As before, my view on a usable combat system is that it needs to be either a fully manual or a fully automeated one. Since the fully manual ones are FPS/arcade style and depend heavily not only on lag, but also on player skill in handling their I/O devices, player's own I/O mechanisms and attributes (reaction speed, experience, etc.), they are IMO very much unsuited for something like PS that places emphasis on not the
player, but the
character. It's not surprising that in an FPS you don't usually find a rich set of skills and stats, even though that notion isn't completely absent in some.
Thusly, the only viable way is to make it in no way depend on the player or the player's location / wealth, and that means a fully automated system. Once combat begins, the server takes control of the characters, with the player being able to watch and do strategic control only, like select stance, select specific attacks, weapons, potions / magic, fleeing and so forth. Granted, this control option still leaves room for exploits as well as being affected by player / system specs, but in a
severely limited way.
Yes, using the system that is in place ATM can be fun. Exactly as much fun as glitching into normally inaccessible places, in fact. However, both are not in accordance with what PS wants to be: a realistic and nondicriminatory game. The devs are striving to remove the glitching part of PS, as it certainly is neither realistic (though often more realistic than the actual implementation ATM (climbing...)) nor IC (walking through walls isn't for everyone...) nor nondiscriminatory (some glitching requires good (ab)use of the controls). Therefore, the same must be done for combat, and the, or one of the, reasons little progress is being made there is because 1) so many people focus on combat as a cheap way of gaining "fame", 2) so many people are used to FPSses and love them (like me), but don't see (or want, or can't) the very different genre of these games that any move to better the system results in great whining throughout the playerbase, and I'm pretty sure that at least some devs suffer the same issues, while the glitchers usually are not only well aware that they are bypassing / abusing things, but don't create fame by doing it over and over, but by doing it first. It's still OOC and sort of cheating, though not malicious and not harmful (except for those unfortunate occasions where malicious "fighters" glitch into unreachable position and kill from there, usually targetting newbies).
Kerol's suggestions would work perfectly well with a fully (or almost fully) automated system, and I like most of them (collision detection
will be excessively abused, and I see a giant pile of /petitions asking GMs to remove block-griefers over and over again. I can completely shut down Ojaveda by creating an army of alts that simply idles blocking all entrances and passageways. While timing out would technically work, having to wait for the timeout each and every time one needs to pass through one of my 100 hypothetical alts will severely slow down gameplay, with absolutely no RP benefit at all). Even with only a few block-griefers in strategic locations like Harnquist's, gameplay can be severely disturbed, and we should never underestimate the extreme lengths people go to in order to cause grief to others (sometimes, mostly by the griefers, also referred to as "being funny").
To follow up on Kerol's sig quote:
No system can compensate the lack of personal opinion.
No system can compensate lack of common sense. And since common sense starts lacking immediately when there is any chance of getting away with it, if we don't very carefully design a system to be abuse-proof to the maximum degree possible, we will end up constantly asking ourselves "why is there so much abuse?".
