In Game Rules Improvements!!

[Talad]

Merry Christmas and Xiosiamas to everyone! We would like to update you on the recent changes we did to the game rules. First of all, we have built a new model which puts together the rule simulators we already had in place. Basically the tool allows to simulate the progression of a character and calculate the total time spent in performing certain tasks, the amount of experience, practice and money gained. This allowed us to identify some problems in the current progression, where certain skills were very unbalanced and slower than others.

Here is a summary of the changes:

• Monsters for tutorial: The monsters present in the tutorial have been made much easier to kill, so new players will have a smoother start.
• Quests: We have dramatically raised the amount of money and experience quests provide. They were unbalanced compared to fight/magic/crafting.
• Weapon decay and repair: Weapons and armors were decaying too fast, about 1 point of quality every 10 hits, which was quite unrealistic. The new ratio is 1 point every 100 hits. Also all basic weapons (Small Battle Axe, Short Sword, Club, ... ) have been lowered to a cost of less than 1000 tria, and we changed the repair formula to allow everyone to repair items cheaper than 1000. This should make life of new players easier. Also you can now see the instructions on how to use the repair kits in their descriptions.
• Spell Practice: Practice given when casting spells has been changed to vary based on the spell's realm and caster's skill rank. Basically when you are higher rank, you will gain more practice points by using higher realm spells. Before it was flat.
• Crafting: Practice gained from Crafting was previously only related to the number of transformations completed (example smelting one ore). The new formula takes into account the time spent in the process and gives practice point accordingly. We also fixed a bug which was calculating improperly the time of crafting when a secondary skill was not required. This should make crafting have a similar progression to fight/magic.
• Loot: The value of all monster loot (excluding random weapons/armors) have been rebalanced to take into account the actual strength of the monster and the probability of finding the item.
• Damage in combat: The damage dealt in combat (weapons or melee) by high rank characters was exponentially reaching too high numbers. This was allowing monsters to one-shot-kill players and viceversa removing much of the fun of combat. The overall damage formula has been changed to remove this exponential factor.
• Experience points: When killing a monster (magic/fight) the engine was comparing the power of the attacker and the victim and then assigning experience points based on the result. The problem was that only stats (str,agi,end,int,cha,wil) were considered. The new formula includes stats, weapon skills, magic skills, and armor skills. The result is a much more balanced number of experience points.
• Training stats: Stats (str,agi,end,int,cha,wil) were considerably faster to train than skills, up to the point you could max out in few days. This was obviously not the intent, so we slowed down the progression of stats considerably. This together with the other changes we did, will rebalance their usefulness in the game compared to skills.
• Overall progression: The overall progression of a character includes three main factors: experience, practice and money needed for trainings. Now that we have connected the most important formulas of the game into a single tool, we can more easily balance progression. Also we can calculate the amount of hours needed to reach a certain rank (example from 0 to 100 in sword) or to rank up by one. We have reviewed this and made the progression a bit slower than before. For example to go from rank 0 to 10 it doesn't require 10 minutes anymore, but 3-4 hours.

Considering the big amount of changes done, we will avoid doing other changes for some time, and we will wait for your feedback. Please test the system with new characters and with existing ones. We know it's not perfect by any means, but we hope the changes above are a significant progress to make the game more enjoyable and balanced.

Thanks to everyone who participated to the testing!

[Gilrond]

Spell Practice: Practice given when casting spells has been changed to vary based on the spell's realm and caster's skill rank. Basically when you are higher rank, you will gain more practice points by using higher realm spells. Before it was flat.

Something went very wrong with it today though. If yesterday that change was noticeable (i.e. higher realm spells really produced more practice and made progression faster than before, which really made using high realm spells enjoyable), today this regressed to something much worse than even before the first change. Basically now magic progression is almost unnoticeable, even after you cast 50 spells. I'm not sure if it was intended, but it definitely didn't make it any better to what it was before any changes were introduced. Can you please review what changes were made (looks like there were 2 changes for magic at least), and make the first change effective, reverting the second one?

UPDATE: Looks like there was a 3rd change, which made magic a bit better again. I'll test it to see how it works.

UPDATE2: It looks somewhat better now. Progress is not as rapid as after the first change, but still probably faster than before. The only missing part now are spells for realms 6-10 which will be naturally needed to progress in levels above 100 with normal rate.

