New Vorpal Functionality

Verghazrin was kind enough to host a battle royale PK quest last night which was a great testing grounds for the new functionality we gave vorpal.  It generated a fair bit of discussion both last night and this morning, but some of the suggestions or criticisms seem to be rooted in misconceptions on how vorpal weapons now work.  So as to make it unambiguous, here's how everything is laid out:

Class	Recharge	Spell	Relative Damage	Damage Potential
Mage	2	acid blast	10	5.0
Cleric	2	smite	8.3	4.2
Monk	3	lightning bolt	1.3	0.44
Warrior	4	fireball	2.7	0.66
Barbarian	5	N/A	N/A	N/A
Psionicist	2	mind blast	8.3	4.2
Druid	2	natures wrath	7.1	3.6
Ranger	5	lightning bolt	1.3	0.26
Rogue	3	N/A	N/A	N/A
Bard	3	deathsong	7.1	2.4
Wildmage	2	wildfire	4.9	2.5
Warlock	3	ravage	7.1	2.4
Necromancer	2	decay	6.3*	N/A
Templar	3	flamestrike	4.6	1.5

Recharge is the time (rounds of combat) it takes for the vorpal to "recharge."  Once a vorpal weapon is recharged, it will discharge (cast its spell) on the next hit, then recharge again.
Relative Damage is a figure of merit expressing how much damage each class's vorpal spell will do.  The higher this number is, the more damage a single vorpal discharge will do.
Damage Potential is the Relative Damage divided by the recharge time.  It gives you an idea of how much damage a class's vorpal spell will do over time.  Necromancers' Damage Potential is a bit trickier to calculate since their spell does damage over time.

Whenever a vorpal weapon discharges (mind you, "discharge" is a term I just made up now), it casts your class's vorpal spell at the level of the weapon and won't discharge again until the recharge time is up.  However, this recharge time is attached to the character, not the weapon, so a dual-wielding ranger will not get double discharges, and swapping out vorpal weapons very quickly in combat will not let you get a bunch of free spell casts.  Incidentally, a side-effect of these new vorpal spells is that other special weapon properties (chill, flame, shock, poison, and others) are now also limited by each class's recharge time.  This side-effect will be removed soon so that chill/flame/shock/poison/etc work the way they used to.

We are fairly confident in how this new vorpal is working for the time being and we do not consider the feature to be still in the testing stage.  We aren't looking for unsolicited feedback on what classes should get what spells or recharge times or anything like that; however, we will be keeping an eye on how vorpal weapons get used and, if necessary, can tweak things.

With that being said, we are considering tweaking necromancers after last night's quest.  One of the leading suggestions was to make necromancers' vorpal be like judgment but with necro spells instead of maledictions.

Brawler Scoreboard Stage 2

We're moving forward with implementing the next stage of our new Brawler system, and based on our original ideas and some suggestions and observations from Stage 1, I think we're looking at rolling out features some fun new features.

A major component that we're currently lacking is the ability for the game to know that a particular fight is a brawl as it's happening; right now, brawls only become brawls when the victory command is used. To address this best, we're planning to add a command that will act as an "opening move" to initiate a brawl called "clobber."

We envision this clobber command functioning like backstab, where one Brawler uses it to tag another Brawler, and thereafter, both combatants are identified as brawling each other.  This establishes a nice framework where we can implement some features exclusive to brawls to make it easier, safer, and cheaper to learn PK as a brawler.

One of the significant (and controversial) features we'd like to include immediately is ultra-low-cost healing for brawls.  This has the benefit of letting people get up and running in PK without having to grind for gold, and really turns brawling into its own minigame within Dark Risings.  However, there are a lot of potential issues here:

PROS: no grinding for gold if you just want to pk for fun potentially attracts new players who may start out just looking for a good PK mud (but get sucked into RP in search for a vamp, etc) cements in PK as a distinct minigame within Dark Risings

CONS: less of a need for pure-PK players to actually play the game since they don't need to worry about collecting gold LOTS of potential for abuse if not coded properly

I think the pros are self-evident, but let's look at the cons a little more closely.

1. Less of a Need for Pure-PK Players to Actually Play the Game

"and stay IC" should be tacked on to the end of this con, and it's one of the bigger reservations I have.  Catering to PK-only players draws in a bigger pbase, and as long as they aren't disruptive to the rest of the game, I don't really mind.   However, I like to think that the process of getting money can often involve RP (e.g., collecting people to go kill mobs for equipment), and if we obviate the need for pure-PK players to get gold, it's easy to envision them having no reason to bother trying to roleplay at all.

Realistically though, gold farming has become the norm these days, and there's really no RP involved in that process anyway.  So I guess the damage has already been done, and giving Brawlers cheap healing won't cause too much more trouble.  It's just that the nightmare scenario for me is having a game full of players used to pure-PK MUDs who log in and are totally OOC in says, tells, over the brawler channel, etc, and generally degrade the quality of the game.  I absolutely do not want this, and I hope catering to PKers in this way won't effect that.

2. LOTS of Potential for Abuse

Of course, this is the most immediately problematic, because there are a number of ways this healing discount can be abused.  Here are a few scenarios.

