by Azaroth | March 22nd, 2010
Humility, Spirituality and Honesty are three of the hardest action lists to populate in the Virtue System. I’m looking for thoughts here from the community, because each list of actions should be quite extensive. I find myself a little stumped here, and I know my list isn’t long enough.
Start with basic actions that give or take points. That’s the most important part.
If you feel so inspired, go for quests and achievements and so on.
Basic actions that contribute to a Virtue score should be dead logical. They can’t be there for the sake of being there, or else you’re designing for a game. What we’re doing here is designing for a world. The point of the Virtue system is to add breadth to the world and to quantify a player’s actions within it. A point in compassion might be had by healing a small animal… but never by bringing ten feathers to a quest NPC.
If that quest NPC is a plucked chicken, then maybe.
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Humility++: Joining someone else’s guild.
Spirituality++: Using spirit speak succesfully, resurrecting someone.
Honesty++: Points for running a succesful (honest) vendor?
Honesty–: Killing someone within 2 minutes after resurrecting them.
How would you judge an honest vendor from a dishonest one? Compare prices across the entire server, I suppose. That might be impractical. But interesting!
Res killing might fit more into Shame, Wrong, Despise, or something else.
I remember Greybeard used to wear armour under a robe and steal from people, making them think he was a thief and then killing them when they attacked. Now THAT should net Deceit points. But I’m not sure how you’d detect it, or a broader range of actions like it. ;)
It’s funny, though. Because I think a relatively invisible system is going to end up being a massive, massive amount of coding.
RD, you want to volunteer? ;)
Something like this could quickly get away from you programming wise. You can find a wealth of answers to this question by thinking more about the root meaning of each of the word and its relation to UO skills.
Humility is typically brought about through loss or failure.
Spiritually is the belief in things otherworldly.
Honesty you can think of as not partaking in anything deceitful.
That being said you can pull a lot from that. Magery builds spirituality. Failure events can be tied to humility. Honesty you can lower with any thief related skills and raise with any crafting skill. “Honest days work”. Time wise tethering honesty to player to player transactions would be an epic coding time sink for not much result. If you were going to associate honesty with anything I’d stick with NPC transactions only. I would keep the trigger events simple and rely on a wide variety to make the system robust. A couple grains of sand isn’t intriguing but an entire desert full is amazing.
Honesty–: Ripping off someone else’s SAMP server and stealing their population.
:P. How you been, Dave?
Someone ripped off someone else’s free server?
I’m shocked.
There’s a good reason I talk very sparingly about what we’re doing in public. I also fully expect everything I do talk about to get ripped off. ;)
Bump.
Yeah I’m confused as to the implications of that one. Not sure if I got accused of something or if that was some round about apology? <3 eDrama.
Yep, exactly.
As far as coding time… that’ll be on the shoulders of the lead coder (whoever decides to adopt the final system). I’ll have them run through the list and cross off anything that causes unintentionally large amounts of wasted time. Not that I’m just going to add things willy-nilly, but they’ll have the final say there. Like I said, running through all of the prices on the server in regards to player vendors… hey, that’d be an awesome way to award honesty points. But… yeah, probably not too practical. Although maybe someone could do it very, very simply without adding any strain on the server. Maybe they could, who knows.
One thing I do like is honesty points in relation to crafting. Not only could honesty points accrue passively in relation to using crafting skills, but I’m sure very simple static quests could be added to gauge honesty.
Point from above:
A lot of the time, there’s not much in the way of basic actions that you can base points in this system off of, and it comes down to adding choice-based quests.
So hopefully people see that as proper and world-y when it happens, and they don’t go ahead and draw a direct line between our quests and the quests most other games have.
That said:
Still need an XMLSpawner2 guy (or guys). Ideally with some background in coding.
If you WANT to start learning XMLSpawner2, it’s REALLY not that difficult. It’s just that the documentation is bad, and I need you to be able to get pretty frigging creative sometimes. But if you’re hungry for a set of green robes on the new IPY, this is the way to go about it. Lead Seer sounds like a great title, doesn’t it?
Curious, what programming language are your programmers writing in for IPY 2.0?
C#, sir.
“That being said you can pull a lot from that. Magery builds spirituality. Failure events can be tied to humility. Honesty you can lower with any thief related skills and raise with any crafting skill.”
