10-04-2025, 06:15 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-04-2025, 06:52 AM by DirectorBright.)
Hard agree with OP. A lot of this is just kind of a bunch of late-night thoughts, so it might not be too coherent. Opinions on the game, though, since this is a place to discuss them.
Sorcery as a class also has another other cap modifying feature, not just Domain. Destined. Forces higher ratings. Considering that several items were also spotted allowed forced caps inside settlements, plus some of the OOC rhetoric, there was a palpable level of "fuck you for being old, die" that surrounded things - and a sense it crept into IC. Most of the time that I've seen the words "Shake things up" it's just been a euphemism for "(Thing) has existed too long, destroy it."
There was obvious 'witch fatigue' beforehand, that much was clear, people were tired of 'everyone vs fel nation' war- and that is fair. It'd been going on for over a year straight without any huge differences in the grand scale of it. Yet some of what came after almost felt driven by OOC malice more than IC buildup, or people just fighting to fight. It's not really new for players to go cause trouble for 'world presence,' we've all encountered a scenario in which someone was very obviously just trying to get a 5th danger in.
As far as the spawning in with uniques and sigs and etc. etc. some of that emerges as a result of characters undergoing major development and apping for the capacity to do that, but the notion of dying before your app is approved is real right now when it can take months to get a response for even minor things.
Of course people want to app for a stronger weapon, people want feel a sense of progression. Of course, as has been noted, you almost need them to keep even with some people these days. There is an arms race in play. Such is the nature of power creep, where 'well X group has Y thing and therefore we need to make something stronger by comparison to keep up' until you end up in statwall hell. Sometimes you did just make a really special piece of kit from rare ingredients and it was neat.
On the flip side a lot of them are just a statstick, and I always enjoy seeing weird abilities on equipment or just abilities straight-up. Lets be real, big number weapon is kind of boring compared to 'it does WHAT' equipment. I wish more apps would be along the lines of creating wonders or making things reproducible, but the majority of them from what I know are just a stat boosted piece of kit. Even so, it smacks you in the face to see someone spawn in with one already when you have to wait for a while. Makes your own efforts feel cheapened by comparison. The wait only compounds that, a sense of 'I waited months to get this and they just have it?'
Aetius so far has been rolling everyone for a while now. I don't know all of what is going on within it. I do know that there was a very strong sentiment within the republic that the faction basically existed to blow up older nations, and I know that there've been a lot of raised eyebrows at the volume of unique weapons visible. Including the ones that allowed forced caps. Aetius ate dirt for a while in the early years, but suddenly a number of characters appeared at about the same time, all with the same batch of unique weapons, and started punching way higher than was expected for how fresh they were.
Undoubtedly no small part of the suspicion and hard stares are from a lack of knowledge of what the other group actually did or has. A lot of the salt regarding Aetius is that frankly, most people don't really know why they're so cracked in recent months. We know they have unique weapons, we know they have sigs of some kind, we know the owner is in the faction, we know they were basically founded around a new class - and there's a whole lot of OOC weight behind it regarding a lot of discourse of people bitching about specific characters or countries OOCly for existing "too long" - but nobody really knows how strong those things actually are or what they really have. Just that something is there. Speculation flows from that point on.
People see a group of guys who have weird shit and they're suddenly winning at everything with the owner standing right there and get suspicious. Nobody actually knows what they have, or how strong it is. They just know that its there, and they feel targeted. People aren't going to trust whatever the players in the faction have to say about it either. Conflict of interest. Especially noted was the feeling of bad faith surrounding it on an OOC level from, to put it bluntly, people shit-talking the targeted factions out of character for a long time.
Personally, I have no idea what is really going on. I'm just doing my thing, or trying to at least. One of the things that appeals to me the most about this game is how much the players can influence the world or setting. In theory you can come up with weird, gamechanging things that provide all manner of hooks and pulls and so on for other people to go off of. It's very cool in such a way. Sometimes, and I do feel it myself as well, I think people get too caught up in world arcs or massive picture events and lose sight of the 'role' in 'roleplaying game.' A sense of 'ok but how does that affect you specifically' needs to be kept. Some of the most fun I had was early on when the world felt small and it was just me and Mars and Rio and my full attention was centered around like 5 PCs.
