Need for a change

[Alexi]

Grinding spots where healers are a must have..

I agree 99.9% with everything you said except what was quoted.

First make equal amount of healers on both sides of the alignment, or also some neutral ones, then I agree. As you can see there's some inconsistency there.

OCC Evil Healers:
PoT

Neutral Layman Healers
Elementalists and Minstrels

OCC Good Healers:
SCoP
Rangers

Good Layman Healers
Valar

[Ilrahil]

Agreed with Alexi there. The heals also need to be balanced appropriately. The Priesthoods barely can heal a titan/champ a full level of health, on the same par as laymen valars/minstrels, while the Occupational for the "good" side can heal them 2-3 levels.

[Targun]

Hmmm ... I'd need to research this, as I'm not familiar with Gaussian Distribution. Can you tell me more?

I was reffering to a term used mainly in statistics- probability. I had on mind the way it's graph looks and some other connections linked to the density of probability, though there's no point in going into the details here... Simplyfying:

Code: Select all

1. Lets take two players. 
-They have sword skill (SS) at 95, 100 respectively. 
-We create a variable, we call Weapon Combat Potency (WCP). WCP= SS/100. 
Simplified on todays Gen these skills are linear or very close to being linear. Therefore for both players their WCP is respectively 0.95, 1.  It is easy to see that there is 5% of difference in WCP for SS here. Compared to the hit rating weapons give the diffrence is almost neglectable. So whether you have your wep skill at 90 or 100...  will you see it on the spot with bare eye? Highly unlikely. With the wep skills range for fighter guilds of 90-100, all players pretty much have the same skill. As an effect of this weapon skill plays very little role in determining whether you are a tank/dps/allround. Everyone does, with his regular attacks, very similar dmg. Makes our weapon skill just a money sink. It changes almost nothing.

2. Now we take a non linear approach. We assume that there is a modifier e.g ^3 for the sword skill.  The WCP will be respectively  0,86 and 1. So the difference is much more significant. It starts to make sense. Weapon skill begins to matter and it does so for a reason. We want to be able to distinguish tanks from the dps. Same goes for other skills. If a tanking guild has it's parry and defence skills at 95 while dps at 75, there will be a noticable difference, between their capabilities of being a 'beat box' ;).

Stright from here we go to the regular dmg attacks as two things are connected. With regular dmg attacks and low chance to hit on heavy armoured high defence mobs, your special attack does huge majority of dmg. In some cases probably even up to 90%. On extreme cases it may go even worse. Now when we have the distinction between tank/dps/heavily oriented dps- whatever, manipulating just a few modifiers we can get precisely the results we want. Your Overall Combat Potency (OCP) is no longer your specials. Those 5 points in wep training paly a role. How big this role is? As big as the coder wants it. IMHO the dmg for regular attacks could be reaching a value of 30-40%, for the highest dps output guilds.Of course we want to manipulate on how WCP is related to 'chance to hit'. The dmg of regular attacks perhaps needs to be worked on, but carefully. The hit ratio needs an upgrade badly though. Regardless whether we want tank/dps/healer design or not (just my opinion though).

These are of course simple changes, but I tried keep it relatively easy to code. As for the healers, of course some tweaks in balancing them out would be needed, though I took it for obvious and not worth mentioning. Besides healing does not have to limit itself to tapping one boring bind. Clerics can have a range of skills for enhancing team combat potency. They may have multiple variations of heals- increased regeneration, proc on hit with hidden cooldown, soaking dmg, direct heal. Some abilities can be exlusive, while other's boost each others effects. As a result, you'd have to think how to heal depending on a fight and versus mana regen/cost. Aside from that dmg enhancing, armor reducing- whatever you like.

The general idea behind? Have fun! Actually play the game. Healers... heal, you are (slightly) nervous about health bar dropping, it's not just special attacks you have triggers set on anyway. Wizards can get some fun too coding top notch weapons holders as a challenge. And when I mean a challnge it's not about killing everyone who enters the room. E.g? You fight a lich, it summons some spirits. Tank tanks the lich, healer keeps him up. It would be too much dmg for the tank to tank lich and be drained by spirits, so other team members job is to <draw spirit attention> so they leech their health not the tank. Healer throws improved regeneration on team members, so they can make it to the end of the fight. At 30% some adds show up- skeletons e.g, you need to switch from the lich to the adds as they are weak, but put a lot of strain on your tank and healer for their dmg, kill them and finish off the lich. Sounds better than <kill arlenn> <watch youtube><wield abbasi>?

