Split discussion: Improving Imperian - server-side offense

Eoghan

This discussion was created from comments split from: Improving Imperian.

Gurn

Idea: One of the biggest learning curves to Imperian is coding. If you want to get good at combat, you have to code.

This has been largely mitigated by autocuring, which is awesome. However, offences still have to be coded from the ground up, and anyone who came into the game who wants to fight has to first sit down with a "lua for dummies" book.

That's just not inviting.

Taking this from other MMOs, why don't we have each profession have some basic combos and useful sets already pre-programmed in?


I haven't exactly got this idea fleshed out or have good examples, but for instance, a Runeguard can enter in "1" and it'll do DSL TARGET STRYCHNINE/STRYCHNINE/FLARE SOWULU AT TARGET, and "2" will do DSL TARGET STRYCHNINE/STRYCHNINE/FLARE PITHAKHAN AT TARGET  or something like that.

Guild Wars 2 does something similar where as you continue to hit a certain attack, it'll continue down a path of attacks(okay, maybe not the best example since it's been years since I've played that game, but), and we can probably do that with this as well. Not the best toxin stack in the world for a Renegade, for instance, but maybe a basic one that can make them feel useful in a team, or otherwise a series of button presses that can make them feel like they can fight.

Khizan

That's not really coding, that's more like 'making a basic alias' and it's the kind of thing they really need to learn for themselves and the kind of thing that anybody can manage. Where the coding burden becomes problematic is when you are dealing with affliction tracking and such things, and that's something that really can't be avoided; having a 'g-tracker' to go along with the g-bot would be ludicrous.

That aside, how do you gauge it? I mean, either the toxin stack is good enough to kill somebody and thusly does their work for them or it's not good enough to kill somebody and you're giving your newbie Renegade a nerf gun and sending him out into the jungle.

Bellentine

Gurn said:

Idea: One of the biggest learning curves to Imperian is coding. If you want to get good at combat, you have to code.

This has been largely mitigated by autocuring, which is awesome. However, offences still have to be coded from the ground up, and anyone who came into the game who wants to fight has to first sit down with a "lua for dummies" book.

That's just not inviting.

Taking this from other MMOs, why don't we have each profession have some basic combos and useful sets already pre-programmed in?


I haven't exactly got this idea fleshed out or have good examples, but for instance, a Runeguard can enter in "1" and it'll do DSL TARGET STRYCHNINE/STRYCHNINE/FLARE SOWULU AT TARGET, and "2" will do DSL TARGET STRYCHNINE/STRYCHNINE/FLARE PITHAKHAN AT TARGET  or something like that.

Guild Wars 2 does something similar where as you continue to hit a certain attack, it'll continue down a path of attacks(okay, maybe not the best example since it's been years since I've played that game, but), and we can probably do that with this as well. Not the best toxin stack in the world for a Renegade, for instance, but maybe a basic one that can make them feel useful in a team, or otherwise a series of button presses that can make them feel like they can fight.

As someone who can't code my way out of a  paper bag, but want to get involved with these things, what I found super amazing OMG helpful was Iniar's "Eden" machine.  I'm not even using the right words.  But essentially it does what's described.  It takes the 'hard coding' aspect away and says "Here's your class, this is what it does.  Go for it".

It provides a baseline capacity for combat based interaction and allows newbies to be proficient and capable, within the capacity of their class.  

The mode of thinking that resembles "You gotta code here, son" is outdated and from the same school of "Well I had to do it, so do you".  Those opportunities exist to expand on already available systems.  However, if you want new combatants in a PVP centric world, you (the player base of alpha PKers) needs to look at alternatives to engage those who cannot (and will not) learn to code.

In a marketplace saturated with competent, engaging and well polished PVP experiences, simply saying "This is how its done" leads to a dying realm filled with PK dinosaurs.

Choose your outcome.

Linslet

Eden is pretty holy balls amazing. Iniar is a cool guy and even helped me to overhaul what his terrible defiler buttons were doing.

Khizan

The big problem with that is that there are essentially two different kinds of offenses in Imperian.

• Affliction: These require competent affliction tracking to really be pushed successfully; anything else is just throwing afflictions at the wall and hoping something sticks. This is a fairly complicated task that requires a low-to-moderate level of coding ability, a high amount of game knowledge, and a fair amount of dedication to get working properly, much like healing systems were. So it sounds like it would be a prime candidate for the g-bot treatment.
  
