Why power level people by taking them out into the dangerous wilds, when you can bring the monsters to the people? Also- some in the comments were talking about how NPCs don’t normally gain EXP. I already established a while ago, that monsters do, and it’s likely that NPCs do as well, thus that mage that attacked at Callum’s new home city. Now, how they obtained that power.
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This is about as we expected given comments on the previous page; blatantly talking about this rich kid being close to a level. I wonder if our heroines can quickly save the goblin with one of Kaylin’s potions, or if it’s already too late. Doing so would expose them before the Forger is found however, which is probably why it was mentioned on this page. On the other hand, a nekomata might draw the Forger’s interest…
Karma suggests Nyna will impulsively jump in to deal with these people, and in the process find how much exp she gains from levelled humans. Wouldn’t it be ironic if these NPCs have their own loot tables to draw from? In some games they certainly do…
“people in the Comments were talking NPC’s dont get EXP”
have Clearly forgotten the time line, the Issues and WHY the guy Got stuck as the SEXY avatar dark elf, kaylen in teh 1st place.
teh game/s has evolved and so has its Code written Occupants.. welcome to the new Gaming A.i systems we Could be looking at ourselves in 10-30 years time
-also love your Work Sage, been reading your work since 2 months before you launched A.i, it was interesting to follow since the start
Well actually this kind of system has already been implemented in a very old mmorpgfps game called Neocron in the early 2000s. All NPC-s had usable and lootable equipment and even vendors would fight you if attacked and could be killed. Every player and human npcs used the same equipment with the same stats. Even the copbots placed to enforce no combat zones could be killed when overwhelmed by players and their equipment taken and used by players. (this was actually a bug as the devs never tought that they would be killed, so never implemented usage restrictions or unlimited health) Of course the loot system had to be realistic, so for example killing a mutant would give the equipment used by him/her and killing a player allowed his/her equipment to be looted off the body. On the other hand, killing a rat usually gave only rat meat, bones or some small trash that could have been in it. Robots had their weapons and various machine parts. This allowed a player based economy, so players used what other players crafted (weapons, armor, vehicles, implants, etc) because most vendors only had trash items (usable only for blueprinting) and consumables.
They did implement a monster / npc / player respan system though, so anyone killed would eventually return. The item system was semi permanent, so in common areas dropped items and items in containers would despan/respan daily, while in private homes and clan hqs everything was permanent, including player placed furnitures and items.
The funny thing was that until talking with someone through player chat or observing their movement, you could not be sure that the other was a mob an npc, a dev or an actual player. Actually the difference between mobs and npcs were if they had talk lines or not. Friendliness was faction and standing based, so for a different player an npc could act like a mob. It was kind of frustrating when a quest giver was fighting other guys and got killed, so players were incentivized to protect friendly npcs from hostile pcs and npcs. Pvp was encouraged and kind of required, including large scale clan vs clan and faction vs faction battles over territory and factories/mines, including some huge mob/npc/player versus mob/npc/player battles.
It was a long time ago, but the system was there and actually worked most of the time, even with the very limited hardware and network bandwidth available that time.
That is cruel and really disturbing.
But I see two big problems with their method:
1. I can see that the gain in experience points will be diminished, because it is not really a challenge to kill a helpless creature.
2. The mindset of the persons who level this way will be faulty, they won’t know how to handle in a proper fight, if they only level up with imprisoned monsters, and think they won’t defend themselves or fight back i.e. a quote the brat could bring: “The cat person dodged my attack, it is not allowed to do it, tell it that, mommy.”
That is only a problem if the game determined XP based on how something is killed rather than what is killed, and it’s a tradition for things to be given an XP value regardless of what it takes to kill them. Those points also can MAKE you better at fighting, and impart knowledge based on your class, thus how you gain weapon skills or magic skills when you level up. You are right about one thing, while it does grant you that knowledge, it doesn’t teach you the optimal way to use those abilities, XP Points are not really experience. Doesn’t mean its impossible for them to gain that kind of experience but the mind set is totally an issue for many.
It’s unclear here if the Forger is a system entity or a profession. My bet, based on the mother’s statement, is on some kind of entity/avatar that appears when their people are intending to make a kill, but only when it would be worth it. The implication here is that they can decide to show up, and if it were a profession, they’d want to be paid, but she isn’t complaining about needing to pay them more than this overpriced goblin is already costing her.
Sorry, that replied on the wrong comment.
I’d lean towards a profession, as they have to worry about time and number. If it was a system entity it would just show up, regardless of what or how many is being killed, a profession would care about what they could make. So if a Forger gets paid based on the mobs killed and there is an extremely limited number of them I could see them accompanying hunting trips for any mobs that must be killed instead of captured, and in town there may be people like that old noble who have more money and therefore a larger number of mobs to process. However I am interested in what it does, as drops wouldn’t need to be taken care of right away unless they were perishable, kill the goblin, collect the drops and wait until you have enough to call the Forger. If there are say 3 forgers in the Kingdom, and the family isn’t high enough rank, the Forger may be annoyed by getting called for just a single goblin. Annoying the Forger enough may cause him to stop doing his work for you when you start getting the better mobs even.
