It's that time again... so let's jump into another installment of player-submitted Featured Questions! I'm always happy to chat and hear your questions and concerns regarding Nodeka; you can submit any Nodeka-related questions you may have as a comment on this blog or via e-mail, and I will select a number of them every other Tuesday to answer in this column.
Featured Questions #6:
Why is the affect you get when you fail a trade with Gerahf so long (4 days)? Seems like a severe punishment for making a typo.
Is the spit affect for Gerahf being angry with you made invisible once you acquire a smile affect? That is to say, you have the spit affect, he smiles on you, and the spit affect is visibly replaced with the smile affect, but he still holds you in scorn due to ripping him off, and refuses to accept offers that were acceptable pre-spit affect? If this is the case, would it be possible to clear the spit affect once you get the smile affect so you can obtain the full benefit of the smile, or make the affect not disappear?
Gerahf's favor is on a sliding scale. Every time you anger him with a poor trade offer, his opinion of you slips down a little bit. Every time you please him with a particularly good trade (i.e., not just any successful trade but one in which he smiles at you), his opinion of you increases a little bit. "Spit effects" and "smile effects" are not actually differentiated; there's just one sliding scale based on the sum of your positive/negative interactions with him. If you're at the undesirable end of the scale, the effect's duration is reduced a bit.
In invasions, if you hit something smaller than you and don't kill it before you get jailed, when you come out of jail, it hunts you down and hits you and sends you right back (unless someone else kills it). This can result in a cycle of permanent jailing. Can it be fixed to clear the player from the mobs agg list if the player is jailed for hitting the mob and the mob is too small?
Thanks for reminding me. I think there might be a clever way to address this; adding it to my to-do list. =)
...I noticed (or hope) that 'help resistances' is out of date. Reason being it says there that for any given attack only -one- resistance can proc, with the logic being that all resistances provide equal damage reduction. Seeing as this is no longer the case - do resistances work differently now?
Multi-part question, but really just looking for an entire chart as an answer:
1. What is the % damage gain for a vulnerability?
2. What are the % damage cuts for the following resistances: magic, mental, holy, physical?
Currently, some resistances are more effective than others. They work along these lines:
1. All applicable resist percentages are attempted. Of the successes, only the most effective successful resist is applied.
2. Vulnerabilities work the same way; only the most 'painful' successful vulnerability is applied.
All resistances reduce damage by 20%, except for the elemental resists which reduce damage by 50%. These resists are considered elemental resists: fire, frost, lightning, earth, elemental.
All vulnerabilities increase damage by 20%.
Thus, if Serenity has 70% lightning resistance and 50% physical resistance, and is hit by a lightning bolt (which is physical + magical + lightning):
1. If the lightning resist check is successful, Serenity takes 50% less damage.
2. If the lightning check fails, but the physical check is successful, she takes 20% less damage.
3. If both checks fail, she takes full damage.
Statistically speaking...
70% chance: takes 50% damage
15% chance: takes 80% damage
15% chance: takes 100% damage
An attack can be both reduced (via resistance) and increased (via vulnerability) simultaneously.
For empowered aspect - aura: jta rank 1, what's the rank number mean? What's the highest rank attainable? Do they grow naturally?
That rank is the power level of the aura; this power level is determined by the number of times the player has inscribed that aura. For example:
- Iblis has no inscriptions. When he successfully empowers an 'xt' aura, it will be of rank 1.
- Alala has four inscriptions -- [ armor: loj ], [ lightning: sji ], [ visit: xt ], and [ extrinsic elucidation: xt ]. When she successfully empowers an 'xt' aura, its rank will be boosted by 1 for every 'xt' inscription she possesses (thus, her aura will be of rank 3).
Higher-ranked auras are more durable, and they provide a greater combat bonus as well. In addition, many inscriptions base their effectiveness in part on the rank of the triggering aura (these are clearly marked as such in the online inscription list helpfiles).
I've always felt that sun stones played a crucial role in character development and even more so now with everyone needing to augment to progress. Any plans on implementing more ways to acquire these?
