Initial testing

[*Goodguy666]

Ok, so I tried making a level 1 and start out as a new character would. Here are some initial thought/ideas:

1. The bazaar is too big and open. It gives it the feel of being "dead", I think it would be much better if it was crammed more together with more wandering npc's..then use the left over space for a new little "area". Something like a group of people huddled together around a small fire with, a slave pit, something to add to the misery of the city
2. Factions. Reduce them heavily. At startup theres 16 factions I believe. The most populated servers have 40 people online at once, which means 3 of each faction. I would rather see 3-5 factions and have larger factions which might generate some RP based around factions. With so many factions it becomes too confusing and leads to little RP IMO
3. Basic shields sold at the market square, couldent find any
4. lots of broken quest, but I assume thats a known issue
5. Smoking inn. Like it alot, but couldnÂ’t find the npc for a quest there (the blind person quest).
6. The undersigil area. I tried hunting to see how difficult it is to level. The spawns are way too slow IMO. I can only imagine the trouble if 3-5 people try to hunt there at the same time. The rats, spiders etc. spawn so slowly that most of the time is spent running around instead of fighting. Lets face it, when people hunt they want to fight, not run in circles. If xp is the worry, lower the xp a little, but xp seemed good as is.
7. I like the spider area under the inn, very nice atmosphere
8. Alot of the sigil areas (the ones that are functional) have a very empty feel. It feels like the city is dead. Would love to make areas smaller if that cramps the things together. Perhaps a lot more wandering npc or something migh do the trick. But I catch myself thinking the city is very empty
9. ECLs....I hate that ECLs cant get to level 30, but thatÂ’s prob a personal preference. Good thing is that it makes humans and ECL 0 races more common.
10. I would love to see a part of Sigil that is clearly for another faction. Something to base the evil pc's from..some way to better give conflict based RP where factions belong to certain parts of Sigil or something. Perhaps split the bazaar up into different zones with them leading different places. Gives the faction some sort of "sense of ownership" and something to RP about


thats all I remember now...and forgive the many spelling mistakes, just threw it up there and too lazy to correct it

[*pelhikano]

Thank you for your feedback, it's greatly appreciated. I can't give any immediate comments, but I'm sure we will take heed of your criticism for finishing the world.

[*Mr_Otyugh]

Yeah, that Gray Lady in the edge of Great Bazaar is kinda the quest to introduce portals (by guiding people to go to talk to Sage [which is in second floor of Smoking Hammer Inn] whom tell more about portals). The portal is near her also and with right portal key you can find it... the Sage tells the portal key, so you can go ask from him, but I can just as well say it, it's 'Obsidian' gem, which you can find from merchant very nearby that quest giver also.




And if you want to test areas, I can put more or less the appropriate levels here:
- Place: level range : portal key : where to find

- Gray Waste: levels 1-5 : Obsidian : Sigil Main near Gray Lady
- Outlands: levels 4-9 : Shovel : Hall of Records
- Beastlands: levels 7-12 : Belladonna : Sigil Main
(is going to be made more or less appropriate level for continuing progressive leveling, but spawns aren't the best at the moment)
- Paraelemental Plane of Ice: levels 10-17 : Ray of Frost Scroll : Lady's Ward
(giants/elementals aren't really soloable except on a higher level on those, but they are more of single versus group encounters)
- Minauros: levels 15-21 : Black Lotus Extract : Sigil Main


Non Sigil accessable currently:
Carceri: levels 18-25?
Demiplane: levels 12-17?
Mercuria: varieting level ranges. (low, medium and high level)

[*Shyntree]

I'll offer a few comments in response - just my own though and not neccessarily representative of anyone else's opinions...

With regards to factions and the point you made: I see where you're coming from, but the "factions" in CSoD aren't meant to work like player-run guilds on other servers - the way I see them. Rather, "faction" is more close to "alignment", or character class, or character race, than anything - it's something more to do with background RP and is tied into the lore of Sigil.

With regards to broken quests and insufficient merchants - points taken, though I just want to point out, we're not even in beta stage yet. Rather, we're in alpha stage - meaning, we're still making the server. Usually at this point in PW construction, there wouldnt BE a publicly accessible server - that would happen late in beta stage. What we have so far is nowhere near a finished product. In my view, at least.

