Fix Combat Gains

[Kavrick]

So this is something I've thought about for a while now, and maybe staff will slap me if I'm too detailed. But- The way combat gains currently work as far as I can tell and test are completely archaic and overly tedious for a game. Every other skill in the game is reasonable to increase except combat skills. Normally, as long as I'm not dying and I'm killing a thing, I wouldn't care. But when you put skills into the game that branch off weapon skills, I feel like it should be reasonable to expect a tolerable gaining system.

As it currently stands, only dodges increase skills. Blocks and parries do not increase them. So even if you suck at combat, as long as you're getting those pathetic nicks that do 1-3 damage, you're not actually getting better. Most mobs in the world are statted with huge health pools and terrible evasion in what I think was an intentional move to make leveling slower. Two-handed is in an even worse spot right now because of recent changes and due to the fighting style being so accurate, it's incredibly difficult to level.

Now you might ask 'Kavrick, you filthy min-maxer, why do you care about this? Just roleplay!' And the answer is simple. This game is still an RPG, people enjoy their gains. I think the idea of a 10 days played character with the ability to fight things like Carru and Dujat worms being stuck at apprentice weapon skill and dealing pathetic damage in game because they always hit and never increase their weapon skills is a little silly.

Frankly, I don't understand why we have such a convoluted system when it comes to getting stronger. Crafting, stealth, foraging, skinning, all these skills are very straight-forward to level. But combat gains are all incredibly weird and tedious. And if you want my blunt opinion about min-maxing and powergamers. This whole system encourages powergaming and doing silly thing to do those gains. If you're going to tell me 'just spar!', well firstly, not everyone is in a sparring clan, secondly, it's currently peak time of me making this post and there are 15 players online, and thirdly, there shouldn't be a single way to play the game in a way that's not gimped.

So, you might ask what I would recommend, and I think the answer is at least fairly simple.
Firstly, parries and blocks should count, no idea why they don't.
Secondly, bounces, grazes and nicks should also count for skill gains.
If my character is struggle to land a solid hit that properly penetrates the defenses of the enemy, should that not count as me failing? Why does my character specifically need their attacks dodged to learn anything from fighting?

And before you say, because I know some of you do tend to react to these sorts of things with 'you just want the game to be easier or get things easily!'. I don't care if becoming strong takes a long time, I don't care if it's hard and dangerous. It should just be consistent and intuitive. People shouldn't be expected to always play a month in the Byn to get their combat skills in a decent place. It's actually pretty bad for the Byn as a clan because the people in the clan are basically just a revolving door of runners that never actually stay in the clan. They join, do their sparing for an irl month, then leave.

Just a parting note, if staff want to delete this because it contains too much mechanical information, it wont bother me, I half-expect it. But I also don't think 'how do I get stronger' in a game should be hidden.

[mansa]

I'm not sure if I should merge this post to this thread here:
https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,59776.0.html

or this thread here:
https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,57527.0.html


Perhaps I'll just repost what I posted before:

I always liked graphs to explain stuff.
I made up these numbers.

This is a graph that shows the old classes and the new classes, and how the new classes start 'higher', but it still takes a long ass time to hit the top end of the skill percentage.



There's a few things here:
a) ArmageddonMUD does not have skill degradation.  Once you hit 'master', you don't ever go back down to 'advanced'.
b) Once you hit a certain level of proficiency, you've 'won' that aspect of the game.   Be that stealth, crafting, spells, combat.  You can't really lose anymore, unless there's some external intervention going on.   This is why combat scripts get added to the 'high-end' beasts of the game.
c) Combat is the most important part of ArmageddonMUD, as it is the primary way to kill other characters of the game.   The skill gains are designed to be slower -> It's a chance to go up every fail, rather than a guaranteed gain upon a fail.
d) As you get better and better at the skills involved, it gets harder and harder to fail the skill.  When you have a random roll between 1 and 10, or between 1 and 100, or between 1 and 1000 upon a chance skillup, those skills progression becomes harder and harder.
e) The game world is designed around players never reaching maximum.  There is a particular threshold of player proficiency that the game is expected to be played in, and you can exceed that threshold and 'break the game' as designed.
f) Characters that break the game aren't fun to play with.  They are only fun to play as.   Those characters ruin other players experience and fun of the game.

Combat skills in ArmageddonMUD are designed to grow like this:

(click for a bigger image)

There are a few reasons why it's not a linear growth pattern:
a) It's harder to fail the skill when you're getting better and better at it.
b) Skills never degrade over time - so once you hit a certain proficiency, you need to find harder and more difficult challenges to progress.
c) The game is primarily designed for "low level" characters - there is no end-game play for "high level" characters.


