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A Few Suggestions

Posted: 07 Jul 2014, 15:06
by Akeno
I don't know from where to begin with so i'll do my best with trying to explain what i think would be nice for Smolderforge to happen in the future and it might consist of a lot of criticism but i don't want anyone from the Smolderforge staff or any player to take it personally.

So let's begin...

Cross-faction talking

I've been playing on Smolderforge since late 2010 ,early 2011 and one thing that has made a huge impression on me was the community. The way people spoke to each other,how they acted towards different players made me really disappointed most of the time. I think the first reason for the bad community of Smolderforge is the cross-faction talking. I am 90% sure that if players from different factions were not able to talk to each other almost all of the pointless argues we see every day could have been and could be avoided. It really disappoints me how for all of the years that i've been playing here ,most part of the players that play here -whether now or old ones , haven't changed at all . It's as if almost everyone that starts playing here get's drained down into becoming more and more like the rest of the players and that is mainly due to the fact that cross-faction communation is allowed. Because just a simple swear such as '' alliance noob '' or ''horde noob'' can trigger that feeling where you - the player become the same as the person that offended you and the cycle goes on and on. And i think it's something that should be taken care of and viewed quite seriously from Henhouse and the rest of the team. Another thing a lot of players on Smolderforge should do is stop acting as if they're some super stars in the server. Imagine a new player who just starts playing here and the first thing they get to experience is the ''best of all'' Smolderforge players and the constant rage and argues between them which leads to my 2nd argument of why cross-faction talking should be removed. The players. Most players that play on Smolderforge are under the age of 20 , that includes me and many of you . And although age is not a factor of how well you behave i think it plays a major role. Not to mention that some players here don't even know English well enough to communicate well with other players. So what happens exactly ? They know a few words and for example you tell them '' noob '' . And from then on they say the same to someone else and this goes on and on and on. And yes,there's an ignore button that works wonderfully . But when you hear such conversations all around you ,mainly from players from different factions who want to prove they're better ,you slowly join them and become the same type of a person (at least in the game ) or you get disgusted and you don't enjoy playing at all . I got carried away,but i'm sure plenty of you get the idea.


Forums

Okey,let's admit it. The design and style of the Forums is old. It represents the original World Of Warcraft website was it was back during The Burning Crusade ,but it's pointless now. Smolderforge is one of the last remaining servers to use this kind of design /template for it's Forums. It has to be changed . It is confusing for new players. The scale of the profile pictures is 64x64 which is damn small. 1/3 of the posts in these forums are just a waste of time which for a new player joining the forums can make a really really bad impression. That's a little bit how it was in the original World Of Warcraft forums too ,but this isn't Blizzard's WoW. This is supposed to be Smolderforge - where it's fun to pvp and to pve . Where people play together and have fun . With many cool features ,with helpful GMs and a friendly community. And how will that ever happen if the community remains the way it is - which is affecting the forums too and sometimes even the behavior of Smolderforge staff. How many times have you pointlessly argued about something on the Forums Henhouse ? Not just you,any GM , i am asking you , how many times have you wasted your time writing a long message to reply to a bunch of trolls . And how would any of you feel if you join the Forums community and all you read every day is this kind of shit . Yeah...excuse for using such words ,but it is just a bunch of crap. Here's examples :

http://www.smolderforge.com/forums/view ... =12&t=8986
http://www.smolderforge.com/forums/view ... =12&t=8987
http://www.smolderforge.com/forums/view ... =12&t=8985
http://www.smolderforge.com/forums/view ... =12&t=8916
http://www.smolderforge.com/forums/view ... =12&t=8969
http://www.smolderforge.com/forums/view ... =12&t=8888