[*cryptc]

Yep, factions are more like a question about your characters philosophy... like Shyntree says its more close to alignment... it has barely any other meanings that the roleplay that will fit the character best...

When the server fill up there will be some factions with alot more members than others most likely... so it will open up for more and less social groups... and also since the factions generally aren't at war (although some really dislike eachother), its not something that prevents people from forming other alliances or groups...

It should work out nicely, if we manage to make people understand their function and meaning, which is what we must work on...


Oh, and the sage that you were looking for is on second floor, and also the bartender can be asked about where he is.

[*Mr_Otyugh]

Ok, so I tried making a level 1 and start out as a new character would. Here are some initial thought/ideas:

1. The bazaar is too big and open. It gives it the feel of being "dead", I think it would be much better if it was crammed more together with more wandering npc's..then use the left over space for a new little "area". Something like a group of people huddled together around a small fire with, a slave pit, something to add to the misery of the city
2. Factions. Reduce them heavily. At startup theres 16 factions I believe. The most populated servers have 40 people online at once, which means 3 of each faction. I would rather see 3-5 factions and have larger factions which might generate some RP based around factions. With so many factions it becomes too confusing and leads to little RP IMO
3. Basic shields sold at the market square, couldent find any
4. lots of broken quest, but I assume thats a known issue
5. Smoking inn. Like it alot, but couldnÂ’t find the npc for a quest there (the blind person quest).
6. The undersigil area. I tried hunting to see how difficult it is to level. The spawns are way too slow IMO. I can only imagine the trouble if 3-5 people try to hunt there at the same time. The rats, spiders etc. spawn so slowly that most of the time is spent running around instead of fighting. Lets face it, when people hunt they want to fight, not run in circles. If xp is the worry, lower the xp a little, but xp seemed good as is.
7. I like the spider area under the inn, very nice atmosphere
8. Alot of the sigil areas (the ones that are functional) have a very empty feel. It feels like the city is dead. Would love to make areas smaller if that cramps the things together. Perhaps a lot more wandering npc or something migh do the trick. But I catch myself thinking the city is very empty
9. ECLs....I hate that ECLs cant get to level 30, but thatÂ’s prob a personal preference. Good thing is that it makes humans and ECL 0 races more common.
10. I would love to see a part of Sigil that is clearly for another faction. Something to base the evil pc's from..some way to better give conflict based RP where factions belong to certain parts of Sigil or something. Perhaps split the bazaar up into different zones with them leading different places. Gives the faction some sort of "sense of ownership" and something to RP about


thats all I remember now...and forgive the many spelling mistakes, just threw it up there and too lazy to correct it

Thanks for posting your thoughts, they're much appreciated (eventhough I'll be posting some stuff which notes that I'll disagree ;P)

At first: Quests, items, NPCs, store prices and such at the moment do need single overview, but those takes time. I'm going to try to set them for next alpha version, at least some of them. (But it bears noting that we'd appreciate additional NPCs and items if someone feels like helping a bit ;P)

About the sigil main, yeah. Agreed it's too empty at the moment, Shyntree is working on adding some stuff there.

Factions, as cryptc and Shyntree already noted, they have rather different role in Sigil than casual servers guilds. However, we'll probably be going to also alter the necessarity to pick a faction a bit, rather than you need to pick one on porting to Sigil, you'll be picking one in game at their guild halls where they can explain a bit more about the factions stand etc to those whom wants to join. It wouldn't reduce the amount of them, but would make it slightly more new player friendly.

The Sage for that quest is currently upstairs of Smoking Hammer Inn, I agree it's a bit "out of the way", but we placed him up there to avoid making him spam roleplaying annoyingly downstairs.

Spawn rate, currently I'm rather two sided about it. I'd ideally want to avoid making people grind the same area over and over again, rather make them move through the dungeons, but I also don't want to make people have nothing to fight against. Oh and there spawns more monsters the more people there is in there, so amount of monsters shouldn't be problem.

ECL thing. Well maybe people rather picks ECL races finally for more than + 41 SR or bonus abilities, and technically they get to level 30, we're just preventing them getting to above level 30 because of their ECL +#. There will be allowed some higher ECL races to be played, in which case this is the thing that keeps them in line.

All factions are going to get their own faction halls, also all of them have some sort of function within Sigil. Also on alignment scale I'd say lawful and chaos takes a lot bigger chunk of attention in SCoD/planescape compaired to forgotten realms settings where you'll pretty much see only "good vs evil" thing.

