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Teaching Restrictions

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HiRoGIiFiQ
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Teaching Restrictions

Post by HiRoGIiFiQ »

Really?
cooki
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by cooki »

The one that made me giggle was the minors to 50.
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Shoury »

HiRoGIiFiQ wrote:Really?
Whats wrong, friend?
HiRoGIiFiQ
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by HiRoGIiFiQ »

Well after reading it over a few times I noted that it could be more harsh & I appreciate that it isn't. However, my biggest concern is that teachers that don't dream are subject to possible halo-stripping. Rulers, Master Teachers and others that are responsible for keeping the Dream going should be expected to be available more often having a responsibility to keep things going but just regular teachers? I dream when I can, personally and I don't want my character's halo stripped in punishment for not being around when I'm already being punished by my real life by not being able to be there, ha! I'd appreciate if this portion of the new guidelines could be more considerate.
Shoury
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Shoury »

I see friend. I guess they want to avoid specifics (like # days or months) because that might encourage people to log in the day before just to keep it (Like some do with their crests).

But I see why you'd like further clarification and consideration. I hope you get the answers you seek lady.
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Craig
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Craig »

I mostly agree with you HiRo, the new guidelines are a mixed bag. I also understand where the team is coming from, though I don't agree with all of the changes. From my perspective, the primary goal should be to increase player interaction and keep people playing. So I'll address some of the changes that I believe are positive and would help to enrich the game, as well as some of the negative ones that may damage the player-base.

The Good
**A Teacher has the freedom, within reason, to grant any task that is of appropriate difficulty for the corresponding student and the Art sought.
**A Teacher has the freedom to accept or deny the report of any student if they feel it is inadequate or insufficient.
This is something I've suggested before in both the early Lyra days and SoT days, and I am very glad to see finally implemented. There have been far too many players who have walked away because they got tired of waiting around for a specific teacher. Life happens. Unexpected absences or just conflicting schedules should not artificially hold a player back from advancing their character. This goes doubly for new players, since the modern gamer is very expectant of instant gratification. Even most older gamers have started to expect regular forward motion to stay interested in a game these days. As a side anecdote, this applies to even board games as I tried to play through an older slower paced game (Kingmaker, awesome game btw!) with a group of people I play board games with regularly and most of them simply didn't have the patience for it.

The Mixed
**A Teacher may seek MT status after having spent at least 3 active months as a Teacher and having issued 15+ completed tasks to students. These tasks will be reviewed by the Teaching Team and the Teaching Lead to determine if the Teacher should be passed to the next stage.
**A Teacher must obtain the support of 3 other teachers before approaching a GMMT for nomination. (Until a MT teaching council is created, this shall be how MTs are chosen)
This is also a mostly positive change to the system that should help to encourage players who play teachers to be more active, and give them a goal to work towards. This of course also benefits all of the other players since those teachers will be more active and will facilitate others to play more often as well. I would however also suggest a teacher requiring the support of a couple houses as well, but not necessarily be a member of a house.

This is where the change starts to have a negative impact on the game, and why I put this in the mixed category, removing the houses from having a say in the teaching process severely degrades their importance. I feel that the houses should be the main focus of the storyline, while there should be many side storylines going on outside and around the houses as well. That was the original purpose of the houses, to give players a sense of social expectation to the fellow players in their social group. The idea is to encourage house membership and participation, so that players want to be involved in them for a sense that they're missing out if they aren't. Players in other MMO's that are in Guilds, and regularly play with their fellow Guild members, tend to spend more time playing and have a much lower chance of leaving the game.

