Calyx of Isis

It sounds like the weather there is like anywhere else... changable. At least you're hear with us in Sunny Magic Duel.

The Goddess' Calyx stands, hands on hips, her eyes almost glowing, boring holes the Morrell, one beautifully shot foot tapping impatiently, "My Goddess says you must do it now. We .. want .. it .. NOW!" After a while she relents and smiles at the stunned artist. Almost purring, she says seductively, "And there are many ways of being a bad girl!" She coyly flutters long lashes at the artist as she sashays out his studio door. After a moment Calyx's face appears by the door. She seems simultaneously icily distant and unimaginably desirable. "Do you know what it is, a calyx? We hope you have a dictionary." She is gone before the artist can respond in any way.

We're glad you found the game and hope you enjoy it. If you see me in the game, please feel free to ask me for help or advice. Sometimes PM works better than chat (I PM too much).

I just went 34 rounds with Loreroot Guardian 1. It's got to be pretty high.

Oooh! I really like her! Wonderful! Just the sort of thing I'd like for myself, but a little too innocent.

I've been meaning to mention this for some time: The battle log table is a bit farbled in the victory and loss columns in some browsers. The cells without X's do not display correctly because they have no content. The correction is to add a single space to these cells rather than leaving them blank. I think a text space works, but non-breaking space " " would be better. As I said, minor and easy to fix.

Absolutely the impression I intended. However, if you don't want to be "mastered" I shall omit the whip.

It's not just that the interface seems clumsy, but gives the impression that one must have a death wish. Your rituals are your armor and your weapons. In what real world or game world would you walk out the door without first choosing your weapons or strapping on your armor. It's rather annoying to be totally pulped because I am standing around setting a defense ritual as one player after another stomps on me. It then means I have to wait hours to regen all the VE my creatures lost (it's so much higher than what I have if they all get stomped). Good Question Glai.

In this case there would be no problem, you would just change the name to that of the new "master." Speaking of which... would you like a Mistress intread!

@Blackthorn... I'd be proud to wear either of your two avatars! @Morgana... I like yours, too. She's really hidden in the shadows.

Envy, In many ways I am as much or more of a tyro as you. However, in learning about healing rituals and other things I am learning that the way you set a ritual is as important as the contents of ingredients of a spell. For total newcomers, and important thing you need to know is that a ritual must have at least 301 VE (Vital Energy). That means that the current VE of the creatures in the ritual must total at least 301 or the system will choose a random ritual for you. Thus, for example, you cannot do a healing ritual with a single Barren Soul as the most VE a Barren Soul can have is 200. If your rituals are turning out random on you, this is why. The next thing you need to know is what you want to accomplish. As an MP3 one ritual is pretty much as good as another. Every time you loose less VE than your opponent, your win counter is incremented. However, once you are MP4 or higher this is no longer true. In this extended system, there are victories, which will increment your win counter and take heads from another player, and simple wins which get you neither heads nor a tick on your win counter. A simple win is good for growing your creatures, but does not advance your character. This distinction must force a change in the way you approach attacks. Attacks with overwhelming power will advance your creatures, but very rarely increment your win counter or get you heads. You must be willing to risk a loss to win. The system requires that you loose 15% of the VE committed to a ritual in order to get a victory. And, your opponent must loose 35% more VE than you. If you want the victory, you have to structure the ritual and the amount of your character's VE so that you actually can loose 15+% VE. This is quite a challenge. Learning to do this is far more impressive than learning to always win with massive force. It is also why Mur is always saying that with the right ritual, you can eventually topple even the powerful and experienced of opponents. It's true in the real world, and here. My personal take on this is that there is more to be gained by discussing rituals with an opponent in advance of attack or defense. The reason is, this gives both players the opportunity to actually learn something about rituals and learn how to obtain a victor (not simple win) under a wide variety of circumstances. At least, this is what I strongly believed based on the way people learn the martial arts in the real world. There are other issues to setting up attacking and defending rituals. For instance, in a single creature ritual, that creature must not be one that has multiple targets. In general they are effective only so long as there are two or more targets. When the target count reaches one, they no longer do any damage or weakening to your opponent. Well, that exhausts what I've learned in three weeks. It's all common knowledge, so there are no spoilers here. The only thing that is truly my own is my analysis that the game offers more rewards to those who use less than overpowering force. I have so much to learn.