I'm not going to look for more ,but i'm sure you all know and have seen such Forum topics that are just useless. And that's not Smolderforge's problem ,that's how the community is. But there is something else. It is Smolderforge's problem that their actually allowing such useless argues or wantings to continue. You guys , Henhouse , the GMs and everyone on the Smolderforge team. You are in charge here. Why do you waste your time explaining the same things over and over again. You are the law. You're not some teachers or mothers or babysitters that have to give everyone on the server attention , you should be more formal ,more neutral and distant from players. So they can learn where to post things ,how to name them and most of all how to act towards you and towards each other. Because the more attention you give them ,the more they'll continue being this way. How many times have you been offended by a player just because you replied to their post ? And then you waste your time even more by writing more and all you get is the same shitty answers every time. And all of these things ,all of this which you guys are allowing along with the fact that all players can trash talk each other all they want since cross-faction talking is enabled leads to how the players are being today and how they have been for as long as i've been here (and even before that ) . Something needs to change Henhouse and you know it.


Website

Okey so ...first of all ... why the hell is there are a giant Armory sign in front of the main website page ? It's like it's saying '' Armory '' instead of giving you that feeling that you're entering the Smolderforge website. Why isn't there any information with what Smolderforge has to offer ? Why does the damn news feed / news posts look like a f*cking tumblr website allowing you to '' see older posts '' . And why are the server specs along with more information than just the server being online not given ? Dude,imagine i just enter the website . I know a few english words and all i see is '' Armory '' and some damn posts of Henhouse . Why are the '' Main '' Menus so small ? They should be bigger,they should be placed somewhere everyone can see them. I mean , look at those little menus . And why is donating the second menu option after '' Home '' . And why is there even a '' Home '' button on the damn homepage ? Why is '' Membership '' or '' Create Account '' just put in the left side of the website ? '' Create Account , Client Download , How to Connect , Vote , Donate , Forums and lastly About us. That's all the options you need to have as menu buttons. And they need to big ,to be clear ,to be placed somewhere everyone can see them. Another question. Why isn't there a god damn slide show or for example some kind of advertising / show off of the movies /videos created by some players here. I mean,just look at all the amazing sh*t you guys can do with the website . Not only will it get many players but it will look damn awesome. Smolderforge can offer so much more and yet i feel like we're stuck in some cycle of hell that repeats itself every month , every year. Heck you can add a '' Features '' menu option showing all of the amazing and unqiue things about Smolderforge. You can make a slide show in the middle top of the webpage that says : Instant 70 , unique features , amazing Staff and community , lots of fun ... etc . Something like that. And get rid of that Armory sign . The armory is amazing ,congratulations on that Henhouse and congratulations to everyone else that worked on it . And you can still '' show it off '' ,but not in the f*cking middle of your awesome server. I really got carried away with all of these and i wrote so much more than i should have for which i hope you all excuse me if you happen to read this .

Donation Dragon

Remove it. It's big,it's annoying. It allows you to slow fall anywhere you want. This can be abused in battlegrounds , in open pvp areas or anywhere else. If someone wants to slow fall they can get a mage or a priest or whatever and do it all the want. These dragons just take too much space literally and you can abuse things with them very easily.


Poison Duration

Don't know what happened to this one or why it got canceled. But would love to see it being at least 2 hours long instead of one ,cause it's really annoying sometimes to have to apply your poison every 45-50 minutes because you know the rest of the remaining time you'll be fighting and in combat.


Visual Enchanting

This one already got suggested and i also agree. That would be amazing. Would be nice to have some gnome mage with some runes around him or an anvil with a purple sword in front of him that changes the visual style of your weapon enchants or removes it.

A little bit of grammar and word mistakes ,but i got really carried away.

More to come soon...

Re: A Few Suggestions

Posted: 07 Jul 2014, 16:52
by Dntryme
Akeno wrote:Cross-faction talking
I can't really agree with that. Rather get rid of LFG than crossfaction talking. On the other side, it's one of the main aspects of Smolderforge.