The Bad
**A Teacher is expected to actively use their halo. Periods of inactivity (either absence from the game in general, or non-use of Train) may result in removal of Train, Train Self or Sphere.
I find it strange and troubling that this is the direction we're going with this. The biggest problem is that removing such a thing as this may give players a reason not to come back if they have had an absence. I might agree if it was specifically that they, when in the game, never teach. However stripping someones halo for being absent to me is the wrong direction, especially with such a low player-base. I would however agree with losing MT status if there is a long absence, since MT is a higher station that other players rely on more heavily than regular teachers. This is similar to leadership positions in the houses, playing as a Ruler or MT is essentially taking on a semi-GM role with your character.
**Bundle Tasking will be discontinued. The lack of Bundles will give lower Train Teachers an ability to do more teaching. It will also help to keep the workload of the Elder Teaching Team at a minimum while allowing them to monitor tasking.
I considered labelling this "The Ugly" since it absolutely is the biggest mistake in the new revisions. Most of the players who play today are old players with years old characters at very high sphere. If we want to gain new players, we HAVE to fast track them to some degree and I thought the bundle tasking was a fantastic idea to address this problem. I agree that there were problems with the system, and expected it to be revised. However to completely scrap this system itself is a horrible idea. I would suggest bringing it back, but restrict the bundles to focus arts only. That way it resolves the issue that came up with Soul Evoke and still gives new players a reason to interact with more teachers, to get their Dream Soul and non-focus minors.

I'd like to finish by saying that every decision that is made needs to be carefully considered on how it will effect players leaving, coming back, and especially potential new players staying. If you make some of the more standard roles in the game a chore or a job, people will leave or not come back when they lose things they've worked hard for. New players will need to feel like they can catch up to the older players in a reasonable period of time.

Editing was to fix the name of the old board game I referred to "Kingmaker" is the correct name, formatting issues and removed the last sentence that was entirely inappropriate on my part.
Last edited by Craig on Sun Jul 12, 2015 7:46 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Shoury »

@Corin - Insightful insight as always (pun intended)
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Craig
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Craig »

Shoury wrote:@Corin - Insightful insight as always (pun intended)
But Corin was a GateKeeper, not a DreamSeer! :P
~Craig
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Krodoc »

My only question is what happens after you return to find your halo stripped? Are you given it back after being updated on the current regulations and procedures, or are you going to have to re-apprentice and stuff?

Having to re-apprentice would be complete garbage. Perhaps instead of stripping Train, just strip the art of Quest? That way when the teacher comes back they can get an update from an Elder and get Quest back.
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Craig
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Craig »

Krodoc wrote:My only question is what happens after you return to find your halo stripped? Are you given it back after being updated on the current regulations and procedures, or are you going to have to re-apprentice and stuff?

Having to re-apprentice would be complete garbage. Perhaps instead of stripping Train, just strip the art of Quest? That way when the teacher comes back they can get an update from an Elder and get Quest back.
+1 Krodoc
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Shoury
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Shoury »

Krodoc wrote:My only question is what happens after you return to find your halo stripped? Are you given it back after being updated on the current regulations and procedures, or are you going to have to re-apprentice and stuff?

Having to re-apprentice would be complete garbage. Perhaps instead of stripping Train, just strip the art of Quest? That way when the teacher comes back they can get an update from an Elder and get Quest back.
+2 Kroddie
HiRoGIiFiQ
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by HiRoGIiFiQ »

I feel two ways about this... On one side I understand the need to have some basic guidelines to teaching. On the other side, I feel like a dreamer who earns the station of teacher (a grueling process) should then be set free to teach as they see fit. I really feel like whether someone's tasks are easy or self serving or limited or whatever the case may be adds to the environment and we don't necessarily have the same ecosphere as we did in Lyra days in terms of being worried that Dreamers will max out & game over.

"Easy" tasks can actually be quite impressive if done properly and add much to the roleplay atmosphere. I don't think the game has much to offer in terms of action points because the environment and how things are done mechanically are quite restrictive. However, the more freedom characters have to be characters adds a lot to that and takes it from one level to the next by giving diversity in the simplest of ways. Placing more restrictions on one of the few action points of the game just makes it that much harder to resist ye olde /e wear jade skin and frolic about asking for a purify routine that in my mind went out gracefully with Ariana.
cooki
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by cooki »

There has been one version of the game (I think SoT) where the halo was taken after inactivity. It seemed to work for the most part, and if you came back, it wasn't too difficult to get your halo back. I had to do this with Mystala in SoT.
The only concern I have though about it is the fact you have to be tasking on a regular basis. While I haven't been back long, students are few and far between because there are so many teachers.
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by OfF KiLTeR »

I would have liked to see just a little more accountability for forge, specifically. It would be difficult to police, and having people held accountable for how they use the art is important.

