Constructive Critisim

LaurnaRose · 02-03-2007, 11:58 PM

Aruspex, Dreamcookie, and the rest of the Diplomacy Team:

I hope this is taken as constructive critisism, as I love diplomacy and mean no ill will to the DTeam.

Playing my Varanjar diplomat today I was met with extreme frustration. I got to skill 42 and was sent on my horse quest. The quest which actually gives the horse as a reward asks me to parley with 3 npcs and travel with a time limit of 40m. Fine. However, when parleying with the first NPC he is skill 75. This starts the parley off with him at 6 and me at 12. I found it impossible to get pass the first NPC so I decided to go back to Halgarad to level my Dip skill a bit before continuing on.

Once I reached Halgarad, I was met with the unfortunate reality that the lowest parley started at 75. I finally found a quest (one quest only) that would give me an additional piece of dip clothing to add to my arsenal. I got past the first 2 parleys and was met with "You must have 7 noble presence"... I only had 6. So I asked around how to raise my noble presence and was answered with, "parley". Back where I started with not enough skill to parley for presence. When I did try to parley with the skill 75 NPCs I found myself once again being met with impossible decks to counter and NPCs that were simply too strong for my lvl 42ishness.

My suggestion is this:

Put in quest givers for the middle skill ranges. It would be nice to have the ability to level from 42 to 75 or at the very least 60 or so so we have half a chance of winning a parley. The faction hits for each failure simply are too steep to risk the loss as it is.

I would love to see one quest giver for each presence available in each city. Someone who would send you on arrands to parley with other folk of similar status (noble, crafting, domestic, soldier). This would allow us to level our diplomacy to a more reasonable skill level before trying to take on the world. This would also be a nice way to gain presence in these areas. These quest givers could hand out presence specific equipment or maybe even a permenant presence bonus after a long drawn out quest.

Something else that I would suggest looking into would be separate tabs for adventuring/diplomacy/crafting quests. It gets too cluttered when you are active in all three spheres.

Not sure if any of this is a possibility, but something HAS to be done. As it stands, diplomacy is great fun ... until you reach civic diplomacy. There needs to be an alternative to civic diplomacy ... some of us just want to have fun with it.

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I went back on the game and looked around a little more at the parley opponents scattered about. I found that if i backtracked to the starting area there were in deed a few (very few) opponents who were skill level 50. Unfortunately, the faction hit + the stacking of the cards on the NPCs side + the timer lockout + lack of reward = not fun any more.

Look at adventuring and how many options we have there. As an adventurer, you can go out solo or in a group or in a raid and work on quests that give you rewards, experience, faction that scale in difficulty. As well, you can go out into the wilderness and solo for base experience - lacking reward, but you still get the benefit of leveling while you are out there.

It appears with diplomacy that once you reach skill 40 or so (hit civic level) that you are forced into one way of leveling. I think that the civic diplomacy is a really cool concept, but I also think that civic diplomcacy should be the equivilant of a diplomacy raid. There should be other quest givers that allow small group and solo diplomcacy as well, hence the idea of the presence specific diplomacy quests. This would allow us the ability to continue experiencing diplomacy in a questing fashion in a manner that affected US and not everyone else. As well, there should be base diplomacy on almost every NPC allowing you to simply have a conversation with someone to increase your skill.

I know it would be extremely difficult (but im not sure why it wasnt done in the first place, maybe you can explain), but you might want to look at the sphere and see if there is a way to give us experience and levels as oppose to simply skill points. Adventuring and crafting are set up that way. it kinda confuses me why diplomcacy, which is a sphere of its own beast, was done so different. As it is, we get a skill point with every parley. I would much rather the quests be scaled in experience by difficulty.

FEDS-91 · 02-04-2007, 12:03 AM

Yeah, I'm having a hell of a time finding anyone with a reasonable skill level in Tursh that I can parley with. But, I think I lost a few points before they 'capped' it so I'm pretty well screwed I think.

Ysharros · 02-04-2007, 07:31 AM

I agree with much of what Laurna said. Right now, Diplomacy has hit a frustration high with me again and I'm leaving it be. Biting the ears off your parley opponents is not, I'm told, a valid diplomacy tactic.

That said, I will reiterate her words: this is not a bash at the team or at the concept, both of which are just plain awesome. Tweaking is undoubtedly an ongoing process, and I don't envy you guys the task of balancing something so complex so that it's challenging yet not *so* challenging that nobody can do it.

Some sort of 40-75 content other than civic diplomacy, which has way too huge a hit for me to relish being beaten 10 times in a row, would indeed be nice. Or maybe all we need is 40-50 content, to give us a leg up into the same strata as the lower NPCs we can parlay with (who are, that said, very few and far between).

