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  #1  
Old 07-20-2015, 05:56 PM
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Default Post 2009 Balance Direction

If you want to ask questions about things that were done or where we intended to go feel free. For right now, I made this thread to respond to the following chatbox comment since the character limit is too restrictive there to provide a proper response.

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Blackbeard: I enjoyed the fast paced aspect of self healing. I never got to toy around with the balance changes since Japan is quite far from the servers and lag was a major issue for me.
With things the way they were you, as a meleer, would generally walk up to a monster, spam your heal alias, and just stand there until it was dead. The aim was to make them game more interactive and hands on for all classes. Basically, I wanted the game to be a fast paced action adventure that required your active involvement every step of the way. If your idea of fun is going through the motions while farming experience then you would have been displeased. If, on the other idea, you actually wanted to engage in battles that could challenge you, you would have been happy with the direction Wyvern was headed in.

Firstly, that meant you couldn't attack everything. Some monsters would be mage/archer/other meleer type oriented so you were going to have to avoid, run past, distract, (with summons), employ things like rods, wands, and hurling, or group with friends to defeat certain monsters.

Secondly, that means that sometimes you'd have to run. Healing, at its peak, worked within 2 seconds. That was meant to be achievable for a dedicated healer class, not for a meleer who dabbles so, if you were on your own, you were going to have to either deal with longer wait times or utilize things like potions. This might mean your heal kicked in as you were running (only your own combat would stop the spell from working; if you were only taking damage, say from a firespray spell, you were fine) or it might mean you'd have to go hide somewhere and stew as beads of sweat ran down your face as your foe got closer and closer.

Thirdly, you may have had to use additional aspects of the game that you previously ignored like lifesaving amulets, recall, etc.

Fourthly, you were taking less damage in the first place since things like ac were fixed, so healing wasn't as important.

On top of all that, more things were on their way to help in the previous established categories. We were going to add more helpful items (we had already done so with things like healing/mana stones, but more were on their way - for example, phoenix amulets might have been restored to their original state where they teleported you away from battle upon death) and you were going to take less damage as we fixed enchant (remember, enchant doesn't just add protection against hit damage, but also elemental attacks so you would have even been less susceptible to death ray once we got that taken care of) and as we instituted additional features.

One of the big things on my list were abilities, which would have given meleers the capability to better mimic the fast paced button mashing style of gameplay that their mage friends engaged in. So I wanted you to have things like an ability which temporarily increases defense, does additional damage, etc. Since I wanted this to serve as a way to further make the game less about standing next to a monster waiting for it to die, that would have involved things like a Link style sword dash into a monster or a shield crouch that protects you from damage but prevents you from attacking (and possibly slows or immobilizes you).

We were also going to do more work on monster/area balance so, as I've said a million times now, those RD floors filled with Reapers were only temporary. Random lists are set up so that there is one .list file for every level between 1 and 20 and one .list file for high level boss monsters. Reapers were put in the level 20 list by Legolas, presumably because they were not bigger than 2x2 and therefore did not get trapped when spawning in random dungeons. However, their difficulty, particularly after we tweaked death ray, warranted them being in that boss list alongside Riagors, Demon Lords, and Mariliths.

The reason we were holding off on putting them there was because they were the only things stopping you guys from farming random dungeons. You would get to a certain point where it would become too heavily populated with Reapers and therefore had to leave. Without that, we would have had to put a level cap back on random dungeons because we couldn't leave them as endless experience farms while we worked our way up to tackling the random dungeon overhaul. It's a massive undertaking, so it was one of the last things on our lists and we hadn't sat down to work it all out. However, Reapers absolutely would have been on that boss list and instead of having bosses randomly spawn within the existing dungeon layout (where they can get trapped) I wanted there to be an opportunity for a boss floor every so many levels. So, for example, at level 100, instead of the traditional floor with hallways between rooms, you'd perhaps end up in a good sized room with plenty of space to move around and a Demon Lord that you had to beat to progress.

Those who had adapted to the changes and had been actively playing the game into 2011 were doing quite well with where we were at with balance. There were still some things that people were legitimately right to complain about, but we were working on it. Some people were confused as to why the Reaper random dungeon situation was the way it was or why they couldn't get better protection against death with current items. As I always try to explain whenever this comes up it's because we had a lot to balance and so we couldn't always do things in the order that best works for players. We got death ray where we wanted it... considering how we knew it would work in the game once we also got through enchanting, the random dungeon redo, and once we made the game more group friendly. Until we got through those things players were going to have more problems with it than we ultimately intended them to have.

And, btw, please remember that when we first attempted to fix death ray a coding error was made that took awhile to track down. As a result, there was a period of time where death ray was exceptionally brutal, which may be the time some of you are remembering when you think back on what death ray was like.
  #2  
Old 07-20-2015, 07:04 PM
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I always enjoyed RDing. was nice knowing I could train without interference. The remake overhaul was rough at first having to spend money to retrain skills and going from the face first and can't stop, won't stop mindset. I'm sure with the modification to AP and time to adjust it wasn't too bad in the later form. But I was never with a connection capable or close enough to the servers in later years to be able to play comfortable. At this point however I'd be happy to play any form of Wyvern.
  #3  
Old 07-20-2015, 07:29 PM
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I thought it was weird when I talked to 4 current (2011) mages and found that they did not use mana shield.
  #4  
Old 07-20-2015, 08:02 PM
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if I remember right. Mana shield was made to last a shorter amount of time, and require multiple stats instead of just 7 spirit.
  #5  
Old 07-20-2015, 08:31 PM
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Mana shield was reworked so that Mind increased duration while Spirit affected effectiveness. I personally used a combination of 2 mind and 3 or 4 Spirit on my mana shield with Helen. It didn't last too long, and a portion of some hits got through, but it was good enough to slap on in a pinch to help mitigate damage.
  #6  
Old 07-21-2015, 01:38 AM
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Iro was an elf axeman who used mana shield to mitigate damage with his large mana pool. The build was surprisingly effective (I had done well enough to obtain an amethyst axe), and I thought I was prepared for the inevitable nerf to spam healing. My memory is hazy, but a change was made to the Axeman's guild that crippled my mana shield casting (I think it was a blanket nerf to all magical elements, but I can't seem to find anything on the archived site's news section about it). That, and chugging potions during combat was made ineffective. At the time I was very upset about my character being made useless.

I feel like the changes were good for the game overall, but it was disappointing to see creative/interesting builds take a hit. Mana shield felt like a workaround for "squishier" races to be viable in melee-oriented builds without having to completely break bank skillpoint-wise. You could argue that something like a pixie paladin is highly unconventional from a roleplay perspective and building one should reflect that by being inefficient, but I feel that some allowances ought to be made in order to encourage build diversity. "Weird" builds were already fairly uncommon pre-nerf, and with the changes I think they'd be too impractical for anyone to play.

