Well Splork got to finally see first hand the group chaos failure tonight and he said it was better on reboot, thank you Rick.
Cloud [Wa:0.29 629hp 52ma 259mv] (-6 ac, -5 when he lost holy shield)
Cloud was on the front line and was lit and was taking as much damage as the tank was. He couldn’t sanc self, so with the lite, and all the heals, he was draining tons of mana. We all came up with an idea that people could protect 1 person (until person died, quit, or protector changed his protect) Protector took 40% damage, protectee took 60%. You could protect only if on front line and could protect someone else on the front line, or in the back. Sort of like a buddy buddy system fighting shoulder to shoulder. (By the way, he was the only other warrior other than the tank for quite some time.)
Casters in back row have been getting bashed so badly, we were hoping bashes could help some of this. For example, earlier thief stabbed, I webbed the mob and instantly started getting bashed by the mob. One round went by, and I typed group to see the group. You’d think after one round you could see the group, but no. Two rounds went by.. ok, still being bashed and in lag. Three rounds went by, someone died, then the group list came up. I didn’t even have a chance to see if someone needed healed.
I can’t heal tank, check group to see who to heal that’s low, and get bashed over and over. I got so frustrated, I just said “who wants group” to which no one stepped up and group ended. So do the math and figure up what needs fixed. I have fun grouping when groups rock, but when you’re lagged beyond belief because you’re in the back row and getting bashed, and 1 person on the front line is getting 90% of what tank doesn’t get hit with, screw it. I don’t want to lead.
I just logged on:
These are the groups:
Joesmoe is leading ‘The Boisterous Fellowship’ on Thordfalan:
(Wa:1.33) Joesmoe
(Th:2.30) Hounds
Rallaster is leading ‘The Dangerous Crew’ on Valkyre:
(Ne:0.01) Rallaster
(Immortal) Chobbs
Ta is leading ‘Ta’s Fearless Fellowship’ on Niebelung:
(Ma:2.33) Ta
(Wa:1.35) Badden
(Wa:1.35) Rogue
Filariel is leading ‘The Fearsome Hunters’ on Thordfalan:
(Ma:2.32) Filariel
(Th:2.33) Jintana
I would strongly recommend for a quick fix get rid of front and back lines and use old group style, only make protects all automatic like s3, except protects are automatic.. Things seemed to work pretty good back then unless somone lost link and fled when hit, or didn’t all up. I think it would solve a lot. Everyone on one line, it just doesn’t work with a mud so small atm.
So, get rid of front/back lines. Make protecting automatic.
-Toxis
I think your entirely forgetting that protects were not automatic and it could take up to half an hour to simply setup a group before. Now take into account half the mud is newbies and my guess is starting a group and keeping it going would be even worse. The first 3 months of this sloth clearly showed how much easier grouping and exp is when its done correctly.
We are not removing front and back lines.
As for finally seeing group collapsing, Ive seen it from the beginning. I fixed it for small groups quite awhile ago and the change is in for larger groups.
As for one person getting hit 90% of the non tank hits, it should of been obvious months ago the mobs choose the weakest players. When this happens over and over with the same player and you know that player is being targeted, might be in everyone’s best interest and try to replace him with somebody else…
I hear this complaint every time a group starts and doesn’t have enough front non casters to fill out a front line. The new change should help solve some of that. Its not going to remove it entirely nor should it.
I miss the days when I could log in here and constantly throw temper tantrums:)
Enjoy,
Splork
“I can’t heal tank, check group to see who to heal that’s low, and get bashed over and over.”
No one person should be able to do everything, nor should they have to. That’s why it’s a group mud. Mobs can only bash one person, so the other folks have to pick up the slack. Learn which mobs bash, and assign a 2.healer just in case, or have the little healers stay on their toes. Get a dsancer to save your precious heal mana.
Or we can whine about how the system is unfair. That random generator took my other characters, now it’s back for me!
“… and 1 person on the front line is getting 90% of what tank doesn’t get hit with…”
That sounds a lot like 2.tank. Oops, I mean front/back line is unfair.
Nice group list. Is it possible folks are doing other things than just BH exp?
As for one person getting hit 90% of the non tank hits, it should of been obvious months ago the mobs choose the weakest players. When this happens over and over with the same player [/quote:34nuqvkr]
I like the front row back row thing, but have been on the receiving end of the getting 90% of the non point hits thing, what I find frustrating is losing 90%+ of my hp in first round of combat (through sanc) manning back to heal up next time I look the leader has moved me forward again, next fight repeat and despite tells and grouptells it keeps going on. I’ve left the last 2 groups I joined precisely for this reason.
