Reading over the recent combat threads and from the point of view of those that are very new to PK or MUDs in general. I wonder if we can create an ability to spar in arenas at a slower pace. Like five or ten times the speed for all balances, healing, offense, everything. Even being able to pick between several speeds. Then I can bring someone new in and they can really get an understanding of how their own offense works, while they are doing it and the curing on the other end as well. And really be able to mark and say, I need to highlight that.
I am not sure how feasible this would be to code, but I think it would be a good tool to help teach combat.
Make it an incurable affliction similar to slow balance afflictions, optional mode as a modifier at the end of a spar challenge.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
With a 5x slow, my standard druid attack is a FIFTEEN SECOND balance. At 10x, it's 30 seconds and I can sip health about once a minute. That's sort of insane, even for training.
That aside, I'm unsure how much that would help. G-bot is already lightning quick and able to handle most anything when set right, and I think that training at slow speed, especially that slow, wouldn't prepare people for the real deal, where you have to have a system to track your afflictions because the spam flying by limits your ability to do so by eye and where you've got to make sure you've got good gags and highlights because a dozen people smashing at each other turns the room into a blur.
The hardest part of getting good at combat is dealing with the speed and the pressure. I don't think that removing it will really make for a very useful training tool.
Like I've always said, the only way to get better at fighting is to fight.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
I think the best way for people to learn to fight is to fight other scrubs, but not the same scrubs all the time. That's why I think a tiered arena ranking system would do well. Cosmetic rewards would ensure varied participation, fighting in a lower tier arena event will not get you killed by Iluv, Kryss, (Insert PK'er here). As you get better (or meet a might/artifact level) you will not be able to participate in lower tiers, leaving them free for newer players to learn safely.
A small thing I'd like to see is spar length lengthened a little and/or a type of spar that lasts a set amount of time and allows multiple deaths during that time. Like paying for practice bloodbaths or something similar. I know you can trigger to accept spars and all that jazz, but I think just having some server-side functionality like that would be great. I would test things that end in kills and just rez afterwards, but then I'd be pk farming at the same time.
You don't learn as well from doings things slowly. Because after all your training spars you will stroll out into a real fight and be dazzled by the speed of actual battle. Better to learn combat at the actual pace of combat in my opinion.
You don't learn as well from doings things slowly.
- Expect in every other aspect of life(sports, music, art). I don't know why reading comprehension and quick recognition of memorized messages would be any different. Edit: To clarify, learning slowly at first and building up speed is what I'm advocating.
Because after all your training spars you will stroll out into a real fight and be dazzled by the speed of actual battle.
- Except that's why you still have the option of sparring at normal speed once you start to learn what these quickly scrolling messages actually mean.
Better to learn combat at the actual pace of combat in my opinion.
- Young players don't really learn things during their first combat(where this tool is designed to help), besides how to flail at all the messages they don't understand scrolling too fast. Even most older players don't really learn new things about classes during live combat(apart from with generic aff and damage messages), they're learning(at least about class-unique things and new gimmicks) by looking back at logs afterwards and picking the combat apart. This gives you a chance to pick it apart while it's still going on.
Something like this wouldn't be meant to replace real combat as a learning tool, but to compliment it. Spar novice at 3x so they can learn new messages and the generic order of how things are occurring. Spar novice at 2x after they're a little more familiar with the messages and have maybe set up some highlights or gags to bring up their speed at it. After a round or two of this, spar novice at 1x so they see what to expect in real combat. They aren't crippled in any way. After enough normal sessions, they'll learn to comprehend it just as quickly as someone that had just had it all thrown at them at 1x. And, presumably, they'll have had a much less frustrating time getting up to combat speed than if they had just had their face melted off from the get-go.
Granted, I think you could achieve the same effect with a novice by having them disable autocuring and walking them through everything yourself, command by command, but I'd still like to see how novices responded to training using a tool like this.
Slower paced spars would only serve to offer a false sense of how combat flows. If you're going to have to reach normal speed eventually all slow fights would do is waste time where someone could be out actually fighting or sparring at actual speed. And in my opinion, the opposite of starting slow is just as good if not better in lots of cases for many different things. Take other competitive games for example. Sure you can play with rules like no rush for 10 minutes in Starcraft or -em in Dota. But why would you? It only creates bad habits.
Bad habits like what, mashing the same I-can-kill-you-macro that sacrifices my last 13 health to die? That looks like it would happen in real time. We're not talking about refining the perfect one trick pony here. We're addressing teaching NEWBIES how to fight.