Akeno wrote:Forums
Nor with that.
Akeno wrote:Website
The website is fine.
Although, the armory needs improvements. You can't even see the current gear (without transmogrification) nor the gems or enchants.
Additionally, why doesn't a guild feature exist?
Akeno wrote:Donation Dragon
^ this.
Donors already have big advantages, giving them the ability to fly makes it even worse (e.g. from Lumber Mill down to Blacksmith/Gold Mine)
There are a few other mounts left which could be used as a donation mount.
Akeno wrote:Poison Duration
I completely agree with this.
Many private servers have this feature. It's annoying if you have to apply 4-5 poisons to your weapons every hour.
Akeno wrote:Visual Enchanting
I'm not sure if that's possible.

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I'd love to see crossfaction battlegrounds, a new consumable system and a PvE-gear nerf for PvP.
To promote voting, you could add spells which alter your appearance (e.g. from Undead -> Tauren).

Edit: Hyjal / Azshara Crater rotation please.

Re: A Few Suggestions

Posted: 07 Jul 2014, 18:59
by Henhouse
@Faction-talking:

So this was done because Smolderforge was a funserver, and we started with an insanely low population and grew into the server today. I never changed it, because, well people enjoy being able to communicate with each other. Same reason no one wanted the LFG channel removed when we took a poll census on it. It is pretty toxic, yea, but I don't know how much people would enjoy being restricted to half the server being immediately cut off. Most active players have both horde/alliance characters anyway and so if they logged into an alt, they could not talk to half their friends currently online in their friend's list. With no faction restriction and unlimited accounts, people would just log alts and trash-talk there.

However, about a month ago I brainstormed the idea to the GMs to disable cross-faction chat while in a battleground. I felt this actually may help some of the toxicity there. However ,then the issue became the players resorting to LFG to trash-talk about their current BG, whispers, etc. I wasn't sure how to properly make that work without disabling all cross-faction chat during a BG. Let me know your thoughts on this.


@Forums, I definitely know what you mean here. I have wanted to switch forums for a long time honestly, but it does suck leaving behind 65,000 posts containing a lot of memories, and reference. If we did leave these forums I would likely leave an archived version online for people to be able to review through since there is a lot of content here.

I would love to switch to a whole new forums such as esoTalk which is really fast, light-weight, mobile-ready and very easy to use. The problem is its development team and speed is very slow, so when I say it would be a very light-weight forum I wasn't kidding. But yes, these forums are ANCIENT. The software they run on is from 2008! That's 6 years old! Posting replies in a separate window (like this, without "quick reply") is a thing of the past! I agree, they're terrible. I only use them because it's what we presently have.

As for the toxicity on here, yes, it has gotten out of hand drastically. I think the only way to really impose new rules on a new community would be to move to new forums to impose change there. We let this community get out of hand a long time ago.


@Website: Sure the website could use improvements, but for the most part it works really well and is pretty straight-forward and simplistic. We didn't want to fill up your whole screen with content, that would be excessive, require a lot of artwork (we don't have an artist). We were really inspired by a similar model that Molten uses for their site. Theirs is also very simplistic and straight-forward and that's what we aimed for. I mean I'd be down for a new, revamped theme for the site but the fact is it took us a long time to develop that (not just the style), but we wrote the entire engine that powers the site from scratch and it requires a lot of time to make improvements. A lot of WoW sites now use some pre-written engine called FushionCMS (you can Google it) which came out around the time of us finished completion of our own website, sadly. I think the site is fine, and it's better than the old one we had.

@Dragon: I'd like to see more feedback on this. I am totally open to removing that blasted dragon. I would likely keep the DNT mount though.

@Poison Duration: Totally open to doing, but I don't know how to extend buff durations actually, so maybe if I can find a thread somewhere on Trinity's forums or something on how to do so, I've heard it's possible.

@Visual Enchanting: This may be possible, but I don't know if I can work it into the transmog system. We basically adapted the transmog system from the one that was developed as a feature for TrinityCore for Wrath into TBC.

Re: A Few Suggestions

Posted: 07 Jul 2014, 19:57
by Akeno
Damn Henhouse <3
Thank you for the long reply and so sorry i was a bit too rough on the website .

For the buff duration: http://www.ac-web.org/forums/showthread ... f-the-buff
This should help and work.

I'll reply later about the other parts of your message and i'll find more information.