The only concern I have in regards to task monitoring is that the task monitoring only applies to the quest codex and may be missing a great part of the context. I would hope that there would be some sort of grievance process if there should be someone who had made an honest mistake. With something as subjective as "appropriateness" there runs a big risk for one person's opinion to have a negative impact without any recourse or opportunity to correct their behavior.
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Clarity
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Clarity »

As someone who's character has a brand new halo, there are a few things that are both really good, and terrible about the changes.

The Good: Bundle tasks being a thing of the past. As a new teacher, bundle tasks completely removed Clarity's ability to teach pretty much anything. The occasional Chaos Well task for returning folks, the odd 4th sphere dreamer looking for minors or dreamsoul learns. She can teach FS 4th and 5th majors (Blind, Darkness, Firestorm) IF there were more Fatesenders looking, and IF they didn't already go to elders or more experienced teachers first. Which is almost always the likely scenario. With bundles gone, or even reduced to just majors, it opens up teaching to lower train and new teachers. It gets them tasking, and wanting to progress.

The Bad: Because of lack of people needing learn tasks, be it because they already fast-tracked with the bundle system, or because they sought elders or more experienced teachers, they aren't able to task with any sort of regularity. So now there's a rule in place that says "No tasks? No Train," and that sucks. Mentoring isn't exactly hard, but it is time consuming. The reward for putting the time and effort in is getting to be able to train others, and we're not really able to up to this point for varying reasons. This new rule isn't just a backlash for people with old halos who aren't really doing anything with it, it's a punishment for people with low train or new halos who haven't had the opportunity to plat their trains or really USE them.

Example, Myridian Sun. His train is 19, but due to wonky play time and the wonky play time of the Elder MT's, he hasn't been able to secure a plateau task. Even if he did, he'd have to complete it and then promptly plat it again two more times, if not three, to really be any sort of effective teacher for the small FS community, due to us just not having anyone with arts under 30 anymore.

Of course that also rolls into my gripe about not enough people being willing to play Fatesenders in the first place due to their shiniest arts being high sphere and terrible at low plats, and their only uncounterable low sphere art being a minor, but that's a whole other can of worms I won't pop open here.

All in all though, we do just have way to many teachers. Which seems like an issue, until you factor in that it's not the to many teachers that's the problem. The problem is that there aren't enough players to utilize them. And no one wants to willingly give up the halo they worked their ass off obtaining, because why would they? I know I wouldn't, and i just got mine. Older players returning want to be able to go back to teaching, as it was a huge portion of their previous time. Being able to Train other players is a huge draw for people, even if they end up just sitting on the ability due to lack of ability to do so. Punishing people for that isn't going to fix the problem.

What might fix the problem, is giving MT's the ability to plateau train. At least in the first few plats, say, up to 30. Right now MT is just a status symbol with the ability to self-train and apprentice so the GMMT's don't have to do quite so much work. Maybe mechanically it's not something that's feasible, but at least allow them to write tasks for train plats, and have the student turn in a "completion" codex to an elder. That would take a lot of strain off the GMMT's, and give the community a more self-sustainable goal. It would keep people tasking, because then they'd be able to actually train people, and make the MT status more then just self-training power houses who can occasionally add one more person to the pool of teachers not able to use their halo.

The new requirements for MT gate the hell out of the station. It sucks, but it's also understandable. MT previously has been a swinging door position that you can lose (and rightly so) due to inactivity. While having it linked to houses is good for House Arts, it's otherwise useless and amazingly frustrating when the eligible players in a house disappear, or only join the house so they can have access to the shiny status symbol of "Look how much better I am then you are!" But, if that gating comes with a real reason, by allowing MT's to become actual Masters of their focus, able to assist TEACHERS with shining up their halo to a respectable level, it would go a long way towards fixing the teaching problems.

