Messages

1

Suggestions & Ideas / Re: Skills & Spells Suggestions

« on: November 30, 2009, 06:45:45 am »

Well after abusing my clan you have another rant here.

If you are really that uninterested in any feedback, then just go ahead and implement whatever you damn well feel like, like you always planned to.

*stops reading the forum* 

2

Suggestions & Ideas / Re: Skills & Spells Suggestions

« on: November 30, 2009, 05:43:25 am »

'Wall of force' will create a wall of magic blocking a room exit. Another mage with a higher rank dispel magic than the original mages rank in wall of force will be able to remove it.

Sounds quite abusable if you meet someone without dispel magic in a !recall room. Considering how imms disliked people using the pit I dont see them wanting this? 

'Pass wall' will allow someone to move through certain walls/doors without opening or otherwise being able to beforehand.

I guess this will only be used for doors that are pickable anyway... so its just another vesion of knock. Also, walls? You understand how rooms are built right? You cannot just magically create an exit and link it up to where it 'should' line up elsewhere, as rooms are not strictly built on a grid system.

'Melt metal' will burn armour type equipment until it is so hot it needs to be removed. It will be like a disarm except for armour type equipment rather than weapons. Armour will end up in player inventory.

Not all armour is metal... and not all items worn are even armour. Not sure if this is really going to make much difference anyway? Don't we have curse armor or other debuffs already..

'Disarm' will knock weapons to the ground rather than into inventories.

Odd change... I know a mud that started with disarm like this and went to it staying in inventory to avoid abuse from stealing disarmed items.....

'Clone' will be changed so that if you are high enough rank in 'clone' you will be able to control the clone like a remote control car.

Good change.

'Darkness' spell will darken a room and no light source will penetrate it.

Sounds good. I take it this will not work outside.

'Light' will dispel it, so will a high enough rank of 'dispel magic'. 'Light' will also blind people with infravision.

Hmm, 'light' spell blids peple with infranvision? Nonsense. light is light, infravision is infra red, which is commonly called HEAT.

'Floating disc' will create a flat disc that follows players around and allows them to put objects on it.

Um, like an inventory? Object or mob? Sounds interesting, not sure how practical it will be.

'Create water' at a high enough rank will cause a whole room to flood washing people into adjacent rooms or bashing them to the ground. As well as extinguishing any fires in that room.

'Fireball' of a high enough rank will have a chance of burning outside rooms and creating forest fires, etc. Once a room is burning there is a chance adjoining rooms will catch alight. A room on fire might cause damage to mobs or players in it. It could also turn the room description red.

This sounds like a major coding project in itself...

'Wall of thorns' will be like 'wall of force' only instead of blocking an exit, it will hurt anyone that uses the exit.

Sounds abusable in some situations... similar to wall of force.

There will be various types of traps for thieves created, entry or exit traps, timered traps, trigger traps.
etc. Think trip wires and stuff. Traps could target single or multiple players/mobs, they could be explosion type traps to damage or holding type traps to snare, etc.

Again could be abusable like wall of thorns.. it depends how its implemented.

Id rather existing spells be fixed to actually do stuff myself.. 

3

Suggestions & Ideas / Stats in 4D - Moved from Pwipe thread

« on: November 21, 2009, 08:12:52 pm »

That definition still does not have any rational connection to how powerful your fireball is, nor why you have more hitpoints.

Or why an animal would be affected by that, unless it is some magical effect.

Oh wait, charm is a magic spell, isn't it. 

4

Suggestions & Ideas / Stats in 4D - Moved from Pwipe thread

« on: November 21, 2009, 06:53:31 pm »

Good discussion, keep it going!

I won't comment specifically on anything except to defend the so much despised CHA a bit.

1. Like someone already said; removing cha would mean removing one variable, which would lead to less variety.

2. To me it's in a way logic that cha should be beneficial to magicians, because to me magicians are partlly tricksters.
So try to regard high cha, not as how beautiful and attractive you are, but how well you are able to con people (no pun intended). Another word for magician actually is conjurer or illusionist.

