IDEAS FOR RYZOM

As per Daomei's suggestion, and to avoid further hijacking Virg's thread, I'm starting a new thread to discuss player's ideas about marauders and their logical future.

This was Placio's comment:

Well, I think it's probably a bad idea to take the marauder faction out of the game. Mostly because it's generally disastrous to give something to a player base and then take it out afterwards. Much crying will ensue. =P Also because it feels like a huge waste to throw away all the time and effort that was dumped into coding the mara faction and then just toss it. From what I was told it took like 2 years of dev time to code the mara faction, not sure if that's accurate.

However, I do agree with Placio on the view that the mara faction is perhaps "unecessary" or to put it more accurately, that there were better things to do with the dev time than to implement the maras.

The player base is already somewhat scarce, PVP is not a huge thing for most actives, and to be honest neutrals have always been the underdogs in Ryzom and I find that the Ranger faction is much more needed to give neutrals some extra gameplay and RP options than a mara faction. After all PVPers already had the whole kami vs kara conflict to go about =P

Plus as Placio said a faction that is despised by all civilizations and both religions and generally viewed as the bad guys of Atys doesn't make for good socialization in such a small community. And many people who go mara just want to try something new or take advantage of the teleport system, and they don't seem to even care about the lore and background history of the faction or about RP'ing a "bad guy".

I think it's just that maras came to exist in a different context. From what I was told, Aniro had a much larger player base than the other servers, and PVP and RP was much more prevalent there. Player initiated events and politics was also a big thing, so giving the player base a "villain" faction as an RP tool to propel events made more sense in that context maybe?

But I mean… occupations are somewhat unfinished (advanced occupations gone, the promise of new occupations not fulfilled), the Kitin Lair is unfinished, the NPC bosses are unfinished. Neutrals as I said never had much love and the ranger faction is unfinished. I just think those things are a better investment of dev time than a mara faction.

But since mara faction was chosen as a priority and coded first (not sure why), might as well make sure it's a finished product and playable with a few more options of missions and/or occupations (even the evil maras need dappers ^^) and access to Almati.

When the mara were brought in we actually had dev/s!
We had new things back then
Now we do not actually have devs - we have this fairy dust called Forge, which is there to make us shut up about lack of development - but nothing that is on forge is coming in here

BUT
One change that COULD be made - was the removal of quick tp to KL from NH
It just beggars belief ...
The forge is nothing - sorry for all the homins who got sucked in and wasted their time this past few years - - basically because the owner/dev cannot do anything in code for this game - can use one (ONE) cheap server (picture of woodshed somewhere) and remove the odd thing - especially

[Edited. You must act as a polite and civilized individual, and be respectful with WinchGate staff. Foul langage, insulting, defamatory, obscene, xenophobic or anti-semitic talk is prohibited.]

Also - this game will never go on Steam - as it would bring more English speakers to game - and that is not desirable

We are marauders and we are the bad guys in YOUR eyes. I get this. In our eyes you are the bad guys for leaving us behind in the Old Lands during the Kitin War. If you look at it from our view you are the bad guys. Much like parents that abandon their children when something bad happens. The children are all grown up now and everything is supposed to be ok? I doubt many of you would take back your parents if they just threw you away. Of course we want to seek revenge, so in our eyes YOU are the bad guys.
I do not want special treatment and in fact even accept that the Kitin Lair is Ranger's property. I just can not see the logic in me using a karavan priestess to teleport me there. Make the ranger guards attack me when I enter. I just can't come to believe that after all that time, surviving all that time among the kitin, we would not have found this lair ourselves or even aquired a means to find it through our many spies. You don't want us to have OCC, ok, no problem. just don't wish us away....

To go to the KL a marauder simply has to wear a helmet so that they are not recognized :) and in this way you get to fool the stupid temple transporters :D

I don't know if what Bina says is true, but the lack of action does support it for the moment. If the people that choose the direction this game is heading have decided to stop trying to create an entire new civilization just to make 10-20 marauder players happy they should probably just say so :P

But as I see it the marauders as a playable faction is not working, and would require a lot of work that apparently is not coming anytime soon. If my company was selling a broken product that was driving customers away, i would pull that product from the market and either redesign it or completely trash it.

I think it is a shame that so much energy was spent making the marauder camp and TPs, but thats not something we can get back, and alone is not a reason to continue something that isn't an improvement to the game.

hahaha

I don't think removing a faction improves the game. Maras were given the faction. It would be responsible to put at least some development to fix the issues that have the highest benefit/work ratio.

