Ary Endleg

Rophs are you really suggesting that? You do realize that new player who would find such situation of huge negative VP difficult WOULDN'T have access to such spell in first place. But sure let's assume that player happens to have it, it would be 4 casts which equals 32 minutes of attacklock, if somebody wants to bully you, it won't help you, besides you would have to know in front that specific person has such intention, something which said player wouldn't know. Best solution would be to run quickly to sanctuary, something that works better than any of your solutions yet you didn't have the insight to come up with it. But it still has same problem, said victim has to be aware of the danger! Big negative VP thing isn't a problem to us older players because we can fix it one way or the other, but player with under half year play time can struggle with it. It's very possible and discouraging scenario for a player at such stage in game, something that can greatly influence how such player will continue to play the game or not play it should it happen to him and you ain't thinking this for such situation. You are thinking it as if it were happen to you, who (possibly) have needed stuff to counter it. Richy, I'm just saying that piling up honor under -500 has no other use other than making it harder for player to come back up. bottom cap would be good, let's say -1000 or -750 honor that way it has enough of room to prevent possibly abuses that would be possible if cap was to be set exactly at -500. If however you are talking about second part of my post, which is just the observation rather than actual problem or solution of any kind, making the better distinction between strong and weak player, can easily be topic for itself, something that I won't really jump into, but if done properly it would indeed create honor problems for those deemed strong and hence system would work as Mur original intended it to work. No one, nobody replied to this topic in two months, so how long should I wait before reply to raised issues? But yeah this is just a collection of my opinions on the combat stuff open to discussion which I write according to how I know things at that moment regarding it, something that can change over time in light of finding the new things, if I say something wrong, it's here openly in public for everybody to read, get to know possible issues and their effects as well as correct my wrong conclusions or challenge them. See my reply to Richy, I'm not even trying to, just saying that system isn't doing what it was originally intended to do. Um...? I don't understand this, what you mean by weak attack? Low attack stat of creature? Weaken defense ability? Either way how ever it was balanced back then, it's not working today, tokens and big personal stats make creature stats irrelevant besides those creatures with target "all" have usually the highest attack stat, see Drachorn. Weaken defense works quite nicely if used before damage all, it just empowers it, besides target all also works for weaken defense. I don't understand what point you are trying to make here, so yes you either missed something or need to clarify it. It's good to know that certain abuses were taken care of, my point was to remind that certain creatures lack sacrificial rewards and that current rewards are almost monotonic. I disagree, when you get the loan you own the loan, if you lose that cash, then you lost it but it was your cash which you got in first place as part of deal to repay it with interest, hence before you lost it, you had it and owned it. You don't make a loan with VP and neg stats. What bases for abuses? Tell me what I'm not seeing. It isn't a point in inability to increase the stats or inability to prevent the loss of stats. You need to remember that combat isn't only thing in all whole game. Let's say a person does only RP in his first year and suffers big stat loss. (This is just a hypothetical situation, there can be many others) On it's second year same person decides to start fighting but has huge downside due to quite an amount of accumulated negative stats, making it's debut in combat increasingly difficult. In such situation person is excessively punished because he didn't involve himself in business of combat when he started the game. I further argument that mechanics that allow accumulation of negative stats isn't good thing due to facts that negative stats are set to zero for combat purposes as well as you can't lose some that you don't have, I never heard of car that has minus 100 horsepower. Only thing is that accumulated negative stats are punishing to player because they prolong his recovery. Said person plays for a year and doesn't fight, in his eyes he thinks that he lost whole year of training by being idle and accumulated negative stats are there to further punish him for lack of training. From perception of that player at the time he decides to start fighting he sees that he lost year and half worth of time while he was in game, year due to not training and another half year he would have to spent in order just to catch up back to positive. Is such punishment really necessarily? I think not, that's why I don't have a problem with losing VP/stats, but them going below zero is something I don't think is beneficial to game or players. I didn't really know it would expand this much and it seems to me quite rude to flood the forum with half a dozen topics at once especially if some of them would have connection, so I made single topic. But yes it's like this in it's forum-ish fashion which resulted in it's unfriendly-to-follow nature. Unfortunately I won't be opening separate topics any time soon.

