Balancing the Risks

[Cogliostro]

Let's put something that I'm sure bothers a lot of people, not just me, into better perspective. We've had this argument, repeated over and over, that it's really "unrealistic" and bad that a single criminal or a small band of 2-3 could wipe out an entire thriving town in Cantr. A number of atrociously bad new rules and changes were added to the game driven by the force of this argument; but let's try to get some perspective on what the situation actually is.

A Cantr town is just a dozen people or so. It should not properly be called a town, or even a village. A "family homestead" would be more appropriate by far. Even a lone enemy, if they're well-armed, SHOULD pose a serious risk of injury and/or death to at least 3-5 people of the 10 or so that live in that homestead.

Let's stop listening to that particular argument going forward, and switch to methodically balancing the risks on each side of the possible conflict so that they are fun and suggest some realistic "I could win, but then I could lose too, it's a gamble" dynamic in the player's mind. Meaning, we have to look at what the assailants are risking versus what the defenders of the homestead are risking, and make it so BOTH are reasonably at risk from the violent situations that might arise.

We can't go on just removing all the risks from the defender's lives, and shafting the attackers since we think they're baddies and we have a moral problem with them, or are tired of people quitting after their character was murdered.

[Bowser]

The attackers have the element of surprise. They also have the luxery of attacking when all 3 or 4 are awake. When the pirates attacked Dory, they had lots of tea and all four could attack each person with full strength... Most of whom where asleep. This "slow paced game" should not be only slow paced in making things but also give the victims some sort of time or defense.

[Cogliostro]

Quite right. But lets not get carried away calling them "victims". I mean, who knows, maybe the attackers have a very legitimate RP grievance or family vendetta against that particular homestead.

That's why I say, the goal must be to balance the risks ON BOTH SIDES; making sure that the homestead defenders are risking something more than just "being oh-so-rudely surprised".

Also that attackers do not gain any special advantages from silly clickfesting / timing their attack outside of the game.

[Black Canyon]

I agree that there needs to be a balance, but we need to be cautious.

The truth is that when I first started playing cantr, there was one event that I can remember that really hooked me. My character lived in Pok at the time. One of their fairly long-term inhabitants went crazy and along with a couple of cohorts staged a massacre. It was quite horrible, with a few established upstanding citizens getting killed. There was a standoff and attempted negotiations and yadda yadda. It was awesome! Even though my character was pretty young at the time and hadn't quite figured it all out, it created the scenario in which she became a part of something, and worked with the survivors to prevail against the attackers and so on. I remember feeling quite afraid for her life as well as the lives of the others and the excitement involved during the even that transpired over several days. I really think these types of events are priceless.

[Cogliostro]

Historically in Cantr there's been a chronic misunderstanding of what balance means. There's good balance and bad balance, and unfortunately the good kind is what Black Canyon is talking about (i.e. unstable situations, power struggles) and not the kind the game admins are constantly being forced to put into Cantr to make it safer (stagnation, serious violence impossible in practice, no power struggles at all as one person can easily and safely control all the keys, etc.).

I just thought that the best way to think about it would be as a reasonable balance of Risk. Then our eyes are opened to the fact that the godly hand of the admin shouldn't meddle in little affairs and impose moral rules on what happens in-game, and we start to look at how new risks can be deliberately introduced where they're sorely needed. So that people feel like they're a part of a life-and-death thing on both sides of a conflict.

[Bowser]

"let's not call them victims"? ... A man farming potatoes for years, flirting with the girls.... A ship rolls up and attacks the entire town? That's not a victim? Okay, I'll call them defenders. Whatever. Im all for conflict, Im all for things to drive story lines but do not try and say the people in a town attacked by pirates are not victims. You have your opinion but do not pick apart my vocabulary when it is spot on

[Cogliostro]

Someone has to pick on you for the vocabulary, Bowser. Look what happened when we let them call Cantr's little homesteads "towns". Suddenly they "couldn't be realistically wiped out by small groups or individuals", and everyone even on GAB seemed to agree with this. That wouldn't be the case if in their minds they correctly thought of Cantr towns as homesteads or whatever, much much smaller units than the misleading but conventional "towns".

Similarly with your insistence on the term "victims", which in many people's minds has the automatic unconscious connotation of "people who require our lawful protection".

That is just not the case in Cantr, and I think you too realize it. Lawful protection should be organized by characters in game, not by extravagant GAB measures like disabling tea, nerfing weapons, taking away the ability to attack multiple people via energy etc. And note, this was always done without giving a single thing "back", without providing any counterbalance bonus to the attackers. The defender's risk was radically reduced step, by step, by step, and NOTHING was ever done to legitimately improve the chances of the attackers. Why so? I reckon vocab has a thing or two to do with it.

That said, even if Cantr's combat system was totally unfettered and the nerfings all tossed outta the window, I would continue to take major issues with it, it's rife with really stupid problems which should not be there, like emphasis on clickfesting, babysitting characters in combat, unsatisfying insta-death and insta-heal, and more. That's why I really look forward to any coming combat system changes, though my gut complains they're likely to be even more "safety first" than current, which IMHO is totally counterproductive, and against everyone's interests whether they will admit it or not...