3. Cha is actually used in several quests, again in an attempt to add some variation, so that the quest isn't always the same to every player.

4. And naturally cha should affect how successful you are in charming mobs or bartering with them.

As someone also said, don't expect a mud to be fully logic. After all, we are dealing with magic, dragons and vampires here. Within it's very twisted world however, we should at least try to be consistant. That's not the same of being logic.

Disagree with pretty much every point..

1. Impossible. We have no variety right now. I don't see how you can get into negative variety? I never suggested removing cha, just stopping it affecting the power of spells and raising hp like it does now, and developing its own use into the mud. See Riley's suggestion. I have others.

2. To me and 99% of people it is illogical that how pretty you are affects the strength of a fireball. Or your abiltiy to absorb damage before you die. Yes, those are synonyms of magician, but that is because we do not have real magic, so it is an illusion. 4D has real magic, it is NO illusion.

3. I see no reason why this is a problem. Unless of course some quests are only available if you have enough charisma... which is a horrendus quest design and should be fixed anyway.

4. How pretty you are should affect your interactions with sentient beings only, How does being good looking stop a bear from mauling you again? Charm is a spell, so should require spell ability no?

5

Suggestions & Ideas / Re: Player Wipe (PWipe)

« on: November 18, 2009, 07:29:53 pm »

Alright, I expect this to be an extremely long post, so I will try to break it up into short paragraphs

Okay, first issue, playerwipe or no playerwipe? Full or partial?

"I agree with the pwipe, I actually do. By the same token I don't agree with everyone losing everything. I think it's downright wrong." - Natalya

I agree with the pwipe. I also agree that it is very unfair to everyone, but the issue that many people seem to forget is:

If we do not have a pwipe now, we will have one when the mud dies.

Why?

"but from talking to the coders it's obviously a bunch of hacked together stuff that looks like a cat threw up - not a pretty picture.  The way to really get things working right is to start from scratch - coding wise first.  Right now, if we just fix things that are broken, all we're doing is putting a patch on it and making the pile of cat vomit look even worse." - Kvetch

It is unfair - because everyone has wasted their time already, on a mud that wasnt upto scratch gameplay wise.

Do not take a pwipe out of context. It cannot be just a reset to fix old grandfathered items, token inflation or whatever.

It *must* be the end result of totally replacing the hack + slash elements in the game. Grouping, classes, races, char builds, skills, spells, physical stats, all need to be looked at and rethought.

If (and I mean if, I dont hold my breath here) this is done, then we have to have a pwipe. Imagine you play snakes and ladders for 10 years, and then move to playing risk, would you keep your old scores and playing pieces from playing snakes and ladders? No, of course not.

To make the pwipe valid, the game really has to change to be good enough to match the quality of the zones and the playerbase 4D has.




Alright, we have a pwipe if we get stuff fixed. But what is 'fixed' exactly?

"Right now, if we just fix things that are broken, all we're doing is putting a patch on it and making the pile of cat vomit look even worse." - Kvetch

This is why I do not favour the 'skill trees' being proposed. To me, it is exactly 'patching' over the cracks in the game rather than fixing the core elements of the game. We will still have the irritating features that make no sense and limit gameplay.

It also makes little sense in reality.

Ah, bringing up reality in a fantasy time travel mud involving magic where you cannot technically die? Yeah I know, but if something doesn't make sense to you, it's often a good warning that what you want to do is likely to confuse players and limit the game experience.

Prime examples: Charisma increases spell damage and gives you more hitpoints when you level. Damroll is the only important bonus for melee types.

How does being pretty or showing empathy give you a more powerful magic missile or help you absorb more physical damage before you die? Its confusing, and counterproductiove to have one stat *both* improve your spells and make you gain more HP. Same with damroll - its the only bonus that really matters once you have anything like decent equip. What even is damroll again? Wouldn't like, strength govern how hard I hit instead? Intelligence or widsom affect spellpower more? Dexterity affect my ability to avoid attacks rather than armour?

Who knows what mord was smoking. 




