4Dimensions Forum
General Category => Suggestions & Ideas => Topic started by: Virisin on September 17, 2011, 11:43:20 pm
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Bear with me here, this might be quite long and I'm not entirely sure how coherent it will be yet. I am going to try to outline what I think 4dimensions should be heading towards, that should not require huge change like we sometimes talk about, but that could basically be done with three fairly significant alterations to three of our existing features and one new feature. People need to remember here, and really think about this the whole way through: none of these changes will make things harder for you. If anything, the goal is to make things easier but more enjoyable, and it would all require reasonable testing to make sure it worked well, otherwise it wouldn't be implemented. You should keep an open mind while reading and decide if you think the idea's would actually make things a little more interesting for you.
Now, the four features I would like to see change are GM, the movement/mana system and the skills/spells system, and a new weapon/elemental proficiencies system.
First of all, if the GM flag was removed so that you didn't ever get to keep all tier 2 skills/spells in the game, and instead kept your last 8 remorts tier 1-4 skills/spells. This would open new dynamics for different styles of play, Thief/Warrior, Hunter/Priest, Gypsy/Esper - this is actually how it was on the old code, except you kept your last 4 remorts, except without tiers that meant 4 classes. This would probably actually make players stronger, because they would now be able to keep 2 tier 4's at a time if they liked. However, if they thought 1 tier 4 class was enough, they could go Thief tier 4, Warrior tier 2, Hunter tier 2, and now they would be a mixture of 3 classes, but still with one solid tier 4 behind them.
Secondly, if the movement/mana system was altered to be more similar to a type of 'action points' system that most big games use. We already use stamina instead of movement for a lot of things, and it's actually a much better stat. It discourages spamming because it effectively 'heats up' very fast, but it also 'cools down' very fast too. It is kind of like action points, limiting the amount of things you can do in x amount of time. This is different to movement which is just a large total, which only limits the total amount of things you can do over a very large time, but is essentially so out of scale it is a pool by which to sip through straws on.
Also, all movement really does in 4d is stop newbies from being able to explore and run around. Their 'pool' of movement is only a puddle, and it runs out fast and takes a long time to restore. Unlike stamina which is fairly similar for every player, only newbies are affected by this small 'pool'. Now, imagine if we had a similar, stamina version of mana, and lost mana too. Now we would have two sets of 'action points' that were basically 'Stamina' and 'Mana', we would have discouraged spamming both skills and spells by making them both very 'heat sensitive' features basically.
If someone wants to cast a spell in battle, they have to realize it might eat up a significant amount of their Mana, and they need to choose which spells to cast, and choose them wisely. On top of that, if you could determine roughly how much Stamina or Mana to use, ie, by charging your spell, or putting effort into your kick, you could actually potentially do more or less damage with a selected skill in battle. All this would be balanced so even if you only used 2 skills in a fight, you would still kill a mob at the same speed (hopefully even faster) in this system as you would currently. This would hopefully mean that instead of typing behead;behead;behead;behead;behead;behead 15 times in one fight, you only need to behead a mob once, or heart squeeze a mob once, or demonshreak a mob once, or encircle a mob once, (and so you should) and the fight would be largely over. Your stamina or mana would restore quickly, maybe 10 seconds of not using any skills or spells or speedwalking.
The third change would be to the skills system, to try and make some basic skill-trees. e.g. every class actually has a 'style' and roughly two tree's of skills inside it. If you only had enough practice sessions to learn one of the trees inside a class, or half of both trees, then you could really add even more variety to the classes, as well as beefing up each individual tree, because if you can only learn 'behead' but can't learn 'brace' then you can make behead do much more damage and brace block much more damage. This would work very well with the 'remember 8 remorts' thing spoken about above. If you want to do Thief twice, and remember 8 remorts of Thief, you would be able to learn BOTH of the skill trees every class has. And be a truely specialized class.
I will now give a brief idea of how the skill trees might look:
Imagine that the core skills of each class are as follows,
Mage: heart squeeze, inferno, meteor shower (offensive individual, offensive area)
Hunter: behead, bladedance
Thief: backstab, focus, blackjack
Gypsy: slit, phase, sleep
Ranger: encircle, dodge, hamstring
Esper: phase, slowness, corrupt armor (evasive, debuffs)
Warrior: brace, parry
Priest: sanctuary, bless, armor, heal (buffs, heals)
You can almost see they range from very OFFENSIVE at the top to very DEFENSIVE at the bottom.
Mage being either an offensive towards an individual type class, by using a key spell like heart squeeze, or being an offensive towards an area type class, by using inferno and meteor shower.
Hunters can only behead once per fight, but bladedance makes that behead seriously strong. That shit will kill most of the time.
Thieves get backstab a massive opener, and focus to increase the power of backstab, as well as blackjack which can make backstab a one-hit-kill.
Slit would deal ongoing damage, phase would let you avoid more hits and increase the frequency of yours. Sleep puts them under, even in battle so a Gypsy could slit and sleep as a potential to do some damage - though it wouldn't be the fastest.