(I think as a caster prime in the front row the code may be skewed towards seeing me as an easy target)
I don’t group often, but when I do I like to hope the leader dosen’t play fast and loose with risking people dying.
(Name of group leader withheld because I know that other than the above they lead good groups that give all members a good yield of xp).
Ok, think about this… a year down the road we have a great group going, tough warriors in the front who are badass, we have a few clerics and mages in the back… and a thief who gets hit a LOT because he has a couple ac and a few hp less than the other tanks in the front. Yeah… better put the thief in the back row and have a tank lead with curse.
There’s a difference between taking 400 damage in 3 rounds than 1000 in 3 rounds (not lit). I think you might want to go back and rethink the targetting system and hack it out of the code.
Thankya,
Tox
How does a mob know which player is weakest. This is a bit absurd. First of all many monsters are not smart and just randomly hit stuff. Secondly even players don’t have a skill that tells them which mobs are tougher when your already in combat. Sure you can consider something but we all know that this tells you little if anything.
I just don’t see how monsters can be smart enough and knowledgeable enough to attack the weakest front line member. I have played sloth for 15 years and I still don’t know all the mobs or know which is weakest if a group of them attacked me. The ones that I do know are from sheer experience as a leader and not “just because”.
Not all mobs are like this, the smarter mobs act smarter than they did in 3 and we( admin ) like it this way, and we would rather it doesn’t change.
Kj’s calculations take tons of things into account such as level of the player, prime class, hps, armorclass, etc.
We hear all the time from players that sometimes we try to bring too much reality into the game and we need to back off that this is a fantasy game.
Well I will use the same argument against your’s medios. This is a fantasy game and some mobs are simply smarter than others. This hasn’t been a major issue and it isn’t now, it simply makes the game a little more exciting and yeah, probably more difficult sometimes.
Mobs do things players can not do and players can do things mobs can not do. It has always been this way and there is no way around it.
There are several ways to beat this system but nobody has taken the time to even explore them. People really didn’t even know it was happening until I said so, so this is just silly to me. I could say Ive removed it and nobody would even know because they didn’t even know it existed in the first place!!!
Enjoy,
Splork
The thing that bugs me the most is being bashed for 3 to 5 minutes while I’m in the back row trying to heal. A good tank has 800 to 1000 hp, and getting hit 200 to 400 damage per round, the person is gonna die.
Is this a bug or was this the plan?
And are all mobs bashing now?
-Toxis
There have been no changes to bash or mobs using it, they are the same ones from sloth3 at the same rates as used in S3.
Splork
Mobs also bash tanks before engaging other players, fun stuff!
-Rig
Oh yeah I did add that one sorry:)
Splork
Being bashed for 3 rounds while trying to heal is harsh, especially when normally there aren’t many healers seriously.
I’m trying to follow this, but I have to confess I haven’t been playing enough.
What is the current ratio of front row to back row?
Basically your complaint is that you have a hard time filling out the front row because the mobs attack the weakest link and therefore front liners need to be tanks basically?
I’m sure the balance issues can be worked out. Please stop suggesting drastic revisions of the combat system. There’s no going back as it was a pretty severe code change. Besides that, it was an obvious success from the beginning. The players loved it: not to mention the amount of time KJ and Splork have invested in it.
The difficulty can be tweaked to some reasonable balance I’m sure. It’s good that you are able to raise these issues on behalf of the mortals, but perhaps it’d be better via email so as not to get people so riled up.
edit:
The suggestion of a very limited protect skill sounded interesting tho. Is there any kind of limited protect in the game at the moment? I feel like such a noob these days…
I, much to the dismay of tox, actually like this sense of unpredictability.
I suppose it may carry some weight since I usually rake in well over 30-40 deaths weekly.
-Rig
I do get where Tox is coming from… His suggestions usually revolve around the difficulties in maintaining a large group for an extended period of time, which is an important style of play (helps keep our numbers up).
Personally I always liked the smaller, high risk groups.
One problem tho is that people are already leveling faster than anyone had anticipated, and large xp groups are the biggest contributor to that. It’s just a question of balance.
Ive fixed the ratio aspect awhile ago for small groups to 1 front 2 back and it helped greatly.
I followed that up two days ago changing all groups to a 1:2 ratio which has pretty much solved the group chaosing except if the leader is extremely ignorant and wont move people around. Although to be quite honest, we all know the chaosing was nothing more than added spam and annoyance but at least it has been taken care of.
I also lowered switching awhile back and have followed that up with another lowering two nights ago. I am not sure if this is ingame yet but it most certainly will be by the next crash or reboot.