I didn't get to play very much after the AC fix, so I don't know much about how effective armor became. Maybe a good set of armor and scrolls/potions of mana shield would have worked for Iro.

How was healing supposed to work in this new combat environment? Some enemies had recoil or did large amounts of damage very quickly, which seemed to necessitate a retreat -> heal -> re-engage pattern. Making repeat hit-and-runs seems like a hindrance to what was an otherwise smooth combat experience. Was AC's damage mitigation enough to prevent players from needing to do this a dozen times to fight off a single beholder? As I said, I didn't get to experience combat much after these changes, so I am genuinely curious as to how this affected combat against bigger, badder enemies.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arilou
...This might mean your heal kicked in as you were running (only your own combat would stop the spell from working; if you were only taking damage, say from a firespray spell, you were fine)...
What about auto-retaliating when attacked by an enemy while on the run? Would your healing be canceled in such a situation?

Last edited by Iro : 07-21-2015 at 04:14 AM.
  #7  
Old 07-21-2015, 08:02 AM
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Originally Posted by Arilou View Post
Firstly, that meant you couldn't attack everything. Some monsters would be mage/archer/other meleer type oriented so you were going to have to avoid, run past, distract, (with summons), employ things like rods, wands, and hurling, or group with friends to defeat certain monsters.
Rods were near impossible for a giant to use once all the melee guilds got negative skills in magic.

And the spell slow was so incredibly harsh against non human sized players. Once giants and hydras were slowed down (what I never understood why, longer strides and all that) it became almost impossible for me to kill things if there was a monster will slow anywhere in a map, they would cast slow and then I wouldn't be able to tell if I was lagging out really bad or what was going on. And don't get me started with getting stuck in a pit whilst slowed.

(Is not going to talk about -13 spirit travel or what ever I had accumalated at the end)
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  #8  
Old 07-21-2015, 09:45 AM
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I agree that the game in general was going in the right direction in terms of balance and fun. There were a few growing pains that made it really difficult to be a high-level player in late 2010-early 2011...

1.) Death ray. obviously. Just a cheap spell in general, very demotivating after purchasing 6 pieces of plat + dpro and still getting 1 hit. Would plat have been able to be enchanted after the enchant fixes, making it possible for immunity?

2.) Available training spots for 25+ players. This goes along with the RDing complaint, which was the exclusive spot post 25. What else is there besides RDs? Macabre, Har'Oloth, Tehur, AV? AV starts to fall into a similar issue as RDs in the interim with beholders. The others are quest areas that end up being less rewarding in terms of XP/GP per hour. Perhaps I've just been spoiled by being able to RD to 30 with Glacio before the eventual death ray change that made it too risky to lose 17M with one death.


3.) Scorelists. This was the main thing that used to keep me going, especially when getting Glacio to 30. after the giants got nerfed and RDs were gutted, I simply couldn't compete anymore with the likes of Dioxide, Betty, and Slowlight. Talks with a lot of my friends generally resulted in us being in favor of a stat wipe even before the server shutdown.

And, not regarding balance, 4.) My statue. Arilou. Pls. All i wanted was a Then statue in MMA. :P
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  #9  
Old 07-21-2015, 11:56 AM
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Originally Posted by Frosten View Post
1.) Death ray. obviously. Just a cheap spell in general, very demotivating after purchasing 6 pieces of plat + dpro and still getting 1 hit. Would plat have been able to be enchanted after the enchant fixes, making it possible for immunity?
The idea was that you'd never be able to obtain full immunity. The purpose of death protection items was to decrease your chance of dying if accidentally hit, but if you were a meleer, and you saw a Reaper, you needed to run. We very much wanted there to be monsters that were only beatable by certain classes of players. It's actually a foundational aspect of the game that was not properly developed. Since the early days you had things like greater air elementals and diamond golems, the latter of which actually came with its own controversy because people did not understand this "not everything can be killed by everyone" concept.

Reapers, meanwhile, were meant to be beaten mostly by mages. If you were fighting one from a distance you had time to see death ray coming and, since it's a bolt spell, you should've been able to dodge it easily if you were on top of things. Conversely, if you were not fighting it from a distance, you would not be able to see if coming and your chances of being randomly hit were good, thus making it stupid to fight it in close combat.

Unfortunately, there was a mentality issue where people thought they should be able to kill everything as meleers so they would run up next to Reapers, do their little dance around it, get hit with death ray, die, and then complain that they died. If that situation is familiar to you, you are solely to blame for what happened.

Having said that, I understand that the game was in a state where they were a common occurrence and we still needed to do a lot more in the grouping department. As I mentioned already, Reapers were going to be made into a rare spawning boss monster, so you would have had a much less likely chance to run into them and, thus, they wouldn't have been such an interruption if you didn't have a mage with you.

To avoid accidental run ins the idea was that you could use your lifesaving/phoenix amulet, employ wizard's eye, (I know, they don't work well in dark maps so obviously that was on my list of things to look into improving) have someone in your group who had a tracking ability once that was introduced, (that would be the ability to get information on what monsters were in a map before encountering them) or group with a fodder account (someone who didn't care about losing experience and could therefore act as a scout). We also might have done more with death ray protection. Something I suggested was that if we ever got full armor bonuses going, perhaps platinum armor could come with an X chance of deflecting death ray entirely. In which case it wouldn't even hit you, but it would be sent in a different direction where your teammate might be standing. It was just an idea, not something that we agreed upon, but the point is that we would have been working on creative features that would have helped.
Quote:
2.) Available training spots for 25+ players. This goes along with the RDing complaint, which was the exclusive spot post 25. What else is there besides RDs? Macabre, Har'Oloth, Tehur, AV? AV starts to fall into a similar issue as RDs in the interim with beholders. The others are quest areas that end up being less rewarding in terms of XP/GP per hour.
Absolutely. Our dungeon situation was underdeveloped and we definitely wanted to, well, develop it. The problem was that we didn't have a proper wizard base. Teshuvah and I were supposed to primarily be map makers who worked in a middle management type of role that allowed us to assist the arch wizards, but not eat up so much of our map making time. With Rhialto gone, the work load structure was wonky, so we ended up being stuck with all this other work and we weren't able to find solid replacements for ourselves. That meant less maps from us (and thus less maps overall) while we were working on balance. Nevertheless, I had a three stage plan. We were nearing the end of stage 1. Stage 3 would have saw us focus on new content/features.