Encircle for Rangers would be like a less powerful backstab, used in battle. Dodge would make Rangers super hard to hit, and hamstring would cripple the opponent.
Warriors would get brace, maybe reducing up to 60% of the incoming damage, as well as parry, blocking a huge amount of blows.
Priests would get lots of buff type spells, like sanctuary, bless and armor, to make them absorb heavy damage feeling almost nothing. They could also learn heals, letting them heal up during fights.
All other skills would just be prereqs to these main skills, or a lot of them in a pool that all classes can learn, like mount, riding, firearms, etc. I imagine cleave would be a pre-requisite for behead, that warriors could learn too. Sneak would be something many classes could learn, but it would be especially good for increasing the damage of backstab.
Fourthly, and finally: weapon and elemental proficiencies, separate to the skill trees are these proficiencies in every type of weapon: shortsword, axe, warhammer, etc, as well as all of our elemental types, fire, water, air, etc. These are not things you need to worry about learning with practice sessions, these are things you get better at through use. They are zero-sum equations, eg, any gains in one thing result in losses in other things. If you spend all your time using fire, you will not be able to get very good at air, or water. Similarly, if you use longswords most, your other weapon masteries will face depletion. These would all be on scales of 1-100.
This is all I can think of for now.. Have a read, have a think, have a post.
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All of this should be with the goal of having it so if you're in a fight with a mob of your same level, you should be able to kill it in 10-20 seconds without doing anything other in battle than typing 'kill dragon'. If you want to fight something above your level, you can start using up action points in fight, either consistently casting heal until the fight is over, or making a one-off heart squeeze that requires all your action points, but ends it immediately.
In the end, it should actually be easier to gain experience and kill mobs.
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Thanks Virisin, for taking this initiative. :)
We definitely need to set down our future goals, and I think the four features that Viri mention pretty much sums up what mostly needs working on.
In an ideal world, we'd just define the goal, and then make sure that every small change in the future is consistent with that goal. But it isn't that easy.
Naturally different people will have different ideas about what those goals should be. Debate is always good so it will be encouraged. Usually some good ideas come out of the debate itself.
However, we don't want to waste the time explaining the mechanics of every proposed idea. Some changes won't work as well as intended and will have to be reversed or tweaked. Some ideas are just not feasible, and would upset too many other parts of the system. Others may need to much work to be worth the effort, for instance extensive OLC work. Yet others might upset the balance of the game.
If we want people to spend their spare time working for 4D, we must respect that their time is best used doing what they are good at.
Coders should spend their time coding and Builders should spend their time building. Don't expect them to explain in detail why a certain feature cannot be implemented.
If they say that something cannot be done, you'll just have to take their word for it.
And at some point or other someone will have to make the decisions. There is no way we can please everyone, but at least everyone will have a chance to have their say. So let's discuss the future of 4D with open minds.
However, debating shouldn't stop us from acting. We need some changes, and we need them now – not in two years time. So while we are debating the future, let's also act now.
And please don't make this a discussion just about GM or no GM, that's what this thread is for:
http://4dimensions.org/forum/?topic=723.msg4869;topicseen
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Alright this is pretty amateur still so we were going to let the thread get going before posting it, but no one's saying anything so here it is: a possible stepping stone to skill trees.
We've tried to make use of skills already in the game wherever possible but pretty much all of them would have to be adjusted to be as powerful as the next in one way or another. For example, Thieves may seem hard done by until until you imagine SNEAK adding a sizable bonus to opening attacks, BLACKJACK being usable in battle, BACKSTAB halving a big foe's HP at least, and FOCUS maybe doubling BACKSTAB's chance of instakill. In this way, a perfectly specialized THIEF is suddenly a class that concentrates on sneaking into a boss mob's room undetected, backstabbing it down to 50%HP or so and then blackjacking it on its ass and sneaking away again to recover some stamina. Or alternatively, sneaking in, blackjacking, focussing and then killing it with one opening backstab.
Likewise a Ranger's SNARE would also slow down the opponent considerably and increase the effectiveness of ENCIRCLE, while HAMSTRING would massively reduce the damage an opponent could dish out and DODGE would make you ridiculously hard to hit.
These would be the unique, specialist skills of each class. Each class would only get a handful and to get all of them the thinking is that you would need to have 8 remorts in that one class. They're designed to make each class feel unique.
We haven't really attempted spells yet.. that's a whole nother kettle to deal with. :-\
Stay tuned for the actual tree in the next post. :D
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BRANCH 1 BRANCH 2
Hunter
T1 Melee
T2 Cleave Adv. Melee
T3 Master Melee
T4 Behead Bladedance
Thief
T1 Blackjack Sneak
T2 BJ II
T3 Focus
T4 Backstab Focus II
Gypsy
T1 Hyperactivity
T2 Midas Touch
T3 MT II Phase
T4 Slit Phase II
Ranger
T1 Hamstring Snare
T2 Ham II
T3 Dodge
T4 Encircle Dodge II
Warrior
T1 Martial Arts
T2 Bash Parry
T3 Fortify
T4 Grapple Brace
So, basically it's not so much a tree as it is two branches. Some skills are deliberately aligned in the middle because you learn them before choosing which direction to go in at tier 2/3. Like I said, it's amateur but that's essentially what we're aiming for. The one I'm most worried about is GRAPPLE. It fits well with the Warrior's defensive, BRACED style, but how to make it worth investing in in its own right?