  The problem with that is that serverside affliction tracking will turn Septus from a monster into a monster++ while moving the B-list to maybe an B+ and making several affliction classes outright overpowered. Most people won't bother to take advantage of it and will still suck; you will still have to know how to respond to the tracking. If you avoid that by making a full-fledged offensive bot you might as well just implement a system of coinflips because combat is largely going to devolve into whose class has the faster g-offense.
  
  
• Everything Else: None of these offenses are particularly code-intensive; the difficulty here is almost entirely in execution. Tracking limb damage, dual-pressuring health/mana, blowing people up with damage, etc. This stuff requires almost no coding experience to handle, especially now that we have the limb damage warning messages.
  
  The problem with these offenses is that I cannot give you a 1, 2, 3 sequence of simple aliases that will push a real offense against anybody who has half a clue, because this all depends on reading your opponent and reacting properly. Feinting at the right time, avoiding parry, etc. This is all skill-based; the buttons are dirt simple but you still have to know when to push them.  Again, making these offenses work out of the can without that skill would require a straight up Fazlee-esque "push F1 repeatedly to kill" system.

The solution to the first problem is that they should stop making so goddamn many affliction classes when there's only like 4 people who play them properly. The solution to the second problem is learning how to use the buttons. And regardless, they should fix the in-game alias system and make it less of a reeking pile of crap.

Having to set the alias target with "st tar <target> is ridiculous, there's no reason why there can't be a generic target variable that you can set with 't' and use as &target.  Furthermore, there's no good reason why separators shouldn't work in an in-game alias. Maybe just make the pipe a generic alias separator or something. I should be able to do

setalias sow dsl &target strychnine strychnine|flare sowulu at &target

and then just be able to do 

t bob
sow

to dsl/runeflare Bob. 

That, combined with autocuring, would be enough functionality for many classes to play work decently well straight out of the box with basically no coding knowledge at all. I could implement most all of my offenses with those aliases. Outrider would be a bit wonky cause I'd have to cycle my surges, but most non-tracking offenses with that kind of setup would be no problem at all.

Dicene

As @Khizan says above, there is no real difficulty in execution with most affliction classes. These classes also tend to be more powerful than other classes. As such, giving everyone a nextDstab button (or Iluv's system or any other system that does ALL the work for you) would churn out a bunch of people with no real skill or understanding of what they are doing that are dominating in pvp because Renegade/Saboteur is so extremely powerful compared to other classes.

As @Khizan also states above, there are a lot of classes that play well without any tracking outside of rebounding and shield. Even if you've never coded a thing in your life, tracking a single rebounding variable and doing one if <blah> then <blah> else <blah> end conditional in each alias/macro should still be very doable. If you're not able to manage that at this point, there are tons of starter guides for all the major clients. If you have any questions about getting the examples in those tutorials/guides/forum posts working, a lot of us are glad to answer.

For reference, classes that can be played without anything more than rebounding/shield tracking, simple aliases or macros, and highlights for important stuff: Templar, Monk, Priest, Wardancer(artifacted for damage, pretty sure they can still suicide drop for kills), Ranger, Predator, Outrider(bloodfreeze or shatter), Druid, Mage(lavablast route), Runeguard(battleaxe with the 5 flares you use for pushing damage), Bard, Deathknight, Diabolist(artifacted for damage, or focusing mana). I'm not familiar enough with Defiler or Summoner to guarantee it, but I'm willing to bet that I could set you up with highlights and less than 10 macros and you could make a very solid showing in either class.

Bellentine

So guys, just remember:

If you can't code, just code!

Also, if you don't -know- your class, you don't deserve to win.

And we wonder why the population is in decline.

To keep in line with the thread - I hate the entrenched views of those who seek to maintain the status quo, without reasoning beyond "But this is how it -is-"

Dicene

I'm going to try to respond to that as cordially as I can, but with the rude tone you're taking, I can't guarantee that I'll succeed:

If you can't code on the rudimentary level that is required for simple one-line aliases, but you have the time to spend playing a game, you could invest a very small portion of your time to learn. Again, if you don't get it from what you read, there are plenty of people who will gladly answer any questions you have.

If you are entirely unwilling to put in the hour or two it would take you to learn the very, very basics of coding, and are convinced that the entire game should be catered to that unwillingness to learn, then yeah, this likely isn't the best game for you.

On your second point. Yes, in anything that you play, if you don't know(not sure if you had some special meaning you meant with the - - on either side of it) anything about the class you're playing, you're going to do poorly. If you are unwilling to actually learn how your class works, then no, you don't deserve to win.

