Re: CF: Crossfire playbalance

[David Sundqvist <azzie@netpolicy.com>]

On Wed, 10 Mar 1999 sfink@digital-integrity.com wrote:
> Of course, one of the most fun aspects of crossfire is getting into
> those rarefied regions of megastats, where each increase has a really
> noticeable effect. The bathwater is clear; the baby is pink. I'd be more
> in favor of making it harder to increase stats (and making it easier to
> decrease them). Removing stat booster potions from shops is a great
> idea, IMO.

This has to be balanced against the getting killed for beginners too;
getting killed a few times can make a character pretty bad. My suggestion
would be to remove the stat boosters from shops and replace them with a
medium expensive death-stat-loss-restoration potion. That way it wont be
as easy to gain the stats, while beginners wont get their ability to
regain their losses yanked out. 

> > 2) In reality, most of the really great artifacts should probably be
> > counterbalance with something bad - most fiction tends to do that.  I believe
> > most of the newer custom artifacts on the maps only gives postives with no
> > negatives, so they are items you use all the time.
> 
> This sounds like the best way to go to me. Especially since it
> encourages class differentiation -- wizards will run around with +5 Int,
> -5 Str things.

Agreed.
 
> Another random idea, again probably too complicated to be practical:
> give artifacts unique IDs and timers. A player can only possess (equip?)
> a given artifact for a certain amount of time, then it teleports back
> home (or gets sucked into the Void, if random). I'm sure there's a
> pseudological explanation for why this happens. It would increase
> turnover. If demanded, you could also expire the timers after a while
> (so the player would be able to use it for a week every year, instead of
> a week a lifetime.) Prevents the player files from getting overbloated,
> too.

A bit complicated tho... also, the rewards for quests, I think should be
permanent, just for player satisfaction. However, something like a charge
system like there is for rods might be possible. To use the really good
features of the artifacts (immunities, special attacks, etc) would consume
the stored SP in the artifact, which would have to recharge before being
used again.
 
> General question: what should be the overall goal of all this
> playbalance-meddling?

Well, I mostly wanted to get a discussion going, since there are a lot of
opinions, and we should actually get some overall goals :). 

To reiterate; in my opinion, we should concentrate on prolonging the game
within useful levels (current player power between levels 3 to 25), since 
this is where the maximum payback will be.

Combined with that, classes/races should be balanced to allow reasonably
similar difficulty level between the ranges mostly-geared-to-mage/priest
through mixed classes/races to warrior/barbarian. The absolute extremes
are not as necessary to achieve absolute balance in, but ordinarily
differentiated classes should be playable within similar difficulty levels
without having to do serious crossover to survive.

Any generic map set to, for example, level 12 should be playable by all
mainstream class/race combinations of level 12 using primarily their own
standard method of dealing with dangers, by a moderately experienced
player. 

This does not preclude (and I strongly think we should have) having 
class/race geared maps (like Nethacks quest maps), that are seriously
different enough in challange to provide mainly the right challange level
for a certain class. A warrior quest can have no-magic unholy ground all
over, but a mage or priest would have extreme difficulty handling such a
quest. This sort of quests would also encourage playing of different
characters to explore the game and provide sufficient variation to make it
fun to play through many times (and they would, I think, add a lot to the 
storyline/atmosphere). 

Otherwise, as far as public servers, I agree. No online game I've seen has
been able to really deal with the problem caused by people into ruining
play. The only real way to handle it is by providing a sufficiently
balanced environment combined with really nasty sysadmins who whack those
who misbehave. I think we should concentrate on the lower level
playability issues, map expansion and server stability before trying to
deal with the difficult reality of balancing high power characters on
multiplayer online servers.

Best regards,
David

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