Dog Pile Solution

[Morrolan]

Max combat vs one target at 8 characters/npcs.

You cannot fight the tall muscular man, he's fighting too many right now!

I think that's the best idea.

I think this is a good idea.

I'd like to add another idea to it: that PCs "guard"ing the target should count in the number. Which would require "you can't guard in loops!" because SOMEONE has to be on the outside and available for smashing.

[Trying to avoid versions of A guards B guards C guards A.]

EDIT to add:

I also think that when a PC is guarding another PC who is present, it should show up to the "look" command (possibly only showing up based on either your own "guard" skill or "watch."

The pug-nosed templar is here.
The militia-hooded soldier is here.
  --He is guarding the pug-nosed templar.

[Barsook]

EDIT to add:

I also think that when a PC is guarding another PC who is present, it should show up to the "look" command (possibly only showing up based on either your own "guard" skill or "watch."

The pug-nosed templar is here.
The militia-hooded soldier is here.
  --He is guarding the pug-nosed templar.

I dig this too, very realistic if the guard is close to the person being guarded.

[hatchets]

"Mostly useless skills" LOL, you are surely doing things wrong.

No I make fair of use of them although I am not blind to believe that 20 attacking 1 person in a group, still allows those skills to be useful but some people prefer tunnel vision I suppose.

I also am not trying to purposefully ignore the fact that guarding exits to kill someone is less effective then simply dog piling the target with 10 pcs even though there really is no physical room around the individual to do such.

Any videos you watch of swordplay, will not have 10 people all swinging at 1 person at one time, the reason they will not have this is because it is not only stupid to attempt (in the best efforts of a direct up and down swing, still consuming 2-3 feet shoulder span in spice, and looking to take up 20-30 feet then being shoulder to shoulder, allowing for nor room between each other) but when done by someone whom knows how to use a weapon consumes much more space, as they are not simply running up to pummel them, they are seeking to give themselves the best offense while keeping a good defense which inolves moving around, which takes up more space. Which if you can do math, which I am assuming you can, makes it physically impossible to have that many pc's attacking.

As well, it is good to note, that these people are also not using shields and the style of shield fighting. Or giant mounts trying to wedge them all together to get clear, multiple strikes at 1 target. The more details you add, instead of purposely seem to ignore, the more space you are requiring.

Go outside, find 10 people, and have them stand around you, and see how well that looks. Now try it with 20. Now put them on horses.

Any videos of swordplay with more then 4-5 people on 1, have them standing farther back, AND the combat sequence has 1 or 2 approach at a time, giving the defender a chance to defend and attack those that come at them while the others WAIT for an opening to jump in.

[catchall]

The pug-nosed templar is here.
The militia-hooded soldier is here.
  --He is guarding the pug-nosed templar.

I dig this too, very realistic if the guard is close to the person being guarded.

This is really awesome, though personally I'd rather see the subtitle on the person being guarded, like this:

The militia-hooded soldier is here.
The pug-nosed templar is here.
  --The militia-hooded soldier is guarding him.


Makes the guard-ee more prominent and it's more relevant to see who is being guarded, rather than who is guarding.  And it scales up better too.

Consider:

The Allanaki soldier is here.
The other Allanaki soldier is here.
The Tuluki soldier is here.
The other Tuluki soldier is here.
The third Tuluki soldier is here.
The Jihaen templar is here.
  --The Tuluki soldier is guarding him.
  --The other Tuluki soldier is guarding him.
  --The third Tuluki soldier is guarding him.
The blue-robe templar is here.
  --The Allanaki soldier is guarding him.
  --The other Allanaki soldier is guarding him.


vs.

The Allanaki soldier is here.
  --He is guarding the blue robe templar
The other Allanaki soldier is here.
  --He is guarding the blue robe templar
The Tuluki soldier is here.
--He is guarding the Jihaen templar
The other Tuluki soldier is here.
--He is guarding the Jihaen templar
The third Tuluki soldier is here.
--He is guarding the Jihaen templar
The Jihaen templar is here.
The blue-robe templar is here.

.. where it is not nearly as obvious what is going on.

[Lizzie]

The pug-nosed templar is here.
The militia-hooded soldier is here.
  --He is guarding the pug-nosed templar.

I dig this too, very realistic if the guard is close to the person being guarded.

This is really awesome, though personally I'd rather see the subtitle on the person being guarded, like this:

The militia-hooded soldier is here.
The pug-nosed templar is here.
  --The militia-hooded soldier is guarding him.


Makes the guard-ee more prominent and it's more relevant to see who is being guarded, rather than who is guarding.  And it scales up better too.