To expand on point c:
Balder's Gate 3 recently came out, and it locks the character progression to max at level 12.  Level 13 characters start to become "overpowered" with their abilities and spells and the game itself is not designed to provide a challenge for that difficulty level.

In relation to ArmageddonMUD - there is a cap of coded skills and abilities, as well as political power and influence.  Your character will become too powerful for the interactions that the game is designed to play out.  At some point, your powerful character will need a dedicated staff member to play the world surrounding them and manually manipulate the world to show the power and influence that your character has obtained.

This expands to the skills and spells that are coded in the game.  There comes a point where the implemented world cannot offer a challenge to highly skilled characters.  A recent example is where a highly skilled criminal is captured and put into the Allanak arena, and after throwing all the arena creatures at the criminal character, that criminal character defeated them all.  In order to actually execute that criminal, staff members had to manually intercede to have the game world react accordingly - which was not possible using the game code.


So, to summarize again:
The game world is not implemented to offer a challenge to extremely high skilled characters.
Using D&D levels, the game world is designed as a play area for characters between the levels of 1 and 10.

[Kavrick]

The game world is not implemented to offer a challenge to extremely high skilled characters.
Using D&D levels, the game world is designed as a play area for characters between the levels of 1 and 10.

Ok so, my point is not to do with characters getting stupid strong and overpowered. I'm talking about characters merely going from apprentice to j-man with weapon skills. I struggle to get to j-man and I've never actually had a character with an advanced weapon skill. Also when you attach certain classes skill branching to weapon skills, you might as well remove that branch.

It's not to do with the speed either, or even the class. I'm talking a Tier 1 combat class. If you want skilling to be slow and taper off, I don't see an issue with doing that. But I do have an issue when the system to get the gains in the first place is so arcane and hard to understand that it becomes abusable for old players and frustrating for new players. Most people just think fight = get better, but that's far from the truth.

[Pariah]

This is all guessing from just playing the game for a while and playing "mostly" as a hunter type that's more PVE than PVP.

I think the combat system was designed around the PVP'er and not hunters.

I've also played characters that did a year in the Byn, an active year and the combat skills flow like water compared to fighting birds,chalton,scrab,spiders,drov beetles, salt worms, mekillots and so on.

I think, I could be totally wrong too, but I think that the game is designed for you to not ever get higher than Journeyman without substantial fighting of PCs.  Because when I do that Bynner, by the time my IG year is up I'm high Journeyman, low advanced from all the combat porn the Byn goes through, not to mention master kick, bash etc.  Now I still normally suck at first hunting after that year, because of the whole suspected versus opponent type that needs to get leveled up too.

So an Advanced Slashing ex-bynner will most likely slaughter everything that breaths pve wise, while getting mollywomped for a while because his versus thing isn't high except for people types combat.  Which has been explained to me is showing the difference between a boxer knowing how to sense and dodge another man's attacks and a hunter having the instincts to know spiders attack this certain way, sorta what makes a Stalker a better hunter normally than a Fighter in a way.

So if you want to advance past Journeyman without turning into a PVPer or joining the Byn, it requires you to slope up the danger dramatically.  If you are slaughtering drov beetles, silt flyers and other similar prowess critters and not getting any gains and hardly ever getting hit for the defense gains.  You have to ramp it up to the next level or two.  The problem normally is that when you get too high, you end up hitting poisons or special attacks that can get you dead QUICKLY.  So you might be able to mollywomp the fuck outta a Kryl, then it hits you with one special attack and your health goes from 100 to 50 and you're paralysed for example (Extreme example but that's sorta how it feels), so now you're dead, you just haven't seen the Mantis screen yet.

So then it becomes the trial and tribulation of "Do I try these super dangerous things for the hope I'll miss a swing and they won't just one hit kill me? or do I just stay where I'm at?"  And normally I end up just getting to a plateau and staying myself because it's not worth the risk to try and advance your skills higher.

So I think that's why you'll see a lot of the ANTAGS that live a long time, are either special races (Mul or HG to which the strength bonus alone makes them deadly).  A half-mage who can eventually get fireballs or other spell abilities that will make them able to easily kill you.  Or they spend a bunch of time in the Byn, simply to get those easier to achieve dodges off you.

I don't like it, but that's my take and I think how they sorta designed it work.

