Defense Nerfed

[Quirk]

One thing I keep hearing is that this is somehow only affecting the characters.  Just to be clear, this is a 'sauce for the goose' situation.  NPCs are equally affected by this, making them get hit more often than they previously would have.  By no means was this something where we specifically targetted PCs with the change.

I was unaware that NPC skills changed significantly over time, however?

The problem I was referring to is that PCs are suffering a double penalty - firstly, they're losing the bonus to defence they had formerly, and secondly, since they've had that bonus for so long, their skills aren't representative of what they would have been had the bug never existed.

Let's take two hypothetical fighters.

Fighter A started this time last year, and has trained for an hour daily since his creation.
Fighter B started today, and will train for an hour daily for the next year.

Fighter A's defence today will be lower than Fighter B's will be in a year's time; over that time period, his defence has failed less. NPCs, however, will have the same offence and defence today as they will in a year's time (unless someone deliberately alters them).

Fighter A therefore is not just worse off than before the bug was fixed, but worse off against NPCs than he would be had the bug never existed.

[Morgenes]

Once again, the actual 'defense' skill did not change.  What did change was how parry and shield use were being applied.  Previously it was possible to parry blows without the parry skill at all.  

The actual defense scores of characters have not changed.  You are getting hit more often because parry and shield use are not the magickal impenetrable barrier they once were.  It is now more of a skill with a chance of success or failure, rather than a 100% sure thing that constantly protects you.

Edited to directly reply to your example:

Fighter A started this time last year, and has trained for an hour daily since his creation.
Fighter B started today, and will train for an hour daily for the next year.

Fighter A's defence today will be lower than Fighter B's will be in a year's time; over that time period, his defence has failed less. NPCs, however, will have the same offence and defence today as they will in a year's time (unless someone deliberately alters them).

Fighter A therefore is not just worse off than before the bug was fixed, but worse off against NPCs than he would be had the bug never existed.

Since defense wasn't actually altered, most of this is moot, however, yes, a year from now Fighter B will have more defense than Fighter A has now, however Fighter A, a year from now, will have been building up equally and be able to smear Fighter B's butt.

We are sorry this has inconvenienced you all, and that this was not properly announced giving you all warning.  However we have no way of evaluating what a proper reimbursement would be, and therefore you guys are just going to have to be more cautious and do more training to get your defense scores up some more.  I will say that the days of 15-20 minute turtle fights are not going to happen again.

[Djarjak]

Fighter A's defence today will be lower than Fighter B's will be in a year's time
...
Fighter A therefore is not just worse off than before the bug was fixed, but worse off against NPCs than he would be had the bug never existed.

This isn't true. If Fighter A continues to use his skills on the same rate that he has up to this point, he will continue to progress and should remain above Fighter B and gain against NPCs in the same regard. You're basing your logic on a false assumption, as Morgenes has stated.

[UnderSeven]

Maybe I shouldn't ask on this thread, but just a curiosity I have for staff.

When the defense was chosen for npcs which do not use parry or shield use skills and therefore were not affected by this fix, was it based off of the way fights went during the time that this bug existed?

My point I'm trying to get at it is, as a player point of view, we were apparently fairly blind to this bug going on, and therefore saw things as more or less how they should be.  Maybe a few of us did think fights lasted too long.  However, if this bug was as big a one as it seems to have been, then it should of been that npcs without the parry and shield use skill would of fallen much quicker than ones with, actually it seems to me they should anyway since they've not got weapons or shields to use or skills to use them with.  Considering a tembo really for instance has nothing to block with, you miss that bastard only because it dodged.  

So my point or question is, if their defense was made based off of how normal npcs acted with an artificially boosted defensive score, would their now base defense not be a little high?  I had really long matches against these npcs before, I had boosted defense stats due to this bug, they did not, therefore when I have working defensive stats (and I am referring to parry and shield) they will still have the same defensive stats which will then appear relatively higher.  

I know that this bug didn't technically affect them, but staff putting in their stats prior to this fix may not of looked purely at numbers considering that the equations used to determine overall aptitude is probably (this is from a blind point of view from someone who can only guess) probably too complex to know that this defense rating is roughly equivalent to this combination of parry, defense and weapon skill, ect.  If the above statement is true, and I don't know that it is, I think it safe to assume staff would of had to more feel out where an npcs power should be and would have to therefore feel it out based on how pcs and npcs around them act and fight.  Therefore indirectly this bug WOULD of affected their stating and defense skills and would make it, while not dramatic, but probably so they would be with this fix, a little higher on defense than maybe they should be.  