1. An Inferno named Jane jumps Bob the Brawler who has a contract on his head.  The Bob the Brawler just initiates a brawl against Jane so that Brawler rules (and cheap healing) are in effect and Jane can no longer loot on KO, etc.
2. In a real PK, player Bob is getting attacked by player Jane.  He has a buddy, Harry, initiate a brawl against him so that Bob gets discounted healing since the game thinks he's brawling Harry when in fact he's fighting for his life against Jane.
3. The opposite happens, and Bob initiates a brawl to get discounted healing, then jumps Jane.

Unfortunately, I really only see two solutions to these sorts of abuses.  The first one, which perhaps is what many players would immediately think, is to have an immortal arbitrate cases of abuse like this, and have stiff punishments for people who do this sort of thing.  This is a possibility, but we don't really have the staffing manpower to be micromanaging brawls and this is not really a good solution.

The second solution is to make it so that this "clobber" command to start a brawl can only be used when both participants are not in PK fightlag.  This solves the issues of people initiating brawls mid-fight to abuse the perks of brawling, but it also means that if you forget to make your initial tag with clobber, you have to flee safe before you can correct the issue and re-tag to initiate the brawl.  In practice, I suspect this might get annoying.

Another idea would be to create the opposite command of "clobber" and have it be something like "nobrawl."  If Jane wants to jump Bob for real, she can issue the "nobrawl" command on him after tagging him to lock Bob (and Jane) out of initiating brawls until they leave fightlag.  This is getting a bit complicated though, as Jane would have to remember to keep issuing nobrawl throughout the fight in case Bob momentarily got out of fightlag.  It also all operates under the assumption that Bob is definitely going to cheat to get out of getting KO'ed by Jane, which should be a pretty remote possibility to begin with.  Throwing a ton of complicated code at such a narrow problem is not something I like doing.

At any rate, for stage 2, the only brawler perk we're looking to put in would be this discounted healing. However, we might also consider features such as...

• people flagged as being in brawls never leave fightlag (this was suggested a few times)
• people flagged as being in brawls cannot be looted (by either anyone, or their brawling opponent) once they are KO'ed
• announcements over the Brawler channel that Bob and Jane have begun brawling

For right now though, just figuring out how to prevent people from spuriously declaring brawls mid-fight to get out of a real PK is challenging enough.  Tying it to fight lag is tricky because there may be times when brawlers get out of fightlag but aren't actually done fighting (running to heal, running for a trap, etc), but we're not quite ready to force brawlers to remain in fightlag until someone gets KO'ed.

Comments, ideas, or suggestions are welcome.  Since this post won't fit into a note in the game, it's probably best to leave replies (anonymously or otherwise) as comments to the blog here.

Brawler Scoreboard Update

I've been working on getting this Brawler scoreboard system up and running, and at the present pace, it seems like we're going to likely implement this in stages.  Right now the basics are working, but Team Admin(tm) will probably have to decide how to pretty it all up before we can roll out this first stage.

Right now, the general process is that you knock out another Brawler and use the "victory" command on their unconscious body (much like murder or loot) which registers the victory.  To the loser, the process would look something like this:


Parviane utters the words, 'xahzf barh'.
Parviane sends a blast of water at you.
Parviane's blast of water <*>_MORTALLY WOUNDS_<*> you!
You are unconscious.


1<1729> 1012<1012> 394<394> <0g 5s> <NEW:FIGHTLAG>


Parviane has claimed victory over you!

These victories get added to a global scoreboard which can be accessed via some command (currently called "scoreboard," but this is just a work-in-progress name...it's apt to change).  The current rough draft of the scoreboard then looks like this:

        Name         Wins       Losses     Wimpouts      K/D     K/D*

   Muristang         1(1)         5(2)         0(0)    0.200    0.500

    Parviane         5(2)         0(0)         0(0)    5.000    2.000

   Suqlaheru         1(1)         2(2)         0(0)    0.500    0.500

The statistics presented are pretty straightforward; the reason there are two numbers under wins/losses/wimpouts is because the game will keep track of unique wins/losses/wimpouts in addition to overall total.  So, in the above example, Parviane beat Muristang four times and Suqlaheru once.  This is a total of five wins, but since they were against only two people, there are only two unique wins registered...hence the 5(2) under the Wins column.  This should help make obvious cases where one person is racking up a lot of wins by fighting the same opponent.

The K/D and K/D* columns are the standard kill/deaths ratio and the unique kills/unique deaths ratio, respectively.

Under the hood, this system actually keeps a record of every fight (registered by the "victory" command), so brawlers can access a list of their fights using the tentatively named "brawllist" command.  If Muristang was to use this command, it would look like this:

1729<1729> 1012<1012> 394<394> <0g 5s> <NEW:>

brawllist

[  1]  Oct 23 2011: Loss against Parviane

[  2]  Oct 23 2011: Loss against Suqlaheru

[  3]  Oct 23 2011: Win against Suqlaheru

[  4]  Oct 23 2011: Loss against Parviane

[  5]  Oct 23 2011: Loss against Parviane

[  6]  Oct 23 2011: Loss against Parviane

At present, these records really don't contain a lot of data other than the date of the fight, the two combatants, and the outcome.  However, it does leave the door open to a number of possibilities in the future such as amount of damage done by each side, the duration of the fight, number of times blinded, et cetera.  The system is robust enough to allow for the easy addition of features as we move forward.

