Doctor Overlord, on 10 January 2013 - 09:36 PM, said:
This is getting off track because your definition of 'unbalanced exploit' is very different than that of the rest of the gaming world. If something is unbalanced and an exploit is also called a -bug-. If someone says that a mechanic is unbalanced in a game, then the common expectation that the dev will fix it. If someone says that a game has an exploit, then the expectation is that it will be stopped. Tell any gamer that a game has had an exploit for a year and they will tell you the devs are failing to do their jobs.
What you are talking about is working within the system, so don't call it unbalanced or an exploit because devising strategies that still occur within the game's EULA is not the same.
The original point I was making was that it is incorrect to assume any game could have the kind of complex system you suggested with hundreds of randomly generated NPCs running out across it, all of them interacting with each other in different ways without leading to countless bugs that players could abuse.
I was not talking about legitimate strategies within a game's EULA but the innumerable bugs and problems that would lead to real exploits that would unbalance the game, destroying economy or progression or whatever else is meant to keep players playing while sucking away company resources dealing with the bugs.
So you actually expect MMO programmers to be able to make NPC AIs that mimic the concepts of psychological tactics like a bluff? Our current state of gaming programming commonly has issues with NPC pathing. Games still have problems just making an NPC walk from point A to point B. You really think it possible for MMO programmers given their limitations of resources and budgets to create AIs of that level, (and judging from your other posts you seem to expect these AIs to be adaptive as well, changing based on their interactions).
Then there's the issue that complex systems always generate unexpected consequences and one as complicated as that would be nightmare to debug while being unprofitable to try to produce.
As I said, that doesn't mean MMO devs should not continue to evolve the genre but there is difference between realistic goals and expectations that repeatedly come up on MMO forums for some kind of total immersion, virtual world simulator that creates an 'emergent narrative' where every single mob interacts with every other as well as the environment and players. Such expectations never seem to bother considering whether a company could actually stay in business attempting to create such a thing.
Oh, so that's what you mean... Thanks for the explanation. I assumed that you meant taking advantage of things happening within the system. In the case of actual exploits that are the result of a bug, these would exist just like in every other game and would be fixed just like in any other game.
NPC pathing has been solved long ago, the problem is rather that this knowledge isn't distributed properly. The main problem, I think, is that the industry (accurately, unfortunately) perceives actual programmers as expensive... Game designers, including the people who write quest scripts and the like, are usually not programmers. They have some knowledge about programming, but owning a hammer doesn't make you a carpenter.
witteker, on 10 January 2013 - 05:49 PM, said:
You are admitting it here yourself. There is no need for specific example. It's just logic. You can simulate will, but computer objects do not have will. It just looks like it's will, but it's not. The player in the game is different. npc's have no will of their own. It's logical. It's obvious.
You have some questions to answer before you can participate in this discussion.
XPhiler, on 10 January 2013 - 04:46 PM, said:
I find most of them to be funny actually, its kinda like a light black humor especially the asura ones. Personally I always found the story to be the most worth while thing in questing. The actual combat itself no matter what game becomes repetative very fast.
Cause I didnt find them all yet ? have yet to start playing 7 zones which means I obviously didnt find the jumping puzzles there. Cause I like to vary my game play am not the type of player who decides this month I am going to do jp and spend all month doing just that? Plenty of reasons. As for the monthly achievement like I said before its impossible not to repeat anything in an MMO so yes some monthly achievement content is repetative. Well not sure if you can consider killing 50 enemies in WvW repetative per se. But the fractals one can be if you do a lot of fractals. Its also the reason I didnt bother with the monthly achievement last month. Didnt feel like it didnt do it as simple as that. Not sure why it has to be so hard to avoid playing something you dont enjoy.
Come on these tactics are below you, if like you claim you like to excel at any games combat mechanic surely you can see its a lot more then just different skill names. In any case reread my last post I explained clearly the differences in play style. Tell me how is ele staff the same as warrior bow? Warrior bow is just 3 DPS skills and 2 CCs. Ele Staff is WoW I dont even know where to begin. 7 DPS skills, 2 Self Support skills, 6 group support, 9 Crowd control skills. But yeah sure maximize your combat potentially on you elementalist by just using 3 dps and 2 ccs because well they're the same thing according to you. Hey if you want to simplfy things so much, how is a staff on an ele so different then an axe on a warrior in gw2. They both "just" give you boost to stats and do some damage using a basic attack. Ohh please!
Scripts dont have to fire off at once, you can still simulate gradually increased worry level by delaying the excusion of the chosen outcome no problem. Maybe dwarf fortress does have the complexity you mention underneat it but it would have been a waste of resource if thats the case in my opinion. The best way to code is creating the desired functionality with the least complexity possible. Sure you could write a script that makes the dwarf actually check the contents of the barrel and decide on its skill level if something is off. But its alot simpler and produces the same exact result if RNG decides the dwarf is going to close the barrel and then another RNG decides if the dwarf notices the baby inside perhaps with a positive modifier based on the dwarf ale brewning skill.
