Zuma/Daimons

[Jhaelen Irsei]

You are joking right? Until recently the Zuma didn't HAVE a CS advantage, at least not compared to realms like Astrum. These large armies are a recent thing.

Get OVER the idea that the Zuma are the antagonist of the island. They might be that is true, but their is nothing to suggest that actually is there role. In fact if we look at how things have panned out recently it would appear that they are more a resource for canny player antagonist to use, with the associated risks if you don't approach things correctly.

This is the interesting thing of the Zumas indeed. They're not the regular Daimons from pop culture (comics, movie, etc).

They're a localized force tough, in East Dwilight they don't play any role and this causes a "shift" in players' experience on Dwilight.

[fodder]

I would challenge anyone with the unfortunate job of running the Zuma to run them without a great CS advantage. It's too much of an easy I Win button and that dominates the way most people think about them. I'm enjoying myself on Dwilight more than usual (which is to say, at all) because I don't care if my character dies and my character cares less if he dies than most do (since he's old).

... why should it not win?

And even that wouldn't bother me if there were any discernible way the Zuma could be divided, co-opted, or conquered.

why should there be a need for that to happen to zuma?

[Carna]

When the !@#$ hit the fan between the Zuma Coalition and Barca, two things happened. Dramatic decline in activity levels and the loss of at least a couple of players. I know its directly related because my brother was one of the players. I wasn't too far from not bothering myself. They are an unbeatable force that can randomly stand up and walk over anyone in their path. "It adds an element of danger" is a poxy excuse for someone going on an ego trip. I'm absolutely fine with going up against a vastly superior force, so long as I know I'm not wasting my time putting up a fight. As far as insta-kill jobs like the Zuma are in play, what's the point? The admin will either stop at some point or not.

It may be considered a wonderful attraction and a damn good reason to join neighbouring realms like Barca and Terran, but I'd bet the vast majority of people in that mindframe are not in Barca or Terran or Asylon. They do not make it fun to play. They have caused players to stop playing. And as for myself, I could just move realm if I don't like it, but why should I bother? Its as easy to just ignore they exist and let the admin do what they're going to do. Not like there's a chance of stopping them from doing just that. And therein lies why I am one of the people who said I "hated" them. Too strong a word, but I definiately don't appreciate them or think they're a brilliant part of the game. More like the most off-putting.

Finn.

[Anaris]

No. I want more GMs, not less. I'm fine with GMs ROTFLstomping Terran if they want. I'm fine with GMs doing nothing at all. It's the sporadic, hit-or-miss unreliable behavior that bothers me. And even that wouldn't bother me if there were any discernible way the Zuma could be divided, co-opted, or conquered. But, as it is, the Zuma are strong enough to require constant attention, but do very little with it, meaning it's boring.

Vellos, you haven't been listening, so I'm going to get out my chloroform and tattoo needles, knock you out, and tattoo the following in reverse on your forehead:

It doesn't matter how many GMs there are, Tom still won't let you turn the Zuma against each other.

OK, now look in the mirror.

Turn away.

Now look in the mirror again, and notice that it's still there.

Read it.

Does that help you understand why your argument makes no bloody sense whatsoever?

[songqu88@gmail.com]

Here's a chilling fact: The Zuma GM who plays the Daimonbreeds does not go out of his way to bother human realms. Really, his MO seems to be to sit in his regions doing nothing, which is the very nothing that some people have said was boring not too long ago. Seriously he sits in his regions doing nothing (or the closest thing to nothing that is possible). He's done that for a very very long time already, and when complaints were getting heated here, and I suggested that we once more withdraw and do nothing so people could cool down, he declined out of interest and respect for the interactions you people who are now complaining have initiated. So be a little humble to know that you're playing with someone who's so accomodating. I know I'd probably not make the same decision.

Now, usually things only happen if people go into Zumalands. This is important because most of the time the only way that a remote message gets acknowledged is something that people don't appreciate and ironically even attack. Most of those realms don't even know how lucky they are. (People will roll their eyes and be like "there goes Artemesia being all pseudocryptic with his nonsense again". Makes me sometimes want to just sit back, relax, and watch people fail on their own. Least then no one can blame me for anything.)

We have yet to hear from the player behind Flavia, who actually managed to become ruler because she was slick enough to figure out how to essentially use the daimons to put herself on the throne. We have yet to hear from the player behind Edmund Ryan in Summerdale. Remember, Summerdale before had declarations against it because they harbored Bowie. Those declarations have since been dissolved. Wonder why, hmmm...?

You could also try to find the myriad of repeat sellers who have gone in and out of the Zuma Coalition with neither incidence to themselves or their realms. Madina is a perennial favorite. Sure, they had that one hitch when Vesna was still around, but since then, they've pretty much been number one in terms of people coming into Zuma lands. Also number one for people who go away without causing any trouble. Go ask them what their secret is, since they're definitely close enough to see daimons breathing down their necks.