The secondary protect is something KJ and I had planned from the beginning of this new combat system but figured we would hold off and see how this pans out difficulty wise. I could probably work on it this week and it could cover the secondary target for a round or two. But it will still be up to the leader to notice whats going on and attempt to fix it which I have not seen happen once yet.
Ive made about 15-20 different switches mobs can make and found it impossible basically to code something around scripts from tanks. I added an invisible switch, kick switch, and bash switch which atleast makes the tanks think and be at the keyboard when they occur or death happens. I am not going to change these. Im sorry.
Bashing sucks, rescue lag sucks, they are all mostly identical to S3. It isnt something new we have added.
Large groups and small groups can do extremely well in this new system, much better than in s3. We all know this and have seen it from the beginning. Medium sized groups with alot of newbies or low level players don’t do as well but did they really do so well in s3? I think not.
Enjoy,
Splork
I find when I am leading i try to gmove people and it won’t let me …i know there is a new command for this but since i am used to using gmove can you please put this in and allow it to work for moving people again so i don’t have to tell them to man up or try and remember a new strange command to use… I like to be able to put my group in the order I like and gmove works best for this….
thanks
Deb
Hey Juggleblood, do you check your slothmud email ? I need your help with something.
Bashing sucks, rescue lag sucks, they are all mostly identical to S3. It isnt something new we have added.
[/quote:1nv9itf0]
Also, is it intentional that you can be bashed when you’re in the back row without the mob chaosing the group? It seems to go against the front/back row concept.
Ive spent an hour looking into this tonight Shyla.
It appears that gmove works if you want to move people around that are in the same rows. If they are not in the same row it works randomly(bugged).
This one is going to take awhile to fix, Im sorry.
For now, I would suggest using man
Splork
thankyou I just wanted to make sure it was something you knew about…if this is going to take time to figure out and fix that is fine at least it is known about and being worked on i can be patient if i am forced to …thanks for the quick reply to it
:)
one other question while you are responding to posts..when you say i can man flight rowname…is that just man flight up and man flight down or can you have multiple rows like row one row two row three etc?? so man flight rowone?
[quote:pxy5uc4p]I do get where Tox is coming from… His suggestions usually revolve around the difficulties in maintaining a large group for an extended period of time, which is an important style of play ([b:pxy5uc4p]helps keep our numbers up[/b:pxy5uc4p]).
Personally I always liked the smaller, high risk groups. [/quote:pxy5uc4p]
Numbers aren’t everything.
I’m with you though Juggs, the smaller, high risk groups are usually the best places to learn more about the intricacies of sloth. And they tend to be a lot more fun.
I’m concerned that if folks just run bh exp all the time, what will they do if there is no bh exp? Folks flock to bh exp since it’s easy, but unless you teach them stuff outside it, that’ll be the only time they show up. You don’t really learn much just sitting there spamming blast spells and let the leader check your mana for you, raise you, and complain about bash for you. Heck, I haven’t seen any bh groups blind anything in a while, save for a few old schoolish folks.
[quote:pxy5uc4p]Also, is it intentional that you can be bashed when you’re in the back row without the mob chaosing the group? It seems to go against the front/back row concept.[/quote:pxy5uc4p]
Probably functions on the same concept that allows you to bash the mobs from the back row. Not like anyone advertised sloth to make sense or anything.
[quote:pxy5uc4p]The suggestion of a very limited protect skill sounded interesting tho.[/quote:pxy5uc4p]
Just curious, but does oath of protection still work? Or was it rendered defunct?
[quote:3qn27arm] Heck, I haven’t seen any bh groups blind anything in a while, save for a few old schoolish folks.
[/quote:3qn27arm][/quote:3qn27arm]
Thats only because it now takes about 20 rounds of trying to blind a high level mob, and when you do blind - it makes no friggin difference whatsoever.
Dont forget its not the same old sloth anymore, things changed.
“This is a group mud” «< sort of really annoys me because I don’t enjoy grouping, but that said it is kinda true at higher levels.
“This is a group mud” «< yet there are only 2 players who lead groups and one of them is quite frankly hopeless at it and both only lead the same bh xp runs, except when you say this lots of players come out of the woodwork and cite examples of groups they led days / weeks / months ago.
“This is a group mud” «< I’d love this to be true rather than just the optimistic desire of the admin, if it were true there should always be a choice of groups to join at all times.
I know there are niggling problems with getting tanks for groups etc. but lets face these could be overcome if players had incentive, but the biggest bar to this this being a true group mud is the lack of leaders. Rather than leaders being arm twisted into leading and getting flack for not doing it well enough we should have players competing for the chance to lead. Make the lead bonuses signigficant enough and it would happen.