So I guess what I'm asking is if this could be the case or if I'm mistaken.  This isn't meant as any accusation to the staff or even a complaint, just a mild curiosity from a player.

[Dresan]

Once again, the actual 'defense' skill did not change.  What did change was how parry and shield use were being applied.  Previously it was possible to parry blows without the parry skill at all.  

The actual defense scores of characters have not changed.  You are getting hit more often because parry and shield use are not the magickal impenetrable barrier they once were.  It is now more of a skill with a chance of success or failure, rather than a 100% sure thing that constantly protects you.

It completely makes sense to me now. This explains why i've been seeing or not seeing certain things since the bug was fixed. Thanks and now knowing the exact nature of the bug and what i was seeing in the sparring ring before i'm -really- happy with the fix.  

Trust me guys it was needed.

Editted to add: This is not to say i might not eventually wish that parry/dodge(defence)/shield_use were more effective but  i used to see few day old none-warrior PCs parry the shit out of my PC, which always seemed odd, to me at least.

[Halaster]

When the defense was chosen for npcs which do not use parry or shield use skills and therefore were not affected by this fix, was it based off of the way fights went during the time that this bug existed?

That's a really good question.  The best answer is "Mostly no, but probably sometimes yes".  The vast majority of time when someome makes an NPC and sets their fighting skills, they base it off templates, and those templates are just raw numbers that if you used them would make sense.  The 'bug' with parry/shield-use wasn't showing up to staff very easily, though we knew something was "off".

For example, I can think of many times where we said "Sheesh, look at that 4-DAY-OLD warrior wiping the desert clean of NPC-X, how the hell is he doing that?", "I dunno", "me either.. oh hey, let's fix this crash bug".. and it'd get dropped.  It's one of those things we kinda knew about, but weren't totally sure, and couldn't explain the behavior we were seeing.

So based on the fact we were seeing situations like that (where someone who shouldn't be able to whack certain npc's was doing it) we can say that: No, most NPC's were underpowered for a long, long time.  We meant for NPC-X to be tougher to kill that he was, yet it wasn't working for some inexplicable reason.

Finally, we found that reason, and now things are as we intended - for the most part.

I'm sure there's probably some NPC's out there who are overpowered because of it, but I'm confident that most are not.  Most are finally behaving as we've always meant it.  Now your 2-day old warrior is likely going to get beat up by that hardened desert gith who's been struggling for survival against rival gith, elves, and so on - just like we meant it.

And I think that's important to understand:  characters who shouldn't have been able to defeat certain people were doing it.  Literally, 5-day old warriors were able to fight as well as what we thought a 40+ day warrior should, on average (assuming your 5-day old warrior was actually out there fighting and gaining skill).

Having said all that, if you find an npc that you think is just way over-powered, you can always email in about it (I'll be glad to take the email at halaster@armageddon.org).  We may not change it at all, but we'll probably at least give it a once-over to make sure it's where we want it to be.

[Quirk]

Fighter A's defence today will be lower than Fighter B's will be in a year's time
...
Fighter A therefore is not just worse off than before the bug was fixed, but worse off against NPCs than he would be had the bug never existed.

This isn't true. If Fighter A continues to use his skills on the same rate that he has up to this point, he will continue to progress and should remain above Fighter B and gain against NPCs in the same regard. You're basing your logic on a false assumption, as Morgenes has stated.

I stated that Fighter A's defensive ability today is lower than Fighter B's will be in a year's time. Morgenes has since confirmed this.

I never stated that Fighter A wouldn't continue to progress. I compared a fighter at a point right now with a fighter in a year's time, not the two of them in a year's time.

I apologise if my phrasing was unclear; would it have been better if I had compared Fighters A and B over a parallel time period in a mud where the bug existed and was fixed, and an otherwise identical mud in which the bug had never existed in the first place?

[Djarjak]

I guess it didn't seem fair to imply that a 4 day old warrior is going to get his butt kicked by a newer warrior in 4 more days of play.

But I gues sit is a valid point to evaluate if the rate of skill progression was impacted.

[spawnloser]

Since we learn from faillure, Quirk, and considering the quantity of fails you will get in a sparring session, I'm sure this did not "seriously" affect skill gain...but affected it to some amount.  Chill, okay?

