Gauging Interest in Forum Game Concept

[† Mute point]

I think it's the rounding within the stat blocks. They appear to round, but the original, unrounded values get added together and then rounded. (or multiplied and then rounded in the case of HP) to come up with the compounded values.

In the opponent stat blocks however, they only get a hard number. They don't know that your strength was 137.5 or that your dex was 136.363636... before rounding.

[Dae314]

Fixed the sheet, and also fixed a small hole in the rules.

/>http://www.mediafire.com/view/?1394e49rc93u9a8

The hole was what happens when you're killed while in the midst of purchasing an item. The answer to that is you die and lose 60% of your EXP, and you don't receive the item if your EXP is too low after that. This was implicitly laid out in the rules. On a more practical side, it's hard for me to guarantee item purchase without changing the rules at this stage . What needs to be changed is to explicitly lay out that when you put in a request to buy an item, the EXP necessary for the transaction is put into limbo (not in the player's possession). Theoretically, item purchases don't happen during any of the play phases (defense/offense) so it's very hard to say when/how you should denote item purchases.

As of right now, you do not need to state that you purchased an item in your post (because you can purchase an item without posting). However, that also means that saying you're purchasing an item in a post does not protect your EXP from being stolen due to death. As a safety mechanism, the shop will refuse to fulfill your order if your post is currently the latest in the thread (I fulfilled zx0's order because I don't think anybody has enough STR to kill him in 1 hit). During future play, or during the final edition of the game, I'll put in rules that will protect your item purchases from being lost to death, but I cannot guarantee that now due to the current rules, and I don't think this is a game stopping issue at the moment.

[Malyssa Rahl]

Why not judge based on when the item purchase request is put in vs when the kill happened? Like, if I put in a purchase request for an item at 7:30, and someone kills me at 8:10, then the item is purchased, and I lose 60% of whatever exp value I would have had left after the purchase While if I don't see that someone killed me at 7:30, and I request an item at 8:10, unless I have enough AFTER the 60% is taken away, I don't get the item. I think this would be a much fairer way to set it up than just "If you're a valid target you can't shop."

I can understand it being different if the kill happens while they're typing the request, but unless it happens in the same minute, it should be a simple matter to determine which went in first.

[Dae314]

The reason why I'm not letting that happen for now is because the rules currently have it so that players don't report changes in EXP until after the purchase is finalized. Like I said above, this means that the player possesses the EXP. The rules are pretty clear about that. The rules actually say "you're not required to", but for a game like this that translates to "the game does not recognize your purchase until... so it's fine if you leave your EXP in your wallet...". That clause needs to be changed to say that your EXP is in limbo and therefore protected while the transaction is processed. While most people here understand what I'm going for, anyone else who happens to join the pilot run will be very confused due to the apparent conflict in the rules.

Also, the verbage I'm thinking of for the rule would be something along the lines of "if you're going to purchase something right after an attack post, report your EXP in that post as it would be AFTER the purchase (i.e. take out the purchase amount from your wallet)." This way if you're purchasing something right out of an attack, you immediately put your EXP in limbo and protect it from theft. In other cases (where you haven't made an attack post right before the purchase) you would subtract the EXP from your personal table and if you make another attack post before the transaction is complete you just report the lower EXP amount.

I guess I also should've been clearer that EXP you gain from an attack is immediately added to your wallet so when zx0 just attacked me at 0 EXP and gained 10, whoever kills him will get 60% of that 10 EXP. Judging by the action that happened on the thread that was pretty well understood, but I might as well be specific about that in the rules too.

I'm not saying the rules right now are right/good/fair. I recognize this is currently a problem however, the pilot run is going, and it's hard to change the rules in the middle of the game (which is why this is the pilot run). Plus I need time to draft the new rule and make sure it integrates logically with the rest of the game. So for now (that could mean till the end of the pilot run to some time sooner), you're going to have to wait for your item purchase till after someone has posted after you. I chose to take the conservative path because I don't want to confuse everyone with "so if someone can kill you you don't get your item otherwise I'll give it to you..." stuff -___-.

When I get the new rules written and uploaded I'll update the thread and here like I did with the player sheet update.

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Completely unrelated, I'm gonna do a special long-ish term (as in doesn't apply to just the poster above the event post) Halloween "random event" for the game ^^. Look forward to it.

[Dae314]

So I had a "bad" game in the luck game, and scored a 6719. Turns out this is one of the scores that will give 145 in the stat o.O'''. I figure that I might as well use this score (which is a legitimate score) rather than my faked 5100 (which computes to a luck score of 120). I've been scoring higher on the other games, and I notice other people are doing well in the games too, so I think think using this score instead of my fake one will help legitimize my stats, and honestly, a 120 luck when I'm really doing pretty top notch performance in the game (almost 10k >.< I haven't been able to replicate that since), I might as well have capped luk like mute has capped int .

I'm still not going to use my actual high score because that's a bit of a game breaker .

If anyone disagrees feel free to tell me here, and I'll consider your concerns.

[Dae314]

I think this warrants a new post since it's completely unrelated to my previous post.

The new rules are here: http://www.mediafire.com/view/?hsvp01nr86rzpqm

I went through and formally outlined the flow of battle which goes like this:

Pre-Offensive

Offensive

Post-Offensive

Defensive

Post-Defensive

I hope the flow of battle is more clear now.

The explanation of the battle progression was actually a side-effect of implementing the Purchase Protection System. I realized that I couldn't easily refer to the different phases of battle (since Purchase Protection only pertains to purchases made during the Post-Offensive stage). Everything should be set up now to allow players to make purchases immediately after they have rolled for a successful attack and have those purchases logically and fairly protected during their defensive phase.