Re: A Few Suggestions

Posted: 07 Jul 2014, 20:00
by Akeno
Something else i found interesting and i'll post it / them here :
http://www.ac-web.org/forums/showthread ... Change-NPC
Enchanting visuals:
http://emudevs.com/showthread.php/53-Lu ... and-gossip

Re: A Few Suggestions

Posted: 08 Jul 2014, 19:55
by Akeno
Cross-faction talking
Disabled for battlegrounds. Have every battleground zone removed from such feature. People can write whatever they want but they won't be able to understand each other. Whispers between the two factions inside the battleground should be disabled too. Writing in the global channels should be disabled too since it's already a little bit useless in a battleground. The only problem i see is how would people whisper players from the opposite faction that are not in a battleground. That's the only part that bothers me. For example if i'm a horde orc shaman and i'm playing Arathi Basin and i want to whisper my human warrior friend who's not inside a battleground. Who's at Tanaris for example. How would that happen if i have cross-faction talking disabled while i'm inside a battleground.


Forums
Well i'm glad Henhouse replied to this thread and said that Smolderforge does really need new forums. So i think we all agree on that . The old posts and old forums can always be left as a memory,viewable by anyone who wants to read them or just look through old posts ,players etc.

Donation Mount: Dragon
Okey so this one should be really disabled. It's big ,it gives a lot of advantages and it's annoying. It's a really cool mount but i'm sure you can edit the visual npc ID in Spell.dbc and change it with something else. For example Bengal Tiger or change the speed of the Turtle Mount to 100% . Something like that. Or just use something else as visual.


Enchant Visual Remover And Changer
It is possible and i hope it can be done soon. There are many ehcnat visuals that aren't even part of the normal enchants players get to use so i'm sure everyone is up for this idea.


Poison Duration
Again possible and i think i already gave a link for it. Would love to see the lenght increased.


Hunter / Warlock Pet Skin Changer
There's plenty of skins for their pets. I'm not talking about the models ,just the skins. The colours.
I think this is a goodi dea too.



Hyjal / Azshara Rotation
Totally up for it. Azshara does get boring. Would love if they change every few hours. Just like there were some edits to the battleground rotation and there's plenty more WSG. That was great and this would only improve that original idea.



Some Fun Staircase Event or a Game
Something to do if you just want to spend time while waiting for battlegrounds but you don't feel like doing quests or dueling or traveling around. Something that doesn't require a GM to always have to observe that's going on. Something automatic. A stair case event or some kind of a game that's just fun. That doesn't require skills in neither pvp or pve. Just random things to make Smolderforge even more awesome.


Enchant visual can also be purchased through voting only.



Make all Outland Quests give Fragments Of Justice
One fragment of Justice per normal quest and 3 per Elite. I'm not sure if they were called Fragments of Justice since i haven't done PvE in ages,but you get the idea. I would love to see people quest more in Outland. In every zone - from Hellfire all the way to Shadowmoon Valley. That way people will report bugs,have a decent reward and fun at the same time , plus lots of items they can use for transmogging later on if they want to. Or the reward could be something less than a fragment of justice that combined into 5 for example makes a fragment of justice. Something like that. Coin Of Justice or something.

Re: A Few Suggestions

Posted: 09 Jul 2014, 13:20
by Akeno
Server Locales Multi-language Support
I've seen it only on one server for now. Basically every player can view npcs,quests,items in the language their wow client is. So if you're a russian player with a russian client ,you can view everything in russian (expect for custom quests,npcs that is) . But English players still get to see everything in English. And even linked items are viewed depending on your client language without any problems.

Re: A Few Suggestions

Posted: 09 Jul 2014, 18:53
by Henhouse
@Cross-faction talking:

At this time it would be too difficult to make it to where you were not allowed to speak to the only faction, but could speak to other players outside the BG. It would require the server to keep certain lists of all the players in the BG and knowing who they are allowed to speak to, it would be a little difficult and isn't too high of a priority. So it's either that, or have it all disabled, or simply disable cross-chat /say, and /yell.