[najdorf]

i'v played and observed alot of badass warriors and many of you know that after lets say 10-15 days of playing time, you got no more hits and parry skill suddenly stops gettting better.
And i think %99 of the warriors until bug-fix were not able to reach even half of their parry-skill potential. I think after 15 days of playing a warrior, we will understand it. Because the untouchable period of our warriors will end and we will finally start to force our parry potential up %80-%100s.

[Sokotra]

Now your 2-day old warrior is likely going to get beat up by that hardened desert gith who's been struggling for survival against rival gith, elves, and so on - just like we meant it.

This has probably come up before, but my only concern is that some of those 2-day old warriors may have a background of struggling for survival in the wastes their entire life - perhaps in just as brutal ways that those gith are.  I guess this might be getting a little bit off topic, but I have been kinda wondering where the opinion of the staff is on this sort of thing.  I know we don't want people being able to put anything in their background and expecting it to become instant reality in the game, but then again.. isn't this what the approval process is for?

So what it comes down to is the question of having a typical warrior that has been around the block; veteran caravan guide, ranger born in the wastes, assassin/street-thug that has been getting into knife fights ever since he was a child, etc.  This character may have a good background and good IC reasons for being a pretty rough individual that could probably hold his own against, at the least, a single gith.  

Are these going to continue to have to be special app'd (if that is the current process, I'm not sure) in order to be as tough as their background may say they are, or is there going to be some sort of variation of stats depending on your character's age?  Will karma affect this sort of thing?  Maybe only allowing character's with at least 1 karma have their skills affected by their age/background?  Again, this may be getting off-topic and may have been asked/discussed before, so point me in the right direction if I'm just re-hashing old, dead topics.  Thanks.

[daedroug]

to further derail the thread I'm going reply to sokotra:

I don't know about other people but the way that i usually think of characters on this and other muds, is that before the day that you start them most of their life they've been matched just the same as every other humdrum individual in Zalanthas, and the day you started controlling him/her was the day they satrt becoming extraordinary. Just think of must of the characters as the cream of the crop of Zalanthas. Sure some of the cream is better then others but most characters (all those that arn't created specifically to be horrible) are representative of the Zalanthas best and brightest. In this I usually apply the same for the wildlife. Ther may be weaker Gith out there that never come into play becasue they were simply so easy to bat off that they weren't worth mentioning. So in your background you may have toughed it out with all the other VPCs and be pretty tough compared to all of them but once you start playing them they start having contend with the rest of the cream

[spawnloser]

Now your 2-day old warrior is likely going to get beat up by that hardened desert gith who's been struggling for survival against rival gith, elves, and so on - just like we meant it.

This has probably come up before, but my only concern is that some of those 2-day old warriors may have a background of struggling for survival in the wastes their entire life - perhaps in just as brutal ways that those gith are.  I guess this might be getting a little bit off topic, but I have been kinda wondering where the opinion of the staff is on this sort of thing.  I know we don't want people being able to put anything in their background and expecting it to become instant reality in the game, but then again.. isn't this what the approval process is for?

I think you got it there at the end.  If your character won't start out as an experienced character (read: all starting characters) don't have the background say that your character is  so experienced.  That or include a reason why the character is no longer as elite as s/he once used to be.  That or special app an experienced character, but I would expect some limitations, like a good reason you should play an experienced character.

[Halaster]

stuff

If you want any skills better than starting skills, you have to Special App it - and even then it's unlikely to be approved.  The solution to "but what if my background says he's been fighting all his life and should be more skilled" is... don't put that in your background.   Another way to look at it is that that life of fighting has got you to the point where you are when you start the game - it was just enough to get you to "newbie warrior" skills (which isn't as bad as you think).

Maybe your long nomadic life had fighting involved in it, but your enemies were never tough, I dunno.

Anything beyond that, like we said, is Special App material.

[Cyrian20]

stuff

If you want any skills better than starting skills, you have to Special App it - and even then it's unlikely to be approved.  The solution to "but what if my background says he's been fighting all his life and should be more skilled" is... don't put that in your background.   Another way to look at it is that that life of fighting has got you to the point where you are when you start the game - it was just enough to get you to "newbie warrior" skills (which isn't as bad as you think).

Maybe your long nomadic life had fighting involved in it, but your enemies were never tough, I dunno.

Anything beyond that, like we said, is Special App material.

Also if I may add, there is no more reason to add an extensive background anymore with the bio command. You can now write up his life as it happens, so -if- he was a hardened byn sergeant that joined Borsail. Bio add Shit slave becomes a slaver.