Yup, definitely! I feel that sun stones should be (in general) a PvP-oriented reward, with questing as a secondary source. There are plans. =)
How is the precedence of altered attack types determined? E.g. I'm a ru wulniothe fallad and have 100% spiritual attacks with creed of the gods volition, and 64% frost attacks from race, do I ever get any frost-based attacks? What if my spiritual attacks were under 100%?
Right now, halwen/spiritual/black magic are checked sequentially before the elemental attacks. Thus, while your 100% spiritual attack effect is active, you will never see a frost attack (you can verify this by expanding your combat output, since "altered" attacks have their text visibly altered).
I'd like to lodge a complaint about the koj spiritualist immoral trial. I ran around the arena for 15-20 minutes today without one spawning. >:|
Agreed. I think the Trials' concept is sound, but there's soooo much more I can do with them given the advances in AI tech that Nodeka has made since their implementation. The current set of trials on each side is pretty arbitrary and not necessarily superbly balanced (I still remember the two nights I spent drawing them up and trimming them down, in a rush to get this cool new feature out the door.) Expect a redesign. =)
What are you [working on] now? Any improvements for (my_class)?
My active work right now is split between the new Fields of Guidance, a new monk skill, a new sorcerer spell, and helping to prep some new areas for you folks that other builders are working on. =)
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Featured Questions #5
Featured Questions is back! Find the answers to your Nodeka-related questions in this column every other Tuesday - just submit your questions via the comments section or e-mail them to me.
Featured Questions #5:
Can you quantify for us what training nim past 100% does?
Training nim beyond 100% reduces the chance of being caught. Currently, no other bonus is gained.
If I have evasion at 250% and 400 willpower, does my evasion prowess increase with 500 willpower?
Yes. There are three ways to improve your chance to evade:
- Improve your evasion mastery beyond 100%.
- Improve your willpower.
- Improve your spellpower (that is, your maximum mana and maximum spirit).
The basic "challenge" to evade an attack is a randomized comparison of your willpower versus your enemy's. This randomized comparison is tilted in two ways. First, your evasion mastery beyond 100% tilts the chances in your favor. Second, the chances are tilted AGAINST you by a certain value - let's call it X. This X is multiplied by the ratio of the enemy's spellpower versus yours. If the ratio is 2:1 (your enemy has twice your spellpower), then X is doubled, making it harder for you to evade. If the ratio is 1:1.5 (you have 1.5 times the spellpower of your enemy), then X is multiplied by 2/3, making it easier for you to evade.
Why do empowered inscriptions only last for 1 use of the ability, causing the aura to shift immediately? Seems pretty harsh since a. most empower attempts fail and b. on a successful empower, the aura doesn't last very long in the first place.
At the risk of sounding ostentatious - "ah, but that's the beauty of the system!" =) The fact that your aura shifts when you fire off an empowered inscription is vital to the system's design.
First of all, point (a) is definitely valid right now. It is hard for a "vanilla" character to empower very often. That's the point of runed gear - by assembling a good collection of runes on your equipment, you make it easier to access the auras that match those runes. You'll find that as the system gets deeper, the combination of runes and ciphers (e.g., cyclopean) will allow you to design your character to access certain auras with more consistency than is possible right now. You'll be able to "customize" your character to access the auras which you want the most (or, conversely, you might choose your inscriptions based on which runes are on the best gear you've collected).
As for point (b) - remember, when the aura shifts, it also refreshes its duration! If you need to fire off that empowered inscription immediately, go for it, but if you can afford to time it, you can greatly extend your "aura uptime" by shifting your aura just before it's about to expire. This leads to an interesting dynamic in inscription choice as well. If you choose to learn several "kyf" inscriptions, then your "kyf" aura will be more powerful - but once you shift out of kyf, chances are you won't have any inscriptions to match the new aura. On the other hand, if you learn a variety of different inscriptions (say, a "kyf", a "bal", and a "zmo"), you greatly increase the chance that you'll be able to chain inscriptions off of each other when they shift, but none of your auras will be quite as strong as a stacked aura.
