Part of my idea was that in the end, a block and an attack would be the same thing. In the meantime, however, the only skills I was thinking of were skills like a blade twirl, a kick, or jump kick+slash. These skills would be added on to the system in place now.

Oh.  . Well, i imagine that an equation wouldn't be that hard to make, but I don't know much about coding... Maybe it could be somthing like attack skill with current weapon type / your attack skill with your current weapon. The higher your level is, the lower amount of exp you will get in relation to the opponent. I don't know much about these things, though...

That's one of the reasons that the "off-balance" idea seemed so good. While your character is off-balance, you have some time to get your mouse on the button/hand on the key. It just adds some depth to the combat system and requires some skill from the player. Besides, fighting should be about player skill, not the numbers (imho). Just clicking and attacking is so easy. Deciding on skills to use and which attacks to use when is much better (like carrion fields vs. aetolia for all you MUD players out there). Also, I forgot to post my customary short-term/long-term list. Here it is, from easiest to hardest to implement:

1- add skills like blade twirling and kicking, but keep the main fighting system the same. You just click the skill to do it during the fight.
2- add the complete fighting overhaul and with skills and basic attacks, as suggested here
3- do #2 and add a special stat for balance
4- replace the health system with different body sections, which impairs your fighting. This goes with the bleed-to-death suggestion I saw a while back.

Ok... Up front, i'll just say that this would be REALLY hard to implement. It would require changing the entire combat system. But it seems like a good idea.

Here's my idea: Change combat to a list of skills. You target a monster, then click a skill to attack. You are put off balance for a second or two and can't attack. You then click another skill to attack again, etc. This would mean getting rid of the whole auto-attack system, though auto-defense would stay because it would be very hard to block AND attack at the same time. The fight just goes on like this. Same basic idea with ranging. Here's a screenshot with a basic idea of what the window for skills might look like (in the real version, the skill name would pop up on mouseover. For example, that boot at the bottom would have a name "Kick" pop up when you moused over it.)



The "basic attacks" are the attacks that everyone has ie. downwards slash from left to right. the "skills" are the special attacks that you learn through training ie. a blade twirl. the "standard skills" are other fighting skills that don't relate to your current weapon ie. a kick. The other thing that would work nicely is if dexterity/agility could be used to tell how long you are off-balance for. Also, some moves could be chained together ie. slash downwards from left to right, followed by a stab, which would put you off-balance for a longer time but do more damage.

Well, that's the idea, however hard it may be to implement. What do you think?

I have the same problem as skner. Usually the camera has correct colision dectection and stops when it hits a wall, but sometimes it can go through the walls and floor. On the Ojaroad, i found a piece of bread stuck in a wall by accident this way. It's really annoying because sometimes i see an onionskin of where my mouse was, and sometimes it sends me to the death realm (fell off the edge of the world bug). What is wrong? Is there a bug in camera collision detection? This isn't really important, but it's kinda annoying.

This thread has degraded from a real discussion to a taking-quotes-out-of-context war. But anyway. I know that the devs are trying to actually make the game rather than please the players for the time being. But the current city setup and respawn points totally confuses newbies. For one thing, finding the way to Ojaveda or Hydlaa is basically impossible without help. I think it could be solved with two things; one short-term and one long-term. A) add signposts to the road so newbies can find the road. B) Add more depth to both cities (especially Ojaveda), so a lot of travel is not nessicary. I also like the "choose where you live" idea, but it would need to be put in the char creation. To change it later, you need to pay an NPC in the city a decent sum of money. This would probably solve the problem of respawn, but the long-term plan would need to come first. that is my opinion, and i don't know if any of this would work.

This story is great! I love it. But will it ever be updated again? the last post was in 2005. This may be thread necromancy, but I just had to ask. The story is so addictive!

 

I have been using the java updater. I even suggested it in the step-by-step. But why can't PS just come with instructions? We need real instructions on the actual website in an easy place. There could even be links to the nessicary pages. Why not?