Most of the kids are going to be heavily manual operating with a few simple aliases. At the speed of combat now, that's never going to happen. You know what most sports do to practice? Slow motion run throughs. You know what a lot of high elo players do to practice basic skills like last hitting and jungle strategies? Bot games. Completely worthless, 0 reward, practice bot games. That's what Aulani is suggesting. A practice mode where -everything- is modified by the same factor so combat 'seems' slower so you can get a grasp of why you're doing what you're doing.
Will it be helpful to you? No. We're just waiting for the next new class for that. Will it be helpful for newbie1686? Yes.
The point here is to become familiar with your skills and why you would use one instead of the other in a given situation. Something they're not going to learn in a shardfall when Captain Flavor of the Month screams ICICLES! NEED MORE ICICLES or "Why are you not druid/rg? Go home."
@Kryss & @Khizan I think you guys are way underestimating just how new and bad some players are. I mean, forget getting familiar with the speed of combat, building bad habits, making decisions under pressure - that stuff doesn't happen if you don't even know what sorts of decisions you need to be making, what sort of things you need to be looking for, and what qualifies as good or bad habits. Now, yes, the goal is to graduate to real time, but if you want to continue to develop a tier of combatant that isn't just pick druid or AM, but one that is critically making decisions under pressure there has to be a learning curve that isn't quite so steeply logarithmic. You don't learn basketball in a game - you learn it by doing drills, by someone teaching you how to dribble and pass and shoot in a less threatening environment, then you learn to run plays and see how rotating the ball can throw defenders off (in slow motion usually might I add), then you scrimmage it with an actual defense, and THEN you play the game. And for newbies, essentially we are dropping them into a game and praying they pick the early 90's Chicago Bulls or the late 70's Indiana Pacers so that they can even begin to hold their own in any real way against the majority of the combatant player base.
This is semi possible now. Originally we had some code in place where we could change a single variable in the game that would increase or decrease balance times for everything (healing, eq, etc). We never used it, but the framework is still semi there I think. I could be wrong. However, fixing this up would require time, and we are in the process of a few big things right now.
@Jeremy I'll buy some more credits if you make this happen:
sendGMCP("IRE.Who.Get")
display(gmcp.IRE.Who.players)
{
{
name = "Azefel",
location = "Below belltower at Caanae Road and Stavenn Road"
},
{
name = "Shou"
}
}
No real change in functionality(you can even limit the location name to 24(or 25?) characters like on WHO, it just doesn't break MORE and things that need AGREE or CONFIRM like spamming and gagging WHO does.
Please give stupidity a General Issue Failure Message.
I CAN trigger detection of it off of its current secondary messages, but this would entail triggering every emote in the gameand that is stupid and awful and terrible and bad.
Also, please let me just add a freaking affliction to the queue, so that when I decide "o hay i haz stupid" I can just tell the g-bot "hey, try and cure stupidity" and not have to worry about whether or not I should add tree, focus, purge, or orphine to the cure queue.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Please give stupidity a General Issue Failure Message.
I CAN trigger detection of it off of its current secondary messages, but this would entail triggering every emote in the gameand that is stupid and awful and terrible and bad.
Also, please let me just add a freaking affliction to the queue, so that when I decide "o hay i haz stupid" I can just tell the g-bot "hey, try and cure stupidity" and not have to worry about whether or not I should add tree, focus, purge, or orphine to the cure queue.
Didn't I hear something about Azefel lagging everybody by testing emote triggers repeatedly or something?
This is probably just an oversight, but when the desecration skillset is built around using 'sips of blood' and some of those 'sips are amounts at values of 20, storing blood in vials becomes sort of inefficient.
Can defilers get the ability to
-Leech blood into vialbelt# or
-Pour vials of blood into the vialbelt
tl;dr Store blood (and toxic blood) in vialbelt.
plz&ty
It's pretty dumb to waste a classlead on something this obvious (in4comment)
Didn't I hear something about Azefel lagging everybody by testing emote triggers repeatedly or something?
He sent every emote in the game in one huge command block to get all the messages.
This is a thing I don't want to have to do.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
It would be way easier to just give the game a massive lag spiking command block and let another trigger generate all my emote triggers automatically, so if I ever decide to do it that's the way I'm going to go.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Is there some kind of change going through with AB? It looks different than before. Mainly, I thought AB was showing all skills by default, and I don't remember this line:
You have 9 unlearned abilities in Weaponry. AB WEAPONRY FULL to see them.
Also, I'll take this time to reiterate how awesome it would be for AB <skillset> RANKS to show the lessons you would have to learn to get to each remaining unlearned skill. That would be amazing.
