Post by Aberrant on Oct 3, 2006 8:49:12 GMT -5
This is an interesting idea that someone from only-war found in a development diary
This could be really cool. Remember in DAoC how the enemy always went for your casters and healers first? If this worked out, you might want to think twice if the tanker you killed last got buffed up from his group getting killed.
How about a tougher example? Say we want a character to have a buff that scales both with the size of the player's group and the number of enemies faced. Every time an enemy hits anyone in the group, the character gets a small incremental advantage against that enemy.
In game terms, we create a simple buff that the player can place on groupmates. When an enemy hits a character with this buff, that enemy receives a counter. As counters build up on the enemy, we buff the character slightly. All is well and good so far. The trick comes in balancing out the variability in the results; the number of characters in a group can increase the creation of counters, the number of attackers can vary widely, etc. How powerful is this ability anyway? How do we give it a value we can compare against other abilities of a drastically different nature? How does this ability compare to the Squig Armor ability?
Fortunately, as you break down such an ability into its fundamental components, this task becomes easier. Every counter acts as a very small buff to some set of abilities on the character. We know how much, say, a 1% increase to the character's current damage absorption will decrease the effective DPS of the enemy he faces. We can set limits on how many counters can accumulate, and how fast, so in turn we know how big that buff can get, and how fast. So we break it out further: how effective is this ability solo? How effective is it in an average group against a single mob? Against an equal sized group of mobs? Against more? With a full player group? We know the average hit rates and DPS of both players and mobs, so we can get some working numbers on the most effective uses of the ability. From that, you can derive the boundary cases, which just means “the extremes”. What is the maximum possible effectiveness of this ability? What is the minimum? Average? Some complicated math and sample data can derive the “overall” effectiveness of the ability, and we can say with reasonable certainty how powerful the ability is compared to a normal buff (such as a straight damage or stat buff) or an enemy attack (incoming DPS), or another more complicated ability.
Of course, I just hand-waved a LOT of work, but in the end it does come back to numbers. Next, however, those assumptions now need to be tested. So we implement the ability in the game and begin to play with it. Do the numbers match our expectations? Are there any unintended consequences? Mobs may behave in a reliable manner, but can enemy players find a clever way to sidestep the effects? Testing may find, for instance, that players quickly realize that the best way to avoid the ill effects is to take down the character with this ability first. If we're smart, we've made that ability for a tank class, and so the player would naturally want to draw the attention of enemies from his group to himself.
In game terms, we create a simple buff that the player can place on groupmates. When an enemy hits a character with this buff, that enemy receives a counter. As counters build up on the enemy, we buff the character slightly. All is well and good so far. The trick comes in balancing out the variability in the results; the number of characters in a group can increase the creation of counters, the number of attackers can vary widely, etc. How powerful is this ability anyway? How do we give it a value we can compare against other abilities of a drastically different nature? How does this ability compare to the Squig Armor ability?
Fortunately, as you break down such an ability into its fundamental components, this task becomes easier. Every counter acts as a very small buff to some set of abilities on the character. We know how much, say, a 1% increase to the character's current damage absorption will decrease the effective DPS of the enemy he faces. We can set limits on how many counters can accumulate, and how fast, so in turn we know how big that buff can get, and how fast. So we break it out further: how effective is this ability solo? How effective is it in an average group against a single mob? Against an equal sized group of mobs? Against more? With a full player group? We know the average hit rates and DPS of both players and mobs, so we can get some working numbers on the most effective uses of the ability. From that, you can derive the boundary cases, which just means “the extremes”. What is the maximum possible effectiveness of this ability? What is the minimum? Average? Some complicated math and sample data can derive the “overall” effectiveness of the ability, and we can say with reasonable certainty how powerful the ability is compared to a normal buff (such as a straight damage or stat buff) or an enemy attack (incoming DPS), or another more complicated ability.
Of course, I just hand-waved a LOT of work, but in the end it does come back to numbers. Next, however, those assumptions now need to be tested. So we implement the ability in the game and begin to play with it. Do the numbers match our expectations? Are there any unintended consequences? Mobs may behave in a reliable manner, but can enemy players find a clever way to sidestep the effects? Testing may find, for instance, that players quickly realize that the best way to avoid the ill effects is to take down the character with this ability first. If we're smart, we've made that ability for a tank class, and so the player would naturally want to draw the attention of enemies from his group to himself.
This could be really cool. Remember in DAoC how the enemy always went for your casters and healers first? If this worked out, you might want to think twice if the tanker you killed last got buffed up from his group getting killed.
