20 Aug, 2011, Omega wrote in the 81st comment:
Votes: 0
I am going to pipe in on this one here;

Personally, in a class-less mud, I tend to lean towards the every skill should be situational; and here is what I mean. Balancing skills can be rough based on classes.

Combat for instance (my main point) can be controlled by making your core-set of skills into a series of skills based on situation; armor vs non, melee vs ranged. magical protection vs non magical protection. The list goes on, but by making skills designed to 'attack' or 'deflect' the other is a good point.

An example, the spell shield, on my mud blocked against ranged attacks, (arrows and what-not) but a good ole fashioned bash would break the spell, as well as yield high damage.

Of course, knowing is half the battle, so this is where those semi-useful skills come in, I had one called 'glance' where by you would glance at your victim ie, glance soenso and it would simply let you know some basics about them.

Ie:
SoEnSo shimmers with a white haze and is wearing cloth armor and wielding a bow & arrow.

Doesn't look like much, but it tells the user a great deal of information; and of course is a skill of itself, which means the better it is, the more revealing it is.

Shimmers with a white haze was for shield, cloth armor tells me allot, as well as his weapon.

With that, I can use my skills to protect against ranged, take down his shield, and attack against what cloth armor is weak against, (piercing/slashing).

So my policy on class-less is just to focus on making situational skills; ie, skills that interrupt spell casting when up against a caster. Or from a casters point of view, skills/spells that slow/halt the enemy so they can cast or protection against them. If you are creative enough, the ideas for skills/spells like this will simply flow in and you can balance reletively easily.

Another thing is to have skills/spells scale (ever so slightly) with your character level (assuming it isn't level-less) Which if it was, it makes the balance even easier as it will derive all their power off of the actual skill level, and not your level.

Anyways; no skill is truly useless. It all depends on what you are going to do with it; you often used the example of lock picking, which was a great example. Some people won't even think of that as a skill because allot of people think skills as combat only.

In rom, they have a spell called 'continual light' (not sure if it is in all diku derived muds) but I know it is in rom; I know people never took it because it wasn't a combat spell, but I always took it, damn thing gave me a ever-lasting light source, and people would pay for me to make them one. So never think of skills as weak/useless/fluff/fun, its all of what you make of it. What/how you enhance your mud with it.

The rose spell for example; to get into Vivians Hostel (my mud) you had to cast the rose spell and present the rose to the bellhop to get in; otherwise you couldn't enter. And you *HAD* to be the caster, the rose wilts over time, and was marked owner to you the player; so giving it to another player, while you could do, they couldn't use it to activate the entrance.

Anyways, I am ranting here; but I think my point is clear, simply make the skills/spells situational, base them on your mud, play styles, possible combat enhancements, etc, etc. People will build their skill-sets based off of how they want to play; ranged, melee, caster; etc, etc. Just enjoy building the skills and think like a player when doing it. Play your own mud and find out what you would do; then build exactly opposite and thats likely what you would not think of happening. Structure it as you would play it first of course; then go over it, and put yourself in the other players shoes. Log/talk with players about it, and as I said, be situational; it means if you take all your skills to combat melee players (and your melee) then that ranged player will smoke you time and again. This forces them to divide up their skills if they want to be semi-effective against everything. Or if they want to focus on being the Mage Killer; they can specificially build towards it.

Cheers
20 Aug, 2011, Runter wrote in the 82nd comment:
Votes: 0
I'm not really adding or responding to any other points being made, but I thought I'd like to share my thoughts on balanced mmos/muds.

Balancing skills/classes/builds is hard.
The more complex the choices and the synergy between other players the more difficult it becomes.
Unbalanced builds can be fun; balanced builds can be boring. These aren't exclusive.

A classic dilemma comes when you know you've got classes which aren't "balanced", or you have strong suspicion that a few are dominating multiple areas of play. Yet the game is fun. There's no guarantee the game will be more fun as the game becomes more balanced, but that's beside the point. If we want a balanced game there are ways to achieve it.

The most balanced game starts with fewest choices.