I should add that Master Teachers should probably also be Master Smiths, but that's also another can of worms, and at the moment most of them are anyway.
So it’s gonna be forever, and I will stay up through the night. You can tell me when it’s over, and let’s be clear, won’t close my eyes. @-;-
Shoury
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Shoury »

Excellent insight Clarity.. especially from a fresh teacher's PoV.
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Craig
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Craig »

I'm gonna +1 Clarity too, you've made a lot of very good points.
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cooki
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by cooki »

I believe in the original UL, MTs could mentor teachers for their train plat. I think GMs still had to honor it in the end though.
Shoury
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Shoury »

cooki wrote:I believe in the original UL, MTs could mentor teachers for their train plat. I think GMs still had to honor it in the end though.
Gord gord.
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Koi-Spark »

To clarify a few things in regard to the new teaching rules, and hopefully settle some of the resentment you've expressed here:
HiRoGIiFiQ wrote:...my biggest concern is that teachers that don't dream are subject to possible halo-stripping. Rulers, Master Teachers and others that are responsible for keeping the Dream going should be expected to be available more often having a responsibility to keep things going but just regular teachers? I dream when I can, personally and I don't want my character's halo stripped in punishment for not being around when I'm already being punished by my real life by not being able to be there, ha! I'd appreciate if this portion of the new guidelines could be more considerate.
"A Teacher is expected to actively use their halo. Periods of inactivity (either absence from the game in general, or non-use of Train) may result in removal of Train, Train Self or Sphere."
Train Self will be removed (via an automated process) after 30 days of inactivity. There is no automated process for Train and Sphere at this time and we haven't made plans to implement such a process. The key word here is "may." Most of that is case-by-case and would likely be after six months or more. For just general inactivity, Quest would most likely be the only art removed so that you'll have to get a refresher/updates from a GM. This rule is directed more to those teachers who will wear their halo every day, but refuse to quest any students when requested. If we get RP/cheat reports of teachers wearing halos but never actually doing any teaching, we're going to investigate their activity and if they like to wear the halo as a nifty status symbol, it will get yanked.
Corin wrote: [Removing bundle tasking] is the biggest mistake in the new revisions. Most of the players who play today are old players with years old characters at very high sphere. If we want to gain new players, we HAVE to fast track them to some degree and I thought the bundle tasking was a fantastic idea to address this problem. I agree that there were problems with the system, and expected it to be revised. However to completely scrap this system itself is a horrible idea.
We not only appreciate feedback on all aspects of the game, but we do take them all into consideration (some more briefly than others, of course). Bundle tasking may be reintroduced at some point in the future, but it was removed largely to avoid the abuses we were seeing with the system. As most of you know, it is very rare we get a genuinely new player - almost every student to take advantage of bundled tasking has been an alternate. Because of the bundled tasking and the over-simplified sphere quests being given out, some newly-created alternates have reached higher spheres and art skills at a faster rate than any other version of Underlight. In doing so, we're simply expanding the gap that exists between the old players (and their alts) and new players just learning the game for the first time. Especially since brand new players are learning things for the first time, it is in their best interest (especially when it comes to things like Soul Evoke) to take time learning the fundamentals one step at a time, rather than learning a dozen arts all at one time with very little knowledge of what they do and how they work. The only people truly benefiting from the bundle system were existing player alts and it was being overtly abused.
HiRoGIiFiQ wrote:I feel like a dreamer who earns the station of teacher (a grueling process) should then be set free to teach as they see fit. I really feel like whether someone's tasks are easy or self serving or limited or whatever the case may be adds to the environment and we don't necessarily have the same ecosphere as we did in Lyra days in terms of being worried that Dreamers will max out & game over.

