Re: [crossfire] Spell rebalancing notes/thoughts
That's not to say all parts of the game should just be combat - getting elected mayor, etc, is reasonable, but that is a bit different than adventuring. I'd like to establish my own city... Or at least build a headquarters for my adventuring band (should I ever get one together). Building a building is already possible with acme (I gather - haven't actually tested), but getting npc's to move over to your city might be nice, too. This, of course, produces a problem: is the number of npc's fixed or should they reproduce? If the number is fixed, moving would mean depleting other places, which may or may not be desirable. If they reproduce, some must also die... again, we may or may not want that. One thing is certain, though: the npc who gives quest related information in Scorn should always live in Scorn and not move elsewhere. (Perhaps if the quest is not at all Scorn-related, this could be relaxed.) The npc could travel around, though, but should definitely be in Scorn almost always (but could go home to sleep at night etc). It may not be bad to have NPCS to help provide clues, like the old mage saying I wouldn't venture into the caves with less than half a dozen potions. I'd say of course they should provide clues. It's just a matter of getting around writing them. All in all, some more clues about various places around the world might be nice - if someone just wrote them! =) I could drop in a few npcs for the few places I know of, but I haven't really looted every single dungeon in the game and I do not know the point or story behind quite a few places I've been to. For example the elven tree houses North-West of Scorn or the archaeological dig East of Scorn, the whaling village (and the antarctic island you can get to from there) etc. I have no idea about the stories behind those. Skud's tower looks unfinished etc. have regen go up even faster - the idea being here that character is presumably in a 'safe' location if they are not taking damage or doing combat, so why not have them get stats back faster. Sounds good, but does it incur much load for the server? The more different things we offload to the server, the sooner we need to start thinking about multithreading it... (if we are to support really massively multiplayer stuff, of the order of tens or hundreds of players). And within crossfire, that could also work - have fewer tougher monsters that are more interspersed with open space. Sounds good, too. Some puzzles would be nice, too. Although I admit puzzles are really difficult to invent in a game like this. -Juha -- --- | Juha Jäykkä, [EMAIL PROTECTED]| | home: http://www.utu.fi/~juolja/ | --- signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
Re: [crossfire] Spell rebalancing notes/thoughts
Somehow, I don't like this definition of fun... But I admit I don't have many ideas of other definitions. I'm open to ideas to make this better. Certainly waiting around for HP/SP/Grace to come back isn't fun, yet at the same time, we can't just ramp up the regen speed, as that effectively makes characters more powerful (if a character gets all their HP back in 2 seconds, it means you just have to avoid damage for that long). What about making other fun activities the player could do while waiting for sp/hp/gr to regenerate? Like, going to drink in a bar and falling in love with someone. Or trying to decipher a coded message. Or getting around trying to be elected to mayor? While potions of heal/power/whatever work, one can't really give them out in infinite supply. What about forcing the player to accumulate some before they go in dungeons? What about focusing on non-combat things too? Enigms and such? Nicolas -- http://nicolas.weeger.org [Petit site d'images, de textes, de code, bref de l'aléatoire !] signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
Re: [crossfire] Spell rebalancing notes/thoughts
Juha Jäykkä wrote: If a fighter has a tactic to defeat a monster and take no damage, that is no problem, as long as he can't do it a lot faster. For example, I'd rather see different classes meaning different tactics and possibly different time... I tend to agree with Nicolas here. It is not a problem if it takes longer to gain a level as an X than as an Y. But that would need to be balanced by a high level X being more powerful than high level Y, otherwise I don't see many people playing X at all. OTOH, perhaps even that is not a problem: in many fantasy worlds, being a powerful wizard takes decades of study, whereas becoming a powerful fighter is much faster. It's also quite logical: a 60-year fighter won't be quite so agile and enduring as a 30-year old, whereas in a wizard, the age is not so much of an issue. But since we do not have character ages in the game, I'm not sure how applicaple this is. A lot of this is balancing act. My own thought is I'd much rather a level 50 fighter be same power as a level 50 priest which is same power as level 50 mage. I think balancing that is going to be easier than a level 50 fighter is same power as level 30 cleric which is equal to level 40 mage. And when comparing power, it means these characters are going into the same dungeons, fighting the same monsters, etc. If the mage is limited to dungeons not as tough, then clear that comparison doesn't hold There are lots of reasons I think have equal level is good. Some of the quick one is HP (which is tied to level) - becomes tough if some characters have 30% fewer HP than others to balance things. In theory, if the characters are going into the same dungeons, the equipment should be comparable, but there are still some things that limit it. I do agree that the classes should be more distinct. I also think this is to some extent also part of a visible reward system - from a first impression, if someone played a class than took 2 hours to gain their first level, and someone else played a class that took 20 minutes, the person who played for two hours would think 'boy, this class really sucks' because probably not directly obvious that they may be more power than that other character, but it is directly obvious it took a lot longer. ___ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
Re: [crossfire] Spell rebalancing notes/thoughts