[Kavrick]

If you are slaughtering drov beetles, silt flyers and other similar prowest critters and not getting any gains and hardly ever getting hit for the defense gains.  You have to ramp it up to the next level or two.  The problem normally is that when you get too high, you end up hitting poisons or special attacks that can get you dead QUICKLY.  So you might be able to mollywomp the fuck outta a Kryl, then it hits you with one special attack and your health goes from 100 to 50 and you're paralysed for example (Extreme example but that's sorta how it feels), so now you're dead, you just haven't seen the Mantis screen yet.

This is an issue I've experienced. There's this weird cut-off point where creatures go from hitting you for 10-20 damage to having scripted attacks and hitting you for 50% of your hp total. Not to mention poisons. And related to one of the threads that Mansa posted, it's a little funny that you need some sort of meta-gamey secret information to know what mobs to fight to get increases. It just kinda reinforces my point that the current combat system is more of a boon for old players. I should just be able to rp and play normally without doing silly stuff like hunting for specific mobs to fight just to get my misses or to get hit.

[Pariah]

I agree the combat system is sorta fucked in that way, but on the flip side, if you make every bounce, every nick, every parry from an enemy count to be a fail for a hunter.  Then they simply need to fight scrabs who bounce like crazy, fight Gith, who parry like a mofo and so on to cheese the combat system.

I'm all for being able to advance to master/advanced whatever weaponskill your class allows for, but I also understand that they want "Masters" to be rarer and not the product of just a dude who plays the game everyday and rotates through all the fail types.  Because if say you're a stalker that maxes out at Advanced Bludgeoning, and your running around knocking out Mekillots with your massive club power, that's impressive, but it's less so when every other dickhead who's been playing a hunter for a while can do the same thing.

I think they want the higher end to be rarer than common.

[Kavrick]

I agree the combat system is sorta fucked in that way, but on the flip side, if you make every bounce, every nick, every parry from an enemy count to be a fail for a hunter.  Then they simply need to fight scrabs who bounce like crazy, fight Gith, who parry like a mofo and so on to cheese the combat system.

Well I think there's ways to balance it, but I also understand that you could just kinda use shit weapons to get those bounces. Otherwise I think generally increasing the evasion of enemies would be nice, and I do think blocks and parries should count.

[Kaathe]

You're not gonna like this, but can I suggest brief skills?

Maybe it should default to on. 

Back in my day, nobody cared about being stuck at apprentice weapon skills because you couldn't see it and overall you felt the growth.

Also when you attach certain classes skill branching to weapon skills, you might as well remove that branch.

Yeah true this part sucks. 

Also I agree that bullet sponge enemies are dumb and boring in every game, but I still just ignore my weapon skills and am happy.

[Kavrick]

You're not gonna like this, but can I suggest brief skills?

Maybe it should default to on. 

Back in my day, nobody cared about being stuck at apprentice weapon skills because you couldn't see it and overall you felt the growth.

Also when you attach certain classes skill branching to weapon skills, you might as well remove that branch.

Yeah true this part sucks. 

Also I agree that bullet sponge enemies are dumb and boring in every game, but I still just ignore my weapon skills and am happy.

I don't think not seeing your skills is a good way to deal with the skill system having flaws. It kinda feels like Armageddon is in this weird bubble with skills, it really clashes with modern game design, both in videogames and tabletop RPGs. And yeah, a good few classes have branching from weapon skills so it can be pretty painful.

[mirk_o_loio]

I once managed to get my weapon skill a level up BEFORE I got my first defensive skill (shield/parry) to advanced. So that was kinda interesting. It was in the last couple months, too

[Lotion]

I think skill gains are in a lot better place than most people think they are. I typed out a detailed explanation of why but after some consideration realized that it would certainly be moderated even though it's pure speculation.

[Lotion]

Weapon skills are not very important.

[Riev]

Absolutely incorrect.

[Dar]

While I personally like the fact that killing skills take longer to master, I do hope that the skill gains, or sheer concept of skill training gets a second look for the Seasons Era. 


Discussing it right now is ... pointless in my opinion. Whether its bad now, or good now, it will definitely be bad for seasons.

Balancing and improving it though is going to be a tester nightmare.

[Pariah]

Weapon skills are not very important.

Offense/Defense matters more.

[Riev]

The way DIKU tends to work for hit and damage calculations, the +5/+6 you might get from your weapon skill matters. A lot.

[Kavrick]

The issue with having bad weapon skills is that it massively impacts your damage.