[Scarlett]

The extent to which the people involved with the Zuma or with the devs have the attitude of the exasperated babysitter is remarkable. This is typically a sign of a death spiral in any campaign. You're talking to Vellos like he's a child when he's the guy who is most directly concerned with the Zuma as he lives next door. Maybe he doesn't have to like the Zuma, but who, exactly, do you think you are serving? Yourselves? Some nonspecific players who are reveling in all this? What is your mission as GMs and developers, and how do you measure the success of that mission?

I don't have a pony in this show. I don't care at all about what happens to my Dwilight toon, but this entire thread consists of people registering varying degrees of legitimate complaints and then being told how wrong they are for complaining. I understand how frustrating dealing with players can be, but at some point it seems to me that it doesn't matter if you think they're all morons if what you are doing is not having the desired effect.

Two out of every four good players playing within my bm-o-sphere in 2007 and 2008 left when the game terms were being dictated by region maintenance and TMP. Another one out of four left after SMA never panned out on Dwilight, with its enormous distances, low population, and tremendous travel times. I am not sure that BM knows what kind of player it wants, but like the Zuma, I wish it would decide already and start catering to at least one group. Players have the luxury of bitching without providing solutions or whining for no reason at all. Developers and GMs do not. You run a service. I suggest you examine why.

[songqu88@gmail.com]

...yep, people ignore me...

So uh, Dev Team people, some numbers please. How big of an influence does the Zuma actually have on Dwilight? Meaning, how many players are in the western Dwilight continent playing in the following realms: Iashalur, Astrum, Kabrinskia, Asylon, Terran, Barca, Aurvandil, Madina, D'Hara? Of those, how many have ever seen a daimon? I believe we can safely rule out Astrum, Kabrinskia, and Aurvandil as having a daimon in their actual regions. I also believe Iashalur never actually had a daimon in their regions.

Now, let's go to the bigger picture. How many active players play on Dwilight? How many active players play only on Dwilight? How many active players play on continents to the exception of Dwilight (Anywhere but Dwilight)? How many active players total (throughout the game) as of now?

I have a hunch that the percentage of people who would in the least bit be affected by the Zuma (Those realms I listed) are extremely small, and furthermore, the players within those realms who actually care or would in fact be really affected are even smaller still. I really believe that such a small change will hardly affect player count in the total picture of BM as a game that involves way more than the Zuma on Dwilight.

But don't believe me. Let's ask Anaris or someone for the numbers.

[Scarlett]

I was in Fissoa and then Luria Nova for a while before moving over to Terran, and you're correct, other than a general sense that 'something was out there' I knew nothing at all about the Zuma except to see 'Zuma Coalition vs. (somebody)' 'Attacker victory.' In Madina, Fissoa, and Luria Nova, things were dull for the usual reason of too many regions, too few players, and too long travel times. The Zuma didn't enter into the equation.

But this is a red herring. In measuring the success of the Zuma, you can't look at 'who aren't they bothering.' If that's the metric then just axe them so that everybody can enjoy this status of 'not being bothered.' The metric should be 'what are they adding that wasn't there before,' at what cost, and is the benefit worth the cost. It's also (and obviously) important to divorce this temperature-taking from the impact on any one character or group of characters; fun in BM comes from gaining and losing status and then gaining it all over again, and the various deals and schemes that are the engines for those changes. I don't even necessarily think that the players themselves have to support the idea, but somebody, somewhere, should have a yard stick for 'positive impact of all this stuff we're doing,' even if that yard stick is just 'is it producing good RP.' From my narrow perspective, that answer is easily no. If there are others to the contrary, that's cool.

[songqu88@gmail.com]

Well, you see the difficult thing here is the following: On forums, as those who are familiar with forums would know very well, generally only those who have incentive to post would do so, i.e. those with complaints.

This necessarily means that those who have no complaints or are otherwise satisfied, or those who do not know enough, do not post their opinions as often or as strongly.

You will notice in the poll already that 24/54 voters have a positive opinion of the Zuma. 15/54 have a negative opinion, EQUAL to the number of people who are either unsure or ignorant of the Zuma.

Now, you can argue that this is too small of a sample size. However, my response to that is, the representation in actual posts is very, very strongly skewed towards negative opinions. So posts have a disproportionate negative response, while the current poll is still suggesting otherwise. Now, now, let's think about that.

[Scarlett]

Of course. It's difficult to translate a poll into terribly useful information, but obviously it's not the case that everybody hates them.

If I'm running the Zuma, though, I want to know the following things:

- Which players am I catering to? Am I trying to attract new players, and if so, what kind? Am I willing to alienate current players in the hopes of changing the atmosphere enough so that we can get moar better new players?
- How can I tell if what I'm doing is having the desired effect? Whose good opinion is most valuable?
- How can I tell if what I'm doing is not working? Whose bad opinion is most valuable?

