CDV18: Player changes

[Tim]

Alt Limit changes:

The number of characters allowed per player will decrease from 3 (6 for donors), down to 2 (4 for donors). This will hopefully reduce burnout from trying to maintain too many characters, player bloat from inactive alts, and the amount of influence a single player with a lot of free time has on various game aspects (clan battles, city control, hordes, etc).

Along with this, donors and non-donors alike are now restricted to 2 characters per clan.

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Taint balancing tweaks:

I don't think Taint is as unbalanced as some do, but it is pretty strong. Particularly early in the age, so I want to make it less OP early on, without crippling it late game.

Taint will now have a chance of 'critical missing', in which case is backfires on the user and damaging them instead of their target. On a critical miss, the player will take taint damage equal to their Taint stat on that turn. This damage is ONLY applied that turn and does NOT apply to subsequent turns. However, this damage cannot be healed with health gain.

The percent chance of critical miss will be:
13 + defender's luck - attacker's luck
with a minimum of 5% chance and a maximum of 20% chance.

Fits thematically for Taint to be a strong weapon with few weaknesses, but with a steep price.

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Player Office changes:

The Office options targeting ruler Ji will be changed to increase or decrease a specified clan's Ji. A new prompt will be drop down will be added to specify which clan's Ji to raise or lower. This change will NOT allow a clan's Ji to drop below zero. In addition, options to increase or decrease city funds will now increase/decrease funds by 5 times as much.

Finally, 2 new options will be added:
-- Increase Reputation: Increase the reputation of a selected clan
-- Decrease Reputation: Decrease the reputation of a selected clan
These will be 20 hour tasks that raise reputation using the same formula used for Order/Chaos or raising or lowering Ji. The will be available from level 1 offices, giving more variety at lower levels.

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Escort Quest change:

Minor tweak here, but one that will hopefully make escort quests more appealing. Escort quests currently earn Ji in the destination city, not the city offering the quests. Going forward, the Ji earned will apply to BOTH the offering city and destination city.

[Jenlyn]

I actually like all of these changes, except alts, towards which I'm apathetic because I quit running more than one character several rounds ago. That one doesn't really affect me, and I wouldn't be upset with it if it did.

I really like the office changes. I used my offices this round strictly for wall destruction, but in past ages, I have wished that I could target a clan instead of Ruler Ji, and indeed, I have had to hold off on collecting an office for some time until I could add or detract the Ji from the appropriate clan, what with the way cities can change hands quickly. I also like having more options early on. I assume I'll learn about reputation when I read the clan changes thread.

I suck at math, so I have no way of predicting what the Taint changes will do, but I agree that your logic makes good thematic sense.

That is also a nice improvement to escort quests.

[kaldar]

Decreasing max alts is a great idea. I think it will have an immediate impact on player retention. Also, I don't think too many people would dog about only being able to play 4 accounts with donation. Even Ger and I had a heck of a time running 4 full time accounts our first age back ... it was truly miserable truth be told and then Ger was pissed with me because I also had us make the armies really small so we didn't even need the 2nd army basher account we each made lol.

The change to taint is really tricky. Overall this age I did not find taint near "unbeatable". I was beaten several times by melee accounts , and 2 tainters fighting each other is just annoying because we might as well draw for highest card or roll a die. The suggested critical miss for taint kinda sounds like the critical miss for poison that used to be in the game until people doged so much it was taken out because dodgers sucked balls.

[Tim]

That's why I didn't tie Taint's issue to dodge. Though I still say you guys just needed to add some accuracy to counter the dodge builds.

[gerdonat]

Not sure why are we nerfing taint if there is no evidence at all that taint is overpowered, this age there was almost no dueling really, so no evidence can be drawn...
Anyway, I like that luck takes a bigger role, but I think there is an overreaction with taint...

[kaldar]

I would say one of the main things I don't like about the change to the taint mechanic is that it makes the battle outcome even more random than it already is.

A meleee person fighting a tainter probably won't have much luck so if the tainter beats them handily now, they will beat them handily after the change.