[Hawkester]

I have to read instructions again?!

Edited October 28, 2012 by Hawkester

[Malyssa Rahl]

He did say the game was complicated.

[Hawkester]

Yeah but Dae pointed a point out to me earlier that I didn't read

[Dae314]

You don't need to read the whole thing again if you've already read it before. Just take a look at how the phases are organized and go down and make sure you understand how the purchase protection system works. That's why I gave a short summary of the major changes.

[Hawkester]

tl;dr?

Just kidding, I read the summary

[Dae314]

Ok, first of all, I want to clarify something about how I'm generating these Halloween event items since for some reason only zx0 has gotten a spell . For all my rolls I'm using a random number generator.

First, I generate a number between 1 and 2. 1 means you get an item, 2 means you get a spell. So far only zx0 has gotten a 2 . Then, I roll a number between 1 and 3 which gives me the tier. Finally, I roll a number between 1 and 6 for the category (1 and 5 for spells since boost spells aren't included). After I have the tier and category, I finish creating the item like a normal item (a process that I won't reveal). So, as you can see everything about what you receive is random. Therefore, it's pure chance that only zx0 so far has gotten a spell . I honestly would love to do something about that, but to stay fair as a TM, I can't overrule the random generator.

Now on to business:

After observing the flow of this pilot run for a while, I've come to the realization that Magic Factor, Hit Factor, Dodge Factor, and Max HP are all unbalanced. In addition to this, the luck stat is factoring into too many of these stats making it somewhat overpowered. The last thing I noticed was that EXP is a little too hard to come by right now.

I have a proposal for how to fix this, but it's going to involve a sheet change. Everyone will need to get on board with the sheet change or their stats will be wrong so I want to run the idea by you guys in this thread. If people approve I'll release a new sheet with the updated equations that I'll explain now.

Max HP: 3*(Str + Dex)

Magic Factor: 2*(Int + 0.50*Luck)

Hit Factor: 2*(Dex + 0.25*Luck)

Dodge Factor: 2*(Spd + 0.25*Luck)

Base EXP: 10+5*your_level

Increasing Max HP should help people to die less often which will help them gain the EXP necessary to make some basic purchases. I don't want to increase the multiplier on HP too much because as it stands putting 10 points into strength or dex will already increase your HP by 20. Moving the multiplier up multiplies the effect of those small additions. I feel like a 4x multiplier is a little too high .

The changes to magic, hit, and dodge factors will de-emphasize luck and keep the power of the stat in check. For those 3 calculated stats, the base stats count each once for a total effect size of 1, and luck counts for a total effect size of 1, but spread out over 3 calculated stats. This I think evens out luck's effect size on the calculated stats as a whole. In addition, I added a 2x multiplier in front of those stats in order to increase the effect size of adding small values to your base stats. As it stood before, adding 10 to int, dex, or spd didn't do very much for you. With the multiplier, anything you add gets multiplied by 2 (similar to how HP is right now). The multiplier will also emphasize small differences in people's stats so when someone's speed is 81 while yours is 130 they should have a much higher miss rate than before (I noticed miss rates were generally pretty low...).

Finally, the change in the EXP is actually a fix for a long term problem. The short term problem of people not getting enough EXP should be fixed by the increased Max HP since that'll allow players more time to gather EXP, however I've come to realize that people are going to have an extremely hard time getting high tier items with a gain of only 10 base EXP. So I want to scale EXP gain with player's levels. This will allow players to eventually easily make high tier purchases once they've gained a certain number of levels.

So if everyone thinks these changes are good, I'll release a rule/player sheet change. I need to make sure everyone comes on to the new system though or people will be stuck with (lower I think?) calculated stats than everyone else. It's not going to break the game for some people to do that, but they're going to wonder why they can't hit anyone anymore . So ya, what do you think?

[† Emotional Outlet]

Updates sound fine to me. Just reflect the updated sheets/version numbers in the title and people shouldn't really have reason to be stuck with an old version, haha.

If the updates do go through, are the stats going to be updated like we would if we just got higher scores on the games?

[zx0]

Sounds good to me, I'll make any changes needed and we can see what overall effect it has in the game

[Dae314]

@EO,

Yes, you'd post the stat changes just like you would a normal stat change except now your base stats will be the same, and your computed stats will be different. For HP, we'll follow the normal rule that if your max HP goes up your current HP doesn't go up with it.

[AurionEmblem]

Overall, I like and approve of the changes. Also, thank goodness my speed is stuck at 87 instead of 81, otherwise this new change could really ruin my day. (Seriously though, I hate that game) On a serious, you did a good job of de-emphasizing luck, or well, at least a job which sounds plausible. And I like how even though speed only plays into dodging, with the revamped mechanics (and reduced Luck effect) there is enough incentive to put level up points into Speed, so it comes out on par with say Dex, which affects HP and Accuracy.

[Dae314]

While making these changes I realized that the experience to level calculation doesn't need to be capped at 1000 any more (since each level lets you gain extra EXP per hit). So now I've changed the EXP to level equation to be 100 + level*60, and it doesn't cap at level 20 anymore, it just keeps increasing.

[† Emotional Outlet]

(Seriously though, I hate that game)

Dude, you would not believe the effort I put into making all of my scores go above 100. The luck game alone took me three days of effort, haha.

[Dae314]

So am I just abnormally gifted in that game or something?

[Hawkester]

Most likely