The other thing is, if you chose a branch like Hunter's MELEE, CLEAVE, gap, BEHEAD, you wouldn't get a unique option to learn at tier 3 but you could still invest in other skills from the pool available to everyone. (Or maybe you could invest in some extra STR to boost your damage or something.. but that's for a later post.)
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Grapple would be really good in an action points system where grappling a mob out of the room is a great way of doing significant damage and also giving yourself 2 seconds of stamina recovery - which should be a lot, 20-30% stamina recovered. That's enough for another kick potentially.
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Cool.
This is actually not a new system that needs extensive coding as far as I can tell, it's just a reorganization of what we have now.
We have prerequisites.
We have tiers.
We have the skills. They just need adjustments.
What we do need are Viri's action points style of stamina and mana, and I've been told that's not actually hard as long as no one's trying to rewrite the movement code. So we could leave movement in place for now and just sideline it with stamina and 'sta-mana.' (get it? i wrote mana as if it worked more like stamina :D)
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What we do need are Viri's action points style of stamina and mana, and I've been told that's not actually hard as long as no one's trying to rewrite the movement code. So we could leave movement in place for now and just sideline it with stamina and 'sta-mana.' (get it? i wrote mana as if it worked more like stamina :D)
From what I heard someone is trying to rewrite the movement code, and it's proved to be very hard because the existing code is so convoluted and buggy.
So sidelining movement for now is probably a good idea.
But maybe in the meantime we could give newbies a bit more movepoints to start out with, it seems like an easy fix?
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I'd thought I already increased the amount of basic movement newbies get. I can give them more. This movement is at character creation since the level up code applies to all though I guess it could be possible to check for t1 lvl 1 to 50 and give them a larger movement / stamina gain.
I can take a look and make sure.
Prometheus
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Give them heaps. It shouldn't even be an issue for them.
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Here are some actually balanced skill suggestions, designed to work with action points.
Melee
Everyone gets 300sta(mina) and it regens at 10sta/sec
At tier 4: 100sta corresponds to a skill multiplier of x5, or five extra hits.
At tier 3: 150sta ....
At tier 2: 200sta ....
These are all written as tier 4, high-end skills, but can easily be converted.
Skill Cost Effect Type Class
Bladedance 20sta/sec x2 damage on all hits Buff Hunter
Behead 200sta x10multi Attack Hunter
Agility 20sta/sec 2 for 1 hits Buff Thief
Backstab 200sta x10multi opening Attack Thief
Blackjack 70sta 7sec sleep & -70sta Debuff Thief
(works in battle but ends fighting)
Phase 16sta/sec 40% chance of dodge+hit Buff Gypsy
Slit 100sta x0.5multi every sec for 10sec Attack Gypsy
Midas Touch 60sta +30% stamina cost Debuff Gypsy
Dodge 10sta/sec 50% chance of dodge Buff Ranger
Encircle 50sta multi = sta / opponent_sta x 2 Attack Ranger
Hamstring 50sta -5sta/sec Debuff Ranger
Brace 10sta/sec x0.5 damage taken Buff Warrior
Grapple 50sta thrown from room Debuff Warrior
opp.sta = x(opp.con / your.str)
^^^ approx. 2/3
The numbers should be fairly consistent but I haven't really checked them too carefully and the debuff costs are pretty much educated guesses.
Note the trend from high cost intensity at the top to low cost sustainable at the bottom, IE Rangers and Warriors win by weathering the storm and outlasting their opponent; Hunters and Thieves are in it for the quick kill and recovery time.
One major issue is HP. These skills are all approximately worth the same in terms of damage and such, which means fighters have an advantage with their significantly more HP and dambonus. That could be remedied by giving rogues more base stamina, more stamina regen, or more base sta-mana. I quite like the idea of rogues having more sta-mana, which would make them more generalist and give them a larger arsenal to compete with fighters' HP and damage advantages, both in PK and against mobs.
Feedbackfeedbackfeedbackfeedback
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That looks really good on first look.
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Me: Tier 4, level 50, GM, Priest
Speed 344
Hit Points 2490
Mob: Tier 4, level 50, Caster
Faster than a speeding bullet
Hit Points in the tens of thousands
I think this mob matches my tier and level. One of the easier tier 4, level 50 mobs I know of, so I definitely wouldn't think it was fighting above my level.
The mob was confused, blinded and weakened at the beginning of the fight. So it was disadvantaged, had those spells missed, the fight would have been longer.
