Stop necro'ing threads. Pft.

That's certainly one view of the world, though I'm sure you won't be surprised if I disagree. To me, the main difference here is that 95% of the people that enjoy playing these games do not enjoy programming. They'd love to use their abilities to fight and have fun, but they do not have the ability or the time to write unbelievably complex scripts with which to defend themselves.

Exploring is a matter of just wandering around. If you want to be good at it, you'll learn to draw boxes and lines on a piece of paper. Not nearly as complicated as combat.

Quests are not for everyone, but those who enjoy them, enjoy learning about them. That's for them to discover. Not everyone wants to learn the quests, but they rarely whine that it's unfair when no one gives out the quest details.

Neither questing nor exploring requires any bit of programming knowledge to be competent. To be a combatant, you learn to script or you fail miserably. Do not take the ability to script lightly, either. Just because you and I can do it does not mean everyone has the capacity to also do it.

Last, but not least, if people WANT to learn how to script/fight/cure because they enjoy the learning process, they'll ignore any script posted on a web site and go fight all kinds of people. In the end, those are the ones who make the best fighters, as they've learned it all firsthand and built their knowledgebase for themselves.

I *knew* you'd say that.

(Where are you on MSN?)



EDIT: This is directed at Tavon.

They don't need to write unbelievably complex scripts to defend themselves. They can defend themselves just fine with really simple scripts or no scripts at all, as long as they don't aim at going around and killing people with complex scripts. Which is what everyone really wants - to be the champion, especially if it's for free.



Exploring requires loads of time. Something I've never had enough of to explore to my hearts content. Just as someone doesn't have the time to learn scripting and can't fight straight, I don't have time to wander around so I can't explore straight. Doesn't mean that I am going to demand that someone walks me around or gives me info on all the quests so I can do it all in a few hours. I don't see why exploring the world may remain a personal endeavor, while being a top-tier combatant is seen as something that everyone deserves merely by the virtue of playing the game.




Learning to program is a matter of spending time on it, just as acquiring any other skill in the world. Anyone can do it, just as anyone can explore all of Lusternia given enough time and patience.



This is totally true. It's also pretty sad, because after spending countless hours on experimenting, learning, asking, testing, and thinking, such a person will eventually discover that instead of wasting his time he could've just gone and downloaded the damn thing from the start. He'll certainly become better for it, but the worth of his efforts inside the game will be null.

If you are absolutely convinced that Lusternia must have its own ACP version, then could you at least wait with it until a new IRE game comes out?

Something that some of us forget is that this is still only a game. You may get upset that there are combat reflexes available for little or no cost, but all I'm trying to do is open up the realms' fighting to more people, thereby raising participation in the game.

This is a difference between combat and exploring/questing/etc that I had forgotten. Most other activities are done alone or on an as-you-feel-like-it basis. Combat, however, is often done in groups to fight wars and the need arises suddenly to go and defend your city/commune/shrines/etc. If you're a top-tier combatant and only one of a very few players who fight, you'll get bored with the game more easily. By getting many involved in the fighting (and scripts handed to them will by no means make them an excellent or even competent fighter), we're simply making the game more fun for everyone.

In my opinion, this is what has happened in Achaea with the ACP. No longer are there five fighters who dominate the realms, slaying people in single blows during world events. Now, they must actually fight their way through many people to emerge victorious and win the day. Those who use the ACP, or some derivative, have said it's dramatically increased their level of participation in the game, and thus their enjoyment as well has increased. Many who do not use the ACP but are aware of its existence have said to me that combat is much more challenging and fun for them, also.

It's all in how you see the game, I guess.

Sorry, Zarquan, but your reference to Achaea as if it's something we should aim towards utterly deserves this.

Thanks for that level of maturity there. Seriously.

I would hope that you could see the "reference" to Achaea as me simply saying that it's good to get more people actively involved in the IRE combat than to just have the 10 decent fighters in the realms duke it out or bully others around. Being the number one fighter in the realms, your view is understandably skewed.