So, we get a skill 'tree', where you are limited in the total number of skill choices you can have.

Well we already have normal skills and spells do we not? Are all skills and spells going to be like that or just a certain number of them? The big danger here is that we have a large variation in the usefulness of these skilltree options, making everyone pick the same things... and then there is:

"Option 2: Option 1 + 'skill rank' introduced as a stat available on some equipment. A weapon might have say, backstab +5 which would directly influence their backstabbing multiplier and maybe turn a 2k backstab into a 3k backstab." - Virisin

Okay... IF skill trees were implemented, then this is how they must be done. We need variation in equipment, to get that we need real choices that are genuinely different for different characters. Skill trees would be designed to bring variation and balance to characters to encourage grouping and interdependency.

To bring this to equpiment too, we would undoubtedly need to have items giving some kind of bonus to these choices, such as +5 backstab skill on an item.

But this causes a big issue - you're basicly saying that all the good items in the mud will need to be looked at and such skill bonuses like that to be distributed among them. So, to do the job right imms are going to have a significant amount of work editing equipment already in the game...




Now back to my earlier point - how is it reasonable to limit a character to only learning *some* skills, and then not learning anything ever again? It seems counterintuitive to anyone coming at it from a fresh viewpoint. While at the same time, if we keep how player stats curretly work, everyone will have maximum strength, dexterity, constituion, wisdom, intelligence, and spellcasters with good charisma. The stats being easy to max.

Characters will only learn a lmited number of skills or spells or whatever, but they will all be super strong, intelligent, agile, etc. etc?

Where is the logic here? My view is that it makes more sense to reverse this - to allow players to slowly learn new skills and spells, but to have a maximum limit on the total level of *physical* type stats the character has.

IE: if you have high str, dex, con etc, and you are a tough melee type, you do not have good int, wisdom, or other spellcasting related stats and so your spells will be awful. BUT you can still learn them, even if your ability is greatly reduced.

Similarly a character built to be good spellcasting will be bad in melee, but they could still choose to learn those skills if they wished to. It is just weak from having poor strength, dex or whichever.




How could you do this? simple: look to remove the hard caps on stats. Make stats the important determining factor in combat, remove hitroll and damroll and speed, so only 1 stat is used in determining success, failure, damage etc instead of several.

You then are fixing what currently lets the mud down, and simplifying the game for new players, not adding another layer of complexity onto an already barely functioning game system.

Of course, removing hr, dr, speed boni etc means editing a ton of good items to make them valuable again, right? But... if skill trees were done correctly some item editing is going to have to happen at some point anyway, to make it worthwhile - so isn't it better to take the harder path and make the game simpler as we go?




Doing it this way also has a major bonus, at least to me: With characters defined by their physical strengths, classes become redundant. You can even get rid of classes if you want to and allow people to train up their stats (with a total stat cap to prevent people being good at everything).

This lets you tailor your character to how you want it, choose the eq you want to improve the strengths your character has, *and* allows you to divide your stats between *types* of character, in effect giving you the option of playing a *true multiclass* character. That was the original intention of the tier system in 4d before it was then destroyed with grand masters.

This is how my favourite mud did things: Personally I've never came across another mud which came close to the flexibility and freedom it provided players, and the variation in equipment it had. I don't think it wouldd be a bad idea to emulate at least parts of it.

6

Roleplay / Re: Aliens invading Old West!???

« on: November 17, 2009, 03:29:35 pm »

It was a good thing Riley just happened to be passing to repeatedly heal your backsides. 

7

Suggestions & Ideas / Re: Alignment

« on: November 14, 2009, 03:09:14 pm »

Unfortunately all muds are based on mass murder, so what you suggest isn't really feasible, when it comes to gameplay.

It would basically mean that if you want to stay good you'd have to sit at recall all the time, in which case you'd never gain any levels. Sure, many people hate the so called grind, and many players do little but squat at Recall, but that is mostly after they went through the grind.

I'd rather settle for the existing kill-good or kill-evil system, which may not be totally logical, but at least is persistant and easy to understand.

