Burns

happy birthday =)

i think that's what people call dyslexia we had a kid with that disorder in class back then in pre-school when we just started learning letters and basic words, he never got any letters straight, and much less could read any words formed by 3 or more letters... he got better in time, but they say when such disorders are not treated right away (age 5+), those who suffer from it never learn to read longer texts, and when they try, their brains 'switch off' to save themselves from the stress of failure

That doesn't make sense to me... being balanced implies strenght, i guess, as it takes strenght to be balanced, so shouldn't it be the other way round, and people who are balanced and attack unbalanced people lose honor, since they pick on people who are weaker than them? while your system looks at first glance as though it would solve the honor problems of balanced people (which it most probably wouldn't, because you can throw people off-balance towards losses deliberately [at least some of our community can, pretty effectively] and have them unable to get honor, and in the long run unable to train anything at all because of honor issues), it causes a severe problem for people who get unbalanced accidentally, like any new mp5 will, and is totally unrelated to any strenght concepts the honor-thing was supposed to build upon :/ so... might be a nice start for further ideas, but in that setting definitely a 'hell, no!' from me...

indeed, i have been hasty to say 'whenever'... just now i found a victim i could attack for real XD but it would be pretty handy if those changes could be undone, or changed, because it's somewhat annoying if offline people are there, but unattackable :/

whenever trying to attack somebody i get 'link expired, reload please' clearing cache and cookies didn't solve the problem XD i have also seen a few people asking about that in chat, so i guess it's a global issue :/ any hotfixes, or should i get myself another browser (ff 3.5)? or is it something mur did accidentally? ^^

aandd... you think that was news? he's a jerk, delete the mails and live happy ever after, no? i mean, it's not like he'd need something important... and if he did, who cares?

but breaking it down to the single player (who supposedly has no secret lives as another player), it's still a quite repetetive action, make something and sell it... or steal things and avoid getting caught XD the social ranking thing sounds like a great concept, yeah, but how many leaders can a village afford? and how many people will stay in the slums for all the time they play, working for a lord who's in that position because he started earlier, or invests more time? i don't think the low classes will buy that concept, specially if moving upwards is a long and stony way... if the framework is set in a way that will make constant changes necessary, though, it might keep people active and interested for a very long time, like if warfaring nations can conquer half the known world (mind you, half the world, not all the world) and make their own 'race' leaders of others, and the woodcutter could be head of some plantage or something after participating in the war, or lose it all and turn to a slave with realistic chances of revolution, or flee to another country and build a new life... that's where things get interesting... complicated, yeah, but interesting thing is you'd need to make sure that waging war pays, which is pretty tough if you want to keep things realistic, cause seriously, world reaches a point when war doesn't expand, but diminish economic options... if you could shut globalization down for your system it would be a lot less realistic, but might give incentive for your politics to do things that influence the everyday gameplay, like protectionism, slavery, wars and all that stuff... and you need to give the little people ways of secret communication (which can be systematically spied on if a leader knows how to, but only in pieces and what-not) and realistic chances of revolutions to happen, not have them fight well-paid snipers with a tri-fork like most 'historically correct' games do...

however complex and goodlooking that thing is on the large scale, for the single player, it's damn specialized and pretty boring, ain't it? like, would they be any more than an ant-like humanoid in Age of Empires? One that loops through his job until he dies, strictly speaking? XD you can't keep them attached with competitions, either, casue each competition will favor the one who is the most specialized, aka spent the most time doing repetition. I mean, look at some GameForge games, there's some pretty high complexity in them, but once you are 'in the game', it's repeating the same things over and over again until you are top of whatever you want to be top of... So, i think what you need to get in is not more specialization and repetition, but some sort of uniqueness to keep things appealing for people, like unique quests (meaning, things that happen ONCE) every now and then, and which don't consist of buttonmashing or 24/7-playing, but need people to work together to achieve a solution, like Shadowseekers quest during festival of pain. To make them stay between those events, which could be monthly or every second month, you will want to have some sort of combat-thingie so players can fight with each other, which doesn't necessarily mean beating each other up, but maybe challenging someonein their groups along 'who can gain more ressources in a given time', 'who can produce more carrots', 'who can reach antarctica first'-lines, or also in a more global context 'who can earn more coins with whatever ability they have or haven't'... about ressources, jobs, abilities and such, they are covered, but that wouldn't be anywhere near a game that would make people stick around... unless you plan to have it very short scaled along the lines of starcraft, but that would put you under the pressure of competing with starcraft =P