Given 3 classes A, B, and C. All 3 have one and only one ability to deal damage. The skill is all the same ability cloned with a different name. And they have identical properties otherwise, we can surmise that the game is indeed balanced. In this scenario how do you react to anecdotal evidence? What if the "best" players, the most successful, the most well known, etc all trend towards the A class. We *know* the game is balanced. Yet, you'd have people in this scenario who perhaps insist there's some advantage to A.

Given this situation, it would be easy enough to hand wave away the criticisms and perhaps even convince them that the game really is quite balanced, but once you start adding relationships between the classes, and more abilities, and unique modifiers. Even if the game is balanced, you will have to deal with this same anecdotal evidence. And it may be difficult for even yourself to be convinced otherwise. In fact, it's possible to take this anecdotal evidence and take a balanced game and make it less balanced, in an artificial attempt to give worse players an edge over good players. So that the game becomes more evenly distributed. This is the worst way to balance a game and it will be indeed never ending. Because the scale will soon plummet in a new direction, and you must pile on iron to the other arm to try to get it back to where it was.

My point is, you can't balance any type of build system without tons of work and scientific research. In fact, part of balancing such a game is developing a suite for throughly unit testing your classes in scenarios. Many of us rely on use case statistics retrospectively. Such as taking two players and having them duel. We might take the best player from class A and the best from class B and assume that it should be an even match. But that's a bad assumption. The winner could have just been a better player in general. These are horribly unreliable as good benchmarks, and are in fact the basis on which the anecdotal evidence we've already discussed is formed. In the face of anecdotal evidence, which will come, you must be able to give naysayers a reasoned argument based on real evidence.

Otherwise, the Emperor has already won.
20 Aug, 2011, AppendixG wrote in the 83rd comment:
Votes: 0
Runter said:
Unbalanced builds can be fun; balanced builds can be boring. These aren't exclusive.


This, a thousand times.

I did some contract work for a company a few years back and discovered that as the game approached balance between the four classes, players became bored and felt like their decisions were meaningless.

I think, to some degree, players want some level of imbalance. A lot of players don't even want it so they can take and use the most powerful build, they want to create something unique and unexpected, from the dredges. There's a certain type of player who seems to long only to play the underdog in a world that they feel - or know - will not be easy on them.

That being said, the phenomena isn't really an excuse to throw caution to the wind and ignore balancing altogether. Instead, as was mentioned earlier in this thread, I think the best way to approach it is "different skills for different things." That is, classes or abilities don't necessarily need to be balanced based only on one narrow criteria (usually offensive output). If a player wants to be stealthy, force them to sacrifice some defensive capabilities. If they want to be great at PvE, force them to sacrifice some offensive capabilities. If they want to be great at area control, force them to sacrifice some mobility.

That's kind of the approach we took, with the model system. Each model is good at certain things and bad at others, and each model is designed to be 'weak' to an opposing model and strong against another. The idea being, focusing entirely on one model will make you very good at what that model does, however, you will have no way to overcome your weakness to your opposing model. Instead, I suspect (it's hard to do anything beyond suspect, right now) that the focus will be on investing in 2 models heavily and lightly in a 3rd to handle specific situations that your other 2 models cannot overcome.
20 Aug, 2011, David Haley wrote in the 84th comment:
Votes: 0
Also adding a quick thought here, agreeing with what some people have said… The thing is that most people hear "balance" and they conclude that classes must be balanced across all activities. But that ultimately makes it rather difficult to have differences, because, well, you can't be that different in order to have a truly even experience. So these end up being mostly cosmetic differences. Instead, you can think of balance as a set of tradeoffs; you can have what is essentially multidimensional rock-paper-scissors where you have many activities and some classes are simply better than others at some things. This gives you meaningful strategy (pick the battles you're good at, avoid the ones to your disadvantage), it gives you meaningful choice, and it gives you truly different experiences as you play the different classes.
20 Aug, 2011, AppendixG wrote in the 85th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
[Y]ou can have what is essentially multidimensional rock-paper-scissors where you have many activities and some classes are simply better than others at some things. This gives you meaningful strategy (pick the battles you're good at, avoid the ones to your disadvantage), it gives you meaningful choice, and it gives you truly different experiences as you play the different classes.

This is one of a multitude of reasons that I am addicted to Team Fortress 2.

