I would also argue that it's easier to teach newbies about tactics in group combat than it is in 1v1. Everyone can tell a newbie to mash web when on balance or sic ents.

Ok, but how much fun do you really think mashing web is for them? Group combat holds appeal mostly for people who are already very used to 1v1 combat. If you are completely new to the game, it can take a really long time before you get tired of 1v1.

Eh. If you are a bard, for instance, you become IMMENSELY useful pretty much straight out of the portal to group fights. You can stand and drop octave and pfifth and aurics and murder in groups, absolutely murder. 1v1, you can't do anything. Any conscious enemy won't let you just sit and build aurics if they can't survive, and without your spec, you're usually pretty crippled.

Do you have any data to back that personal preference of people? I'm not sure if a good amount of nebwies to the game actually feel (a lot of them simply leave because MUDs / Lusternias complexity isn't for them)

Well, I know we're not rolling in the new players or anything. But I still think it's worth the effort to try and appeal to them.

But how do you know what their appeals are? IRE hasn't disclosed the results of their testing, and I haven't see anything else - I'm just questioning how can you speak on the behalf of the new players.

I still play Lusternia because the group combat aspect appeals to me. I left Achaea because I got tired of 1v1. Group combat is far more dynamic.

If the newbies don't like the group combat scenario, IRE has plenty of other MUDs. Why can't Lusternia be the one for those of us who do enjoy the group fights?

Edit: I didn't like my choice of words.

One of the hard things about discussions like this is, by and large, the people whose opinions are being discussed aren't here to disagree about what they are. The game becomes self-selecting; the changing of player attitude is also self-reinforcing because those who feel differently participate less and leave. The people left are generally the least qualified to speculate on how the other people felt.

No one can actually fight 1v1 without a spec. Maybe monks, but I would argue that Bards are probably the best 1v1 fighters without spec anyway

Sure as hell isn't guardians or warriors.

I think new players prefer 1v1 for a variety of reasons:

1. If you are a new player in a group fight, and aren't close to useless, then you will probably be targeted first because you aren't a Demigod with artifacts and can be taken down quickly. 10 people hitting a level 50-60 person who has maybe one trans skill is guaranteed to kill them immediately, and a new player isn't going to enjoy that. I thought this point was obvious... now once your level and might gets high enough that you can survive several attackers long enough to tumble out of the room, group fights get more interesting, but it takes a long time, significant investments and a lot of knowledge about the game to reach that point.

2. Newbies generally have less patience for spam. They are often used to graphics, while learning to visualize events in MUDs is in many ways a developed skill. Learning to visualize events with spam going on is the next level of difficulty. You can get used to spam over time, you can code things to make it more manageable, but not being able to follow what's happening with just your eyes can be off-putting to someone who's still learning to process the basic information.

The skill in a nutshell is similar to speed reading. How many times does a line have to come up before they can recognize what that line of text means without having to read the whole thing to themselves in their heads. People still developing this skill don't want to be stuck with 5 pages a second, even if they aren't instantly killed, because they will feel a disconnection from what's happening, and be frustrated by that. Again, I thought this was fairly obvious if you stopped to think about it. People don't like spam.

3. To tie this all together, people like games to feel "fair." The more helpless you feel, the less you understand, the less fair something feels. Confusing (spammy) team fights where a new player can be taken down instantly if they manage to be a threat isn't going to feel as fair to a new player as a 1v1 fight.

... what kind of group combat have you been in to say that newbies, not the important targets like melders, will be targetted first?

Vadi makes a fair point: newbies are rarely priority targets unless they're doing something that would ordinarily make them high-priority anyway, like being a melder. As an aside, there are other problems with using an inexperienced melder, such as not timing effects correctly, that would mean most groups would prefer to use someone else when possible.

I think it would be more accurate to say that newbies will go down quickly to room-wide passive effects, such as from melds (if you're fighting in an enemy meld). Just the afflictions alone - paralysis, epilepsy, scabies, peace/pacify, agoraphobia, hallucinations, and stupidity especially - are enough to put a newbie and/or systemless person out of the fight almost permanently between the spam and trying to figure out and cure whatever it is they have.