All of its attacks missed me.
All of my auto attacks missed the mob.
Alternating different attack spells; Fireball, Acid Arrow, Chill Touch, Cone of Cold, Shocking Grasp and Lightning bolt, it took 18 spells to defeat the mob. All of the attack spells were trained to 98%. One heal was used to see how it affected the timing of the mobs attacks. With the heal the mob got 6 attacks from the last attack I made before the heal to the one cast immediately after. The mob averaged 3 attacks to my 1.
I cast 17 attack spells in total, (after confusion, blindness and weaken), and included a pause to see what happened with the auto attacks. One spell powered up, but never got a report on its damage or missing, although my mana reduced, all of the other spells hit.
My point is, with the changes being talked about, as I understand them, I would have ran out of stamina way before I was able to end this fight with a mob of the same tier and level. I'd have been stuck, pummeled mercilessly, not able to even flee.
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It is very easy to alter mob strength and other attributes on a global scale. A change like this would go through quite rigorous testing in a test port before ever being implemented to the game port to make sure things weren't just made immediately harder by the change. Making things harder is definitely not what we want.
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Thanks Tor, you make a good point.
I would have ran out of stamina way before I was able to end this fight with a mob of the same tier and level. I'd have been stuck, pummeled mercilessly, not able to even flee.
Let's think about that though. You can't just look at the stamina costs and think, well I'm going to run out and be totally vulnerable. Think about what that stamina would be giving you first.
You're a priest, which would basically be the defensive, warrior type; not able to kill something as fast as a mage but able to last comfortably in battle almost indefinitely. Notice that instead of costly, high-damage skills, I've given rangers and warriors much cheaper skills that will see their stamina lasting a lot longer and give them an advantage the longer a fight goes on. Also notice that even the skills you can't use as frequently as you would now, all have much more significant effects, and the same would be true of spells. So your defensive spells would work similarly to brace, which cuts all damage in half.
The point is that in return for limiting how many skills/spells you can use in a short period, this would make those same skills/spells worth a lot more to you. So I think it's safe to say that even if you as a priest managed to use up your stamina/mana against a similar strength mob, you would be a long way from getting pummeled mercilessly.
It is interesting that you didn't land a single regular hit though. What's your hitroll? I think you should definitely be able to rely on auto-attacks more than you do now if we get action points.
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So what's the next step here? How do we get this thing going?
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In another port:
Fix stamina at 300 for fighters and maybe 450 for rogues to make up for their lower HP; regen at 10/sec.
Code those skills.
Tweak until balanced.
Expand to more skills and start on casters.
Incorporate 7-remorts.
All in another port so that it all works as intended and everyone understands and is happy with it before anything gets changed.
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I don't know that we have the right skills to code, but I'm about 80% to the 8 remort system.
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What do you mean by the right skills to code? If you just bring in the 8-remort idea as is, priest/hunter will be a super class and nothing will really change.
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I mean we don't have a concrete list of skills that we'd like to see implemented. I think having that will help anyone who wants to help code this out work on it.
In terms of Hunter, that's mostly from their innate bonuses I think which can easily be tweaked. Priest is a different beast altogether though. Let's frame the conversation as what we need to make all the classes more useful.
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you're clearly not going to put any kind of a sustained effort into this so i'm not going to bother
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I told you guys since the start that I was sporadic and code in sprints. I'm coding now, so either jump on the train and help or don't. If you want to help, coming up with some ideas on how we could make classes more useful would be a good start. If you don't, that's too bad. Your input would have been valuable.
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Just to be clear:
There's two different paths needed to implement a system:
1) The Design - This requires a significant amount of knowledge about what needs to be built, and how it integrates with everything else. This usually also has thematic components, a bit of "art" per se.
2) The Code - This usually is done by following some rough guidelines or "spec". Good code tends to be destructively created in that several approaches are tried until the right one is found. The code itself though tends to often try to follow a high level design. The lack of design can often lead you to wondering where to start and a sense of "writer's block" which is what so often happens in these situations.
Right now I'm not particularly in design mode. I may be later, but I'm looking for good ideas to code. Once I have them, and agree with them, things will move rapidly. If I don't get them, I might move into the design phase myself. If I don't get much feedback beyond questions of my commitment though I may end up questioning the value of continuing to contribute.
Instead of getting frustrated with the lack of progress, why don't you focus on how you can be a constructive element to progress. I've seen a lot of back and forth, but this place has lacked a serious design. There's plenty of chatter floating, but no real concrete, actionable tasks that I can work off of when I'm in the mode (which I happen to be). I'll figure out my own route as necessary, but this is a shout out to all of you to also get your asses in gear and help me. ;)
-Once
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http://4dimensions.org/forum/index.php/topic,735.msg5025.html#msg5025
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I'm afraid Molly and I have a slight disagreement as to the value of me working on maps at this point. I'm planning on working on them after core gameplay is further along (assuming nobody else jumps in before).
What else is on everybody's list?