Nicolas Weeger wrote: What I really care about is not whether hp/sp/whatever goes down (because as mentioned, a clever fighter could perhaps prevent that), but rather total time it takes to gain a level. The real time it takes for a fighter and mage to gain a level should be the same. If it takes the mage 3 times longer, that needs to be fixed. If it does take the same time, and it means the mage is spending 25% of the time gaining back SP, that isn't much a problem, especially if the fighter is spending 25% of his time getting back HP. Somehow, I don't like this definition of fun... But I admit I don't have many ideas of other definitions. I'm open to ideas to make this better. Certainly waiting around for HP/SP/Grace to come back isn't fun, yet at the same time, we can't just ramp up the regen speed, as that effectively makes characters more powerful (if a character gets all their HP back in 2 seconds, it means you just have to avoid damage for that long). While potions of heal/power/whatever work, one can't really give them out in infinite supply. Now my quick thought is that it is less annoying to player for 100 seconds, wait 10 seconds to get HP back, repeat vs player for 1000 seconds and wait 100 seconds. In the first case, maybe it means you do a quick chat with someone (irc channel or in came) or look at your items, etc, and buy the time you do that, you're ready to go. In the second case, seems like a real painful pause. But maybe that is just my play style, where I tend to multitask more. One thought I did have is maybe something like a 'rest' command. In this mode, the character sp/grace/hp regeneration goes way up. But at the same time, player is blind (eyes are closed - resting), so if monsters are about, this is really dangerous. Perhaps put in some sort of time penalty to come out of resting, so a monster may get in a couple good licks. And if you're damaged, you don't get a benefit of resting (so you can't rest if surrounded by wimpy monsters on the basis you get HP back faster than they are doing damage). This could actually add a use to all those chairs and 'normal' beds. You could still issue out of character commands (who, chat, maps) but any in game commands would end the rest cycle (apply, movement, etc). This could perhaps be pretty easily implemented by a basic force object (has blindness set, but also has high sp/hp/grace regen benefit). This basically fixes the problem - when it is boring to regain your hp is when it is safe to do so (in town, in a cleared out dungeon level, etc). This basically reduces that time. If you're actually about fighting creatures, you don't get any benefit. And if you are in a dangerous place, really risky to actually rest. This does sort of make the monks mediation ability pointless however, but maybe the monk can get improved in other ways (rebalancing the monk is probably a project all in itself). And all of this is also basically game mechanics. IIRC, crossfire game time is roughly 10 times faster than real time (in terms of day/night, ett). Don't know about you, but a 50 minute sit in a chair really doesn't do much good (OTOH, I can't eat a chicken leg in 1 second either), so maybe best to not try and think too much about the timings here. ___ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
Re: [crossfire] Spell rebalancing notes/thoughts
I gave that class a couple spells: firebullet - like magic bullet, this fires a bullet that does damage. It does not explode into a fireball. Costs 1 sp to cast I think this is a good move. It is rough that the low level cold/fire/mana spells destroy loot when the new player needs it most. firebolt - basically same as old ones, just lower damage. Costs 2 sp to cast. I figure that for low level spells, when character won't have many mana, they should start at the low end of the sp cost. I also reduced the casting time - before, both had a fairly high time, which basically meant that at best, you could only cast the spell every other or every third tick. Now you can pretty much cast the spell ever ticket But even with that, I found that I was waiting for mana to regen a lot. I suppose this isn't really any worse than fighters waiting for hp to regen. Since by the very nature, these are range spells, the wizard should ideally kill the creatures before they get next to him, and if they get close, fall back, cast again, and so on. Except perhaps that the savvy fighter finds ways to avoid hp going down, and the caster cannot avoid spending mana or grace, so be careful of that comparison, I think. But there are also a couple key points here - one actually needs the space available to fall back. In the newbie tower, once I started making progress, I could basic remain beyond the monsters detect range and hit them with spells (and once the kobolds are dead, gives an outer circle to move in. But the difficult time was initial assault - after opening the doors, kobolds come out eliminating much space to move about. The monster smart movement seems a bit out of whack, but I can't be sure what is going on with that. Maybe it is monster tweaking or map oddities instead. It seems that some maps have all the mobs flooding the entrance, so the level is a ghost town when you get past the front door. Not, I think, what the map maker had in mind. Some mobs too easily detect the player (through walls, non-line of sight, etc.). Others seem normal, which makes me think it might be something other than the smart movement code. The generator limit I put in is quite important - without that, progress would be quite slow - getting through the front doors may have been difficult with those generators always being there. There are a few places where the generator limit breaks the maps, but so far, the limit seems primarily reasonable, even for places like Raffle 1 which still lets you gain an awful lot of XP before all the generators disintegrate. I'll add that fixing the broken maps may be hard to get done. Even for the ones I found, its not always easy to remember to work on the map when you find the breakage, then for me, at least, it seems hard to decide what a reasonable change is to fix it. I'm not necessarily saying to not do adjustments like that, but it probably is good to keep in mind that saying maps can be fixed, and getting them fixed are completely different things. I think that getting them fixed is one of those things that does not excite people, and thus is easily ignored. Another change I made was to give the pyromancer a spell regen bonus - this helps reduce the waiting some more. Rather than that being a force (how I instituted it), doing it as a ring may make more sense - player can upgrade it, but it also means that they don't really get a bonus if they choose a wizard and play it as a fighter (at some point, they'd likely find a ring more suitable for a fighter, and thus loose that sp regen bonus) You talking about a ring granted at character creation? How would this ring be different from any other ring of say magic+, regeneration+, stat+, etc? It should not be taken back by the god that granted it if dropped, IMO. I'm thinking some defensive spell may be in order, so if creatures do get close, they get killed. OTOH, maybe that is part of being a mage - you really don't want to be close to monsters. But many maps don't give much choice - go through the exit, and monsters are behind door 2 spaces away. Sounds good for variety of magic. Sometimes the stat/protection boost spells seem a bit too bland. Another change I'm thinking of is item destruction. The firebullet doesn't destroy items, but the bolt does. I'm thinking that maybe bolts shouldn't destroy items either - as I see it, bolts are maybe a 1' diameter bolt that is 3' or so off the ground as it travels - as such, things on the ground shouldn't be destroyed. Otherwise, especially I think at lower levels, using bolts is a pretty big disadvantage because of all the treasure it destroyes. I am in support of making improvements here. Evocation, for example, is not all that fun being limited to small bullet for several levels just to avoid burning/vaporizing/icing all your loot. Its hard to want to play a pyro, etc., simply because of that difficulty at low
