| Give them a break |
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| Give them a break |
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But for gods sake, I assume Rufus does not get paid for the huge amount of work that he puts in on the mud, and i personally can't think why he puts up with all the hassle he gets when he tries to make a change. I read his post, he seems to be getting a little annoyed with us players. Or at least some.
It seems to me that the game has become academic for some people not fun, not social.... just something they play to beat.
I would really hate to see Rufus get so annoyed that he stops doing any work here. The guy does brilliant work, puts in a lot of effort and all he gets is grief.
So please just give him a break.
-worship Rufus-
Urg <-- Lifes welcome mat
Also remember that despite the fact that none of the imms get paid (to my knowledge, they actually PAY the mud, of course in terms of man-hours, but also in some other forms) it is, or should be, as much a hobby for them as it is a volunteer-job. I personally would miss Rufus's coding and building skills, but if given a choice between having him leave and having him disgruntled, I'd definately choose having him leave. You can't motivate imms unless they themselves are motivated, and altho some of us try not to discourage them, sometimes that just isn't enough. If they are dis- illusioned, have them leave and come back when they feel like it. Don't need to paint the entire imm circle as a disgruntled bunch of folks, that does the relation more harm than good. Unlike the imms, us players arent handpicked, and there will always be those of us who just aren't mature enough. But as imms, you HAVE been picked, and it pays to heed to at least some of the civil codes for the sake of the other imms.
Papercut
As for posting and discussion of features beforehand, I can tell you from experience that this, by and large, accomplishes little. Why? I'm not sure exactly. In the small group of coders, we can usually decide on something and come to a consensus about it, work out formulas, and basically all get on the same track. There's for our five of us. There have been issues in the past taken to the godlist instead of on one of the coder/builder/pr/admin lists, often doubling or more the number of people who get a say in about it. 99% of all those issues, those ideas, remain uncoded, unbuilt, unwhatever because they get tied up in discussion, debate, things get carried off into tangents, sometimes even resulting in people leaving, departments getting restructured, etc. Imagine what that would be like if it were carried out with the entirety of the playerbase. If you think skilltrees is still a fantasy now, we would never see it.
Yes, sometimes I lose sight of what it's like to be a player, but I can assure you, I'm 'just a player' on enough other muds (about 3 now, and an imm on a another mud temporarily -- until we get their code cleaned up so its workable) to know how frustrating it can be when things are changed drastically. One mud, which, I am sad to say, I had to leave, was because of similar things you are probably feeling here. I saw massive changes, changes that adversely affected my character, and it literally became impossible.
It felt as though we weren't being listened to, we weren't being considered, that the imms were making radical changes without ever playing themselves.
Come to find out, really, that the administration of the mud pretty much was following the layout that Papercut posted a while ago. In fact, they went a little beyond, and even expressed the fact that they were punishing players for learning the game. They made the objects, the mobs, the classes and races, decided it was too out of whack and started hacking away at everything imaginable, downgrading nearly everything, making mobs impossibly tough (nothing like a level 12 mob that fireballs 16 times in 1 round =P), all because the players were getting too good.
I can assure you that is not the case here, however. Ultimately, game design changes will lie within the realm of the administration, the coders and the builders of the mud. But we do listen. And there are times when it seems like we're making offhand decisions, and yes, sometimes we do. Many times they're right, a few times, they're dead wrong. Things like the non-tick based regen was an off-the-cuff thing I decided to code one afternoon because i was bored of working on housing. We had no spec, no design, I knew what I was aiming for, but there was little discussion. It was a radical enough change that I felt it needed to be tested offline, so I did, but really, the real test came when we put it in.
One thing I put in my letter to the Godlist when I was reinstated as head builder was that everything would get its chance. We ARE still techincally a 'beta' mud, though many people have played it for many years. We are aiming towards LegendMUD 4.0 (yes, we've really gone through that many 'versions') which include skilltrees, this combat system, some minor spell revisions, axiom changes, skill additions, etc. Even if I think one feature is a bad idea, I'm willing to put it in, tweak it, give the general idea and purpose of it a chance before it gets pulled.