If you've got an empty vial in your inventory, <thing> in your vialbelt, and no vial full of <thing>, then when you try to use <thing> it should automatically tap it and use it.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
just get rid of vials already (aside for things like bloodrain)
Unless you're a Lycaean that can bend over to your waist or possibly have tubes that run up to your mouth from your belt, I see this being a difficult thing to do without vials at an RP stand point.
The only logical way I see that working is having vials be part of the vialbelt as flavour messages explaining something like:
'You quickly detach a vial full of health from your mango scented vialbelt and sip its contents, afterwards reattaching the vial back onto your belt.'
Then they'd just exist for RP reasons among other situations.
By my (very rough) calculations, using 0.2oz as a sip, each concoction in the belt is roughly 4.7 gallons and a full vialbelt would be several bathtubs full of liquid. RP be damned, I want bendy straws for my vialbelts.
For real though, I know where you're coming from with wanting things to make rp sense, but curing is only gonna be so realistic. We're already touching tattoos, eating an herb from an invisible rift, sipping from vials, puffing pipes, applying salves, and doubleslashing targets in the same second. We just need a simple rp cop-out like vialbelts having a vial/hose built in for each concoction and we're golden.
Comments
I am not sure how feasible this would be to code, but I think it would be a good tool to help teach combat.
With a 5x slow, my standard druid attack is a FIFTEEN SECOND balance. At 10x, it's 30 seconds and I can sip health about once a minute. That's sort of insane, even for training.
That aside, I'm unsure how much that would help. G-bot is already lightning quick and able to handle most anything when set right, and I think that training at slow speed, especially that slow, wouldn't prepare people for the real deal, where you have to have a system to track your afflictions because the spam flying by limits your ability to do so by eye and where you've got to make sure you've got good gags and highlights because a dozen people smashing at each other turns the room into a blur.
The hardest part of getting good at combat is dealing with the speed and the pressure. I don't think that removing it will really make for a very useful training tool.
Like I've always said, the only way to get better at fighting is to fight.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Something like this wouldn't be meant to replace real combat as a learning tool, but to compliment it. Spar novice at 3x so they can learn new messages and the generic order of how things are occurring. Spar novice at 2x after they're a little more familiar with the messages and have maybe set up some highlights or gags to bring up their speed at it. After a round or two of this, spar novice at 1x so they see what to expect in real combat. They aren't crippled in any way. After enough normal sessions, they'll learn to comprehend it just as quickly as someone that had just had it all thrown at them at 1x. And, presumably, they'll have had a much less frustrating time getting up to combat speed than if they had just had their face melted off from the get-go.
Most of the kids are going to be heavily manual operating with a few simple aliases. At the speed of combat now, that's never going to happen. You know what most sports do to practice? Slow motion run throughs. You know what a lot of high elo players do to practice basic skills like last hitting and jungle strategies? Bot games. Completely worthless, 0 reward, practice bot games. That's what Aulani is suggesting. A practice mode where -everything- is modified by the same factor so combat 'seems' slower so you can get a grasp of why you're doing what you're doing.
Will it be helpful to you? No. We're just waiting for the next new class for that. Will it be helpful for newbie1686? Yes.
The point here is to become familiar with your skills and why you would use one instead of the other in a given situation. Something they're not going to learn in a shardfall when Captain Flavor of the Month screams ICICLES! NEED MORE ICICLES or "Why are you not druid/rg? Go home."
sendGMCP("IRE.Who.Get")
No real change in functionality(you can even limit the location name to 24(or 25?) characters like on WHO, it just doesn't break MORE and things that need AGREE or CONFIRM like spamming and gagging WHO does.
the claims are stated - it's the world I've created
Please give stupidity a General Issue Failure Message.
I CAN trigger detection of it off of its current secondary messages, but this would entail triggering every emote in the game and that is stupid and awful and terrible and bad.
Also, please let me just add a freaking affliction to the queue, so that when I decide "o hay i haz stupid" I can just tell the g-bot "hey, try and cure stupidity" and not have to worry about whether or not I should add tree, focus, purge, or orphine to the cure queue.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Can defilers get the ability to
or
plz&ty
It's pretty dumb to waste a classlead on something this obvious (in4comment)
He sent every emote in the game in one huge command block to get all the messages.
This is a thing I don't want to have to do.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
It would be way easier to just give the game a massive lag spiking command block and let another trigger generate all my emote triggers automatically, so if I ever decide to do it that's the way I'm going to go.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
The only logical way I see that working is having vials be part of the vialbelt as flavour messages explaining something like:
'You quickly detach a vial full of health from your mango scented vialbelt and sip its contents, afterwards reattaching the vial back onto your belt.'
Then they'd just exist for RP reasons among other situations.
the claims are stated - it's the world I've created