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[Dark_Force9999]

Will sharing experience through parties going to be implemented? If it is, I suggest a 5 level differences!

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Yes! Good suggestion, even though we can only guess what you mean.

Give XP to a party member only if his level is less than five levels higher/lower than your level?
Give XP to a party member only if his level is more than five levels higher/lower than your level?
Give XP to a party member if his level is exactly five levels higher/lower than your level?

GUSY I SUNGEST FAIV LEVULS DIFREFENCE ^_^

 

[Dark_Force9999]

Well... I only said 5 level differences is to prevent uber power leveling. Now this part is interesting, because I don't exactly know how it works. I only usually party with a partner in other MMORPG and it splits half-half if you're in the level range of the closest highest level guy. High levels takes more EXP.

So maybe, if the highest title level guy is near, it will be register him to be the "range". You get half of the exp if you're at, or 5 title levels lower after the monster is killed.

Now I think there's going to be some EXP going into the garbage with this system. Level 25, 20, and a 15. Apparently it will try to split the exp equally but the level 15 will only get half of the half exp shared. If the level 25 goes out of the EXP range, the level 20 will take the range. Then the level 15 will get equal share.

Lets suppose Calrain out of nowhere gives 900 exp total. The Level 25 and 20 will get 300 exp each, where as the level 15 will only get 150. Doesn't it make sense?

 

[[FSM]The Owneded]

I think that we should make a monster's xp calculable with a monster's abilities, dps, hp, and damage reduction all taken into account. It'd help normalize the game and hopefully make it so that work done is directly related to xp given. Something like (dps + abilities)*(hp*(1+damage reduction%)) / 10. Right now I think we have a lot of monsters (especially bosses) that don't give the amount of xp they ought to.

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Owneded, this is the first time that I actually agree with you. A formula should be made that translates monster's armor, HP, damage per second, special attacks and other things that are relevant into a normal amount of XP.

 

[Evaan]

I mentioned this earlier, and I will look into it, just haven't had the time yet.

 

[Shurik3n]

Unfortunately the abilities a monster has is not some numerical value that can just be plugged in.

 

[Thothie]

Me (Veil), Shuri, P, and Jon with various others did a keep run, any of the top teir trained bandits (especially archers/hammers) had boss grade hp. Us 4 would wail on them for a decent bit, about as much as a trapped maldora takes to kill if not a bit more, and most of the time we'd get 50-70xp for it. It took us easily 2-3x the time to kill any of those guys for really about the same xp.
...
Yeah..... those 133ts in keep were.... well, a little too 133t.

I'm afraid you are a little misguided here. No ones made it that far on The Keep on my server while those adjusts were on in my server (no l337 has spawned with adjustments). You are describing the standard experience on The Keep.

Horrors - They blind/drunkify you, dance around you (even while frozen), and move very quickly. They do pretty good damage, but don't have much health. By your thinking, they wouldn't give much exp, because of the low HP. However, because of how annoying they are to actually kill, they are harder than their HP/Damage let on.

This is again why Horrors are worth twice the XP as trolls, despite having about half the HP and no armor.

Since the only thing the ramping gives is a extra hp all ya get is a smattering of extra xp, but its still much more generous than you'd normally get for nailing another monster with that much more health.

On the average monster (low level skeles, orcs stuff with < 400 base hp) this system is pretty good. Its the things that near 1000+ in base HP that worry me...

Well, in case you've forgotten, you were there on ms_snow with seven players– the Gigantic Snow Boar's have 1200HP – putting them right under the curve, it more than doubled that, and it didn't hardly affect us. :/ Got us more XP at least, but didn't slow us tearing through the map hardly at all, unfortunately.

I don't even want to imagine Brawlers with 6 players on foutpost...

Brawlers are actually pretty damned weak, healthwise, as they've no armor. It's their special abilities ( mass blind/stun ) and speed that makes them rough. Accounting for armor, they've less than twice the health of the Flayers they escort.

I do want to see an eight player run at Foutpost under this system – but I know WW3d, ms_snow, and the first bits of the_keep were basically unaffected. The main trick is to see what it does when combined with additional monster spawns, and I've still not gotten to fuxing with those to see if they can be worked out.