I made the suggestion with the current game in mind. I'm unhappy (but not surprised) you dont even consider it properly and just reject it. 

Most mobs here are not wildly good or evil, so you naturally head towards neutral with the current system.

There are lots of areas to xp in, so you can choose to avoid killing good aligned mobs in most situations.

If you want a specific item from a good aligned mob, you have a choice - either take the alignment hit from murdering a good person, or trade for it for someone who has less moral standards than yourself.

I think this would be a relatively simple change that could add a great deal of interesting dynamics to equipment (if you remove the ability we have now to just make align restricted eq wearable by anyone), quests and so on. Being good or evil could then give different benefits.

Right now alignment is just an irritant whenever it actually matters, but if you want to keep it that way then thats what you want.

8

Suggestions & Ideas / Re: Alignment

« on: November 13, 2009, 12:54:41 pm »

That said, align should be at least resonably logic. It makes sense to me that if you specialize in fighting evil creatures, your align goes up, if you go around senselessly killing innocent women and children it goes down, and if you stick to hunting animals nothing big happens..

Not very logical at all. Killing 'evil' people does not make you good, it just makes you a murderer too. At the best it should not change your alignment at all.

To paraphrase an old games take on alignment:

It is very easy to prove to everyone you're evil, it is very hard to convince them you are good. Being good align comes from *not* doing evil acts over time. Certain selfless acts (like doing quests to help people) should raise your alignment to lawful/good, but killing a few innocents should immedately drop it back down to evil/chaotic again. It should be a challenge to maintain a good alighment by not killing good aligned mobs, and very easy to descend into evil by just being selfish and killing what you want for your own personal gain.

So, a simple alignment system:

People start at fully 'good'.
Killing neutral or evil mobs doesnt affect alignment.
Killing good mobs drops alignment fast.
Quests can raise alignment.
Alignment slowly raises by itself, but veeeeery slowwwwwly.

9

Suggestions & Ideas / Re: Clans

« on: November 10, 2009, 05:36:36 am »

Two obvious issues:

1. You're in effect having joining a clan be the same as a safe-PK flag. If you want to PK fully you can have the flag set, if you want to duel with someone you can use the arena. Forcing people to either stay a loner or be attacked while in the 'safety' of their clan hall is not something everyone will like.

2. The raiding/deeds are good ideas... for a mud which regularly has 25-50 people on at a time. I dont think 4d has enough of a playerbase to really have people contesting these things. Deeds will stay with whomever is online and levelling at that time, and during the day its quite common to have noone from one clan or another online, so stealing from their treasury will be unopposed apart from dumb mobs to defend (hah).

Good ideas, but I dont think they suit how 4D is, or our current player size. Oh, and if anything I'd have clans lose money from their vault to pay for their upkeep rather than have them producing money just for having money...

10

General Discussions / Re: Getting and Keeping new players

« on: October 10, 2009, 09:03:25 pm »

This thread is about keeping new players, and the behaviour of unnamed older players; some that are given the responsibility to help and encourage new players so they might stay. Noone was named, it was Tocharaeh himself that decided to be public. Now we have a helper 'strike' - I can't see how this isn't making things even more public.


I agree with the opening post, alot of the reasons that people do not stay are from part of the existing player base.

It has been this way for as long as I've known 4D. If this is labelled as 'a personal quarrel' and not to be discussed, then I don't see how it is going to change.

11

General Discussions / Re: Getting and Keeping new players

« on: October 10, 2009, 05:48:05 am »

We didn't "lose" anything but a potential headache. That is my experienced opinion on the whole matter.

Opinion  [uh-pin-yuhn]
–noun 1. a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty.

So based on your opinion, you decided someone was likely to be a problem in the future - so treating him badly, causing him to delete?

It was a HERO issue
The balls of HERO's have been cut
I am a HERO first.
More importantly, the HERO said go.
the intent behind the creation of HERO

I agree, the 'hero' is the issue here.