Consider:

The Allanaki soldier is here.
The other Allanaki soldier is here.
The Tuluki soldier is here.
The other Tuluki soldier is here.
The third Tuluki soldier is here.
The Jihaen templar is here.
  --The Tuluki soldier is guarding him.
  --The other Tuluki soldier is guarding him.
  --The third Tuluki soldier is guarding him.
The blue-robe templar is here.
  --The Allanaki soldier is guarding him.
  --The other Allanaki soldier is guarding him.


vs.

The Allanaki soldier is here.
  --He is guarding the blue robe templar
The other Allanaki soldier is here.
  --He is guarding the blue robe templar
The Tuluki soldier is here.
--He is guarding the Jihaen templar
The other Tuluki soldier is here.
--He is guarding the Jihaen templar
The third Tuluki soldier is here.
--He is guarding the Jihaen templar
The Jihaen templar is here.
The blue-robe templar is here.

.. where it is not nearly as obvious what is going on.

You can streamline this even further:

The Jihaen templar is here.
  --The Tuluki soldier is here, guarding him.
  --The other Tuluki soldier is here, guarding him.
  --The third Tuluki soldier is here, guarding him.
The blue-robe templar is here.
  --The Allanaki soldier is here, guarding him.
  --The other Allanaki soldier is here, guarding him.

In other words, we don't need to see The Tuluki soldier twice. We only need to see him once. If he's guarding someone, make his existence known in the line of him guarding someone. Obviously - if he's not there, he can't be guarding someone. And if he's guarding someone, he must be there. Along that line - the bug that has you guarding someone even after one of you walks away - might need to be fixed first

[HavokBlue]

I think the dogpile is preferable to all the silly friendly fire that would occur when you have 30 PCs going at 30 PCs and I type KILL MOHAWKED.MAN and end up attacking my sergeant, the purple mohawked man, instead of my target: the short, mohawked man.

[Wastrel]

Or make a new combat system revolving entirely around groups.

[X-D]

Thing is Hatchets...the problem with your entire argument is that, PC wise. 20 on 1 has never happened. Never. 10 on 1 May have happened at some time or another, but honestly, ignoring any NPC auto-assist piles...I doubt it. And I already agreed that the NPC piles should be fixed and that can even be a hard cap.

Making your arguments rather moot. Last HRPT battle was, I am sure the largest EVER arm battle between two groups of PCs and even then, 10 on 1 did NOT happen. The highest was 9 on 1 PC and it happened 2 times, only 1 of which was all PC....and as I said, that one survived.

[BadSkeelz]

For the "10 PCs on 1" combat zerg problem:

Everyone else should just roleplay samurais like I do, walking around shouting your name and lineage until you receive an honorable challenge.

Swirdsnabsuo is the solution. Change the culture, not the code.

[Wastrel]

Making your arguments rather moot. Last HRPT battle was, I am sure the largest EVER arm battle between two groups of PCs and even then, 10 on 1 did NOT happen. The highest was 9 on 1 PC and it happened 2 times, only 1 of which was all PC....and as I said, that one survived.

Really? Thats interesting. X-D knows his shit.

I am suddenly less butthurt about the whole affair.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

You can streamline this even further:

The Jihaen templar is here.
  --The Tuluki soldier is here, guarding him.
  --The other Tuluki soldier is here, guarding him.
  --The third Tuluki soldier is here, guarding him.
The blue-robe templar is here.
  --The Allanaki soldier is here, guarding him.
  --The other Allanaki soldier is here, guarding him.

In other words, we don't need to see The Tuluki soldier twice. We only need to see him once. If he's guarding someone, make his existence known in the line of him guarding someone. Obviously - if he's not there, he can't be guarding someone. And if he's guarding someone, he must be there. Along that line - the bug that has you guarding someone even after one of you walks away - might need to be fixed first

I love this, and I was going to suggest exacly that. Game on, Lizzie.

[hatchets]

Thing is Hatchets...the problem with your entire argument is that, PC wise. 20 on 1 has never happened. Never. 10 on 1 May have happened at some time or another, but honestly, ignoring any NPC auto-assist piles...I doubt it. And I already agreed that the NPC piles should be fixed and that can even be a hard cap.

Making your arguments rather moot. Last HRPT battle was, I am sure the largest EVER arm battle between two groups of PCs and even then, 10 on 1 did NOT happen. The highest was 9 on 1 PC and it happened 2 times, only 1 of which was all PC....and as I said, that one survived.

I am fine with 10, 20, 50 PCs being able to ride/run over a single PC...

