Salem

Ok, deep breaths. I'm going to get torn a new ******* for this. Just hear me out to the end before you get all stabby.

Right now there are 3 ways (same as before) to become competitive, humour and pvp wise.
1. Have a town build you up, this might be a shared account- like a wall basher.
2. Be an insane person.
3. Exploit the **** out of mechanics/bots fall into this as well.

Fair enough for HnH, there was no monetary incentive and the game could be made to reward top tier (top 5%) of playerbase with the best features. We all want Salem to succeed though, and it needs to be possible for mid-range characters to compete in PvP. The problem isn't so much that there are people with 300+ humours stomping about, it's that there's no good way to Identify these threats until it's far too late. (In real life if a guy could tear down a stone wall and smash a brick house single-handed, there would be some visual cues not to mess with him)

There's a reason why more and more games are using matchmaking services now.

So here's the idea, I gave it some thought and think it could work, enhancing the perma death feature, reducing rage quits (loss of revenue) and emboldening all mid range characters to interact with the world more, and hide behind walls less.

Cap Humours. yes. Cap them at 100 or use a pool of Humors (so you could have a 400 point cap to build the type of character you want). There is a limit to human strength and this shouldn't be meant as a WoW like fantasy game. An old idea for sure, but my addition is how this could work and retain the soul of Salem/Hnh.

How it could work: The way it is now, In the beginning you grow from a child to an adult before shipping off to the new world. With this cap in place, you would ship off as an adolescent. Once you passed 200 Humours total (so 50 in each or any combination of) you would become an adult. Once you reached 360-400 (100 in each humour or combination of) you would become a bit more grizzled/grow a beard or whatnot.

Humours would drain slowly while you were offline. The drain being capped at 10 (or something) in each Humour. You would need to be gone a while, say a week or two, to cap the humour drain. Being gone for a day might only drain 1 of each. This means you would start your day with a hardy meal, to replace what you lost while you slept, and keep your character at top cap. Food would never become useless this way. Beds and furnishings (pillows/quality sheets/etc.) could be used to slow the drain.

Armour/weapons/specialized clothing would become much more valuable and useful, allowing you to specialize your character further. When everyone PvPing is more or less the same strength (depending how they specialized) it becomes very important to have the best weapons and protection you can afford. Or perhaps to offset having a high phlegm/low yellow bile build. The combinations could be endless and this would add a visual indicator. Are you getting charged by a desperate bandit dressed in Jute? Or should you maybe consider backing off from the musket wielding plate armour Raiders. And when you finally die in glorious combat, it's not so big a deal to raise yourself a new Pilgrim

Finally, to nip a common complaint of this in the bud:

-High tier players will just make tons of alts-
Yes, they will. Good! Id much rather have 3 alts with 100 humours rush me, than a single guy with 300. I would run, knowing i was outnumbered. Id much rather fight 3 separate fights on equal-ish footing, than get KO'd in a punch by a guy dressed in pilgrims robes. Fight or flight is broken right now- we all know which we will do before the encounters even begin.

Alright that's pretty much it, I feel teeth gnashing as i hover over Submit. go on- get it out of your system. Consider the idea afterwords though it would need lots of tweaking and balancing but the bones are there. Any constructive thoughts?

Wouldn't capping stats essentially be mimicking WoW's level cap? If there is no longer a way in the endgame to watch numbers slowly rise on characters past some arbitrary numbered cap, there'd be nothing left to do besides grind gear, much like WoW, and then go kill randoms all day, resulting in many more ragequits.

There are indeed ways to tell how strong someone is when they're coming at you, if they're wearing the best slottable clothes for pvp, chances are they have high enough humours to justify risking several thousand silver worth of clothes.

Humour decay is also a bad idea, should I be punished for having a life and possibly going on a vacation? I'm pretty sure risking being raided from inactivity is more than enough of a cost for not logging in.

Ornery wrote:Wouldn't capping stats essentially be mimicking WoW's level cap? If there is no longer a way in the endgame to watch numbers slowly rise on characters past some arbitrary numbered cap, there'd be nothing left to do besides grind gear, much like WoW, and then go kill randoms all day, resulting in many more ragequits.

There are indeed ways to tell how strong someone is when they're coming at you, if they're wearing the best slottable clothes for pvp, chances are they have high enough humours to justify risking several thousand silver worth of clothes.