This is literally the issue I've been having with my current character. I have enough offence to hit anything, but I don't hit anything hard enough to do more than grazes. This creates an extremely unenjoyable situation where I don't get hit, I don't miss, but it takes me around 20-30 minutes to kill beefier creatures because the only thing I land are nicks and grazes.

What Riev said is completely correct.

[Riev]

What Riev said is completely correct.

Say it louder for the people in the back.

[Riev]

Anecdotally -  my current PC has Advanced weapon skills and DOG SHIT offense/defense.

I still don't hit very hard because its not in line with offense/defense and it all factors together. With weapon skills I hit often enough but with a good amount of human strength its barely worth anything.

They're both needed, together. A master swordsman who has no offense is like someone who is a master fencer and they get bodied by the guy who 'doesn't play by the rules'.

See: Dark Souls GIF of riposte rapier player being invaded by player with BIGFUCKCLAYMORE+5

[Brokkr]

Pretty sure out of the box DIKU uses a level based THAC0 system to determine if you hit fido.

[Riev]

It sure does! The 80s were rad.

[Roon]

Weapon skills and offense barely affect damage. In fact, I believe weapon skill has no influence whatsoever on damage while offense has a miniscule one if yours is significantly higher than your opponent's defense. Two handed can affect your damage by multiplying your strength bonus, and that's pretty much the only time skills have a meaningful impact on damage. Otherwise it's just weapon dice and strength (and now agility for minimum damage). Skill also doesn't affect the body parts you hit, so it doesn't even have an indirect influence on damage that way. Ranged attacks do have a skill-based damage bonus, though, and skill in backstab or sap has a huge influence on damage with those attacks. Not so with melee swings.

---------------

There are three main problems with combat skillgains:

1) You usually plateau at like journeyman

Barring unusual luck with clanmates and their playtimes, or some very creative use of specific NPCs, your character is unlikely to get better than journeyman. Once in a while, you're lucky enough to end up clanned with somebody who's sufficiently skilled - and willing to take the time to spar with you, gaining nothing himself - to get you past the hump. In most cases, though, that's just not a thing that's available to you. As player numbers continued to dwindle, this got worse and worse. You can also "spar" with certain NPCs, but the amount of grinding it takes to make meaningful long-term progress, and the questionable nature of such play, makes this an iffy prospect. It's really hard to justify travelling halfway across Zalanthas to fight several mantis for no real reason, but if you don't have anyone to spar with, that sort of thing is the only way to become more than okay at fighting.

Do you need to be better than okay? Some have argued that it's bad play to even aspire for anything beyond whatever is required of your role; and if you're a militia private, of course you don't need to be Billy Badass in order to play out your role. But what if you'd like to become a fearsome raider? What if you dream of being the arena champion one day? What if you're a desert ranger who needs to be capable of surviving an encounter with a... whatever those fucking winged ant things are? Or what if you're just getting tired of being the punching bag of players who don't limit themselves to whatever level of competency is necessary for their role?

Besides, this is a game and character growth is part of it. Skills are part of that. Say what you will but it's very clear that a lot of players do care a lot about it. It's satisfying to get better, and not very satisfying if you stop getting better at journeyman. Doubly so if your class started at apprentice. Gaming is largely dopamine-driven, and in an era where such things as plot and story have largely fallen by the wayside, skilling up has been one of the few satisfying activities left. It's enjoyable for all the same reasons that leveling up is enjoyable in a conventional RPG.

2) Everything's gated behind missing

Only a full failure counts as anything. If your opponent doesn't dodge your attack, there was no chance to improve. However, this largely stops happening long before it's reasonable to say that you shouldn't be able to learn anything from fighting that guy/thing. I've had plenty of fights where I could barely get through the opponent's parries and blocks, but they never dodged my attacks once. In the eyes of the code, that opponent was so far beneath me that I didn't deserve to get anything out of fighting him. Meanwhile, I fought him for twenty-five fucking rounds of combat and he's not even starting to worry. It feels broken and ridiculous.

It's a lot easier to raise parry and shield use, so any fighting character that isn't pretty new has these maxed out. You might be hot shit against a scrab, but if you're stuck at journeyman weapon skills and whatever amount of offense you gained in the process, you're barely capable of touching someone with master parry/shield. Hell, even just parry on its own will make you look like a chump. Adding  master shield on top is just depressing for Mr. Journeyman. This is why it feels bad to plateau at that level.

