Winter '22 Town Hall Topic Thread
Topics, get ya topics heah

Is that still happening? What are the standards? This may be worthwhile folding into a general 'rate of advancement' topic, since I still see issues there.

I believe those who interact with a lot of new players will tend to see the occasional disappointment and eventual drop-off of those who feel like there isn't an easy fit for their character's archetype, or get told it's a real far down the road sort of thing. Seems that more clear career paths and stepping stones would go a long way towards drawing in new players to stick around.

- Large pads - It would be good to have a way for other players to obtain these again, even if just through RP and IC achievements with appropriate requirements. Also, it would be good if some of the benefits of having a large pad could also be obtained ICly through other means.

- Corporate rivalries - there needs to be more competition between corps. The corporations need to be trying to outdo each other, each looking to get more of the Withmore population's chyen than the others. This fuels plots, and is themely to the cyberpunk genre and setting. Right now, the corporations cooperate and scratch each other's backs, and it becomes more of a corps vs. mixers situation, rather than corps using mixers as tools against each other. They can cooperate with one hand, but should be stabbing each other in the back with the other. Such should be the duplicity of the corporate game.

- Adding onto the last one, add more corporate options. I would particularly like to see Saedor Krupp developed for more PC participation. Having this would open up employment options for several skillsets that are currently underutilized in the corporate environment, would increase opportunity for corporate overlap and rivalry, and would improve options for players looking for a corporate employer.

-Towing authorization: Currently authorization is required to tow a vehicle. While II understand this mechanical change, it effectively removed an important offensive tool from vehicle combat. I would like to see this altered. Perhaps through the use of a command like break-in in order to expose the aggressor and address the issue of being able to steal vehicles with impunity that seemed to be the cause of this change.

-Hot-wiring Kits: I would suggest that these need to be made -less- specific. As it is, they are fairly expensive and difficult to get a hold of, but my perception is that this just happens to be a bar too high, and is actively stymieing vehicle theft RP.

-Disguise: I feel like the coded systems for this are fairly well balanced, with the exception of ponchos. These are simply too powerful in my opinion. I view a shroud as a low-skill threshold item, and because of how effective it is, it tends to overshadow the higher UE investments. A poncho by itself provides a significant amount of disguise, and has the added bonus of obscuring literally every single naked location, which denies critical information even when disguise is lost. This makes it a powerful offensive tool, and effectively a 'must have'. To address this I would suggest a few things. A) Hard-cap the disguise score of a character using a shroud to a fairly low value. B) impose stat penalties for shrouding up (Your perception sucks when you're hiding your face, and your agility is hampered by all that loose cloth, for example), and C) Do not allow character using a shroud to ever set a disguise name.

-Skillsofts: Having used these fairly extensively, I would say that these absolutely need to be re-evaluated. Where they are currently would feel great with a player base half our size, but what I am perceiving is that high-UE characters that have invested heavily in stats and combat skills, are able to effectively supplant PCs that actually invest UE in technical skills. A platinum soft provides enough skill on its own to effectively make someone wielding such a device to be the 'best' in their field, but they are priced inn such a way that they are inaccessible to most character outside of a specific archetype. Yes there is a cost balance to this, but I believe the way in which these function should be evaluated in order to make more room and RP for characters specializing in skills through actual permanent UE investment.

A lot of the cool recent systems are more accessible to topside or at least late-game play (space, flight improvements, maybe even robotics), and the MacGuffin system particularly is excellent.

What kinds of cool innovations could help make day-to-day Mix play more attractive?

I'd love to hear from those quieter voices. :-)

I'd like to discuss the new player experience; particularly the information presented to new players and how it helps or hinders their assimilation into the game, and what can be done to improve new player retention overall.

If the GMs have data they would like to share on this so we can really understand how things are then that would be helpful as well. Statistics such as the average time between the creation of a new account and when it stops logging in, the percentage of new accounts that make it past 30 days, three months, etc., could all give us a picture of how good a job we're doing of holding onto new players.