There are many people who invest quite some time and effort into their player profile. Results are often very impressive. However thing with profiles is that they aren't really ingame, you can click ingame to see specific papers of player and quite often they would be blank or not finished. If they are done, you won't go on looking into their profile because chances are that you will still find same things over there and that it doesn't have invested effort into it. But making your profile all shiny and nice takes up more effort that papers do and also it offers so much more than papers do, by having power to display most of ingame stuff in single place and making it easier to code some complex stuff. Unfortunately people check profiles only when they are curious about stats of certain player and on rare occasion when they can't reach player ingame to check their papers. This means that profiles mainly live in shadow. That's why I thought about opening this topic. There are many nice profiles that others don't know about. So if you put the effort to turn your profile into something special and want to let others know about it, link it in here. I'll brake the ice by posting the link to my own profile, I expect you to follow suit and show off. Else I'll find your cute shiny profile and post it myself. :P Ary Endleg' profile

Beware! It's Ary the forum necromancer. :p I've got some more stuff to talk on this matter, some of which I planned to talk about earlier but forgot about. In this post I'll be bringing up certain issues regarding the uncommon loss of honor, win imbalance and negative VP as well as negative stats. As most of you know, those are issues I'm facing personally, but I got to ponder on their meaning and purpose as well as design flaws. I'm not complaining about my current bad combat situation which I'm working on to fix it, rather I'm challenging the purpose of those parts of system for possible future improvement of currently flawed system. Loss of honor In here I will raise the issue of uncommon loss of honor, the slow leech of it from unnoticeable source, or should I say sink. We all know the usual ways of how one can lose honor, however there is one interesting way that many don't know about, losing honor in case of losing the fight. Yes you might lose honor when losing fight, but that isn't noticed by many because in order to lose honor in such way there are some prerequisites. First off, this doesn't apply to losing the fight in attack (at least not when I try it although ancient announcements claim otherwise but it might be so because I'm at -3500 honor), because amount of lost honor is calculated from the amount of honor gained by other player and since players can't gain honor in defense, neither can you lose it in failed attack. Second requirement is the one that makes this hard to notice, because the attacking player needs to have less sword balances and/or (not so simple confirm which one exactly is the case, announcement says it's only for wins but some people state it has to do with total recorded fight ratio) less total amount of balance outcomes (sword balances + sheath balances) than you. It's time to check original announcement regarding this mechanic in order to understand the purpose it is intended to fulfill. From that simple conclusion follows. It was intended as a measure to prevent stronger players from aiding weaker one, in other words train. Whole combat system initially was conceived not to allow training and grinding we see and do today, and sure as hell not to encourage any altruism related to combat. Such things are unthinkable in MD we play today. So far that mechanic isn't fulfilling it's purpose, it's incapable to be any sort of punishment for those specified actions, in addition to fact that it doesn't work when you attack and lose (99% sure it doesn't happen as far as I recall) as well as honor ain't used for determining alliance leadership anymore. Secondly this mechanic just like many other assumes that player is strong by number of sword balances. We all know that's a terrible way of determining such thing due to ability to stage fight outcomes and control the amount of fight outcomes that get recorded by system and ability of achieving perpetual balance which effectively freezes your fight outcome recording result in theoretical possibility of player being the strongest in realm and yet having the balance of 100/100 or 0/0 if he uses WP. Finally, this mechanic has no active purpose, sure it can be semi-damaging to honor-farms by possibly disabling their heat dumping abilities with priests but if honor-farm is aware of this mechanic, it can be easily countered in number of ways (won't disclose them) even if honor-farm has the biggest win difference in whole game by tapping into uncommon sources of honor. In addition, this is the only method that can make your honor drop further once you delve under -500 honor. Possibly discouraging player who got himself into this position further from combat aspect of the game and adding additional punishment to his current position. My suggestion is to either reword this mechanic or concept around it in way that it is able to fulfill given purpose. I also suggest that there be implemented bottom honor cap at -500, because really there is no point in further punishing the player in prolonging his bad position. Win imbalance How currently system works, this situation is simply unseen in day to day play. Only the newbs and honor-farms will enter this position, everybody else will avoid it like plague because of so many downsides when entering it and because of ability to stage the balance ratios due to ability to control the fight outcomes (the fact that sword balance for one player doesn't mean sheath balance for another and the other way around). I'm perceiving that entering into win imbalance was meant to be inevitable and spontaneous for "stronger" players, like having winning and losing cycles, but that is definitely not the case. System allows you to absolutely