Third, we know why the population is in decline. It's declining for the same reason that the population of most MUD's have declined. However, Garryn and co. have done a nice job(in my opinion) of adding combat paths to 5 of the last 6 classes they've revamped or released, and I'd imagine he's only getting better at it as he goes. (not to mention the plethora of other things he has done to make life easier for those without extensive coding knowledge including, but not limited to, Autocuring, Inline envenoming, the move away from illusion-based combat, removal of retardation(so you don't need to code contingencies around everything you do), IFEQBAL/IFEQ/IFBAL, Generic Def Messages, and Generic Aff Messages.)

Fourth, this is "Improving Imperian", not "I HATE", and if you didn't see any reasoning in either of our posts beyond "but this is how it -is-", you didn't actually read them.

Edit: Oh, and @Khizan, I agree that a standardized target variable(for more than just the simplest attack commands) would be great, but you can also just "setalias t settarget tar" and then use "t bob".

Bellentine

Got my threads crossed.  Don't cross the streams!

Jules

Jules said:

The problem with learning to code for people like us is that nearly ALL tutorials truly are written for people who are already immersed in coding, and have been for years, but don't know that particular language.  This absolutely includes Lua, beyond the occasional, wonderful tutorial on very basic things (such as Vadi's tutorial on basic GMCP).  

It's frustrating because I really do feel like it's something many of us mostly can't teach ourselves (not to the level where you're able to track things for sure).  You need to have a very particular sort of knack to teach yourself coding from the ground up and be any good at it.  Worse, most people who are good at it do have that knack, and can't understand why you don't just pick it up to the point where you really grasp how things are working (which again, regrettably, seems to include most tutorial authors).  So people in game try to help... bless them, but even when they are trying to be patient, you can almost hear their exasperation at your failure to grasp the "obvious".  

And because they are self-taught, coders do things according to what they've figured out, or what they've picked up from fellow coders.  For example, I had NEVER seen people use the additional trigger lines in Mudlet for anything other than multi-line triggers, and was floored to learn that you can simply put alternative conditions on those lines, rather than trying to pipe them (which for some reason is occasionally tricky, and simply doesn't work, even when I feel pretty sure of what I've put and that it really *should* work).  For whatever reason, there's a small "cultural" difference, where Achaean coders seem to universally prefer piping everything, and at least some Imperian coders would say "why not just use the extra lines, that's why they're there, duh".  

And then, sometimes things just act funny.  I recently had a trigger that looked like this:

^(\w+)\'s aura of weapons rebounding disappears\.$

Several well-respected people reassured me that the trigger should absolutely work, and that ideally, you want to escape everything you can, but another very knowledgeable person nearly always does such a trigger like so:

 ^(\w+)\'s aura of weapons rebounding disappears.$

By what I've learned about regex, I actually do know why the first one should work just fine.  But it wasn't working fine, the second version always worked, and then the first one, which is considered more "proper" by many because it doesn't include any unnecessary wildcards magically started working (so far as I can tell).  This is the sort of thing that pretty much drives a would-be coder to despair, not that I'm not still interested/slowly picking things up.    

In short, Bellentine, I feel your pain, and Imperian would very likely benefit in pretty much every way imaginable from an svo type system, which I promise has not turned non-coms into PK Gods, and which IRE should frankly be paying Vadi for in terms of nabbing and retaining customers over in Achaea, but I don't know that it will happen.  svo doesn't do anything like automating your offense, however.  It mainly just does an amazing job of keeping up your defenses, providing SA by reducing spam and beautiful highlighting, and pretty amazing healing.  Still quite powerful, though.  

aaaaaand, back to another however many pages of reading for tonight  At least it's C.S. Lewis.  I love C.S. Lewis, right?  Still?  

Khizan

Bellentine said:

Also, if you don't -know- your class, you don't deserve to win.

If you don't know how to play the game, you shouldn't win at the game outside of maybe a round or two due to dumb luck. This seems pretty standard throughout any kind of game ever. 

If you can't lane, you're going to lose at LoL. If you can't aim, you're going to lose at an FPS. If you can't make a shot, you're going to lose at basketball. If you don't know how the pieces move, you're going to lose at chess. And if you don't know how to break limbs, you're going to suck as a monk. The solution to all these things isn't "I should get an aimbot because I'm bad at Counterstrike and you aren't", it's "I should learn how to play the game that I want to win."

