KinslayerMUD Forums

Yes, I'm a newbie here. But maybe I can just inject a few general ponts that might help?

"Balancing" weapons and skills is one of the most difficult things to achieve on any mud. But... this is actually especially true of a smaller playerbase, because the trend is for people to copy those who are successful, and it only takes a small number of people to copy one person's technique for that technique to become the latest craze, and then seem 'overpowered/overused'. At that point, the skills/weapons get tweaked, "nerfed", which of course pisses off those who are riding the wave of the craze, and so onto the next craze. And of course once you mess with one class the temptation is to mess with the next, until everyone is pissed off in some way =).

What you have to ask yourself is what sort of mud the imps are actually out to achive, and then work to that goal. And not be afraid to give things which seem "unbalanced" a few days to work. To illustrate, the prime attraction of a pk orientated mud is... to pk - ie to get kills. So, in order to maximise entertainment for that intended audience, you want to give every class lots of killing methods, and quite "overpowered" ones - because killing floats their boat, so give them the tools =). What a PK audience *doesn't* like is lots of 'weak' skill & weapon combinations, because that environment means fewer kills.

"Balance" is hugely arbitrary anyway, and always swayed by the letest greatest craze. I don't know, maybe this is done already, but what might be an interesting exercise for the imps is to make an internal "PK kill" logger, which records the vital stats pertaining to all PK kills such as class, skill, weapon, pracs, def, etc of killer and killed. That would at least collect the facts for them, and using that they could work on tweaking things to whatever they're after.

Some afterthoughts which I forgot to mention, sorry.

Running with that premise above (ie to entertain pkillers you need to have a skill/weap setup that allows lots of killing), the flipside to that is lots of dying. In other words... it's no good asking for a pk mud but also asking for high defence. They're opposites. To have lots of pk and kills, you must have lots of low defences.

One thing that throws a bit of a spanner into the party is "roleplay". Ie, the "ideal" non-RP PK environment would allow every class equal opportunity to achieve pk success. However, old RJ came up with this world that's basically dominated by channelers (weaves) & warrior types (forms). So, to be "RP", a wot-themed mud should give more killing power to channelers and warriors, and less to thieves and rangers.

I think I know who Staer is:P

i agree with the first post. first step would be to make everything overpowered instead of everything underpowered except for the 'latest craze' which can be anything from skewer, bash, or channeling atm.

Hmm, a weakness of the-other-place is that "special attack" damages are not controllable independently of melee damage. Ie there's no such thing as a "backstab" value for a clear curved or for daggers, or a "charge" value for a black tasseled or for spears.... it all comes off the same die rolls that control melee. You can get around this a bit but it takes a lot of trial and error... and still limits things. If it doesn't already have it, I'd suggest that such a value should be implemented here - so that you could have a weapon that's great for stabbing but crap for melee, or great at melee and crap at charging etc...

I already talked to Galnor about these other values, and they are in the game.

I must have mis-understood you, because they aren't.

Then maybe I will talk to you about them again!