Many of you know I have a disdain for pkill on this mud. A lot of people think it's because they slaughter my pk morts left and right. this is far from the truth. Since the combat switch, I've played a few, pkilled in a few different level ranges, tried a few different char types (mage, str fighter, perc fighter) and found that i was moderately successful with all of them. The thing I'm most happy about is that the last three clanned morts I've played, no one has 'found out' who I am. It's about damned time after getting perma threats just because I was Ruf's clanned mort. Anyway, a lot of people think this may cloud my judgement, and it probably clouds some of my arguments, but there are far too many people in the imm staff and in the playerbase to keep me in check as far as pkill goes. I've written many functions that deal with pkill and how pkill works in the combat system and one of the largest frustrations I find with it is that I end up doing twice the work. The 'pkill code' keeps getting farther and farther separated from the mob/player code. Why does this bother me? Code overhead for one, but that's really not the issue, rather, code overhead for a feature of the game that is supposed to be just that, another feature. The farther and farther we pull pkill away from the normal code, fewer and fewer things translate between the two. Fighting mobs will never give you a sense of how well a weapon might perform in pkill, how certain skills will, etc. Many of the things that have been complained about (stun timers, etc) are there and have seen numerous adjustments because we're not dealing with straight-ahead formulas any more. With the exception of boards (FLEE!) some of the skills code is so utterly nasty that I get lost in trying to figure out what something is doing somewhere.
I find another frustration on the building side. If I build an item, authorize an item to be put into the game, I have to (and do!) take pkill into consideration. I originally coded Resists/suscepts/immunes and Parry affects to give builders something else to chew on, something else to make unique and nice items. However, such items as resists and whatnot can entirely eliminate an entire class of pkillers. So what happens? the rent is sky-high, no one uses them, and it's code gone to waste. I have to take queues from the players as well, if -everyone- is using weapon X, perhaps I or someone else did make it a little too powerful to start out with. Frankly, if I had to do this all over from scratch, the restrictions on items would be much more stringent and the whole process would be a bit more controlled. I'm at an impass, however, because if I employ these restrictions now, all the 'old items' if they stay unmodified, will be the 'best items' and the new ones go totally unused. (more on next post)
I have refrained from making changes in the past based on a forcast of public opinion. Perhaps I shouldn't, but sometimes, just sometimes, you don't feel like dealing with the grief.
A lot of people say we base many of our decisions on the pkill community, and that this is bad because it is the minority. In a way this is true, but in a way it's not. Pkill and how items, strategies and whatnot are used give us a better insight into the balance thing. Sometimes this carries over into mob killing, sometimes it doesn't, but it keeps us in check.
I'm a game designer. I was a professional game designer for a while. What does that mean? Little or nothing really. I have a good understanding of macro level game design, what the terms 'balance' and 'playability' actually mean, but really, it -is- the players who make such a game like this possible. Yes, your opinions are valid, however, mine and every opinion of every imm is as well. We see the game from an angle you can't see it from, you see it from an angle we can't see it from. That's typical and cannot be avoided. There are people who can probably rattle off the stats for every piece of equipment in the game, know what's 'good' for a particular stat set up, far far better than I ever could. They know what items are 'cool' what items do what, how to use them all. I have a good understanding of this from a player perspective, though I'm generally a little more carefree about my equipment (if I have a decent fighting stat and a good armor class, I'm set! if something scraps, the nearest thing for that slot will work for a while!), but I do have a vast understanding of how item X fits into the area Y and how it relates in its data to items Z P R Q and V. I know the rules by which these items were created, the basis for the justifications the stats give, etc ad nauseum. Stuff that players should never have to deal with but know is there.
what I guess I"m trying to convey is that every change that may seem radical at its outset is really not, in the end. Whether that end is a week or a month away, that's often hard to tell, but there's a pendulum theory quite well at work here. Sometimes an idea is perceived as unbalancing in one direction, so we compensate a bit too far in the other, make a correction a little while down the road and it swings the other way again. Eventually (and with much hope) it will hit a center point and be 'balanced'. The unfortunate thing is that as Legend is continually expanding, everything that gets added has the tendancy to set multiple pendulums in motion again.