However, we took a break for the anniversary. Because it was a long road that had been hard on you guys I wanted to spend some time away from balance and just give you all as much new content as we could. On my end, I made a high level dungeon one of my priorities and so you ended up with the Magetown Graveyard dungeon which was reasonably popular. Multiple people commented that they were pleasantly surprised to find it to be a good place to train and I would regularly see people in there, both because they liked the XP and because they found the puzzle aspect fun.

More of that was in the pipe. If you've read my blog post about the anniversary you should have seen that my plan for the graveyard from the beginning was to make it a 9 dungeon area. You'd be able to train in 8 of them normally or you could have teamed up with people to collect 8 keys and enter the 9th, mega group dungeon. That was a long way off, but I figured I could work on a dungeon here, a dungeon there, maybe find someone willing to fill a dungeon or two for me, and build the place up as time allowed.

Once we got to stage 3, the mandate for mapmakers would have been to focus on dungeons (both single player and group). My time still would have been split on game design work since I would have had to work with Contrare on what coded features we wanted to introduce, but I imagine it would have been less intense. Also, the plan for stage 3 involved trying to build up the playerbase. That's important because more players equals more people wanting to be wizards so we planned to work on efforts that would have helped to repopulate our wizard base as well. The problem is, as always, that this was dependent on being able to convince Rhialto to do something about the server, which we now know wouldn't have happened.

Quote:
3.) Scorelists. This was the main thing that used to keep me going, especially when getting Glacio to 30. after the giants got nerfed and RDs were gutted, I simply couldn't compete anymore with the likes of Dioxide, Betty, and Slowlight. Talks with a lot of my friends generally resulted in us being in favor of a stat wipe even before the server shutdown.
Yup, we were far from oblivious from about this (we had long talks focused just on the state of the score lists due to old players from the wildly unbalanced days and we discussed many different options on how to handle it). Stage 1 was balance, stage 3 was new features, and since the game went down I admitted that stage 2 was a stat wipe for exactly the reason you pointed out. Rhialto gave us the go ahead to do a stat wipe if we thought it necessary and because of all the bugs and unbalances it needed to be done once we got through all the balance work. Obviously, we wanted this to be the last stat wipe we ever had to do, so we were working very hard to get the game as balanced as possible before doing that.

That, by the way, ties into why you got suggested playing hours. Since you all were having difficulty competing with players on the score lists who got there due to unbalances and since we still had more work to do before we could get to a stat wipe, we wanted to give you a way to have a little edge on those who had retired. As I explained at the time, it was not a permanent feature.

It served two purposes. The first was to make it easier to find people to group. We were pushing group play, but it was difficult to group when there weren't enough people around and you guys had been very patient with us so we wanted to help you out in that department while we continued to wait on a server fix and worked our way to a better balanced game. With suggested playing hours you knew when the most people would be on and could come on then and try to get a group going. The second was to let you gain a bit on the old, unbalanced high score listings. Once the stat wipe happened, the score lists would have been archived, so whatever position you gained on it would be immortalized. Thus, this was one opportunity to shake things up a bit.

As the stat wipe approached I also wanted to announce it and just give you a bonus XP week or month to try to cement whatever position you could. Some would have whined us to death and so I don't know if I could have gotten Teshuvah and Contrare to go along with putting up with that. However, I thought it would be worth it on our end. Normally a stat wipe is met with only anger, whereas if we did this we'd have an increase of people, both past and present, playing to cement their positions despite their annoyance and I hoped that increase would carry over and we'd have more people stick around after the stat wipe than we otherwise would have.

Quote:
And, not regarding balance, 4.) My statue. Arilou. Pls. All i wanted was a Then statue in MMA. :P
*chuckles* Sorry, I know I was the one who came up with the idea and promised it to you, but it was out of my hands. Only Contrare could work out the problem to determine who deserved their statues so I was waiting on him as you were waiting on me. It either would have worked out or we would had to do a do over (Contrare led me to believe it would have been the former, but you never know).

Ideally, we would've had another week or so to work on it and we would have rolled it out slowly by inviting people to come help us test it. Shockingly, when you have 50 million things you're trying to rush to get done by a deadline, things don't always work out as planned. I tested that arena so many times, but without someone else concurrently testing it there was just no way I could have discovered that people would end up in the same maps. Ah, fun times.
  #10  
Old 07-22-2015, 09:55 AM
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Originally Posted by Frosten View Post
2.) Available training spots for 25+ players. This goes along with the RDing complaint, which was the exclusive spot post 25. What else is there besides RDs? Macabre, Har'Oloth, Tehur, AV? AV starts to fall into a similar issue as RDs in the interim with beholders. The others are quest areas that end up being less rewarding in terms of XP/GP per hour. Perhaps I've just been spoiled by being able to RD to 30 with Glacio before the eventual death ray change that made it too risky to lose 17M with one death.


3.) Scorelists. This was the main thing that used to keep me going, especially when getting Glacio to 30. after the giants got nerfed and RDs were gutted, I simply couldn't compete anymore with the likes of Dioxide, Betty, and Slowlight. Talks with a lot of my friends generally resulted in us being in favor of a stat wipe even before the server shutdown.
You could still level pretty decently in AV/Tehur/GP. The thing that was disappointing to me was 'higher level' areas like Hades(I think that's what it was called) weren't worth the effort/risk for the amount of XP and GP you would get. I managed to get to level 29 on Exile after all the balance changes training solely in AV/GP; also helped that AV gave such a ridiculous amount of gold to help offset what little retraining I had to do during the balances since my build only had to change to include some mind magic and life magic to cast dispels.

I was definitely in favor a stat wipe before the game went down. It would have been nearly impossible for anyone to catch up to the top 3 players after the balance changes. I did the math at one point to see how many times I would have to clear AV a day to catch up and it was absurd. I think it was something like every day for a year of getting 5M XP and however much gold, this was also with having to have every single QP you could have after the removal of quests like CoA and even the sokoban tower.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Iro
Some enemies had recoil or did large amounts of damage very quickly, which seemed to necessitate a retreat -> heal -> re-engage pattern. Making repeat hit-and-runs seems like a hindrance to what was an otherwise smooth combat experience. Was AC's damage mitigation enough to prevent players from needing to do this a dozen times to fight off a single beholder?
That is essentially what you had to do, I don't feel like at any level in the game you should be able to stand up to a 'boss' monster like a beholder without having to run away to heal or 'regroup'. Obviously running away from something like a beholder wasn't easy because they had very fast move speed, so it was more of a running away or luring it to where you could run past it, unless you were a mage.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arilou
you were going to take less damage as we fixed enchant (remember, enchant doesn't just add protection against hit damage, but also elemental attacks so you would have even been less susceptible to death ray once we got that taken care of) and as we instituted additional features.
All these people complaining about spam healing missed the couple days where enchanting armor basically made you invincible to everything(not death ray), not kidding, you basically took no damage
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Old 07-22-2015, 10:56 AM
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Originally Posted by Iro View Post
How was healing supposed to work in this new combat environment? Some enemies had recoil or did large amounts of damage very quickly, which seemed to necessitate a retreat -> heal -> re-engage pattern. Making repeat hit-and-runs seems like a hindrance to what was an otherwise smooth combat experience. Was AC's damage mitigation enough to prevent players from needing to do this a dozen times to fight off a single beholder? As I said, I didn't get to experience combat much after these changes, so I am genuinely curious as to how this affected combat against bigger, badder enemies.
Recoil exists as an intentional detriment to meleers. The same thing I told Frosten regarding Reapers largely applies here. If you were a meleer and you had problems with recoil monsters, you may have needed to run away or avoid them.