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I'm planning on working on them after core gameplay is further along (assuming nobody else jumps in before).
Which means they will never be fixed.
As usual.
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Not necessarily. I'd just rather work on things more than 20% of the pbase will see a productive result from. There are plenty of other coders go can jump in on maps (likely far more adequately than I can).
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On the other hand, the maps are immediately actionable and could be a great way of making the world more user-friendly for new players.
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Is the artifact detector system still in testing or what's the hold up with finishing that up.
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That's complete: 15tp for the zone of an artifact no one wants. So current artifacts remain worthless but we have destroyed the value of all future artifacts too, so it balances out. That's how economies work.
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Do you feel that attitude is productive? Artis aren't done, there's plenty of follow up there and new artis to be drafted. I don't personally think 2000tp for the detector is fair but that's my opinion and I can be swayed. I think something in between as part of the detectors "epic" function in the 400-800 tp range makes sense. Maybe even 1k. We just can't cut out everybody but 3 people from using it or it isn't worth the development hours.
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Every single time I go to outer space I buy a spacebike for 30TPs and at least 2 gemclusters for 6tp each. That's 42TPs for running around in outer space. That's pretty much the only thing most people use TPs for, other than some people that do very well off levelling with them. People have gone over 100,000 TPs. Currently the MAIN reason to collect TPs is for use on spacebikes. The reason only 3 people are any good at getting TPs is because the majority of people have never bothered to try collecting them.
Jaros is absolutely right, if we want to revamp the artifact system we don't want this system to be available to everyone just for the sake of the development work and your sense of gratification. If it costs 1000 TPs to detect the zone of an artifact, even that is minimal to the people that actually go about hunting artifacts. You want artifacts to be worthwhile and for people to like them, you can't just let any old idiot use the detector and the top players to just leave the spam going like it's hunger or thirst.
To detect an artifact loaded: 100TPs
To detect an artifact loaded + dimension: 1000TPs
To detect an artifact loaded + dimension + zone: 10000TPs
I don't really get why we're trying to cater to the poor newbies who won't be able to detect the artifact all the way down to the zone? There are things we can do to increase newbie retention, but ruining a good feature by trying to make it compatible with a totally unrelated target audience is a typical 4d maneuver and a very bad idea.
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Thanks for the post Virisin, that was quite helpful.
When I did a rough analysis (with Molly statting people) of about 8 regular people, we didn't really see anyone with over 4000 tp online. Most had far less (around 800 I think was the average). Did I misread that? I'm under the impression that it's actually half a day's work to get 5000 TPs when you consider repop rates in Kush. Am I acting on bad data here?
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Yeah no one really has many TPs because there's not much value to keeping them atm. Once you have them you spend them on experience or buy the odd thing with them. I know for certain Xeriuth I think it was had over 100,000 for a while, and I've been over 50,000 a few times.
My memory's a bit hazy on the whole sitch but if I remember rightly I could get around 200-300 just on first run through Punt and part of Punt at least repops very regularly so that after about an hour long wait I can then run through again on the hour every hour for about another 100 each time. That means that after about 3 hours work I can have 500 just with one zone. If I increase my run to begin at the Greek archipelago, move through Egypt along the Nile and then into Punt, my take goes up significantly. I'm pretty certain Molly made some of Alpha Centauri TPs too, because I remember being able to earn a lot there.
5000TP in half a day is too big by my estimate, I'd say around about 1000TP in a full day is a pretty good haul. But even that means that if I spend 10 days I have enough to get a detection of an artifact pinpointed to the zone - which is just the bare minimum if we want artifacts to last more than a month as a new feature.
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Maybe we should revisit pricing. That's a very very easy fix. In terms of "how we make classes more useful" that's not a very clear and easy fix. We could use some competent thought on this issue. I've got some time for raw coding right now, but my thinking time is pretty much all dedicated to work at the moment.
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I think that Virisin's estimate of the availability of trade points is probably much closer than the 5000 TP in half a day mentioned by Once.
5000TP in half a day is too big by my estimate, I'd say around about 1000TP in a full day is a pretty good haul.
I can't match his average of 1000 TP in a full day, but his knowledge of where and when to obtain them is better than mine. I can't see anyone playing all day, much less 10 solid days to pay for one detector fire. I usually experience several each time I'm on line.
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How much do you make in a day Tor?
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Yeah on that note the detector seems to work oddly. Every time it goes off it just shows me the same artifact.. Is it not meant to 'zing' you as an artifact loads - so only players online with their detectors on benefit? Rather than every player that subsequently comes online getting repetitively pinged for the same artifact that's in Medieval? I think it'd be better if they just detected the initial ripple in time that caused the artifact to load, rather than picking up some constant ripple.
Tradepoints are actually a pretty alright way of leveling, and if you level in a zone you can collect tradepoints your efficiency in collecting tradepoints goes way up. It just becomes part of the hunting and you suddenly have 40,000 tradepoints which will take you through a good few remorts.