[Gilrond]

Another observation. Using some skill boosters (magic rings, special items and etc.) you can get access to higher realm spells earlier. However using these spells doesn't produce more practice, in comparison to spells from the current character's realm for some reason. Is it intended? One could expect to see the increase even with boosting items.

[novacadian]

After an hour and a half of combat testing the only thing that can be said is that the recent changes are staggering for combat skill advancement. Hopefully the tool which has been mentioned can monitor my character, Venorel, to see how the changes have affected things for her.

My general observations is that one will be able to advance a new character quicker or the same in combat up to about 20-25% of max. After that if you ever max a character it will require no other life what-so-ever. That is based on watching the shield skill advancement; which was her lowest combat skill.

The weapons may wear down less per swing, but because you are doing half the damage than you did before, it appears that they may be wearing down quicker for mid-range characters. Quicker meaning per kill.

Armour did not wear down at all in the hour and half of testing yet that may have been mostly because of her constant circling of the mobs to keep on their rear or side so as to not be killed in the extended combats.

Progression of mid-range combat skills are estimated to be 1/5th advancement to what they had been. It may be less.

Hopefully this is a massive balancing that is still under way and being closely monitored.

There was an additional nasty affect of the changes. All the partial advancement (green line) seemed to be wiped during the changes. Not sure if this was because of some formula change or a straight integer update of those values instead of the original real numbers. The fractional amounts seem to have been lost/removed. This has made it a doubly bitter pill to take.

- Nova

[Edit : Mid-Range was used thinking still in the max skill 200 era. So the changes are even more sever than originally thought. ]

[bilbous]

Armor practice is still unbalanced as you can wear two pieces of each type of armor and get a level in each in about ten minutes bye summoning a swarm with Dazzling Lights or Darkness. I did this with the various ranks in the 60-80 range. There is an additional problem with doing this because with  8-10 tlokes, for example, the number of status messages overflows the buffer and the terminal fills with buffer full messages causing the client to stop responding until the practice messages stop upon ranking. Perhaps my fairly old equipment exacerbates this problem, though.

It would seem that there could be a limit to the number of critters that can attack at one time or perhaps in a swarm individual critters' attacks could be lumped together. It doesn't seem realistic that such an onslaught would generate much training. It might be better if armor training was a passive function of time spent wearing the armor whether in combat or not and with the rate of practice increased significantly while in combat. This would allow you to dispense with all those "you have gained some heavy armor practice" messages that fill up the buffer.

The last time I used this technique it generated 28 buffer full messages every second or two. I am not certain if the problem would be as bad if I wasn't running the game from a bash terminal session.

[Bonifarzia]

Thanks for these updates, Talad and everybody else involved.

Despite the fact that there was a considerable amount of graphical enhancements and new content added, I personally think that these are the best PlaneShift news for this year.
Tackling rule issues takes patience, intuition, time and courage... players are used to some game mechanics over time, and changing things will always result in complaints, no matter how imbalanced a changed rule used to be previously. I hope that with the new diagnostic tools, it will be more systematic and less cumbersome to achieve better balance, but even with that I guess it will still take plenty of trial and error.

Considering the changes to the combat damage formulas, that seems a much needed and reasonable thing. I have the feeling that not only the overall spread and peak damage went down by some big factor (something near a factor of 5 for Boni), but this also implies much more reasonable additive damage reduction. The big problem with that was the very frequent occurrence of both, one shot kills (as Talad mentioned) and failure to inflict any damage (even worse! See the various discussions about the uselessness of the knife and dagger weapon class). As a side note, this change is also directly connected to magic, as it should be possible now to assign much more reasonable values for spells that improve the characters defense (diamond skin etc.)

The only thing that puzzles me a bit are those training costs of physical and mental stats. All I have seen about this is a task on flyspray, but i doubt some 20'000 tria for one lesson at low end ranks are intended. Well, we will see how things will equilibrate.

Armor practice is still unbalanced [...] There is an additional problem with [...] the number of status messages [...] causing the client to stop responding  [...]

Well, that problem persists, but it has been there all the time. I think it would be much simpler to link armor practice with your own attack events: Each time you use a weapon, you also gain a bit of practice per slot of armor equipped.

By the way, mixing up armor types does not really speed up practice, as only one hit zone will count per NPC attack event. And I have observed the client freeze issue when finishing heavy armor training (some 30-40 seconds per rank in the end), and hitting the filter button in the stats widget seemed to help a lot.

[Tzarhunt]

Hey, excellent news! You might have just gotten me back in the game.

