Chanter(OD)

Hey! I like this thread. Here is my first entry. Playing an 85th level Necromancer back in the day, in the secret cow level, on hell mode, and the dang 80+ level Barbarian PK'er came in and slaughtered all the low level guys I was hosting in the game. Then he made his second mistake, trying to kill the Necromancer! After he died, over and over again, he asked me how I was killing him, and I responded with a question of my own, "have you ever even played a necromancer", I'm guessing the answer is no, or you would have known better than too try. He tried again, and again, and so I finally told him to try and catch me when I wasn't standing on a mountain of dead hell-bovines, as it was the explosions of their corpses that was killing him. Then, when he was in town again, I ran into a cleared area, and summoned all my minions. He knew about the skeletons and mages, and the fire Golem, but was surprised by the revived heard that wasn't attacking me, lol. IDK what patch this was in, but before 1.10 for sure.

Well, hello and thanks for joining us here at Overdosed. Hope that you have many an enjoyable year of gaming fun with us. Welcome.

I'm looking to have a 'wish list' of things suggested as improvements to the game creator, and wanted to provide a thread, set up as a monthly thing, for all the things folks would like to have/see in "The Cave" in the future. Here are my initial things, from the day i started playing, to today. First off, when playing with someone of a higher level, there is a bug that will corrupt your character file in the very early game. The bug is that, as a quest reward for completion of the "Meet thy Enemy quest", you character gains 200 experience points. This is all fine and good, but the problem is that folks cannot gain more than one level of experience at a time, and if you had help (mainly from folks that are more than a few levels higher than you), you may not have gotten enough experience points to level up to where the 200 experience points from the quest reward will not cause you to gain more than a single level, and thus your character file gets broken. I would fix this somehow, like not letting you get the quest in the first place till you are already third level or something. The way Experience points (XP) get calculated needs to be explained clearly, so that folks are not surprised and disappointed by trying to play with a friend, and not getting any XP because of the way the game is currently coded. AFAIK, all XP not gained from a quest reward, go through something like the following process: Killing blow character level is used to determine possible XP, where the killing blow characters level is subtracted from the monsters level to determine how many XP that particular kill will provide in total. A 50th level guy killing chickens in the 'Farmers Field' isn't going to gain any..., and then, based upon how many folks (in a party or not) are near that monsters death, each will be allocated some of those XP, but then a second function is performed, that compares the deceased monsters level with that of the nearby characters, and if the difference is just a few levels, then less and less XP will be awarded, but if the difference to the compared levels is too large, then no XP will be awarded. This nerfs high level guys being able to 'rush' low level guys to high level, which is good and understandable, but it also causes problems when people are looking to run with folks not quite their own current levels. For this problem, I propose the following solution until something better and permanent can be coded in. Set up a party, and for purposes of XP calculations and disbursements, use the lowest characters level for all calculations, thus, if in an appropriate area of low level monsters, XP will be gained by all. For example, a 50th level guys kills a chicken, worth 6 XP to low level guys. Using my proposed system, the killing blows for any party members, would always be set to that of the lowest member of the party, say in this case 1st level. As I understand it, this sets the XP totals, and then each person would get their share, and then perform the check of their current level against that of the dearly departed foe's level. Many of the things central to the games mechanics, are not well known to all first time players. Among these, are quests, the Inn, the character trainer, the Blacksmith, and the Bank. I recently was hanging out in the discord, and an experienced player enjoying late game content and game play, was surprised to learn that you can store and transfer items between your various characters by means of the bank, as well as that you could buy additional storage for you bank! Too address these kinda of issues, I would love to see some really good tutorial videos posted to the net, that demonstrate how these things work, and serve as a ready made place where solutions can be found. I realize that I have far too many of these things to list within a single post, and so will be making additional posts weekly to keep this going forward, and allowing others to comment in between. Since I started this on a Tuesday, I'll give folks till next Sunday night to reply.