Finally, ciphers can change the inscription game in many different ways. The magi's remembrance cipher can make your auras last considerably longer, if duration is a concern; the cyclopean cipher can sometimes turn a failed empower into a success (albeit of a strange and different aura type); and so on. The sky's the limit - just wait 'til I start really expanding on the available inscriptions and ciphers. =)
Bash+trip+lock in groups of 2 or more is [harsh]... While lateral defense has been introduced as one means of defense... I would like to see [other methods of defense].
Actually, I've had plans to approach this from a skew angle. Expect bash and trip to be reworked at some point. I'd like these impairments to be useful as strategic counters and pacing tools; right now, at instant speed, they're usually just "spam me right away" spoilers, which is not where they should be.
Speaking of which, can we take Stun Immunity away from ranks as well?
I'm open to a reworking of rank bonuses. We have a lot of unique and interesting potential bonuses which simply didn't exist at the time that rank effects were introduced which could be interesting.
Will Sigil Citadel ever be automated? And will we be looking at more of such events in the near future?
Yah, this is easily doable with the advancements in AI sophistication which have been implemented over time. The primary reason that I haven't done this already is that I'd like to rework Sigil Citadels at the same time - they're a nice stepping point but right now they primarily devolve into a single, giant, bloody, game-ending Team A vs. Team B pileup (not that there's anything wrong with that, and that could easily be its own Citadel mode, but that's selling the intent of Sigil Cits a bit short).
I've talked online a bit about Citadel variants I'd like to do (for example, the champion idea I've mentioned a few times and even experimented with a few days ago via a MechaGodzilla-sized Issabella). I have several ideas that you'll see pop up eventually, and the plan is for these to be automated Citadel variants with a faction-based incentive to compete and win (a simple shared set of faction rewards).
Are there any gambling systems on the table to be implemented? Even something as simple as spinning a wheel and betting on even or odd with 1:1 plat payouts would be awesome!
The idea's popped up many times (ever since I started working on Aur-vindi all those years ago). I'd want to make it something interesting and unique to Nodeka, but none of the ideas I've ever come up with have struck me as "the one". It's something that shouldn't be too hard to do, though, so I'll take a look at it as a between-time project (the stuff I work on, like new abilities, "in between" sessions of work on a major project in order to clear my mind and change the coding pace a bit).
Will the tech lock be reduced from 18 hours in the future?
I have no plans for this. Teching is fairly hard as it is (tip: tech chance is related to material cost, so a wrist has a much lower chance of teching than a chest), and reducing or eliminating the tech lock wouldn't do much except open up the system to "power-leveling".
Lots of questions this time around; I need to get back to development work so we'll stop here for this session. Keep those questions coming in, I appreciate them and I'm happy to help shed a little light!
Featured Questions #5:
Can you quantify for us what training nim past 100% does?
Training nim beyond 100% reduces the chance of being caught. Currently, no other bonus is gained.
If I have evasion at 250% and 400 willpower, does my evasion prowess increase with 500 willpower?
Yes. There are three ways to improve your chance to evade:
- Improve your evasion mastery beyond 100%.
- Improve your willpower.
- Improve your spellpower (that is, your maximum mana and maximum spirit).
The basic "challenge" to evade an attack is a randomized comparison of your willpower versus your enemy's. This randomized comparison is tilted in two ways. First, your evasion mastery beyond 100% tilts the chances in your favor. Second, the chances are tilted AGAINST you by a certain value - let's call it X. This X is multiplied by the ratio of the enemy's spellpower versus yours. If the ratio is 2:1 (your enemy has twice your spellpower), then X is doubled, making it harder for you to evade. If the ratio is 1:1.5 (you have 1.5 times the spellpower of your enemy), then X is multiplied by 2/3, making it easier for you to evade.
Why do empowered inscriptions only last for 1 use of the ability, causing the aura to shift immediately? Seems pretty harsh since a. most empower attempts fail and b. on a successful empower, the aura doesn't last very long in the first place.