12

Building Board / Request concerning 'Equipment Guidelines'

« on: August 23, 2009, 06:43:37 pm »

Can we have an updated list of maximum limits etc for items? Seeing how horribly out of date the current ones are, as shown by all the items that break them. 

13

Suggestions & Ideas / Re: I just want to see how many of our players agree with the new skill tree system

« on: August 02, 2009, 10:45:17 am »

Lets put this in perspective, if I were to try to explain to you the CURRENT gaming mechanics, you would all be confused and complain that its complicated.

All I am going to say on this matter is, we will be running the current version of the code, while playertesting a second version of the code with skill trees. It is during this playertesting (by players) that we will then decide whether to implement it or not. So volunteer to be a playertester and have a say.

Then, fix the current system removing unnecessary feature and making it simpler. Do not leave it as it is, adding ontop another level of features making the game even more complex to understand. Less is more people....

14

Suggestions & Ideas / Re: CASTERS, DMG, HP: Serious problems.

« on: July 30, 2009, 04:57:36 am »

Well, spell resistances have been completed. I decided against fixing the other things for now.

Hurray!  Ok back to the issues.

In the addaffect list we have the following affects to put on equipment:
20) Paralize Defence     
21) Rod Defence       
22) Petrify Defence     
23) Breath Defence       
24) Spell Defence

They exist in OLC, and they also have been set on quite a lot of pieces of equipment in the game.

Yeah, well so far whenever I see an item give one of these, I take a step back, because:
1. They are pretty uncommon to see.
2. They are on items that otherwise suck monkey nuts.
3. They are pretty vague, -5 spell defence?

Is -5 meaning I take less, or more? Does it even work? Is it 5% less damage or 5% chance to avoid? Just 5 points of damage less??

And even if it does work, and I crawl  dozens of zones to find such uncommon items, because they are on such sucky equip otherwise my damroll will now be through the floor anyway, making the whole exercise pointless for anything other than PK. There instead Ill just take slightly longer to die anyway.

Putting more items with these bonuses in, will not help a mobs lack of spell defence either.

Which brings me to the second point: Caster equipment being too easy to get, no questing needed.
This is probably true, since int, wiz and cha were never cherished by the players at the time when we made most of the quests. Hit- and damroll was all they cared for, and so the player preferences have partly decided the stats of the high profile quest equipment.

Now I'd be perfectly willing to make some caster equipment as Quest prices, even if it means creating new quests in existing zones. That's what we are doing all the time in the old zones that we update, and a fact is that we often have trouble thinking of good quest rewards that would not spiral the stats on everything.
So that's not the main problem here, instead the problem is that the existing caster equip would have to be nerfed, before we could put the quests into action.

Which means balancing, plus a mass change - which is coder work, not builder.
And which would affect all casters in the game.

Scarily, I think youre seeing the point I'm trying to make.
Right now, you could remove int, dex, con, wis, and maybe even strength, and you would lose nothing in terms of gameplay.
Everyone maxes these stats as a matter of course, leaving interest in just damroll, and charisma. They cap far too easily to leave anyone a decision on what equip to use, or what kind of strengths and weaknesses their char might have. Character growth in this respect is entirely one dimensional.

And for spellcasters it is much worse. As Toch already said, all the good quest stuff is melee centric. Why? this kinda thing is why:

(2 steps from Yorke square, is a newbie jewellery shop, with)

an emerald ring is a type of treasure made from base-material
It can be taken and worn on TAKE FINGER
Its weight is 1 and its valued at 4000 coins.
If worn it will give you --
     5 to your Charisma

Plus five. And there are lots of other such high char items around the mud, easily available even to the bad explorers like me, which give +5 or greater. When you have over 20 item slots to wear things, it is pretty straightforward for everyone to easily reach 100 charisma.

Now, If I'm a builder. I want people to do my quests. If spellcasters already have 100 cha easily already, then im not going to put in items that give even more charisma than existing equip am I? Even if I am allowed to break the item stat rules, its not worth bothering: a +6 or +7 charisma ring isnt any use if you are maxed already.