In the future, though, I'd like to see fighting with less hits and more damage (I know of no critter that can survive 127 blows of an axe, even if wielded by a beginner axeman; I think (but I wasn't there taking arrows or sword-slashes while wearing breastplate) either you hit and the armour blocks it, either you don't hit because the other guy blocks you, either you merely pass the armour and do almost nothing, or either it becomes horrible very quickly), but I do realize what big work on balancing it would mean.

Anyway, bravo on this last update!

[Eonwind]

Excellent Work Talad and all devs at work!

I think those improvement were really needed as they should improve the fun (and reduce the dieing risks) for newbies.
I also appreciate the rebalance in skills progression (even if it's going to be quite unpopular) because having around too many ungodly powerful char may sometimes be a little intimidating for newbies.

I also appreciated tria and animal parts re-factoring since it allows a char to approach the mobs best suited to his capability instead of blasting more powerful or one shot weeker mobs for hours just because intermediate mobs don't give out enough tria. This may improve the fun even if training is slower now.

Armor practice is still unbalanced [...] There is an additional problem with [...] the number of status messages [...] causing the client to stop responding  [...]

Well, that problem persists, but it has been there all the time. I think it would be much simpler to link armor practice with your own attack events: Each time you use a weapon, you also gain a bit of practice per slot of armor equipped.

About armour training I just want to point that if it is only trained while using weapons it is very unfair to the char that use magic instead of weapons... and we all knows armour training is necessary to survive the mobs

[Bonifarzia]

About armour training I just want to point that if it is only trained while using weapons it is very unfair to the char that use magic instead of weapons... and we all knows armour training is necessary to survive the mobs

You make a valid point, Eonwind.
On the other hand, one could argue that it makes sense to have higher synergy between weapon and armor skills, though. Or in other words: "The best armor is to keep out of range." (Italian proverb.)
All of this depends on your personal understanding or flavor for rules related to combat, armors, and ranged attacks.
For example, I always had the impression that it does not really make sense to have a stronger damage reduction value with higher ranks of armor training. The skill should define your mobility, stamina and ability to engage in combat, while the type and quality of armor alone should provide the damage reduction. However, such a system would be less convenient to set up in terms of character progression and balancing, so the skill does act on the observable that fits in the sense of simple game mechanics rather than realism. Either way, there are always compromises, and the suggestion was meant as a simple workaround. I hope that I am not going off topic here.

[Zalya]

Despite the fact that there was a considerable amount of graphical enhancements and new content added, I personally think that these are the best PlaneShift news for this year.

I agree! This is a step in the right direction

[Mordaan]

• Quests: We have dramatically raised the amount of money and experience quests provide. They were unbalanced compared to fight/magic/crafting.

A couple of notes about quests.  You may have noticed that for a lot of these quests, the tria has been pretty good but the exp was really low (max of 1000 exp per quest).  So not sure how much the tria has changed but certainly the exp increase is indeed quite dramatic.   

Also note that this change effects quests that use give scripts.  Many of the older quests use a manual "give exp" command rather than scripts, so the values are static.  We are in the process of converting those so they will all use the same convention.  There are a lot of them so it will take some time.  Just be aware that those may not yet be effected by this change, but it's an ongoing process and we should be done in a few weeks.

[bilbous]

I do not understand the comment about only training armor while using weapons. You only train armor when standing toe to toe with a mob but it doesn't matter if you are swinging an axe or gesticulating madly to conjure an effect, or did I miss something?

Nice to hear that about the quests, I wondered why malco was so stingy for lunch while gulm was so generous for his package.

[Aramara Meibi]

Training stats: Stats (str,agi,end,int,cha,wil) were considerably faster to train than skills, up to the point you could max out in few days. This was obviously not the intent, so we slowed down the progression of stats considerably. This together with the other changes we did, will rebalance their usefulness in the game compared to skills.

before you could just simply pump tria into these stats to train them, that's why they were so easy and quick to raise, no skill or action was needed past raising the funds. How exactly have you slowed a simple financial transaction down? Make it more expensive? Deny the use of credit cards?

[Gilrond]

Credit scrolls rather

[Jilata]

I don't seem to get any practice for axe while fighting with one. Is that normal? I do get practice for my armor when I get hit...

Whoops... forgot to add: I tried fighting with dlayos and I am level 199 in axe and light armor. It still should be trained, since I bought a level some time ago.