Any videos of swordplay with more then 4-5 people on 1, have them standing farther back, AND the combat sequence has 1 or 2 approach at a time, giving the defender a chance to defend and attack those that come at them while the others WAIT for an opening to jump in.

To Unmoot my point, I was simply bringing up your extreme numbers, which you seemed to have forgotten that you momentarily ago were in full support of.

I personally am not going to go through the log of the fight and count up who died or who was attacked by who. I just briefly scroll through to the parts where I might have stabbed someone.

But As I said, and still will say 4 is plenty for human on human and will make fights more interesting across the board.

Equally the suggestion was to include such things to creatures as well.

[Vwest]

Solution: Master Parry, Master Shield Use.

Go ahead, master parry and shield use and go let twenty people swing at you. It's not as impossible to get passed as you think.

You know, if you said that to anyone else, you'd be right.

[Scarecrow]

There's no getting around that, realistically, a guy can't be attacked by twenty people at once. The max would be about eight, I reckon. And that's just going off my old DnD tabletop days. I also don't think it would be realistic to assume a trample over is what killed Billy Bob the soldier, as if he had pals with him (which everyone did, in this case) they'd be pushing back against the swarm to present said tramplage.
However, whilst I say this, I can't think of a rational and helpful solution. My only comment would be that these kind of battles are -incredibly- rare, so I don't see it being much of a problem.

[IntuitiveApathy]

I just thought I'd add - back in the day, it seemed to be that the penalty to defense for any character facing more than two attackers was so severe that it was tantamount to expecting death.  Somewhere along the way, it seems that penalty was nerfed.

Still, getting dogpiled now isn't that fun either.. just wanted to point out that it isn't nearly as bad as it used to be.  So X-D is right so far as I've seen - dogpiling is survivable in the current code.  What the major problem now is with dogpiling, and more generally having 129587125 PC's in a room, is the pace of combat and/or stuff happening doesn't change from the default - with so many characters, even with brief combat on (which leaves out things I as the player would still like to see, actually), it's really really difficult to keep track of what's going on, unless you're somehow a robot, like Mansa.  Ok yes, mass combat should be crazy, and hectic and confusing, but impossible?  I really like some of the suggestions regarding dogpiling delays and think they could be taken even further, which I feel could be done to mass combat in Armageddon in general in one way or another, so that we as players can understand what's happening, and have our characters react realistically in turn.

Eve Online has something called Time Dilation when there are a massive number of players all trying to fight each other.  Time Dilation is a solution for the server-side load, as apparently their servers would just give up the ghost when too much was happening at once.  When it kicks in, it slows game time down, so that the server can process everything that is happening and still stay up, and it is apparently scaled according to what's going on.  Maybe something similar could be introduced for mass-scale battles in Arm, but for the aim of player comprehension and playability rather than server processing as modern-day Ginka seems to have no problems with processing 1250897125 commands at once and spitting out 129358713698135192385 lines at once!  I have no idea how difficult this would be to implement code-wise though.  I suppose it may be just easier to do a completely separate system for mass-battles via grouping or otherwise, which tends to be suggested after every HRPT.. 

Not having a character react properly to a given situation though just because you as the player didn't notice that x, y or z was going on because of the massive scroll doesn't fit with the aim of realistic roleplay, IMO.

[X-D]

Well, i know i did not clarify, but i still am fine with twenty plus pcs piling on to a lone pc...meaning he has nobody with him. code wise...not saying it will not warrent some kind of rp complaint though. Sorry if that was not clear.

Now, aside from the fact that arbittary hard caps are just as unrealistic as no caps. Another reason i dislike them is the balance issue that would surely come up....this issue would cause people to want more nerfs to certain classes...i am always against nerfs. I realize that most players think they have a bomb ass warrior or whatever at ten to twenty days played...but the fact is...those are just babies. A single fifty day warrior could win against. forty twenty day warriors if the hard cap was 4 to 1 and an unlimited number of other. mundane classes.

[Qzzrbl]

Yeah.... Maybe we've been throwing around numbers like 20 vs 1 a bit much. PC gank squads like that-- I dunno about you guys, but I've never seen one coming close to that number in non-HRTP scenarios. Hell, even NPCs don't typically group up like that.

So....

Lone PC = Unlimited number of potential assailants.

PC with friends = Depends on how many friends you have.

[brytta.leofa]

group(X) = number guarding X + number in X's follow-tree, excluding duplicates
allowed attackers(X) = max(2, 8 - group(X))

8 people can attack a lone person.
2 people can attack even the most heavily-guarded person, assuming guard checks fail.
In a group of four, 5-on-1 is your worst odds.
Fighting in a group of five, you'll never be attacked by more than four.