[Alexi]

I like the idea of a "WoW"ish team feel to Genesis combat except that I like not having to be super attentive all the time during combat. Wow is a time sink and isn't possible unless you can devote you undivided attention. Second issue I see with "real time" interaction is link speed and connectivity. Unlike the blizZard servers I don't think Genesis is designed for that.

Great concepts though

[Makfly]

If we are moving into the design of "The Holy Trinity" (Tank, Healer, damagedealer) then I think Genesis trying to become something the DikuMUDs already do better. DikuMUD was the basis for Everquest and subsequent games.
Now, you see games like Rift or Guildwars 2, that are moving away from that idea, and empowering players to team regardless of class, to address some of the inherent problems of the Trinity. It also seems to be a trend that is/will continue.

The problems with the Holy Trinity design is manifold, but it can actually act as a barrier for teaming, because people will be standing around waiting for a healer, or waiting for a tank etc, knowing that they can't really do much on their own, or as 3 Healers or 3 DPS or whatever.

I am certainly not saying that focusing on making Genesis more team-based is a bad idea - not at all.
I am saying that focusing on pigeonholing people into 1 of 3 archetype and requiring those archetype to be present for a decent/working team, is stepping into potentially dangerous territory that might backfire. Also that there are DikuMUDs out there already, that offer this, so moving the design concept into Genesis will only make it a bastardized version, that might not be all that successful - Worse that the original (DikuMUD) and worse than the alternatives like Rift/Guildwars 2 etc.

The good thing about the Holy Trinity is of course that it is a concept which SO many people are familiar with these days. That would certainly make it easier to migrate from other games to Genesis.

[Laurel]

scale down playerchars and leave NPCs as they are (with their current "natural" ac and skills), thus requiring teams to take them down WITHOUT an increased playerbase on hand you get either

1. bot/seconds/multilog/script teams
or
2. players who are used to and need to rely on good gear to accomplish anything in the current game setup would be forced to lower their standards or even effectively stop going out = leave

there was a time when playerchars were much smaller and people were using gear they wouldn't today ... however exp was gained differently and npcs didn't have that much of the shit-idiotic "natural" ac they usually have right now

example: 2 Rangers/militia/legends of much bigger stats than back in the days BUT with poleaxes (yes, we tried to get other weapons before ... failed of course) fought Ash for 45 minutes ... and he didn't even have a maul

back in the days Laurel (gladiator/no-combat lay/hero) was able to repeatedly kill Ash in a team with a monk (no layman/hero)

take a wild guess what will happen if you force everyone to rely on "poleaxes" (or similar-quality other weapon-types) ... playing Genesis above champion without a team (how do you get a team formed from the current playerbase for longer than 2-3 hours other than option 1 above?) will loose any sort of goal
maybe except you have a char in the not-yet-recoded (not even started) MM and can supply your fighter char with enough great gear

btw. comparison to WoW and the trinity:
in end-game WoW (been for almost 1 year in a guild with server-first kills and achievments - 3-4 raid evenings per week, 8-11PM with a 15 min. break ... focus all the time) you spend your solo time preparing for raids - gather herbs, food, cash for repairs, monkey-anuses for rep (enchants), etc. ... SOLO!

and before you are approved to participate in such end-game raids you have to bring already epic gear with you = doing PUG 5's and 10's (I never got to experience a 25 PUG for other than 1-3 boss dungeons)

if you want to make end-game Gen available also in raid-mode only ... do you want to leave the "solo" part to be herbing, forging and making cash on smallfry npcs only? what is NOT boring in that?

my thrill in solo WoW was to collect rare pets with my huntard (he has 5 of them by now) and collecting good stuff with my raider char (boomkin/feral) to supply my smallfry chars I've been experimenting with ... I hardly see such possibilities in Gen in the next years

oh and we didn't even touch the small fact that weapons/armours once acquired in WoW stay with you until YOU want to part with them ... if any of my WoW chars would each (let's assume some "WoW-Arma) month have to first buy/create some weapons/armours (don't even start with the time wasted to max out leatherworking AND smithing AND jewelcrafting on different chars) and then do a few 5's and 10's to be ready for a guild raid for the epic 25's ... I can safely assure you only selected few would be playing such WoW

reference:
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/a ... #168:14922 - main raider, leatherworker and cook
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/a ... baktsa/pet - petsesssss, alchemy for raider and fun dps for PUG epics
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/a ... oug/simple - fun tank for PUG epics and jewelcrafter for raider
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/a ... ood/simple - beneficiary of the BOA items (4 of them, as you can see)
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/a ... mal/simple - my disenchanter and inscriptionist

[Chanele]

If you scale down player size i believe the small ones and newcomers will suffer the most. Also this is hard to implement with the current playerbase.