Every class has a strength; every strength comes with a weakness; every weakness has a class that can exploit it.
20 Aug, 2011, quixadhal wrote in the 86th comment:
Votes: 0
The mantra that people making MUD's have forgotten is… balance for the group, not the individual.

An MMO is a multi-player game. You should be encouraging people to group and designing your content with the assumption that people will have a full (complementary) group to tackle it. If you DON'T have a group, you should have a very hard time unless you're outleveled/overpowered it so much that the rewards are barely worth it.

But Quix, what about PvP?

What about it? Why does everyone assume PvP has to always be one-on-one fights? Why not expect people to group up and travel in hunting packs to PvP?

But Quix! Seriously, they'll just target the healers…

Yeah, duh! So would I. Maybe that means either your healer-types need to be able to defend themselves against alpha-strikes (but perhaps not against sustained damage), or your tanky types need better ways to defend the more fragile support members of the group.

If I want to solo everything, I'll play a nice single player game (like Zork!).
21 Aug, 2011, Rarva.Riendf wrote in the 87th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
The mantra that people making MUD's have forgotten is… balance for the group, not the individual.

Because nowadays many muds will neve see enough people to even have the start of a group. I kind of eased the problem with charmies.
For PVP the only balance I do is that it is hard to kill anyone in a one on one anyway. Better to group, and then you have a lot of good different combos.
21 Aug, 2011, David Haley wrote in the 88th comment:
Votes: 0
If we are starting with the premise that our multiplayer games don't have multiple players, then goodness, what is it indeed that people are doing?
21 Aug, 2011, Omega wrote in the 89th comment:
Votes: 0
not to sidetrack the post; but a common belief is muds are dying. That is not true.

The mudconnector has a record number of muds on it; and growing each year. Its not that there are not enough players on muds, its that there is too much diversity between them. Everyone wants to build a mud, and we supply them with the tools and code to do so. So our individual numbers may dwindle, but the global number is still quite high.

With that said, group based mudding is key; I try to design the mud so that you can PvE solo but it gives quests that require groups to complete. But thats me and it also diverts from the overall posts topic. The point is, skills need to be diverse enough for players to want them in a class-less system. Which is why I state have them all situational/beneficial to the mud.

Posts about guild/clan skills are great if your in a guild/clan, some muds house factions. Having faction specific ones as well. One I rarely see is skills for wearing different armor types; but yet again a good idea. And of-course, wearing heavier armor and casting may be yet another skill. Lowering the amount of skill points spent on combat skills, and more on passive skills.

Ultimately, its up to the dev to decide, and up to the players to critique and for time to tell if it was the right choice. Personally, my new mud has 6 classes, 3 subclasses(per class), but no levels, and skills have to be purchased with a set for each class/subclass being available. Skills themselves have levels; thus they scale, don't use a skill, it doesn't progress. Some skills benefit from other skills Slam inherits from Rush; higher rush skill, better slam does. But that is just me. When I housed a classless system I tried to go level-less and it worked well.

As for balance vs no-balance, very good points, not balancing can lead to some unexpected results and is often more fun. Ultimately, in classless, where you come across skills either by training/purchase, it gives the players the ability to make their own builds perfectly; be the perfect stalker/hunter/caster/melee/etc, you cannot go wrong with players interacting. Plus this gives players the insentive to try different skills, sure they know how one set works, but they may think of another build. A perfect example would be the following.
Melee: High armor Constantly does damage; skill after skill of punishing damages.
Disrupter: Low Armor, disarm/disrupts casting, knockdown skills, slow/hinderence spells

Both have their distinct advantages. Melee just punishes the opponent with lots of damage.

But meanwhile, the disrupter, if he gets the first shot in, could be what changes the tide in his favor, spend all his time disarming/disabling their opponent, knocking them down(bash, trip for the rom guys), slow spell to hinder their recovery (atleast on my mud it did that, not sure if thats something I did or if it was stock).

note on armor in descriptions, melee have high armor, while the disruptor, because of his skills/spells, cannot wear heavy armor; so is effectively squishy. Couple hits and done..

Anyways, the point is pretty simple, the cookie cutter builds are a fact of class-less; but the different builds you will see won't all be the high yielding damaging builds if you supply the right skills/spells into the muds arsenel you will see a variety of builds that drastically effect combat (which I think is the main point of this); especially when in teams/groups.