Take for example the Gae-Bolg. Now I'm going to give away a few things on this board that are not supposed to be given away in public forums, but I feel it's necessary for this discussion. First off, it's got a spell on it that is very effective for those who use thief tactics (backstab/flee, etc), it also does the highest maximum damage a piercing weapon can do (9max) and is only 8kg, it has a total stat bonus of +5, and no penalties. For many, it's wieldable in 1 hand. On the logistics side, it's a long spear, it's throwable, it should have never been able to be used as a backstabber. But, at the time, it would have been nearly useless without that, so it was left in. Parry wasn't even coded at the time, and the three-tiered, multi-gridded weapon/weapon comparison parry wasn't even a real thought. When parry went in, I had a few choices, leave it as-is, and see what happens (this was my choice, at the time), restructure the item so that would have it's logical bonuses (good spell, large, impossible to backstab with, difficult to parry with), or pick one based on game design. I chose the latter after much thought and consideration. If the gae-bolg were to parry, backstab, do absolute max dam of a piercer, +5 stat boost and a nice spell... hell? Who wouldn't make rent space for it?!?!?! One of the reasons many people felt that sniper/thieves were too powerful was because of this one item.
Guess what? I goofed. The thing is, there is no easy way to solve it. As stated above I could either downgrade the weapon and make 'old types' leave it as is and have it overshadow every other piercing weapon in the game, or alter everyone's that they have currently, thereby taking away something they worked for (admit it, it's not an easy weapon to get) and potentially throwing a wrench into the code and the pfiles that could be fatale.
(continued on next post)
Oh and that was supposed to be 'fatal' not 'fatale'... add that one to the 'you can tell you've been on legend way too long.
As someone recently pointed out to me, regardless of how tough you make an item to get, eventually, everyone that wants one will have one and oh is that ever the truth. There are three basic 'design' ideas as far as muds are concerned on this:
1) (our method) give everything stringent guidelines to be built by, and all items will have a maximum bonus they can provide. Numbers are not part of the equation.
2) LP-style (this doesn't got for all LP muds, but many I've played) Every time you log in, you gotta re-eq yourself. No one saves 'eq'.
3) (diku) Limits, either by cost (gold cost to rent) and/or limits on the items (only 9 of item X can ever be floating about)
Each one has its advantages and disadvantages. Here's ours: Advantages: Players can be on equal footing where eq is concerned, players can obtain anything, nothing is out of reach (eq-wise), we don't have the code overhead for keeping track of items and their limits, we don't have a major gold hunt going on all the time to afford to rent the equipment (monetary cost renting). Disadvantages: 'Difficulty in obtaining' is not a justification for how powerful an item can be, people will often push the envelope and be 'bored' and it becomes increasingly difficult to add anything to the game later on.
Back to this whole sniper/gae bolg thing... The Gae was never intended to be a 'thief' or a 'sniper' weapon. It's a spear, it's a weapon of a warrior. However, it is the way it is, and how to go about repairing it along with the other changes?
Many avenues... make snipers different from thieves... 'snipers' should rely on their guns as their weapons, rather than the weapons of hand to hand combat. How do we go about this? Up gun damage? Sure, potential but we still have their weapon in hand. Restrict skill learning for people with sniper skills (can't learn expert fencing etc if you can learn sniper, etc), increase fire rate and accuracy if weapon isn't eq'd? Good idea, some problems though.
If we up the fire rate and accuracy of weapons if the shooter does not have a hand-to-hand weapon eq'd, how does that affect mob kill? Is the overwhelmingly 'good plan' to carry 4 snipers instead of hitters around? We need to put limits on the damage.
Limiting skills? Well, we do this by axioms, usually, there's no exclusive skills (are some words, but that's handled slightly differently), but whose to say a 'thief' can't be from lima and a 'sniper' can? Should we increase the amount of damage done via thief skills (backstab, kick) depending on where the person is from (like we've done with surgery and london?) Since snipers can shoot while sitting, should we increase the defensive ability of those who are more 'thieves' than 'snipers?'
In the world of mob-killing (yes, i know, a lot of you think it's boring but 1023 mobs get killed to every one pkill engagement, so I think we need to pay it at least a little mind) it wouldn't matter. Snipers are going to find mobs that are easy for them to kill, str fighters are going to find some that are easier for them to kill, mages will still stun stuff senseless, etc... balance is much easier in that realm.