And your offense skill becomes your enemy. It factors into the attack roll, and I suspect it counts for as much as your weapon skills when it comes to landing hits. This means that once your offense is decent, you can forget about ever raising a second weapon skill. If anything, it's a mistake to ever use anything but the one you've chosen to focus on, because unless you're so uniquely lucky as to have access to a sparring mentor so skilled that you know you can max out regardless, spending any time on multiple weapon skills just reduces your ultimate potential in whichever one is your "main," since gaining offense while training secondary weapon skills lowers the ceiling of how high you can raise any of them.

3) NPCs mostly suck

There are almost no NPCs that have high defense. Even animals that are considered really dangerous tend not to have much actual defense, and since this is mostly what determines how useful they are at making you better at fighting, they're pretty useless. By and large, animals that are "tanky" aren't tanky because they're hard to hit, they just have a lot of health and natural armor. Even some of the more skilled NPCs, like mantis and the tougher variants of gith, barely have enough to get you past journeyman. You'll probably need to use all kinds of sketchy tricks like blindfighting, or fighting them sitting and with a weapon in ES only.

In the distant past, certain NPCs had stupidly high defense. Older players probably remember the Stilt Lizard Academy of Martial Mastery. Turaals, the Zalanthan equivalent of ferrets, were another fan favorite. These have been nerfed over the years, and while that's fair enough, it kind of left a void where there just isn't any realistic way to pursue long-term combat improvements outside of having the rare good fortune to be able to spar regularly with someone who's skilled. Or blindfighting mantis and hoping nobody notices and tells you to knock it off.

It largely did away with the idea of, say, a desert elf who became a fearsome warrior by besting the fiercest beasts of the land. The fiercest beasts of the land (that you can fight without mocking the fundamental notion of roleplay) ain't shit. Rantarri? Braxat? Carru? Tembo? Hell, even bricky tarantulas--they won't get you to a level where you can be identified as someone who's really good at fighting. They'll get you to the point where you can easily hunt those same things, but that level just isn't very high. If you ever end up in a fight with Mr. Four Screeching Bamuks, who has spent a RL year idly sparring with Angry Amos the Similarly Bored Nomad, you're gonna get schooled big-time. And all they had to do to get there was be friends on Discord and agree to spar daily for however long they could stand it.

And yes, there's one or two kinds of animals that still do have pretty high defense, but you try explaining to your clan staff why you're climbing around on mountains looking for fucking kiyet lions when your clan's documentation says you live nowhere near there and have no reason whatsoever to do any such thing. There are ridiculously twinky things you can do to try and overcome the humps, but the fact that these relics of the distant past still exist doesn't mean the problem goes away. It's still supposed to be a roleplaying game where we do what's IC, and if the game punishes us for that while rewarding us for doing what's decidedly not IC, the game has failed.

---------------

All of this comes together to create a system of combat skill growth that feels fundamentally broken, and is routinely gamed by players who have been around long enough to discover this fact and learn how to overcome the obstacles. However, playing Armageddon "the right way" means you get stuck at those obstacles, and then you have to choose whether to play in the way where you're true to your role but the loser in the "meta," or the way where you know it's kind of wrong but you don't want to forever be the hapless prey of those who don't give a shit. That or you just don't want to eat dirt every time you meet some fucking winged ant or whatever idiotically overpowered mob has been added to the game lately because it's imposssible for staff to judge the field when some characters are Conan the Barbarian while others are Sergeant Vimes of the City Watch, all based on their individual ability to navigate a very poorly designed system of combat skillgains.

[Windstorm]

Not that any of it is wrong, but it misses the point Mansa made above.

The game is not actually designed for or ready for a lot of PCs to be super highly skilled combat masters.

It's not really intended for that. Even having one in the game can be a little bit immersion breaking when a mekillot can't hit them.

For the most part, I don't believe Armageddon needs or wants it to be any easier to raise weapon skills beyond a certain point. I don't.

[Kavrick]

The game is not actually designed for or ready for a lot of PCs to be super highly skilled combat masters.

I would believe this if it was actually enforced across the board. The only people who actually suffer from low gains are people who aren't in a sparring clan. Inside a sparring clan you can hit master within an irl month.

[Roon]

Inside a sparring clan you can hit master within an irl month.

Only in theory. In reality, there usually won't be anyone in any given "sparring clan" who has the skills to get you there. It's rare that there's even anyone who can get you to advanced.

If you do get to spar regularly with someone who's unusually skilled, you can definitely get to master within a month--but there's practically never going to be any such PC in a sparring clan.

It's almost impossible to reach that level at all these days, and it takes a playstyle that's largely incompatible with the Byn or the militias. You'll find those PCs in places like the Masterless and such.