COGG BBS

I have to be completely honest. When I was playing my previous character, I immediately took the training. Soon after though, I regretted it. People fell in places I really didn't have any business in, but the constant ringing just kept egging me on. I wanted the ringing to stop so I went after it, even though in a couple occasions it meant I just added to the body count. It's the reason why I haven't picked it up on any current characters, and why I probably won't pick it up on any future characters either. Being repeatedly confronted with the fact that my character isn't good enough to aid someone regardless of how much i want to help puts a damper on a lot of the game play for me, so a way to toggle the sensitivity would go a long way I think.

I am in serious opposition to encouraging people to send tells about what's going on. That's my two cents.

I was asked to post something for the player Belladana, which follows with minor cleanup:

I feel that the system of playing hot and cold while trying to find a body can cause for someone to not know if someone else is looking for them or not. the system may have someone looking all over in a direction and be in the wrong place. A system that may offer more directions or even a flash of the location (ala the other game) may be more engaging than going all over the map in pseudo-random pursuit.

Admittedly I've also experienced the problems she speaks of. Sometimes it is rather difficult to find someone's corpse and it just becomes annoying at best. The dragging times are also annoying, but that's not related to this. Stop dying far from towns, people!

I'm wondering at what spots people have found the hot/cold method difficult, out of curiosity.

I tend to find it reasonably intuitive in nailing down what zone it is, or if it might be a wilderness death, and then simple enough to find in zones. This makes me wonder if it's just familiarity with the areas of the game itself, or just how people are reading the hot/cold methods?

I can't make a more in-depth post right now but to clarify something briefly, the hot/cold thing does become a lot more of a pain when it comes to combat zones that have several sub-zones and a lot of rooms overall. Aura who returns "extremely close" and nothing else direction-wise starting when you're right on top of the exit leading into a zone, from my observations, and this continues when you pass through the exit to enter the area. So in places like Tarueka, as a tiny example, you can't get a lot of further clarification on the specific part of Tarueka you should be looking in and need to settle for searching through every room in Tarueka.

Though Tarueka specifically isn't such a bad case of this--the hostiles are relatively low-ish skill, it's near-ish to a major town, and it's in range of an ESP zone, so it's possible to coordinate with other rescuers relatively easily in order to cover more ground quickly and to be aware of someone finding the dead person without relying on the dead person ringing the deathknell pretty quickly. It's likely a more significant problem in a place like Valeria, which is a lot bigger, a lot tougher, and not within range of an ESP zone.

I'm not 100% sure this is the case for all larger zones, but it is something I've run into doing recoveries in Tarueka and the bandit fort, and I assume others have had similar problems with it. Otherwise, I don't have much trouble with the hot/cold system. It is pretty easy to work with once you get the hang of it. Hopefully this was helpful for anyone who might've needed that clarification.

I guess I just don't find the zones that big themselves, most tend to be about 10 rooms total and throwing in peer tends to mean they're pretty quick to get through. Admittedly, I can see it being an issue with something like the Hilltop Fort due to the Fjelbeist area below which is so out of whack with the rest of the spot.

Late to the discussion, and haven't been on in a bit so this might have been fixed already, but there have historically been some places where the hot/cold was simply broken because the entrance to an area was in a different wilderness tile than the hot/cold directions reported.

Otherwise, as an aggressive corpse retriever, I've had no issues finding people.

I would once again like to revisit the idea of a series of notifications for the death knell system.

Today I went hunting for a body after it had rung twice and shown no signs of movement, assuming either nobody else was looking or they needed help retrieving due to danger or whatnot.

Got to the area where it said 'extremely close' and went in to start searching. After searching half the entire area with no luck, I checked again and found the body had moved. Following this, I eventually found someone else hauling the body halfway back to town.

A whole lot of wasted time to no reward or need.

I think a lot of people (me included) do not like to spam the bell when dead. The unfortunate side effect is there is no way to know the body has already been found and on its way back.

This makes me less likely to go try to retrieve a body in the future, which is not good.

Please do consider some way for the living to notify those who are death knell attuned that they have found the body and are retrieving it. If it is on the person dragging the body to do it, then the dead don't have to feel like they're spamming everyone, and we are less likely to have an issue with 'crying wolf' as people go to look in potentially dangerous areas for no reason.

A similar return of the "nobody can get you, please depart" notification would likely also be helpful, though I don't think it's been necessary yet.

It'd be nice if, until there's a way to raise the practice of skills that auto-practice to match your trained when trained (such as swimming, or meditation) if those skills couldn't suffer the depart penalty, as I'm not sure there's any way to correct those currently.