Hey @OGsewerat(OD) good to see you here! So, below we see the news and information screens, as of this date, July 6th, 2020. These two pop up windows will appear once the game is loaded. Too proceed, just close them and continue on. Below we see a typical character selection screen. This particular screen is from a while ago, when I had just deleted a few experimental guys. As you can see, there are three rows, each with 6 positions, giving each BANK FILE a maximum of 18 potential characters. Note, you cannot name your characters, nor can you move them from whatever cell they are created in. All characters are created from left to right, top to bottom, and if you delete a character, that cell remains empty until you create a new character to fill it. Do to the current coding of the game, there is no way around this, and this is a problem I hope to get addressed and changed, for reasons that will become clear. Once you check the box under the character you wish to play with for the duration of the current game, click on the select button. My own first character: I lucked out, in that I ended up making a guy that could solo the story line, not all classes are so fortunate as to be able to do that, but the Blood Fiend is a good first character. Low damage, but high survivability! Just what you want for starting off your adventuring career. This will bring you to the next screen, where you can either go ahead and start the game, or repick who you want to play with. I was going to go ahead and show several different characters selected, but my second choice was to start a new guy, and that didn't allow for any more messing around. This may be because you only get one repick, or because once you select a 'new guy', then that is it. Further testing will reveal the truth. Going forward with a new guy, this is what we see now: And now we are ready to start leveling up our next character. A bank file is where all of your server accounts keep your characters and items, your gold, materials, and honor tokens, and your bank (this needs renamed, so as to differentiate between two very different things), or loot, or whatever you want to call your in-game items. It is a storage space that you can enlarge from it's initial 6x4 storage space, for gold. The price is steeply increasing, and each purchase of additional storage pages, in the same 6x4 format, costs more than the previous ones, up to a maximum of 9 pages. Now that we have covered the initial getting into the game, I'm going to skip over the rest of the screen shots I just took, and focus on issues I have, and some hopes for future content.

For anyone that has played "The Cave", can we get some information about things that you liked, as well as things you didn't, and then, maybe, possibly, some ideas on how to correct things? I'm working on a long list of things I like and don't like, and also what I would like to see changed so that the gaming experience could be improved for everyone. First off, the initial screen is a problem for me, as you get a grid of 6 columns in three rows, and your characters are stored just as what info goes in what slot. No name, and no information other than what class and level they are, to say nothing about any other information that might just be useful to know about them, before you make a game and select them. Because I have many ideas, and several of them would require things that are not currently possible in version 3.0, I'm going to focus first on just the character grid and on ways I think that this could be improved.

Welcome! And speaking of games, what games do you play?

Here are some of the things you will first see upon entering the game. The Spawning Spot: This is the starting area of the game for newly created characters. Upon creation, you character will spawn in the fenced off area in the upper left, and Farmer Clyde will have a yellow exclamation point over him, indicating that he has a new quest for you, to get you started on the path to adventure. Read the quest!, and be prepared... The World's End Keep: Unlike many games, you don't immediately have the right to enter the local center of civilization, but have to earn the right to do so by completing the first quest, given to you by Farmer Clyde right at the beginning, and after doing so and returning to him, you will now see a Green Question Mark over him. Talk to him again, and he will reward you for your bravery and service, and direct you to Miss Molly. When you end your conversation with Clyde, you sill now see a Yellow Exclamation Point over Miss Molly, and when you speak to her, she will ask a favor of you, and doing this favor will enable you to now enter the town for the first time. The Adventure begins: Once you have taken care of business in town (and there is much to do there), you will eventually decide to go forth, and begin your adventures in the wider world, and this is where that will take place, just follow the Yellow Brick Road... Er, the Yellow Arrows, and they will almost always steer ya in the right direction. ***Ok, by now folks will realize that my efforts on building helpful content is going to rely heavily on taking screen shots in game, then editing such, then posting them here. It sounds easy (and it really is, after all) but the computer I am working with/on is under-powered and slow, so I cannot just take screen shots, alt+tab to the desktop, do the editing, and then go ahead and post the images here on the forum. Oh no, that would be too easy, lol. Instead, I am forced to exit SC2 entirely, then do the image editing and posting, and then restart SC2, and repeat the process over and over again, for every few screen shots I take. That being said, it takes me a long time to even post a few images, and I need 100's of images posted to make the clan's informative threads regarding playing "The Cave" worth reading and hopefully clear and easy to understand. It's taken me about a month to explore and figure things out enough so that I could even begin to start to think I know where to start, but I'm going to start uploading many, many images in the coming weeks, so please don't get alarmed if these game images start to breed like rabbits, lol. I am also going to start recruiting folks that I am playing with, and so far I have a couple guys I have played with on the European servers, and a couple more folks that I played with on the US servers, from all over the world. I have so far held off on the recruiting to this point, because I didn't really have a clue what I wanted to do, nor where to start, with building Overdosed Gaming's infrastructure to support playing 'The Cave". Now though, I'm going to start bringing folks in and having them help me build content up. I realize that the content I am making right now is going to have to be replaced, and more likely than not, over and over, and over again, because I forget something, or just plain mess things up, but as I make this journey and develop skills, I hope to eventually (Say by Christmas time)) have developed a decent, and comprehensive beginners guide for helping player in game, and also building up a team orientated community of clan members that have had a helping hand within the clan, and are ready and willing to take their skills and knowledge with them when they expand to other games. Feel free to speak up folks, and help me help folks enjoy better gaming. 🙂