Some of that I think gets fed into by the small size and relative emptiness of the game world. Because, frankly, when you can cross it very quickly and it is largely devoid of things to do that aren't centered around messing with each other, you don't run in to 'local problems.' Local issues rapidly become global ones. In some settings, you'd just ignore the superpowered faction because- well, they're way over there, you're way over here. But right now, that's not really doable- they're very close by for how long it takes to reach them, and don't really have anything else to occupy their attention - neither do you.
As for apps:
It would be nice to be able to ask for the status of a form application after a bit, because sometimes it just gets lost in the mass of files - even after being approved.
As for Tactical: the direction it wants to take the game is far more RPG centered, and there's other systems that are indev to further that along. This includes a dissolution of common item applications behind a more robust crafting system and a sense of 'world regions.' All of that is good, I think, in the long run. Very good. Honestly, hyped for what I hear is planned going forward. Obviously the launch is going to be rough, it always is, but Eternia's actual built in roleplaying game features are... very limited right now. And really, the item shift towards a material-assembly based system would take a lot of the load off of things, I feel.
As for the magic circulation:
It's really easy to slap together a 'metabuild' of just whatever's really strong right now and go fuck up most people that you run into without much answerability unless there's some huge skill or statwall. Build matters a lot, verb skill takes a very long time to cultivate, and frankly I think Tactical will be healthy for the game in the sense that it helps even things out a little. Trees are not created equal, and a lot of the time - especially for myself - I feel like I'm having to make a ton of gear just to make the weird thing competitive. And that especially scales with a few other issues. The map is, frankly, tiny (And from what I hear there are plans to fix this kind of thing with 'regions' or something which is good) and its very very easy to bump into people five steps into the woods and immediately die to whatever's simply the strongest setup right now. There have been some builds that are just crazy good and have been for a long time, and the gap is large. Tactical might help this, I think so at least. I hope so. It'll be rough on launch I'm sure.
As for the updates:
From what I understand, the reason there have not been a lot of updates recently is because the current direction for the staff is based around fundamentally reworking the underlying structure of the game, in a direction that I personally think sounds really, really appealing. Eternia needs more RPG features. It is a rework that has become necessary, because as the game has grown and grown, the established framework has not been able to keep up with it. That is what I have been told, essentially, is part of the issue with response times. These things worked early on, but now it's gotten out of hand to do it all manually.
The focus also seems to more enable groups of players to be less involved with other groups and more localized - and while at first woah hey hold on less involvement is bad, right? Well- maybe not. Sometimes stories need a little self-containment, and right now with the size of the world and the relative lack of things to do in it outside of mess with each other, it almost feels like people get a little TOO involved with TOO MANY other characters.
Maybe I'm not articulating that very well... but for example, someone on the other side of the region should have a much harder time beefing with you than they currently do when they can cross the distance in like 30 seconds. Localized stories, localized problems. Things like giant evil super nation or by contrast giant good guy super nation would be much less of a suffocating presence if they weren't effectively locked in a shoebox with you and you could get some breathing room from them. If each of you had other things to do than mess with each other, expeditions, monster hunting, etc. This was spoken of a little. Tactical also helps with creating NPC enemies, too.
On the whole, I think that... there's a lot of salt flowing around Aetius due to their circumstances.
I think the way the development is aimed is intended to fix a lot of things that have become fundamental glaring issues, and that it hasn't had a major update in a while because of the scale of what is having to be done. Ground-up system reworks and creation.
I think that the game suffers mostly from an issue of globalizing every issue, which is furthered by the relative size of the map and the lack of other activities than to mess with each other. We shouldn't be worrying about what every other nation in the world is doing, but that's how it ends up being.
I think the issue of applications is well known and is intended to be mostly resolved with better crafting systems and a combat rework to eliminate most of what makes up their bulk.
I don't want to sound entirely negative about it all. I do like the game, obviously, I've been playing it a lot.
The coolest thing to me in the game is knowing that a lot of what you see has actual history of a sort behind it. It's there because someone made it. How they did that, is up to be discovered. Made for a sort of 'living world.' That is still there.
I think that there has been a building level of OOC resentment towards various groups over the past year that has boiled over into IC to an extent, too. I don't really know how to answer that.
