Bonk deleted

[Cherek]

Well, my knowledge of code is severly limited, but I'd say boosting/reducing size of a couple npcs (many of the same npc require one file, no?) isn't a huge of a deal. Quite sure some of the lieges will be chuffed to improve on their mobs + it could serve as a real life training ground for up and coming coders. Fiddling with mobs, error correction can be done fairly swift. What could possibly go wrong? It's just mobs for crying out loud.

Many of the unused grinds today need this kind of attention regardless of changes prior. And by any estimates, the amount of myths will increase as time goes by. They need a place to hunt.

Draugor mentioned Trollshaws. I'll add Kabal as a whole to that one. Varian made a great area in Gondor, but for technical reasons it's not profitable, and now serves as Avatar's home away from home.

One could argue that the trolls in Terel are very prolific and it's a crowded area - add a few rooms, more trolls. Simple gestures - "visible for all"-code by the new wizards. Everyone wins.

The wizard application board is always open!

Boo, what a lousy answer? Well, it's true. It's not as easy as you think, and even if it was, it takes time, and someone must WANT to do it. Most wizards have little interest in working on old areas, messing with someone else's old confusing code. People generally become wizards to have fun, and work on their own vision. Trying to find someone who wants to take on a project like this, and has the level of skill needed to be trusted with that type of access, might be the hardest part. Think I sound negative? Well, maybe. But during my two or so years in the Admin I've learned that it's harder than you think to go from an idea to implement something into the game. Even small projects, and especially if the project involves more than one wizard. Before, when I used to spend most of my time on the forums coming up with ideas hoping someone else would code, I felt just like you do now. "How hard can it be?". Well, I've realized it actually is pretty hard.

Just like Gorboth mentioned we need a solution that feels realistic to actually implement, or it will just remain a good idea forever. I think anything that requires a lot of changes to game content is very risky as it could take a lot of time. Or never happen.

Of course we could just boost everyone and leave the content as it is, but that will of course lead to even more competition for the few good areas, and even more unused areas. Or... people will settle for lower XP/hour in those previously unused areas instead of competing? So it could work to just leave things as they are too?

[nils]

Well, the newly modified areas don't have to appear simultaneously, and in either case post brute-recode. As a teaching programme, I don't see the problem - at all.

Funny you should say "trust" when refering to adults pushing 50. The fact that trust is needed to modify a couple of npcs in the game just underlines what has become a regular saying "Genesis is a field study of poor project management". The fact that wizards are biased, belong to "sides" is beyond me. It's like we're back in kindergarten. "NO I DON'T TRUST YOU ENOUGH TO HOLD MY NEW LIGHTNING MCQUEEN TOY CAR"


Djeez.. Like.. Still? For real?

[Draugor]

Well, the newly modified areas don't have to appear simultaneously, and in either case post brute-recode. As a teaching programme, I don't see the problem - at all.

Funny you should say "trust" when refering to adults pushing 50. The fact that trust is needed to modify a couple of npcs in the game just underlines what has become a regular saying "Genesis is a field study of poor project management". The fact that wizards are biased, belong to "sides" is beyond me. It's like we're back in kindergarten. "NO I DON'T TRUST YOU ENOUGH TO HOLD MY NEW LIGHTNING MCQUEEN TOY CAR"


Djeez.. Like.. Still? For real?

Well yea, wizards have their friends etc just like everyone else. So biase has and will always be here in one way or another

[Cherek]

Well, the newly modified areas don't have to appear simultaneously, and in either case post brute-recode. As a teaching programme, I don't see the problem - at all.

Funny you should say "trust" when refering to adults pushing 50. The fact that trust is needed to modify a couple of npcs in the game just underlines what has become a regular saying "Genesis is a field study of poor project management". The fact that wizards are biased, belong to "sides" is beyond me. It's like we're back in kindergarten. "NO I DON'T TRUST YOU ENOUGH TO HOLD MY NEW LIGHTNING MCQUEEN TOY CAR"


Djeez.. Like.. Still? For real?

Well yea, wizards have their friends etc just like everyone else. So biase has and will always be here in one way or another

Huh? Who said anything about bias? You guys completely misunderstood and jumped to conclusions and accusations immediately. Kind of unfair against the people who spend their free time coding stuff for you don't you think?:)

I was referring to trust as in trust enough to NOT BREAK THE GAME unintentionally when working on live code. Nothing else.

[Draugor]

I replied to Nils about wizards having biases, ofc they do, players have biases, wizards are old players. Everyone has friends etc

[Pasha]

Greetings, esteemed participants of the discussion!

First of all - I am sad Bonk deleted himself - anyway we became fewer and consequently weaker.

Now to the subject - size cap, brute system etc.

As one of those who reached Myth after > 20 years of living Gen and deserved their power I can speak on behalf of all uber myths who gone a long way and still enjoying the gameplay.