avoid it. Balance is useful and being under balance is useful too. But there is no individual benefit in being the above balance. The designed benefit of it was, that if you are above balance, you are stronger player, something that isn't possible in current game. This results in lack of win deviation. For example delving under balance eventually became so powerful that many nerfs were applied such as reduced heat gain from excessive honor, capped lost fights difference, stat damage for too high lost fights difference, while being above balance has no such downsides because being in there has no individual benefits. If you have thing such as win-loss balance, it's only natural that you have deviations on both sides, it's both expected and and meant to happen yet due to design flaws it doesn't. Whole balance thing is a mess compared to original intention. This is just an observation about it, players won't really like the change to what it should be from what it is, people like to train, being friendly and helpful to each other and to be able to control the system. However such concepts seem to be important to Mur. But fact is that system built and designed with specific workings in mind, we clearly see today that it doesn't operate as such. Negative VP (and stats) In here I'm talking about receiving negative VP, with emphasis to having personal VP under zero. You all know, or should know how you get it, so lets focus on effects of it. (You can refer to mechanical meaning of VP somewhere in this topic.) Once you gain negative VP it is subtracted from your current personal VP pool. This is okay thing, it's mirrors and counterbalances the gain of by same means. However, you can lose more VP than you have, thus putting you in negative. This is where problem lies because you are then unable to buy weapons and armor as well as recruit and upgrade creatures. If you receive gigantic amounts of it, you can be stuck in there for quite a while, paralyzing you from some essential combat related actions. This is extremely dangerous for new player (mainly fresh inexperienced MP5 or allied MP4) where such problem can easily lead to immense frustration and distaste for combat in individual. Basically if you have some millions of negative VP, you are newb, you don't have lifestealers and you don't have big strong veteran friends or if you are in totally remote timezone and your life schedule prevents you from being online when players who have the power to help you out with your problem are playing, then you are in world of a hurt. Additional problem is it that it is very likely the case that you didn't got it due to being careless, but by being bullied, which can possibly lead to receiving more and more of negative VP. If somebody wants to force negative VP on you, there isn't much you can do to prevent it. Now I beg the question, how can you lose something that you didn't have in first place? Does the secret MD VP banker come to you and tell you: "Boy you owe 20mil VP, Aramory and other places no longer accept your MasterCard, btw nor does your barren soul and other creatures you have and want to upgrade". This sort of system behavior just punishes player way more than it should for no real reason or purpose. VP is the only stat in whole MD which you can have negative and yet it is being counted as negative! (Negative stats I'll talk about bellow, but they aren't used as such. I also heard a rumor about shop item that can throw your temporary Ve into negative potentially killing your creatures at start of combat, but I can't confirm this claim, so rumor it is and if it be true then it would be bug.) I suggest that negative VP is reworked so that it doesn't go below personal zero, meaning no negative personal VP. I don't see it fair, as well as many other people, that somebody with ability like Eon can come by impose such a punishment to anybody he wants with a mirror ritual spell, simply because you can't counter it or prevent it. If you don't want to remove negative personal VP, you at least should remove negative VP gain from being hit by mirror ritual because there is no way you can defend from that. No countermeasures or preventive measures exist! So it is a problem. Third solution would be, implement preventive or counter measures for such action, but still HOW DO YOU LOSE THAT WHICH YOU DON'T HAVE? Negative stats As follow up to negative VP, are negative stats, you all know how it works and why it works that way and the purpose of it. Let me repeat the purpose of losing stats, just to be clear. Losing stats has a purpose as a counter reaction to gaining the stats, therefore satisfying the laws of balance. What happens when your stats drop below 0 and you suddenly have negative stats. Nothing, in fights it is counted as if you had no stats, it's not counted as negative! But you can still keep losing stats even though you are under zero. Meaning it will be increasingly harder for you to get out of this already bad situation, it disables your ability to grow, further punishing player way more than it should, as well as possibly frustrating and making him lose interest in combat. This obviously leads to following questions. How can you lose that which you don't have? Why punish a player so much? I suggest that players shouldn't be able to lose more stats than they have, in other words it stops at 0 and doesn't go below. After-all negative stats have no impact and no beneficial purpose on mechanics, only to severely punish player by making him harder to gain stats due to possible high accumulation of negative stats. Again, one should not be able to lose that which he doesn't have nor his playing experience should be punished in such extreme manner. Since I touched the subject of stats, I want to bring up one more thing. When player registers for game, all of his 9 base combat stats are initialized to 0 even before any of it is gained by story mode, is there any specific reason for other stats, such as the ones used by tools, not being initialized to 0 as well?

