the players I've seen. It's clear that most players seek to get huge amounts of losses in order to be able to gain honor, which hurts people who try to stay balanced. Since the game states that a player should strive for balance, I propose the following change: Add a new stat to the game, called "imbalance". Imbalance is the absolute value of the difference between wins and losses: If I have 100 wins and 50 losses, I have 50 imbalance If I have 100 losses and 50 wins, I have 50 imbalance etc. Players will gain honor when fighting someone with a higher imbalance stat, and lose honor against payers with lower imbalance. Thus, the closer you are to being balanced, the easier it is to gain honor

There might be a place to add more options when making a ritual though. Something like "attack healer" or "attack lifestealer", for example. or even a priority list like "attack dying, attack healer, attack weak" so that your creature will attempt to attack dying enemies. if there aren't any dying enemies it'll try to attack healers, and if no healers are available it'll attack the weakest creature

The problem doesn't exist in mp3, because in mp3 the system generates 1 win and 1 loss for every fight. In mp4 and 5, that's not the case, and from my observations it's easier to get a loss then a win. at about 170 wins to 230 losses, 9 out of 10 people in mp5 give me negative honor.

Still not working for me.

It isn't. I have 5 on the list, and can't get any more.

I'm still limited to 5 on my friend list.

Retreating doesn't mean your opponent didn't get a Victorious. It means that YOU didn't get a Loss, but the other guy may get a Win.

I think that I've seen somewhere that the reason to lock players into story mode was that they weren't actually in the world when in story mode. They're locked inside the wooden box, so it makes no sense for them to be active in the world. It's annoying, but makes a sort of sense.

That makes sense. For them to have max honor, they'd need a lot more losses then wins, which in turn means that they take away more of your honor.

Is it possible that the player didn't get XP because he was at the XP cap, but that the notification is problematic and shows a "no creature survived" instead of the proper message?

I've said it before, in a different thread, and I'll say it again. From what I've seen so far, the problem isn't the honor system, it's the win/loss determination system. To be more precise, it's the fact that the "loss" counter is a lot more likely to rise then the "win" counter in most battles. The problem doesn't begin with people wanting a high loss record. It begins with people getting a high loss record, because losses are much more likely then wins. This leads to other people wanting losses too, which sends the while system into a spin. But the while problem begins with the fact that there are more losses in the while system then there are wins. Again, this are mostly my observations, but the same thing has been noted by other players I've talked too.

Same thing's happened to me.

I think it should be noted at this point that losses are gained a lot faster then wins, normally. Looking at my combat log right now, I see 12 fights that resulted in the loser getting his counter incremented, and only 1 fight in which the winner got a "win" count. I don't know how widespread this is, but if, during normal play, 10 loss counts are being generated per win count, the system can't possibly be balanced, because the whole game world has more losses then wins.

If I could give you mine, I would. See, I'm one of those "logoff abusers" you're talking about, and the truth of it is that I'm not interested in the contest at this time. However, I accumulate heads by playing the way I normally do. What this means to me is that sanctuaries are no longer safe, and if I want to keep my creatures with a decent amount of vitality, I have to log off when I finish my APs. This has nothing to do with protecting the heads. they're a handycap i really don't need right now. So yeah, I'm flat out against logged off players being attackable.

We're talking about mp3 here. There's no difference between win types in mp3. every fight you win counts, just like there's no retreating in mp3 and every loss counts.

would it be possible to add time tags to the in game chat? I'm often logging in and seeing conversations, and there's no way of knowing if those conversations took place 10 minutes or 5 hours ago. something like "Tremir, 3.5 hours ago: blah blah blah" is what I'm thinking about, to get around the time zone differences

You saw it in the development notes, probably

I wasn't worried about not getting the story bonuses, actually. Knowing that the "dying" thing doesn't terminate the account or something is good enough for me. Thanks.

I've seen something in the tips area (top of the game screen, next to the status), that some story choices can get you killed. I'd really like to know what are the consequences of dying, since I'd hate to spend time and effort on a game just to have my account destroyed because of a story choice.