Coding a complete system for achaea takes a weekend, for Lusternia it takes a month..

Don't chalk this up to "IRE combat"

Actually once you fix these things, more people can participate merely due to:

1. Damage won't one shot you, so you can actually have a chance to put your skills to work

2. Your class will be able to utilize its skills to their fullest

3. You won't be instantly faceraped because you can't handle a demesne


These are not mere bug fixes, they are the crux of what is wrong with our combat system. People are sitting on the sidelines not because they can't code a system, but because it doesn't matter if they have a system or not. They die in 1 - 2 hits from out of whack issues and give up in frustration.

Whether you want to code your own system or not is not a reason for making things easier to code. There are and always will be systems you can get and most likely far better than anything you can do yourself (I am assuming this not actually knowing your coding skills). What will keep you from participating, however, is being killed right out of the gate before that "easier to code system" of yours can even do anything.

first time walking into one of these was not fun

'Whoa whoa whoa what is this? Holy balls what is happening to me. Who's hitting me? OMG THERE'S NOBODY HERE WHAT IS HAPPEN- *dead*'

This is definitely false.

I've written a total of three player systems for various IRE muds, Lusternia included, for several different clients.

A lot of the initial work to be done is in the architecture - how it handles the prompt and hooks into curing routines for the different balances, how each of them actually utilize the generated cure, etc.

This usually takes much longer than a week alone, especially if you want optimal solutions. If you want a simple sipper and no queueing of afflictions, that would be fast to implement, but would perform poorly in actual use.

The differential between Lusternia and the other IREs mostly comes from the number of afflictions (200+ versus around 100). At most it takes double the time to build for Lusternia, not 15x.

Which of these other games have ectoplasm, crucify, green/gedulah consideration, choke, sap, vibes/groves that don't decay on use and span 20+ rooms, 11k health pools, health/wounding application split, softlocks on one attack requiring a balance consuming cure, size differentials, eliminate instakill on a class that can close rooms completely, preventative uncurables (octave etc), 10k health/mana pools, 50+ defenses without trying, no miniskills to lessen the brunt of learning required for maximum survival, planes necessitating some form of travel other than a nexus and once again requiring skills, dealing out 2-3 completely hidden afflictions constantly (keep in mind bloodborn just lost this as it was too imbalanced on a mud where you can actually be an affliction class) and blah blah blah.

The list is endless. Some of these things make the game unique/interesting but for a long time now my thought has been this:

Through the incredible amount of resilience and passive curing presented, each 'complete' or 'balanced' class is given some absurd set of circumstances that are impossible to cure, in order for that class to get kills.

Examples? Things that delay curing, upgrading skills to fully disable curing and present instakills, upgraded skills to make them inescapable, buff damage out of proportion so that one can kill a 10k giant but also instantly kill any 3k normal, uncurable afflictions in circumstances like octave/healing auras, and balance/eq stack-locks. Each class seems to be gaining "guarantees" rather than things to build on. The four strongest afflictions in game currently are stun, balance stackers, choke, and the various impale methods.

Streamlining is as good as it will get, I assume. The overhaul to remove most of that bloat and nuclear arms race stuff is too far-reaching and will likely never happen. Personally I feel like it should address health scaling, providing standard affliction lines, revisiting racial bonus/malus, lowering kill methods in primary class trees, and perhaps combining or changing how certain passive trans-benefit (resil/etc) skills work.

Sorry for the missunderstanding. I meant 3 -4 weekends, not 30 days. (i.e. a month of weekends)

It's a lot more than just the 200 afflictions. Once your system is down, adding afflictions is not a big deal. However, having to add afflictions that change the flow of logic needed to cure, is a big deal. And adding new cures and healing systems is a big deal.

In lusternia, 'sipping' is not just health and mana vials and sparkelberry... it's health vials, mana vials, ego vials, healing scrolls, sparkleberry, and sparkleberry of the month. It's just overall more complicated and more things to thing about from a coding perspective.

In lusernia, I don't think a basic single trigger -> single action system works even for "entry"

The difference in durability for people who only have a health vial, vs people who can afford the health/sparkle/scroll is huge!

Personally, I think streamlining should make it easier to get a foot in the door.

