A Brave New Salem

[lachlaan]

If something doesn't play out the way we think it will, we will roll back that build/patch and try again.

You can roll back the mechanics, but do you intend to roll back the world to a previous state? If not, what happens when you make walls/braziers/etc a bit too weak and half the playerbase with/without scents left finds their base nullified?

My biggest concern with the last few pages is that you seem to intend for continuous character advancement, which brings us back to the question posed earlier of .. what happens when someone eventually loses everything, and starts from scratch? If you want to keep progression significant at higher levels then you need to make it slow down less as a character progresses, which just increases the time gap between a fresh character and the people that will crush him with their humours and experience.

Not trying to say that an 800 humour character should lose to an 80 humour one in 1v1 combat, but I feel we're going back to the times where zerging titans was the only thing you could attempt and even then 200+200+200+200 =/= 800.

I just hear you saying invulnerability is undesirable, but how would a town that has stood for a year with 600-800 humour characters from all time zones able to play at any given time and defend against squishy fresh chars be anything short of invulnerable?

[nonsonogiucas]

My biggest concern with the last few pages is that you seem to intend for continuous character advancement, which brings us back to the question posed earlier of .. what happens when someone eventually loses everything, and starts from scratch? If you want to keep progression significant at higher levels then you need to make it slow down less as a character progresses, which just increases the time gap between a fresh character and the people that will crush him with their humours and experience.

I feel the same about this. Permadeath does not couple well with really long character development.

I refer again to EVE Online, because I'm biased, where character development is reeeealy slow and you can do nothing about it because skills require real time to pass. Well in EVE if you are careful enough you will not lose your skills, you can lose capital ships and stations, even months of hard work but not a 2 years woth of skills. This is well balanced imo with the cost of clones. The more skill points you have the more a suitable clone (to respawn) costs. High level clones tend to cost like mid-high level ships.

The alternative in moderately fast progression, or even progression based on player skill (so that you get better and better at growing a char).

[Thor]

So PvP is still a grinding competition. Best of luck to you, but I think I'll pass.

About what Potjeh said about PVP being a grind competition, how about making some sort of realistic cap for biles?
Hypothetically speaking let's say the cap would be 500 biles.
Casual player playing 2 hours daily could achieve 500 biles in a year.
Hardcore player could do that in 3 months by playing around 8 hours daily.

Hardcore players would be able to produce more combat alts with capped biles than the casual one, but still one person can only play one character at a time. This would rule out the "unfairness" of huge bile contrast, but not slap the hardcore player on the wrist for his hard work.

[darnokpl]

If casual player would have to spend entire year to reach cap it won't work.

IMO developing character for fight is fine for about month, don't forget it is perma death game,
so invest more than one month just to have few minutes of fun is not fun.

I don't mind having infinite character development, but not biles, there should be hard bile cap 200-300 max for me.
But you can have infinite profs development that should help you make things for your crafters faster, easier, cheaper.

[Voltaire1512]

Hard to believe, but I actually make a post on this forum.

I first heard about Salem on the Paradox forum and I liked the idea. MMO in the New World. Settlers bringing civilization to the wilderness. Great.

Then I joined Beta somewhere in 2012 but could not really find the time to play, so I started new in early 2013. And what I found was not really encouraging.

There were some shortcomings or design decisions I (and probably others too) did not like:

1. The idea of Open PvP and Permadeath is of course something rather few people try to implement. And that`s probably because not a lot of people want to play in such an environment. People like me, who proudly belong to the CCC (Casual Carebear Crowd) do not appreciate the thought, that all the work one has invested is suddenly completely gone. And I think the only reason I did not suffer such a fate was, that at the time I played the servers were already pretty empty and nobody willing to extort / kill me had a decent chance to actually find me.

2. A lot of WTF-moments came due to the fact, that my expectations have been kind of wrong. I expected a world, that offers some "classes" (like soldier, craftsmen, trapper, whatever), which have different roles in colonizing the new world, and that the settlers would have to fight natives / the environment instead of landing in a dog-eat-dog world where other settlers are the biggest threat (okay, except snakes).