However, I, like many, would like to see people in pkill given a fair run. This is much harder to do, considering the cap of damage and whatnot (the fact that there are two separate damcaps, and having to deal with charmies and whatnot makes some of the nice elegant combat code rather nasty in places) It's hard to make one as good as the other. Some character types are generally going to be better at killing some char types than others. I hate to say it, but there is never going to be a 50/50 chance, and if there were, between any two chartypes, what's the point? Might as well just roll dice. A lot of it will depend on skill, but there will always be luck involved, there will always be a time when things just don't go right and you get plastered to the floor. There will also be times when everything possible could go your way. You tumble every single bash! You dodge every stun! Oh and when that backstab landed it hurt! ... and then there's the times that you can't manage to get off your butt, the stun sticks, whatever. PK is part skill, part gamble, each 'class' has it's trump card, each class has its 'tools' and sometimes one needs to rely on a little faith.
To bring this back around, the two-tick backstab? Yeah, it's not a great idea... in and of itself. It may be a very good part of a larger plan, a larger plan that can only be realized when seeing the affects of something so dramatic put into the game.
And what's this have to do with a 7K rent weapon on one of the buffest mobs in the game? That weapon shouldn't be the deciding factor either. There should never be one item that will 'make or break' a charcter. Unfortunately, I and some others have created such items, and now we are in a bind. What do we do? Where do we go? It's frustrating.
Even as I tell myself what wonderful things we could do without pkill, I remind myself how much pkill keeps the entire game in balance. That's not to say that pkill is the determining factor in such, but it's where the largest gaps in code or areas is seen.
Where do we go? What do we do? Building, coding, altering things for this mud is the biggest catch 22 I've ever faced. I hear people scream out to correct my mistakes (such as a few powerful weapons) but when those are corrected, the screams of disdain begin to flow. Damned if I do, damned if I don't.
And this is why I occassionally vent. I overreact, I'm human, it happens. I don't see anyone who would appreciate inviting someone over to test something out, get criticism and then be told off and that I don't know what the hell I'm doing. It's times like that I want to leave, I want to give up. But I know how much this mud means to so many people, including myself, and I will work towards making it better. Sometimes the mud needs to take a few steps back before it moves forward, and I apologize for the players getting caught in the middle of it.
I hope this clears things up, at least a bit. I want the communication lines between myself and the morts open, but I need people to realize that if the above explanations justifictions and the anticipated discussion that may very well ensue happens over every code change, I wouldn't have time to actually make those changes, nor would anyone else.
In the end, there needs to be a decision made. If we did (and we do occassionally) post things far in advance in hopes of getting some feedback, and if there was a single objection, does that mean we shouldn't put it in? If one voice or two voices cry out, does that mean we should scrap the idea entirely? This mud would grind to a halt that way, and rather quickly. I would hate to see it stagnate. In the end, some people are not going to be happy with some changes that go on. And we're going to take the brunt of the damage for it, irregardless of its source. As much as we make decisions and make changes, we too have to live with it. And we do attempt to make every step carefully... for one, we have a love of this game and want to see it go somewhere... secondly, we also have a self preservation instinct that tells us we don't want to nam on people who harp at us. Perhaps the latter is the incorrect reasoning.
-Ruf
http://www.legendmud.org/rufus/html/projects.html> This was written a few months ago, about 5 I think? Something like that.
-Ruf
Cianor
I have to agree that a coding project that took a lot of work should be given every chance to survive. If there was good enough reason to tackle a problem with such effort, at least something must be salvagable even if it turns out to be a great mess. But again, I'd have to ask to take more time discussing the change with at least the active pkers (as they are the players who are affected by changes most--they are restricted to one character unlike others).
In terms of the long/short term goals, I am not too terribly eager to have the skill trees installed in time. If they go in, that's fine and dandy, but right now, for once, i think the mage and the fighter classes have come quite close to par, if not actually tilted more favorably towards the fighter (then again, half the experienced pkers are fighters now, so that could be the major reason of this).