You do not need to be an Ultrix or an Eoghan or a Garryn or a Whyte to make basic attacks for, say, a monk. My monk attacks use highlights on the limb break warnings and attack strings that look like "IFEQBAL stand|||unwield left|||unwield right|||snk $target left|||snk $target left". You don't need to know how to code to do that kind of thing. When you take out my fancy wielding detection, my outrider aliases boil down to "target limb|spear stab target toxin|surge animal". Druid attacks are "evoke wisp at dude|empower thingy|quarterstaff stab dude toxin|naturebind root to attack".

The key to winning as those classes isn't coding or fancy affliction tracking, it's knowing how to play your class and knowing which attack to use in which scenario. I don't know why you think you should be winning fights if you're not willing to put in that much effort. You can get by in teams with "push these 3 buttons over and over", but fighting on your own or in small groups is going to take more from you.

Iniar

Khizan said:

giving your newbie Renegade a nerf gun and sending him out into the jungle.

Hehe the only class I didn't have the heart to do that to were Diabolists before Ghast form.

I think a lot of us underestimate or have forgotten how alien Imperian must seem to truly new players, and conceptually how difficult the whole thing can be for some:- linking variables to triggers, or even understanding how variables work. @Ultrix knows what I am talking about. Some people genuinely don't know how to handle abstract concepts, and that's ok, but it just means that they're likely to discontinue playing (or become a non-com).

That said, it's not a big deal. Like I've told Ultrix, it's not going to cost a competent coder/client-user more than 2-3 hours to write+package a fool-proof really basic alias set for the entirety of AM (or Magick) in your favourite client flavour. (( i.e. just get off your **** and do it already ))

There is scope for the Imperian community (and/or IRE in general) to write some really, really basic tutorials. Step-by-step, picture-by-picture. Instead of you know... continuing to talk about it.

I think combining these two would (a) allow genuinely new players to 'just jump in' and (b) provide written material to help them understand what is happening in case they wanted to learn more (I'm guessing most don't).

tldr: if you really cared, you would have done it already. But what do I know.

Krysaliss

I would like to like/upvote/<3 Iniar's last post like twelve more times. Just FYI.

Dicene

@Iniar I can't tell if you're complaining because most guilds/cities don't have OOC resources or if you are complaining because we haven't taken the time to compile all the existing resources into a mega list to take away the huge work it takes to google "very basic guide to cmud", or if you are complaining because neither circle has a free kill-button system available? The resources are EVERYWHERE. Khizan, you, and myself have all written out lengthy introductions to various aspects of coding and IRE specific things, from basic alias tutorials, to regex information, to basic combat primers, to the basics of aff-tracking. This information is all out there, and every possible coding question has been asked somewhere, you just have to put in a modicum of effort to look for it. Hell, there are resources in all the major combat clans I've been in(including the general Magick combat clan), in the MUDLET clan, and in other clans like MK. I don't active ask all my novices "Hey, do you need help with any coding/scripting/aliasing/triggering/mudletting concerns?", but I have never turned away anybody that has asked for help, and I usually only get impatient with people when they show a complete unwillingness to put in even the slightest bit of effort to figure it out or find the answer on their own.

As far as giving out pre-built systems, if you're asking me to give out a system basic enough for people with 0 ability to code and 0 interest to learn, I've got 0 interest in giving out an F1 kill button. If you want get the tools to Ranger or Druid well enough to be useful in teams, all you need is a single alias or macro. I'll tell novices to "tipslash <target> strychnine"(superior dps to qjab and less of a loss when you hit rebounding/shield) or "evoke wisp metallic glowing <target>|evoke empower rockfall|quarterstaff stab <target> strychnine|naturebind shred <target>" all day, but giving out a system that does that for them is taking away their opportunity to learn the single most basic part of mudding, which is building an alias. That is ONE alias, but with the other changes we've seen(autocuring, etc) it's all they need to participate in team combat. If someone is unwilling to learn how to set up that ONE alias in the client that they've chosen(with the seemingly unlimited about of support that is available in game from people like myself or in various forms should they have the capability to google), they are not putting in any effort and I'm not going to reward that kind of attitude.