You could also have every dwarf continously iteraiting on every item they own and monitor things like worry level. But it would be inefficient because you'd have to iterate through stuff that has zero effect on anything. Its better to do it the other way. The script should be attached to the baby not the mother. That way when baby is lost it can gradually increase the worry state of his mother. Mother owns tons of things, baby has just one mother. Takes less resources that way and is simpler. In fact you dont even need to worry about worrying in reality. You could implement it as follows: Baby script would monitor its own condition and its own health. So Barrel got closed baby died. Baby health is 0 condition is lost. after x amount of time Baby script gives the task to its mother to look for him simulating a low worry level. After another X amount of time baby script gives a new task to look for him even more agressively simulating despiration. Eventually mother finds the baby in the barrel, baby reports health 0 and assigns drastic action to mother. The drastic action could be a selection of actions as discussed above. You know the usual genocide, suicide, take over the world etc... This would still simulate a lot of what you said but at a fraction of the complexity.
In that case the script of the baby would result in having still health, its condition could change from lost to found and it could have actions such as giving the task to the mother to run to him simulating the fact the baby started to cry the moment it was found.
No argument here. There is no such logic simulated or otherwise that trigger events in Gw2.
If you're doing it from scratch yes but as it is you need to litterally redesign 1/4 of the map. I am sure you dont think thats a 2 day job.
I never said what you're suggesting is impossible to implement only it would involve a lot more then a couple of days of work to implement the random event themselves. There is a solution to every problem but as you can see the amount of work keeps piling up. its not just create these random events and you're done.
Again was just pointing out that there are things to consider, a change of this magnitute cant happen over night.
You're playing with words. You know exactly what I meant. In Gw1 you can buy anything you want with gold / platinum. That statement is true. but you're saying it isnt because well I might be too casual to earn enough gold / platium to buy anything thats available for sale in gw1 before the game closes or I die. so does that mean that you're not free to buy anything you want in Gw1?
Combat becomes repetitive? In a way, maybe. On the other hand, consider that chess is repetitive too - all you do is pick up funny shaped pieces of wood and move them to another square, and the combat, which involves moving to a square where there is an enemy piece already, is very dull - yet it's a very popular game.
Why? Because the strategies involved have a high level of complexity. Naturally, the rules of a game need to allow interesting things to emerge.
Wait, you still haven't played all zones? What have you been doing all this time man? How many in-game hours do you have, seriously. Open the game client and type in /age, post results. Also what level is your highest leveled character?
Elementalist staff is a bad example, I agree. That's because eles have multiple attunements. That doesn't matter, really, since at any given moment and set of traits, one or at most two attunements are worth using (which one would change with situation, of course). So if you are in a situation where only fire is worth using, you're stuck with either using the fire skills or being worse than you could be.
An ele staff in GW1 is a ranged weapon, but more importantly it's not a channel for your skills. The ele can drop the staff (or change weapon for whatever reason) and still cast the same spells. The warrior's axe on the other hand is required to use his skills. In GW2, both classes have both ranged and melee weapons and in all cases these weapons are skill channels.
You are right in that you could make specific scripts to produce the specific storyline that I told you about. But consider that that particular storyline probably only happened once in the entire history of the universe. Literally. Out of all the DF players in the world, it happened to
one of them, and it only happened
once. If the specific scripts that generate the storyline were hardcoded, then that would cause this particular thing to happen to a lot of people, making it less unique. Also, it would have to be something that the programmer thought of when he was making the game.
Instead, the way that DF actually is written allows literally trillions of storylines to dynamically emerge.
I have no idea about which object the worry level is attached to (I didn't write Dwarf Fortress and haven't seen the source code, just followed discussions about it). Probably neither the baby nor the mother, but to the relation between them. Doesn't strictly matter as the time complexity would be the same, but thanks for addressing this point.
No, you don't need to redesign anything. Well, that is, it would probably be better to make brand new maps in a brand new game than simply reusing existing ones, but you could use for example the GW2 maps as they are. I could easily see a design where there are, say, 100 spots (houses, caves, pirate ships etc) in a single area that are marked as possible setups for enemy lairs. Of course, a better way would be to have these enemies actually find their own hiding places... But let's assume that that is hard. Anyway, any of these 100 spots can be the home base for any sort of minor threat (bandit gang etc). Each of those would make up their own patrol routes or whatever (generated, not scripted). On top there could be roaming threats (dragons, invading enemy armies whatever). One special case of roaming threats would be ambient threats (e.g. wolf pack in a forest: it navigates around the forest, eating animals, NPCs, players etc, until it's killed). Not to mention more subliminal threats (plague or other infection spreading from character to character, both NPCs and PCs, inside a certain area, until a player devises a cure for it).
Eh yes, it would be far more than a couple days of work. Of course! But the random events would not be
explictly created. They would
dynamically emerge from the other components of the game. The random events would take zero days to make because you would not make them at all. The work, instead, is all about creating the conditions in which those random events would be generated automatically.
I'm not playing with words. I'm merely asking you to use words correctly. "Anything" is not the same word as "all", and what you said is "
in Gw2 you can unlock all without paying anything". If you meant "anything" you should say "anything".
3
) With a necro it would be something on the lines of dodging into them this will cause a mark of blood to be caste giving me a regen and a bleed to them, I would then cast Chilblains, blood is power, putrid mark, epidemic, mark of blood, lich form and when that runs out death shroud when that runs out then its heal and mark of blood / dodge.