[b:djzie0nl]Give group leaders say a bonus of 25% of the xp that every group member receives and players would queue up for their turn to lead and all players would be romanced into joining groups by the leaders[/b:djzie0nl]
Maybe this is over the top, but I would rather have 3 competing bugging me to join their groups when I logged in every time than only seeing a group run once a day normally just before 1am local time.
That all said even with such a bonus I probably still wouldn’t lead anyway …
T
[quote:2piol6uh]
[quote:2piol6uh]Also, is it intentional that you can be bashed when you’re in the back row without the mob chaosing the group? It seems to go against the front/back row concept.[/quote:2piol6uh]
Probably functions on the same concept that allows you to bash the mobs from the back row. Not like anyone advertised sloth to make sense or anything.
[/quote:2piol6uh]
I’d argue player’s -shouldn’t- be able to bash/kick/circle/physical attack du jour from the back row either.
Leaders already seem to get a heap of gold from leading large groups. Then there’s the leader exp, which while not 25% of each, does tend to build up. And of course the first dibs on everything bit.
If these don’t offer proper incentives to lead, I don’t think adding more will help. Folks just need to try new things, die a little here and there, and learn other areas outside of the the same, safe bh exp stuff all the time.
//
Also, a thought occurred to me after Dragoth’s post.
He mentioned that no one blinds because it’s not worth it anymore to blind. I vaguely recall that blinding mobs stopped them from bashing, does this still hold true? I remember that one of the old indicators if blindness dropped on a mob was if they started bashing again, but I haven’t really checked it out now.
If this is true, perhaps this is why bashing is so ‘problematic’ now: mobs aren’t blind nor debuffed, so they bash folks to frustration.
[quote:3t029fry]I’d argue player’s -shouldn’t- be able to bash/kick/circle/physical attack du jour from the back row either.[/quote:3t029fry]
In my opinion, sometimes you have to overlook things like this and go with what you think is best for the game. I really don’t want to remove an option from a player’s arsenal and cause players to have to sit in the back row and do absolutely nothing when they run out of mana. It might be a different situation if we had something fun and viable to replace them but we currently do not.
Splork
Not only that, but it would make those lowbie warriors thieves and monks absolutely useless in big groups.
“This is a group mud” «< sort of really annoys me because I don’t enjoy grouping, but that said it is kinda true at higher levels.
“This is a group mud” «< yet there are only 2 players who lead groups and one of them is quite frankly hopeless at it and both only lead the same bh xp runs, except when you say this lots of players come out of the woodwork and cite examples of groups they led days / weeks / months ago.
“This is a group mud” «< I’d love this to be true rather than just the optimistic desire of the admin, if it were true there should always be a choice of groups to join at all times.
I know there are niggling problems with getting tanks for groups etc. but lets face these could be overcome if players had incentive, but the biggest bar to this this being a true group mud is the lack of leaders. Rather than leaders being arm twisted into leading and getting flack for not doing it well enough we should have players competing for the chance to lead. Make the lead bonuses signigficant enough and it would happen.
[b:3v67rb0u]Give group leaders say a bonus of 25% of the xp that every group member receives and players would queue up for their turn to lead and all players would be romanced into joining groups by the leaders[/b:3v67rb0u]
Maybe this is over the top, but I would rather have 3 competing bugging me to join their groups when I logged in every time than only seeing a group run once a day normally just before 1am local time.
That all said even with such a bonus I probably still wouldn’t lead anyway …
T[/quote:3v67rb0u]
I dunno. You’re right that there’s a paucity of leaders, but I don’t know if it’s from lack of incentive as someone else pointed out. Maybe it’s just the personality types that are still putting hours of play into a text based game who’s very name is synonymous with laziness. It’s a real hassle to lead big groups. You’re a loner type yourself, so I’m sure u can understand. I think if we over-incentivized it, we’d see more of the hardcore power xping ala Surfnazi and ilk.
Ideally grouping would be encouraged by fresh content, quests, etc… Low level imms could do a lot in that regard, but you also have to consider that school just started back up and we generally see reduced interest until the holidays. I wish I had the time to build more. I’ll be fairly busy until winter.
When I log in and see 2 or 3 groups of 2-4 people each, I’m happy. We have a few xp leaders who come and go in waves and when they start to slow down, people take time to assess their char, see what spells they need, run some eq, etc… I don’t think we need to take any drastic measures to assure theres an xp group every night.
just my 2 cents