Reset Password
Existing players used to logging in with their character name and moo password must signup for a website account.
- Napoleon 2h
- robotdogfighter 2s
- Bruhlicious 48m Deine Mutter stinkt nach Erbrochenem und Bier.
- AdamBlue9000 4m Rolling 526d6 damage against both of us.
a Mench 5h Doing a bit of everything.
- QueenZombean 8s
- notloose 2m
- Woeful 20s
And 18 more hiding and/or disguised
Connect to Sindome @ moo.sindome.org:5555 or just Play Now

Redwards for being a good person
UE for your good deeds!

So I am new to the game(but have played MOO's/MUD's before) and have noticed one thing: the only time outside of your 3(I think it's 3 anyway) UE a day that you get UE is when you uncover a play tip.

Well I for one would like another way to get even a minor amount of UE under my own control.

I had the idea to tie it to work, because if you're working you're being productive which generally leads to learning new things or meeting new people.

The first one that came to mind was simple. For every job you do you get a minute UE reward, something along the lines of 0.1 UE per job per location per day. So as an example you go to be a courier on Red and deliver your three packages. When you successfully complete the delivery of the third package you would get 0.1 UE.

If you see someone get shot or stabbed or otherwise assaulted and you carry them to the clinic/cloners to be saved it could be as much as a .25 UE bonus.

I'm not saying to put in things for a UE grindable type thing, but to assume everyone learns at the same rate and grows at the same speed just seems illogical to me.

Doesn't someone who works their ass off learn faster than the slacker who gets fired after one week of working someplace? That's the only situation I'd like to replicate.

I know it isn't much, but with the rest of the UE being time release it would be helpful in my thinking if my character actually grew from doing actions in the world instead of just accumulating it over a period of time.

Edit: I just realized I can't type, the title should be "Rewards", my bad xD

(Edited by Uno at 3:06 am on July 2, 2012)

The UE "question" has actually been debated on and off for some twelve years or so now.

That said, many characters have salaried jobs that don't involve repetition of an action. If someone is, for example, a CorpSec guard, what do you reward them for? What about a TERRA Agent? What if someone works as a mechanic but no one needs repairs on a given day, or they work as a cyberdoc but no one needs implants? Should they effectively be penalized by not receiving these UE rewards?

Also, why would it make sense to reward someone for helping the dying or being a good samaritan? What if that isn't part of their character? Should they have to break character to grow at the same rate as a goody two-shoes? Then we should give rewards for ignoring them as well? Or for looting the corpse? Then what prevents someone from shooting you, taking your shit, waiting a few minutes to get the 'ignoring' UE, then  having you emergency cloned?

Like as not, the only ways to fairly give out automated UE *are* grinds. Anyone can find a way to grind anything, if they have the will - which means it requires admin supervision to prevent abuse. And we'd rather be running plots and stimulating RP and conflict than policing people.

That said, not everyone *does* grow at the same rate. People get 3 UE per day dependent on them being active. Simply logging on to get your UE is 1) boring 2) against the rules 3) Completely disadvantageous, as if no one knows you from Adam ICly they have no reason to trust you, sell you the best gear etc. unless it's metagaming fuckery - which is even more against the rules. Therefore the people who grow the fastest are the ones out RPing.

Additionally, even if you gain all this UE there's no guarantee you're spending it optimally to obtain the results you want. This is one of the reasons the numbers are hidden and the exact mechanics aren't laid out - two people at the same stage of UE growth leaning in the same direction won't necessarily be equally capable.

However, I've always believed the playtips should dole out bigger rewards.  

Feel free to go as far back as 2000/2001 for plenty of threads on the subject of UE and why it works the way it works. This isn't a dead horse, it's dried horse stains on the sidewalk, with chunky bits.

This is a cyberpunk game.  We should be rewarding you for killing and betraying everyone around you in your never ending plight for survival.

This genre itself is not so much about cooperation for mutual gain, but manipulation for personal gain.

If you took someone to the clinic, you should expect that PERSON who's life you just saved, to reward you in some way.  And if they don't?  Put them back into the state you found them in and this time?  Let them bleed out.

~S

My only response is that putting UE into the game like that makes the game less about RP, and more about grinding and UE farming. That is something I never want to see happen here.
I get that this game is about personal gain and about RP primarily. It just makes it difficult to RP a person out for personal gain when you're stuck standing there with nothing you can do because you're a new character.