I don't hate the Zuma at all, either. I don't really get them and I don't see a lot of carrots that make me want to get them, but I'm definitely too small a sample size. I just see a lot of effort going into some production, and it seems to me that there are more efficient ways of spending that much time and energy on content and game events within the realm of a Serious Medieval Atmosphere (if that is even a goal anymore) that would get you a lot more of a reward.

[Anaris]

The extent to which the people involved with the Zuma or with the devs have the attitude of the exasperated babysitter is remarkable. This is typically a sign of a death spiral in any campaign. You're talking to Vellos like he's a child when he's the guy who is most directly concerned with the Zuma as he lives next door. Maybe he doesn't have to like the Zuma, but who, exactly, do you think you are serving? Yourselves? Some nonspecific players who are reveling in all this? What is your mission as GMs and developers, and how do you measure the success of that mission?

I serve Tom.

He put the Zuma on Dwilight for a purpose. I don't know what that purpose is, but until he decides to change or remove them, they're there and they are what they are.

And you would not believe some of the bitchfests we've had in the past. Seriously, this is a calm and reasoned discussion by BattleMaster standards. And the vast majority of the time, it's a vocal minority doing the complaining about a particular feature or event. And the vast majority of the time, the resolution is that said vocal minority finally gives up and just gets on with the game. (Note: not "said vocal minority realizes they were wrong"; that almost never happens. Once people have formed an opinion on a particular topic of this nature, and especially once they've argued it for days on an email list or forum, they're not generally likely to back down and say, "Sorry, no, I was wrong," even if there's no credible evidence to back up their position and mountains of it to back up the other guy's. And yes, I have been on both sides of this  )

(checks Scarlett's player page)

Actually, you've been around long enough that if you ever followed the old discussion list, you might believe the bitchfests

Either way, my point here is that just because you get a long argument/flamewar on a particular topic—even if there are a half-dozen people on the side of "We need to change X about the game"—it doesn't mean that they're right, and it doesn't mean that they're going to get what they want.

I don't have a pony in this show. I don't care at all about what happens to my Dwilight toon, but this entire thread consists of people registering varying degrees of legitimate complaints and then being told how wrong they are for complaining. I understand how frustrating dealing with players can be, but at some point it seems to me that it doesn't matter if you think they're all morons if what you are doing is not having the desired effect.

First: whether the complaints are legitimate is precisely what is at issue here, so you just coming in and stating it as if it's a decided fact is pretty much begging the question.

Second: when you say "...what you are doing is not having the desired effect," I'm unsure as to whether you mean what the Zuma are doing in-game, or what all our arguing is doing on the forum. However, in the former case, if what the Zuma are doing was not having the desired effect (whatever that happens to be), I'm reasonably sure Tom would tell them to change it or remove them. And in the latter case, as I've already stated, this is an argument on the Internet. It's not going to go anywhere by its very nature. We're not going to convince Vellos and Gustav Kuriga (and the others), and they're not going to convince us, because we're coming at it from completely different premises.

Two out of every four good players playing within my bm-o-sphere in 2007 and 2008 left when the game terms were being dictated by region maintenance and TMP.

We know about this, and over the past several months, we have been working to make changes that undo the damage to the game that was caused by the old estate system and TMP.  It is a difficult process, however, because everything needs to be carefully balanced, fun, and reasonably historically accurate (pretty much in that order).

Another one out of four left after SMA never panned out on Dwilight, with its enormous distances, low population, and tremendous travel times.

I'm not sure what would have been required for you to consider SMA to have "panned out." It was never, in any way, shape, or form intended to mean, "Dwilight will be exactly like medieval Europe."

SMA is a guide for how to play your character, nothing more.  True, some people understand it and follow it better than others, but if you find someone to be consistently breaking the serious medieval atmosphere on Dwilight, you are encouraged to report them via the SMA Report link on the Messages page (though, as a warning, it may be moving somewhere else in the not-too-distant future).

I am not sure that BM knows what kind of player it wants, but like the Zuma, I wish it would decide already and start catering to at least one group.

BattleMaster cannot cater to just one group. If it were to do so, it would cease to be BattleMaster.  Yes, we could probably pull in more people by catering specifically to, say, high-powered strategy players, and abandoning the RP angle altogether—but would that be BattleMaster?  (And frankly, if we were to cater specifically to the roleplay players, we might as well close up BattleMaster and return to its play-by-post roots, because you'll never be able to make game mechanics to fit everybody's favorite roleplay. Not to mention there's nowhere near enough of them to sustain the game.)

Players have the luxury of bitching without providing solutions or whining for no reason at all. Developers and GMs do not. You run a service. I suggest you examine why.