thank god it's not about all offtopic posts, but useless crap posts like DBs... and yours, all too often -.- and please don't try and tell me that anybody could do 'real' posts, with contents, at that rate... Personally, i find it terribly annoying when i open the forums in the morning and looks at new contents, seeing topics with new posts, and knowing that 15 of them will contain nothing but approval-posts, stupid comments, idiocy of high levels, or straight-out spam like 'lol', '', 'oh how funny', 'looks good to me', 'YAY! I'll be there', something which seems to be popular not only with DB, but also Aql lately... Either way, for those peopel who have a life, every single of those damn stupid posts is not just annoying, but wasting our time, which we could invest in writing decent stuff, or playing, ourselves, if it weren't for the spammers and peopel who fail to make decent posts an instead go and repeat themselves ten times with another 2-line-post like Fenrir... I postively lose the interest in posting in any thread that has your name on it because it's absolutely sure that any arguments are going to get lost under the sheer ammount of repetition you are posting -.-

once again, i feel tempted to put my toes on the line XD postive aspects: YAY, people will finally start thinking before posting crap YAY, less stupid spam to read for me =) YAY, people will hopefully try to stay ontopic, sometimes at least... negative aspects: Mod preview? that's like... you know, i think even the romanian mafia and tomato cultists have heard of free speech and such... I think/hope that mods will leave posts with content and stuff, but that's certainly looking a bit like Big Brother... Though i admit, he had it coming for a pretty long time LOL Are there certain warning levels and rules one should know about now? Or are they secret? Or are things being decided out of peoples mood? :/

You leave the cube - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You enter the cube - you stay in MD and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. What do you do for recreation? The usual... I fight, run around... the occassional drachorn killing me... There are tons of movie-quotes out there waiting to be redone =))

Tzaroth... Tzaroth... *rummages in the depths of his memories* Aahh, i remember... you had no crits for a very long time, and then you started beating me up with a token BP-rit XD (yes, i actually associated people with their defences, this is no joke) You did some pretty cool things, too bad you're leaving... but i bet you have some good reasons, you seemed pretty dedicated ot MD back then when Peace died... Hopefully you'll come back some time =)

can there be a 'guide' for roleplaying? I mean, Udgard tried to do one, and several people claim to do lessons on that, but can you teach people to use common sense online? Their mothers could, maybe.. A questing-guide would be great, and i think Grido has covered the issue in his FAQ... if we think of the same thing there, which is not teaching how to solve a quest, but showing how to start one... And the good old fight-guide-issue: We know things because we learned them, and i think it is a good idea to share certain parts of it without spoiling, but the line between basics and pretty advanced stuff is really really thin in MD... Even with nothing more but explaining which abilities do what i pretty often slip major spoilers without realizing at first (good thing the newbies don't get it either way XD), so where does a basic fighting guide stop? At explaining how weaken stacks? At the steallife cap? With freeze auras?

Lately i fiddled a lot with dark arts and myths, and found an enchanted treasure chest... I deposited it at the Middle Step on the GoE, to see you fools being drawn in by its endless powers and suffer from it... The rules shall be disclosed to those who are willing to participate, the chest and my military page, which is on my [url="http://www.magicduel.com/players/*burns*"]profile[/url], too, will point the way. I hope you will have as much fun playing as i had coding! [size="5"][color="#FF0000"] Big Thanks go to Rendril, Cutler and Chewett, without whom that would not be possible.[/color][/size]

