11-21-2021, 01:40 AM
There's truth to every joke - and there is truth to the joke that eternia is a pvp game
If you want to do a significant blow to your enemy and/ or get rid of them altogether - you have to pvp them (or someone else must, i.e your ally)
If you want to achieve combat excellence - you must pvp
If you want to win wars/ battles etc - you must pvp
The list goes on
There are, of course, what i'd call "secondary objectives" that are achievable - you can achieve diplomacy with someone and gain military ally that you won't have to pvp, or you can create a project that weakens your enemy (see: lighthouse in spires), but even then, there's a big thing that you have to consider whenever you shoot for these "secondary objectives" that are not pvp
Unless it falls into your hand, you will not achieve it
A diplomacy ally would not be achieved unless the other party is down for it already. The lighthouse would never be created if admin team isn't down for that idea, and so on. This can be opposed with "but dev-", though let's be honest - if the idea is generally not welcomed/ not liked etc, usually no amount of dev will overcome it. It's very rare that it is received after all in the future; this isn't necessarily a bad thing, because bad ideas are not welcomed for a reason, but it means that your other option is PVP.
How to fix that?
Idk. To be honest I don't think that Eternia's pvp nature will ever be changed - but there's one big difference that I noticed between spires and esshar
Spires rewarded you based on how far you go, the sky was the limit.
Esshar rewards you based on how fair it would be to others.
You can argue against it by saying "but there are characters like Nidaz that have achieved so much that is well beyond fairness", yeah well news flash a person dedicating more than 1 OOC year to a character is a very rare exception, it should not be a standard (even then Nidaz is still beatable and there have been stronger characters from You Know Which Arc)
As of right now, the Very Brief And Down To Earth Formula On How to Make A Strong Character is:
1. have good build. the more meta it is, the better
2. have IC that isn't terrible and makes at least some sense
3. get your 2 hiddens by the time you're young adult or something
4. congrats, you're a strong character. you might as well go AFK because there's about 95% chance you will not get anything else - unless you wanted IC projects
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I didn't word it correctly, but that's the perception I'm having on Eternia as of now. I've had 3 characters so far on this iteration and what it boils down to is that most characters are going to go about with 2 hiddens - I get the necessity of this, but...
If you virtually limit all characters to 2 hiddens, this only encourages more selective, careful choice of metabuild - because quite often 2 hiddens is simply not enough to overcome a meta build
And this feeds back into the loop that Eternia is a PVP game.
>select build that is not meta
>get beat by everyone
>can't do that much unless things go very well for you in secondary objectives
>get 2 hiddens - still can't beat because your build isn't meta
TLDR:
Maybe not limiting characters to 2 hiddens and thus forcing them to select their build very carefully and returning to Spires formula of rewards based on merit and not what would be fair to everybody else is going to improve the situation.
To Hipster's point, by rewarding characters based on merit and not "overall fairness", that exceptional character (with the merits outlined in his post) might as well overcome against the odds of meta build by sheer development and eventually becoming stronger than them; relying on the "secondary objectives" is faulty, it may or may not happen.
Because let's be real - Eternia will never achieve perfect balance where a thing such as "meta build" disappears entirely.
If you want to do a significant blow to your enemy and/ or get rid of them altogether - you have to pvp them (or someone else must, i.e your ally)
If you want to achieve combat excellence - you must pvp
If you want to win wars/ battles etc - you must pvp
The list goes on
There are, of course, what i'd call "secondary objectives" that are achievable - you can achieve diplomacy with someone and gain military ally that you won't have to pvp, or you can create a project that weakens your enemy (see: lighthouse in spires), but even then, there's a big thing that you have to consider whenever you shoot for these "secondary objectives" that are not pvp
Unless it falls into your hand, you will not achieve it
A diplomacy ally would not be achieved unless the other party is down for it already. The lighthouse would never be created if admin team isn't down for that idea, and so on. This can be opposed with "but dev-", though let's be honest - if the idea is generally not welcomed/ not liked etc, usually no amount of dev will overcome it. It's very rare that it is received after all in the future; this isn't necessarily a bad thing, because bad ideas are not welcomed for a reason, but it means that your other option is PVP.
How to fix that?
Idk. To be honest I don't think that Eternia's pvp nature will ever be changed - but there's one big difference that I noticed between spires and esshar
Spires rewarded you based on how far you go, the sky was the limit.
Esshar rewards you based on how fair it would be to others.
You can argue against it by saying "but there are characters like Nidaz that have achieved so much that is well beyond fairness", yeah well news flash a person dedicating more than 1 OOC year to a character is a very rare exception, it should not be a standard (even then Nidaz is still beatable and there have been stronger characters from You Know Which Arc)
As of right now, the Very Brief And Down To Earth Formula On How to Make A Strong Character is:
1. have good build. the more meta it is, the better
2. have IC that isn't terrible and makes at least some sense
3. get your 2 hiddens by the time you're young adult or something
4. congrats, you're a strong character. you might as well go AFK because there's about 95% chance you will not get anything else - unless you wanted IC projects
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I didn't word it correctly, but that's the perception I'm having on Eternia as of now. I've had 3 characters so far on this iteration and what it boils down to is that most characters are going to go about with 2 hiddens - I get the necessity of this, but...
If you virtually limit all characters to 2 hiddens, this only encourages more selective, careful choice of metabuild - because quite often 2 hiddens is simply not enough to overcome a meta build
And this feeds back into the loop that Eternia is a PVP game.
>select build that is not meta
>get beat by everyone
>can't do that much unless things go very well for you in secondary objectives
>get 2 hiddens - still can't beat because your build isn't meta
TLDR:
Maybe not limiting characters to 2 hiddens and thus forcing them to select their build very carefully and returning to Spires formula of rewards based on merit and not what would be fair to everybody else is going to improve the situation.
To Hipster's point, by rewarding characters based on merit and not "overall fairness", that exceptional character (with the merits outlined in his post) might as well overcome against the odds of meta build by sheer development and eventually becoming stronger than them; relying on the "secondary objectives" is faulty, it may or may not happen.
Because let's be real - Eternia will never achieve perfect balance where a thing such as "meta build" disappears entirely.
![[Image: TfL47eY.png]](https://i.imgur.com/TfL47eY.png)