A few new changes

We've got a stack of new changes going in, but we have opted to delay rolling out the new changes (and any possible bugs included with them) until after the big event that's happening tonight happens.  So as to not let anyone who follows our Dark Risings twitter feed feel like we've been leading anyone on, I figured it would be appropriate to reiterate that big new changes are going in.  Here's a taste of what's going to happen:

1. Poison will no longer break sleep, but pinch/haunt will now always work.  There are a bunch of auxiliary changes accompanying this too.  For example, we are working to replace all current poison-giving items (moldy bread, vial of the undead) with pinch/haunt equivalents, sleep's duration is now much shorter, and things of that nature.
2. People were complaining about protection of peaches being undispellable, so we've made it possible to dispel, but not quite as easily as sanctuary.
3. Monks will now get divine focus (the templar ability) at level 15.  This is in addition to their frenzy spell, so it should give monks a nice boost.
4. Lots of changes have been made to the prompt.  You now have to manually color %h, %H, %m, %M, %v, and %V, %l will now show the exact number of seconds left in latelog, %f will now show the exact seconds left in fightlag (this is pretty huge!), and some other stuff.
5. Ticks will have randomized lengths to curb unfair practices that certain script-happy pkers have been abusing.

There are a lot more intermediate changes going in too; the brawler board will be sorted now, various code has been added to support the new tradeskill we'll be putting in, and a lot of (mostly) transparent bug fixes are going in.  For example, sand spirits and desert scorpions should no longer be holding hundreds of fossilized shells, the 'info' command will now work properly in creation, and harm touch will now depend on your skill% in it.

The complete details will be posted as a change in the game once the new code is actually in play.  Hopefully they are received well!

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.

Sacred Spork

Stage 5 of Project Sacred Spork has concluded, and thus the project is ready to be unveiled. This is all very exciting to us admins, as we've put a considerable amount of time and effort into clarifying what our vision for this was, discussing how it should all fit into the framework of the exiting game, actually implementing it all, and then testing and re-testing everything. As of our last bout of testing this afternoon, everything is in working order, and this evening I finally attached the last pieces of the code to the rest of the game with which players interface.

We're aiming to unveil the project sometime in the coming ten days or so, with the latest target date being Sunday, June 7. Hopefully everyone finds that it's worth all of this hype.