For example: I made the Black Dragon. It’s a mid-level monster which casts time stop and has an acid counter attack. A mid-level player of any class could technically beat it, but it would be a challenge unless you were an archer or a meleer who lacks armor. The same concept applied to high level monsters and would have increasingly applied to them as we made more monsters that were vulnerable to particular classes. If you saw a beholder while alone and you knew you could only beat it with a lot of effort, you should have tried to get around it, ran, or did as you describe if you really wanted to challenge yourself. Just keep in mind that if you felt forced into the latter option, that’s on you. Again, there’s this mentality that everything in a meleer's path needed to be killable and that unfortunately prevented people from understanding the solution is avoidance or assistance. Like Exile said, it's a boss monster for mages, so you can't expect to just run through it.

Does that mean every dungeon everywhere needs to be setup like this? No. If you had a problem finding appropriate places to solo at your class and that’s why you felt the need to deal with the random dungeon situation, I understand. My goal was to have group dungeons that would throw a lot of different monster types at you so that it was necessary for mages to step in here and axeman to step in there and so on. However, it was also to have dungeons aimed at a particular class or group of classes. So absolutely there should be a dungeon that those who were archers, for example, would do great in, but other classes wouldn’t. We just weren’t fully there yet and random dungeons, by default, take on that group dungeon setup since they are populated by random lists of every general monster in the game. When Raeden was talking about being the one to redo random dungeons way back around 2004 he wanted wizards to be able to set the monster selection based on thematic considerations. I don’t think there were enough monsters to make that work but, when we worked on the random dungeon redo, creating class based solo dungeons was perhaps something we could have looked into.

So, basically, the problem you bring up was a result of the game being at a transitional point in our efforts to make group play more important. The goal was not just to differentiate between group and solo dungeons, but to differentiate between group and solo skills. Instead of you being able to fully resist, heal, navigate, etc., all on your own, we wanted there to be abilities that only another player could bring to the table. The ultimate goal was that, yes, you could solo, but you would get generally better experience or gold with a group both because those dungeons would have better experience or gold and because the combination of skills would speed you up and decrease your chance of dying.

The problem is, again, that we didn’t have a lot of time to work on new content and we were understaffed. Fully completing the group system that we were building toward meant making a whole mess of new dungeons, which meant that we needed time to work on maps and we needed more game art. Wyvern isn’t the type of game where we could go; “Okay, I’m going to make a sk-smash based dungeon now. Here is a list of all the monsters that I think would make perfect sense to be weak to sk-smash and strong against other forms attacks. Go make them and get back to me within two weeks if you want to get paid.”

Instead we got art whenever someone felt like making something and the specific something that we got was often also what they felt like making. Thus, if we were given something that looked like it would be good to aim toward a particular class of player, we would design it that way and throw it up on the server. The hope was that over time we’d build up enough of those kinds of monsters to be able to make a complete dungeon with them and once we built up our wizard base again requesting art would be easier.

Quote:
What about auto-retaliating when attacked by an enemy while on the run? Would your healing be canceled in such a situation?
Auto-retaliation cancels your healing, yes, but auto-retaliation only works when you’re right next to a monster. Thus, your attack generally wouldn’t be canceled if you’re running away (and there aren’t other monsters blocking your path). If the monster is faster than you (which most aren’t) or if you get siren songed, then that’s a different story.

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Originally Posted by Crier View Post
Rods were near impossible for a giant to use once all the melee guilds got negative skills in magic.
Well you are giant. You tend to be harder to take down (unless you get swarmed) so you lose some access to protective capabilities that others have.

Quote:
And the spell slow was so incredibly harsh against non human sized players. Once giants and hydras were slowed down (what I never understood why, longer strides and all that) it became almost impossible for me to kill things if there was a monster will slow anywhere in a map, they would cast slow and then I wouldn't be able to tell if I was lagging out really bad or what was going on.
And you couldn’t use free action, why?

Quote:
And don't get me started with getting stuck in a pit whilst slowed.
Agreeing to play test a game in beta can suck sometimes. You and everyone else have spent your entire playing lives thinking that we want you to just lumber around and deal with traps as they come. However, the game was, at its conception, designed to allow a certain class of players to locate and disable traps. Granted, as a giant, that, by itself, doesn’t help you much if you decide to solo. However, once those features worked there could have been things that gave all classes lesser skilled versions of them. We already had a ring of searching and if we ever got a mercenary/pet system working (which is among the more complicated tasks) you could have perhaps hired a little sneaky sneak to run around with you and look for traps.

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Originally Posted by Exile View Post
this was also with having to have every single QP you could have after the removal of quests like CoA and even the sokoban tower.
Fyi - It's possible that we would have done a backfill before the stat wipe. Meaning, we might have deleted those inactive quests from people's XML files.

Quote:
All these people complaining about spam healing missed the couple days where enchanting armor basically made you invincible to everything(not death ray), not kidding, you basically took no damage
heh Yeah, it was basically back to the way it had been. Getting it right was such a problem that we had to shelf it for a bit (it and random dungeons were the two most complicated programming projects left in the balance stage).

---

By the way, to briefly go back to the death ray immunity thing; the idea that players should never be able to gain immunity to anything did not come from us. It was mandate from Rhialto back in the day. Here’s the news post from after he fixed it so that players maxed out at 90% resistance:

Resists and Caps
11-JUN-04

A long-standing bug with caps on resistances like resist fire was fixed recently. It wasn't supposed to have been possible for players to be 100% immune to any magic, but an error in the code allowed it in some cases. Doubtless many of you are noticing the change. Rather than react vocally just because it's changed and you don't like the change, please take an honest look at it, and if you still feel there's a problem, suggest possible solutions with the idea command.