So, getting back to this, I made this image and am going to use it in helping new players out. So, my thoughts are to try to help new players of this great map/game out, so that more folks 'stick with it' all the way through the game. Right now, most folks that run across this map are just going in, having no clue what to do, being ignored by other folks in the game when they ask how to do things, then play on their own, and then quit altogether. I would love input from folks in the clan that have played this game, to give testimonials about their experiences, and suggest ways that learning the game could be made easier and more fun. I would also like to invite folks to start characters with me, and play-through some of the initial content of the game. The reason for my asking this is that I want some interaction in the forum here, so that others that come by later can see posts and maybe images from in game, posted by many members, and decide to give this game a go. In the above screenshot, I captured the screen image, blew it up, and then just did some editing so that folks could see more clearly the 'Inner Regions' of this games main map. Right now, this image is just something that I whipped up, set off center so to be able to use it as a desktop background, and plan to make a series of images, that work off this as a base, so that each successive image reveals more information to the player. Eventually, I hope to be able to show the author that there is actually a need for this kinda thing, and get him to code in an interactive quest within the game itself, where your character is 'tested' on their ever expanding skill and knowledge of how to get around on the map, and thus all players can benefit from the effort of making things easier to understand and thus being more fun.

Good to have another player of "The Cave". Looking forward to many a great adventure.

^^ What he said. In addition, I remember a time when I had a couple of players wanting to join up, and at the time I had not gone through the recruiter training, and you, Sassy, sick in your hospital bed with covid19, and not even really able to talk, but you took the time and performed a double recruitment from your hospital bed! For me, that was the most incredible statement of commitment to the clan that I can even think of, and so you can count on my vote as well. Well done Sassy, and thank you for your devotion.

So, just using the polls and forums to test out some ideas, so that clan OD can coordinate and build a skilled team of players for the cave. From my initial observations, this game is intricate and very easy to make annoying and time consuming mistakes in, and this means that unlike most games, this game requires more from the players than just randomly jumping in and hacking away at the evil monsters. Instead, players in this game that don't want to have to constantly have their progress stifled and ruined, may want to take a different approach to this little gem of a game. In this first thread, I'm just going to make a few points, and see if clan OD can take a stab at this game like professional gamers. First off, for those without any experience with this particular game, starting off on their own is NOT recommended, as mistakes have a way of adding up, and screwing things up more and more as time goes by and your character misses out of more and more content along the way. For those that just want to play the dang game, and to heck with planning and co-op work, more power to ya, and I wish ya the best of luck. For those that want to have a good experience, have good teamwork skills, while learning the basics of the game, I have some thoughts: We would probably have a great deal better fun and learning, by having teams working together, and making the most of our clan's infrastructure to make co-ordination possible and fun. For me, this would mean having a (weekly) forum thread, that lists player availability, and later on, game focus, like team composition, level/goals for a gaming session and whatever else we eventually think of, based upon the number of people that are actually playing the game. So, a thread to list and co-ordinate player times, started on Wed-Thur each week, for the coming Sunday to Saturday calendar week, good idea or bad? Required play through's for some simple, quick and easy team sessions, to get the bugs worked out, and folks comfortable with their knowledge of the game, while in the trial members stage? Think here of playing a character to level 7, and being able to list the quests that you want to have completed and enabled when stepping out of town for the very first time. Basically, if you cannot play the game a bit in your trial membership period, why should you pass? Making 7th level is so easy in this game, and so quick, that I cannot see any reason not to make this a requirement. This game has many pitfalls, and folks that don't get a good starting experience playing, may just up and quit playing it, and to do everything in our power as a clan, discord voice communications should be a requirement, as I cannot see trying to help walk folks through this games initial stages without voice communication with all of my teammates.