There's no guide to give you an idea that when you start you'll have to time sink out jobs to be able to pay rent to be able to save items to be able to time sink out jobs etc.

The RP is fantastic in this game, I agree there should be rewards for being evil too.

Maybe if there was a little more start up information that told you what the skills did, what the skills were based on and which skills *might* get you a job to make living in the city easier so you could focus more on the RP aspect it would probably alleviate a lot of the new gamer blues that comes with the whole "I have no ue and made my character with what I thought was cool and not what the game requires to be able to get any sort of decent income".

Skimpy UE + crappy jobs = bored gamer.

I have a shitty job and a small house irl, if I wanted a 9 to 5 grind every day I would go and get another job.

Call me what you will but with the fact the game will just sit there and screw you over(my UE resets when I get cloned and yet my play tips don't so I can never make up that difference in UE) and yet when you do something awesome your only reward is "Wow, I just got to do some really cool RP" just seems a little lopsided to me.

Satisfying? Yes. Enough to justify getting screwed royally the next day and not wanting to screw over everyone involved in your said screwing? Not one bit.

So is this game all about RPing and fucking everyone you see over as hard as possible? Because other games classify that as griefing.

Slithers comment seems to stem from the fact that there are too many people playing a puppydog version of a game based around strife.

And we've all lost things and have had to work hard to get them back, often times only to lose them or more in the process.

That isn't about griefing, or trying to advocate it. Conflict spawns rp and it spirals into a mess of unpredictable days on the Moo, which means less bored people.

Newbie Guide:

http://universe.sindome.org/wiki/index.php/Newbie_Guide

The "time sink" jobs are the bottom of the barrel ways to make money, meant as initial easy income while you find your footing.

There are myriad other ways of making money if you have the slightest entrepreneurial spirit. If you have no ambition or goals for your character whatsoever, then you won't be doing very much or making much money - you need to find a niche and explore it.  There are many other ways to make cash besides salaried jobs, and the majority of them involve RP.

Indeed, the highest salaried jobs in the game are typically those that either require you to get into conflict or to generate RP in other ways. Conflict is the crux of any decent story, and in the end that's what the point of RP and an RP-centric game is - the stories. Betrayal is one instigator for conflict - there are others but it's a core element of cyberpunk fiction.

Griefing is repeatedly abusing people for no reason. The point of betrayal is to do it for personal gain or advancement of your goals. You want some guy's fancy gun? Seduce their girlfriend to get his apartment codes and go take it. You got your gun, you got RP and you generate RP for the guy who just got robbed as he tries to find out the who, the how, the why and get revenge.

Look at it this way, would you rather play "Strange Days" or would you rather play "When Harry Met Sally"?

That's why I am trying to come up with ideas to make more people more capable of doing more shit!

I reread my earlier posts and it does sound like newbie whining, but it has been annoying the past two days (had a really cool RP session and then got hit by the law and now have to RP like the coolest thing this toon did never happened which is BS lol).

There needs to be something that works as an incentive to keep players involved instead of logging in and walking in circles doing what amounts to reverse fetch quests for tiny insignificant rewards. Money is only so valuable in this game, stats and skills seem to be what makes all the fun(outside of RP I mean).

Well if there isn't anything to actually keep my character involved in the city, and he has no skills to go start something besides sit there and RP with anyone who is on, then what the hell? Isn't it against the rules to reroll characters?

It just seems like the interface for such an in depth game is so cold and controlling with only having the ability to "grow" on a timed schedule.

If you can get 3 UE in a day what is the time delay between them? If one person is actively active(by that I mean engaging in in depth RP and being their character) and the other is being passively active(tabbing out and checking e-mail, watching yotube) will they both accrue UE at the same rate?

You don't need skills to go start something. A well placed lie (or truth) can start something, moving things or info for people can start something. Make yourself useful to someone who can afford to pay you.

You need to get your head out of the video game mentality in order to be successful. What skill or stat is going to let you gain other players' trust? What skill or stat is going to let you use that trust against them, or against each other?

What skill or stat is going to let you find out info from one that another is willing to pay for? What skill or stat is going to allow you to find rare commodities and resell them to players who need them, at a higher price?

Think, McFly, think!

well technically, Stealth and Perception might help with those last few points..

...but then again, nobody is going to buy what you have to sell if you don't make a name for yourself as a character.

