Post 2009 Balance Direction

[Arilou]

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.

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.

[Jacksparow]

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.

[Dracco]

I thought it was weird when I talked to 4 current (2011) mages and found that they did not use mana shield.

[Jacksparow]

if I remember right. Mana shield was made to last a shorter amount of time, and require multiple stats instead of just 7 spirit.

[Morwen]

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.

[Iro]

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.

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?

[Crier]

Originally Posted by Arilou

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)

[Frosten]

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

[Arilou]

Originally Posted by Frosten

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Exile]

Originally Posted by Frosten

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.

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.

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

[Arilou]

Originally Posted by 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.

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Crier

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.

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?

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.

Originally Posted by Exile

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.

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.

[Crier]

Originally Posted by Arilou

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.

[Arilou]

Hey, just briefly; I don't know if I've made this clear before but sometimes you guys complain about how the changes messed with your ability to create things like a pixie caveman or whatever difficult combo that you could think up. I appreciate that some of you didn't like that change because you were attached to specific accounts that you had spent time training and you liked the idea those particular combo types.

However, the general sentiment behind it, which was to engage in the challenge of leveling a difficult character, is something that I wanted to exist within the unlockable race idea. That's the entire basis of my concept of creating tier 1 races that were a step below all standard races. It's essentially a hardcore game mode.