I've been noticing it for two, maybe three days. I suspect it's debugging code that Mur will remove in a bit.

I have removed myself from being someone's adept by deleting all characters from the field and clicking the change button to the right. I'm surprised to hear it did not work for you.

The is an old post somewhere in the forums by Mur that points out that when you have as many adepts as possible you can actually give your creatures more VE than their max. However, as Meiche has pointed out, this can be a curse if you and your creatures are not of particularly high level.

It just amazes me how many people want Magic Duel to look like other cames they are more familiar with. MagicDuel is unique and need not offer the same features of other games. It's not even clear how the forces of your rituals are deployed, so reliable application of reach may not even be practical.

I am in complete agreement.

This make so much sense. Thanks for the suggestion. However, this is still a bug -- in the HTML, not the flash or other code.

Before you entered the combat... did it say you would gain or loose honor. Bing victorious and logging a win does not mean honor will increase. There's a big only if you were told in advance that you would gain honor, and that's something you've not yet stated.

@Glaistig: You understood me correctly. Thanks for supply the quote from Manu. The thing that attracted me to MagicDuel was the requirement for balancing wins and losses. I hate PvP, but MagicDuel is a dream scenario for me. The other thing that hooked me were the principles, ideas that underlaid all the teaching I received while a student of a tribal shaman.

This suggestion is now on the "official" list of good ideas. Manu requested yesterday that such a list be created to make it easer for him to keep track of all the ideas that get bandied about. Chewett is maintaining this list and selecting items for inclusion.

I like this. The question is how to make it work. We already know that XP bonuses to the player with the more balanced ritual. Does anyone know how this bonus is determined? It is definitely situational and takes into account the two rituals and current statistics. So we are looking for something similar for Honor? It occurs to me that part of the issue is Manu's definition of honor. It's supposed to be a reflection of player strength, but I think we all agree that it is not an estimate of strength at all. Among other thing it does nothing to reflect the creature levels of an opponent. I think some of the heuristics used to compute XP bonus should be applied to computing honor. I don't think any of these relatively simple formulas will really work without a true comparison of the relative strengths of the two rituals. The existing definition of honor does not mean what Manu says it does. Raw differences between wins and losses do not reflect strength, especially in a system where keeping wins and losses close is a requirement. There is another curious thing. Pushing your honor up is necessary for certain MD purchases and other in-game stuff. This definitely runs counter to the requirement that one maintain balance. It's clear that Manu wanted this duality where concurrent goals oppose each other. I suspect Manu wants to maintain this tension, so any adjustment to honor and victory-loss computation must take this into account. I learned as an MP3 that there were ways I could run up my honor while maintaining my win-loss balance. The change in game mechanics that comes when you hit MP4 makes this more difficult, but not impossible. In real world high honor (reputation) comes from either a long string of wins, or a few wins against apparently stronger opponents. I think this is what Manu wanted. However in real world, balancing wins and losses is not the goal. Most people will tell you more is learned from failures than from successes. A long string of success does nothing to teach what to do in crisis. Manu is trying to force us to learn this way. The only question is, has he set the bar too high and how to lower it and how close the victory-loss ratio has to be to one. One last thought: The max XP boundary is another. My first character hit the ceiling at 64 wins. My second character hit the ceiling at 34 wins. No more growth is possible yet I must fight on. The lesson here, I was too smart about getting XP bonuses. Growing XP too fast is an issue for MP3 and MP4. We need to learn to check the urge towards rapid advancement. As a student of a tribal shaman my grandmother was always trying to get me to slow down. In game we have slow regen and other things that force us to slow down and THINK. Sorry about the length of this; once I start writing the ideas just keep surfacing and evolving.

I like it. I've been wondering about my inventory getting cluttered as I gradually level up. It's not a problem, but it would be nice.

Well that's very nice. I am a bit young to need a shop reset yet, but I can see how one might want a reset when you've plowed down to the bottom. Too, it is good for Manu as it keeps the money flowing.

As I have said, my visual memory is poor so I am not really sure if there was a change. It may be that I have mistaken the map on the login page for my in-game map. I do recall it was hard to find myself initially. And just vaguely, maybe the map didn't show player locations. I just don't know, and that's why I posted.

This is the second time you've referred to wins by a color ("grey" before). What are these colors?