Being able to detect an artifact ping down to the exact zone is a serious advantage in hunting artifacts. If someone active is online to see that, the artifact is essentially their's.
Let's project in that 2 years lots of people know the locations of lots of artifacts. If I just have artifact detector on 1000 which is 1 days work I will see the dimension of where artifacts load. Let's say there are 30 artifacts equally spread over dimensions, I have to go check the locations of 7 or 8 artifact loads that I know and the artifact is mine.
If we want artifacts to be actually really good and sought after, we can't make them easily sought.
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The detector only goes off when an item loads. What you're seeing is that items get deleted and reloaded in the build process as part of a zone reset. Good post otherwise, definitely food for thought.
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Also I'd like if the scheme was aligned with the current worth scheme: eg in line with the Ethos stat and with similar colorings
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Sure, I'll do that right now.
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Do you feel that attitude is productive?
No, but I don't think you're productive either so it balances out.
In terms of "how we make classes more useful" that's not a very clear and easy fix. We could use some competent thought on this issue.
My what an ingenious idea. Oh look, someone already did it: http://4dimensions.org/forum/index.php/topic,724.msg5001.html#msg5001
It's not an easy fix because no lasting fix to gameplay is going to be quick and easy. It is an actual project that will require some sustained effort to achieve. No one is going to waste their time making an exhaustive list of twiddled skills that will shift the imbalances around a bit until you get bored next week and stop. I wrote up a core system that is balanced and works with the current code; the rest is much less important and can be dealt with as the core is tested and I can work out where to concentrate on expanding it.
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I'm not seeing the rationale of how these effects are balanced. Can you explain it a bit more? Are they balanced per stamina point, or is there some other metric?
Skill Cost Effect Type Class
Bladedance 20sta/sec x2 damage on all hits Buff Hunter
Behead 200sta x10multi Attack Hunter
Agility 20sta/sec 2 for 1 hits Buff Thief
Backstab 200sta x10multi opening Attack Thief
Blackjack 70sta 7sec sleep & -70sta Debuff Thief
(works in battle but ends fighting)
Phase 16sta/sec 40% chance of dodge+hit Buff Gypsy
Slit 100sta x0.5multi every sec for 10sec Attack Gypsy
Midas Touch 60sta +30% stamina cost Debuff Gypsy
Dodge 10sta/sec 50% chance of dodge Buff Ranger
Encircle 50sta multi = sta / opponent_sta x 2 Attack Ranger
Hamstring 50sta -5sta/sec Debuff Ranger
Brace 10sta/sec x0.5 damage taken Buff Warrior
Grapple 50sta thrown from room Debuff Warrior
opp.sta = x(opp.con / your.str)
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At tier 4: 100sta corresponds to a skill multiplier of x5, or five extra hits.
It's not airtight. The balance varies depending on context, so:
Bladedance is more powerful than agility if your speed gives you more than 1hit per second, which it probably does. I don't know the conversion rate for speed to hit frequency so just used a 1hit/sec assumption.
Bladedance vs brace looks ridiculous, I know. Head to head they cancel each other out even though brace is half the cost. But then, bladedance over 10secs costs 200sta and doubles your total damage so assuming 1hit/sec and 2000damage/hit, that's 20k extra damage over 10s. Brace for the same duration costs 100sta and saves 10k damage. I don't really know how to reconcile that except by seeing how they both pan out in action.
Dodge and agility are basically similar to ^^^ but again, speed is unaccounted for.
Encircle I did some numbers and estimated that it would fall in a similar bracket depending on how long the fight went on.
The debuffs are straight guesses because their value is so hard to pin down.
My main problem is that there are too many factors for me to account for on paper even though this is the simplest system I can come up with for skills that are actually useful in different ways. Like I said, it can't be done without commitment and I can't see much point in trying to take it any further without coding.
Blunt alternative:
Take evasive skills off thief and give them to ranger, so thief is aggressive with encircle and ranger is evasive with dodge/phase, and then make warrior's brace more potent while blunting cleave to make a similar difference within fighters. That is a viable option I think, making thief and hunter purely aggressive; ranger and warrior purely defensive; gypsy in between. Then spells are still ridiculous but you could take mind electricity/ice off priest and that would halve their damage and leave heal as their primary strength, which is enough; then confiscate high level aggressive spells from priest, give them all to mage and remove the delays, thus granting mages huge damage; then esper would go somewhere in between I guess.
All of that would make a difference but likewise you obviously know that every step there throws something else up in the air and all of it would need so much testing and balancing to actually make it worthwhile that I don't even know if it would be worth it. I think it would more likely wind up just as half-assed and unbalanced as it is now.
The OTHER possible way forward is uncapping str, con, dex, int, wis and cha. tie str firmly to melee damage, con to damage taken, dex to chance of skill success, int & cha to magic damage and wis to magic damage taken. Skill success rate would then depend on dex vs opponent dex or something, and practicing it to increase proficiency could instead reduce cost. in my world it would reduce stamina cost such that a high tier allows you to use skills much more cheaply. AGAIN the factors involved scare the shit out of me but this would allow different players to specialize in damage as opposed to defense, etc.