As it stands, warriors have the hardest difficulty in killing at lower levels, due to all the money requirements.

You need credits to buy a good weapon, you *need* to be tri-trans just in order to be able to fight at anything above newbie levels, imo. The other archetypes don't need to be tri-trans *AND* have to get an obscenely good weapon (well, monks need a weapon) to get into newbie and lowbie fighting.

I'm not saying make highbie fighting easier, but there should be an easy learning curve before hitting the steeper curve to become good.

This particularly could be looked at; I acknowledge I'm not trans resilience, but for some reason being two-shotted by a warrior AND having that attack stun AND paralyse doesn't seem like it's at all a reason to hook someone into participating more in combat - at all - or for that matter wanting them to stick around with this stupid kills/deaths thing, where they can be ganked at anytime, for any reason (including "teh lulz"), or even to buy credits so they can trans the skills. So yes, fix damage scaling.

I agree with Gregori's analysis. Its up to the player to learn to code or acquire a system, which is fine, but 'being killed right out of the gate' with the current setup I'd wager is the major disincentive.

Another remedy to the problem: ban systems.

Keep afflictions just as complicated as they are and shrub anyone who's caught using a system to handle them. Then you don't have to be a programmer to survive, you just have to be INSANELY experienced at recognizing the affliction lines yourself and be able to keep track of all your balances in your head.

So everyone's on board with this idea?

Impractical to monitor and would also require rebuilding about 1/3 of the game from the ground up. Not happening.

I know that it's not happening. I think the point I was failing to make is that combat in Lusternia would be better described as "inhuman" than "complex". It's something that, in real time, only machines can handle. I think that's a huge problem for anyone who's interested in combat but not programming. Honestly, I don't have a lot of stake in it since I'm interested in neither. I'll just go back to finding honour quests to do. Carry on.

I don't understand this sort of statement when there is a free combat system available for a free client. It requires very little effort to install, configure, and learn to use it. (Unless you're using a Mac...)

You're right, but with half the work to reduce the complexity by an infinitesimal amount already done it seems a bit late to be bringing it up, I guess.

Lusternia is 33% cash, 33% coding skills, and 33% actual skill. Even if you've got a great system and a million credits you'll still get your ass handed to you, at least for awhile. If you've got all the best artis and know how to use them it won't help if your system can't deal with pinned legs or sap or choke or whatever. This is what makes entering combat such an overwhelming chore: it's complexity on top of difficulty on top of complexity. I personally know nothing about coding... I couldn't even make a simple, one-line trigger when I started playing Lusternia. I'm better now, I can set up basic triggers, aliases and variables, and combine them in meaningful ways, but my knowledge is still pretty full of holes. I've looked up guides but haven't found anything that doesn't already assume you know a lot about coding... there don't seem to be any specific MUSHclient guides out there, at least. How any of you learned what you know is a mystery to me as the information just doesn't seem to be out there, and attempting to learn by taking apart Ethelon's system only makes me more and more confused.

Your numbers are weird. I had an alt get jumped by a demigod yesterday. No trans skills except influence. Demigod was about 350% of the alt's might. I had no tinderbox, so my system was pitching a fit. Demigod ran away.

Skills only contribute two things: numbers and options. Resilience and magic are traditional "numbers" skills. Knights and monks have lots more numbers abilities. Those're important because they effectively raise your level, which saves you from a damage kill.

Options are there for system-breaking purposes. If you operate under the assumption that everyone has a system, you need to work it until the system prioritizes something incorrectly and you can get ahead with more hindering things or until you can break it.

The options don't matter at all if you can't compose your thoughts in a hurry, and keeping a level head under strong time pressure requires a ton of discipline or a fair bit of practice and familiarity. When combat newbies post a log crying about how impossible things are, that's usually where the problem lies. They're sloppy. They override actions in aeon or choke .75 seconds after the initial command. Sometimes they'll do that many times in a row. Sometimes they only try to push a kill condition and ignore the fight. Sometimes they're so terrified of damage or afflictions that they web spam. I don't think classifying this as "skill" is fair to the people who have real skill. That's just composure, and that falls outside the purview of streamlining entirely.