I agree with that assessment. Newbies are the ones that typically die from meld passive effects as well.

I think while Lehki is correct in saying that those who do not like the way the game is (specifically have a problem with group combat) are not here to voice their objections with statistics because they have already left, I would like to point out that this actually means the majority of the current players DO prefer group combat. It is not logical to try and gain would-have-been players at the expense of currently existing players, so any solution should not reduce the prevalence of group combat, and must instead make 1v1 more viable at the same time.

Secondly, I find it fallacious and ridiculous to say that there will be more newbies attracted if 1v1 combat is the main type of PvP in the game. If you've been playing IREs for a long time, surely you might be one of those who would prefer such an environment. But a true newbie as the target? People who are "used to graphics", or "put off by spam"? 1v1 is no better than group combat in that aspect. Surely, group combat generates much more spam numerically... but if you're telling me that true newbies will notice a difference between 1v1 spam and group spam, I'll laugh in your face.

Lusternia's combat is probably one of the more complicated. Instead of straightforward limb-damage and thresholds for mangles, you have wounds and an entire set of afflictions called "deepwounds" that replicate affliction effects, but are based on those wound levels. You have 3 types of focus. You have a wide variety of novel and unique mechanics in combat. Not even touching on group combat dynamics, the 1v1 scene in Lusternia is complex enough to throw even experienced IRE players out of their league. Building a system as a true newbie is almost an impossible prospect. It'll almost certainly take weeks of effort. Getting used to 1v1 here takes days, maybe weeks or months for experienced players.

And you're claiming that having 1v1 be the prevalent form of combat will miraculously attract true newbies and make them stay more than group combat will? Perhaps if you collar all the newbies and give them a taste of both group combat and 1v1, and say "CHOOSE ONE!", they'll say they prefer 1v1. The fact of the matter is, however, a newbie put off by group combat is equally likely to be put off by 1v1 for the same reasons.

Note that I'm not defending group combat here. I'm a class that allegedly does very well in 1v1 and is crippled by having targets die fast (momentum, lol), and I enjoy spars a great deal. I'm on the side of making 1v1 more prevalent, definitely. However, the argument about newbies being able to enjoy the game more with 1v1 is flawed. I've advocated the coding of a server-side, full automatic system (like first-aid, only automatic, see aetolia). That would help get a lot more newbies into the combat scene instead of making 1v1 prevalent and still throwing them into the deep end with no choice but to buy a system - and even after, struggle to understand combat.

I do believe it was out of a similar advocating a couple years back that the FirstAid ability was born. I for one would also support a server-side system of some sort. Naturally, there ought to be a config option to turn it off and let people use their own, but hey.

Shush, otter-boy.

I'm pretty shocked by some of the arguments and fallacious replies I've gotten in this thread, but to think that you would point out that there's a large difference yourself and then say that people wouldn't notice the difference? Clearly wrong.

Anyway, I never said that 1v1 should be "prevalent", I said that it should be encouraged. I'm not sure how that got misinterpreted or if you just want to put words in my mouth, but it's getting tiresome trying to reason with some of you obsessive and angry people about basic things like spam. I got my message across so I think it's time to stop.

I was addressing specifically this claim that 1v1 spam is somehow less off-putting and thus "preferable" to newbies. Oh, my mistake, since you get so grumpy at people "putting words in your mouth", I meant "new players", not "newbies".

Numerically, group combat produces spam that is many times more than 1v1. That is fact. The claim that it is any easier to process for new players is unsupported at best, fallacious at worst. As an experienced combatant yourself, I find it hard to imagine you would argue otherwise.

The basis of your posts is that "new players" somehow "prefer" or somehow receive more benefit from 1v1 as opposed to group combat. I apologise if I have misinterpreted of course, and maybe I'm getting your posts in this thread mixed up with another thread, but you certainly sounded like you wished to encourage the prevalence of 1v1 at the expense of group combat.

I'm not sure you did, though. I'm quite unconvinced; there's no actual evidence (just opinion).