I was excited about the idea of a virtue system because I think it could be a great way to challenge people to reflect on how their actions in the game reflect and affect their character. Tying virtues to in-game mechanics in an arbitrary way, like the above post suggests, seems to me meaningless and uninteresting. If that’s what you do end up going for, the system will be at best a technical flourish, like the reputation system with a twist, rather than something valuable and innovative.
Maybe I’m the only one who is interested in seeing coding reflect virtues, rather than “virtues” reflecting coding (which is what happened with the noto/rep systems). Either way is fine with me, it won’t effect my decision to play or not, but I’m curious to know which it is. So what’s the point of making a virtue system? A make-over for the reputation system, or something else?
Both. ;)
But I think I make my intentions pretty clear. I hope. Maybe?
@Domnu: Hah, I’m with you there actually. Revamping the virtue system, in my humble opinion, doesn’t really add much value to what I like about UO. I’m just kind of tossing out suggestions that aren’t too difficult from a programming perspective, keeping the actions relitively simple.
Honestly, I could care less what the title of the people I’m killing are but if it means more players are interested in playing IPY, then I’d like to see the idea florish.
Not sure if it’s the intention of this thread to discuss what the benefits are / will be, rather to figure out already in place game actions that would make sense to add or subtract from each of these virtues. From the topic I can assume that Az has an acceptably long list of actions for the other virtues. The other thread on this topic got derailed as well, and I think covered most of the concerns regarding the quaestions of “how do you make it valuable?” “What would make it worth while?” etc. etc.
Not that your thoughts aren’t valid, because I do agree that there should be something specific regarding uniqueness for each chosen playstyle and it’s correspnding virtue(s), or the system will be meaningless. One of the ideas that I thoguht was really interesting was to make different virtues appear at war with / allied with each other.
Obviously this would mean that virtues associated with crafting playstyles would have to be fleshed out in a way where they wouldn’t be placed at war with a virtue associated with a PvPer’s playstyle. Instead, you could “ally” them with say, NPCs for increased gold received for selling items to them or something.
With the proposed difficulty of raising skills, there needs to be a significant amount of incentive for someone wanting to be a crafter anyway.
With that said, that porposed incentives (or lack thereof) for each virtue and consequently playstyle cannot adequately be determined without first having an extensive list of actions to bind to each virtue.
See what I did there? I didn’t actually give any suggestions regarding the topic at hand!
More suggestions, please. ;)
Synching 3 or more flamestrikes on yaht’s face. Plus 1 spirituality because you have to communicate in a world separate from the UO world in order to do it.
First, I don’t understand why you still don’t have forums set up. It would make these discussions much easier. Next, I figured you were well into development by now, but from your recent statements, it seems like you haven’t even begun, and that you are still fleshing out the design?
Here are a couple quick ideas. I didn’t spend much time on them, but they could probably spur some direction.
Honesty-
Items are tagged with the playerID who either created the item or the first player to loot a newly generated item (ex. Lich dies, item is generated with no playerID attached, that item is then looted by X player, and now his playerID is bound to the item).
A player gains a small bit of honesty when trading (through a trade transaction) an item that is bound to their playerID.
If a murderer obtains an item tagged with another playerID, that item is flagged and an honesty hit is taken when trading that item to another player.
Humility –
Neg Humility – Spamming balance at the bank when your balance is above X
Neg Humility – Wearing a full suit of rare ore armor.
Pos Humility – Not opening a players corpse who is near your characters skill level and isn’t naked that you killed. Humility is gained when the corpse decays (even if it was looted by another).
Pos Humility – Throwing rare items, or items of high value into the trash, and having those items be destroyed (by trash collection).
Spirituality –
Some sort of confessional, where you go to a healer and confess your sins, and based on your recent actions and time since your last confession the healer requires certain items (or gold) to be given to him.
Maybe after you kill another player you are given the option to sacrifice 100gp to help them in the afterlife (kinda like putting coins on somebody’s eyes after they pass).
We’re about to pass the 8 months of discussion mark now, and I’m starting to feel like we’ve been had. It would be reassuring to have some sort of progress update, Az. Keep in mind most of us are part of the work force now, and recognize the limitations you’re working with, so no matter where you are in the process we’ll be understanding. It would just be nice to have some validation that we aren’t fools for still hoping to see an IPY 2.0.
