Interviews

Asherons Call: srand’s Q&A

Genji-Glove asks: Can we please sell back our racial skills?
srand: For the record, the way the code is set up your racial skills cost you 0 credits, and so if we just allowed you to get those credits back in the normal way, you’d get … 0 credits. At this point, we are not planning on investing the time to modify the skill sellback code to work around this.
And Later: Swapping out racial skills would take even more coding time. It’s something we have discussed briefly in the past, and will likely be discussing in more detail next week as part of a planning meeting, but not something we have plans for at this point. (And if I was unclear, even things like Item Tinkering, when it is a free racial skill, is recorded in code as being worth 0 credits.)

George_Clinton asks: When you retool legacy content, please don’t forget the spawn rate. 10+ minute spawn rates make you lose interest in a place rather quickly.
srand: In some situations, a slow respawn rate is appropriate. A quest aimed to be challenging for newbie players, for instance, might use more challenging creatures with a slower respawn rate. On the other hand, it may just be that we missed a generator. *grin* If you would, tell me what revamped locations you have found with a 10 minute or greater respawn rate, and I will tell you whether it was intentional or not.

Aelia_LC asks: Why did you only pick a select group of quests to make repeatable? Why not all of them?
srand: Why those few to start? Because they were quick and easy. We are in the process of examining a number of one-time-per-character quests and perhaps revising them, but many of them have complicated quest flag interactions and need to be carefully studied before we go fiddling. These, however, did not.

Televangelist asks: Please make the Overlord’s Sword door un-pickable. This is meant to be a *quest*. The keys for the quest are scattered all over the dires for a good reason.
srand: The entire quest, from beginning to end, can now be done without lockpick. And it should be a bit less frustrating due to the descriptions of the keys. But if you have lockpick, you can skip bits of the quest if you want to. And because the difficulty of the lockpicking goes up as the quest progresses, you may be able to skip the first one or two or three locations, but still need to get the keys to go on from there, depending on your lockpick skill. And in some places, you can substitute your jump skill for lockpick. Right now it’s relatively easy to organize a group with a highly skilled lockpicker for this quest, but in the future, when the demand has died down, it will still be an eminently soloable quest because of this flexibility. Not all quests need to be soloable, but not all quests need to require mixed groups, either. Personally, I like the design. But then, I did design it this way, quite deliberately. So thank you for your feedback, Televangelist, but we have no plans at this point to change this dynamic.

KainetheDragoon asks: Why did you upgrade only some quest items this month?
srand: We’re nowhere close to having all of the quest weapons upgraded. We chose a selection of them to update this month, and we will continue with that push in the future (albeit perhaps not so many at once, as other things also need to get done).

Phrog_Endor asks: Can we get a graphics update to loot generated weapons?
srand: We are slowly, as we have time, upgrading graphics on a number of items. We hope to do to other weapons what we did to loot staffs and the Overlord Sword — but it may take a while, particularly since this isn’t our highest priority. *grin*

Greybeard asks: Is housing restricted to one per account per server? or one per account?
srand: You can own multiple houses with one account, so long as they are on different servers.

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