Humour decay is also a bad idea, should I be punished for having a life and possibly going on a vacation? I'm pretty sure risking being raided from inactivity is more than enough of a cost for not logging in.

WoW's lvl cap is 90..Hes suggesting 100, most games do 99, instead of infinite lvls, this does make sense, a lot of sense actually, makes you depend on Skill/Gear more then what your farming, (Skills as in actually being skilled in real combat situations in Salem)

Seems like there'd be little to no escape from lowbie zergsquads in decent gear then. If you're solo and come across 5+ guys and need to run, and you and your attackers are both limited to 100 phlegm, you're done. No amount of skill can save you from 5 inept but similarly stat'd people all boxing you in. With no humour cap, you can at least make a break for it and have a possibility to get away, or for backup to come.

as far as I read the intention of the devs, the point was to have some kind of softcap of the humours, through not being able to glutton faster than the drain from invariance/the fact that the return of biles is the square root of your biles.

The broken purity just meant that within one-two months of a new server, there were several 400+ biles running around.

The way I see the later developments, the plan is to make the purity grind last longer. a lot longer. The purity your group has access to would more or less dictate the highest plausible humours you have.

On another note (and although I have little experience with PvP, apart from some new alts for testing some moves and such), I'd say the main problem is that a group of players has a very big problem when fighting one single (whether OP or not) demi-god. The current combat system means that fighting as a group is so hard, mainly due to the fact that you can just as easily hit your friends. Admittedly, this might not be a bad thing, but currently (and again, in my limited experience) it seems that a single player fighting a group has the advantage. Note that I don't take into account guns (I guess a peleton of muskets firing would mean a serious disadvantage). Put in some melee fighters, though, and you have your average commander's problem between hitting your own men and your enemies. But, at least for melee combat, I am of the opinion that a more intuitive/easy way should exist for fighting as a group.

Of course, I am loathe to offer such a combat mechanism, as I'm quite aware some of the things I'm thinking about would be even more horrible than we currently have.

Not sold on caps, sure there a Demi-gods running around, but what better endgame is there? Even though I'm low now I like the idea that I could be there at some point, even if it'll be a massive pain, much better than I like the idea of meticulously plotting where each stat point needs to go.

I've seen how people play the stat game, they make a million characters, because the fun is in the stating. There's little investment in the character itself, perma-death would become basically meaningless because you've already maxed out 15 characters.

Sure you'd get less ragequits but you'd get more borequits.

caping humors is just stupid. isntead of the 500 char i have now i would just have 10+ 100 humor characters and you would still be ***** about it.

Was expecting far more negativity, thanks for mostly positive replies


To clarify: this would work best with a pool system. with a 400 point cap you could make a character with 200 phlegm, 100 yb, 50 bb and 50 blood if you liked. I imagine hermits would prefer higher Phlegm builds, trading off combat strength for the ability to run further/work longer. It would be rare to meet someone who had the same stats, so in a pursuit it would be unknown if the pursuer would catch you or not until they did, or you got away.

The drain when you are offline would be negligible, as long as you ate a decent meal when logging on you could get it back easily, the drain would cap at something small (I suggested 10 as an example above), in case you were gone for a long period of time. With beds and bed furnishing reducing this further, if you slept in your bed it wouldn't be a big deal, but would keep the value of food in the endgame (and make more sense, when you consider the pies needed to get past 300 Humours).

Also, no one here is ***** about the system Dallane so calm your roll, it's Beta and this is a forum for suggestions. You can't deny a large majority will never risk their mains the way it is now, (same as HnH) people already use Alts for that. If you'd read my original post, Yes i would much rather fight your 10+ 100 humours than you with 500 humours. you're going to juggle them all at once? and besides I'd be long gone when I saw 10 people coming at me in the distance. This would reward smart pvping and tactics, instead of the eating contest it is now.

Bodolf wrote: (...) We all want Salem to succeed though, and it needs to be possible for mid-range characters to compete in PvP. (...)

I think you are making a too large assumption. A large part of the playerbase would be fine if the game dies given that certain conditions are met (for some enough personal power, for some simply enough personal building, for yet others just enough fun). Furthermore, I've never seen devs state that they want the game to succeed, they seem to be more interested in doing their game how they want it to be no matter the consequences.

For me the "game" is to adapt to the weekly updates, when they stopped changing HnH it got boring for me. I imagine the same will happen when they have "finished" Salem, unless of course they do come up with an end game.