I thought I had more to say, but I guess not.

The long-forgotten AE is relevant to this conversation... although I don't know that anyone has ever managed to figure out how it should work beyond the basic idea, let alone start coding it.

I'm pretty sure the option is there in the @assign command, but un-used.

For the un-aware, AE = assigned experience.

As Guardian said, there's been many conversations over the years, what's here on the forums represents the tip of a very (and often contentious) subject. We've briefly had "sparring" systems that allowed you to grind skills up (the library), but they were abused.

I've always liked the idea of AE being a small "mobile" pool of skill points that would constantly redistribute themselves based on skill use. The total sum of the pool would be fairly constant but each use of a skill would increase that skills share of the pool and take a little away from other skills that currently have AE on them... effectively it's a "fresh in your mind" bonus.

Then we could re-instate the library and other sparring systems to use only the above pool. Players could use them to have a degree of control over their AE distribution but there'd be no scope for abuse as the total skill points available from it is fixed.

How about instead of adding AE or whatever. You just enable people to transfer UE from player to player via training.

I.E.

Bob has professional Heavy_weapons and wants to teach Jill. He has 120 UE, so he teaches Jill Heavy_weapons and it costs HIM ue.

This would allow oldbies to invest in newbies and slow the overwhelming power of many oldbies but you should probably limit the amount an oldbie can train people on a weekly basis.

It's not just wham, bam, ninja goat master after all.

I suspect that would just encourage the creation of UE farming alts or 'buddy' accounts purely for the purpose of boosting characters.
Quote: from Rastus2 on 6:57 pm on July 21, 2012[br]I suspect that would just encourage the creation of UE farming alts or 'buddy' accounts purely for the purpose of boosting characters.

This. Or existing oldbies have their RL/OOC friends join the game and 'boost' them to oldbie status by feeding them UE, cash and gear. Meanwhile, the people who remain IC and treat all characters according to RP and IC events get left behind unless they're particularly fortunate.

I say we just have a lottery.   People that want to can put their UE into a lottery system and every week/month or whenever  those that contributed have a chance to win that lottery.  Just like a real lottery, the jackpot amount is entirely dependent on how much UE gets contributed.  

Of course their should be a limit involved in the amount of UE a person can win, therefore at least having some type of cap.  You take a chance and lose..shit happens, thanks for playing.  

Okay...I'll shut up and quit being a smart ass now.  

Between cyberware, nanos, drugs and skillsofts you can actually get to nearly oldbie/late-midbie stats/skills. I just did the math myself to be sure.

So, as long as you can control your cashflow, you can control skill/stat progression. Is it expensive? Hard? Risky? You bet your sweet ass it is. That's what it takes to 'skip' years of play.

Is UE irrelevant then? Not at all. There are a lot more factors at play in skill and stat checks, including combat, than most people or self-proclaimed Sindome "experts" think. But the gap is much, much, much smaller than you might expect.

Any other admin who don't believe me, I'll show you the numbers on request. We can pit some NPCs against each other if you remain unconvinced.


(Edited by Guardian at 12:32 am on July 22, 2012)

I continue to advocate a form of stat reset with considerations for existing roles, responsibilities and logical capabilities. Some oldbies are so old they predate some significant bug fixes from the very early beta state. Bug fixes that correct horribly abused mistakes I and others have written in the code. Arguments against the value of a reset are getting a lot more hollow sounding.

That said, the time for such a reset is not yet at hand. There are some significant tasks that must be completed before we can consider the work needed for doing a reset. As I have no intention of robbing anyone of their effort, this is something we would do with the utmost care and planning.

This is a very contentious topic and there are a lot of unknown things to consider. Feel free to debate the whats and hows and such. You should not however plan a character around the notion that a 'reset is coming', as its not definite and not happening soon. Your IC actions today will have consequences tomorrow, reset or not.

I think a player reset would be awesome but I also think steps should be taken to limit PC's so you don't end up with the superpowered ones you see today.
I personally don't see the problem with a few people being quite strong, Whilst my character is most definitely an oldbie, I've lost more fights then I've won I would wager, and oldbies tend to simply cut eachother down where applicable.

I actively avoid simply handing a newer player their arse unless it would be absurd for me RPwise to do so. Which is how the last person I killed died.

