Fighting system

[Firsanthalas]

One thing that occurs to me and has been frustrating me is this:
Honour.
At the moment if you are balanced almost everyone seems to give you a minus honour value. Right now Eon gives me minus 185 honour if I attack him and win. As such the system seems to regard Eon as a weaker player than I am. The truth however, is that Eon is by far the stronger player in combat. I should really be getting an honour bonus if I manage to defeat him (probably a free car or something too ).
I think that it should be changed to reflect the total number of fights or stats or something like that. Another option might even be to compare the number of wins of the attacker and defender.
Calculating it based on the number of wins in comparison to the number of losses you have is not working. It also allows someone to calculate things to their advantage over far far weaker opposition.

The current setup is very frustrating and seems to encourage the use of honour farms.

[Eon]

Being balanced has it's positives and negatives, low honor happens to be one of it's negatives. You don't get to have the best of both worlds.

If honor is calculated based on stats then I'll probably only be able to hit Clock and MRA for a little positive honor. I'm a fighter, constantly striving to see how powerful I can become. The thought of having to wait months to a year for people to catch up to our stats before we can get any decent training in sounds ridiculous to me.

Also, a lot of us give such negative honor because the majority of the time we have easy defs up. This in turn helps new/weak mp's that would normally get smashed and demoralized by our defenses.

All in all I don't see much damage being done from the current setup.

Edited July 8, 2011 by Eon

[Jubaris]

So what do you suggest Firsanthalas?
To simply set aside honor system, and let everyone aim for wins? Nobody will put trees in defense anymore to get losses, and younglings will never progress.

This way, those who don't want to be balanced, need losses, and they'll get them by letting the younglings farm on their trees. Those who want to be balanced, have the advantage of that extra rewards via battles, and it is the most practical thing for allied mp6s, tho for some lazy allied mp5s as well.

The System works.

[Firsanthalas]

Rhaegar, I did actually make a suggestion other than to simply abandon it.
My point though is that as I understand it, balance is a concept in MD and it is supposed to be part of fighting. i.e. striving to have a balance between wins and losses. However, with so few balanced and most people with a larger number of losses than wins, that leave anyone balanced in a bit of an honour trap. So, no Rhaegar, I have to disagree that the system works as you say it does. I know it is a tricky subject and there are many factors, but from an honour perspective, it seems the system favours people that are out of balance. Maybe I am wrong however, and that is the way it is supposed to be.

[(Zl-eye-f)-nea]

At present I can't find a single person to give me positive honor. Not one. So im in the position that some think is ridiculous, but appear to also be saying well it has pros and cons so you cant have the best of both worlds. The fighting system is supposed to favour balance, it doesn't.

The whole argument about Trees in defence only goes to show how tedious the fighting system has become. The new players have nothing to learn from and no challenge, just "easy wins". Its a nice way to keep the ignorant ignorant under the guise of helping them, but really its not fighting its just collecting points for upgrades. It makes the fighting system work on the same principle as something like farmville - which is fine, but lets call a spade a spade.

Where relating it to skill is concerned I would relate it to....Some super strong gladiator (strength +100) walks up to a skinny nerd (strength +5) and beats him up. Not honorable. So it would make sense for you only to get honor from very few people, the people in the small pool that is your level if you are that powerful. Based on skill the system would be more reflective of that, but then your issue is the cap on negative honor (and maybe the fact that there isn't an npc gym )

Im not saying that is the solution, but I do agree that something being done about the situation would be good.

Z

[Mighty Pirate]

I'm one of those 'lazy allied MP5' how Rhaegar calls them. It is hard for me to keep my honour up as I can actually only attack other allied players. But it is possible for me, though it is quite hard work. (Comparable perhaps to the old means of loosing XP, that was hard work too.)

There is one point where I completely agree to Firs: The fighting system should always prefer balance in the WIN/LOSS ratio. It should be possible to get an imbalanced ratio for a strong player but it shouldn't pay off. I'm not sure how to implement this, perhaps with just an increased honour bonus for alliance fights. But perhaps also a more general change of the fighting system is needed.

[Jubaris]

I, for example, support full-power battles, but at mp3/mp4, for new people to learn some things about combat, but on mp5, there needs to be a player or two with trees on def so they can try accomplishing some goals they want, otherwise...
What if we all start putting max tokened creatures in defense, in 'best' combinations? It takes a good willed and determined spirit to keep up attacking and finding a weak spot The worst thing is that you can't even see the creatures of all those tokens, so you have to frustrate yourself in that log to see what's what

If you are a proactive fighter, lots of losses are better for you. If you don't spend much time attacking people tho, balance is the answer for you, where you are free to idle with some nasty fighting ritual trying to get some wins.

The system isn't perfect of course, but it works to a point. If we don't find a decent -complete- answer for this, there's no point complaining about it honestly...


If you make the system where the honor points are really based on are you attacking a weaker or stronger opponent, that would mean that the strongest and proactivest of MD members would have to idle whole day without attacking.
Maybe not that wrong, but certainly a radical change, are we prepared for that?

[xrieg]

I like current system idea... But see large discrepancy between idea:
1. player should attack ppl in their league and above; attacking weaker players is penalized,
2. balance between wins and losses allows to learn more from each battle fought,
and its realization.
Ad1. Balance as a measure of strength clearly doesn't work. I believe we learn something from each battle we fight (well, maybe not from full annihilation) and believe the total number of battles fought (not only sum of victories and losses, new counter needed) is much better measure of fighter's profficiency (well... maybe total number of wights minus losses)
Ad2. current balance for unallied is absolutely unattractive - it requires a lot of micromanagement and with any reasonable training is unsustainable. I think it would be much more attractive if full bonus were balance +/- 5 - down to 75% at about 100 fights off 50% at about 300, 25% at 500 - and 0% and skilldamage at 1000 (remark: slight change of concept: I do not mean here bonus to standard rewards but % rate of the full score - so full balance would give 4x more rewards than balance -500)...
I believe ally permbalance should be reconsidered if such a change was implemented. Currently it is a reward for the limited targets range as most players are very far from balance. System I described above makes profile balance much more attractive... but it would favour allied players far too much (too many pros, too few cons)

LE: of course balance based on number would have to be adjusted (non-linear dependence of strength on number of fights) so that top fighters would still get positive honot from second-tier fighters... but it's manageable - parametrization issue

Edited July 8, 2011 by xrieg

[dayredeemer]

Hi there,

i am in an alliance and i am currently balanced. I manage to scrape together a bit of honour as a result of alliance fights, although it takes quite a few to get 100 honour. I think the last time i saw a player offering me positive honour was Argos about a week ago.

i would increase the honour gained from sacrificing.... and I would also boost the alliance honour rewards.

A few random big boss npcs would be great too.

[Burns]

I never saw the solution in making honor depend on actual skill, it's too simply to betray any system that we could come up with. The key lies in having balance be so attractive that people like Eon would kill to be in perfect balance times, because as it is, balance is the mortal enemy of grinding.
If that finally works out, grinders are limited by honor, and weaklings can try their luck as often as they wish.

And of course Eon would still need to keep his trees set, because even with such stats it's pretty hard to constantly not get victories, especially on the people who are in the same or higher range of balance as himself.

[Pipstickz]

I haven't attacked a non-alliance for honour since Apop lost his balance, and before that I don't even remember. I'm perfectly fine with only attacking allied people, even if most of them can beat me >>