I really can't see a way to get anything worthwhile out of gameplay one way or another without committing to it as a long-term project and investing hours on end in the balancing, and I can't see that happening. I see half-finished efforts and a bunch of people annoyed with a new set of imbalances that haven't fundamentally changed anything. I honestly think the maps are a better option.
lastly yea, the detector could still be fun. there are about 15 new artifacts sitting on the buildport that are ready whenever the pricing is, bar a couple that i think still need locations. i haven't looked at them in a few weeks.
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Good post. Will follow up more thoroughly when I'm not still awake at 5am. What specific imbalances are you referring to that have been introduced?
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Priests are the only worthy casters because they have heal and can do pretty much equivalent damage to the others, if not more. Heal is huge, casters are rubbish without it because of the low HP.
Espers have magic bubble, which is useless for a class that relies on magic damage, and no heal, much like mage.
Earthquake is pretty much an experience fountain and I think priests are the only class that get it so they're also the easiest to remort.
No one goes warrior because it's essentially the same as hunter but lacks utility skills and if I'm not mistaken brace only works while not typing anything or some other similarly crippling compromise.
Gypsy is useful against casters thanks to magic bubble but very average against mobs or anyone else because they can't spam anything. Also woodsing is rubbish and tinker doesn't compete with spam-skills.
Thief is strong and ranger is now all but identical. both are played in exactly the same way, which is also pretty much the same as fighter but with less HP, less base damage and similar spam-skill damage.
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Ah, so nothing on my end. Roughly when did these changes come in? Do you feel like it was better balanced before? If I have an idea of the date I can actually look at the subversion logs and see how the formulas have changed over time.
This is pretty helpful information overall.
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Uncapping stats would be a good thing.
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liked that part where each class actually HAVE UNIQUE skills..
but if you make one class defensive, and one offensive.
it in turn will unfold as one of those being the better one don't you think?
this goes for fighters/casters/rogues. in a perfect world each class would have its
unique purpose that no other class could do.. should make each class tier 3 and 4 skills
totally uniqie to each class....woohoo
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Roughly when did these changes come in? Do you feel like it was better balanced before?
No idea. Partly from the beginning, partly at any point over the past 8 or so years. It's never been balanced.
but if you make one class defensive, and one offensive.
it in turn will unfold as one of those being the better one don't you think?
Yes. That's why the challenge has always been in testing/balancing, even if all you do is shift some skills around.
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I think one of the first things you could do would be removing GM and implementing the remember 8 remorts system, and getting that balanced so it meant no one was weaker than they were now if they had a solid 8 remorts behind them.
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What would that accomplish? We have three classes worth playing now; 8remorts would narrow that even further to priest+hunter/thief. Heal is ridiculously useful so everyone would have it, but then why stay as priest and not just carry on into hunter and have twice the HP and behead? Players would be uber so mob strength would have to be adjusted. End result: gameplay is even more one-dimensional. I think it would be a total waste of time unless the effort was actually put into balancing classes along with it, which I originally thought was a given but clearly isn't.
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I don't think anyone would just implement 8 remorts only and nothing else. That would of course be ludicrous. What you're running into is a volunteer team that either has:
A) Time Limits
B) Interest Limits
C) Skill Limits
Which sometimes prevents things from being brought in exactly how you'd like and at the speed and manner with which you'd like. A and C are pretty hard to overcome, but I think if you reach out to programmers, make it clear you value their contributions, and try to get them involved (without just telling them all the stuff they won't ever do) you might find more work happening here.
I'm definitely in the A category and occasionally in the B category. Everyone on these boards has the opportunity to help make this place better. Your collective value is in using your player experiences to help us understand what's going to be most relevant to the base, and then using your characters on our test ports to help test things as they come in and rejigger the balance. If the rate or style of progress isn't to your liking perhaps you should ask yourself what you can do to help with it. Chances are there's plenty of things.
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Basically this is what always happens, there's a lot of talk, a few of the most minor changes of a big idea come in, end up making things worse and then nothing else happens for a while. Rince, repeat.
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Yeah, I think it's worth accepting that this isn't going to happen so we can all save our breaths. Nothing personal about it, it's just too big of a task. :)
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Basically this is what always happens, there's a lot of talk, a few of the most minor changes of a big idea come in, end up making things worse and then nothing else happens for a while. Rince, repeat.
Fair point.
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Yeah, I think it's worth accepting that this isn't going to happen so we can all save our breaths. Nothing personal about it, it's just too big of a task. :)
Quit being emo.