Perfect example of effect combat in groups:

Group A: Tank, Caster, Healer

Group B: Melee, Melee, Caster

Group A is primarily squishy, while group B isn't. Group B has the melee attack the healer; Group A's Tank uses distract skill (takes targetting from healer to themselves), Healer is able to keep healing the tank, assuming Group B doesn't knock him down.

I think that is an effective example of group's working together, albeit not the best because I didn't touch on the casters, but for questionable sakes, we will assume they are battling each other in a headon firefight of aweful yet awesome death and leave it at that.

Case/point All depending how you build your character in class-less, will determine your effectiveness against other types of players. So go all out with its development; make lots of skills and give lots of skills situational effects to make them more/less useful in different situations. Eg: Rush = Not as effective when wearing heavy armor.

Just another pipein by me.

Cheers
21 Aug, 2011, Runter wrote in the 90th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
The mudconnector has a record number of muds on it; and growing each year. Its not that there are not enough players on muds, its that there is too much diversity between them. Everyone wants to build a mud, and we supply them with the tools and code to do so. So our individual numbers may dwindle, but the global number is still quite high.


I've been around since the 90's and without a doubt the numbers have fallen since then. The reason that more people are making muds is simply that it's easy and usually free to get hosting. And if not free, dirt cheap. It wasn't always like this.

I'm not terribly interested in the "is muds dying?" debate, but I think it's clear the popularity of muds has went down. And with good reason, I might add. Muds typically are still using the interfaces available to gamers in the 80's. I believes the fundamentals of the game are solid (if not great, for many muds), but the very interface we often expose is toxic to growing a player base. Because it's onerous and it's not the level of service or convenience that even free-to-play folks have come to expect.

I think all too often we build an optional interface to try to lower the barrier of joining the game. In my experience this isn't enough. I've tried out games who have what look like promising web interfaces only to learn a few minutes into the game that they're often secondary to the CLI. Or the heal bars and information panels are in places that don't make a lot of sense to a player focused on the bottom of a scrolling region. I think the first step in the right direction is making a primary UI that isn't a second class citizen to the CLI.

I think inline gui elements in the scrolling region is almost required these days. Floating windows or skirts isn't enough. MXP is a start but it's not nearly enough. For example, a simple convenience is a small health bar in-line with the name of other actors/npcs. It could either be part of the background, or very small and docked above the name. Another example is simply planting icons into the text. Next to npcs, or items, or other players. It can indicate player status, rareness, factions, etc etc.
21 Aug, 2011, Omega wrote in the 91st comment:
Votes: 0
The number of muds on mudconnect has gone up, mind you that doesn't mean they are any good, most are muds that are in development, usualy some random stock base.

Anyways, I agree that its harder to get players now, but again, thats because the amount of players to muds ratio is changing, 20 years ago (90's) there were half the muds running as their are now. But those muds were quality and had good solid player-bases. What I see today is a thousand muds all based off of Diku's, few LP's, and fewer Custom bases. With the market flooded for a mud to play, it dwindles away the players that would play. With less muds out there, each mud would most likely have significantly more players then they do now.

Muds are very popular with highschoolers (because they can connect from libraries) and with older people who played them. Or people seeking to play D&D but cannot find a local group. Thats been my experience anyways.

But with all that said; my point about the number of muds was for the few posts posts above mine that were talking about lack of players / groups and their effect on the mud.

A mud cannot base all its skills purely off of the potential for players around them; thats the feel those 2 posts above mine were essentially getting at in some round about way (minus david haleys, it was sarcasm as far as I can tell)

If we build skills based on the ability to work in unity with other players, then we must ensure we have a playerbase, else wise it won't work out all that well…
21 Aug, 2011, Runter wrote in the 92nd comment:
Votes: 0
I just responded to precisely why the number of muds has gone up. They used to be expensive to run, now they're free. Server administration used to take some expertise. Now you can have that done for you for cheap.