Well... I only said 5 level differences is to prevent uber power leveling.

Since XP is distributed by the damage you've done, and since monsters do not ramp XP at direct ratio to their difficulty (but rather, only relative to monsters of their own tier), there is no need to worry about PL'ing n00bs by letting them share experience with the vets.

(dps + abilities)*(hp*(1+damage reduction%)) / 10. Right now I think we have a lot of monsters (especially bosses) that don't give the amount of xp they ought to.

Unfortunately the abilities a monster has is not some numerical value that can just be plugged in.

The XP does work this way between monsters on the same tier. However, monsters on different tiers do not share the same ramp. Because, again, if they did, you'd have to get at least 500 times the XP for any of the bosses, and you'd, again, be level 40 in under a week. (Days, really.)

There's no way to automatedly pull in effects, or even damage per second, sadly - especially on monsters with multiple attacks. It all has to be worked out for each monster via individual judgement calls, save maybe for HP/armor.

(Mind you, to give you an idea of how insane that proposal is, assuming rats are worth 3xp, and you adjust for both HP and damage output: Calrian would have to be worth 4,500xp (vs. the current 200), and the Ice Lord 47,000xp (vs. the current 800) – and that's not adding anything for special abilities, just scaled for proportional damage and hp.)

We simply do not have a game world, nor weapon, nor monster repitoiré, large enough to accommodate that rate of leveling, nor do we even have one planned to be that large.

 

[HumanSteak]

Is there a way to make these "you fail casting the spell" thing disapear?
I mean come on... SC 24 and I can still fail casting rejuv 3 times in a row and get killed because of that ****... It really pisses me off when that happens .

 

[Mikkel]

When Maladora spawns shadows and a player stand near him they get stuck in each other

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Today:
Five players in the_keep, including me.

*WHAZZAM* artifact chest appears.

Artifact chest chooses: J-M v2.5.5
J-M v2.5.5 gets a great axe
Artifact chest chooses: J-M v2.5.5
J-M v2.5.5 gets a rune axe

*WHAZZAM* artifact chest disappears.

8) 8) 8)
That's still one of the best bugs in the game.

 

[Thothie]

Well, it beats the level 10 n00b yoinking them from you cuz he gets to/clicks on the chest faster, I suppose.

Hmmm... I hope I have time to do a thorough debuggary on that by August 1st. I wound up suddenly doing a bunch of last second map scripts.

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Question: Why does the Ice Bone Lord give me 1030 XP and Mikkel 900 XP while Atholo only gives 800 XP (give or take) in total?

 

[Thothie]

Question: Why does the Ice Bone Lord give me 1030 XP and Mikkel 900 XP while Atholo only gives 800 XP (give or take) in total?

There's a lot of factors that fux with the XP system - including armor/resistances/parry etc. Really Atholo's minimum XP is 1200XP - due to his armor. There's other mitigating factors that can raise it, but the BASE XP's are 600 for the Queen and 800 for Atholo.

BTW - in regards to the monster ramping thing, I've decided to dump it for all but a few of the maps. It is on by default though, so you'll still need to spawn something if yer making a new map. What I'm considering instead is allowing server options:

ms_difficulty (default 0):
0 - Use the default behavior (map by map)
1 - Ramp XP/difficulty base on total HP of all players on server (override local map settings)
2 - or more - Always treat XP/difficulty as if there were at least this number of players present (override local map settings, max is 10).

I figure since we often have more servers than players, we can give servers the option to set difficulty levels.

ms_difficulty 1 varies with map. Each map has a "ye are too weak" HP warning right now. If ms_difficulty is set to 1, the game will gather the total HP of all players on the server with each monster spawn, and ramp XP/difficulty as if there were TotalHP divided by HPWarning present (round down). So on ms_snow, it'd treat it as 1 player for every 500hp on the server. The plus side is, it won't raise the difficulty for 6 players with 150hp each, but the down side is it would raise the difficulty if say, Shuriken showed up with his 800hp, and there were only two players that only had 150hp. (Although its true, it'd only treat it as 2 players, even though there are actually 3.)