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http://4dimensions.org/forum/index.php/topic,724.msg5141.html#msg5141
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I think the chances of things being implemented now are greater than they ever have been in the past. Why? Because we have more than one coder that's actively looking at making changes. Each is working on their own special thing, but all of what they are working on is made to improve 4D. Some of it may seem like it's trivial (do we NEED a special client for our mud? No, but think of the attention it will draw. I love the fact we've got someone (Kavir no less) working on one), some of the things they do may seem like the time could be spent on something else - something better - but I'm not a coder and I'm not going to tell them that B comes after A and then have the mud break because in coding C always comes first - before either B or A... The idea is to use this tread to get the ideas out, tell them what's not working and why, if you can.
Also realize it takes time - kind of like driving a place that's a half hour away - even if I drive directly back without doing anything it's going to take me an hour minimum, don't call me after 20 minutes wondering why I'm not home... *blinks innocently* In other words - we want the mud to be great, and we want them to take the time to make it great, so let's stop asking them "when are you going to be home" when they've barely started the drive.
Also, if you continue saying things like "It's never going to get done" and you say it enough times, why would they even bother trying? Call someone "stupid" long enough and they'll actually start to believe you, even if they are a genius and know better. It may not have gotten done in the past, but we've got some awesome coders right now that we have to believe in. I'm willing to believe that they can get anything done if they put their minds to it and if we believe in them. Call it the tinkerbell theory. Do you believe in fairies? I do... *claps hands and stomps feet* But I believe in our coders even more. *gives a round of cheering to go with clapping hands and stomping feet*
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There was only ever one coder who could make the changes.
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In all fairness; Once warned me from start about his way of working. Which is to code and test intensely during a short period, and then be inactive for a couple of weeks, until next coding spree arises. I have no problem with that, as long as some interesting code comes out of it, and it has. Each have their own method of work and I am not going to tell anyone when and how they should do things. Instead I think we should be grateful for the things that actually are produced.
It's another thing that worries me more.
During the last months, (and earlier too), our Forums have been very active, and a lot of ideas and suggestions come up. Some of those involve a total upheaval of our current system, others obviously need a lot of work, coordination and testing, yet others are possible to implement with a reasonable amount of work without interfering with the rest of the system. Some require the cooperation of both builders and coders, others are more pure coding, but require input and testing from players.
Here is what bothers me about this:
A lot of ideas get tossed around, many of them have potential. In some cases there even seems to be a total concensus that they should be implemented.
Then time passes, our coders have limited time or interest, or other things pop up that need to take precedence.
Then new ideas about new things pop up and get tossed around, and suddenly the earlier ones that did have potential are buried and forgotten. It's even hard to drag them up from the forums, since they are spread over so many different places, sometimes in a thread that started about something totally different.
So what we need is an easy reference that allows us to call up the ideas that most people seemed to like.
I'm going to start a new thread called Priorities, and list all the ideas that I remember and liked myself on it. Then I'll make it sticky, so it is easy to find. Others can add to the list and/or comment my choices, but I don't want the thread to grow into one of the usual megathreads, filled with even more ideas. That discussion should take place in other threads, and if it happens anyhow I'll just split the thread. The original list should be kept simple and short, easy to find and to return to.
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Molly, your idea of a sticky priority list sounds like something that is sorely needed. Thanks.
I also agree with your statements regarding the people working on the coding.
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On the other hand, the maps are immediately actionable and could be a great way of making the world more user-friendly for new players.
Fixed.
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Another concern is that we have a couple of active voices and not many of other voices. Or the other voices get beat down by the active voices (I'm not going to name names you know who you are :)) And the attitude if you don't post your opinion doesn't count is bull as well. We need to encourage input and not worry about being beat down by the louder voices.
And that is the true problem of balancing things. You have one group who want things one way and damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead and the heck with anyone else posts or says. And we have others who might want to post but doesn't want to get ran over by the this is the only way group as well.
And then you have the coders who tend to go off on their own tangents and we don't talk to each other. I think we need to have coder meetings so we can keep tabs on each other so we don't step on each other's toes. So for example Once is working on gypsy's, I'm sort of working on gypsy's. This could cause issues. Which is the biggest issue we have as coders is that we tend not to talk to each other much. It doesn't mean we don't talk to each other it is just we are more independent coders.
And we need to respect each other on posting as well. Calling someone an idiot or blowing off an idea because you don't agree with it isn't the right way of handling it. Not everyone can debate well over a forum. We all need to be patient and try to understand what other people are trying to express.
Prometheus
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What exactly is your goal with these postings? Your desired outcome isn't exactly clear. If there's some process you're suggesting, I'm not quite seeing it.
That said, with regards to other coders, anyone who dislikes one of my changes is free to roll it back as long as they understand it. You won't get much argument from me. I don't get attached to the work I create, I see this as a destructive process, like chiseling at stone to make a statue. There's often more opportunity lost to an unwillingness to act than is ever lost to bad actions. You miss every shot you don't take.
If you're worried I'm going to step on your toes or get in the way of your plans then put your plans out there and take steps to achieve them. If you don't have the time to take steps to achieve them at the very least people will be able to see your idea. If they disagree with your idea, at least it's out there and had the opportunity of being implemented. Who knows, you might just find someone doing the dirty work for you though ;).
-Once