And I think what you're saying is wishful thinking. I know *good muds* whose playerbase has dropped dramatically. Not because bad muds have taken their players away, because players in general are leaving the mudding community. I know a ton of friends who used to play muds every day. And now they play rarely/never. Your anecdotal evidence that all these muds with no players on them added up means the mudding community is in a state of incline is ridiculous. Also, I would argue that the sum of the parts is less than the whole. The opposite of synergy. A bunch of people playing single player on different muds = muds in decline vs the same number of people on less muds.

And muds aren't "very popular" with anyone. They're so far into the niche that you'd have to explain what one is to even someone who considers themselves an avid gamer.
21 Aug, 2011, David Haley wrote in the 93rd comment:
Votes: 0
Runter said:
Also, I would argue that the sum of the parts is less than the whole.

+1 – competition where games try to attract players can be healthy… competition where so many games have just a player or two isn't healthy. :wink:
21 Aug, 2011, quixadhal wrote in the 94th comment:
Votes: 0
Rarva.Riendf said:
Quote
The mantra that people making MUD's have forgotten is… balance for the group, not the individual.

Because nowadays many muds will neve see enough people to even have the start of a group. I kind of eased the problem with charmies.
For PVP the only balance I do is that it is hard to kill anyone in a one on one anyway. Better to group, and then you have a lot of good different combos.

This is a bit long, so get some coffee and enjoy. Try not to spit it out at the monitor. *grin*

If you believe that's the case, then why are you here? Seriously, if you aren't designing your game with the premise of having people work together in groups, and even more interestingly as groups against OTHER groups, why bother? It's much easier to make a single-player game, and in fact, the big graphical AAA games are headed in that direction!

No, I'm not kidding. Look at the most recent MMO's on the market. How many of them really require groups to play through the majority of the content? How many even encourage it? Pick any MMO that has more than 50,0000 subscribers… do any of them make you join groups right from the start? No. Why not?

First, they are aimed at the casual gamer market. People who have an hour to play here and there, maybe after the kids get put to bed and before the news comes on. Maybe for half an hour at lunch if they're brown-bagging it. Most of these games don't make it easy to form groups, so you can either spend that half hour looking for a tank/healer, or bashing stuff and collecting loot.

Second, they are stuck in the rut of the holy trinity, just like most MUD's have been for 20 years. Tank, healer, DPS. That's how my grandpappy did it, and by gosh that's how we're gonna do it too! Which of those is the most fun to play for MOST people? DPS. So, you end up with a server that has 5,000 people on it and 4,000 of them are DPS. Good luck getting the required tank and healer for your group in a reasonable amount of time if you're DPS.

The result is a game with lots of people playing it, all playing their own little game.

To break out of that mold, games are going to have to make forming groups an almost automatic thing. If your friends aren't online, the game is going to have to come right out and say "Your skills are needed by these people, will you join them?" NPC's are going to have to work in groups as well… no more stupid blobs of meat with gold embedded in them. As you walk down the road, you won't encounter a bandit… you'll encounter 2 or 3 bandits, and if a fight starts, you'll realize they also have 2 or 3 archers in cover to either side of the road.

If players find themselves in this kind of environment, they'll quickly learn that soloing is not practical. But… we're also talking text games here. You aren't going to have a pool of 5,000 players to form groups with. At the start, you'll be lucky to have 5 players on at a time. So, becaue of this, you may NEED to provide some kind of NPC hireling that can attempt to fill in and make soloing possible.

But, doesn't that defeat the purpose? Now people can solo again!

Yes, it does. But unless you can line up a few dozen folks to play your game right at launch, it's gonna be a necessary evil. You can't be on 24/7, and people will show up one or two at a time when nobody else is on. If they can't make any progress, most of them will get frustrated and leave. The trick is, your hirelings have to suck badly enough to make people prefer even BAD players to them, but they have to be JUST GOOD ENOUGH to be better than nothing at all.

As for class vs classless, to bring things back on topic, to encourage group play you can't let everyone be everything at once. If everyone is their own tank/healer/DPS, nobody needs to group and even if they do, they will argue over who is going to have to tank or who has to be the healbot. If you arrange your skills in paths/groups/hierarchies that require the player to decide their role in order to excel in it, that problem goes away.

