Blocks for Thought

[Celerity]

5 hours ago, Unknown Criminal said:

... ask the simple questions of how and why. Full loots (used to be common) which meant for every 1-2 badasses there were 10 dudes  wearing mithril or dragon gear, it also meant rares got circulated. Player PK skills weren't as polished, knowledge of the lands was low and the last thing on anyone's mind was becoming famous.

Games are meant to be fun where players of all skill levels should have some chance or opportunity to compete at the any level, NOT just fight at any level. ...

 

3 hours ago, Fireman said:

What's the fix to this issue?

What blocks go into a character's build?

• Class
• Race
• Trains
• Religion
• Alignment/Ethos

On top of builds, we add layers of in game stuff you can achieve to affect your character:

• Wearables - items that do something when worn/inventory (weapons, armor, containers)
• Expendables - consumables, useables, quests, rp points, and trains
• Joinables - cabals, clans, and factions

Class and equipment receive a lot of attention because those are two areas where the player has a lot of control. Class determines most of your tactical options in the form of skills/spells and equipment covers the primary preparation function.

People often are upset with consumables because they are a hybrid between the two -- tactical options that you can prepare (stock) beforehand. They aren't as developed or tested, often have wide balance swings, and also aren't often intended by the designers. Virigoth was very angry when he found out people were using poison to cancel sleep affects. Protection scrolls were hotly debated in the past. People hated having to buy mounts when they first came out. Reliance on sanctuary has been discussed from the very beginning. Healing consumables have been contentious for 10 years and so forth. 

Consumables are a lot like quests. Quests give a permanent gain but can only be done once. Consumables are repeatable but only provide temporary gains. The balance lies in the utility to investment ratio, not in their existence. 

We have a lot of building blocks to play with, so we don't always need to focus on class or equipment balance. We've developed those two and made them very important, but that doesn't mean you should try to solve all problems using those blocks.

If you want to make equipment less important, you can keep the overall same balance by increasing the strength of one or more of the other blocks. There are unlimited ways of doing this. For instance, most competitive games don't have the itemization that we have -- predetermined sets of items are more popular for designers because they are easier to balance.

Games that do have skill-based itemization tend to globally reset often. Think of an arena style shooter -- it is natural that the best players will quickly armor up and obtain the best weapons. They stay alive longer, they time the drops better, and they can overpower players better in general. After a number of frags or time limit, everyone resets and is balanced back out to zero. This is important because although the good players will rise to the top again inevitably, the lesser skilled have a time where they are on equal footing and stand a better chance. @Unknown Brother is asking how to do such a reset periodically.

FL is essentially a shooter that has extreme itemization, is nearly 1vs1 exclusive, has dire loss consequences and has an odd reset function (per player and by inactivity). That makes it very, very elitist. 1vs1 in shooters is always stressful...FL is on a whole different level. Just like you couldn't (and more importantly wouldn't want) to take on a 10,000 hour veteran of a shooter in a high stakes 1vs1 where their skill has allowed them to accumulate dozens or hundreds of hours of base advantage over you. new players do not want to join our environment.

I am not making the case for arena-style rules or predetermined sets of items. I'm trying to point out why things exist as they do.

@Fireman asks how to fix the power gap issue. You can address the power gap at any point, but here are some examples:

Power Accumulation:

• Increase the investment to gain in game layers (harder to get good equipment, join/advance in cabals etc.)
  • This slows down power accumulation. Unfortunately, this makes skill even more important because efficiency has greater rewards.
• Decrease the investment to gain in game layers (easier to get good equipment, etc.)
  • This speeds up power accumulation so that weak players can approach established characters faster. @Erelei recently implemented a bit of this for cabal joining/advancement.

