V4 January, 2019 Plot Feedback Thread

[Spartan]

While Alec died relatively early into this plot line, I wanted to touch on what I saw.

- Good
Watching the stream and seeing EfU - City of Rings come about has me thinking back over the last several years. I played EfU since launch and the only word I can come up with to describe the end to v4 is 'right'. Yes it was insanely frustrating at times. I am very guilty of complaining far more than I should have. However, putting it all together resulted in a story telling experience I have never seen equaled.

I especially love that true to EfU roots, not everything was fully explained. There are still multiple plot threads out there that are not tied up. No idea how EfU City of Rings will play out, but I can only hope that some of those v4 threads will continue into v5 in some form or format.

- Bad
Some of the actions on the epic events seemed geared to produce PC deaths. I am a bit of two minds on this. Looking back after the chapter change, I get the DM point of view. How do you make an event really stick in regards to the gravity of what you have done? IE taking down the Tower of the Spellguard or a main city of the Illithid? Player deaths seem to be the answer to that. If no one dies, the player base and their PCs start going ..... yeah no big lets just crush this and the setting loses a great deal of its edge feeling (v4 specifically).

On the flip side, its really frustrating as a player to lose a character you spent a lot of time on to something you dont feel you could survive given the level ranges. I am not sure if there is a good answer to this. Increasing the number of hostile NPCs causes lag. Making the NPC abilities more powerful to simulate a larger number of NPCs causes the 'unfair' argument above.

Maybe the answer is the new direction in City of Rings. Having a setting that is less 'oh shit our backs our to a wall' will not cause the DMs to need to pull out that stuff on the epic events.

Please dont take any of this the wrong way. EfU has given me more entertainment than any book or game. Its far more than a game, it is more of a hobby or even a work of art.

[TsunamiWombat]

I have no complaints. Just A+. It's understandable now that the 3 year torpor experienced was because the new setting was being worked on; and events occurred in such a way as to keep us busy or direct us to the conclusion while new systems etc were placed into the next module. I feel most complaints people have can be directly attributed to this holding pattern.

[Anonymous Lemur]

Though I was unable to play much for a while due to an ailment there was one sole issue that bothered me in the last months. That issue was ironically uncertainty, not so much an in character uncertainty, so much as an ooc one. The death of any character during these periods comes with the stress of the impending end. Which was always made out to be seemingly imminent. I noticed players latching onto characters they didn't even really enjoy playing any more, for fear that they really didn't have time to make a new one before the end that "might survive."

I think player's would have had more fun if they were told a specific date for the end and perhaps also warned that it is very likely they will be unable to play their characters any longer after that point. Would this create uncharacteristic bravery in some people? Sure, but at the same time I think it would have eased peoples minds and allowed them to relax a little instead of being so tense about absolutely having to stack all their supplies and have their high level character ready to battle in the end.

Other than that I think v4 was a fantastic setting and had some of the most fun I've had in efu during this setting. Just that it may have been detrimental in the long run to keep up the mystery of what might happen and more importantly -when- it will happen.

[Brandobaris]

There were too many loose ends to the plot. A number of secrets that were not resolved/revealed. Given the change of the  setting its a shame this wasnt done.

[Juhanian]

I really enjoyed the final event itself. Nothing like a grueling permadeath event to make it feel appropriately epic, and make you feel appropriately badass if you manage to live through it.

I hated the ending itself, though. Not because everyone died, though personally I would have preferred if we didn't, but because it seems to make most, if not all, of the events of all the previous chapters meaningless. Saving Sanctuary vs Destroying Ysinode was touted as this big meaningful server changing event that was totally up to the players, when in reality both Sanctuary and Ysinode were going to be destroyed in a week  anyway regardless of what we did. It made everything feel pointless to me, like we're just on a rollercoaster to a preordained destination and nothing we do matters. And to an extent I get that, limitations of the format means real meaningful choices are going to be a lot more limited than in a PnP campaign.

[Letsplayforfun]

Given I've hardly DMed for about 2 years, played some forgettable PCs in the meantime (Ekron, Obooto, then Noochii, for those who wonder what pcs DMs play), I'll chime in on that thread playerwise.

I've been a real fan of dismal, dark, harsh server. The early atmosphere was great, the shielded town was awesome. Initial factions were nice, and open to all kinds of pcs. We've had some cool vilains (and I'm not a pvp fan, but it certainly fits it's purpose on a server like efu). The heroic-fantasy/ mecha town actually worked very well. And all the custom efu stuff ofc is great, and just kepted piling up during v4 thanks to hard work from our tecky DMs. DM presence was good, too.

Then somewhere things went a bit downhill for me.

Factions became oriented evil only, not so much by design, but by efu culture or lack of other way. Over a very short timespan, town was open to aberrants, slimers, necromancers, monster pcs (which as a result mostly became dull adventurers imo). Back pedaling came in too late and atmosphere damage was done.