A poison person fighting a tainter will have luck , so it could improve their chances, but again it is just adding another random element to an already random outcome.

A tainer fighting another tainter, there is just so little strategy wise you can do to make this any more than an up in the air random chance battle.

So if we aren't adding another element of strategy or counter equipment to deal with a situation, what does this improve? It just once again discourages use of taint which was already underutilized before last age which led to the change so people would use it

[Seitaarin]

Good changes, agree with Kaldar's assessment of the taint change however.

[Tim]

Jul 6, 2017 19:11:15 GMT -6 Seitaarin said:

Good changes, agree with Kaldar's assessment of the taint change however.

Okay. When you guys start agreeing, that makes me take notice.

Taint has been strong early in the age for a long time. This age there was a LOT of dueling by the Shadow players early on and there was no real way to combat Taint players. Many Light players came asking me for advice and there wasn't much I can give them. With the improvements I made to Taint this age for higher levels, I feel that It was unfortunate that there wasn't a lot of dueling late age, because I still believe Taint will balance out at higher levels.

So if somebody else has a better idea of how to balance Taint early on without nerfing it late game, I'm all ears. I'll hold off and making the actual code changes on Taint for now.

[terrisg]

I made top ten duelist..with two alt,both used taint..and poison. It is strong,but I also had success with just dam and def bonuses..I hope taint doesn't change.

[gerdonat]

Early on Taint was allways better, and there is no much health gain, so taint is not really more powerfull now on early levels...
But if you want to balance it at lower levels, make the chance to misfire depending on the char level, so once you progressed enough and mastered the taint, you have 0% missfire, but in low levels, you have up to 25%, something like 25% - 1 each 2 character levels of missfiring or something like that. Minimun 0.
So at lvl 50 you dont have more missfiring chances.

[Tim]

What about dropping misfire and just making taint more likely to hit the higher level you get

Taint chance to hit = (47+(attacker's Luck/2)-(defender's Luck)+(attacker's level/4)%
Minimum 35, Maximum 85

So at level 1, Taint will hit 13% less often than Poison does, but at level 100 it will hit 12% more often, with them equaling out at level 52. I can rationalize it thematically with the Dark One favoring the strong more than the weak and will give Taint a boost I feel it might still need late game. I widened the upper end of the range more than than the lower end due to it being unlikely players would have a huge Luck disparity at low levels anyways.

Thoughts?

[Seitaarin]

Prefer Ger's idea tbh. Problem with taint at the early levels isn't really to-hit, it's the fact that you can absorb 100% (or near enough) of the incoming melee damage with base block values, then apply damage in return that the melee character cannot block at all. The balance scale tipping point has nothing to do with actual taint itself, it's when base dmg + dmg % >> block + defense%, or at least when the difference between the 2 is higher than tain't damage potential. That's why in previous ages taint > all up until around lvl 25-28 or so and then fell off so sharply into RNG wins. Last age , block to damage bridge was still there to cross, though the exact tipping point would have changed slightly due to the introduction of increased block AND damage gain in the starter classes, but there was also additional taint stacking available to starter classes compared to previous ages, which is where the RNG component of a win comes from. So yes, melees would have started to become competitive in the mid 20's due to overcoming the block/damage ratio, but the win curve stretched out far further due to the taint stack ... yes, RNG would allow a win from time to time, but the chances of gaining a win were far reduced for a much longer period compared to previous ages.

[Seitaarin]

so the conclusion there is that taint applies a damage% bonus to an enemy that's value has to do with a character's taint:luck ratio perhaps, or some other ratio that is high to start with (higher with a higher taint stack) and that peters off to minimal values at the tipping point of dmg to block, and then reverses perhaps even at higher levels, into a damage reduction somewhat similar to poison.

Maybe even a taint:block modifier ... thematically speaking, if you are wearing heavy armour, your taint is somewhat contained. Just a thought.

[kaldar]

I think Tim's idea is fine. I don't really think taint needs much reduction and I think this is minimal enough to be alright in the short term.