If you're asking me or Khizan or Edmund to put out our own Eden, I've personally never liked the idea of giving out entire combat systems. I'll export my aff-tracker, druid tracking triggers, etc and teach people how to use it with simple conditionals all day, but I've given out my full Druid system twice, and I regret it in both situations. Part of the "skill" requirement for having a solid offense beyond the limb-break classes is learning how to track things like poisonwisp and avoid repeating them. If you do ALL of that work for someone, you're elevating them from one-button Druid to (not quite) Eldreth for nothing, and demeaning all the work that anyone who has put in to get to that point. Giving out entire Fazlee F1 systems or Iluv Next-Dstab systems to people ruins the part of combat where people have to actually put in effort to be good at what they do. Sure, you get a significant head-start if you already know how to code, but that's the nature of MUD combat. If you take that away from MUD combat, what you're left with is a bunch of people pushing their killbutton with no idea what is even happening, and THAT(in my eyes), is scarier than losing the few novices that have absolutely no willingness to put any effort at all into understanding the game and the environment that they play it in.

If for some reason someone is unable to handle googling "basic tutorial for <client>", here are some things I found in 10 minutes of looking(also some posts and comments from this very same forum, for people that are unwilling to use the search feature):

General:

HELP ALIAS

http://www.ironrealms.com/coding-for-newbie-vol-1

http://forums.imperian.com/discussion/comment/13498/#Comment_13498

http://forums.imperian.com/discussion/comment/23390/#Comment_23390

http://www.ironrealms.com/game-mods

Mudlet:

http://wiki.mudlet.org/w/Manual:Introduction

http://forums.imperian.com/discussion/comment/13106/#Comment_13106
http://forums.imperian.com/discussion/comment/16207/#Comment_16207
http://forums.imperian.com/discussion/comment/16489/#Comment_16489

http://forums.imperian.com/discussion/comment/16498/#Comment_16498

http://forums.imperian.com/discussion/comment/18095/#Comment_18095

http://www.mudlet.org/asciidoc/manual.html

http://www.achaea.com/forum/basic-gmcp-tutorial-for-mudlet-users

http://www.achaea.com/forum/getting-started-on-mudlet

http://forums.achaea.com/discussion/1717/mudlet-video-tutorials

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URbwW41LBcQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzmcfU_Ri4Q

MUSHClient:

http://mushclient.com/faq

http://mushclient.com/forum/bbshowpost.php?id=6030

http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/bbshowpost.php?bbsubject_id=7966

Cmud:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1HmKXLVjyo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImJYLUwmTKY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PInAdnVj_UI

http://www.achaea.com/forum/scripting-tutorial-for-zmud

http://xaruthan.yolasite.com/the-basics.php

Edit: Might I also point out that in this day and age, there are even video tutorials for those that need something more advanced than a text tutorial. If you would prefer to spend <x> minutes on the forum ranting about your inability to code an alias and can't be bothered to spend those few minutes instead watching someone explain it to you, there's not much that can be done to help you.

Iniar

I'm not complaining. Am I? I just thought if Gurn wanted a progressive thing, it's fairly easy for him to do so. Like, I'd rather the players do/share it rather than getting it done by admin.

Also, that is a nice list.

Dicene

Iniar said:

That said, it's not a big deal. Like I've told Ultrix, it's not going to cost a competent coder/client-user more than 2-3 hours to write+package a fool-proof really basic alias set for the entirety of AM (or Magick) in your favourite client flavour. (( i.e. just get off your **** and do it already ))

<snip>

tldr: if you really cared, you would have done it already. But what do I know.

I had a hard time finding any way to interpret the above that wasn't in some form a dig at Khizan(or myself). =P

Iniar

No offense meant. :P

Cassius

Bashing PVP already exists in large scale team combat [AND EVERYONE COMPLAINS ABOUT IT].  Every class has something they can do to support team combat in essentially 1 or 2 aliases.  No effort doesn't and shouldn't make a PVP superstar.

Does anybody really think reducing more aspects of PVP to bashing-equivalent will really be an improvement to the game?

tldr: From my point of view (which is perhaps somewhat biased), it's not a learning curve or lack of Bashing-PVP systems that ruin a game like Imperian, it's widespread laziness and a proclivity to whining that does. [this is not directed at any one specific person, just a general observation]

Kabaal

I'm not sure if something like IRE-provided tracking or other tools are supposed to make everyone a god or only help the elite, given the arguments here. It all reminds me of the caterwauling about IMTS being the end of the world, though.

That said, I'm maybe just okay with accommodating a bit of laziness in something that isn't anywhere in the promoted aspects of the game to make things better overall. And if the game can't handle people playing it, then I don't think it's the players' fault.

Signed,

Someone who loves coding.

Krysaliss

Yea, this all strikes me as a reiteration of the same freak out that happened when Whyte's curing became widely available. Combat is dying because people can get in without putting in all the world. IN MY DAY, WE HAD TO CODE UPHILL BOTH WAYS. <-- This last bit is a paraphrase of that freakout. Not a reflection of what's currently being said. Before people snark at me about it.