@Dragon mount: Thanks for bringing attention to this again. We're likely going to get rid of it. Though there is the argument that donors also have access to unlimited Noggenfogger which simply can give you slow fall as well. And as you can I see I released the new DNT mount that now goes 100%. I probably should have waited to release it, but went ahead and did so. I also could make the turtle go 100%.... That's actually a pretty good idea!

Edit: So because the spell is lacking the speed increase effect I don't know if this can work unless I figure out how to add effects to spells. Notice how the DNT one, for example, has the 2nd effect of Mod Speed Mounted? http://wotlk.openwow.com/spell=42929

@Poison duration: Let me know if you can figure it out because the structures must be very different from the Wrath ones that they're talking about. So I see where the IDs in SpellDuration.dbc define times in milliseconds like for 1 hour, but when I look for that ID under the spell for each poison... I don't see it. Maybe I am missing something. It would be better to have a C++ way to do this though which is possible in SpellMgr.cpp but I don't know much about spell modification. Exsurgo did though.

@Hyjal: Hyjal is coming back in the future. We're slightly revamping so it cannot be graveyard camped, which, yes, means HKs will be enabled there again. Oh and the HK cap is getting lifted soon.

@Outland, good idea but I don't have a list with every Outland quest readily available. Additionally, I'm sure a lot are broken here and there.

@Multi-language: This would require someone, or many people, rather to translate all of our stuff... it would take a long time and be difficult to find. I thought about it once, honestly. Having our GMs translate for the Spanish, German, French clients, etc. But then I just realized it's an English server anyway and promoting the other languages may make it difficult when they expect us to speak their language and we cannot prove a GM with their language, for example.

Re: A Few Suggestions

Posted: 09 Jul 2014, 20:28
by foulacy
Henhouse wrote:@Cross-faction talking:

At this time it would be too difficult to make it to where you were not allowed to speak to the only faction, but could speak to other players outside the BG. It would require the server to keep certain lists of all the players in the BG and knowing who they are allowed to speak to, it would be a little difficult and isn't too high of a priority. So it's either that, or have it all disabled, or simply disable cross-chat /say, and /yell.

@Dragon mount: Thanks for bringing attention to this again. We're likely going to get rid of it. Though there is the argument that donors also have access to unlimited Noggenfogger which simply can give you slow fall as well. And as you can I see I released the new DNT mount that now goes 100%. I probably should have waited to release it, but went ahead and did so. I also could make the turtle go 100%.... That's actually a pretty good idea!

Edit: So because the spell is lacking the speed increase effect I don't know if this can work unless I figure out how to add effects to spells. Notice how the DNT one, for example, has the 2nd effect of Mod Speed Mounted? http://wotlk.openwow.com/spell=42929

@Poison duration: Let me know if you can figure it out because the structures must be very different from the Wrath ones that they're talking about. So I see where the IDs in SpellDuration.dbc define times in milliseconds like for 1 hour, but when I look for that ID under the spell for each poison... I don't see it. Maybe I am missing something. It would be better to have a C++ way to do this though which is possible in SpellMgr.cpp but I don't know much about spell modification. Exsurgo did though.

@Hyjal: Hyjal is coming back in the future. We're slightly revamping so it cannot be graveyard camped, which, yes, means HKs will be enabled there again. Oh and the HK cap is getting lifted soon.

@Outland, good idea but I don't have a list with every Outland quest readily available. Additionally, I'm sure a lot are broken here and there.

@Multi-language: This would require someone, or many people, rather to translate all of our stuff... it would take a long time and be difficult to find. I thought about it once, honestly. Having our GMs translate for the Spanish, German, French clients, etc. But then I just realized it's an English server anyway and promoting the other languages may make it difficult when they expect us to speak their language and we cannot prove a GM with their language, for example.
<3 <3

Re: A Few Suggestions

Posted: 10 Jul 2014, 07:48
by Imperium
Henhouse wrote:Oh and the HK cap is getting lifted soon.

fuuuuuck.

this gonna start another war?