Co8 New Content: Verbobonc

I think the explanation offered by Wilfrick and Captain Abiram fits the bill quite nicely: they were en route to Verbobonc from where they had recovered the children (somewhere other than Emridy Meadows). You happened upon them while they were encamped there. They had to travel, after all, which doesn't happen overnight. And communication is not what we're used to in the modern day real world. It would take several days for word to get out that the children had been recovered and that the rescuers were escorting them ... all perfectly legitimate reasons for you to be cautious about who you go around launching fireballs at, particularly given that they're a group of humans (whom it is illegal to kill arbitrarily) as opposed to a gang of bugbears or something.

I suppose that we could go to the trouble of creating new protos and portraits for the rescuers (which you still wouldn't see until after you attacked them), and add all the necessary scripting to swap them out for the slavers when particular conditions were met, but I think people would rather have some new material in the next release instead of an extremely convincing rendition of a scenario that most players will likely never see. :shrug:

There's another reason for them being there specifically that you learn from Wilfrick if you go the preferred route and beat them 'lawfully,' so to speak: the fissures in the ground at EM where the slavers are are custom content that has to do with the slavers storyline and ultimate fate. Therefore, to move them somewhere else would require a fairly large rewrite.

That's true, but it's a bit meta-gamey sounding. We can't really account for everything that the player may know and cater to it; only your party. If we did, we'd have to allow for everything that repeat players know from their earlier playthroughs, and so on.

I guess a solution would be to do new portraits for the rescuers, but I still have to wonder if that's really a wise investment of time and resources given the payoff - that being that players who act recklessly can be more effectively convinced that they were acting recklessly. I'd rather give seven new portraits to a new group of NPCs in a random encounter or something like that.

Other than that, I don't know what else to tell you. You attacked a group of innocents. Wilfrick even tells you their names after you get back to Verbobonc, as well as the far-reaching repercussions of your actions on future relations with Dyvers. Better to just know for a certainty who it is you're attacking beforehand.

p.s. - From a more pragmatic point of view, this simply isn't going to change due to the large potential for exploit here by the player. Like I said up the thread, it's really, really, REALLY hard to get NPCs to behave intelligently and effectively. I mean, it takes hours, days, weeks of testing and tweaking to get them to do even the most rudimentary things that players can do, due to the fact that you can actually think. Given that, it's very aggravating to have those efforts go to waste by players using exploits and gaining even greater advantages. I certainly understand your desire to increase your chances whenever possible - that's human nature, but it's sort of the modder's job to fight that, and ultimately that advocacy is in your best interests because it makes for far more engaging battles and scenarios. We can try real hard to make challenging battles and make it so that you have to play them straight, or we can just shrug our shoulders and stage another string of rote fights with ToEE's fabled bugbear hordes. Which would you prefer? (Don't answer that, I'm being facetious. )

 

@chano, while I genuinely admire your citizenship, you've sent PMs to spambots the last two times.

You can often tell a spambot from a regular person when it:

• Has a name like "Annagyijjk" or "Kenjifujima"
• Acts as though it's been here all along
• Makes and introductory post that does not acknowledge being new whatsoever
• Asks generic or common questions or makes similar comments
• Has hyperlinks (meds, online gaming, viagra, ec.) in its signature
• Often has an anime-ish avatar (odd for a gaming community like Co8)
• Posts responses to replies that it did not ask the original question for

This bot, for example, posted a pointless generic reply in the console thread (e.g. "it sure is cold in winter!") and a nonsensical reply to someone else's answer in the whaddya know thread (e.g. "good stuff, thanks!"), in addition to an exact quote from the last bot's slave trader statement here. (It's curious that "slave" + "trader" + "spoiler" has apparently made it into the spambot lexicon btw, lol.)

Anyway, it's probably not a good idea to PM a bot, because that's like waking the machines and letting them know we're here.

I don't mean this as a jump-on-chano post, just more of a general info for everybody thing. Carry on. :thumbsup:

 

LOL

Queen Tarah takes Viagra? That explains everything (like why she has bigger **lls than any man)!