Working Definitions (READ FIRST)

[kennykhsiung]

DEFINITIONS

1. Current Duris (CD) -- the shit version that everyone has quit and that there is no administrative presence or any news entries made to for the last year+ (mud.durismud.com port 7777).
2. New Duris (ND) -- the testmud/port that we have ongoing people working on and contributing to (46.110.109.164 port 7777).
3. A Wipe/Season -- clearly defined beginning and end (start of wipe and end of wipe) in the ND.
4. Over Powered Item(s) (OPIs) -- items existing in the game that cause exploitable power/balance issues. These items and their associated problems often require thorough research and understanding of what makes them overpowered, and how they can be balanced, modified, adjusted, or if necessary removed entirely.
5. Bartender Quests (BTQs) - mechanism for acquiring/spending plat to "farming"/obtaining gear throughout the world at early stages of wipe particularly (but also later stages of wipe CP/NY3 the 2 most common examples), that often significantly stimulates and facilitates PVP. BTQ rewards are linked to the zone file, so that the reward can drop almost anything from the zone file, with some exceptions in specific zones for rareload items. There was a change made that sneak/stoneskin items cannot drop from bartender quest rewards, but that either doesnt work or doesn't apply to certain zones, since both sneak dagger and invoke stone platemail can drop from NY3 BTQs in CD. Certain zones do not offer BTQs (poor band-aid I think) but they include: 222, HOA, and CRL.
6. Zone Explorer (ZE) - the interactive zone website made by Sainth where you can lookup quests, zones, mobs, object stats: https://dev.eidolons.org/zone/
7. Winterhaven Quest Item (WHQI) - all WH quest items are extremely long and difficult to make, you typically can make between 3-5 of each WHQI per wipe depending on how much grinding you want to do. As an example: if I played 8 hours a day every single day for an entire wipe, and devoted every boot to farming the items I'd probably be able to make 5-6 of them in that wipe (assuming the wipe was 1 full year long). This is a screenshot from ZE that doesn't quite accurately reflect how difficult WHQIs are to obtain, because each of these pictured individual quest components in and of itself is a quest component that relies on rareload items dropping in the vaults of a number of high level/low level zones throughout the world.

OPIs continued and their categories:
There are 3 main categories of OPIs, characterized by some combination of the benefit they provide and or their accessibility. Over CD's history, OPIs have fit into some or all of the categories. The general categories are:

1. Providing immortality (they allow you to escape death more easily/avoid dying and losing your gear more easily).
2. Damage output (they allow you to burst damage at unhealable, unfair rates).
3. Accessibility - the availability/difficulty of obtaining said item is disproportionate to its overall power level (meaning its mass produced so that there are hundreds in game which makes it OP, whereas if it was tuned such that for example there could only ever be 5 of them in game per season, it would be a much better solution that allowed for fun/cool/enjoyable items to be in game, rather than just removing them entirely.