Not everyone has the time or inclination to learn any aspect of coding. For those who have been doing it for years, understand that learning PK for someone new to it or even new to MUDs as a whole is a -daunting- task. The less painful you can make the learning curve, the more people you'll have willing to participate in it. 

More fighters, even mediocre ones, is good for the game. Good for PK. Having a smash-button system that allows moderately useful assistance means that you'll have people join who would otherwise be intimidated. Some of them will never graduate beyond smash-button. Some will get the PK bug and start learning beyond that. 

I see no downside here.

You (directed to anyone who feels insulted) don't have to do it, but -someone- doing it would be good for the game overall. (And I am super excited by the general trend from Imperian's admin to do this on their end, with autocuring and the advancements to the web-client)

Wysrias

I understand that coding isn't for everyone, but I have to question - if coding prowess (or even basic capacity) isn't supposed to be a measure of skill in the game, what is? Should it solely be your monetary investment? Getting into basic combat requires nothing more than a handful of aliases. In my experience, this takes less than an hour to teach nearly anyone, even the most coding inept. Advancing beyond that point requires a combination of coding (again, nothing extravagant - you can seriously do this all by understanding aliases, variables, triggers, and IF statements) AND learning the intricacies of the combat system itself. These go hand in hand and provide an ample learning process.

I think stating that requiring some amount of coding to excel in PvP is an effort to maintain the status quo is shortsighted and honestly kind of selfish. It's a core part of the game - combat strength does not scale with level, it doesn't scale with time, it mainly scales with knowledge. If you don't want to learn how to play the game, you can't expect to do well. I am an abysmal coder (seriously - don't look at my system, you will cry if you have any appreciation for efficiency), but I've spent the time to learn the little details so that I can participate. It's not part of maintaining any status quo to expect people to make some amount of effort in that vein - it's simply an integral part of the game.

If someone can jump into the game without any coding knowledge or any understanding of combat specifics, why should they win?

That being said, I can get behind attempting to lower the barrier to make it easier to jump into the code. Things that I think would help:

- Actual documentation for the web client. Seriously, why bother with the fancy buttons and bars if your support documentation is literally two pages and can be summarized as "learn javascript"? It seems like a complete waste of effort, because anyone who already knows how to code will probably be using a separate client.

- Maybe a configuration output for 3P afflicition messages (e.g. blah blah shuffles his feet impatiently could give an additional line of "Wysrias has been afflicted with impatience."). I'm not talking Aetolia discernment-level information output, despite how easy it makes coding tracking systems, but every step that can be taken to remove trigger line collection is a step towards lowering the bar for new players who don't have access to a pre-built system.

- Configurable/standardized messages for important combat states - rebounding, prone, shielded, prismatic. Making these jump out server side reduces the need for automation, at least in smaller skirmishes, and standardizing the messages (probably, again, with a config) would let players skip past the fluff and line collection aspect.

Krysaliss

Eh. I watched Sethren fight for years. Coding prowess had -nothing- to do with his skill in PK. That comes from knowledge and experience. His coding was terrible and his system broke about every 2.5 seconds mid-fight. I've also known a few -excellent- coders who were sub-par fighters. Coding is a part of what makes a fighter. Purchasing power can help too, but a -good- fighter is someone who spends the time learning everything they can about the skills in the game and is adaptable. 

Aetolia has a number of prebuilt system with -full- AI for combat. Lots of people have them. It lets people who would normally be non-coms participate in their conflict mechanisms, but it doesn't automatically make them exceptional fighters. It's not possible to do that sort of AI here. So that's not even a concern. It'll still take knowledge and practice for someone to go beyond mediocre. Which is all that's necessary to let more folks participate.

TL;DR version

It's about letting people participate. Not giving them an instant-win button. If they want to get good, they'll still need to put in work and learn the skills.

Cassius

Krysaliss said:

More fighters, even mediocre ones, is good for the game. Good for PK. Having a smash-button system that allows moderately useful assistance means that you'll have people join who would otherwise be intimidated. Some of them will never graduate beyond smash-button. Some will get the PK bug and start learning beyond that. 

I guess the point several people have already tried to make is that this already exists between autocuring and 1 or 2 simple aliases.

Krysaliss

Yea, I know people think that. How is that working out for magick/demonic drawing in new combatants? 