I think the globalizing issue as above is a huge part of it. Conflict and struggle can drive stories, but right now the only main sort of outlet for that is PVP. If you want to play as bandits, cultists, adventurers, monster hunters... there's just not a lot for you to do except get in a war with like half the map really quick like and run the risk of bumping into a super strong character in a place they really shouldn't be patrolling due to distance but due to game mechanics its just... well, not that far away OOCly for them to wander.
I think that part of the reason people get so mad or so pressured over things is how long it takes to get them vs how fast they can get taken away.
I think the staff are well aware of a lot of these above issues and the development is focused around addressing them, and I think things will improve afterwards. A lot of the current state is temporary, but it will repeat for a while because it exists that way for a reason. That's not to say the game is 'bad' right now, I'm sure a lot of people are still enjoying themselves. These are just the issues that I've noticed as I see them.
Edit:
Something upon thinking it over that I also would say is my biggest spotted problem (ties into the map size). There is a lack of conflict sources in the current setup that are not life and death fights with other people.
For example: When I was messing with Clan Crownforge as Mordeaux, I wanted to give them some sort of nemesis to deal with. The problem is that there really wasn't a lot in place to do that. My options basically boiled down to 'danger in the woods' or 'declare war.' I would have wanted to do things like raid caravans, set up dens of infected monsters, so on, eventually building up to the caproll fight as a real showdown when they finally either catch him at some bastion he's set up or he assails them with a legion of monstrosities, with a lot of plot and buildup behind it- and that just... isn't there.
This extends to characters like demons, bandits, beasts, and cultists. It is very difficult for them to do their thing, because their only real options are fighting another PC immediately and possibly running into super strong guys very fast as the word gets back and the map is a funnel for such things. People really, really need other methods of engaging with each other that prompt some kind of buildup and have some growth and rivalry beyond IMMEDIATELY leaping into the final showdown or beating each other up in the woods over and over. If you want to play a bandit or a thief, who are you stealing from? Other PCs. And if its something valuable? War time. There's not a lot of options for both heroes and antagonists to 'build up' off of environmental actions and lower-level engagements. If you want to play a monster hunter you're pretty much SoL as far as doing things goes.
Sorcery as a class also has another other cap modifying feature, not just Domain. Destined. Forces higher ratings. Considering that several items were also spotted allowed forced caps inside settlements, plus some of the OOC rhetoric, there was a palpable level of "fuck you for being old, die" that surrounded things - and a sense it crept into IC. Most of the time that I've seen the words "Shake things up" it's just been a euphemism for "(Thing) has existed too long, destroy it."
There was obvious 'witch fatigue' beforehand, that much was clear, people were tired of 'everyone vs fel nation' war- and that is fair. It'd been going on for over a year straight without any huge differences in the grand scale of it. Yet some of what came after almost felt driven by OOC malice more than IC buildup, or people just fighting to fight. It's not really new for players to go cause trouble for 'world presence,' we've all encountered a scenario in which someone was very obviously just trying to get a 5th danger in.
As far as the spawning in with uniques and sigs and etc. etc. some of that emerges as a result of characters undergoing major development and apping for the capacity to do that, but the notion of dying before your app is approved is real right now when it can take months to get a response for even minor things.
Of course people want to app for a stronger weapon, people want feel a sense of progression. Of course, as has been noted, you almost need them to keep even with some people these days. There is an arms race in play. Such is the nature of power creep, where 'well X group has Y thing and therefore we need to make something stronger by comparison to keep up' until you end up in statwall hell. Sometimes you did just make a really special piece of kit from rare ingredients and it was neat.
On the flip side a lot of them are just a statstick, and I always enjoy seeing weird abilities on equipment or just abilities straight-up. Lets be real, big number weapon is kind of boring compared to 'it does WHAT' equipment. I wish more apps would be along the lines of creating wonders or making things reproducible, but the majority of them from what I know are just a stat boosted piece of kit. Even so, it smacks you in the face to see someone spawn in with one already when you have to wait for a while. Makes your own efforts feel cheapened by comparison. The wait only compounds that, a sense of 'I waited months to get this and they just have it?'
