Muleing / Twinking discussion

[Your best friend]

Just going to throw in my two cents: muling has become a pretty common practice and is, at this point, just part of the experience on Baldur's Gate. It has been that way for years. I personally consider it a fun and rewarding experience, kind of like a loyalty program as Flipside put it.

To suddenly crack down on muling would, in essence, just be cracking down on people's fun. Game design for the sake of balance is all and good -- but I think it should be guided by philosophy. The fun of the audience these changes would effecting should always be considered.

[NeOmega]

Ending muling would be nice, but impossible to enforce.

The economy has been wracked because of the lifting of item level restrictions.

+2 and many +3 items are now worthless, when they used to be pretty good, and could fetch good coin at the auction. In fact, other items, without the + also became worthless. I know, because it was my specialty to find those very valuable items in stores that hit the sweet spot for levels 5 -20, and sell them.

Again, this server had fallen prey to the wishes of the level 30 players.

There is a solution, however, and that is to make enchanting stackable on top of items, instead of having to wipe items clean, and then enchant.

That way, many of the lower level items can be bought with the thought in the back of the mind that it can be enchanted later.

I personally muled like crazy, to keep my merchants/mules in order, so I could know who was carrying what.

I also traded between my characters... ..using gems as ways to pay each other for the items.

[chad878262]

The issue as I see it is that you can chose not to mule gear, but if the rules are no muling there is no choice. Both methodologies have positives and negatives so there is not really a right or wrong answer. You can get a limited P&P like experience by starting with a group of players as level 1's and not muling any gear, in fact it's some of the most fun I've had, even though we all pretty much know every dungeon we enter by heart. However, with no muling the stories players craft for themselves become more limited. If RCR'ing from a level 30 down to level 20 and crafting a backstory of an accomplished, middle-aged adventurer it would stand to reason that character would have more than basic equipment and 1,000 gold after all.

Personally I can have fun in either system and actually prefer not muling. However, I fully embrace that others do have different viewpoints which are no less valid than mine. End of the day the decision was made to allow muling here and I highly doubt Admin/HDM's would even consider ruling against it at this point.

As to item level restrictions I agree, but it's a bit of Pandora's box. There were some issues with having item level restrictions in place, such as bugged items with level 60 requirements. Now that they are removed, re-implementing them could cause a lot of issues which would require the diversion of significant admin, dm and developer resources to address. Thus I see that as a situation where it would be good to go back to, but the amount of work makes it a bit prohibitive.

[NeOmega]

It is impossible to go back to the item level restrictions. Tons of players would lose gear or have all sorts of technical issues.

The only real way* to bring back value of low level items is to allow the stacking of enchantments on them.

That way, a pair of +2 boots with a level 3 cleric spell, and +5 hit points, could still have value, to someone plotting to enchant them.



*that I know of right now. I only started thinking about it last night, when I fired up the game, looked at the auction, and started trying to think of a way to make low level gear still cool.

[Valefort]

Eh.. with muling and the removal of level cap for items the low levels are near instantly done, there is a ton of content that is barely played because of the very fast leveling pre-epic (and pre-teen is worse). I can't really see how that was the wish of level 30 players btw, why would they care about leveling ?

And it's possible to add the level restriction back even though it'll take a bit of tinkering outside the game.

[mrm3ntalist]

I mule everything to new characters. The best gear i mule them. It is still very fun for me to play in low level dungeons. Or even try higher CR dungeons for a bigger challenge. I dont see how the choice i made to play the game and is fun to me affects the fun for others that choose to play the game differently. It doesnt. If it was fun for me not to mule, I can choose to do that. Again it wont affect others.

In practice, there is no real issue with muling. On the contrary it allows for specific character concepts such as merchants. Finally, lets be real and not kid ourselves - how fun will it be when you find a dusty tome on your alt barbarian build when you have a wizard as main. Or a powerful epic item drops that you can use on an alt build? Are you saying in this thread, that you would trade that rare find and not mule it? I never seen this happening ( unless they have no use for the item). Not from those who call themselves "roleplayers" nor from those who call themselves "grinders".

In a few words and in case you skipped everything before. Muling is not a problem, it is all in our heads.