Power Cap:

• Raise the power cap (max end game potential is greater)
  • This allows for quicker, more decisive fights. That means less time, thus fewer class skill/consumable options, situations, less chasing and so forth. This makes your build much more important and effectively lowers the active skill threshold to get a kill. Weak players can more easily compete. (e.g. in a one shot kill game, even great players lose to newbies sometimes). This can really backfire if you combine a slow accumulation and high power cap -- you end up with grind to win scenarios.
• Lower the power cap (max end game potential is lower)
  • This allows for longer, less decisive fights. This can help players because with more time, you have more ability to recover from mistakes and more of a chance to think/react. This raises the skill threshold for a kill, but lowers the skill needed to reach end game. This allows players to compete more evenly for a longer period of time.

Power Attrition:

• Increase the rate of power of attrition (easier to cancel/weaken/lose consumables, equipment, cabal abilities or any other layer achievement)
  • This is a way to balance out high amounts of powers but still allow its existence. Capturing a cabal item does this currently, draining their advanced powers. Many games implement significant side effects to expendables or blanket penalties to equipment use. This can help weaker players by lowering the final power cap and recycling that power faster (e.g. equipment). It makes builds more important, as your layers are constantly being weakened, and those layers take more attention to replenish.
• Decrease the rate of power of attrition (harder to lose layers)
  • Failure or loss has less consequences, giving more of a safety net which weak players will naturally use more often than strong ones. This allows weak players to also better maintain advantages they have achieved.  The downside is that it requires less equality and more oversight to work. Advantages have to be won not through skill, but some other mechanism. If it is skill-based, this will severely demotivate and further disadvantage weak players (life insurance being used by a strong opponent, for instance).

These aren't mutually exclusive. For example, you can both raise and lower the power cap in different ways (increase damage, decrease health). These are some manipulations you can think about and play with. You can manipulate different blocks (let's think about ways to counteract cabal skills or increase the power cap for gnome melees, for example) and also the blocks to each other (synergize particular race and class combinations or whatever). We've only scratched the surface of that.

Alternatively, you may think in general terms (how can I increase the importance of race and lower the importance of equipment). Every block/layer can be expanded, you don't need to work with what we have. I only listed the blocks that go into characters themselves. We have lots of other blocks, such as a weather system, law system, terrain system, and so forth. Those are all things you can use to ultimately affect characters. Nearly all of them only have basic implementation and application -- that doesn't need to be so.

Remember, there are all sorts of blocks/layers that we don't even use. FL has no independent implementation of followers for instance -- they only exist as consumables, class skills, or subsets of other blocks/layers. Same thing with machinery and tools, property, crafting/professions, health, magic, rituals, whatever. Just about anything can be made into a game system.

For instance, we have magic, but only as a subset. I cannot study magic or otherwise observe/use/contain/manipulate it except as an implied effect of what that we currently have. The Vortex does not actually ebb and flow in our world. The moons and planets have no effect on it. There is no general implementation of magic, just the illusion of it.

Look at the different building blocks of the game as I outlined above. Consider the general power cap you want (and I strongly suggest significantly lower than now). Then implement those thoughts through various manipulations to the blocks.

[aaa]

5 hours ago, Celerity said:

 

• Lower the power cap (max end game potential is lower)
  • This allows for longer, less decisive fights. This can help players because with more time, you have more ability to recover from mistakes and more of a chance to think/react. This raises the skill threshold for a kill, but lowers the skill needed to reach end game. This allows players to compete more evenly for a longer period of time. 

 

I always felt the game was balanced around the lower damage values of yesteryear. Even things like skill lag lends themselves to it, if people aren't dirt kicking because two rounds of lag is too much, it means damage output is too high. 

I've always been in favour of cutting damage down for more strategic feeling gameplay. 

[egreir]

Is there a tl;dr version 

[Magick]

6 hours ago, egreir said:

Is there a tl;dr version 

"Blocks."  Namely, the interactions between various aspects of the game.

Copy/paste here for the quicker, full read: https://www.spreeder.com/

Just bump the wpm to 700 and be done in under 2 minutes.

[f0xx]

I love it how Magick takes shitposts like egreir's and responds to them seriously, with his true intent being to help.

I also love it that most of the time he does indeed, somehow, manage to help, no matter how silly the shitpost is.

[Magick]

The spreeder part was my subtle way of responding to potential sarcasm.