Anyway, this is just a preview of the first draft of how the brawler scoreboard system will work.  Nothing is finalized, and a lot of features are missing.  In fact, some core features may still be missing when we decide to roll out the first stage; we haven't discussed whether it'd be better to let you all play with this system live before everything is prim, or to wait until the entire system is done before we release it.  Specifically, the following features are currently wholly absent:

• any way to sort the scoreboard
• the entire wimpout reporting system
• any way for immortals to arbitrate fight outcomes and change the scoreboard
• monthly cycling of the scoreboard and retention of each month's top scorers
• automatic monitoring of inactive brawlers
• any diagnostics for admins to make sure the system behaves itself

However, the framework is complete and it's quite flexible and expandable.  All in all, I'm quite pleased with the progress and am excited to see how it gets used once Stage 1 is out.

Premise of the Dark Risings Admin Blog

In the past, I've not thought there to be much of a reason to expand Dark Risings outside of itself; notes, ideas, histories, changes, and the OOC channel really seemed to cover all of the necessary bases. I didn't think there would be any reason for anyone to post thoughts or comments on anything mud-related anywhere else, and the short-lived, unofficial Dark Risings forums sort of exemplified that. After all, if someone had something to share with the rest of the players about the game, why wouldn't it get blurted out on the OOC channel (as what usually happens) or in a note?

Of course, I've become somewhat wizened over the years to the fact that there are gaps within our mud's channels-notes-helps communication fabric. There exist a wide range of thoughts and responses of mine which aren't important enough to warrant a note to everyone yet should reach more screens than just the people who have OOC turned on. Help files are meant to fill in that gap, but they tend not to be topical and tend not to be discovered until long after they are written. While I could just be more liberal on what I say over OOC or what notes I post to everyone, I'd rather give players the option to "opt in" to all of this less-important information. Thus, having some sort of blog where I can easily post information without forcing all players to wade through it all seems like a good idea.

While I cannot speak on behalf of the other admins, I do have an idea of what I would like to post here. One major motivation for me writing to this blog is that, as an admin, I have unique access to a tremendous amount of interesting game information that nobody else does. Although some of it should be kept secret in the spirit of fairness, a lot of it is information that isn't secret; it's just hard to get out there. Nobody seems to talk to me on instant messengers except my fellow admins, and most people seem to regard the helpfiles as completely unchanging, so I cannot rely on them as a medium for disseminating new information. This blogging business fills a nice gap, as it appeals to everyone's secret desire to spy on others over the internet and get insider info, yet people who want to contribute to the discussion are free to do so (using the comment feature which should appear at the bottom of this post). All of you readers can get topical, insider info at your leisure, and can participate to whatever extent (if any) you want.

There are also sometimes new and fun things which us admins get excited about but simply have nobody to share it with, and I hope to start venting some of that here as well. This Project Sacred Spork is a good example; I personally have been working on it full-time (in excess of at least eight hours a day) for a few days now, although it has been in the planning for months now. As it nears completion and we get to test it out to make sure it's all in working order, it's hard not to get excited about it--it's fun, it's fresh, and it's finally taking its final form before our eyes. It won't be long before you all get to use it, and I hope most of you will be as pumped about it as we have been once it hits the game.

Finally, I can also see this blog as being a potential place for us IMPs to let our voices be heard with regards to some of the gossip that we know floats around the instant messages. Although I'll not get into it now, one of the biggest frustrations associated with being an IMP is that we don't often have a way to share our side of things with people. For example, when we ban someone, that person is free to (and usually does) tell everyone who will listen how we banned them for shoddy reasons over instant messengers. I'd say 99% of the people who hear how the IMPs banned _____ for no reason just leave it at that, and never hear the other side of it. Although I don't envision this blog as being a "hall of shame" sort of setup, I certainly can see it as being an appropriate place for us to vent. And, since everyone is free to comment here on what we say, it's a bit fairer than just having us IMPs talk smack about people we banned on a place where they can't defend themselves.

So, for those of you too lazy to read the giant block of prose which preceded this, here is a summary:

• This blog will be a place for the Dark Risings admins to share our thoughts on current things happening on the game
• Everyone will be able to stalk us on the internet anonymously and get insider info without us IMPs explicitly knowing it
• This'll be a place for us to respond to good ideas or common misconceptions that keep cropping up but don't quite warrant a note to all or a help file
• We might vent here from time to time--but everyone will be allowed to post comments

I should also say that, for the time being, this blog is "unofficial." Despite being the DR Admin Blog, what I post here under my name are my thoughts alone. Unlike the notes I post to everyone on the game, what I post here has not been previewed and approved by the other admins, and my views here may differ from my "official" stance on the game. Don't expect to be able to hold anything I write here against me in the game.