Of topic
Laurel please stop your bullshit about how much Rangers suck cause they dont. Your expectations on the recode will leave you very disappointed since you will not get the huge upgrade you seek. Unless AoB goes wild of course...
You just cant have it all.

[Laurel]

Of topic
Laurel please stop your bullshit about how much Rangers suck cause they dont. Your expectations on the recode will leave you very disappointed since you will not get the huge upgrade you seek. Unless AoB goes wild of course...
You just cant have it all.

is that wiz-info, wishful thinking or just still the same problem you have with me for seemingly booting one of your alts?

[Alexi]

Server firsts in Wow meant dick. Means you got to brag to a small population how awesome you thought you were because you used one of the "world firsts" walkthroughs.

If you weren't part of the 3 or 4 super guilds that got endorsements to play you were just a casual gamer. Besides Genesis shouldn't try an emulate WoW because it's NOT.

[Targun]

Solo vs team play:
It says nowhere that you cannot play solo. It's just you'll get xp much slower, e.g. 2-3 times. I've never played Diku, though look at the old days. We were teaming all the time, because we couldn't grind/PvP/get good stuff alone. Players grew, the above changed, PvP nerfed- fear of death- players left. The most extensive botting took place just recently. If the game is to be played by scripts, (Just yesterday I met a folk, who was running all over the xpground not even realising, he was attacking the mobs I was fighting with) what's the point of it anyway. So yeah... tell me about botting.
Time:
Um, sorry but how much time do you have on your hands Laurel? More than 2-3 hours? It's not enough? You want people to stay online for what... 10? Only few would play such WoW? How many people paly Geneis? 35 at peak, 4 are wizards, 5 are idling, 5 are semi-idling, 4 are idling in teams with assists on, 4 are LD, 13 people play?
Attention:
The maximum, undivided attention would be probably required only for the top notch stuff. Albeit, I do believe attention should be rewarded. It's better to log in for an 1-2 hours and actually play the game, want to return to it, feel excited rather than have it opened for 8 hours, not talking to anyone, idle for 5, stride for 2-3 typing kill from time to time. You could of course do that, but I am not convinced if its fair towards those who play actively. Besides I believe, if game is not boring by itself, you'll find it amusing anyway and want to be active.
I never suggested holy trinity. In the MMORPGs tank does like what 15% of dps dmg? We probably don't want to go this far. Same thing for healer. I said make the classes more distinctive. You could go grind alone, if you want to stick to the play style of 5-10 hours online, but just don't expect the same results. Guys who team, get themselves a healer etc, will be e.g. 3 times more effective. They spent some time to gather in a team, teaming is to be more rewarding, so... it evens out. The main idea is to make Genesis stop discouraging teams.
Scaling down:
The smallest will 'suffer' the least. In fact it would close the gap a bit between small guys and big guys. The myth of avr [numbers are wiz-info] would get to [numbers are wiz-info]. The whatever lvl it is of avr [numbers are wiz-info] would get to [numbers are wiz-info]. The % difference stays the same. Big guy remains 200% stronger than the small guy, but there is [numbers are wiz-info] instead of [numbers are wiz-info] points between them. Besides if new myth is from 140 points, you cannot grind past that at very fast pace. While the smaller guy can cath up a little bit. A newcomer could probably start to actually 'play' the game after a 1,5 year right now. We could add a one or two titles for the heavy grinders to get them something to do for the next 3 or 4 years. They wouldn't get past the old legens so the sizes would remain in range, when the game mechanics can work for small/avr/huge guys. They have troubles to do so now.
WoW
I agree totally. Genesis shouldn't emulate WoW. In fact nice quests, storyline and role playing is where Genesis has an upper hand over MMORPGS. But as with given example of the mud Rhaeger and I were reffering to. You can't get a single piece of magic equipment alone. Of course, the regular eq is fairly expensive and of good quality compared to Gen, still you really feel that you got a magic item. A multiplayer game has to encourage not force interaction- you meet a guy 'hi there, maybe we go together' instead of 'damn, with this guy around the respawn rate won't be fast enough to grindd endlessly'. Genesis sparsely does so and even then it's very small teams of very big players.