Note: Resources, really, and education. If you want people to come out and play, they have to feel confident that they can do it. If it's as simple as 'bash alias, set autocuring to A, B, C', then make sure people know that. Put those resources in game in an obvious place, grab newbs and tell them, take them in the arena. I'm not seeing that reflected in the help files I have access to now. 

Wysrias

Krysaliss said:

Eh. I watched Sethren fight for years. Coding prowess had -nothing- to do with his skill in PK. That comes from knowledge and experience. His coding was terrible and his system broke about every 2.5 seconds mid-fight. I've also known a few -excellent- coders who were sub-par fighters. Coding is a part of what makes a fighter. Purchasing power can help too, but a -good- fighter is someone who spends the time learning everything they can about the skills in the game and is adaptable. 

Aetolia has a number of prebuilt system with -full- AI for combat. Lots of people have them. It lets people who would normally be non-coms participate in their conflict mechanisms, but it doesn't automatically make them exceptional fighters. It's not possible to do that sort of AI here. So that's not even a concern. It'll still take knowledge and practice for someone to go beyond mediocre. Which is all that's necessary to let more folks participate.

Comparing Imperian's combat setup to Aetolia's is apples and oranges. Aetolia has two things Imperian does not: static curing trees for everything but the tree tattoo, and Discernment, which gives 3P messages for all cures that do not follow a static curing order. This means you can nearly 100% automate it, and as a result, the combat metagame has evolved around having free information and tight tracking (Discernment has existed for over half a decade, and static cure trees came from Achaea). Classes are balanced around this aspect - you have a much smaller margin for error in your affliction delivery, because everyone is given enough information to push you 90% of the way there.

EDIT (so I don't double post):

Krysaliss said:

Yea, I know people think that. How is that working out for magick/demonic drawing in new combatants? 

The initial coding hurdle is not the problem, that lies more in the core functionality of the classes. Every single class in Demonic has a basic "autobash" combat command, but unlike AM's classes, these are usually accessory to the core strategy of the class. The other issue is that 3/6 of Demonic's classes ARE heavily tied into affliction strategies, and there's no way around that - it's simply what those class archetypes are. Automating affliction tracking won't fix the fact that you need to understand what afflictions do and why you're delivering them, and as you learn the knowledge core to affliction strategies, you learn to code alongside it. I don't think there's a magic fix for this, especially in handing out tracking for free.

The point is that you need to learn what you're doing. AM gets a leg up here because their classes all do damage with every primary attack, and that's simply how their classes have been designed.

Krysaliss said:

Note: Resources, really, and education. If you want people to come out and play, they have to feel confident that they can do it. If it's as simple as 'bash alias, set autocuring to A, B, C', then make sure people know that. Put those resources in game in an obvious place, grab newbs and tell them, take them in the arena. I'm not seeing that reflected in the help files I have access to now.

This, I agree with. I think there's a lot of value in approaching other players for help, but I understand that it's not always an option. I will always be behind having more resources available, but I can't get behind letting people skip that. It's a core facet of the game, and I think we stand to lose much more than we gain by bypassing it entirely.

Krysaliss

..which is why I said that they have AI and we don't. I'm saying they -have- systems that do all the work for people and it results in a lot more participation, but not instantaneously fantastic fighters. We can't do the same level of automation, so even if we give people the tools, they aren't going to become instant elite. 

I'm not comparing the curing, I'm talking about the impact of easily accessible, simple-to-use systems have on the conflict in the game. There are still lots of players who don't participate, but a larger percentage do, and a lot of them are not people I'd see involved in PK here. 

Ultrix

Iniar said:

I think a lot of us underestimate or have forgotten how alien Imperian must seem to truly new players, and conceptually how difficult the whole thing can be for some:- linking variables to triggers, or even understanding how variables work. @Ultrix knows what I am talking about. Some people genuinely don't know how to handle abstract concepts, and that's ok, but it just means that they're likely to discontinue playing (or become a non-com).

I wholeheartedly agree with this. From my limited experience here (coming up on a RL year in like...2 months, woo!), there are a great number of people in this game who do not understand what the concept of a 'variable' is, why you would want to use one (or how to do that), or what the difference between a 'trigger' and an 'alias' is. I also agree with @Jules's statement that even the introductory materials (and especially the Mudlet documentation/tutorials) seem to presume that the reader has a basic, fundamental understanding of the "why", and just needs to know the syntax/semantics of the "how".