I’d rather let people believe what they’d like.
If you want to believe it’ll never happen, that’s okay. If you want to believe it will, that’s okay too.
Silence is annoying, and the blogging amounts to a tease. I realize. Honestly, my blog should be about how I went out to dinner and there was a cockroach under the table, and the only thing you see regarding IPY should be a placeholder webpage if I want to be quiet and stealthy about things. But I did genuinely want to involve those that were most interested.
I also knew that the problem with that was going to be that people got pissed off eventually.
You’re not the first guy to get a bit angry, won’t be the last (REALLY won’t be the last).
But really… I’m very comfortable letting people think what they will at this point.
I think hype and wild promises are lame.
Humility + Donating Gold to Npcs / Escorts
Humility – Begging
Spirituality + Resurrecting a Blue ghost
Spirituality – Resurrecting a criminal or red ghost
Honesty + ?
Honesty – Stealing / Looting from Innocents.
That’s the idea. Keep those actions as dead simple as possible.
More complex reasons for handing out points can be suggested as quests or achievements. We’re building the base of a pyramid here.
if this could be tied into the chaos/order system, it would be pretty good…
whether you are forced into chaos or order off the bat, automatically once you get to a certain skillcap or at your own discretion, it would make it interesting and worthwhile to stick to one playstyle with advantages and disadvantages to both…
otherwise, if this virute system is not tied into the ‘world’ significantly enough that players will need to consider it/’live’ by it in their gameplay, nobody will give a rats ass.
some benefits would be:
1 dungeon for order/1 dungeon for chaos.
city for just order, city for just chaos (guards will run after you if you are in a wrong city based on your chaos/order standing)
etc…
This system will be tied into everything by the time we’re done. That’s the point of it.
Also: O/C isn’t even slated to exist as of right now.
I will love you long time if this means a faction like system.
Honesty + return stolen/looted items to original owner (like maybe make a thing where you could see whom it was taken from)
More!
How about this:
Beta 1 slot to the person who produces the best list.
(I almost said longest, but that may have been a bad idea).
Honesty – Taking from anothers treasure chest.
Honesty + Untrapping trapped chests [perventing damage upon someone instade of just not doing anything]
how would you code “ownership” of a treasure chest?
2nd item, magic trap, untrap macro to exploit that mechanic.
certain actions need to be applied to certain specific “tiers” of “virtue reputation” as specified in the other thread.
for example, snooping from someone gives negative honesty from 0 to -1000 honesty. At -1000, snooping can no longer decrease that virtue. from -1000 to -2000 the virtue would be able to be decreased by attempted stealing. The “tiers” in which each ability is placed with have to be determined by the skill required to perform each action in order to scale accordingly.
This is how I picture this system anyway. This would make it so that the virtue would be a reflection of the person’s playstyle, and not the other way around. The idea is to get a system that is adequately tracked by how people already play the game. With that in mind:
Honesty negative:
snooping a blue
stealing from a blue
Trapping a container (with tinkering, not magic trap spell)
popping a container to break magic trap
casting incognito
more coming.
auctually its already in uo when you loot from someones treasure that they got from a tmap they flag grey if not in party.
Visiting shrines should give spirituality.
Visiting healers for resurrection should give positive spirituality.
Killing priests and healer NPCs should give negative spirituality.
If you have any religion based evil NPCs – templars or zealots or whatever, killing them could affect spirituality (either negative or positively)
Donating to wandering healers, a tithe – positive spirituality
Lockpicking – negative honesty
Buying cheap things from vendors – positive humility
Buying extremely expensive vendor items – negative humility
Slaying a rat – positive humility
Slaying a dragon – negative humility
I’ll see if I can think of a few more. The thing is the more complex we make our suggestions, the more work we make for potential coders and the longer it’ll take to get this system done… so keep em simple
“I’ve only got 500 more npcs of this faction to kill before I’m Exaulted!”
- A Blue
Geez, Bird, this is going to be a real turkey shoot!
PS. the official unofficial forums complements of The Macro Police
forums (dot) assholeroth (dot) org
I see you’ve already got a fan site Az.
I’m like Kobe. I gave myself a nickname. But it actually stuck.
There’s been some good suggestions so far, by the way. Keep ‘em coming. Do my job for me, thanks. ;)