The problem was that although players couldn’t get above 90% resistance to death, a death resist amulet was enough to effectively give them immunity and I promise you that, based on Rhialto’s lengthy discussion about immunity that’s not how he intended the game to be. Unfortunately, us changing things is the first time a bunch of you hear of many of these things, but he discussed his intentions on this matter at length on the private wizard forum back in 2004.
  #12  
Old 07-22-2015, 10:14 PM
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Originally Posted by Arilou View Post

Well you are giant. You tend to be harder to take down (unless you get swarmed) so you lose some access to protective capabilities that others have.

And you couldn’t use free action, why?


By the way, to briefly go back to the death ray immunity thing; the idea that players should never be able to gain immunity to anything did not come from us. It was mandate from Rhialto back in the day. Here’s the news post from after he fixed it so that players maxed out at 90% resistance:
I used the ring and a potion, but just like death ray you can never have immunity, and all the monsters that had slow seemed to like to spam it so it was impossible to dodge it.
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  #13  
Old 07-31-2015, 07:29 PM
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I see. Well if you felt that free action was legitimately useless you should have let us know. That's something we could have looked into. I can't properly speak to this as it's the first time I'm hearing it, but if it is as you say it might have needed to give you a few seconds of immunity or there might have needed to be more methods to resist slow. Or not. Again, I would have had to look into it.

On a different note, does everyone here get that the reason we worked on balance in the order that we did was because the playerbase was already shot? If we had 60-80 players still we would have had to handle things in a whole different matter. The problem is that doing it that way would have been a lot slower and since we were seeing numbers in the mid 20s during peek hours it was the perfect time to get all of this stuff done in as timely a fashion as possible. The numbers were not going to radically change until Rhialto got the server fixed and so the goal was to quickly get through the balance period so we could start putting out new content as fast as possible.

From the start, we told people this would be difficult at times and we appreciated if they stayed around to help us test things, but understood if they wanted to take a break and come back later. At its worst, this led to us having peeks in the low 10s. However, as I've said a million times, we got back into the 40s at the end and there was nothing on our list at that point that would have severely inconvenienced people so that shouldn't have fallen unless more server problems asserted themselves.

Before we started we found that it had gotten so bad that we'd have significant lag spikes when we had 30 something consecutive people playing at once. It's therefore hardly surprising (to us) that player numbers settled in the 20s. The server problem was not something that we could do anything about. We had to wait for Rhialto to get around to looking into it. In the meantime, the best we could do was to look into game functions that put too much strain on the server's already limited capacity. Hence, Contrare made changes to things like ball spells and teleport. With that we were able to make the game playable again with more than 20 something people playing, but we were unlikely to be able to get much higher than we were until the server was fixed.

Unfortunately, people love to exploit dips in peek playing numbers to justify whatever they don't like. This is not something new. For example, people have been trying to change the narrative regarding what happened after the enchant bug was fixed since around 2004. At the time peek hours dipped to around the 80s and between then and 2006 it dipped all the way to the 60s. So opportunists decided to pop in and try to claim that the reason we no longer saw highs at around 100 (although really, they'd exaggerate and claim we used to regularly have highs of 120-150, which wasn't true) was because we fixed the enchant bug. Of course, in reality, the enchant bug was fixed in March of 2003 and it wasn't until the summer of 2003 that Rhialto's work on the server allowed us to get those 100 player highs. There was legitimately a dip after the fix, but it didn't last long.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. People do it with everything. On the forum, Unknown is the king of popping in and trying to claim that things he didn't like from years ago are the the reason for then current playerbase states. Below is one of his many highlights. You can follow the link to see my reply.

Quote:
I think the main mayor failure of the game, was when you desired to take off the “GIVE” and the “PICK UP FROM OTHERS”... I know people was using this to cheat... i did it, having a character with 11 in merchant that was the “seller” of my party... but you know... THATS WHAT MADE THE GAME FUN!!! You where able to help new players, help yourself grow fast and strong, try new stuffs easily. My point is... it used to make the game from my point of view more fun... and yeah some players were able to get HOF in 1 day... so what? They loved the game that way, we used to see over 50 connected most of the time... (KEY WORD... most of the time, i remember lots of time over 100 during this time)
http://www.wyvernrpg.com/forum/showt...?t=2146&page=5

More recently people have been trying to lump our balance changes with the dip that followed the game's return. A lot of you here have heard me say this before, but when the game came back we had an overwhelming number of people playing that shocked even me. However, it made sense. After such a long hiatus there were a lot of people from different time periods who had different levels of engagement with the game who wanted to play for nostalgic purposes. Thus, they did so as much as they could (what I didn't expect was for word to spread that quickly, that widely).

If you've been playing the game for a year you might get down to logging in a few hours a week or skipping some weeks entirely. If, on the other hand, you've been dying to play for 15 months you might be highly motivated to spend all day every day (for a period of days) logged in (or as much time as you can fit into your schedule). However, there's going to be a natural drop off as the excitement wears down and people return to the other games that they've started regularly playing during the hiatus. We could have done a better job of trying to encourage that group to stay around, (by we I mean Rhialto) but a drop off was inevitable.

Compounding that, the server was in a horrendous state. At 100 consecutive players people were putting up with lag so bad that the game would regularly crash. You can put up with that if you're on for nostalgic reasons, but you can't put up with that if you actually want to get back into playing the game. The best Teshuvah and I could do for you guys was to get Rhialto to once again cap the number of people who could login at once (it was at 50 when I came to Wyvern in January of 2003; this time we had him put it at 70). With player numbers in the 60s the server would only occasionally crash, but the lag was still very bad. People waited around for Rhialto to fix it and when he didn't they dropped off.

What about the 2008 spam healing change, you ask? Yes, that never should have happened the way it did. It was one of the last things that I got Rhialto to do before he dropped out entirely on us again. The only way that you guys could play the game without ac and enchant working under normal condition was with spam healing. With the server issues, not having it made the game unplayable with 60 people taxing the server. The numbers were already falling and would have fell further without that change, but between the server woes, the state of spam healing, and losing all semblance that we were going to have an active lead programmer again they fell all the way to the mid-20s.

Had you all been able to continue spam healing (as opposed to giants being able to dominate with full heal) the numbers probably would have stabilized in the 30s or 40s. It would have been laggier, but people would have put up with the lag if they could survive a little better. So, yes, that was a problem, but the problem was not that we wanted to fix it, it was that it was not fixed properly. I had a long chat with Rhialto. I explained the whole situation to him and what I thought needed to be done. I wanted a break between castings then, but Rhialto was hesitant to do that and instead decided put those max levels in place. We discussed how this wouldn't solve all the problems and that we needed to address things like giant healing, ac, and monster stats next.

