Gauging..

[Targun]

Idea I saw on discord.

Remove the health boost that was added post white hit changes?

Just a thought.
T

If that's the case, then that might be the primary reason. Before Carnak left he increased health pool by 20-30%. Question is, whether recent changes take this into account or not. I suppose Ckrik or Zizuph would need to let us know.

For me, the combat feels too slow right now. I'd rather have decreased XP and previous combat pace than current situation. I think we're back to the meta when everyone's a gobbo and you're a tank with any guild. Slap a shield or just enough con and you passively outheal all the damage.

Previous iteration had many flaws, but in my opinion rather than change one OP configuration to a different one, it'd be better to address the root cause of the problem which is the fact that on Genesis in-combat and out-of-combat health regen is the same. It ruins all attempts to balance things out.

[kelrhys]

Previous iteration had many flaws, but in my opinion rather than change one OP configuration to a different one, it'd be better to address the root cause of the problem which is the fact that on Genesis in-combat and out-of-combat health regen is the same. It ruins all attempts to balance things out.

You've just exposed another required component to good organizational decision making: mission and vision.

I don't know what that currently is. But the mission might be something like "Genesis is an entirely free to play immersive fantasy realm where imagination runs wild and actions have consequences." The vision might be "To uphold the unique spirit of Genesis while offering new adventures to captivate the young and young at heart."

With that vision in mind, changing the core health regen system would be as jarring and cause as much thrash as what we have all just went through. While it would likely introduce a stumbling block to botters/scripting, it would create a whole host of new problems that would require solutions. I have seen this done on another mud, which is perfectly balanced...and completely lacks the Genesis spirit. No one really wants to stand around waiting for vitals regeneration. We'd have to do what that mud did - have instaheal potions, food, and healers. Which would then unbalance both healers and casters, etc.

It is likely that individual guilds are now in need of yet more tweaking so they are fun to play. With every global change this is a risk. It also gives opportunity. The only way a configuration is truly OP in my opinion is if it offers an easy button in both pve and pvp for no significant ongoing price.

[zizuph]

If that's the case, then that might be the primary reason. Before Carnak left he increased health pool by 20-30%. Question is, whether recent changes take this into account or not. I suppose Ckrik or Zizuph would need to let us know.

For me, the combat feels too slow right now. I'd rather have decreased XP and previous combat pace than current situation. I think we're back to the meta when everyone's a gobbo and you're a tank with any guild. Slap a shield or just enough con and you passively outheal all the damage.

Previous iteration had many flaws, but in my opinion rather than change one OP configuration to a different one, it'd be better to address the root cause of the problem which is the fact that on Genesis in-combat and out-of-combat health regen is the same. It ruins all attempts to balance things out.

Yes, the health boost was taken into consideration, and the damage reduction would have been higher if not for that.

Before this change, a team of three myths would be killing myth-level NPCs in 5-10 seconds. Which would potentially mean PVP kills at that pace, and a 10 second movement stun would guarantee kills, particularly if there were alpha strikes involved.

This changes provides multiple things. It is a necessity to allow movement impairment to be viable for PVP. It makes teaming more viable, because areas can provide longer. It enables melee layman guilds to get more out of their natural regeneration, which tries to make them more viable again. It reduces the need for evasions and such for the same reason.

Meanwhile guilds are now more copy-paste vanilla with less unique spice, which vastly diminishes the reward of the roleplay core value of creating new characters to live a different lifestyle.

I have heard multiple people say this, about copy-paste vanilla, but it is less clear to me which guilds have had their flavor reduced from the past. It would be helpful if you could elaborate about why you feel this way. Is it because white hits are a bigger portion of the damage now? Or is there some other uniqueness that comes into play?

You've just exposed another required component to good organizational decision making: mission and vision.

There are some that play to grow and try to be as high a they can on the toplist. If you want to compete there, you need to expect to put in thousands of hours of grinding. There is a very steep soft cap already in place, but some people have been working 40+ hour weeks for years to keep climbing that cliff, for relatively small gains. Cassius chose to put in these thousands of hours of work, most of it at the current combat speed, and if you want to catch him, expect it to take years, just like what he put in.

Others hunt as an activity while interacting with their team. Equipment hunting is another popular pastime. PVP, we hope to make more reasonable so players can enjoy conflict. Supporting RP has always been a core goal.

I personally think our mission is to make sure all of these are well supported, both for casual and hard-core players. Some ideas are more viable, and some less. ALL of them are discussed, even if you don't hear it externally. And big changes need a lot of deliberation, as pretty much every solution has tradeoffs we don't like. Win-wins are hard to find, if they exist at all.

I work with Ckrik on balance, and one of my personal goals is to make sure you have a good experience no matter which guild you are in. I have spent much of the year trying to bring quality of life improvements to many guilds. Melee and magic should both be quite viable, though I do wish we had more content (we could use more wizards) to get better spell enhancer coverage.