[aaron22]

i will create a character and play it for just about any reason. fun build concept. fun RP style. even a unique item can be a starter for a concept. in the cases of the latter, i twink (muling is basically dead with storage). most of the gear on all my toons are picked up by them, and by most i mean like 95-100%. i have a solid in game reason to be able to twink too. i usually just don't mostly because it is unnecessary. all told, i really do not think twinking is a problem. it really doesnt matter that much. at the very early levels, sure. but as you get, even to, level 5 it becomes less important.

a fix to the "problem" of twinking could be to "bind" gear to a player once it is equip. that way you cannot use something then use it again on another build unless that build has the exact same name. this would still allow for trading which should be ENCOURAGED. but wont let a player keep using the same super item on every character they play. some items would not need to be bindable while others that are considered really good/epic/super-epic/AC81-epic would be.

[NeOmega]

I mule everything to new characters. The best gear i mule them. It is still very fun for me to play in low level dungeons. Or even try higher CR dungeons for a bigger challenge. I dont see how the choice i made to play the game and is fun to me affects the fun for others that choose to play the game differently. It doesnt. If it was fun for me not to mule, I can choose to do that. Again it wont affect others.

In practice, there is no real issue with muling. On the contrary it allows for specific character concepts such as merchants. Finally, lets be real and not kid ourselves - how fun will it be when you find a dusty tome on your alt barbarian build when you have a wizard as main. Or a powerful epic item drops that you can use on an alt build? Are you saying in this thread, that you would trade that rare find and not mule it? I never seen this happening ( unless they have no use for the item). Not from those who call themselves "roleplayers" nor from those who call themselves "grinders".

In a few words and in case you skipped everything before. Muling is not a problem, it is all in our heads.

Muling, mixed with no level restrictions, has destroyed the value of lower level items. Now it is not worth the consignment risk to sell +2 items at mudds, and even mnay +3 items. As somebody who played 40 characters to level 15 or so, the auction was the way to get these items, and oft get them for a good price. The lifting of level restriction has given me two choices for lowbies: mule, or pay full merchant price for +2 or +3 gear, becausenobody wants to risk te commission to sell items in low demand, as most players can just mule better now.

However, i am pro-muling, as stated before. There are just too many work arpunds, and i think mod enforcement of muling restrictions would become their only job.

I have thought of more solutions while driving to work for the economy, and will post them in a new thread soon.

[Laughingman]

Muleing is practically impossible to enforce so it's tolerated.

/Thread

Seriously though I have been on another server that tried to stop and it didn't make playing more fun and everyone knew people were simply doing it anyways.

[RaiderOne]

My original post was to find out peoples opinions and from those that have posted it seems the majority would prefer to have no muleing but some do like to do it. Despite some of the comments I did not ask for it to be banned. But I would like the rule to be "we would prefer you don't but wont stop you if you do". As it is now its a bit of a metaproblem for lack of a better term.

For item restrictions I had this idea.

Code: Select all

Power Tier Item Restriction
This system is based on the idea that there a several tiers of play. In this example we will use 3 tiers, but the system could be configured to use as many as desired.

When the ‘loot system’ spawns an item it is assigned a tier based on how powerful/rare the item is. The easiest way to do this is to base the tier on the ‘loot table’ the item comes from. This means the loot tables must be configured to use the tier system, but has the advantage that no additional scripting is required to value the item.

**It would be worth adding the items tier to its name/description.**

When a player equips an item the item is checked against its tier and the characters level, if his level to too low to use the item the script unequips the item automatically. For the example 3 tiers the power level would be configured as follows;
Tier 1 (CL 1-10) +1/+2 items
Tier 2 (CL 11-20) +3/+4 items
Tier 3 (CL 21-30) Better than +4 items

I don’t think the check applies to the DM client but it’s easy to exempt them from the check.

One advantage of this system is that it would not affect any existing items, so the current player base is unaffected and cannot complain about not being able to use their items. These items would eventually leave circulation and would not impact on the system.

Note: crafting / shops / item storage / auction may need some scripting / item tags adding

[AC81]

Why is this needed? If you don't want to mule/twink, just don't do it. Pretty easy.

[Calodan]

Why is this needed? If you don't want to mule/twink, just don't do it. Pretty easy.

Indeed. I echo this sentiment. Not hard really. Just enjoy the game.

[aaron22]

it's not needed, because it doesn't matter. the game is not so hard to require this. the game is long, not hard. i play a lot of toons from 1 with zero twinking and it doesnt make any/much difference. really bad gearing on top of a really bad build. that would be a problem i think.. never tried it.... yet.

[NeOmega]

Why is this needed? If you don't want to mule/twink, just don't do it. Pretty easy.

way to skip the comments and go straight for your opinion. I answered why, and it doesn't have to do with muling, it has to do with the economy.

[aaron22]

the economy has been discussed many times and the problem is that server economy is unlike any real world ideas. concepts fall apart when the variables of available and static currency are infinity.