Ceyllynn · 02-04-2007, 08:38 AM

agreed with this post... i love diplo.. but on my other half's advice(my redheaded temper and all)...not been doing it since i got the horse(before the changes).

there are some guys in derogar's (by bjorn) who are 50's, but it's a 9/10 if you're lucky with the current state of civic.

i don't know what they did.. but it went from too easy to almost impossible.

Coreia · 02-04-2007, 12:53 PM

Throwing in my agreement here...

In Leth Nurae, I've made it to the Sickness in our Midst quest. For this one, I have to parley with an NPC named Faolin - and it has to be gossip. As a high elf, my only strength is in Reason. Without Reason, I have at most '3' cards, which all have higher refresh times, and so far I just can't come close to beating Faolin with what I have. Especially since my lower skill level (40ish) means he starts with a lower counter.

Okay, so put that quest on hold for a while, there must be a solution somewhere else... I went and found the civic diplomacy instructor. He wants me to parley with 'crafters and soldiers' until I get two hearsay for blackmail. Okay, cool, this sounds fun. I used to civic-parley with the nobles in the palace. They started with a counter of 1, but I got lucky several times.... Not anymore. Now I can't even attempt a parley with anyone higher than 75 - which appears to be most of the town.

I finally found an area with crafters in the 50-75 range. They still start with a counter of 10 to my 15, but at least I can use reason... I won Convince parleys against a couple of them, and settled on one girl who happened to just throw Reason expression at me. I leveled up to 60 on her, bringing her counter to 13 to my 15, filling the gaps with Convinces (about a 50/50 success rate) on others when I lost against her and had to wait for her to reset. I collected 30-40 pieces of information, but no hearsay for blackmail. I backtracked and searched out the arcana informant and got a couple of pieces of gear -- but it's presence only. I need /cards/ or starting /expression/. Something to actually help me win a parley.

Right now I'm frustrated out of my mind, and I don't know what I'm expected to do to progress. The normal quest line has thrown me into gossip with no tools to help me through it, and civic diplomacy has pitted me against only one 'target' that is even semi-consistently winnable. And no rewards for two hours' parley. What am I missing?

spicie · 02-04-2007, 01:29 PM

I would agree diplomacy can be VERY frustrating at times.

A suggestion for the civic diplomacy tutorial though:
Can we have special civic diplomacy NPC's that are ONLY for the tutorial. I have a halfling diplomat and have been running through Tursh trying to get it done. Because of my race, class, and my choses rewards earlier, gossip is EXTREMELY difficult for me. I think I lost about 60 faction trying to win about 4 arguments to get me my 2 blackmail to finish that part of the quest (and the only reason I won is because I had good luck on my timers).

Now I'm not saying it shouldn't be difficult, but depending on your race, class, and rewards chosen, it could make the civic introduction extremely easy, or just about impossible. If you could make the intro to civic easier to teach HOW it's done and what to look for that would greatly help. I have found I can Entertain and interview crafters very well, so I've been sticking with that to level up some and get better cards and items. (then I can go back and build decks for the others)

I do love the difficulty of the diplomacy (though at times sometimes it's too difficult). But getting into the civic diplomacy through the introduction could be just a bit easier to not scare everyone off before they can find a deck they are good with.

Over all I love the diplomacy, I have found I'm doing diplomacy more then anything else, and even was grinding out adventuring levels just to get up high enough to continue the diplomacy line

Keep up the good work.

Doomcookie · 02-06-2007, 07:06 PM

Content in that range is our current priority. We have been working hard at getting in new content (between the necessary fixes) and you should very quickly be able to find quests piled onto neutral towns. We are focusing on the cities where the horse quest dumps you (Three Rivers, Tawar Galan, Dark Horse Downs, Naemsog, and Veskal's).

Trust me, we lament every day the lack of content. It's been a struggle just to get this thing working. We think that we have hit a stride though and you should only see more and more content with every patch.

FEDS-91 · 02-06-2007, 07:46 PM

Not that I want to slow down any of my adventuring, but I really do want to delve into diplo a bit more. Any recommendations for a good area to go for a level 26? (think thats what I'm at)

SwordMage · 02-06-2007, 07:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FEDS-91

Not that I want to slow down any of my adventuring, but I really do want to delve into diplo a bit more. Any recommendations for a good area to go for a level 26? (think thats what I'm at)

If you haven't started yet, I believe you need to return to your roots and speak to the diplomat trainer for your race (in you starting city).

FEDS-91 · 02-06-2007, 07:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SwordMage

If you haven't started yet, I believe you need to return to your roots and speak to the diplomat trainer for your race (in you starting city).

Think thats Tursh village. But, last time I was there, there wasn't much at all that was my level.

Also, is there any way to change the 'path' I selected when they asked what family I wanted to put my allegiance towards? I was almost falling asleep when I was doing that and not really reading what was going on and ended up picking the wrong way I wanted to go.