"Easy" tasks can actually be quite impressive if done properly and add much to the roleplay atmosphere. I don't think the game has much to offer in terms of action points because the environment and how things are done mechanically are quite restrictive. However, the more freedom characters have to be characters adds a lot to that and takes it from one level to the next by giving diversity in the simplest of ways. Placing more restrictions on one of the few action points of the game just makes it that much harder to resist ye olde /e wear jade skin and frolic about asking for a purify routine that in my mind went out gracefully with Ariana.
From the beginning of Clash of Dreams, the GM teaching team set out to encourage teachers to make the teaching system player-driven and self-sustaining as much as possible. We still do, but we also want to maintain the integrity of the teaching system as it's one of the most unique parts of Underlight since day one with Lyra Studios. What we have seen from an alarmingly big part of the player base is not just "easy" tasks, but disproportionately simple tasks that cannot be considered to be a fair/worthy measure of effort by any player teacher. I think you all know that we as a team fully understand that this isn't 2001 anymore. We're all a decade older and (hopefully) wiser, but more importantly we have more responsibilities and less time to do more things. Underlight, for many of us, probably gets only a piece of your "free time" allotments in life, so we just don't have the 2-6 hours (or more) every night we used to put into roleplaying and teaching and advancing back in the day. But remember that, regardless of your sphere, your rank, or any other accomplishments, progression in Underlight has always and will always be designed to be a challenge. If we completely remove all restriction and just make it a free-for-all, everyone will speed to orbit 99, get every art of every focus to level 99, and it will just fail to be fun or entertaining anymore. The conflicts, backtracks, struggles, and headaches you face every time you play are what makes interesting story and makes your achievements that much more rewarding. If you get everything for free, you don't get that same sense of accomplishment because you don't give yourself the opportunity to do better or BE better than everyone else, even if for just a moment. That's one of the best parts of Underlight I remember and something I still value in it today. When you get that sphere and the whole room cheers for you and teachers come to you asking if they can write you a task for your new arts and plateaus. When you get knighted, or ascend to Ruler of your house and not only have the support, but the respect of other players who likely helped you get there. I'm sort of going off the rails on a bit of a soapbox, but the point is if all you want from this game are easy handouts and fast-tracked success, you are doing yourself and all other players a huge disservice. You don't have to get to 9th sphere fastest. You will progress, sometimes slowly, but just remember it's all for fun and it's meant to take time to achieve.

But getting back on topic, yes "easy" tasks can be impressive if done properly, but they are so very rarely done properly because most people are just looking for a shortcut and will absolutely lose interest in playing once the challenge is no longer a factor.
cooki wrote:The only concern I have though about it is the fact you have to be tasking on a regular basis. While I haven't been back long, students are few and far between because there are so many teachers.
Right - as I said above, we're not going to be removing anything simply because you haven't evoked Train in xx days. This is more for those who do play, are asked to train, and refuse because they just don't want to do it. We are completely aware that there are more teachers than students and the only real way to fix that is to attract new players who are serious about roleplaying and find late 90's gaming technology "quaint" or "nostalgic." If you're looking to give your graphics card a workout, move along. If you want to give your brain and your creativity a workout, we're here to play.
OfF KiLTeR wrote:I would have liked to see just a little more accountability for forge, specifically. It would be difficult to police, and having people held accountable for how they use the art is important.
The only concern I have in regards to task monitoring is that the task monitoring only applies to the quest codex and may be missing a great part of the context. I would hope that there would be some sort of grievance process if there should be someone who had made an honest mistake. With something as subjective as "appropriateness" there runs a big risk for one person's opinion to have a negative impact without any recourse or opportunity to correct their behavior.
Regarding Forge, I think it's really something difficult to regulate without full-time monitoring. But if I can be honest, if players shouldn't be forging items with certain charges/stats, then we would probably remove the specific capabilities. The biggest complaint has always been the DreamSoul elemen issue. We could just remove DreamSoul forging completely, or we could significantly restrict the value, but I think that would just upset people. As most of you know, item generators get pretty useless after 5th sphere or so. I believe that's why Forge is learnable at 5th sphere. Not sure what other accountability you're looking for, but as I said previously, we'll always consider any feedback and suggestions you may have on how to improve the game and those particular dynamics.

As for the "appropriateness" context, we're not running solely off of the quest codex. While it's often one of our triggers, we do more investigation into logs and discussions with players as needed. Believe me when I say we have granted a great deal of leeway when it comes to most tasking thus far. There have been a few, however, that completely ignore any sense of appropriate worthiness. As we have said before, if there is any doubt in your mind that a GM (or any other player/teacher) reads the quest codex and may or may not think it's a valid task, then it's probably in your best interest to make some adjustments to the quest itself. If you're really unsure, you can also verify with a MT elder in-game or at roleplaying@ before finalizing the task. If it's a Join Party to 10 task, we probably won't judge too harshly when it comes to difficulty. If you're plateauing a flame art or Forge or something to 60, we expect it to be more than "discuss the art with 3 other dreamers and tell me their opinions of it."
Clarity wrote:The reward for putting the time and effort in is getting to be able to train others, and we're not really able to up to this point for varying reasons. This new rule isn't just a backlash for people with old halos who aren't really doing anything with it, it's a punishment for people with low train or new halos who haven't had the opportunity to plat their trains or really USE them.