saturday evening has come and gone, Esme wins the WP! For those interested in the solution: (yes, i will do similar things in the future *mwahaha*) [spoiler]The carvings are Freemason ciphers, commonly referred to as Pigpen, hint for that were the picture, which should have enabled to find the system if you wanted, and 'Stone', since only runic symbols like those can easily be carved in stone. Upon correctly deciphering pigpen, you get yvj slcz lygoj Next in line is Caesar 3, hints 'Roman Emperor' and 'o-r'. Might have been the hardest part of the quest. Next step in the decryption is vsg pizw ivdlg 'Hebrew belief' points not only to the final word you seek, but also to the next encryption, Atbash. This should have been a lot easier after i gave you the hint aleph-taw, before that it was tough, but manageable (google redirects to the wellknown Baphomet-Sophia, and Wiki associates hebrew cipher directly with atbash). After applying Atbash, you come to eht krad rewot Now read every word back to front, and you reach The Dark Tower ^^ The poem was [url="http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/rbrowning/bl-rbrown-childe.htm"]Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came[/url] by Browning, something Wiki and google know instantly. My link redirects to the full poem, where the number combinations on the piece of paper are applied in a Nelya-like way [stave-line-letter] to get 'Resurrection'. Anybody who comes that far deserves a WP in my opinion, the essay and quality ranking were just tools i had to use in case i got too many people solving it since my WP are limited. [/spoiler] It was a nice test, unfortunately not too many people cared to participate... or maybe they just got lost on the way :/ Either way, i don't consider it too hard, though it definitely was on the edge of evilness

hell yeah! show me all your useless scripts, maybe i can learn from it XD

how about that: instead of erasing all items every now and then, we should start with erasing the things scripted by people who lost the ability recently, and then delte items as the need comes up? like in, someone like Chewie or Rendril get the ability to edit all entries and delete things that are _really_ useless? [you need to keep in mind that a lot of scripts out there would look useless if you don't meet the requirements to read them, empty pages are not always empty]

Happy B-Day, and thanks for all the presents we got from you =)) it's like birthday's in the shire...

you are a genius, thanks a lot =)) i have made a few changes to the script to get just a list of people, not each person as often as they click the item, maybe it's going to be useful for someone else some time, too: [php]@vs = mds_storage("namestore", toau); @va = @storage[@vs]; //@va stores the names and is an array //@va = array(); if (!mds_has_rpcq_keys ('burns-store-test-key')) { array_push(@va,uv('name')); @storage[@vs] = @va; mds_give_rpcq_keys ('burns-store-test-key');} foreach(@va as @vk => @vv) { echo "<br> @vv";//VN: @vk => }[/php] what i can't do anymore with that code is reseting the array like before, with uncommenting the =array() line, and unset refuses to work, too :/ not too much of a problem of course, you can just use another variable to set a new array, or it won't happen to you at all i had to do it that way because it was _very_ annoying to get each name ten times, and my quest will require people to check the list several times... Thanks for your quick help =D ah, obviously Rendril is right there... a lot shorter now XD but i still can't delete the data in the array with your code :/

i got another problem with stores... so far, i tried with Rendril's suggestion, and also did an array with Observer's help, but seemingly we are either too stupid, or foudn the borders of mur's anti-data-farming XD here's what i have: [php]@vs = mds_storage("namestore", toau); @storage[@vs] = uv('name'); @va = @storage[@vs]; echo @va; //Rendril's script @vb = array(uv('id') => uv('name')); Echo @vb[53832];] //Observer's script[/php] What it does: it echos my name, two times... not the name of any other id i enter, though, i guess for safekeeping reasons however, i want it to do something different: i want it to output a list of all people who clicked the object (and chose a certain way, but that's another issue i should be able to cover pretty easily)... is that possible, and if, how to do it? thanks for your help, hints, or whatever else you have for me XD

still a pretty fun screenie... and after all we are in offtopic here, not bug reports, what did you expect? =D i wonder how often that happened to me already... not because images were so ufll of tokens i couldn't see a crit, but because i killed them off before the image was finished loading *mwahaha*