Oh, I feel your pain man! I have 2 Blood Fiends, one is 50th level, the other somewhere in his 30's, two Holy warrior wanna-bees (34th level Paladins right now), and a 30 something rifleman turned Mortar team, plus various low level guys I cannot make up my mind about, lol. I am slowly amassing info and experience, and plan to do much in the way of picture heavy threads, that hopefully can teach folks how to work the basics of the game. There is just so much to this game. I enjoy talking with Glorn (the creator of "The Cave"), and some of his in crowd are quite helpful with info and links. If I had a better computer, I would try to make videos as part of the help files, but the task is going to take months, and at some point I'm going to have to have some help from other players. I don't want to start recruiting folks for the cave until I know I can provide enough helpful advice and documentation to make the game far less confusing for new players, and think that getting existing clan members to at least level one or two characters up to level 11, so that they have a good working knowledge of the basics, and can serve as a cadre of experienced players, so that all the questions and confusion can be answered by several players, not just me, for all our future recruits. 🙂 Does clan Overdosed have any members that are good at making instructional videos? Are there many members that would be willing to participate in a limited way, so that we can have our own core group of players to teach the basics to new recruits and help develop all the stuff to support what might become a new squad, or even division? I like helping people, and this game needs folks to do that, and right now I can help folks play through their first 2 quests, that get them into town, and from there they can complete a couple more quests without heading back out into the wilderness for more exploration and adventuring. To start off with, I would like to limit our initial foray into "THE CAVE" to have a role-play kinda feel for those that want that kind of experience, and would like to keep the spoilers to a minimum for that group the players, as they learn the ins and outs of the first few Regions in the overland map. The story line is a quest driven one, and there is plenty of room for things to get confused, and messed up, and to prevent frustration as much as possible, I would make the suggestion that initial games have folks play 1st level characters, in a party, and stick together, with special attention paid to keeping folks all up to date on the quests they have enabled. My limited playing within 10 player games, let me see that their is a need for organised play, and this needs someone that knows a bit about the game to be a "Party Leader", and working to improve the gaming experience for the group as a whole, to prevent quests having to be repeated, sometimes over and over again within the same game, because someone didn't click on something when they needed too, and so didn't complete (or even activate) a given quest, and this means either the whole group needs to redo, or the unlucky guy has to fall behind by redoing one or more quests the rest of the party has completed, and this effectively means that they get left behind. 😞 Anyway, I want to refrain from posting more pics for a day or three, until the leadership can give me the green light to post many, many more. Love the game, and interested in playing this every day personally, but looking for folks that can spare an hour or three, once a week or so. We need to have times set up for initial walk through of the first couple of quests, both with and without people that take the time to work together, and only have to do quests once for their team.

Ok, so having messed around with this enough to start having a clue what this game is all about, I am making this thread to start presenting images from in-game, and hopefully getting some feedback from the clan on what to work on and what to include. Start up SC2, select custom maps... then click on Arcade, and select or type in "The Cave"... and make your lobby... The Cave supports up to 10 players at a time, but adding AI's does nothing. I know this because I made the attempt to include them in my first games, so go ahead and get a laugh in at my expense. 🙂 I'm sure it won't be the last one, but hey, you never know until you try. I need to get my thoughts together, and get feed back on just how in depth I should get with this picture heavy intro to "The Cave". Basically, I'll leave this topic alone for a bit, before going all in on the project, so folks can have a chance to weigh in and let me know their thoughts.

Went to play the cave, but it appears that the map has been pulled from the servers ATM. Was talking with the game creator over discord this morning while he was driving home, and I lost him around 8:00 am eastern time this morning, so he must have been updating the map this morning, and it seems to be a big update! Am eagerly awaiting the latest version! 🙂 🙂 🙂

A couple of the guys in the SC2 division got me hooked on an arcade game within the SC2 game, and I have put in entirely too many hours in the week since I was introduced to "The Cave". The current version of this game came out about 2 months ago, and I just can't stop playing this great little game. The game allows folks to play as one of three basic character types, and as you level up, additional choices upon the path you selected open up, and you can make several decisions on you way to 50th level, which is the current maximum level a character can attain. As I learn more and more about the game, I will start posting some in game screen shots, and see what folks think about the game.