20 years ago progress was much more difficult then nowadays - no death recovery, no quest info, no any other info we penetrated all by own heads
These days people bounce from novice to myth and back in a month as I see ...
Despite my level I still lack the power to complete ONE OF my goals - to perform better against certain NPCs.
I am still enjoying the gameplay, consequently I am grinding, consequently I am progressing - we need to progress on each level.

And believe me - current gameplay is fun on each level (even more fun on lower levels in many cases).(+)

I think death plateau is not an option - all CONs were listed in above posts.
I could support player progress boost if they really want to grow big faster , but check the thesis marked (+) above once more.
And finally, as a uber myth representative , I should urge the Greatests to consider an option NOT to cut the progress for Myths - thus I defend the interests of my department

[nils]

Cherek, I like you. You're funny.

[Boreaulam]

Re: Nils

As quite young wizard (but very experienced developer) I can tell that adjusting areas:
- is not difficult task
- is long task
- is boring task
- doesn't teach new wizard anything about coding quality content or game balance

Small area as village is the best well-rounded education project that teaches wizard what is Genesis.

[Makfly]

I've given a great deal of thought as to how to make pvp more fun in Genesis. Here are a few of the ideas that I think would work. But, they all come with various downsides:

• Implement the damned stat cap: This is the one that would probably fix everything. The upsides are considerable - It would give us a way to truly balance things, create an even playing field in terms of character power, and it has been proven to be effective in nearly every successful commerial game out there. In doing this, we would also want to make it so that the racial stat modifiers are considerably less pronounced, perhaps adding a straight number of stat points rather than scaling as your stat grows. The downside, that has always and still does prevent us from going this direction is that we stand to lose a huge number of dedicated players, due to the fact that we are literally removing from their characters years, and in some cases decades of progress that they have worked toward (depending on where we set the cap.)
• Plateau death penalty with mortal levels: With this change, we would make it so that once you have reached a given mortal level, you cannot lose exp if you are at the point of that plateau. For example, once you reached "wanderer" you could die 1000 times but death could never take more experience than what is needed to achieve the "wanderer" level. Once you rose to the next mortal level, the plateau vs. death penalty would shift. This would be true all the way up to myth. The upside here is that once you achieve a given level, you can rest assured that you will never lose that level by dying. It gives you that feeling of "ding!" that you get in games like WoW when you reach a new level - you've achieved something significant that you will never lose. It also gives you a feeling of carte blanche when you do die down to the threshhold. Now death carries no fear for you, and you could pvp with impunity (gear withstanding, of course.) Gear loss would become the death penalty if you were happy to pvp as a bare-bones myth, for example, since you could not lose any stats. The downsides would include the fact that we might get people who simply don't fear death, and therefore have no way to be influenced in their behavior. The whole "spit in the face of the BDA General and laugh" problem surfaces. Another downside would be the fact that this would mean people could not respec their stats if they wanted to guildhop - but that, to be honest, is another design problem entirely.
• Create auto-recovery of one week: With this change, you could die, and no matter what happened, you would recover back to where your exp had been in the course of seven days, even if you did nothing but idle, and even if you didn't log in. The nice thing about this would be that it would still allow us to give a steep death penalty, but it would mean that the penalty does not take your level from you until *you* can recover it. Rather, time will recover your level for you, regardless of your own efforts and toil. There are some nice implications here for pvp. One is that once you die, you become less powerful. This means that your enemies could still profit from your death, and at no point would your behavior become subject to zero-loss of stats as in the idea above. Any death would push the recovery time forward another 7 days. It also means that if you wanted to pvp, you could do so knowing that the worst possible stat punishment you might incur would be one-week of being less powerful than you are at full recovery. The downside is that it might make people want to not log in for a week, rather than play and risk having their recovery pushed forward another 7 days if they were to be killed again. This might be one of those things where certain people prefer to stay away and recover in safety, while others would just revel in chaos and go right back out and fight more, knowing that death never stings for too long. I am not sure what way the majority would swing, but I am always reluctant to implement design that gives people an incentive to not log in.

These are the ideas that I feel have real merit so far. There are other ideas that I have heard that would be a lot more interesting and potentially better, but those ideas involve a massive amount of code redesign. The above three would be easy to implement, and thus are realistic options.

G.

It is a basic premise in any balancing effort that it cannot be done without going against the interests that benefit from the imbalance.

Seeing that the admin have inched its way closer to dealing with a problem that have been heavily debated the last 15 years is encouraging, and I think you answered you own question on which solution is the best.
I hope the admin summons the courage to follow through with the simple, best solution, especially now that the population of Genesis is much healthier, and thus the threat of someone leaving is much less of an excuse to postpone fixing it once and for all.

[Kvator]

It's funny how some ppl consider stat-cap as ultimate solution for PvP issues that came out in thread about PvP-related deletion of one of the biggest chars in Genesis