3. The grind versus reward ratio was rather unbalanced, to put it mildly. It was really an effing bore to run around, gather stuff and build the umpteenth item, so I get a proficiency from 8 to 9. And repeat that a dozen times so I can learn a new skill. Which allows me to build a new structure, as soon as I learn two other skills. Argh.

4. Some more things like snakes climbing up slopes, animals not appearing on the minimap or having to install a third party client in order to efficiently flattening some land.

I wanted to like the game. I really did. But at some point of time I realized, that it was not fun. I was looking for some cooperation to turn the New World into a Colony. But all I saw were a few last souls spending their days raiding each other. Then I pulled the plug and called it a day, expecting to see the project die soon. What more or less happened.

I would love to see a reboot of this project and I wish the new developers from Mortal Moments the best of luck. I will follow this and I hope, that they will make some changes in the design, so "Salem" may become interesting again.

Sincerely

[alloin]

Hard to believe, but I actually make a post on this forum.

I first heard about Salem on the Paradox forum and I liked the idea. MMO in the New World. Settlers bringing civilization to the wilderness. Great.

Then I joined Beta somewhere in 2012 but could not really find the time to play, so I started new in early 2013. And what I found was not really encouraging.

There were some shortcomings or design decisions I (and probably others too) did not like:

1. The idea of Open PvP and Permadeath is of course something rather few people try to implement. And that`s probably because not a lot of people want to play in such an environment. People like me, who proudly belong to the CCC (Casual Carebear Crowd) do not appreciate the thought, that all the work one has invested is suddenly completely gone. And I think the only reason I did not suffer such a fate was, that at the time I played the servers were already pretty empty and nobody willing to extort / kill me had a decent chance to actually find me.

2. A lot of WTF-moments came due to the fact, that my expectations have been kind of wrong. I expected a world, that offers some "classes" (like soldier, craftsmen, trapper, whatever), which have different roles in colonizing the new world, and that the settlers would have to fight natives / the environment instead of landing in a dog-eat-dog world where other settlers are the biggest threat (okay, except snakes).

3. The grind versus reward ratio was rather unbalanced, to put it mildly. It was really an effing bore to run around, gather stuff and build the umpteenth item, so I get a proficiency from 8 to 9. And repeat that a dozen times so I can learn a new skill. Which allows me to build a new structure, as soon as I learn two other skills. Argh.

4. Some more things like snakes climbing up slopes, animals not appearing on the minimap or having to install a third party client in order to efficiently flattening some land.

I wanted to like the game. I really did. But at some point of time I realized, that it was not fun. I was looking for some cooperation to turn the New World into a Colony. But all I saw were a few last souls spending their days raiding each other. Then I pulled the plug and called it a day, expecting to see the project die soon. What more or less happened.

I would love to see a reboot of this project and I wish the new developers from Mortal Moments the best of luck. I will follow this and I hope, that they will make some changes in the design, so "Salem" may become interesting again.

Sincerely

This is not a themepark game !!!

Goodbye !

[Thor]

Exactly what Alloin said, this game is not definitely for you, not even after updates.

[Voltaire1512]

Exactly what Alloin said, this game is not definitely for you, not even after updates.

Exactly the reason why I quit. And considering the current playerbase, this game is for nobody.

There is a game and the player community. And the first needs the latter more than vice versa. So if the new developers want to increase the playerbase, they will have to offer something. If the result is, that "Salem" can survive with a more or less decent amount of players, but the concept is still not to my liking, I can live with that.

[alloin]

You might be lucky that the new management might introduce a PVE server though

[Suffragium]

Exactly what Alloin said, this game is not definitely for you, not even after updates.

Exactly the reason why I quit. And considering the current playerbase, this game is for nobody.

There is a game and the player community. And the first needs the latter more than vice versa. So if the new developers want to increase the playerbase, they will have to offer something. If the result is, that "Salem" can survive with a more or less decent amount of players, but the concept is still not to my liking, I can live with that.

I am pretty sure these new developers will make some great stuff. They're planning on making the game slightly more casual friendly, but I am completely sure they will never remove permadeath. It's possible they will implement some system similar to HnH where you do not lose literally everything upon your death, but permadeath is here to stay.

Regardless, it's worth to stick around for a while until a few of these updates have been pumped out, at the very least. If you have questions regarding the game or want to join a village, send me a PM.