As far as the spirit quest goes, I wouldnt think it'll be too hard to come up with 5 other quests involving areas rarely visited, and I honestly wouldn't mind them not going in at the same time either. After all, spirit has been with us for a while (translation: before my time) and just having at least one alternative for a while wouldn't hurt too much. But I have to think that if we are to add more quests, some of the eq should be reconsidered. A lot of the fighters currently benefit from beyond-spec gear, and most fighters can incorporate enough beyond-spec points to offset the additional +!0 on the useless stat. I know for a fact that if we were to make the spi movable, I can create a 100/100/100 char with hunt and -100
acs. that might not mean much off-hand, but as you might have noticed there is incredibly little variance in the straight-fighter department. Given 3 high stats, most ppl will choose to wield str, and within non-sniper non-spell casters, almost everyone invariably is either str with high con/dex or str with high damroll.
We have managed variety in the fighter-mage class, and to some degree in the sniper class (bow, gun, hps, damroll, hit, lvl, etc) but the fighter class is now a bunch of str fighters with some minor differences in the other stats. Since other stats provide enough of their bonuses without having to wield a weapon of that type, it is indeed a logical choice in my opinion. Of course, the abundance of good str weapons doesnt hurt either, since str weapons are the only ones with +dam as far as i've seen.
I personally see that as a more pressing problem then downgrading snipers. But how would you go about inducing fighters to wield a different weapon? And if you did, of course, the fragile balance between fighter-mages and fighters may collapse once again--even now, a fighter mage with str is probably the arch-nemesis of any non spell-caster.
Weapon-enabled skills might be possible, such as a con weapon that inspires, a dex weapon that entrances or something, provided that the user of the weapon has a skill that allows him to use the features of a weapon--and instead of having stat minimum requirements, these skills might come with stat maximum requirements.
Stat maximum requirements is something i've personally thought more interesting a way to limit availability of skills than hometowns, as it'll give more room for flexibility for newbies, or for char adaptation to changes. (for example, you can't learn parry if your mind is greater than 50, or something)
Also, hometowns shouldn't entirely prevent ppl from learning anything. Just make skills cost more if their hometown is further away from the 'scale'--3rd circle words would cost 2 pracs for a taran/klein, and maybe up to 4 pracs for a liman/londoner, while surgery may cost up to 6 pracs for an arabian, while 5 for taran and 4 for kleiners, etc. Right now, you can tell way too much about a character by divining their hometowns; with such features, you'll never know :)
Well, enough of random rambling. In case it got lost, I'd again like to thank rufus for taking the time to respond/shed light upon the issues imms deal with. But i haven't backed down from my points either, i -STILL- think snipers are underpowered, and the two-tick thing is a grievious error :P
Papercut
If it were entirely up to me, it would be easy to make five other quests. But it's not, it's up to the builders. When I brought this up, a lot of people wanted to put them in areas that are in development, others wanted to put them in some areas that don't get a lot of traffic.
The one thing the spirit quest does is make -sense-. The bonus os (that's is, not os) consistent with the flavor of both the area and the quest.
Also, quests are not at all easy to write. That's not 100% true, some are easier than others, but the checks that need to be in place for multiple quests like this is much more difficult.
QUOTE =================
We have managed variety in the fighter-mage class, and to some degree
in the sniper class (bow, gun, hps, damroll, hit, lvl, etc) but the
fighter class is now a bunch of str fighters with some minor differences
in the other stats. Since other stats provide enough of their bonuses
without having to wield a weapon of that type, it is indeed a logical
choice in my opinion. Of course, the abundance of good str weapons doesnt
hurt either, since str weapons are the only ones with +dam as far as
i've seen.
END QUOTE ===============
My major argument against currently varying weapons is that new areas don't have much to go on. I added in the damroll, parry, resistance, etc things so that new builders would have tools to make their items unique from the normal set of stat gear that's out there. If I were to go through and make a bunch of new and cool weapons, I would give the game a lot more flavor immediately and a ton of redundancy later. This, unfortunately, works against the overall interest level of the game. It doesn't mean I won't add a few here and there, but for the most part, we've limited our addition to where it would make sense.
