Autocuring - a basic healing system
I read the post about curing priorities today and I felt that we're going too far with this in game autocuring. I remember that people asked for something along the lines of a basic healing system before it was created, something in game that allowed people who couldn't code be able to join in on a fight and actually do a decent job at it. I repeat: Decent job. But at the current state of autocuring I start to think to myself, why should I even bother do my own system today?
I've done client side coding since about 1999 when I first started playing Achaea. I joined Imperian about a week after it opened up and have stuck around since then on several characters and I've played basically every profession except for the new revamped ones. One of the reasons I've stuck to MUD's for so long and especially IRE is the thrill of combat where you begin with learning what cures what, why certain afflictions stop others and how to counter it by both curing and attacking. Imperian is certainly killing that feeling for me with the current state of autocuring.
Don’t get me wrong though, I love that more people can compete at a higher level thanks to in game solutions such as autocuring. But I don’t agree that it should be so advanced that it’s the one and all solution to every curing in game. Just look at other games such as Aetolia where you get this in game curing. But what’s the difference? It ticks every 3 seconds. It is not something that basically instantly throws out a cure and heals you up so you can continue with attacking.
Let me describe some main problems I have with autocuring that makes it superior to client side curing.
- It is super fast. I know it’s supposed to be a 250 millisecond delay or whatever but my tests say something else. From my point of view it looks like a timer that ticks every 250 millisecond and that means that sometimes (most of the times during my test) I get cured basically instantly after I get afflicted. From my client it takes AT LEAST 150 milliseconds due to ping and that’s on a good day. The average however is about 250-350 milliseconds AFTER I get afflicted since I send the cure at the prompt.
- Autocuring knows when a command failed and sends the command again. This is AMAZINGLY good against stupidity and aeon. What do I do in my own system? I have a timer that resets the affliction after X amount of time and resends the cure if it failed. I can’t send it again on a failed attempt such as an emote because that might have been from my attack and not my cure failing. We got the small “a” in the prompt from delayed commands from aeon though, but that’s basically useless since I send cures, if afflicted by aeon, after my attack.
- Keeping track of every single balance at any time. I can do this with my client of course, but certainly not at the same level that autocuring can. If I’d have balances available in GMCP, this wouldn’t be a problem.
These are some of the main points that make autocuring superior to client side curing. So why should I use client side curing today? The only real reason would be for parrying, using special abilities such as restore automatically and of course choose the prio of defences (since that’s not done in game YET) and being able to deal with hidden afflictions in a better way other then using DIAG (since that’s not done in game YET...).
It’s scary to see that autocuring is somehow a necessary thing now and MUST be updated with sophisticated things such as prioritizing afflictions. Is that basic healing? Basic healing to me is that you in a linear fashion send out cures in an attempt to at least cure yourself and not sending herb cures if you got anorexia for example. THAT is basic healing, there’s nothing else to it. But I fear that the few of us who still make our own client side coding starts to become a minority in Imperian because basically everyone uses autocuring now and so our voices aren’t heard or cared about anymore in this new age of curing.
The side effect of doing this isn’t just positive. It requires most classes to be revamped due to autocuring and we’re going into an era where everything in game is done for you. Why should they be revamped? Because autocuring is superior in most ways to client side curing and the majority uses it now. This made some classes, especially affliction classes not as good anymore and we had to throw in buffs in some fashion. New classes focus on uncurable afflictions, building up a set of afflictions to finish you off with a HARD hitting attack or a quick instant kill with a small window to stop. We never saw this amount of uncurable affliction before autocuring.
Also look at it this way - we constantly say that 1v1 is dead and team combat is what we focus on these days due to shardfalls and obelisk fights. Then why is a perfect in game curing system needed? The focus in a battle like that is holding down targets with writhes and then dealing damage until they die. No system can help you with that and so I don’t know why we need to request more and more and more features for an already excellent in game curing system.
Autocuring in Imperian is far more superior to any other IRE game, as far as I know. Other games have a basic level of curing where you like in Aetolia learn an ability in Survival and that makes you able to cure on a 3 second tick. That’s basic healing but it’s not the thing you want to use forever, you actually need to learn how to do it on your own if you want to compete with the high level combatants.
My suggestion is therefore that autocuring should be linear, it should of course put up defences, cure you from anything as long as you have the cure available, but it should be at a far slower rate such as a 3 second ticks. Because THAT to me is basic healing and that’s what would put all not so experienced combatants get a chance to go right into it and learn from there. But from there, if you decide you want to do more, you should actually get a friend to help you or make your own client side healing system.
Clients also need to get some help if you want to keep autocuring on par with them. Such as a notification if I failed to cure something from stupidity and a way to track balances through GMCP.
I hope that this large post open up your eyes and that you look at it from a different perspective. We can’t solve everything with in game solutions that goes beyond the ability of what clients can do. It’s like cheating to me. I love seeing more people in combat these days, even if they’re still not enough, but this is starting to get a bit silly.
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Comments
....What was that!? You mean Imperian came out with a non-buy in combat mechanic!? GET READY FOR THE APOCOLYPSE!
All kidding aside, i'd much rather see a game with a good healing system that everyone has access to. The population is already small enough, and with the constant fluctuation of "the flavor of the month" circle swapping, even shardfalls rarely induce conflict anymore. Because there just isn't enough people on the opposing sides to make it a challenge. Now cut those numbers buy 75% if you take AUTOCURING out of the equation.
To be honest with you, I'd much rather see even more AUTOCURING customization. Be able to change priorities around, pick which defenses to keep up and which to do only on login, and a plethora of other things. Some might say that'd be to much in a server side curing system, I say it creates diversity by allowing people being able to choose different priorites, thus allowing for varying types of combat.