Aetius so far has been rolling everyone for a while now. I don't know all of what is going on within it. I do know that there was a very strong sentiment within the republic that the faction basically existed to blow up older nations, and I know that there've been a lot of raised eyebrows at the volume of unique weapons visible. Including the ones that allowed forced caps. Aetius ate dirt for a while in the early years, but suddenly a number of characters appeared at about the same time, all with the same batch of unique weapons, and started punching way higher than was expected for how fresh they were.
Undoubtedly no small part of the suspicion and hard stares are from a lack of knowledge of what the other group actually did or has. A lot of the salt regarding Aetius is that frankly, most people don't really know why they're so cracked in recent months. We know they have unique weapons, we know they have sigs of some kind, we know the owner is in the faction, we know they were basically founded around a new class - and there's a whole lot of OOC weight behind it regarding a lot of discourse of people bitching about specific characters or countries OOCly for existing "too long" - but nobody really knows how strong those things actually are or what they really have. Just that something is there. Speculation flows from that point on.
People see a group of guys who have weird shit and they're suddenly winning at everything with the owner standing right there and get suspicious. Nobody actually knows what they have, or how strong it is. They just know that its there, and they feel targeted. People aren't going to trust whatever the players in the faction have to say about it either. Conflict of interest. Especially noted was the feeling of bad faith surrounding it on an OOC level from, to put it bluntly, people shit-talking the targeted factions out of character for a long time.
Personally, I have no idea what is really going on. I'm just doing my thing, or trying to at least. One of the things that appeals to me the most about this game is how much the players can influence the world or setting. In theory you can come up with weird, gamechanging things that provide all manner of hooks and pulls and so on for other people to go off of. It's very cool in such a way. Sometimes, and I do feel it myself as well, I think people get too caught up in world arcs or massive picture events and lose sight of the 'role' in 'roleplaying game.' A sense of 'ok but how does that affect you specifically' needs to be kept. Some of the most fun I had was early on when the world felt small and it was just me and Mars and Rio and my full attention was centered around like 5 PCs.
Some of that I think gets fed into by the small size and relative emptiness of the game world. Because, frankly, when you can cross it very quickly and it is largely devoid of things to do that aren't centered around messing with each other, you don't run in to 'local problems.' Local issues rapidly become global ones. In some settings, you'd just ignore the superpowered faction because- well, they're way over there, you're way over here. But right now, that's not really doable- they're very close by for how long it takes to reach them, and don't really have anything else to occupy their attention - neither do you.
As for apps:
It would be nice to be able to ask for the status of a form application after a bit, because sometimes it just gets lost in the mass of files - even after being approved.
As for Tactical: the direction it wants to take the game is far more RPG centered, and there's other systems that are indev to further that along. This includes a dissolution of common item applications behind a more robust crafting system and a sense of 'world regions.' All of that is good, I think, in the long run. Very good. Honestly, hyped for what I hear is planned going forward. Obviously the launch is going to be rough, it always is, but Eternia's actual built in roleplaying game features are... very limited right now. And really, the item shift towards a material-assembly based system would take a lot of the load off of things, I feel.
As for the magic circulation:
It's really easy to slap together a 'metabuild' of just whatever's really strong right now and go fuck up most people that you run into without much answerability unless there's some huge skill or statwall. Build matters a lot, verb skill takes a very long time to cultivate, and frankly I think Tactical will be healthy for the game in the sense that it helps even things out a little. Trees are not created equal, and a lot of the time - especially for myself - I feel like I'm having to make a ton of gear just to make the weird thing competitive. And that especially scales with a few other issues. The map is, frankly, tiny (And from what I hear there are plans to fix this kind of thing with 'regions' or something which is good) and its very very easy to bump into people five steps into the woods and immediately die to whatever's simply the strongest setup right now. There have been some builds that are just crazy good and have been for a long time, and the gap is large. Tactical might help this, I think so at least. I hope so. It'll be rough on launch I'm sure.
As for the updates:
From what I understand, the reason there have not been a lot of updates recently is because the current direction for the staff is based around fundamentally reworking the underlying structure of the game, in a direction that I personally think sounds really, really appealing. Eternia needs more RPG features. It is a rework that has become necessary, because as the game has grown and grown, the established framework has not been able to keep up with it. That is what I have been told, essentially, is part of the issue with response times. These things worked early on, but now it's gotten out of hand to do it all manually.