[*Goodguy666]

All the input is only meant in a constructive way. Theres many things I like alot, but I figured that the things needed improvement was the most intresting discussing

I still feel that 16 faction halls and making background material for each one (or copying it from somewhere and adding it to npc's) is alot of work that ends up giving only little back in form of RP. Im betting that most faction halls will be very empthy if there are indeed 16 of them.

point taken about the chaos/lawful, just not gotten my head around to thinking planescape yet ;) But some sort of faction splitup so there is a base for those of opposite allignment. Most of us have played on TFR and I think the setup with drows vs surface added alot of opertunity for RP. Without the conflict based RP the RP will much easier be based on DM events etc. Just seems easier to maintain player run plotlines with the added element. Something I have always liked....if it makes any sense at all

about the grinding; I havent searched everywhere (like I dident search the second floor for the wizard, dont know why I dident, hehe) but rats+spiders seemed like the only place to hunt at low levels. with the current spawnrate an ECL 3 charecter will be spending a LONG time with the rats. I agree that XP shouldent be a main focus on a RP server, but few people think its fun RPing a level 1 charecter for long, hard to go anywhere and RP when a rat can kill you :). The charecter development is a big part of most NWN2 players fun. Im glad that the spawnrate increase with more players though

P.S. Im very understanding of it being Alpha and only in testing...which is why I bother writing this :) Its an attempt to give some imput from someone that dont know the overall vision or idea. Just commenting on what I see in an attempt to help a little :)

[*Mr_Otyugh]

Well, I'm going to take a look at that warehouse/first under sigil area for spawn rates. (Gray Waste is decent for many classes to also hunt at lower levels, though rogues are going to have harsh time) Not yet admittably, we basically take turns with moving the module from admin to another when adding content/fixing things, so when it comes to me to add stuff and fix stuff, I'll take a look at it.

Oh and I have nothing against people going around fighting monsters, I understand that players want to get experience and levels, if we didn't want players to do that, we would've made no experience come from it <,< I'm more of trying to think some way to avoid keeping players getting mind numbed for running in one single area round after another. At least on my own experience, I can continue killing spawns much longer if I keep moving and areas varie a bit. That's also reason why I've been trying to make the hunting areas atmospheric and some different kind of encounters.



Hmm, conflict based RP. I see where you're coming from there, and I agree, open conflict is great way to self-create RP (*coughs* and problems hehe). Though so far there hasn't been much of plans or intentions to make one side versus another (at least no open war like surface versus underdark thing) as player factions. Not to say Sigil is carebear meeting place though, where the chaos, good, evil and law collides, there's bound to be conflict.

[*cryptc]

When server is finished there should be enough non-combat related quests so that a dedicated low level char could atleast reach level 2 without killing a single monster. But I did design the rats for the weakest of the 1st level chars so that they have a chance to solo. As MrO said, Gray Waste is also good for low levels.

Surface/Underdark on TFR was basicly open war, which admittedly does provide some rp, but I feel it gets more shallow than more philosophical and political conflict. All the factions have reasons to plot against all the others, so there is alot of opportunity for conflict (when player numbers get decent).

In general, I prefer to think of planescape as being more reliant on philosophies than alignments, with the factions being the ways to divide them... rarely hear that people say 9 alignments are too many ;) ... so its just an adjustment to get used to that factions is not the same as guilds on other servers... if a few dedicated players join the same faction and roleplays it well they could practicly be a guild, but in general remember that each faction is a huge group of npcs...

Nothing about the factions is something we've decided on ourselves, just kept to the lore that is in planescape, we couldn't change/remove any faction without completely ruining the setting.

[*Goodguy666]

Ya, wasent tinking open war as drow-surface. But factions who were clearly opposed and could spend time plotting etc. against each other. Something like that.

Will try to give the grey waste a go with my low level, just dident find the way to it and trying not to "cheat" with my low level testing chatecter (so dident port with the widget). Im no good with a toolset, but if you need the spawns of the different areas tested thats something I can help with. If you were to list the areas you want tested and their approx level I wouldent mid making a charecter and going through them testing how appropriate they are for their level range.

P.S. did I miss some way to get to the grey waste. I think I excausted all possible exits from Sigil and only found the basement/undersigil as a place to with monsters (clearly dont know any portals yet)