Featured Questions #8

If you have a Nodeka-related question you'd like to see answered in a future Featured Questions article, just leave a blog comment or e-mail it to me!

Featured Questions #8:

A single death takes ALL of your renown.. Why not only a portion?

It's basically a "death penalty" for losing in PvP. If you don't manage to win or escape, you lose the (usually 5%) renown benefit to gold and experience until you can build that renown back up. (It takes a little over four hours outside of a safe-room to build your renown back up to the base 5% level.))

In invasion, is the reward of killing your own ogre the same as assisting someone killing theirs? Or has it a lower count. And what if we kill a bigger ogre do we get a higher reward count?

The specifics of the Invasion contribution system are a bit complex, and it's intentional that I avoid sharing many details when talking about it. Rest assured that I try my best to design and tweak these systems with fairness in mind; if there's a glaring issue, you should definitely bring it up, but as long as the system is working fairly, my response to these questions will generally be "don't worry about it, the more you participate, the better your contribution". =)

Do aura affects stack with other similar abilities? i.e. Let's just say I had what appears to be a 25% lag reduction that the zmo aura grants - would that also stack with time bending if I had it?

Yes, empyreal striding stacks with other similar effects, in the same way that time-bending and the two time-walker abilities stack (multiplicative, as is usual for Nodeka). The various auras were designed and tested with these types of interaction in mind.

You'd mentioned that the eventuality of +aura equipment coming in. Are those pieces of equipment already accessible? Are scrolls already accessible too? Spoils of war, any update on progress, when it will be out, ideas of what the spoils may be?

Runed equipment and scrolls aren't accessible yet; you'll see them first as rare 'spoils of war' benefits. I don't want to spoil the 'spoils of war' too much; they're on my active plate, so you shouldn't have to wait too long for stuff to start appearing. (The primary delay, other than sharing development time with newbie improvements, is that I'm still working on the design side and trying to solidly delineate precisely what rewards I want to appear where. I'm currently designing four different reward sets - Invasion spoils, special Citadels, a new event, and general PvP. The primary design issue here is that I don't want to just haphazardly throw out rewards for each of them - each system needs to be logical and compelling.)

Is it intentional that auras sometimes shift to the 'fringe' auras (i.e. the cyclopean ones) when an inscription is empowered?

Absolutely. It is the only way (outside of the cyclopean riddle) to obtain these auras, since you can't empower them manually. There are definitely reasons for this. =)

Is it possible to program into one ability, multiple counterattacks of the same type?

Of course. =) I implemented a sorcerer + daja ability (wings of seraphic fire) which essentially did that, but it got tweaked and eventually became unearthly rapture instead. I like the idea of nasty (perhaps stacking) reactive shields (as opposed to the "buff" type which are up 50% of the time or so, which seem less strategic). Note that there are more and more ways to counteract shields nowadays, as well - definitely intentional. =)

I'm not sure if this question is in the spirit of "Featured Questions", but I was curious if Nodeka tracks any statistics, in particular to aid in class balancing?

Nodeka creates and retains numerous logs of various types, for administrative and rule-enforcement purposes. In addition to Nodeka's internal logging, I do a lot of monitoring (both manual and automated) between and during projects (I have a number of scripts set up for this purpose). This is where I get my initial assessments; I then have the capability of running tests locally to verify things (which is what I do for every update - in fact, testing and design both take far, far more time than any actual implementation).

Let's consider a char that is blackened, cloaked, and blended. Rank affects come up, and this person now get's a 30% invisible affect. Suppose there is another char with more than 131% see visible. For the blackened-cloaked-blended: is there an overall precedence in the ability to not be seen by the invis char? With that 30% aff and the 131% sight, will the see-invis char always get to see the otherwise hidden char? Thanks for your 100% inSIGHTs!

Keep in mind, first of all, that 'see invisible' cannot reveal a blackened character. The 'see invisible' effect only works on invisibility and the 'see cloaked' effect only works on cloak. (The only viewer-based way to break through blackened, currently, is empyreal vigilance. Note that having the forced visibility effect can force the subject to be visible regardless of the hiding source, and thus can nullify blackened.)

Vision works like this: for each hiding effect that the "hider" possesses, roll its percentage. If it succeeds, the "viewer" gets to check against his or her matching vision effects, if any, to counter the hiding effect success. If any hiding effect goes through uncountered, the hider is hidden from sight.

Thus, if the viewer has 131% chance to see invisible, then any invisibility effect on the hider would be countered every single time (thus, invisibility could never hide him or her from the viewer). Having more than 100% does nothing special; nor does this chance to see invisible have any effect on other hiding effect types, such as cloak.

Re: Targeting.. Way it seems now, I need to almost be in the same room in order for target to work.. Any chance of a skill that can boost the distance? Maybe make it only increase it very little when at 100%, but can prac beyond 100% to increase that distance?.. Or instead of an automatic skill.. make it have a high prevent time, so its not something that is just kept up all the time.. High prevent, short active time.

Targeting range is slightly shorter on average, currently (especially since people are far more likely to stack strength than learn curve - imagine that!). I'm working on new types of bonuses to add to equipment (such as the runes which were implemented but are not yet accessible), and you'll definitely see more learn curve equipment out there in the future (and perhaps plain +target range as well). When I go back to tweak the races a bit, I'll also differentiate their learn curves in order to make some into excellent targeters. =)