just a few thoughts on Nahblard's post: we all start raising crits with kicking upon people who are already down, and i'm pretty sure that you can win some fights every day with hit and run tactics, that's how mp4 starts. You don't kill the loreguards on mp3 normally, and it's very uncommon and to some extent annoying that too many people stay mp3 forever and show off with lore-crits, because it's out of the ordinary to have them, or to be mp3 longer than 3 weeks at all, and those few show a completely twisted picture of the world to newbies. I'm also pretty sure that at least some of your creatures don't need too many wins and xp to grow further, but a whole lot of age, so technically you could at this point already know that patience and waiting is a key element of this game. The battle logs do run WAY too fast, but if you are attacker, you hav ethe full log in the combat details, and if you are defender or forgot to copy it, you can always let it scroll through, highlight all and copy it to an editor or word, and bang, you have a full log mp3 cap has been even lower before, and we still survived, but of course you are right, it would be easier if more weaklings stumbled through MD... however, most of those weaklings we want hide in GGG or secret training circles with their friends, and we don't actually want the rest of the weaklings XD dst is a troll sometimes, don't always take her words just because she's a mod and old and all that ^^ and i fail to understand the last comment you have in there since i have never seen a game with a clearer concept of daily progress than MD, with 'stats for today', creatures that grow older and level up every now and then, free credits that will give you a power boost on short term and help you get cool, helpful features on long term... and really, on mp3 and the start of mp4, a few bottles of learning and DO make a difference, don't underestimate them!

