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Old 06-05-2013, 06:31 PM   #74
ardent
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Re: Join Dragonrealms today!

I wouldn't bother trying to poke holes in Dragonrealms' combat engine. It's easily far more robust than anything you'll find in the wild of free-to-play MUDs, although it's in the middle of some fine-tuning following an engine update.

I have, for the record, played God Wars 2.X and, yes, Dreagonrealms' combat engine is more advanced.

For an example of the specious situation you've proposed, here's your answer:

R> assess
You assess your combat situation...

You (nimbly balanced) are facing a Buffy (3) at melee range.
A Boffo (1: slightly off balance) is behind you at melee range.
A Bubba (2: very badly balanced) is behind you at melee range.
A Buffy (3: stunned and extremely imbalanced) is facing you at melee range.

I can hit all three of the engaged mobs in 90% of situations. There are some situations where the way the engagement is structured or the difficulty level of opponents prevents me from attacking one of the targets (typically the one(s) behind me). Most characters will have Area of Effect spells or abilities as well, so they can use those in those engagement-restricted situations.

Now that you've made your appeal to the superiority of your game's combat engine, I'd rather get on to why I hate Dragonrealms rather than praising its innovative and deep systems and potential.

I hate Dragonrealms because it is squandered potential writ large. Every time a simple, reasonable proposal for something is put forward to the staff, the response is muted or negative. Problems are allowed to snowball to the point where something breaks. The staff has a tendency to be unprofessionally abrasive, and complaints about staff behavior are met with "well so are you so shut up or I'll ban you."

As an example of how Dragonrealms can take a very basic problem and turn it into a clusterf**k of epic proportions, take the core problem of the game at current: the population split. There are about 50% of the players who have to go to distant zones to hunt because they are "powerful," and 50% that are able to stick around the populated areas and keep them, you know, populated. The players forced to go to the distant zones complain about this situation for literally years -- 12 of them to be exact -- and the staff response is varying shades of "shut up." Sometimes couched nicely, sometimes with empty promises, but generally it's a "shut up about this" response. The response leaned upon for about five years towards the end was it was a combat engine limitation (with no real answer to the question of "why don't you just import mob X to zone Y and be Z with it?" forthcoming). So the combat engine gets updated, mostly through the hard work of Juason who is posting here. New mobs are released. People shrug and go "Okay, whatever."

All of these new mobs are inferior to the existing mobs in the distant zones in their risk vs reward payout. Empirically worse. In the way that, for all you Diku-derived MUD players might be familiar with, it's as if you have two equal-level mobs, but one gave 110 xp and the other 100 xp, and the one giving 100 xp had a better lower and upper damage range and to-hit modifier and had a lower drop frequency than the 110 xp mob. That sort of empirically worse. When, with minimal fuss (35 rooms away there was a desert zone perfect for the desert zone mobs that continue to draw the high level characters), they could have simply imported the existing solution, written it off however the heck they wanted to (events are sort of an also-ran for high level characters, which is another problem unto itself -- when you remove players from role-playing environments for so long for training purposes, why would they go back to role-playing again?).

So yes, DR's combat system is the best you're ever going to find in a text-based game. That's not hyperbole or even an endorsement of the game. The reality is that it comes with even more baggage and poor decision-making than God Wars ever will, and I include that whole debacle with the guy who claims he invented Facebook (Twitter?) claiming to have written your code or whatever.

I've done MUDs from the design and development side as well (SWR and Shadows of the Empire, specifically). I'm not just blowing smoke up Simutronics' collective rears. I know that there's "a lot that you don't understand" going on behind the scenes, although I would never couch it like that. I realize that there are headaches with 100 players online that there aren't with 10 players online. I just don't accept excuses when the solutions aren't that hard to figure out, let alone implement.
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