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Old 10-27-2010, 01:57 PM   #4
KaVir
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Name: Richard
Home MUD: God Wars II
Posts: 2,052
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Re: Bobo's Tour de Mud

I must admit I'm rather surprised by your comment about documentation, as most players are very positive about the dynamic help files and the 'what' command. In fact, a frequent problem I encounter is people ignoring the help files because they expect them to be inaccurate or out-of-date, being used to that from their experiences on other muds.

On your blog you mentioned "Things like cooldown, soak, and other various attributes of combat aren't very well explained in the helpfiles, and learning a good character build can be a very frustrating series of trial-and-error." There is actually a 'cooldown' help file which describes how cooldown works, and a two page 'armour' help file (the American spelling 'armor' is also supported) which describes how soak works, along with 'bypass' and 'critical-bypass' help files which explain how to get past armour. While decent character builds are indeed difficult to create, there's a 'build' help file which gives you some solid advice for starting out, and it's dynamically tailored to the viewer's class - this help file is referenced by the 'classed' help file, which the context-sensitive hint system advises you to read the moment you class.

The in-game documentation is something I've actually invested quite a lot of time and effort into, primarily to compensate for the vast learning curve faced by players switching from other muds (this is something many people consider a major negative, and it comes up in most reviews, so I was rather intrigued that you didn't mention it). So I'm definitely open to suggestions for adding or clarifying help files - I know there are a few other things that really are missing, and those I'm aware of are on my todo.


You mentioned that "the AI pathfinding is horrible". In fact it's non-existent, the monsters will simply charge at you (or to the location they last saw you). I thought I could get away with this because I didn't realise people were able to attack targets without line-of-sight - this is the sort of feedback players often forget to mention :P It's most likely a side-effect of the blind-fighting changes. The dungeons used to have some very broken mechanics though, and I've had to overhaul them a few times, so this is clearly something that needs more work.

The issue with accidental casting is intentional to a certain degree (learning the ins and outs of your different combos, and how to use them to your advantage, is an important part of the game), although I've tweaked a few combos in the past to avoid major conflicts. It's really difficult to do this without causing a conflict with something else, however - perhaps because of the diversity of spells compared to regular combat techniques.

There have been quite a few clearly flawed (if not outright broken) mechanics in the past, and no doubt there are more of them buried away, but I try to fix them whenever I find them.


As far as the players being annoying, some of them can be downright obnoxious, despite my attempts to persuade them to shift their more unsavoury conversations to the (off-by-default) 'gossip' channel. This is a difficult situation to deal with though - a lot of players really hate being told what they can and can't say, and policing the public channels with an iron fist would upset just as many people as doing nothing, so it really is a case of "You can't please everyone". However players do have an 'ignore' command, so you can do your own moderation if you wish.


Thanks for the review!

Last edited by KaVir : 10-27-2010 at 03:23 PM. Reason: Typo
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