Rikukatis: First, from what I had heard, Aniro did not have a larger player base than Arispotle, in fact, it seems to have been smaller than the anglophone community, though much larger than the german speaking one. The idea to create a playable marauder faction had been in discussion for a long time - before the creation, there had been the opportunity to become marauder by title and self-description for years, by obtaining negative fame everywhere (-25 if I recall correctly).

I still see a lot of interest in the marauder faction. The main reason that it has become a death trap for Ryzom participation is, in my eyes, the very high obstacle to get back to normal after having been a marauder. And I think there should be worked on with some priority.

When marauders are demanding a roleplay compliant teleportation opportunity to Almati, this is legitimate as well. But I fail to see a really high priority. In fact, marauders are living in the new territories as outlaws and insurgents, and have to hide and to pretend where they do not appear in overwhelming numbers - decoy is a normal basic skill of every warrior or soldier in hostile environments.

So where is the point in lying to some priest? Honestly, I as a ranger applicant, not believing in either of the two religions, am also forced to lie at the temple teleporters when they ask me whether I am ready to fight the enemies of their gods. Even worse, as a loyal and fairly patriotic inhabitant of the Burning Desert, I feel much compelled to the principles of my homeland, the four pillars, and truth is one of them, so brazenly lying into the face of a cleric is more a conflict for me than for a marauder. Also as a ranger, I am hold to maintain friendly relations to the cults, and deceiving their priestess or priest is surely clashing with that. I would very much favor to have a hidden ranger path from the surface to our headquarters, and fail to see that it is of much lesser priority than the teleporter of the marauders.

There are other demands and complaints I do not, or at least not fully agree to. For example, creating occupation masters in the camp in HS is a questionable thing, much more as the desire does not stop at the point of having more comfortable access to occupations than in the hostile environment of the nations' capitals.

There is a proverb in the german language saying: if you offer your little finger to the devil, he will grab your whole arm. When asking for occupations, there is the next, bigger wish behind it, the demand to obtain marauder faction points.

I do not agree to that wish. The marauders are no nation, thus they are excluded from nation points. Being in uprising a gainst the nations, this is consequential, there is no social security card for guerillas, nowhere, at least not before their victory and state creation. Granted, there are Kami and Kara faction points (I have some), they are fairly useless until now, and were earned only once during the temple outpost event. They have been widely superseded by PvP points until now.

We should discuss in detail whether or not organizations like marauders, rangers, and future trytonists should have their own faction points. I am not convinced that it is reasonable. As to the access to sap crystals, generic materials, and other stuff, I would rather prefer a more generous granting of PvP points, also for fights at OPs, in Umbra and Nexus, arenas, duels, and against homins of the same alignment, maybe at a lesser reward, but encourageing PvP activities everywhere.

Well beyond the points mentioned above, easier exit, roleplay compliant teleporter, occupation access, and faction points, what else is missing for the marauders?

ooc teleport to almati woods for mara (might take a week of ark coding, less if someone really worked at it, and there was a translator ready for each of the main languages of the game's ui)

pvp points, (personally i say toss the points all together, but i'm one homin) they get those from a few people, the current pvp points system is insanly complex for no reason other then to discourage pvp. change that to give x points for a pvp kill for tagged players, and OP wars, forced pvp zones should not give pvp points in anyway, that would only encourage killing harmless people in these zones.

an more pain free exit: ooc npc that will give a mission every 8 hours that give's +10 fame to each, this mission would require great efforts to complete given it's "high" reward (this mission would only give fame up to 0, any fame over 0 would make this mission unavailable)

marauder faction points: they use pvp points which are rather hard to get, much like the marauders like things (hard)

occupations: something where you have to kill a guard in each region, reward: flowers.

as for the lore, again, thanks to the "river of time" we can crate anything we want, and say it was from before the world as we now know it exists. thanks to "river of time" any new lore doesn't have to be supported by the old lore, WG and the powers that be really made a mistake by using a paradox as a way to explain the merging of histories: thus any lore is valid as a result.