I'm not an experienced warrior-player, but that feels about right to me.  If you want it a bit more punchy, make it, like, max(3, 12-group(X)).

(Orrrr...you could factor in PCs' actual defense/parry/shield use skills, so the merchant tagalong doesn't help. But clever attackers will probably kill the weak ones first.)

[Refugee]

Specific info here, but since that's already being thrown around- here's some data for your argument.

There were 10 PCs on one PC Sunday.  Just sayin'.  I've got the logs of them taking swipes at him as he fled.

He did survive, near death.

[X-D]

Now that I am not posting from my phone.

I am sure that 20-1 has never happened. It did not happen with the last HRPT, and I am sure that it was the largest PC battle in arm history, with around 80-90 PCs split between 2 rooms. And if it did not happen then, with the highest numbers I have ever seen and likely a record. Then it could not have happened in past events with numbers half and quarter that. All of which I was involved in and never saw it.

NOW...what I find amusing about this entire thread is...the people that want hard caps want between 4 and 8 as the caps. On actual dogpiles in my logs for HRPT(s) and other events over the last 20+ years...MOST, and by most I mean 90%+ "dogpiles" Are 6-1...4-1 and 8-1 are not too uncommon, 9-1 or higher is very uncommon.

I really think people have a perception that it is more because of the spam, If 5 PCs attack one, assuming all dual wielding. Then you get 3 lines of text for each one...15 lines flash on the screen pretty much all at once....for each PC the attack message and 2 swings. Which would seem like OMG THE ENTIRE NAKKI ARMY JUST ATTACKED MY PC!!!!

Refugee, Looked like 9 to me, but I will not argue 10...still, he did survive, after 1 normal round and a flee round...and I can say that PC was VERY much a newb..
Sorta puts the kibosh on the idea that "Nobody can survive" Argument.

[Refugee]

The PC was only a 2 week old PC.  [probably shouldn't have posted this part]





I wonder how you know so much about him lol.

[X-D]

I just pay attention.


Which brings me to another thought...somewhat off topic I suppose.

But it seemed to me that one side had a LOT more older PCs then the other.

I wonder how things would have went if, before battle, staff was to step in and go.

Alright, everybody with 30 days play or more, go 1 room east...everybody with less then 10 days played go one room west.

Then matched them that way...how it would have gone?

[Lizzie]

RE: 20:1 being unbelievable and un-doable - obviously y'all haven't ever seen Kill Bill vol. 1.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq-E7RefoHo

[Morrolan]

The game would benefit from a hard-cap limit (figured however staff comes up with) as to how many PCs can be involved in attacking one PC.

Players with massive IG combat experience and/or good combat mentors are not the average player. What happened in the HRPT is only one example, but some kind of change that limits the number of people hitting one human-sized combatant would benefit the game as a whole.

The "dog pile" doesn't only happen in HRPTs. And just because it's marginally survivable, that doesn't mean it's good for the game.

It's the battle-equivalent of
">think (aggressive) Raiding time!;run;e;e;kill target;bash;stand;disarm;kick;kick;kick"
or
">flee self;e;e;e;n;n;n;n;n;e;e;e;e;e;e;think (annoyed) Damn raiders."

Many of us do these things when we must because they work, and will keep doing them because they work. Some people argue on the GDB that such actions are "good roleplay" -- because they're what the PC would do. Sure, that's "good" roleplay. But that doesn't mean it's what's best for the game. That's why code changes are being suggested.

The point of this discussion is to find a better way, a more elegant solution than everyone in a group walking into a room and typing "assist sarge" after sarge takes the first swing.

[X-D]

Look, hard cap limits would be abused...or make no difference at all. Low limits , 3-6, abused, this abuse would then cause people to scream for nerfs, the nerfs would then of course mean that new lower hard caps would need to go in. Limits of 6-8 Would change nothing.  as it sits right now, that is the high end for most "dogpiling" anyway.

The amount of change that would have to be put in to every single class and skill to make hard caps even close to viable is insane. And in the end you would just end up with SOI or Atonement where you type kill Joe, then walk away for 30 minutes. Because combat is that slow and boring and the risk of it being lethal...1%.

Soft caps or other solutions to the actual problem (which is still arguable that there is a problem) that would be easy to balance and code would be preferable IMO. A few have been mentioned.

(disclaimer) Not badmouthing SOI or Atonement...I split my time evenly between Arm and SOI in fact.