I’m not sure how it is nowadays anymore, but in MMOs it used to be a potentially lucrative profession to craft items when you weren’t out exploring. Like say you could craft hi-potions and the shops only sold regular potions, you could charge x amount for the crafting if the person brought you the items. Same with armor and weapons. However the prices could vary dramatically based on a few factors. If the crafter has a higher skill than what is required they may have a chance to make a high quality version. That caused a number of fights as the high quality versions sold for multiples of the normal quality. In Final Fantasy XI, I know I saw stuff where the normal quality would sell for say $50k, but the high quality would sell for over $1mil. Some crafters would give them the HQ item, others would just buy the items again and craft a normal quality for the person to have while they kept the HQ version, while others would go legalese and say they were asked to create the item with no recompense if the crafting failed to create the base version so since the HQ isn’t the base version the person making the request got nothing.
Most games give out XP based on kills or damage dealt if multiple players attack the same target. Better systems give out XP to each skill as they are being used. For example sneaking around updates the sneaking skill, taking hits upgrades the constitution, dealing damage with one type of weapon upgrades the skill with that weapon type. Successfully dodging damage upgrades the doging ability and so forth. You have to train the skill you want to get better at. Killing an imprisoned creature would not help much in the latter system. Using something like this would also eliminate the need for levels as each skill could be an independent and linear score for that certain thing it represents. So getting a 100% in constitution or spear fighting would not give anything to dodge or to a longsword attack.
Quite a lot of games use this linear progression, per skill type levelling, but very few if any mmo-s.
Aight, any speculation or mercy is being suspended. GET THEM!!!
I would not be surprised if this shows that Kaala has reworked the loot table function so that killing monsters(at least the sapient ones) no longer drops loot.
Kaala may not have that power. She’s like a GameMaster/Moderator over seeing “Monsters”, not a “Developer” with code or asset level access. Ellisia (the General AI of the game & now central goddess) seems to be a bit busy, having to live patch universe crashing bugs. You’d think just patching out loot tables, making them empty, or only have 1e-13 chance to drop a pebble would be simple… but you don’t always know what instability that change causes in another system.
I can think of several ways removing “loot” could lead to a crash (end of the world). Depending on the serving size of the spaghetti code.
From prior comics and this, it sounds like there are now people in this world who figured out how to “Forge” or create the loot out of a “monster” (or possibly anyone with an underlying loot table). Which is a worst case. It seems to be a learnable “exploit”, and not unqiue to an individual person/location/item. It’s not THE worst case, where it’s so simple even a child can do it on their own as part of the kill, as an Adventurer would do.
It’s unclear here if the Forger is a system entity or a profession. My bet, based on the mother’s statement, is on some kind of entity/avatar that appears when their people are intending to make a kill, but only when it would be worth it. The implication here is that they can decide to show up, and if it were a profession, they’d want to be paid, but she isn’t complaining about needing to pay them more than this overpriced goblin is already costing her.
could also be another adventurer that hasn’t been as fortunate as Kaylin to run into the new “Gods”, and using a skill or class ability to harvest drops from a corpse to make money in the new world to get by as they still believe monsters are just brainless creatures to be slaughtered for XP and drops, because they never Stopped to have a conversation with one. (iirc Nyna was Hostile before Kaylin talked her out of it, and there’s no guarantee everyone brought in would be as diplomatic nor as interested in holding back if they ran into say, a goblin or Ogre instead of a cute nekomata)
The forget can decide or improve the loot dropped by “monsters”, hm
attack or retreat?
What concerns me is that NPCs are aware of the concept of leveling and able to sense when it’s about to happen.
could be a side effect of awakening/transferring the various VRmmos worlds to this new universe was to apply a pseudo-Player status to all Npcs and mobs equally and someone in Talithar’s just managed to figure out how to access the Status/hud so they’ve gone overboard with the level focus.(to the point where they’ve started to push the local monsters to near-extinction)
Understanding that murder through cage bars may level one up it does nothing to improve basic combat skill sets nor does it convey that extremely valuable muscle motor memory. I cite Minecraft and its various monster trap EP generators. Sure you get EP but. That doesn’t do you much good in learning the game dynamics and figuring out the methods and getting the skills to take on monsters in combat. As has been mentioned, villagers who level up in this manner are going to be in real trouble when they encounter a real combat situation.
That said, there must a set of villagers who are experienced in capturing monsters alive. This has to involve combat to some extent as I don’t see traps and tricks working all of the time. Also capture is often more difficult than fighting and killing.