Whilst I'm sure I could kill alot of players one on one - there is significant disadvantages to engaging multiple people at once - get some good weapons, and bum rush and oldbie, and it's unlikely they'll win. Either that or fuck them over in a way that combat won't help them.

I know my opinion means a little less than a pile of dog shit on Fuller street, but the idea of a reset kinda freaks me out. I'm one of the people who are greatly effected by the oldbies and their immovable power over me. In fact a lot of my rp stems from the fact of them fighting over me or just flat out trying to destroy so as not to be an asset of another oldbie.

This makes Saba's story so much more interesting to me. Losing that due to a reset would bum me out more than the loss of her possessions. One of which is a huge part of her rp and isn't something that really gives her power over anyone else, yet is massively rare and expensive.

I don't think resetting is a valid option. There is always going to be looming powerful figure's in Withmore. And to be honest it adds to the experience.
I always get a little adrenalin rush when "HOLY SHIT i just saw Red-Ike on Ashlin" comes over SIC.
It just adds that wild card.
Quote: from Johnny on 7:34 pm on July 22, 2012[br] Some oldbies are so old they predate some significant bug fixes from the very early beta state. Bug fixes that correct horribly abused mistakes I and others have written in the code. Arguments against the value of a reset are getting a lot more hollow sounding.

The crux of this, and pretty much all the cases raised for a reset, is the very first word of the quote. "Some"... How many true oldbies are still around and active?

Granted, some are flagged no-reap and may return, or occasionally pop on, but in truth their day-to-day impact on the game isn't that huge. The ones that are active, how much of their "uber" status is pure UE, and how much is just raw experience of the game and being SD-savvy?

Oldbies don't kick ass just because of UE, they kick ass because of who they are, what contacts they have, how well they know game mechanics, how well they influence and manipulate other players, what roles they ICly fill and a dozen other factors... all of which either can't be taken away (unless we change all the mechanics and brainwash people of their SD experience) or we would explicitly not want to take away (characters, roles, backgrounds, RP, the raw IC history of SD).

So in truth, it'll level one of many playing fields, and I'd argue it's one that largely doesn't matter to oldbies. The people who are most concerned about UE are the people who feel they don't have enough or over-rate its importance, the ones who look at oldbies and covet their position and status which they mistakenly attribute to UE. In truth, that position and status was built over time and in parallel to, not through, UE. UE is just a scape-goat for oldbies being "too uber" because it's quantifiable.

Ironically, they're also the ones who would be most effected by a reset. They don't have the level of established IC presence to fall back on that oldbies do, and they don't have the minimal time investment loss than newbies would.

(Edited by Rastus2 at 6:42 pm on July 24, 2012)

(Edited by Rastus2 at 6:52 pm on July 24, 2012)

Oldbie - definition - a character perceived as being older than and possessing more UE than the observer.

Consider Kro, he was considered an oldbie 10 years ago, and the newbies of the time skirted around him and no-one (apart from Jared) ever dared fight him. In truth, because of the "cloning incident", he had less UE than most of the newbies who grovelled around and ran his errands.

He was reaped, recreated, and Neo-Kro 2.0 with fresh out of char-gen stats still seems untouchable, every other noob char I've ever created gets the usual newbie initiation treatment, but not Kro. (I know, I've just painted a huge neon "rape me" sign over his head if I ever log him in again).

(Edited by Rastus2 at 7:02 pm on July 24, 2012)

Reset.  Doesn't matter to me either way.  I've played the game on and off for a long time.  I've had various characters, some for awhile and some not very long.  I do get a sort of attachment to my character and most that know me (or rather the various characters I've had) know that UE isn't that important to me.  

I'm not going to sit here and say I've not at one point been all about getting UE so I could be badass.  Now I use that shit on stuff like charisma and shit that really won't have much effect on other player characters.  I'd hate to lose the  occasional glimpses of oldbies here or there, or their deft maneuvering behind the scenes.   But for me personally if I had to start a new pc tomorrow, I'm fine with that.  I'd had -plenty- of experience going through chargen.  I like to think of the badass hard to kill oldbies like the bosses in video games that if you want to kill them you'll have to find some clever way to do it because rushing them single-handedly won't work.  

Of course even though I've played on and off for years I've never had a huge presence with my characters.  Most are forgettable, some made a splash while others were blah.  

With that said I'm not in a position to know how it would effect those that are oldbies. To put the years into a character you've grown and shaped in so many ways only to have to start over?