Pvp became way too encouraged (exit npcs, exit a stable law enforcement). There was everyday a pointless squirmish on the square. And with little FD (because most players are chill) which made pvp look like a respawn arena video game. The gap between powergamers crushing lvl9 in a week, then acting badass, and casual players went too wide, too, for most pvp to be enjoyable/not win only oriented/somewhat fair.

As for the metaplot, the epic backstory making believe a small town was not only surviving, but starting to fight back, where empires crumbled, just didn't stick with me. Timezone issues, ofc, as well. I've tons of playtime, but somehow kept missing what went on at US hours, which didn't help my involvement in major plot stuff.

Questing was fun, though casual metagaming from part of the playerbase became more and more irratingas server grew old. Which is no one's fault, save we all knew the quests too well, and lvlup racing became too  apparent. I did start refusing to quest with some players whom just crushed quest trains silently or metagamingly.

So, well, v4 as a player was absolutly great for me for a while, then immersion started to wane in the end, I guess, that plus usual rl priorities.

The final month was much more on par with what I adore in this server, and set back the mood as efu4 was in the beginning. It had me logging back dm wise for just that reason.

So yeah, early v4 was nice for me, then it less so.
But v5 looks, omg, so good...!

[bobofwestoregonusa]

In all honesty, the whole of the server lifespan it felt like no matter how many times armies of Pcs rallied to kill the spellguard, it never mattered. There was never any finality to them as a faction no matter how many times they were overthrown or their leaders killed, while other factions were erased from the module. The society, the EC, the Ark - all mostly by the spellguard. It would be preferfable not to see a faction be functionally immune to death in the future. Across multiple iterations of spellguard overthrow, defeat, and civil war, it never actually felt as though they were ever "defeated" because they just acted as usual regardless of their state in the city.

This frustrated a lot of people who felt like nothing they did really mattered that much because the one faction they didn't like was consistently the most powerful and they couldn't actually do anything about it no matter how many times it was overthrown.


That said I personally really enjoyed the spellguard myself but toward the end it all felt pre determined like we no longer had any impact on the outcome of the faction wars or the server end state.

EDIT: I would also like to mirror what LPFF saod about the tone of the server getting a bit wild with NPCs disappearing and pvp in the square being tediously common. The original grimy tone of EFU:R drew me in but the consistent quality kept me around. The wild intrigues and political maneuvering of different guilds looking to hold court were the most memorable thing and I think just letting them do their thing was one of the strongest things about EFU:R

[Cruzel]

I will echo something said by others:

The removed quest limits was, In my opinion: One of the best changes I've ever seen on EFU. Please, consider keeping this as the norm. Please, please, please, consider it.

Nothing was more awful than seeing high level PCs have to make excuses and miss quest trains consisting of the entire server population when there was 5/6 people online on the train. People got left behind. It sucked. Obviously, there's a question of reward, and you don't really want people cheesing their way to 10 or 11 "safely" on volts and madbao (or their v5 equivalent super easy quests)  but I feel like this aspect of the server really really improved player interactions.


It was amazing seeing high level/rank watch PCs get to go out and train/fight alongside rookies, interact and RP properly instead of just square idling and waiting for DM quests or the occasional distant shores run. it made the server feel more alive, and the strong characters were more visible and active.  I strongly wish you guys would consider keeping this, and look for ways to balance rewards rather than limit peoples' options as to what they can run.



Aside from the questing, it was wonderful seeing so many people online, the DMs were super active, everyone was hyped.  The conclusion of v4 was emotional as hell, after 11 years. I had tears in my eyes as the machine turned on.


I do think however, announcing the BIG DATES a long time in advance ensures activity, but it also caused a ton of OOC, powergamey behaviours and a lot of BURNOUT from players who died or didn't have a PC in that time. "Meh, I'll just wait until the 20th" was something I saw a lot of people say. People bumrushed quests as much as they could, and there was barely any real conflict that I saw because nobody seemed to want to pvp and waste supplies before "the big thing"   I think in future it would be fine to say "Hey leading up to the middle of january we're gonna have some MAJOR plot shit going down" but I definitely understand the nature of the choice to try and get as many people in as possible, considering this was the finale of an 11 year buildup. It gave time for people to book time off, which was great.


I guess there was a fair few points as well, that everything did seem a little railroaded at times. That's not a bad thing, but so much big stuff happened so fast, it was hard to really savor.  Ysinode died, but there was no time to celebrate. Sanctuary died, and there was no time to mourn, or really let that desperation sink in. The appetite died and svirfs were freed, but there was no time to interact or try to puzzle anything out with them.  I understand time was a constraint and the doom/gloom environment would've gotten stagnant, but i dunno. I feel like the pacing could've been handled differently, to let all the awesome things that happened truly sink in. Because they were definitely awesome things. but so much awesome was happening so fast, a lot of it got missed or just underappreciated!