[Ckrik]

I work with Ckrik on balance, and one of my personal goals is to make sure you have a good experience no matter which guild you are in. I have spent much of the year trying to bring quality of life improvements to many guilds. Melee and magic should both be quite viable, though I do wish we had more content (we could use more wizards) to get better spell enhancer coverage.

To everyone monitoring this thread I know the knee-jerk reaction to any change we make is that wizards are out to ruin your fun. That is clearly not our objective. For every big decision we spend many man hours deliberating, researching code and looking at relevant data even before 1 line of code is written. I can say that every adjustment made is done to address some deficiency that we see in the game.

Many many years ago guilds had wildly different power levels because everything guild related was fully custom code. There would be bugs, oversights, patches to oversights that made guild balance impossible to implement. This is why every guild special and spell now has to go through a centralized code path and every guild was recoded. We only finished this huge project with the recode of the Dragon Order that I took on and Rangers that Zizuph took on in the past year.

Carnak addressed the huge imbalances due to combat aid miscalculations in specials and spells that made PvP a very one sided affair in many situations. In hindsight when we increased the relevance of vanilla hits, we should have simultaneously brought the total damage output into the same envelop that we had before. Hindsight is obviously 20/20 and Carnak's departure from the game delayed the remedy. But we have addressed it now and guilds are more balanced now than ever in the history of the game.

For the past decade and a half healthy PvP intrigue (the presence of which we consider necessary for a good end-game ecosystem) has been sorely missing from the game. It has been especially glaring in the past year because combat pace reduced visiting Lars and Death into a 15 second affair. The large size difference (and still growing) among our players skew the win-rate too far to the larger side. Smaller players need to have a small chance to win or at the very least force a draw in the majority of encounters. The length of the punishment due to death for our largest players has gotten intractably large making them rather deathly afraid of involving themselves into a situation that has even a remote chance of touching death. They have become some of the most risk averse players that I have ever seen. Equally matched sides rarely engage with each other as a result.

The next couple of moves that we are contemplating are all aimed at addressing the above and bringing back some of the end game intrigue that spawned many Genesis legends. We are addressing something that probably should have been fixed years ago. Restoring and adding player interaction points is our main goal and hopefully we will succeed in doing so.

[Cherek]

I was gonna post about what our end goal and current vision is, but Zizuph and Ckrik beat me to it, so I'll just agree. The end goal for me has always been to first try to even things out a bit (races, sizes, guilds, etc) and then try to make Genesis a little more about human interaction and less about the best grind-script. Grinding should, and will always be a big part of Genesis, but for the game to thrive we need to bring back a bit more of the other stuff too. Like _fun_ PVP, more RP, more interaction, basically a game where players WANT to be more awake and active.

I think we'll get there, but we've had some bumpy times for a while now, with lots of big changes and tweaks, and we're not out of the woods yet. I totally understand this is frustrating for players, and that some will abandon us (at least temporarily) due to it, but that's just how it'll have to be. I strongly believe the stuff we do now will in the end be crucial for the game's long term survival, even if it might be feel a bit chaotic right now.

So, a few more major changes are likely coming during 2023. When that's done, we just need to fill up that game with more players and then sit back, relax, and enjoy the game. (And fix all the new issues our changes brought to the surface)

[Targun]

Think you're falling victims to the powerful mistress - Nostalgia. Players who wanted to do anything else than grind were driven away in the past 15+ years. Besides, almost every game will offer much better PvP experience than a text game (which can be notoriously abused and automated).

This all coincides with the period when admin turned completely blind eye to botting (especially in the past 2 years, when it has been more excessive and prevalent than ever before - with tons and tons of proofs of chars being let unsupervised for hours if not days with no action from you whatsoever).

We're not (as community) schoolkids, students, etc. as we used to be. We have wörk, wörk, wörk und kinder, kinder, kinder. This game became a clicker loooong time ago. A clicker that runs in the background when we're at work and we talk about it on discord as a getaway from the mundane lives. We run scripts and for half an hour or maybe an hour in the evening, we socialize. Mostly on the aforementioned Discord, anyway. Hardly anybody has time for other drama.

You're talking about PvP (that has terrible track record on Genesis anyway, in terms of how it was implemented and how unfair it was)... except, almost all PvP abilities are gated in guilds. It would've made half a sense if these abilities were available to choose for players (similar to Cherek's idea of race perks), but they're not.

What do you expect will happen? Will these few people who actually play the game, socialize and RP and have not been botting for the past 15 years suddenly say - hey lets go PvP? Or will we have 4-5 griefers with guild-granted tools that have been botting for years (and were not deleted that) ruin the game for others.

Things will not be like in the 90s, 'cos we're not in the 90s. No one has time for this... I mean, some of us will soon retire, so we can have time again on our hands and teach our grandchildren new ways of wasting time, but before that, I sense hopium in the amounts that are dangerous even in Christmas season.

