Some 'General' Fairy Questions

[Oxlazr]

Hi! Just had a few questions and thoughts regarding the fairies, seeing as they've just been spoiled (somewhat) on twitter.

This isn't spoiler-related stuff, rather integration and logistics.

Can a level 1 essentially be "carried" through winter nexus to unlock the race immediately, or is there some sort of hard requirement that can't be bypassed?

If they can, would this be a way for new players to essentially skip the low level experience? Necromancy comes to mind as being fairly popular and many people are willing to help new players unlock it. I can see why a new player would want to be ran through the WN to unlock the new race before investing time into a character they might otherwise simply discard.

Given the characters aren't likely to be "fresh" on an account, is it intended that players share some resources with that character (I.e. councils), or is it balanced in a way that the new character can be entirely independent?

What exactly does "starting a level 30" mean? Simply level 30 knife fighting? Or level 30 in a bunch of skills?

Will their racial qualities be suppressed while in an animal form (presumably for greater than 4 hours)?

For things like this, is there any chance we can get the test server back ahead of their implantation? I figure the player-base is big enough now to justify it.


And just a personal note -
I wonder if it's possible to go wild with any ideas you had then work backwards, pruning some that don't work well instead of playing it safe?

Anyways, it seems like a good excuse to engage with the game on a fresh character, so despite fairies not exactly being my thing I'm looking forward to the new options they might present.

Edit: Is there any chance of an extra character slot upon their release?

[Citan]

There isn't a hard lock on running the WN quest so it is possible to carry someone through it, probably, if they are extremely careful. However, the new-player fairy experience is not easy, and it assumes you are reasonably competent at the game. For instance, you need to make your own ice knives from frozen ice that you conjure, which means using several recipes and abilities in conjunction. This isn't super hard stuff, but a complete newbie will be totally overwhelmed and totally lost, and the newbie experience for fairies doesn't cover any of that stuff at all. (It's busy teaching you the new stuff specific to fairies.)

A new fairy will start at level 30 in a couple of skills. There are four combat skills being developed for them, and I think you'll be able to pick two of the four. (Not quite sure yet. Could be you can pick from two skill combinations, or something like that.) After the newbie experience you can always start new skills as usual, although being a fairy means that some skills are a bit harder to learn than they are for humans, elves, and rakshasa -- while others are a bit easier. I don't want to get into what that means exactly, because I'm still fiddling with the details.

Some of the fairy's abilities and restrictions are permanent in every form, but most physical attributes are tied to their physical form. So a fairy turned into a deer will play pretty much like a regular deer.

We aren't designing the experience with the expectation that fairies are receiving support from other characters on the account. That said, no, we won't be adding more character slots for them, sorry. (But the eventual VIP service will include another slot or three.)

The fairy is pretty far out there in terms of design. What I mean is, it has a lot of weird mechanics that may or may not work! But the game's in beta, and this will be a soft-launch of the race, so players just need to understand that the mechanics will probably change over time. I don't think setting up the test server will be too helpful, because I think most of the tricky changes will take weeks to gather useful feedback on. Well, maybe I'll rethink that. But right now I intend to use the main server for testing.

[Oxlazr]

Thanks for the reply! It's much of what I expected and a sensible approach overall - I'd be happy to test them ahead of time in some capacity, though I can't speak for anyone else.

Regardless, I think it's important to at least implement things as you envisioned them then tinker after the fact, given there's no other way to know for sure if something could have worked; I'd generally expect the community to have some level of patience on that front.

Keep it up & all that jazz! Thanks again for the info.

[Vish]

i think that starting with 4 combat skills at lv 30 will be great.
why?
because that will give New Fairy character option to use one of 6 Setskill build and because they will be many number of new fairy characters at beginning whey will be much data related to staring playing with those skillset and if one of those will be for some reason not so good as stating skillset it will be easy remove it from staring skills before game official release.
Because it advanced race that will need be unlocked maybe adding some not-combat skills will be nice idea: like Tailoring (at lv 30 OR lv 20 or lv 25) Cooking at mhm lv 15 (no need to add all skill at lv 30) some basic lvl in Foraging (lv 20) Flower Arrangement (lv5) Art History (lv20) Nature Appreciation (lv10) and few lv at Anatomy (species-specific Anatomy skills like species-specific Anatomy skills like Elemental Anatomy) new character that start only with few lv 30 combat skills look somehow mhm unnatural

[Tagamogi]

i think that starting with 4 combat skills at lv 30 will be great.

I'm the absolute opposite here. I love leveling, and I really enjoy the early levels of any skill because dinging is fast and easy at that stage. Also, if a skill starts at a higher level, I feel like I'm missing information about the skill because I didn't really level the skill from 1-30, so I'm missing the actual play experience my numerical level claims I have. If I only get to play 50 levels of a skill instead of 80, I'd much rather play 1 - 50 than 30 - 80.

I think I'm a pretty solid minority in my views but wanted to toss it out here. :) I can live with the fairy skills starting higher and understand why it may make logical sense. I just kind of wish they wouldn't and I really would prefer starting with as few high level skills as possible on a new character.


Oh, and I am really excited about the fairies having a release date now! :D

[Vish]

Tagamogi: Fairy will start witch lv30 environment.
Imagine you start standart new charcter and after Tutorial island you going to Elibure...
Even totally fresh newbie in most case have 4 skills at begining of game (sword + unarmed + psyhology + archery)
If new Fairy race start wit only 2 skills then there are 2 option: players are forced to use those skills to explore lv 30 zones or back to newbie zones to learn new skills and i think that is not purpose of 'advanced' race

[Velaethia]

Real question: Why are you guys so against more character slots? I know you said more in ViP but as an altaholic it's incredibly limited. I already have 4 characters. It seems fair to add at least 1 with a new race being implemented. Is it not? I don't mean to come off rude. It's just frustrating as a player who is passionate about alts.

[ShieldBreaker]

Real question: Why are you guys so against more character slots? I know you said more in ViP but as an altaholic it's incredibly limited. I already have 4 characters. It seems fair to add at least 1 with a new race being implemented. Is it not? I don't mean to come off rude. It's just frustrating as a player who is passionate about alts.

This is just speculation on my part, but I think it would boil down to costs. Consider if each character takes up on average 125k of space, so your 4 characters take up 1/2 a MB of database space. If you double that your up to 1 MB per player. Times that by the number of player (past, present and future) and your talking GBs. And as you make the database larger and larger you need to make sure the hardware can keep the read/write and seek times low. Basically they probably love to give everyone loads of characters, but there are real-world consideration that constrain them.

[Glythe]

Real question: Why are you guys so against more character slots? I know you said more in ViP but as an altaholic it's incredibly limited. I already have 4 characters. It seems fair to add at least 1 with a new race being implemented. Is it not? I don't mean to come off rude. It's just frustrating as a player who is passionate about alts.

A quick answer to your question is that alts for most people provide more space. But for some people like me alts are a runaway train when it comes to income. A fifth or sixth slot would completely break the game in terms of how much money you could make per month.

More characters makes space less limiting; this is supposed to be a game defining issue where inventory space is extremely valuable and you need to be selective about what to carry.