At the risk of sounding ostentatious - "ah, but that's the beauty of the system!" =) The fact that your aura shifts when you fire off an empowered inscription is vital to the system's design.
First of all, point (a) is definitely valid right now. It is hard for a "vanilla" character to empower very often. That's the point of runed gear - by assembling a good collection of runes on your equipment, you make it easier to access the auras that match those runes. You'll find that as the system gets deeper, the combination of runes and ciphers (e.g., cyclopean) will allow you to design your character to access certain auras with more consistency than is possible right now. You'll be able to "customize" your character to access the auras which you want the most (or, conversely, you might choose your inscriptions based on which runes are on the best gear you've collected).
As for point (b) - remember, when the aura shifts, it also refreshes its duration! If you need to fire off that empowered inscription immediately, go for it, but if you can afford to time it, you can greatly extend your "aura uptime" by shifting your aura just before it's about to expire. This leads to an interesting dynamic in inscription choice as well. If you choose to learn several "kyf" inscriptions, then your "kyf" aura will be more powerful - but once you shift out of kyf, chances are you won't have any inscriptions to match the new aura. On the other hand, if you learn a variety of different inscriptions (say, a "kyf", a "bal", and a "zmo"), you greatly increase the chance that you'll be able to chain inscriptions off of each other when they shift, but none of your auras will be quite as strong as a stacked aura.
Finally, ciphers can change the inscription game in many different ways. The magi's remembrance cipher can make your auras last considerably longer, if duration is a concern; the cyclopean cipher can sometimes turn a failed empower into a success (albeit of a strange and different aura type); and so on. The sky's the limit - just wait 'til I start really expanding on the available inscriptions and ciphers. =)
Bash+trip+lock in groups of 2 or more is [harsh]... While lateral defense has been introduced as one means of defense... I would like to see [other methods of defense].
Actually, I've had plans to approach this from a skew angle. Expect bash and trip to be reworked at some point. I'd like these impairments to be useful as strategic counters and pacing tools; right now, at instant speed, they're usually just "spam me right away" spoilers, which is not where they should be.
Speaking of which, can we take Stun Immunity away from ranks as well?
I'm open to a reworking of rank bonuses. We have a lot of unique and interesting potential bonuses which simply didn't exist at the time that rank effects were introduced which could be interesting.
Will Sigil Citadel ever be automated? And will we be looking at more of such events in the near future?
Yah, this is easily doable with the advancements in AI sophistication which have been implemented over time. The primary reason that I haven't done this already is that I'd like to rework Sigil Citadels at the same time - they're a nice stepping point but right now they primarily devolve into a single, giant, bloody, game-ending Team A vs. Team B pileup (not that there's anything wrong with that, and that could easily be its own Citadel mode, but that's selling the intent of Sigil Cits a bit short).
I've talked online a bit about Citadel variants I'd like to do (for example, the champion idea I've mentioned a few times and even experimented with a few days ago via a MechaGodzilla-sized Issabella). I have several ideas that you'll see pop up eventually, and the plan is for these to be automated Citadel variants with a faction-based incentive to compete and win (a simple shared set of faction rewards).
Are there any gambling systems on the table to be implemented? Even something as simple as spinning a wheel and betting on even or odd with 1:1 plat payouts would be awesome!
The idea's popped up many times (ever since I started working on Aur-vindi all those years ago). I'd want to make it something interesting and unique to Nodeka, but none of the ideas I've ever come up with have struck me as "the one". It's something that shouldn't be too hard to do, though, so I'll take a look at it as a between-time project (the stuff I work on, like new abilities, "in between" sessions of work on a major project in order to clear my mind and change the coding pace a bit).
Will the tech lock be reduced from 18 hours in the future?
I have no plans for this. Teching is fairly hard as it is (tip: tech chance is related to material cost, so a wrist has a much lower chance of teching than a chest), and reducing or eliminating the tech lock wouldn't do much except open up the system to "power-leveling".
Lots of questions this time around; I need to get back to development work so we'll stop here for this session. Keep those questions coming in, I appreciate them and I'm happy to help shed a little light!
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