The problem is that there aren't enough players to utilize [teachers]. Being able to Train other players is a huge draw for people, even if they end up just sitting on the ability due to lack of ability to do so. Punishing people for that isn't going to fix the problem.

Right now MT is just a status symbol with the ability to self-train and apprentice so the GMMT's don't have to do quite so much work. Maybe mechanically it's not something that's feasible, but at least allow them to write tasks for train plats, and have the student turn in a "completion" codex to an elder. That would take a lot of strain off the GMMT's, and give the community a more self-sustainable goal. It would keep people tasking, because then they'd be able to actually train people, and make the MT status more then just self-training power houses who can occasionally add one more person to the pool of teachers not able to use their halo.

The new requirements for MT gate the hell out of the station. It sucks, but it's also understandable. MT previously has been a swinging door position that you can lose (and rightly so) due to inactivity. While having it linked to houses is good for House Arts, it's otherwise useless and amazingly frustrating when the eligible players in a house disappear, or only join the house so they can have access to the shiny status symbol of "Look how much better I am then you are!"
Again, not going to be removing halos from teachers simply because they don't have students to teach. But don't forget to make an effort to find other players and hound them - "what focus/orbit are you? I can help train you" or "what plateaus do you need right now? Maybe I can help." I have seen SEVERAL instances where there is a newly awakened dreamer enter a room with a group of people and get completely ignored. As a player, YOU may know that Jackalope Frankenberry may be Jimjam McNugget's alt and just won't talk to him, but think about what your character, especially as a teacher, would do if they saw a stranger enter the room. As a player, you should see every new dreamer as a potential new player (not just an alt, which is most often the case) and we want them to keep playing! Welcome them, be nice, be helpful, answer their questions, write them quests. If someone wants to QRP with them, that is between them and the newly, but I really don't condone it and really really don't want to hear any details about it.

Yes, we know there is a disproportionate amount of teachers to available students. There really isn't much we can do about that. Like you said, telling players that they have to give up their halos probably wouldn't be a popular idea - neither would rejecting any request to become a teacher because "sorry, we've met our quota for this month. Check back in a few weeks." But at the same time, we don't want teachers who haven't written tasks (even if for lack of available students) to just be handed plateaus when they have no teaching experience outside of sample quests. For all those teachers with train levels above 50, they have had to do a LOT of work and put a LOT of time into all of those plateaus and it would be a slap to their faces if we ignored those kinds of requirements.

At the same time, we also don't want to make every teacher a Master Teacher. Just like being a teacher, it completely loses its worth when everyone has it. It's meant to be an exclusive position for only a few and we can (and have and will) turned down teachers requesting the status because we have too many in place already. Master Teachers are the key to making the teaching system self-sustaining, but to Train Self they require active Teachers with skill levels similar to their own. It helps prevent MTs from Self-Training themselves far ahead of everyone else and then hording all of the good plateaus. Teachers support MTs, MTs support Teachers. With that in mind, Master Teachers should be directing students to other available teachers for learning arts and lower plateaus. MTs should only be training teachers in the highest plateaus. Elder MTs will typically only train MTs in plateaus that they cannot train themselves due to lack of supporting Teachers. Otherwise, Elder MTs are around just for support of the teaching system as a whole, as well as teaching Train and plateaus in the art. When MT's can manage their own advancement by managing other Teachers, then the Elder MT work is very limited and we can stand by for general support.



I hope this helps answer any questions and alleviates some concerns you've expressed about the teaching changes. Other than the bundled tasking issue, there really is not a lot of change happening here. That line about removing halos/arts after inactivity has been around since we launched, so it's not even new, as is the case with most of the items mentioned here. If you have any further questions or concerns, just let us know.
Koi-Spark,
Development Lead
Technical Admin/Support
Level Design, Artwork
Game Master, In-Game Support
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Craig
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Craig »