anyway i'm just repeating myself over and over, [Edited. You must act as a polite and civilized individual, and be respectful with WinchGate staff.] , well guess what WG, you made "river of time" official lore, and now you need to see that because of that, someone that has an understanding of a "paradox" can use that to make anything valid, thank you for giving us, the players, the power to make ANYTHING valid in lore by simply referencing a time in the past before the "river of time event", because with a paradox, there are a billion unknowns that can be used and still be 100% valid. (sci-fi geek at his finest when you use something that can't be understood by anyone short of a god, concept only is the best we as humans can understand a true paradox of time and space)

ok i've rambled enough, but the bottom line is that Lore should not be the restricting factor in any new content, we need simply reference a time before "the river of time".

talk

Daomei, Maraauders are not organisation. We have been told that we are a faction.  You say we are not a nation, but we are.  You are playing very fast and loose with these concepts to suit your own argument.  Marauders in the new lands do not have national territory, but to say that they are not a nation in the old lands in simply ludicrous.  Just because mara are apposed to to the established civ nations and do not have the similar social and political structure to any of thhem does not mean they are not a nation.  Your narrow definition of nation is the same argument that colonial powers have used, and still use, to deny soverienty to indigenous peoples.  I am not equating mara with the colonised, but that nation is not a the narrow concept that you put forward. A nation is fundmentally an imagined community.

And honestly what is wrong with us getting faction points, we are a faction.  This is now official!  Many of argued before that were an organsition but this has been overruled.  We are an invading, expeditionary force in the new lands, but mara must exist as a nation in the old lands.  Thus we are reprensatives of that nation here.


What is comes down to is that you seem equate lack of access to game content as meaning hard.  We are only asking, not demanding, for parity of content, but to make completion of these occs harder than those already existing. Again it is not about confortable access, but rp consistancy.

I know this is not the subject of this post but there are a couple things that made my nerves cringe for a while around here. The racist and sexist comments. Could you ladies stop picking on men and french? Or should I start being grossly irrespectful of english, germans and women?

@Binarabi : It is all french illuminati conspiracy, you are definitely right.

Apart from this fact, what was the main subject again ?

"This is so unbalanced that even if the marauder faction received the development (and implementation) that it desperately needs, they would still be mostly isolated and unwelcome..." - Placio

Being isolated and unwelcome is the whole point of the mara faction. That's what we like. That's why we're into it.

"I think the point of any game development would be to make the game more enjoyable and to attract and retain players" - Placio

I believe to attract players you have to be able to grant their wishes - and one of them could be being the bad guys or being isolated and unwelcome. And to be able to grant these different wishes makes the game enjoyable.



You guys want to delete the mara faction ?
Well, go ahead. Loose more and more players. I'll be watching.

Lacuna, while the point you make is interesting, I do not fully agree. One may argue that marauders may be considered a nation. I see, though, rivaling nomadic clans in much of inner conflict as well, temporarily accepting the strongest and most cruel of them as a warlord. Still, there is no ingame infrastructure issueing social security cards from the ancient lands to marauder homins of the new territories, who are largely apostates, dissenters, rebels, and partially even criminals from the existing nations in the new lands, not expeditionary soldiers of a nation in the ancient territories.

I miss the recognition of the marauders as a nation anywhere in the game. One may argue that the presence of Akilia during the meeting in Almati in the wake of the second swarming was kind of a de facto recognition. Even that is arguable, and the path from de facto to de jure (with nation points) may be long if not infinite, it may remain in the state of a frozen conflict forever.

Until now, the marauders fall short of being a recognizable national entity. This is even more true as long as they are openly striving for the destruction of all existing nations and the forceful suppression of any of the existing cults. There is no way to establish marauder envoys, even less than to establish kitin diplomats.

Edit: To add that one: During all discussions of the status of the clans of the marauders as an entity, I never perceived them to be regarded a nation, rather kind of a faction, "tierce faction" or third faction, not fifth nation. So demanding the powers (and limitation of powers) of a faction such as resurrection, teleportation etc., and the privileges of a nation (occupations, nation points) at the same time seems to be an example of grabbing the whole arm.

you may quote the enlightened talk here: hate begets hate.

let's try to converse in a less aggressive yet still passionate way.

talk

[EN]
Well, some picking on men is ok, in my eyes. Though they can be much pleasant at times (a point Lacuna sadly misses), they are often annoying and deserve and need a flogging from time to time not to forget who has born them and is the mistress.

Picking on french is filthy and should be punished. It is no better than picking on negroes, jews, muslims, or immigrants. It is false and destructive.

Oh well picking on french is only deeply racist and goes against the Ryzom Code of Conduct but hey, no problem. We like being picked on.