Unfortunatelly tokens ain't worth much on a bird. 3 sc Link is just missing the colon in http//: part

If it wasn't for Blut's guidance you would be Necro :p

I agree with this also and I don't see any other acceptable alternative but as Mur said older leaders being unreachable is big problem. Can you reach Khalazdad for example in order to confirm Peace's queen title? Second problem that Mur stated of old leader disliking the new one and possibly sabotaging him isn't only retroactive problem but also possible problem in future. In the end it's Mur/Council who grant Crowns after citizens have made their mind in elections, whereas previous leader can only voice out support towards certain candidate for election in attempt to sway the votes of those individuals loyal to him to this new candidate who got his support. Such possible support is very relative to the influence old leader still holds. That's why I don't see good reason for any type of such confirming of king titles. I think that they should have confirming authority nulled.

Angien monopoly! Where are antitrust laws when you need them :)) scout 1sc

I was just referring to your 24h deadline.

No birdies? Aw.... my belly is sad. I'm pretty sure that refers to citizens and only to freshly recruited creats that would be given to new players who can't enter LR yet.

What if you don't succeed by that deadline? Do you quit and use potion instead? You know, unlike death, life can't really be "quickened".

That's a good point. But it leads to following question. Does that mean that well established alts can't receive titles?

3 buckets divided on 30 people means 0,1 bucket per person? People tend to camp that place. Sometimes there's nobody and sometimes there are 5 people camping it. Threads of fate and Murphy's law says you won't be grabbing one of those :p

Sorry for offtopic. I got confused over there, I had no idea that "comments" was actually same feature as status.

You can do that? Somebody actually has comments enabled on their profile? I see the option in profile settings to enable it, but it didn't work when I tried it, so...

This is interesting solution. If that is done, people would stop fishing for rep in order to feed their ego. Focus would be moved from overall personal impression and ego towards the actual quality and importance of post. It also should end this so called rep-abuse because mass neg repping old posts would be meaningless since it wouldn't be shown on profile and people wouldn't purposely neg rep others just because they dislike them (at least not to the current extent) in order to tarnish their image. There's a question regarding this for debate however. Is it important to to have total count to see how much words of individual "weight" in "public" eyes or is it more important for each individual post to be judged separately, without the association of posters past thoughts (or deeds)?

Interesting, I've no idea how you made that check inside Excel to count how many characters are in right spot.

Those eyes!

You know that you need to locate person first and be in same spot in order to kill said person? :p :))

Lash wanted to outshine kingslayers dst, Granos and Eon by becoming the godslayer. :p *pins medal on lash's chest*

I meant it had "similar" mechanics, you pick talents/items/abilities what ever, for your character and then play, doesn't have to be it's own application, sort of like D&D played over webcam :p But yeah it seems I missed the point where he wants to make tweeks to the game in order for them to become standard. Well basically he can do it, it's forking, you can pick which version you want to play once you will play, and there is always a good chance that before game starts some rules or stuff get changed for that specific game consensually. Answer to your edit part, yup I know man. For pro player it matters a lot because he needs to readjust, every small change in numbers is huge change for them. My point was that this game isn't hardcoded thing, you can always pick version you want to play, unlike with LoL, just as poker players pick which version of game they play. But I see why my first explanations were bad.

Your poker argument is invalid. There are many types and versions of poker. Hell, if you play weekly with your "gang" or at various shady places chances are each one will have almost unique rules due to various combinations of popular rules with some added house spicy rule or two. I admit I haven't read whole topic about this, but the bits I skimmed it seems dota-ish type, and you know how often those games change, especially LoL where each monthly patch means huge re-balance which is especially felt on other maps where pro players say it's a completely different game each month. Each balance change shifts focus from one thing to another, flow of game is always changing, yet game still has same playerbase and name. Saying that changing the mods (which are like items in dota) would make the game completely different is nonsense. So when you play D&D in different setting it's entirely another game? Don't think so buddy. Edit: pretty much what Sy said.

In short organizers(bfh, nimmy), mods(dst,grido,burns), devs(chew) and summonbytag would be the ones that fall under general category. I guess that special ally leaders and kings don't fall under those? But then again, the ones I mentioned earlier with those public functions are the ones listed to get such titles AND ability to give titles. Which would mean that the only tags that don't come with this title paper are default LHO tag, summon-by-tag groups and donors with default Supporter X tag. I'm just curious of what falls under those generic tags and what is tied to titles. Because I'm wondering if it would be possible to make the difference between those two groups of tags visible ingame? Also current way of tags isn't that nice when person acquires 3 tags, for example when player has it's role tag, public function tag and summon-tag. This would mean if person earns 2 titles during his play or more, something you said is likely to happen and that it's encouraging for players to try to earn as much as possible, then it would be a problem how it would be displayed ingame.

Does that mean that without receiving certificate you can't get tag anymore?

So that's where all those flag-less players live. :))

Skills: number crunching, basics of html/css even a bit of javascript especially with help of google, basic organizational and analyzation skills, ..... can't think of anything else at the moment Interests in MD: fun time :P What you would like to work on now: depends what you got to offer Edit: yes, my skills are pretty much useless >_>