So let's just say that over 8 years I've tried to make a total of six healing systems, two came out somewhat decent, 4 horrid. If each system were only just 5k lines total of code, which I believe to be a small amount. That's 30k lines of code created and scrapped from inefficiency. Now lets assume that it takes me 10 days at a minimum of 4 hours a day to get to that somewhat working 5k line point. I've just spent 40 hours, of doing nothing but coding/testing/debugging/getting into actual combat to see it fail more/and coding some more. 40 HOURS! without me participating in combat, bashing, or doing anything outside of my city/council. No offense, but that just isn't fun on a game level.
Now imagine a new player going through that process for the first time, who doesn't know the first thing about coding, outside of z/cMud's help manual. Which to someone who's never coded before looks like hieroglyphics. AUTOCURING is the answer to their prayers. And guess what? they don't have to go looking around on the forums and pay for someone else's that may or may not be top notch, or to find some outdated mudbot, or learn how to connect to imperian using mudbot with whatever client they use. Now it's all just right there for them. They were going to get it anyway, now they just don't have to buy it like they will skills and artifacts.
As far as the classes go, there are plenty of threads arguing which legacy class gets the next upgrade. Join in on one of those.
Per your final paragraph. If you allow customization of AUTOCURING'S priority lists, then it won't become the ONLY way to cure in the game, because many people will have different priorities, so you'll still have to outsmart your opponent when you see that they heal in a certain way to stop that method of killing.
The high bar of "skill" you're talking about is still there. It's just shifted from being able to tweak your client to being able to tweak garrynbot (and your client). A good example is that Sarrius caught me in chain transfix because G-bot thinks that deaf > blind. I read how G-bot worked, manually adjusted the queue in combat and put Sarrius in a why-am-I-losing-balance-and-ahkan-isn't-transfixed chain. The people who are able to manipulate garryn-bot to compensate for it's short fallings (predictability) are still going to have a leg or two up on the people who don't dedicate the time to understanding what they're using to cure.
As far as class design goes, I'm one of the more vocal "wtf" on the Demonic side. I'm going to step out of my river of tears and defend Garryn. Imperian is a copy, direct ripoff, unholy clone of Achaea. There's a lot of legacy mechanics that are floating around that range from "neat" to "absolute crap." There's a laundry list of broken shit in the queue to fix and they also have to balance releasing new shinies for us to ADD over and all bandwagon to. If you don't want to man up to the challenge of rolling old-and-busted against Garryn-bot, don't. There's a lot of modern classes out there that actually crush G-bot.
-I can customize and tweak it
-It wouldn't have the exact same priority as G-bot so I'd be immune to the flavor of the month.
I used garrynbot because:
-It's portable and I can access it anywhere
-It's better than 99% of the systems out there
-It's faster than anything I would use.
-It keeps me alive when I lag.
Dynamic priorities. It's niche, but the beta version of Empire3 that I'm not using yet shifts priorities around based on the conditions of the fight. If I don't have purge balance, it won't prioritize hemotoxin as highly. Shyness fighting a noctu is more important than shyness fighting an assassin.
You will never, ever get that out of autocuring, no matter how good it gets. At the very least you will need linear client side triggers that change priorities. You can argue that this isn't a big advantage, that it doesn't really matter - and you would have an argument worth making. But it's one reason why I personally spend so much time coding
Speaking of Aetolia's version, I looked and theirs is running on 0.5s ticks these days, not 3s ones.
I appreciate autocuring for making this somewhat hard game accessible to more people. As long as it never gains any magic tricks that lets it do something that I can't, like curing masked afflictions without diagnosing or secondary triggers, I won't care at all.
The ability to heal through lag is a strong compelling reason to use it, as is the ease to get into it and the faster 'ping'. If any of these reasons make it more compelling than someone's home baked system, I'm largely comfortable with that.
As long as you are having fun, that's all that matters really. Client side or not.
The buy-in isn't money, though. At least, it's not just money.
The buy-in here was the opportunity cost of spending your Imperian playing time slaving away in the coding mines so that you didn't get stomped on by every dual-afflictor you ran across, or so that you'd have a health sipper that didn't need to be watched like a hawk. It was being forced to spend your playing time on something other than playing the game, even AFTER you'd already made a credit buyin.
It was, in short, being forced to learn to code to play the game with any competence. This was a terrible thing for the game, because it raised the bar for accessibility so high. Lowering that bar via autocuring has done great things for the game.
"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."
My point in saying that is one that is iterated to the umpteenth time by others, but a little less friendly and a little more accurate.
You can do autocuring on, and in no way is that going to prevent you from being dual break vivisected, because as you said, flaws, such as applying resto > mending while afflicted with slow salves. In that same way, it doesn't stop insta's, it doesn't teach you messages, hell. The reporting on option barely tells you anything. It isn't the end all be all, it's a good basic/starter system, that is insanely fast. Now ANYone who can log into Imperian as their first mud, spend 5 hours learning basic mud commands and style, can then go out and not die at lvl 5 to spiders in Caanae, and they can keep using the same thing all the way up to Iaat/Ebonmarrows, whatever. It doesn't make them worth piss in combat, and it doesn't make a difference for 1v1 or teams much more than Whyte's did, and prior to that, 50% of the combatants in the game were using manual heal aliases and linear triggers. And 100% of the combatants in the game pre-Whyte's would be less than 20% of the combatants now thanks to autocuring.
So, let's recap:
I definitely have benefitted from having autocuring now so I could spend more time with my fiance and 4 year old and not sit on the couch with the laptop for countless hours .
It was fun coding everything and making my own system at the time when I did have the free time but now I have real life work and real life problems I have to delve hours into, not just a fantasy world.
I will throw my hand in. and defend autocuring for the sake of being able to enjoy both worlds without sacrificing one for the other.