Teaching the "why" is, however, somewhat of a hand-holding, time consuming process.  It's why when people ask me for help, I will not do things like use Teamviewer to "fix" someone's code for them. I want people to learn how to do things for themselves, and learn how to debug their own code, so the next time they have a problem, they can at least make an attempt to try to fix it first before asking others for help. Different people learn this at different rates, though, and I suppose some people never really grasp the abstract concept idea at all. 

Having said that, I would love it if the administration made some sort of effort to help people with this initial "What is coding and why do I want to learn how to do this?" hurdle. I don't think the answer is necessarily to release a preset group of aliases though, because at that point, you've done the work for the person. I don't know the answer to this, but I know some people have thrown around the idea of having "Code Guides" (much like the newbie guides we have) that are "paid" positions (working for peanut credits). I think this might be something worth exploring more.

Iniar said:

That said, it's not a big deal. Like I've told Ultrix, it's not going to cost a competent coder/client-user more than 2-3 hours to write+package a fool-proof really basic alias set for the entirety of AM (or Magick) in your favourite client flavour. (( i.e. just get off your **** and do it already ))

One issue that I always see with people "releasing" anything for free (or for pay) is that the people who are recipients of said system expect that there will also be support for use of that system. I know the countless hours that @Iniar put into things when trying to train people to use his Eden system, and I applaud him for that. The problem is, unless you have such kind-hearted people in each circle* who are willing to put in the time and the effort to release and offer support, it's just going to amount to a situation where someone downloads a package and goes "Zuh? How do I use this?" and if no one is around to help that person, you're basically stuck at ground zero again.

*On this issue, I know of 2 people in AM who are decent/good at Mudlet, 2 people in Magick (@Dicene, I'm counting you as Magick here), and 2-3 in Demonic. That is not a lot of people to ask for support from, and it really does put a(n unfair?) burden on those handful of individuals to support an entire circle.

Cassius

Krysaliss said:

Yea, I know people think that. How is that working out for magick/demonic drawing in new combatants? 

Note: Resources, really, and education. If you want people to come out and play, they have to feel confident that they can do it. If it's as simple as 'bash alias, set autocuring to A, B, C', then make sure people know that. Put those resources in game in an obvious place, grab newbs and tell them, take them in the arena. I'm not seeing that reflected in the help files I have access to now. 

I don't really see people not being drawn to Magick/Demonic due to coding skill.  I only see people being drawn to places that suit their enjoyment and game experience.  I mean, @Iniar has published a full system for demonic, so that clearly can't be the reason that demonic doesn't have the numbers they did few months ago.  [See other thread regarding playing experience in demonic, etc.]

Kabaal

Wysrias said:

I think stating that requiring some amount of coding to excel in PvP is an effort to maintain the status quo is shortsighted, and frankly, stupid. I don't mean to be offensive, but I can't think of a better way to put it. It's a core part of the game - combat strength does not scale with level, it doesn't scale with time, it mainly scales with knowledge. If you don't want to learn how to play the game, you can't expect to do well. I am an abysmal coder (seriously - don't look at my system, you will cry if you have any appreciation for efficiency), but I've spent the time to learn the little details so that I can participate. It's not part of maintaining any status quo to expect people to make some amount of effort in that vein - it's simply an integral part of the game.

If someone can jump into the game without any coding knowledge or any understanding of combat specifics, why should they win?

It's about decision making. Coding accelerates and automates the decision making process, but it is not the decision making. There's almost zero difference between a right click in LoL on an enemy and an alias in Imp that goes to a target and begins doing bashing combos until you lose the target/you die/it dies. Should anyone playing an ADC have to prove they know how to code the logic behind the right click in order to be able to use the right click?

I personally think that understanding "My right click does this" and going from there constitutes playing the game. If the right click earns them a victory, then either the opponent did something wrong, they have a gold (arti) lead, or right clicks are imba EDIT - or they brought more friends MIA MID THANKS.

I could be insane, IDK.

Wysrias

I guess I should clarify too, that a major reason that Aetolia has so many available systems is because participation is impossible without them. Autocuring does not exist there and affliction tracking is so much more essential, because far more classes have affliction components to them (in fact, I don't think there's a single 'prep class). Imperian has already released a great set of tools to start with, and I think that pushing for more server-side automation will harm far more than help.

EDIT: Imperian (and IRE games in general) are far, far more complex than MOBAs. It's not really a good comparison because you're talking about a game designed around being as broadly appealing as possible, to one that is sustained largely because of niche interest. If you dilute the appeal of the game (which, in my opinion, would come from removing the coding aspect), I don't think you're left with any substantial draw. If I wanted to play an easy game, I have more options than I can count.