Rhialto was hesitant to make too many radical changes all at once because, ironically, he didn't want to there to be a significant wave of people complaining/quitting. Hence why full healing, for example, was not addressed at that time. The idea was to do things in stages, so we could gauge the results and players could have time to adjust. We were both agreed on that and everything was fine until I went to try to seek some of those follow ups and I couldn't get Rhialto to do them. If you played during that period and you thought you were frustrated, imagine how frustrated Teshuvah and I felt as we had to deal with your complaints while unsuccessfully attempting to get things out of Rhialto.

Nevertheless, there are people who like to say this demonstrates why spam healing should never be touched when really it only demonstrates how bad it is to not follow through on fixes that are designed to happen in stages. After the game went down this last time there were people who tried to link the changes we made to spam healing in 2009 with what happened in 2008 after popping back in. Some of them had no concept that ac was fixed, that the level limits were taken off, that enchanting was being worked on, and so on. Others know good and well that we made additional changes, but they never bothered to actually get used to them and so they still link the work we were doing and the state of the playerbase with what happened in 2008.
  #14  
Old 08-01-2015, 12:49 AM
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Just a small question, but were there ever plans to introduce new spells? I seem to remember something being mentioned about the possibility of different, unique spells being added (some sort of air spell that jumped around randomly?).
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Old 08-01-2015, 02:08 AM
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Yes, of course. I've mentioned before that we wanted to increase the options available to players that could help them survive in combat. New spells that did not operate under the traditional ball, bolt, spray, etc., formats would have been part of that.

We also needed to increase the diversity of spells available in less popular elements. That doesn't mean that there would suddenly be heavy hitting fireball/blizzard type combat spells for each of them. As Teshuvah has explained in the past, different elements serve different purposes. However, they don't all lend themselves well to specialization, so we needed to give you guys some more useful options.

I additionally wanted to take a look at what spells had been suggested in the past apart from all that and see what we can add to the game during stage 3 (the new content stage). Below is the list of Rhialto's that the spell you mentioned came off of. It does not make up all of his spell ideas (there are others in his todo list and in the private arch wizard doc). They're just the ones he put out there for wizards to potentially complete:

Quote:
Hurricane - An Evocation of Air. Uses the BallSpell code, wc-smash, and requires a new image.
Tornado - An Evocation of Air. Produces a tornado (could use Greater Air Elemental image) that moves about randomly for a while, perhaps controllable by the caster.
Ball Lightning - Evocation of Air. Creates a ball of static electricity that moves around randomly, doing damage to anything it hits.
Frostwind - A powerful Water evocation in a cone shape that does severe frost damage, with a slight chance of freezing the monster solid.
Silence - Prevents a monster from casting spells for a while.
Group Heal - Heals everyone in your group by a certain amount
Group Summon - Summons your group members to you.
Ward - Lets you take damage for another player if you're close enough to them.
Detect Magic spell - Tells you what dungeon fountains do, and shows a little twinkle wherever there's a magic item in your view. Flags any detected objects as "(magic)" in their description, using GameObject.addSuffix(). Puts a property on the object that detects when it becomes identified, and removes the suffix.
Summon Golem - Summons a golem, power dependent on caster's level. Unlike normal summoned monsters, golems act under the caster's control. The caster moves the golem like a Wizard Eye.
Ball lightning and tornado both fit your description and both I definitely wanted to see in the game. Similarly, I love the summon golem concept and wanted to push for that when the opportunity arose.

We already took group heal off that list. I designed the mechanics and Contrare coded it (naturally). I needed to speak with him about switching it from requiring evocation to incantation, but otherwise it was a solid spell in my opinion. Group summon is another one that would have helped as we continued to encourage group play. It would come in handy in a number of scenarios including where support based healing is concerned.

There was some talk with Contrare about the silence spell. I forget how that conversation played out, but my thought right now is that it would have been a good way to give players a balanced version of the time stop spell (obviously that could only ever be monster only - players being able to stop magic everywhere in a map would be problematic to say the least).

The only one that we had no intention of including was hurricane. Both Teshuvah and I agreed that the aim should not be to give every element a ball spell variant and we told players many times that, no, we would not be doing that. It's Rhialto's idea so he could have overridden us if he returned, but I would have made our case if that happened.

What I would have liked to see instead were non-damaging wind spells. So my version of hurricane (I don't know that I'd call it that though) would be a ball spell that released an explosion of air that attempted to push all monsters, players, and objects that it came into contact with. It's basically a scatter spell. It would useful if you needed to split up a collection of monsters (whether because it would make it easier to fight them or whether you wanted to get past them without getting killed) but you couldn't have killed them with that spell alone.

Same applies for a bolt variant. I wanted there to be a wind spell that would allow you to push monsters back, (depending on your skill and their weight and/or strength) but not hurt them. It would have helped you get away or avoid scenarios or simply buy time while you did damage to them with other spells. You would have just had to be careful when using it in a group since you could end up pushing a near death ally into a monster.

---

On a similar note for anyone wondering, yes, there were also plans for new everything, particularly in stage 3. I've said before that stage 2 is the stat wipe stage, but that doesn't mean that when we were done with balance, we were going to do the stat wipe, and then move right into the new content stage. I envisioned it as a transitional stage where we did everything that we need to to in order to make the stat wipe happen and launch stage 3 in a big way.

There are certain mechanics that we needed/wanted to change before everyone was reset, but wouldn't take effect until after. Just to give you an example: I really wanted to do that good/evil quest thing that I talked about in my blog. If you do an evil quest, you get negative quest points, which (high score wise) are equal to positive points (-200 qp = 200 qp for all intents and purposes). I had never seriously discussed that with the other wizards and gotten a; "Yes, let's do that." It exists just in my own personal notes, (and on my blog) but as we sat down to work on stage 2 I would've pushed for it because the time to release that would have been at the same time as the stat wipe. So if Contrare and Teshuvah agreed, we would have needed to work on that then (which means Contrare would have needed to do the actual coding and I needed to make some more evil quests, starting with low level ones).

Other work would have involved new content to save up so it could be released after the stat wipe. As part of that I think it would have gone over particularly well if we had a some new races and maybe even a guild. I'm very much behind that idea of Zifa's that people get an opportunity to be reborn as different races and I have a whole writeup of how I want that to work. So I wanted any new race ideas to be part of that system moving forward. Meaning, no more starting races unless it's something overly simple and generic. With it the idea of you being in end of game play mode at a certain level is turned on its head and by introducing it after the stat wipe we would have people more willing to play right after: "Yes, your character was just reset to level 1, but if you get to level 28 and you do this quest, you get to reborn as a _______. Doesn't that sound exciting? Now come on and try to get there before anyone else."