[Nao]

And I think that's important to understand:  characters who shouldn't have been able to defeat certain people were doing it.  Literally, 5-day old warriors were able to fight as well as what we thought a 40+ day warrior should, on average (assuming your 5-day old warrior was actually out there fighting and gaining skill).

Does that mean that we'll be gaining at a WAY slower rate now, or were those 5-hour-warriors exceptions due to the bug?

[jmordetsky]

My biggest concern about these changes are:

1) From what I can tell, nearly the entire player base disapproves. This is of course looking at it from my tiny little corner of the world

2) I don't recall ever seeing anythign in code discussion where people seemed unhappy about this particular aspect of the game

3) There are 100 other things that I would imagine the general populace that plays and contributes to armageddon wanted to see.

4) They seemed to have introduced a good deal of oddness, including old rangers being significantly weaker, and mounted combat being useless.

So, my big question is, in light of #2 and #3, Why not post a poll to the players first?

*shrug*

I'm generally unhappy.

[WarriorPoet]

My biggest concern about these changes are:

1) From what I can tell, nearly the entire player base disapproves. This is of course looking at it from my tiny little corner of the world

2) I don't recall ever seeing anythign in code discussion where people seemed unhappy about this particular aspect of the game

3) There are 100 other things that I would imagine the general populace that plays and contributes to armageddon wanted to see.

4) They seemed to have introduced a good deal of oddness, including old rangers being significantly weaker, and mounted combat being useless.

So, my big question is, in light of #2 and #3, Why not post a poll to the players first?

*shrug*

I'm generally unhappy.

That's gospel, for me. Sums up my feelings about the changes perfectly.

-WP

[Dan]

All the more reason for your character to focus on finding a way to defend themselves. Players will actually have to find and kill tregils for a while, rather than going out to hunt gith/duskhorn/scrabs right off the bat because their base agility is high. As I see it, this is being contested much like the drop in D-elf stamina some time ago, only -everyone- has to deal with it now. Deal.

[Halaster]

Does that mean that we'll be gaining at a WAY slower rate now, or were those 5-hour-warriors exceptions due to the bug?

They were exceptions due to the bug.  Their skills were being incorrectly applied, making them much better than what they really should have been.

[Djarjak]

My biggest concern about these changes are:

1) From what I can tell, nearly the entire player base disapproves. This is of course looking at it from my tiny little corner of the world

I can't count the number of times this has happened as a result of a change, even when the playerbase hadn't actually played with something before criticising it.

2) I don't recall ever seeing anythign in code discussion where people seemed unhappy about this particular aspect of the game

It's a bug fix.

3) There are 100 other things that I would imagine the general populace that plays and contributes to armageddon wanted to see.

This is nearly always the case. But, again. This is a bug fix.

4) They seemed to have introduced a good deal of oddness, including old rangers being significantly weaker, and mounted combat being useless.

I'd like more information on this. If you have specifics, I'd like to see them. Feel free to e-mail me - include the character name so I can look at the details.

So, my big question is, in light of #2 and #3, Why not post a poll to the players first?

Because it's not customary to ask for your approval to fix a bug

[Cuusardo]

I have been silent through all this because I am neutral on the whole situation.  However, I do feel the need to say that I hope this will encourage more people to use shields more often and two weapons less often, especially northern PCs, because using a shield should be more common in northern fighting styles.

[Halaster]

2) I don't recall ever seeing anythign in code discussion where people seemed unhappy about this particular aspect of the game

Heheh, of course they wouldn't complain about being able to defeat creatures they shouldn't have, or operating at a skill-level beyond what they really should be.  They didn't even really know there was a problem.

So, my big question is, in light of #2 and #3, Why not post a poll to the players first?

Because we don't poll players to fix a bug.  I agree, if it was a "change" to the way things were supposed to work, it'd be good to get feedback.  But we thought it was a "bug".

[jhunter]

I believe jmordetsky is refering to the changes to the combat system as a whole. There have been only a vocal minority that have really been complaining about it. The majority of the pbase had no problem with the combat system over all.

[najdorf]

After having some experience with my warrior, i realised that this bug-fix was necessary. I dont agree with players who commented it reduces playibility. You hunters will notice you can hunt small animals. But come on! i saw warriors in past hunting dujat worms and salt worms after 4-5 days of playing time? How real was that? Can you kill something that is many times taller and heavier then you? Think about your chances against an elephant, or a tiger. Those animals at ancient times were being hunt by large groups, which should also be the same here.
Again previously, the idea of being able to clean a whole area from beasts (because my warrior could do) was annoying and boring. I am once again glad the code has changed.