[Omega]

Originally Posted by Teshuvah

Here is the game balance page, I posted it directly to the forum to make it easier to find.

http://www.wyvernrpg.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2361

... Which ever so happens to be the copy and paste version of the one I read in the cache (since site is down).

It appears I got ahead of myself, I should have clarified what part of the balance you were even talking about before going into whether or not it makes any sense.

Alright, I will give you the benefit of doubt and properly discuss and reinterpret what Rhialto said in the page you have linked me to. From the context, you are telling me that Rhialto mentioned in that page something along the lines of "you should have a chance of dying against everything".

Therefore let us slowly look through the page for anything that matches your description. If I run into that particular line but interpret it in the wrong way, then feel free to point it out for me. And if it happens to not exist in the page then that is that. I am not doubting that you do not know Rhialto's vision of balance after working on Wyvern for all this time, after all I am sure that you had much more conversations with him than most of the people on Wyvern.

However, telling me to read that page again is not giving me an answer. So we will see what went wrong in this conversation.

Let us begin, this may end up being fairly long but ah well.

I will list quotes from that page one by one, taking every single quote that I feel is even slightly relevant to what you have said.

Your rate of progression should be more or less linear - it should NOT be much easier when you're higher level.

There are two ways to interpret this. The first way is that it is talking about the difficulty to level, which is somewhat more natural and makes more sense in a game.

Meanwhile the second way is a bit of a push so that it leads to what you are saying but it can also mean that you should not have much of an easier time killing a goblin/kobold etc in comparison to before no matter what level you are. But even then, there is one problem with this. Your post used Russian roulette as an analogy, as well as the fact that we are currently talking about deaths by luck and not skill.

This quote, if it was referring to the latter part, it would clearly be talking about difficulty to kill and less about dying by pure luck. If you died to a goblin at level 1, you do not die to it because luck said so, it's because of your carelessness that led to the death. But taking what you said in context, you would be saying that we can die at any given moment against every monster in Wyvern just because Rhialto said so.

You can never "fall asleep at the wheel". You should always run the risk of dying if you stop paying attention.

This is reasonable and while it does not always apply to melees at the moment, it is true for mages and archers. If they decide to leave the computer or something along those lines in the middle of a battle, they would be running a risk of dying from a random stray monster or better yet, the monster right in front of them.

However always having a risk of death against everything hardly has anything to do with paying attention assuming you are not a low level. In the case of death ray, for melees, it does not matter what kind of superhuman reflexes you have when the death ray hits you at point blank range.

Therefore I do not think this part of the balance has anything to do with what you have said.

There should always be monsters that you can't kill. If you can kill the most powerful monsters in the game, then the balance is wrong.

Indeed this is a very good point, grouping would be relatively meaningless if a single player could kill everything by him or herself. I do not know how balanced this part is at the moment, because while I believe most people can take on a Demon lord, Riagor and so on alone, telling them to take on all of the LQ bosses alone may be somewhat hard.

However that is besides the point, we can interpret it in the way that death ray is a measure taken so that people cannot kill everything alone. This does not make sense in this case, because mages and archers kill them perfectly fine, it is even recommended for a melee to start hurling or maging those monsters to death.

Not to mention, it is not that melees *cannot* kill the monsters in question, it is that they expose themselves to significant risk and that deters melees from doing their job and fighting them.

For this reason, I exclude this part from having anything to do with what you have said.

You should always have grave difficulty (pun intended) killing certain monsters. If you can kill everything easily, you'll be bored.

This part is more or less a repeat of the previous part, giving every monster death ray does not make them the slightest bit more difficult, it only forces melees to shoulder the additional risk. Basically if we had to compare, giving a giant rat death ray does not make it "hard" to kill. It only makes you have a chance of dying every time you kill one when fighting against it on a melee.

But in terms of actual difficulty, it's as simple as walking up and smashing it once. Not to mention you can also just hurl a rock, shoot an arrow or cast a spell to kill it perfectly safe.

Once again, luck does not equal to difficulty.

You should never be able to enter combat and then walk away from your keyboard. If you fall asleep, the kobolds should gnaw your face off.

Yep this part is true, if people did that then it would be a symbol of how confident they are in not dying. And since you are supposed to have a sense of danger and be on high alert when training, it would not make sense for people to blatantly leave the computer in the middle.

I stated this a bit above but, this already somewhat applies to mages and archers. If you took them and walked up to a monster with decent strength, like a ghast or whatever and then left the computer, you would obviously come back dead.

However it does not always apply to melees because they would usually automatically retaliate to attacks. But yet again, this has absolutely nothing to do with having a chance to die against every monster through luck.

If you die to something like this, it is the result of your actions.

And that ends all of the quotes that I could find related to this subject.

Alright, I have finished my side of the things, perhaps there are some minor areas I overlooked but the most obvious points have been stated here. Now it is your turn to answer and explain.