The example I would always use is a vampire since it's an obvious one, not because it was specifically planned. However, I helped Fenixdown test the version that he was working on with Stonewing and one of the things that was discussed then was how to handle the whole aversion to daylight thing. I think Stonewing ended up going on about Daywalkers because you simply can't have a new player start to die whenever they go outdoors. On the other hand, as an unlockable race it would get a chance to truly shine because you can have the vampire start to die if the player is outdoors. It provides an added challenge for the experienced player and you can start to use things like the darkness spell or a hard to find cloak at later levels to get by this problem (Zifa has a darkness cloak somewhere, so something like that, but it would have to be much less common).

Additionally, the weaknesses don't have to balance out the strengths so that it gathers experience at the same rate as all starting races. Instead, it can be a step above all of them. The reason being is that my addition to the idea is a tier system. All the starting races are tier 2. You can unlock some tier 1 races if you want an added challenge (so like a 2 skill point per level goblin maybe - someone suggested that once). If you want to advance, you need to unlock a tier 3 race and from there a tier 4 and then a tier 5 race. Each are balanced within their respective tiers so Tier 3 races are stronger than tier 2. Thus it incentivizes leveling to 24-30 and allowing yourself to be reborn as a new race. Instead of just doing it for the cool factor or bragging rights you would have been doing it because you can be better and advance faster on the high score lists with your unlocked race. But in doing so you have to give up all your current levels and experience, so it also sets you back a bit versus people who keep leveling the same character.

At least, that's the concept as I envisioned it. The core idea of letting players be reborn as new races was definitely going to happen eventually. My particular spin on it though needed to be pitched. Meaning, although I spoke about the concept previously, we needed to sit down to seriously talk it all over and decide amongst ourselves how the actual final product would come out. During that time Teshuvah/Contrare would have no doubt added/removed things to my writeup and we would have hammered out specifics.
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Old 08-01-2015, 02:06 PM
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The spells listed sound awesome. A wider variety and flavor of spells provided to players would have made things even more fun.

The "achieved races" also sounds like something I've seen elsewhere (in a beneficial way). It gives people something to strive for at the end game. Would the new races have applied to the character that achieved them, or would they have been something that you could make as a new character? If applied to the existing character would their skills be reset along with their level? What were some of the ideas for the advanced races, or were they all a nebulous concept?

Were there any plans for more unique items? By that I mean situational/changed items. Archers had the elemental arrows (which were definitely nice) but would things like a magic sword that does flame or cold damage (independent of crafting materials) have been added? How about thrown weapons that would hit something (or stop after a certain range) and explode in a cloud of fire/poison?

I've also seen mention of "melee abilities" which sounds like it would have been fun. The one such "ability" I can think of that would be used as reference for me was the Berserking skill, which I only ever dabbled with but was definitely a fun use (even if it was a bit impractical). Were there any concrete plans on these abilities or were they more of a concept at the time as well?
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Old 08-01-2015, 04:35 PM
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There are certain mechanics that we needed/wanted to change before everyone was reset, but wouldn't take effect until after. Just to give you an example: I really wanted to do that good/evil quest thing that I talked about in my blog. If you do an evil quest, you get negative quest points, which (high score wise) are equal to positive points (-200 qp = 200 qp for all intents and purposes). I had never seriously discussed that with the other wizards and gotten a; "Yes, let's do that." It exists just in my own personal notes, (and on my blog) but as sat down to work on stage 2 I would've pushed for it because the time to release that would have been at the same time as the stat wipe. So if Contrare and Teshuvah agreed, we would have needed to work on that then (which means Contrare would have needed to do the actual coding and I needed to make some more evil quests, starting with low level ones).
With positive and negative quest points equaling the same on high score lists. would every quest have a HS-QP integer to them, or would you have to stick to either one side or another. I see an issue with this if someone started doing a lot of good quests and got themselves 100qp, but decided later on (or after achieving tier 3 races) that they wanted to go the evil route and quested. That person could end up showing -30 quest points on the high scores when they actually did 230. (positive and negative)


As for the tier system. I really like that idea. Most naga players can agree that leveling up a naga is fun because of the scaling they get based off of "tiered" player shifts. I'd also be more than happy to see the brick wall of 25+ be changed to allow a fresh start with a stronger race. If this was the case I'd want to see most other races have a tier 3 race before vampires were made human only however. Even if if/when everyone is wiped to level 1.

Last edited by Jacksparow : 08-01-2015 at 04:45 PM.
  #18  
Old 08-01-2015, 05:04 PM
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Originally Posted by Morwen View Post
Would the new races have applied to the character that achieved them, or would they have been something that you could make as a new character? If applied to the existing character would their skills be reset along with their level?
It depends. My writeup is entirely suggestive because, again, it hadn't been discussed in detail with the other wizards. However, in it I have a cursed tier. What that means is that to go to tier 3 you are cursed with some sort of affliction like, again I'm just going to use this example because it's easy, vampirism. It's not applicable to all races, but for those that it is applicable for it is acts as a modifier to your base character. You're still reset to level 1 with no experience, but you're now a green elven vampire or a human vampire.

Naturally that type of curse wouldn't work on demon races like Rakshasas or Nagas so they would have their own cursed transformations that led them to tier 3. After that you'd get to decide if you want to live with the curse or try to escape it. To escape it you have to be completely reborn as a new race. So from there you can go to the tier 4 selection of races.

Since not all races are unlockable from all races, you might want to go back and try to start as a different base race instead of starting a whole new character. That's where tier 1 comes into play. As I said it's there for those wanting to challenge themselves, but it's also the path to picking a new starting race. Starting at tier 3 you can also be reborn as a tier 1 race and from there you can work toward being reborn as a tier 2 race of your choice.

Your quests wouldn't be reset and I wanted to work out a way to let people keep unique one of a kind items like one off LQ rewards between resets, so there would be some benefit to doing it this way over just starting a new character. Also, with the exception of tier 2, there would have been a degree of randomness to it. If you were a Naga you might have had only one option to get to tier 3, but if there were multiple options it would be random which one you got. Tier 4, meanwhile, would be complete randomness. Thus, you might not get the race you wanted and so you may choose the reset to tier 1 option. The idea was to stave off end of game mode as much as possible. Hence, the web like nature of the proposal where you're potentially going back and forth instead of just advancing.