The focus also seems to more enable groups of players to be less involved with other groups and more localized - and while at first woah hey hold on less involvement is bad, right? Well- maybe not. Sometimes stories need a little self-containment, and right now with the size of the world and the relative lack of things to do in it outside of mess with each other, it almost feels like people get a little TOO involved with TOO MANY other characters.
Maybe I'm not articulating that very well... but for example, someone on the other side of the region should have a much harder time beefing with you than they currently do when they can cross the distance in like 30 seconds. Localized stories, localized problems. Things like giant evil super nation or by contrast giant good guy super nation would be much less of a suffocating presence if they weren't effectively locked in a shoebox with you and you could get some breathing room from them. If each of you had other things to do than mess with each other, expeditions, monster hunting, etc. This was spoken of a little. Tactical also helps with creating NPC enemies, too.
On the whole, I think that... there's a lot of salt flowing around Aetius due to their circumstances.
I think the way the development is aimed is intended to fix a lot of things that have become fundamental glaring issues, and that it hasn't had a major update in a while because of the scale of what is having to be done. Ground-up system reworks and creation.
I think that the game suffers mostly from an issue of globalizing every issue, which is furthered by the relative size of the map and the lack of other activities than to mess with each other. We shouldn't be worrying about what every other nation in the world is doing, but that's how it ends up being.
I think the issue of applications is well known and is intended to be mostly resolved with better crafting systems and a combat rework to eliminate most of what makes up their bulk.
I don't want to sound entirely negative about it all. I do like the game, obviously, I've been playing it a lot.
The coolest thing to me in the game is knowing that a lot of what you see has actual history of a sort behind it. It's there because someone made it. How they did that, is up to be discovered. Made for a sort of 'living world.' That is still there.
I think that there has been a building level of OOC resentment towards various groups over the past year that has boiled over into IC to an extent, too. I don't really know how to answer that.
I think the globalizing issue as above is a huge part of it. Conflict and struggle can drive stories, but right now the only main sort of outlet for that is PVP. If you want to play as bandits, cultists, adventurers, monster hunters... there's just not a lot for you to do except get in a war with like half the map really quick like and run the risk of bumping into a super strong character in a place they really shouldn't be patrolling due to distance but due to game mechanics its just... well, not that far away OOCly for them to wander.
I think that part of the reason people get so mad or so pressured over things is how long it takes to get them vs how fast they can get taken away.
I think the staff are well aware of a lot of these above issues and the development is focused around addressing them, and I think things will improve afterwards. A lot of the current state is temporary, but it will repeat for a while because it exists that way for a reason. That's not to say the game is 'bad' right now, I'm sure a lot of people are still enjoying themselves. These are just the issues that I've noticed as I see them.
Edit:
Something upon thinking it over that I also would say is my biggest spotted problem (ties into the map size). There is a lack of conflict sources in the current setup that are not life and death fights with other people.
For example: When I was messing with Clan Crownforge as Mordeaux, I wanted to give them some sort of nemesis to deal with. The problem is that there really wasn't a lot in place to do that. My options basically boiled down to 'danger in the woods' or 'declare war.' I would have wanted to do things like raid caravans, set up dens of infected monsters, so on, eventually building up to the caproll fight as a real showdown when they finally either catch him at some bastion he's set up or he assails them with a legion of monstrosities, with a lot of plot and buildup behind it- and that just... isn't there.
This extends to characters like demons, bandits, beasts, and cultists. It is very difficult for them to do their thing, because their only real options are fighting another PC immediately and possibly running into super strong guys very fast as the word gets back and the map is a funnel for such things. People really, really need other methods of engaging with each other that prompt some kind of buildup and have some growth and rivalry beyond IMMEDIATELY leaping into the final showdown or beating each other up in the woods over and over. If you want to play a bandit or a thief, who are you stealing from? Other PCs. And if its something valuable? War time. There's not a lot of options for both heroes and antagonists to 'build up' off of environmental actions and lower-level engagements. If you want to play a monster hunter you're pretty much SoL as far as doing things goes.