Fixing Goblinese

[Yaffy]

This is in response to the recent blog post talking about improving the leveling experience for players, and making the game a little less frustrating at earlier levels.

Goblinese can be one of the most important skills to get for many players, as many useful NPCs are locked behind Goblinese. Not only that, but players are encouraged to get Goblinese early on, as many players will most likely bump into an NPC who requires it fairly early in the game. Unfortunately, Goblinese might be one of the most annoying skills to level for all the wrong reasons.

The main problem with Goblinese is that looting and "Filtering" Goblin cards is a pain in the neck. Especially when starting out, you're significantly more likely to find many cards that you can't use and will clog your inventory rather than useful cards that can give you exp. This leads to two methods of trying to pick up and "Filter" cards:

1. Upon killing a goblin, mouse over the card in their inventory. Wait for the tool tip to appear and show you what level it is. If it's an appropriate level, pick it up. If not, avoid looting it.
2. Upon killing a goblin, loot its card without looking at it. Then when your inventory is getting too full, mash through all of your goblin cards so you consume any that are usable. Then dump the cards that didn't get used on the ground.

The first is very painful, because waiting for the game to pop up the information box while your trigger finger is waiting to click and loot the card is frustrating. Of course it's pretty minor on its own, but when you have to filter through a ridiculous number of cards just to find the few you can use, that wait time starts getting more and more annoying each time. I've also figured out that the info box takes longer to pop up if you're lagging, so if you have a bad connection then god help you.
The second one is less frustrating since you're letting the game filter the cards for you, but it's still a big hassle because you have to throw away tons of items. Thankfully this is easier if you have the easy drop option on, but either way you're dragging and dropping an item to throw it away for each goblin that dropped a bad card.

This grind is also made worse by a few things:
1. The cards dropped by goblins are entirely random, so at low level you get way too many cards that are unusable. This makes the skill seem extremely difficult to level even though it gets easier overtime.
2. Goblin NPCs slam you in the face with high goblinese requirements immediately. There isn't any real benefit to getting your Goblinese leveled up until you go through half of the skill, and the first Goblin npc you meet has a high chance to require 30 or even 40 Goblinese to talk to. This is incredibly discouraging when you're probably still around level 0 when you first learn of this.

I've played with a few friends through the game, and none of them liked leveling up Goblinese, even though they thought the idea was interesting. One of my friends even changed from Necromancer to Priest just because he didn't want to deal with leveling up Goblinese to learn Necromancy. He literally changed his religious views over the skill because it was that annoying.

So with that said, I have a few suggestions that I think would make this skill less awful to grind:

1. Give the goblin cards more than 1 icon.
One of the easiest ways to make filtering the goblin cards less painful would be to give the cards different icons depending on the skill level required, this way it would be easier to immediately tell if a card is too high level for you. I would imagine a level 0 goblin card would be like a note scribbled on a napkin, while a level 40+ goblin card could look like it was written on a fancy (for a goblin) scroll or parchment. A wider variety of icons would be better, but just having the icon "Upgrade" every 5 or 10 levels (0-10, 11-20, 21-30, etc) would be a big help.

2. Have the goblins drop cards based on their level.
I'm not sure if this is entirely accurate, but as far as I can tell every goblin can drop cards of any level, and goblin cards are only separated by the "type" of goblin (Ex. All swordsmen drop one set of cards, while all archers drop another). I would suggest making it so all of the low level goblins in Serbule hills are heavily biased towards level 0-10 cards and probably shouldn't even drop cards higher than level 25. Goblins at the start of Goblin dungeon could be biased towards 0-30 while the "Advanced" goblins a bit further into the dungeon could be more likely to drop higher level cards. This would give players a better idea of where to farm for a specific level of Goblinese.

3. Lower the requirements for speaking to Goblins.
Many Goblins require a ton of Goblinese to speak to, and this means there's a huge space between your Goblinese level being useless to very helpful skill. Ragabir in the Casino is a good example because you don't need Goblinese to speak to him, but you need it to fully access him as an NPC. I think that doing something similar for other Goblin NPCs would go a long way at improving people's mood towards leveling Goblinese. For example, JumJab is a goblin you can bump into in Etibule and might be the first Goblinese check you see, and he requires a wopping 35 Goblinese to talk to. I think his requirement should be much lower, for example just 5 or 10 (Or maybe even zero considering that he canonically works for humans). However, his functionality as an NPC could be restricted until you get to a higher Goblinese. For example, his training for Necromany skills could have a Goblinese requirement that increases with levels. Not only would this make sense thematically in that the player would need to know Goblinese more fluently to understand more complicated goblin training, but it would mean a low level Necromancy player would see that they can slowly work their way up in Goblinese to learn new skills, from 5 to 10 to 15, etc, rather than being slapped in the face with a level 35 requirement right off the bat. This would have the same end result (Players needing to get high levels in Goblinese to fully learn their skills) but would be much more gradual and less discouraging to grind.

4. Change the visual look of unusable Goblin cards (Ex. Giving them a red tint)
This is basically asking for a system that could be applied to all usable items, but basically what I'm suggesting is that if an item is unusable, tint its icon red or put a small X on it or something to show that the item can't be used by you. This way if you're looting a goblin and its card is 30 levels higher than your Goblinese, you can see that it's red at a glance and skip over it. This could be applied to other items as well like recipe scrolls, but I have to admit it might be a bit overkill for just Goblinese cards. I just wanted to mention this idea in case if it sounded interesting.

So in conclusion, Goblinese is a skill that I definitely think isn't very fun, and by making it less painful it could help encourage players in the level 25-35 range to stick around the Goblin area longer. I have to admit, it's probably not the biggest issue newer players face or one of the biggest changes that I think should happen to skills for player retention, but Goblinese is a skill that I feel like is just so easily identifiable as flawed that I wanted to write about how to fix it. Please let me know what you think, but I've yet to find someone who legitimately liked grinding up Goblinese.