So everyone keeps giving melee items as rewards. Or items that give permament spells and so on.

The problem here was having charisma, a stat that was considered weak and so given easily available + items without concern,  an irrational increase to your spells power without then rebalancing all the items that increase it.

As of now it seems PK skills play a lesser role in a fight now-a-days because fights are over so quickly. Damage has gotten to the point where a encircle can do 500-2000k damage and a spell can do over 5k. We either need to significantly lower damage for PK or significantly increase hp.

...

Now on class interdependency. I.E. getting rid of woodsing. Why in gods name would you want to get rid of the only class interdependency we have. For an obvious example of why interaction between players is a great thing look at our pbase. I wish I had a chart to show it but ever since we put grouping back to normal, the pbase has skyrocketed from what it was before.

 Now for my rant- Skill trees suck. Fix the basics first.
That's all for the rant

Well, if you reduce damage much you will need to adjust the HP of mobs, so I would guess that changing the players HP is going to be a bit easiler from that viewpoint.

Id get rid of gypsys having woodsing and tinker exactly because they are not promoting class interdependency. An ability that is utilised by logging on, tinkering a few items or singing to a few trees for half an hour, then giving your produce to another char and logging off is the worst kind of way to do it. If i want to be useful, I want to be online, in a group interacting with others; not a pet I log on once a month to give you a staff. 

Cannot say whether skill trees suck or not yet, but yes, the very basic things at the core of the game: char stats, damage, unique strengths of each class are the reason people want to xp, quest and so on, to improve their chars and make them feel valued/effective. See my previous post.

Overall focuses don't need much work right now because with new skills/spells and new equipment with spell defense, we don't know how that'll help defending against spell damage.  So until all that happens the quickest fix is to just lower the multi's of majors to be 150 percent of minor staves multi as opposed to 200 percent.

Also eliminating the charisma cap, and making charisma have less of an affect on damage boost.

But using the ungeared melee person, casters just because gear is easily attainble, casters are better, but an equally geared melee they are about equal. That's just my point of view.

Well, +50% is still a huge boost, I was thinking more +20% at most...

An even better solution to increasing the charisma cap: Just stop it affecting spellpower at all. Why does being a good conversationalist, or pretty, or empathetic, make you better at casting a magic fireball again? 

Equal on paper maybe, but as has been said before spells are alot less resisted than melee... though with the latest change that may be less so.


I suppose this all comes down to how brave the imms are willing to be in making changes. I've not been back long, but I see alot of familiar faces around. Are you making changes to please old codgers like us, or that will interest and draw in new people?

Is tinkering (hoho) with such things really going to have the effect you want, or are you willing to risk losing some people with changes they dislike to really make the improvements needed?

I'm always willing to give suggestions, if asked.

Brit.

15

Suggestions & Ideas / Re: CASTERS, DMG, HP: Serious problems.

« on: July 27, 2009, 03:06:55 pm »

Okay let me address both issues of tinker and woodsing.

1) When Mord changed woodsing to allow major focus's he made it very VERY hard to get Major focus with woodsing. Again using Fiachra as an example 47 remorts and I have only woodsang ONE Major focus staff. And until someone can convince me differently I don't see a point in changing woodsing. And again woodsing staves have a long timer from 13k to 17k depending on level.

2) Tinker is very random in damage increase. Again using Fiachra I rarely get 16d16 which is not doubling. And I have had tinkers which lowered the damage as well. So until someone can prove to me tinker it over powered with higher damage with timer I don't see a point in changing tinker either.

Prometheus.

So you agree with what I say but ignore the obvious conclusion.

Luck gives you an item that doubles your damage output. Luck. Doubling damage. How is that not unbalanced? But you don't see it. No single item should just double your damage, its like an item giving you +50 damroll.

Tinker: 10d10 = 55 average, 16d16 = 136 average damage. Hmmm. Almost +150% damage from your weapon before damroll. It is quite easy to tinker a large pile of shop bought weapons and make yourself a handful of 15d15 or better ones, you know.... a single afternoon and you can equip the entire playerbase.