Sure it's your time, do what you will with it, but in my opinion pursuing PvP on Genesis is the deadest of dead ends... except you're being chased by lava, surfed by Flaming Karens.

[Drazson]

If you don't believe in the game having anything else to do and basically say it's a dead clicker, why did you write that wall?

I'm dead serious and very curious, we do things for a purpose so what's yours? Do you want us to be demoralized? The wizards? Do you want to persuade us that your perception of the game is the only one? Do you simply mourn? Can you not find interest in a now past hobby and attempt to force your projection of what it is or isn't to the rest of us, so it can actually become a not-even-steaming pile of crap for the rest of us as well?

Do tell

[Targun]

Why demoralized? Realistic. There are some things that are achievable and some that are not.

Realizing who your playerbase is important. This game is something we talk about. Something we're melancholic and nostalgic about. Something we care about, in general. However, we play it for about 10-15% of the total time spent and script for the rest of it.

Those who are really big, script for 98% of the time spent.

There are some fundamental flaws in PvP on muds in general (being text based) and Genesis brings its creative accounting caid and PvP abilities gated in guilds to top it off. It's a recipe for failure in any game design, let alone volunteer work.

And this is all on top of the unchecked botting that has been abused for years... These are objective and measurable factors. Nothing demoralizing or Grinchy about it.

[zizuph]

Why demoralized? Realistic. There are some things that are achievable and some that are not.

Realizing who your playerbase is important. This game is something we talk about. Something we're melancholic and nostalgic about. Something we care about, in general. However, we play it for about 10-15% of the total time spent and script for the rest of it.

Those who are really big, script for 98% of the time spent.

There are some fundamental flaws in PvP on muds in general (being text based) and Genesis brings its creative accounting caid and PvP abilities gated in guilds to top it off. It's a recipe for failure in any game design, let alone volunteer work.

And this is all on top of the unchecked botting that has been abused for years... These are objective and measurable factors. Nothing demoralizing or Grinchy about it.

At the end of the day, what you get out of the game is largely a factor of what you put into it.

You brought up botting in both your notes. There are some things you can do. If they are inattentive, they can be hunted. You can join the wizards and look at ways to mitigate it. You can ignore it, and enjoy the game with the people you like. You can provide an environment where people have someone to actively interact with, and give them less reasons to bot. I am personally of the opinion that interactions are the most valuable experiences and I know a number of people who focus on that.

I personally do not look to recreate 1992. We plan for all PVP tools to be reviewed to make sure it is relatively equitable. Block is accessible by everyone. As mentioned, we think about death recovery as well, as was requested in a note in Sparkle. It is a lot of moving pieces.

What was not clear in your note, was what you actually want out of Genesis. You have community and friends that you talk with on Discord, while you script. I personally see that as good thing - Genesis gave you a reason to connect with those people that otherwise would not exist. Some players DO want to engage more in the game, either in a cooperative way, or a adversarial one. I believe you play a monk, which would avoid PVP. That aspect may not interest you, but PVP was not the only thing this change worked to enable. I have heard positive feedback from layman melee guilds. With things living longer, the popular areas can provide for more people.

This is a text game, and that will not change. But it is also a community that finds ways to enjoy it together. If the former disappoints, perhaps in the latter you will find more enjoyment. I talk with people I've known for decades. No new game will provide that to you any time soon.

[Targun]

I was making a point about who our playerbase primarily is. Personally, I enjoy Genesis a lot: as something that runs in the background, but also I really enjoy roleplaying when I have a bit more time on my hands, I enjoy walking around and finding out new things after ~20 years, or just checking on the places I haven't been in for gods know how long... as well as socializing on Discord.

I think Genesis, overall as a project, is marvelous. The amount of effort put into descriptions, areas and lore is just stunning. I said it multiple times, but can repeat it: I have massive appreciation for the wizards who put their time into it (despite some bad apples that we had in the past or me disagreeing - sometimes fervently - about ideas, decisions or implementations).

As far as overall balance goes, I think both Arman and Ckrik along with you made massive improvements. Do I think some of your decisions are wrong? Sure. The original point still stands though.

On PvP
I have very negative opinion about it. I believe re-introducing PvP on Genesis will drive players away because of griefing. And I suspect it will hit those players who genuinely spend the most time actively playing. Genesis having a bad record in this department is one thing, but - as I mentioned earlier - any mud can be automated and scripted to such an extent that in my view cons outweigh pros.

I don't think it's fair or OK to introduce a competitive aspect of PvP when people don't have access to the same abilities.
For a competitive game to be enjoyable (any game) it needs to apply a fair and set of rules to everyone. PvP specific abilities that reside only in certain guilds are a direct violation of this law.

I believe the situation will only be aggravated by the unfair advantage acquired from botting. And by botting, I don't mean someone running an XP-ground script.

If you said, "everyone can choose from the same range of PvP abilities and dmg done and received by and to players is normalized to a e.g. legend size", I could get behind the idea. Current model, not so much.