We not only appreciate feedback on all aspects of the game, but we do take them all into consideration (some more briefly than others, of course). Bundle tasking may be reintroduced at some point in the future, but it was removed largely to avoid the abuses we were seeing with the system. As most of you know, it is very rare we get a genuinely new player - almost every student to take advantage of bundled tasking has been an alternate. Because of the bundled tasking and the over-simplified sphere quests being given out, some newly-created alternates have reached higher spheres and art skills at a faster rate than any other version of Underlight. In doing so, we're simply expanding the gap that exists between the old players (and their alts) and new players just learning the game for the first time. Especially since brand new players are learning things for the first time, it is in their best interest (especially when it comes to things like Soul Evoke) to take time learning the fundamentals one step at a time, rather than learning a dozen arts all at one time with very little knowledge of what they do and how they work. The only people truly benefiting from the bundle system were existing player alts and it was being overtly abused.
I appreciate your feedback, and I understand that most new characters are usually not new players. My perspective will always be about gaining new players as this is critical if the game is going to survive long term. I agree completely with revising the bundle task system, to avoid such abuses as you've outlined. For example restricting it to focus only arts/plats, for the first couple of spheres instead of up to 4th.
I'm sort of going off the rails on a bit of a soapbox, but the point is if all you want from this game are easy handouts and fast-tracked success, you are doing yourself and all other players a huge disservice.
I notice you going after the idea of a "fast track" and feel like you've taken what I've said out of context or perhaps I wasn't clear. I am not suggesting that the tasking be made easy all the way up, I am suggesting making a more agreeable difficulty curve for new players. Obviously old players in new characters will go faster, and honestly if you check they're probably using OOC info to do that (you should check and catch them in that act if they are!)

To me it always goes back to getting a new player "hooked" and starting out as a unsphered character when most of the characters around are 60+ makes people feel like they can't have any significant impact. If a new player gets some easy "go ask a few people about this and come tell me what you think" type tasks for their 0-9 or first sphere, that encourages them to get involved with the community and develop a connection to us. I'm NOT suggesting jump tasks or any garbage like that.

I'm suggesting that we start them easy and slowly work up the difficulty and give them a chance to catch up and feel some early victories for their character and build a connection to other players. In my view, the old guidelines with bundles seemed to address this somewhat well (with issues as discussed above) in that the difficulty worked up to about 4th sphere with a decent gradient albeit perhaps a tad on the easy side. I'd probably start slowing things down around 3rd sphere, where it up to me, since that's when you get access to most areas of the game (Rifts become accessible at 3rd.)

Bottom line for me, focus on potential new players first. What is best for getting them hooked on the game is best for the game and everybody involved (particularly those playing teachers.) What hooks people on games is a gradual difficulty curve, where they can gain the skills and understanding how to deal with increasingly difficult challenges over time, not hitting the bricks immediately. If you had never played Tetris, and started out on level 9, you'd probably just give up after a few minutes of losing. Seriously, nearly every game design course uses Tetris as the example of the perfect difficulty curve. It's a good thing that new players have to do more tasks than what the existing bundle task system was doing, but getting the right difficulty curve is critical for the game's design to capture new players.

With Retro gaming becoming a bigger thing now, the graphics are less of an issue than it used to be. With the exception of the Win8+ issues, we have the serious possibility of gaining new players once we start more aggressive advertising into communities of players who would be interested in what we have to offer. But that will all be for nothing if we fail to capture their attention and get them involved enough to keep them playing.

Extra credits: This video does a pretty good job of giving the basic idea of difficulty curve, and rather specifically talks about social difficulty curve which applies directly to our game. While not all of the concepts translate specifically to us, the basic ideas are very important. These guys are great, I've watched most of their videos over the years and I highly recommend checking them out.
Last edited by Craig on Mon Jul 06, 2015 4:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
~Craig
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Shoury »

All this is gord.. very gord. Do these replies fully appease you Sir Corin?
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Craig
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Craig »

Shoury wrote:All this is gord.. very gord. Do these replies fully appease you Sir Corin?
Snarky comments are not appreciated. Also, my name is Craig, Corin was a character I played before. Please try to keep future comments constructive.
~Craig
Shoury
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by Shoury »

Corin wrote:
Shoury wrote:All this is gord.. very gord. Do these replies fully appease you Sir Corin?
Snarky comments are not appreciated. Also, my name is Craig, Corin was a character I played before. Please try to keep future comments constructive.
I was joking - relax.
HiRoGIiFiQ
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Re: Teaching Restrictions

Post by HiRoGIiFiQ »

Thank you for the response, Koi
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