If the hp warning level is less than 300hp, the game treats it as 300hp - so Shruiken doesn't get everyone killed by walking into Thornlands.

If ms_difficulty is set to 10, it will ALWAYS ramp the monsters as if there were 10 players present – which could get pretty insane on some maps, if there, well, weren't.

The map reads the ms_difficulty only once at map start, so you can't cheat by adjusting it up and down as desired as you go.

Oh but it gets better...

New Mapper Toys
[...]
• msmonster_XXX / ms_npc, new property: nplayers
- You can set a #player requirement for a monster or npc to appear
- If the monster does not spawn due to insufficient number of players, he does not count against the fireallperish, so the spawn shouldn't fail to fire as a result
- This also works with treasure ms_npc's (and MAYBE msworlditem_treasure)
• msmonster_XXX / ms_npc, new property: reqhp
- As above, but instead requires the health of all players on server combined to total this number or above before the npc will spawn
- can be combined with above, in which case both conditions must be met for the monster to spawn
• Updated FGD
- Includes above, some new defaults, and has ms_npcscript included
- Removed faulty “multimanager” entry

This system is independent of ms_difficulty, at the moment, and it means mappers can say, “This monster only spawns if there are X players present” and “This monster spawns only if the total HP of all the players present is X or higher.”

Since this doesn't mess with the other monsters in the spawn, this means you can plop in say, 1 orc brawler, to backup your 7 flayers, when theres more than say 6 players totalling more than 2400hp on the server (or just 6 or more players, or just 2400hp or more.)

There's an FGD with those options, and the quoted fixes, available here:
http://www.thothie.com/msc_dev2/ms1.4.fgd
But of course, the actual properties wont work until AUG2007 (they'll just spawn regardless of what you put right now) – but its something for the current mappers to think about if they don't want their maps to get dominated by too many players, or small groups of players far too high level to be on them and/or want to put out extra chests for larger groups of players.

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Should add the ZHLT lightflags to the FGD while you're at it.

 

[Thothie]

Those are part of the Half-Life FGD.

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Yes, but the func_wall entity, for example, is also in the MS: C FGD, and if I add both FGDs I don't see the ZHLT lightflags in the func_wall entity.

 

[Thothie]

Ya will if you add the Half-Life.FGD first. (Or at least I do on mine)

Should carve the xen and hl monster entities out of the Half-Life.FGD and glue them together - but last I tried that it caused err0rz. I figured maybe that's why the NS.FGD works this way as well.

edit:
alternately, try this stripped MS.FGD
http://www.thothie.com/msc_dev2/ms1.4_stripped.fgd

Just ripped out all the dated half-life fgd entries, seems to work.

 

[PBarnum]

I see lightflags as well.

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Ya will if you add the Half-Life.FGD first. (Or at least I do on mine)

Should carve the xen and hl monster entities out of the Half-Life.FGD and glue them together - but last I tried that it caused err0rz. I figured maybe that's why the NS.FGD works this way as well.

edit:
alternately, try this stripped MS.FGD
http://www.thothie.com/msc_dev2/ms1.4_stripped.fgd

Just ripped out all the dated half-life fgd entries, seems to work.

I'll try adding the Half-Life FGD first, and if that fails, I'll try this. Thanks!

 

[elfstone222]

I really like the level ramp/monsterspawn changes, and the "treat as if there are always 10 players" map idea would be great for a boss map you don't want anyone solo/duo'ing.

 

[Shurik3n]

I could see a few ways to "powerlevel" if it was 1 person fighting monsters that give the xp of ten people.

For example, a gold axe does MASSIVE damage and clearly overkills most low-mid level skeletons. Give those skeletons 1000hp and many high level players will still kill em in one hit, making their damage boost useless as well as their HP. So the same effort to kill things, but getting 200% xp for it.

 

[Thothie]

Hrrmmm.. True that. :/ I might just have options for default, scale by hp, or scale by players for all maps until I think of a way around that. :/

 

[Dark_Force9999]

Aug2007A? When!?

 

[Dridmar]

Aug2007A? When!?

Just wait for it.