As for maturity levels, I am hoping that Lusternia does not become Achaea. Doesn't look so good some days, though, especially when folks go out and find a Photoshopped "retard" sign to respond on a forum.

The ACP in Achaea allowed a lot of people to turn some Mystikal Voodo on and survive a lot longer than the amount of ability they actually put into fighting would dictate. The intentions were probably good, but if you want to teach scripting you have to force them to do some work on their own as well. The ACP failed to do that.

You have to work hard to be a good politician, leader, or negotiator. Taking away the 'hard work' aspect of being a good fighter ruined the dynamic to a large degree.

Let me come at this from a different angle. I'm currently running a ported version of the ACP. It's a great base to run and porting it does have that difficultly that you're looking for. From my experiences altering the ACP i've learned a great deal about scripting and am scripting my own stand-alone modules.

As I've said before, using someone's pre-built script doesn't make you a good fighter. There's still a fair amount of work that goes into tweaking it for defense and adding your own offense that will determine your "ability" to rise to the top of the rankings. I would strongly disagree with it being some sort of Mystical Voodoo.

Haaaaaaaaaaar har har hahaaaa!!! Amaru, you are now my hero. I wish I had that sign back then.

The main thing that ACP did was not in providing a "code base" that could be tweaked and customized. Plenty of people could script long before ACP came around. And those who couldn't didn't gain much from ACP anyways - they just became able to tank more. The main thing it provided weren't scripts - it basically became a pseudo-database of combat knowledge. All of a sudden everyone got unrestricted access to a wealth of knowledge concerning afflictions and attacks, how they work, what they do, and how to cure them correctly. All neatly compiled into a single downloadable package with detailed installation instructions. I personally (had no other choice) used it extensively for reference. Before ACP, every time I died to something I've never seen before, I had to find someone who knows what it is, get him to sit down for 5 minutes and explain it to me. Then I had to ask several other people about it to get an idea of what different people think effective ways of defending against it are. Then I had to implement an "experimental" defense against it and provoke someone into killing me with that attack again to test my selected defense. If it didn't work, I repeated the cycle. After ACP, I simply opened the acp.txt file, did a text search for a message and in a couple of minutes I've skipped 10 out of 12 steps towards arriving at the correct solution. That's what, I believe, "ruined the dynamic to a large degree". No need to talk to anyone and acknowledge anyone's personal contribution to solving the problem. ACP doesn't draw any class, city, order, guild boundaries between who gets to know what. There are people in every organization who fight alot and know more than others from that fighting. Others in their organization look up to them not only for protection, but also for advice. Those who fight alot are seen as pioneers who risk their necks for their brethren, the mystery of combat creates mentor-student relationships which are often strong enough to emanate even on the political scene.

I can, to a degree, sympathise with the "teaching to code" motivation. But as I've told Larkin long ago about it: find yourself students who are willing to learn and teach them individually if you must. Publish tutorials on how to do this or that in your client, or how to implement most efficient ways of arriving at this or that goal, or even provide basic sample curing systems that anyone can build upon in the future. But don't get a team of people together, make them test and research everything, then code it in, and spill it to the public. Because when you do the latter, you basically steal RP opportunities from a lot of people who are playing the game now and are going to play it in the future.

You've made a very compelling argument, and I applaud you for that. In retrospect, everything is always much clearer, and I often wish that I had given out a code base to work with instead of handing out all the triggers. Since it's already out there and can't be easily retracted, all I can do is delay any bug fixes so that those who actually learned something from it are ahead of the game and those that have no idea will fall behind as things change in the realms.

I still stand by my own argument, however, in that this is simply a game. Some folks take their roleplaying very seriously, and that's great for them. Others are here to relax and have fun. I used to simply come home from work and go play Quake or Carmaggedon 2. I like to blow things up. These IRE games have really given me an opportunity to not only (metaphorically) blow things up, but to also work on leadership qualities, writing proficiencies, social interactions, and much more. I'm sorry if I've ruined anyone else's enjoyment of the game while I was enjoying it myself.