A Land Far Away

As noted in the Admin forums, all ALFA servers are moving to a 13 minute hour for a sixty day trial.

At the end of this period Admin will poll the community to determine if we should remain on a 13 minute hour or move back to seven minutes.

Please report your feedback here, good or bad, regarding your experiences as both player and or DM. We are especially interested in any technical issues that may turn up because of the change.

Thanks!

Regas


http://www.alandfaraway.org/phpBB3/view ... 67&t=49721

I would ad that DM Admin (me) is interested in knowing whether the time change improves your RP experience.

The big reason I supported this test was because people complained they were rushing RP due to buff expiration and because the sun zips by too quickly while outdoors chatting. Let's see if either of these or other issues are made better (or not).

Should also put in tickets about technical issues.

They're signs of vulnerabilty and bad practices in our coding. We'll want to fix those regardless of whether or not we revert to 7 min/hr.

Castano wrote:I would ad that DM Admin (me) is interested in knowing whether the time change improves your RP experience.

The big reason I supported this test was because people complained they were rushing RP due to buff expiration and because the sun zips by too quickly while outdoors chatting. Let's see if either of these or other issues are made better (or not).

I actually had my PC sitting on a hill in Beregost watching the sun come up tonight. It was a beautiful thing. This is something that is better with the sun rising slowly and gives time to actually look at it before it's over.

This and other situations I've seen so far, is why I think that this change is good for ALFA. It is at least good for me... better for immersion.

Sofar only good things to say about the change. The less days swich by the easier for me to rp out for example a breakfast together or an evening stroll

So far so good. I like the RP of the time passage better than better.


Just notice that RPXP script seems to be firing on the old time compression. (From 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm I received 7 increments). Not sure if that is a feature or a bug. Not a huge deal either way I guess.

I figure that is a feature to deter screams of agony at less XP coming in for the same amount of RL time.

Brokenbone wrote:I figure that is a feature to deter screams of agony at less XP coming in for the same amount of RL time.

Eh? I don't see the relationship between IG hours and XP.

I don't see the relationship between RL hours and XP, but we do it anyhow and people seem to like it.

They actually come every 6 minutes, 30 seconds now, as we totally said in the release notes. Readers are leaders and such.

And XP per real time doesn't change. It's 15 per RL hour of activity, always always, regardless of how many ticks we have across that hour. We just didn't want to increase the span between ticks because then we would be changing how much activity is required to get that XP (which is moderating advancement, which is totally a DMA thing).

I'm hearing some isolated chatter from a player suggesting that further compression may be desired, to support more play without DM presence.

Is it worth discussing further compression or do we run into a scenario where 10min/level spells begin to outlast hour/level spells?

So, going back to the 7 minute hour? Sure! I've never liked this change to be honest. How about a new thread with a poll?

We had the issue of 10 min/lvl spells lasting longer than hr/lvl spells before we moved to 13 RL min/game hour; it was indeed a balance problem.

Though we also saw a reduced incidence of garbage meta tactics (e.g. trying to talk to someone until their hr/lvl buffs ran out) and an increased diversity of rolled character types (which implies that either there's a less obvious "win" button or we've reduced that margin by enough that people aren't discouraged from rolling a non-optimal character). If there's not enough to do without a DM around, we could perhaps work on how entertaining our game is without a DM more directly, rather than throwing out the benefits we got from thsi.

Rather then changing how fast time flows can we just change how often you can rest?

Its currently set at every 24 hours . . . every 12 or every 8 hours would greatly enhance the game particularly when there are no DMs to orchestrate things

PCs end up logging off simply because they have run out of spells and cannot continue and its RL hours before they can rest again

Arianna wrote:Rather then changing how fast time flows can we just change how often you can rest?

Its currently set at every 24 hours . . . every 12 or every 8 hours would greatly enhance the game particularly when there are no DMs to orchestrate things

PCs end up logging off simply because they have run out of spells and cannot continue and its RL hours before they can rest again

Well then you're into balance issues again. If you shorten the rest time too much you end up with NWN1 style power-up sequences where casters walk around fully buffed at all times and can blast away. It tilts the game towards the casters.