That doesn't mean you need the pure trinity. I've seen some interesting classes (and a class is only a collection of skills that you can't change once you've picked them) that bridge the gap nicely. Age of Conan had a "bear shaman" class that was a healer, but they were an offensive healer whose spells were all enhancements to themselves that had the side-effect of healing/curing/protecting everyone around them as they did damage to their enemies. So, the bear shaman would stand right up with the tanks and beat on stuff, and every time he landed a blow, it would do an AOE heal/buff/cure/etc for the group. I've also seen a mage healer in Rift that casts debuffs on enemies so when their teammates damage them, the debuff procs a heal on whomever did the damage.

So, when designing a "classless" system, keep in mind you probably want the most powerful and effective skills to require the player to really choose a class without realizing it, otherwise you do end up with a cookie-cutter everyone does everything system, or the min/max people figure out the "best" build and everyone is that.
21 Aug, 2011, AppendixG wrote in the 95th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
To break out of that mold, games are going to have to make forming groups an almost automatic thing. If your friends aren't online, the game is going to have to come right out and say "Your skills are needed by these people, will you join them?" NPC's are going to have to work in groups as well… no more stupid blobs of meat with gold embedded in them. As you walk down the road, you won't encounter a bandit… you'll encounter 2 or 3 bandits, and if a fight starts, you'll realize they also have 2 or 3 archers in cover to either side of the road.


To kind of segue, here, this is something that I agree with 100%. In fact, I think that it is such an integral part of gaming that we're developing a system solely to take care of it.

When I first started mudding, what kept me in game wasn't the skills or the world or anything like that, it was the people. I was lucky to meet a group of people who had similar interests, we hit it off, traveled as a group and accomplished things together. I would not be mudding today if this hadn't happened.

So, with that in mind, we're working on a sort of… 'pairing' system that creates groups of players on the fly and encourages them to build relationships with each other and to work together. This works by integrating a very subtle 'survey' into the newbie tutorial; it's not a survey, per se, but the player is presented with a number of options and, based on the options they choose, they are matched with one new player and one veteran player with similar interests.

There may be situations like, "A local street urchin has stolen our printing press!" - At which point the player may: help the printer build a new one (+1 crafting), help the police hunt and kill the urchin (+1 combat/pve) or join the urchin and help him fence the stolen press (+1 thieving). At the culmination of the tutorial, all these variables are added up and it attempts to find a 'best fit' to match that player with.

To incentivize this, the players are given an ability that allows them to instantly travel to each other (up to level 20) and are given experience boosts when bashing NPCs together. The veteran player that they are matched with gains skillpoints for every skillpoint their associated novices spend and also gains an experience boost when hunting with them. He also gains an ability to instantly bring any of his 'proteges' to him.

quixadhal said:
So, when designing a "classless" system, keep in mind you probably want the most powerful and effective skills to require the player to really choose a class without realizing it, otherwise you do end up with a cookie-cutter everyone does everything system, or the min/max people figure out the "best" build and everyone is that.


This, I think, is important and something we're aiming for. We want to strongly encourage people to specialize but also allow them to be a jack of all trades but master of none.

Our system is designed so that, hopefully, nobody will be able to do everything with an efficiency that makes all the other decisions obsolete or irrelevant. There should always be a market for a really good Prestidigitator, however, when you can't find one or none are available, someone who has just a few points spent in Prestidigitation may be able to fill the gap, at least temporarily, until you can find someone else.
21 Aug, 2011, AppendixG wrote in the 96th comment:
Votes: 0
Darien said:
The number of muds on mudconnect has gone up, mind you that doesn't mean they are any good, most are muds that are in development, usualy some random stock base.


Yeah, I think this is a problem.

I'm making a MUD because I *bleep*ing love MUDs. We could easily spend the same amount of time developing a less intricate graphical game, but, I love the level of detail and richness that MUDs allow. We're creating a completely custom engine, from scratch, utilizing modern developments (multithreaded, integrated MXP, MDSP, GMCP, integrated website, downloadable image packs for use in custom GUIs) as well as heavily relying on those things instead of making them seem like afterthoughts or tacked on additions.

I have nothing against stock bases, I think art is art, and if its possible to describe your vision in the frame of a stock base, that's awesome. But, at the same time, from a gaming standpoint - ignoring the artistic value - I think you've really got to bring something new to the table in order to be successful.
80.0/96