EDIT to Fenrir: yeah, i complain that i have nothing to do when i'm online, but imagine people were attached to me, and only me, as their personal live-helper... i have nothing to do for about 2 hours a day, and those change every second day with my mood to work for college, and now tell me it would be smart to assign newbies to me, or any other person with ever-changing working-schedules =P ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm pretty sure that nobody cares for my rantings and opinions, but HA, i'm stil forcing them on you =P i can see a wagonload of factors working together to make people leave: [size="4"]pretty boring story mode[/size] At the beginning, people get an intro, a tutorial, another intro, and chapter one, all at once, and if they skip things, they will miss things they need to advance and leave because they get stuck. Now, those are not people i'd worry about, since such impatience is unacceptable anyway, but if someone just pops in during an IT-class at school, or in a break, or in some other pretty limited time-frame, they'd likely leave again because getting started takes too long. [size="4"]annoying dojo-SG-thingy[/size] Once they manage to get out of story and finally are able to attack things, that's exactly what they will do, they attack things. On the one hand, the dojo is pretty handy for that because _something_ is there to be attacked and/or talked to, but lots of the time, people in there are pretty angry when they are attacked and beaten by the newbie VE-boost (if that's still alive, haven't been a newbie for some time now). People should be able to put up with that, but some will realize that a lot of cowards are hiding out there and get angry when real combat approaches, which might not shed the best light on the game for those few who actually expect a PvP-game [btw, same goes for GGG] [size="4"]god-mode[/size] lately it's becoming pretty popular to stay on mp3 forever, which would be one of the major reasons for me to leave instantly. I know, those people are all nice and good and stuff, but any player expecting PvP-action IS very pissed off when about ten of the most active mp3 are _completely_ unbeatable unless you ask very nicely. This is not what i'd do in a PvP-game, and a lot others wouldn't do that, eiter. It's common and accepted that some players are stronger than yourself at the beginning, but under normal circumstances, you can see where they do better than you, learn and get stronger yourself. However, if a few mp3-gods run about with grown up lore-crits, a few maxed grasans, sometimes drachorns, multi-hitter-eles, tokens, and all that backed with the stats of a young mp5, then people will eventually prefer leaving to wondering how to deal 500 damage per strike. [size="4"]tasks[/size] While Willow's Guards are pretty easy, and we do help a lot at berserker's puzzle, the loreguards are pretty offputing for most new players. How the heck should they figure that they can beat them with [spoiler] when they don't even know what a [spoiler] does yet? [spoilers] need a week to grow to [spoiler's attack], and in that week people might decide that they don't want any more of this taunting about finding their weak spots, since even weaken def doesn't really do the trick, and rather keep on playing without entering loreroot until they realize at some point that the lore-crits DO beat them up pretty badly at the start of mp4, sometimes even on mp3. [size="4"]quests[/size] quests... hard to find, hard to solve, often based on history of the realm, almost always easier to solve if you know the friends of the setter, and the good rewards are always gone after a few hours. What more to say? [size="4"]mp5 and GGG[/size] same as god-mode problem, when people enter mp5, if they get that far, they will face people like me on a regular basis. With that i don't intend to say that i was the strongest mp5, which I'm clearly not, but i am out there to hunt and kill almost all the time, and my defs are pretty nasty, too. Since I pretty much disgust what is being done at GGG, I grab any opportunity to get a win on my little angiens, and i'm surely not the only one, seeing that the people i usually meet out there are always the same, and pretty strong, too (Observer, Dayredeemer, Sparrhawk, eigger... the list goes on, but i admit that i don't know who is really beating up newbies all day long, since i only get attacked once in a while anyway). This is due to a personal conflict with the rules of GGG on my side, nobody 'cept for me is to be blamed of my behavior, but i don't intend to sell myself under value and support the mindless GGG-grinders in their strife to get good crits, stats and principles for free, as this is (imo) not what this game is about. Back then it's intentions were good, support the weak to get crits to the next level so they could once compete in the world out there, but nowadays, people don't care to leave the safety of the Gazebo anymore and try what their crits and strategies can do, but rather stay there until they think to be unbeatable (HA!) enough to survive out there, and guess what they notice? the world out there is empty 'cept for a few _very_ destructive people, and they'd have to take tenfolds the effort they already had to break our defs, and eventually, when their grasans reach their 20.000th win, they'll get bored of it... (for the record, i know perfectly well that people think of me and people who think like me to be the reason why the GGG is running, and i don't even feel like arguing against that since it's got some truth in it, but if that game was supposed to be peaceful, there would be no attack button when you are on open fields) [size="4"]lethal weapons[/size] well, i already cut that issue on god-mode and mp5, but now here's some trouble: some of us are nigh-unbeatable, and we know that's true. Angiens, New Archers, new Hollows, come with what you will, there are a few who won't mind any of those kindergarden-toys, but have their well-fueld tokens on their anti-freezers smash you, instantly and almost failproof. THIS, for once, is NOT our choice (well, for some it is^^), but Mur's rule about losses and our urge to show off with the fact that we CAN avoid it, partly for the sake of our trained stats, partly for the sake of 'i can and u can't'. Make no mistakes, boys and girls, we've had our weapons all along, but now we are using them... evil defences are what we use as response for a rule that forbids over-losing, and personally, i'll not get off my evil defences before i'm pretty much balanced, and even then i'll think twice before putting xp-trees again... Solutions? Well, most of those problems are on Mur agenda anyway, like the centralized quest-page, which unfortunately doesn't allow 'normal' people to place quests there yet, a reward-pool, which is still not completely edged out, to give out decent rewards to more than just the 2 or 3 who deserve a WP for a quest, principle draining, skill-damage, new crits... a lot of things are happening every day to solve those problems. What i miss on the plan yet would be ways of forcing people to advance in their mindpower, which might or might not be a good solution, i haven't thought of all the things that means yet, a shorter 'things-to-read-at-once-without-doing-anything-else-in-between'-story, a more spread-out tutorial, like mp2 was in some ways, ways of making people leave GGG, if only once in a while, ways to make setting unbeatable defs all the time a not-paying-option (to hit two issues at once, if the same crits are used "relatively" too often in a defence [might mean, some are always in a def, others never, or something similar] those crits might randomly replaced by another, or vanish for the def or such, not sure how that works, though), and maybe more, or easier, tasks newbies can deal with between beating willows guards and the loreguards to keep them a bit busy, like easy achievements (get full villager's clothing-set, get 20 PL-entries, for heaven's sake, why not even 'get a grasan to level 3', the codes you need for achievements are already there), interactive quests that give them small, but precious rewards (i think/hope that the MDS is on a very good way to that direction)... i hope that post is somewhat structured enough so people actually read it, but you know... experience makes me doubt that -.- thanks for reading if you made it that far, small wonder you all managed the tutorial and the story

there have been several times already when pretty hard work was annihilated with new rules, people will eventually learn to do things in other ways, and will have to put up with the fact that their training was for naught, and seriously, if they can't cope with that, i'm not even sorry to see them packing their bags...

i just received a splendid answer from Esme, so the quest will be closed next saturday evening i thought i'd better tell you who got it, so she can strike bargains if she wants to risk her wishpoint ) [YAR, that's evil me *mwahaha*]