Quote:
What were some of the ideas for the advanced races, or were they all a nebulous concept?
Well I do like the vampire and werewolf ideas for the cursed tier, but again I don't know if we would have ended up setting it up like that so there's no telling that you would have gotten them. I also thought Rhialto's troll idea would work well for that tier. Instead of the D&D view of trolls as their own distinct race, we could have made it so that in Wyvern they were people who had been cursed.

I'm not going to list all of my base suggestions, but for tier 5 I had a bit of a crazy idea involving a dragon race. You're born as a hatching and as you level up you grow in size until you're eventually an ancient 3x3 dragon. The problem is that you have no ability to shift to a smaller size so you can either choose to purposely keep yourself from leveling in order to keep the playability aspect of the game or you can become insanely powerful but have limited options as to where you can train. It would come with a natural fly ability where you could force your way up and out of wherever you are and return to the world map. Thus you couldn't be trapped, but you couldn't enter a lot of places.

Wizards would be outlawed from designing dungeons specifically to be dragon friendly, so you'd have to rely on a few spots that just happened to work out for you and use teleport/a friend with summon player to make use of aspects of existing dungeons. For example, you could do the boss circuit where people summon you to help them take down a group boss and since you'd be a valuable asset you could have them make it up to you in some way. And, of course, you could sit around making lunch out of people in the arena.

Again, though, it's just a kooky writeup that I thought would create a fun little twist for players. There are things I know should definitely be in the game and I just need to find someone to program them. That's not one of them.

Quote:
Were there any plans for more unique items? By that I mean situational/changed items. Archers had the elemental arrows (which were definitely nice) but would things like a magic sword that does flame or cold damage (independent of crafting materials) have been added? How about thrown weapons that would hit something (or stop after a certain range) and explode in a cloud of fire/poison?
Back in 2003 I wanted to create a molotov cocktail which you throw and upon impact it explodes. But, you know, it needed coding so that never went anywhere. It was in my notes though so maybe we could have returned to that.

For arrows, I have a whole balancing archers writeup and part of that involves more arrows. One is an exploding arrowing. You wouldn't get archers guild xp from it, but it's an option if you're in a tough spot. A paralysis arrow would also a must. Meanwhile, Rhialto wanted to do an arrow of homing, but never got around to it. That's something we needed to work on. Also, I've been going on forever about a split fire arrow. I came up with the idea back in 2003. Basically, you fire one black arrow and it splits into three and then splits again until it's the size of a spray spell (if the space is available for it to split that far and if it isn't interrupted by hitting anything before it gets to that point). Unlike a spray spell, there's just that one line of arrows (there's no tail).

For melee weapons, what you describe already exists. There's the flaming sword artifact and daggers (among other things) that do cold/fire damage. The cold one is from one of Janica's mini quests. I think the fire one is called the ember dagger, but I can't recall its source. As I recall you can get it from one of Teshuvah's areas.

Additionally, you can temporarily beef up normal weapons with the blade spells (flame blade, frost blade, life blade, static blade). See the spell list for descriptions.

Quote:
I've also seen mention of "melee abilities" which sounds like it would have been fun. The one such "ability" I can think of that would be used as reference for me was the Berserking skill, which I only ever dabbled with but was definitely a fun use (even if it was a bit impractical). Were there any concrete plans on these abilities or were they more of a concept at the time as well?
Abilities would have been for everyone, not just meleers. I tend to focus on what it can do for meleers when I talk about it because it makes the game more interactive for them. However, as an archer one ability might be that your character does a complete 180 and fires 8 arrows in all directions in rapid succession.

Along with my writeup I do have a list of initial proposed abilities. The ones I mentioned already are on it. Again, we weren't at that point yet so Teshuvah, Contrare, and I hadn't sat down to talk it all over. At that point we would have discussed my suggested abilities and tried to come up with new ones. I also told players that they could post their own suggestions and I would add them to my doc if they wanted, but they never did.

That was after the game went down, during one of Rhialto's talks about bringing the game up. I told them I would send all my docs off to him when he got the game up, (they had to be organized first) so if they wanted their ideas to be heard the best way for that to happen would be for me to add them to my notes.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Blackbeard View Post
With positive and negative quest points equaling the same on high score lists. would every quest have a HS-QP integer to them, or would you have to stick to either one side or another. I see an issue with this if someone started doing a lot of good quests and got themselves 100qp, but decided later on (or after achieving tier 3 races) that they wanted to go the evil route and quested. That person could end up showing -30 quest points on the high scores when they actually did 230. (positive and negative)
That is the exact point: If you want to be evil, you have to decide to be evil early on. Otherwise you need to make a new account. Being reborn as a new race expands re-playability on a singular account, but I wanted to expand re-playability across the board. That means I wanted players to continue to make a lot of different accounts and get a lot of use out of them. So when you decide you want to be evil, you have to make a new account and when you do there's this whole new aspect of the game that is opened up to that wasn't on your primary account. It's not just evil quests. You suddenly have access to whole new items with unique aspects, abilities, spells, and areas.
  #19  
Old 08-13-2015, 04:20 PM
Contrare Contrare is offline
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There were so many things on the verge of being release before this last shutdown, it's not even funny. We were driving hard to get things balanced and give players enough functionality that they could survive a stat wipe. After that, I think all the existing active wizards had excellent lists of things that were then going to be much easier to handle.

For spells in general, we had only recently gotten through the initial adjustment of all spells. A second round of adjustments was in the works, but we needed players to TEST them. That turned out to be very hard since everyone want to just heal in some form. In most combat type games there is always a balance to strike between "Kill Faster" and "Die Slower". We were trying to get to a point where both of those could be done. People weren't giving us a chance. "Oh waaah, they changed <insert favored invincibility bug> and totally ruined the game."

I looked for my working list, but didn't find it. But I do remember it had some things on it that were about a week away from going live. Plus a whole bunch of things that would have opened a lot of possibilities for the content wizards. Frustrating, to say the least.
  #20  
Old 11-09-2015, 12:08 AM
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Morgus Morgus is offline
 

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This was a really interesting read. I had no idea how many additions and balance tweaks were on deck. Alas, it's been so long and I've forgotten some of the finer details of spells and healing guild bonuses/penalties and whatnot. What I do remember is how crippling the heal nerf was to my Naga Monk. I was never quite content with the notion of shifting from Hydra to Cobra or Frog and scampering away to naturally heal. It was never because I felt unsafe while I was healing in Frog form. I think it was more because of how long it took to re-equip upon shifting back into Hydra. IIRC the lengthy wait time for re-equipping 5 amulets and hats was intentional, to simulate how long it should realistically take to do so. If not, that was just me experiencing lag as usual (my computers never had great specs and still don't to this day).

Either way, it's really cool to read about these things that never saw the light of day.
 


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