We run a free game. In our free time. At, in fact, Tom's personal expense.

Yes, you have the luxury of bitching without providing solutions or whining for no reason at all.

And you know what we have?

The luxury of telling you to piss off.

Fortunately for you, we are not exercising that luxury. We are telling you why your arguments are useless, incorrect, or irrelevant. We are engaging with you. We are, in fact, trying very hard to make this game better.

But making the game better does not—cannot—mean bowing to every loudmouthed whiner on the forums. If we were to adopt a policy of doing that, it would lead within months to the utter ruin of the game.

[Scarlett]

Perhaps you consider that you are responding rationally to an annoying, vocal minority. This is typically the logic used to dismiss forum posters, and it's why I always assumed BM never had forums for so long. But here we are. You don't get a medal for doing this in your spare time. You agreed to do it. If that's such a burden, stop doing it, or at least stop coming here to talk about it if you're going to dismiss anything that comes across in this forum anyway. Most BM players, good or bad, have better things to do than post in the forum -- BM advertises itself as lightweight, after all.  I don't really care if you dismiss what Vellos says or what I say, but you're dismissing the entire platform as beneath you.

If you don't even know what the Zuma's purpose is, what on earth are you doing here talking about it as if you do? If all we're doing is guessing about Tom's intentions, why waste the time? You're defending something you don't even understand and telling off people who apparently don't understand it any better than you do.

It is a difficult process, however, because everything needs to be carefully balanced, fun, and reasonably historically accurate (pretty much in that order).

That is one of the reasons and the changes I've seen have been spectacular.  The system was only half the problem, though. The attitude was the other half.

I'm not sure what would have been required for you to consider SMA to have "panned out." It was never, in any way, shape, or form intended to mean, "Dwilight will be exactly like medieval Europe."

I interpreted it literally: that a serious effort would be put forth to build a medieval atmosphere. Instead it's even more fantasy than the other islands and even less medieval because of the low populations and huge travel times. That's a different discussion, though.

SMA is a guide for how to play your character, nothing more.

The 'A' in 'SMA' presumably is for 'atmosphere,' which I take to mean 'the environment of the game.' There are already guides on how to play your character. I was around when SMA was hatched, as were you, and the discussion was focused on emphasizing the feudal oath and medieval power structures. The code changes have done far more for that than Dwilight has.

For SMA to 'pan out' I would want to go to the dozen or so players with whom I was most involved five years ago and tell them to give BM another look because it's got that medieval sauce that was always a little bit on the thin side. It's not just RPers, though many are. You don't need to write tons of RP to go for the intrigue, the scheming, the medieval politics. The folks who 'got it' were frustrated by the bugs and they were frustrated by the attitude of the people in charge. You are dearly mistaken if you believe that, merely because BM is free, you can tell people to 'piss off' with no consequence.

BattleMaster cannot cater to just one group.

Obviously not, but it can decide to whom it is catering, whether that is two or nine groups. Every new realm goes through a process that BM needs to go through. New people take over and they kick out or marginalize the people they most associate with the old problems. They then promote and encourage the people they most associate with the kind of realm they want.  You can make the best structure and write the best code for any game like BM out there, but at the end of the day you've got nothing without dedicated players to make your atmosphere. The kind of players who will put in just as much time as you do writing wiki pages, welcoming new players, and arranging the blobs of text that make up BM into something that feels alive and organic rather than a collection of database queries. 

I do recall the bitchfests of yore. The reason I left the d-lists was because of smug, arrogant posts like yours. I put in my time as a titan and a wiki presence and eventually got tired not of the players bitching or the system (which doesn't bother me as much as it bothered some) but of attitudes like yours. Gratitude and accommodation are two way streets. You shrug off input from the handful of big guns BM has left and then you expect them to be grateful that you only suggested rather than outright said that they could piss off. The more time I spend reading posts like yours and reading about the Zuma -- whose summary seems to be 'you have NO IDEA how cool they could be, you are ignorant! oh and so am I, all hail Tom' -- the more I am blown away that the discussion here never got past the kid stuff we had on the d-list.

It sounds like you want a suggestion box, not a discussion forum.

[songqu88@gmail.com]

How about anyone still with complaints sends an email to Tom privately.

[Creed]

I personally enjoy the Daimons on Dwilight but I believed they need to be nerfed  some what for example their ability to pretty much fly across the continent so much faster then any of us can move. I think they should be able to move a little bit faster but not to what they can do now.

[Indirik]

I personally enjoy the Daimons on Dwilight but I believed they need to be nerfed  some what for example their ability to pretty much fly across the continent so much faster then any of us can move. I think they should be able to move a little bit faster but not to what they can do now.

So far as I am aware, the daimons on Dwilight have no special travel abilities at all. Nor are they any faster than regular player characters. Any appearance of "flying across the continent" is merely player perception.