QUOTE ==============
I personally see that as a more pressing problem then downgrading snipers.
But how would you go about inducing fighters to wield a different weapon?
And if you did, of course, the fragile balance between fighter-mages and
fighters may collapse once again--even now, a fighter mage with str is
probably the arch-nemesis of any non spell-caster.
END QUOTE ==============
Wield weapon is always going to be by preference. Some who take the high damroll bonus weapons and always require q5 weapons as their mainstay are missing some of the features of some other weapons. People argue about which is the best parrying weapon (wit, old gae, wormtooth, black serpent) and the answer is none of the above. I still think people are missing some of the more finer points of the combat system, but that's again, just an opinion. I personally tend to play thieves (dex/perc who do not shoot) and do far better than most who have maxxed various stats, damroll, etc.
QUOTE ==============
Weapon-enabled skills might be possible, such as a con weapon that
inspires, a dex weapon that entrances or something, provided that the
user of the weapon has a skill that allows him to use the features
of a weapon--and instead of having stat minimum requirements, these
skills might come with stat maximum requirements.
END QUOTE ================
Erg! As much as this might be a 'cool' idea it would require either writing a spell identical to each skill, or somewhat radically alter objects. Adding even single variables to objects increases the memory overhead by quite a bit, and to be consistent with the current set up of objects, we'd need to add at least six to make skills on weapons work properly, requiring reformatting of many of the current area files and also conversion of objects existing in the game already. Too many risks for too little reward, generally.
Stat maximums... as much as I can see these being a useful game tool, no game system I have ever seen (and I've seen a ton) has ever implemented these merely on the basis that they don't make a whole hell of a lot of sense. How can you justify being too smart to do something? I learn how to rollerskate when I'm 5, I go to college and all of a sudden I forget how? However, as a 5 year old, I'm not likely to understand higher order non-linear algebra... it's one of those things that isn't generally commutable. I can see it possibly in RARE cases (low mind, and high str barely qualiftying the mind req on mend, but so strong that you end up ripping everything you try to fix, but that could logically be corrected by not changing strength but increasing mind to learn how better to control it). In general, when we make sacrifices of logic for game balance reasons, the sacrifices can at least be relatively justified. I don't see this happening with 'stat maximums.'
On the hometown thing... There's a couple camps on this, and I've been open to both of them. Many of us have entertained the idea of all hometowns being able to learn all skills. Part of that plays heavily to the min-maxers, however, and that's not our intention with a non-class based skill system. That idea is being considered for skilltrees though. The other realm of thought is that some should be impossible. This is what we've got currently... if you were born and raised in victorian london, you would by your environment be hard pressed to be open to the ideas of the 'natural energy' of druids. However gadgets that are commonplace to you would seem like strange magic people from other ages, not hardly being able to describe such to someone let alone teach them how to use it.
There is a third school of thought, in that everyone can learn every skill, however, axioms play a great part in the cost and success of those skills or spells (a londoner who learned 3rd circle magic would be hard pressed to get a 1st 3rd 3rd combo spell working, etc). Also could increase the stat req's to learn those skills (a viking warrior needs 40 con to learn headbutt, whereas the londoner needs 60 to learn the same 'level' of skill). All three of these have been discussed, and really are still being discussed, but only for the implementation of skilltrees.
-Ruf
As far as redundancy on future weapons go, as long as weapons are keep being made in a certain spec, there'll always be room for new and improved weaponry. I think the demon claw was a tad bit too much (hp bonus, damroll bonus, 5 stat bonus, and being claw as opposed to slash--for quite low rent compared to those used to either just cosmetic changes in weaponry (just different combos of bonuses--for fighter mages, this could propose some toss-ups) or creating weapons that have character--defense oriented, offense oriented, or simply a weapon that tries to complement a strategy.
Pc
They're not going to happen, I just don't see how we could justify them and them being incredibly useful. I would rather see axioms used to limit skills.
I think the axioms are pretty kewl, and seriously think we simply have 5 classes of chars in this mud, pretty much, depending on which hometown you are from (klein needs some beefing up! other than repair/forge, i don't personally see any reason to choose klein over tara)
Papercut
wow. it fits in one screen!