[freiana]

First of all; I totally agree with Bowser here. Your language makes it sound like you are forcing all kinds of things upon me(/us) and, regardless of what I think of what you say, my first reaction was annoyance by that tone. Having that said...

I think the biggest risk the attackers in this situation have is that those 10 people in that town (come on, it IS a town, it has always been a town and I will always see it as a town) could be awake, and if that's the case, the 3 attackers are probably quite dead or locked up the day after. For me, that is enough balance... They -do- take a risk, but if they succeed they can empty the entire town and leave very much richer then they entered. To me, honestly it sounds quite fair...

[lulkoek]

The fact is and remains that if you happen to be offline when they grab you and lock you up, you're dead, no matter what. Even while you actually "should" have been able to run away and avoid being grabbed for instance.

There is NO way to defend yourself, unless by locking yourself up in a multi-room house with loads of food and healing stuff. There is no way to avoid an attack or retaliate on one. It's basically, the one that has the ability to drag you into a locked room or that has managed to find a group of people that are on when they are, that wins. Even if they have just a bone club and no shield and you have an iron shield and steel battle axes. That's called broken.

Saying that the nerfing is bad is just plain rubbish. It makes sure people can actually have a chance instead of just knowing they are dead if they are not on their character at the very moment the pirates/killers enters their town.
This whole talk about risk to the attackers is unrealistic. Even if a town has 20 characters in it, chances that more than 5 are awake at the same time are minimal and even then, it takes but 2 seconds to grab someone and drag them to a locked room. A gang of two can kill a whole town of 20 easily that way. That's broken.

People know that, so they "use" it. I still have to see the scene where everyone actually RPs a full hostile situation without "using" the game mechanics to their advantage one way or another.

I like Cantr, but I strongly dislike the way it handles combat. Not to say it is the thing that is causing me to gradually close down my characters.

[Cogliostro]

Precisely. The way it handles combat is... it doesn't really handle it. But does that mean that CAN'T handle it? I have faith still.

I was up on the barricades a few months back here, bemoaning the exact thing you just brought up, that combat isn't really based on combat, but instead on well-timed dragging. Some people agreed, some shook their heads, and some - I think they are the main retrograde & degenerate influence we face - said outright that it should stay the way it is because it works in their leader character's favour at the moment.

[Henkie]

This is just a way around facing the realism argument. Granted, it's not always a justifiable argument, but it still deserves some merit. I'll continue to use this.. 'realism'-argument whenever I see it fit, and I won't support a topic that excludes a sometimes just argument.

[Black Canyon]

....I think they are the main retrograde & degenerate influence we face - said outright that it should stay the way it is...

I might actually fit into this category but not for the reason you indicated. Possible changes in the combat system can have all sorts of unintended consequences and I'm afraid of that. The ramifications one way or the other can have a huge impact on the game as a whole and I want to carefully consider those.

[oxyquan]

....I think they are the main retrograde & degenerate influence we face - said outright that it should stay the way it is...

I might actually fit into this category but not for the reason you indicated. Possible changes in the combat system can have all sorts of unintended consequences and I'm afraid of that. The ramifications one way or the other can have a huge impact on the game as a whole and I want to carefully consider those.

Almost every bigger change in game mechanics create new possibilities to abuse the system. You can make amateur's life harder, but you can't stop villains using sophisticated strategies to spread chaos, death and destruction.

[Henkie]

... you can't stop villains using sophisticated strategies to spread chaos, death and destruction.

We have way too little of that anyway

[Nalaris]

Okay, point one: If ten people is a town, then 3 people with weapons is a small army, not a "tiny group of attackers." I really don't care which scale we use, but it is most definitely true that we shouldn't pull terms for the big scale for the defenders and call them a town and then pull terms from the small scale for the attackers. If an army a third the size of your town's total population rolls up, you're either in deep trouble or you're Sparta.

Point two: Combat is terrible in Cantr. It's all about dragging people around, which looks dumb, synchronizing attacks, which is totally out of place in a game this slow-paced, and having a stockpile of the right food on hand, which also looks dumb. Bloody warfare between men with axes and crossbows shouldn't look like a cross between a picnic and a wrestling match. The most effective way to kill people should be to run up and murder them in the face with superior equipment, training, and numbers.

Here is my idea to revamp the combat system, trying to change as little code as possible. We need a major overhaul though, so yeah, "trying" gets italicized and put in quotation marks and will probably be underlined or colored red or something at some point.

One: The hospitals idea. There's another thread for it. It's amazing. It nerfs healing food in immediate combat while retaining their value in general and opens up a totally new avenue for roleplay in hospitals and nurses, which is awesome for reasons totally unrelated to making combat work in Cantr. Do that.

Two: You should be able to defend yourself immediately. My solution: Engaging the enemy. In this system, you can attack multiple opponents, but you can only engage one enemy at a time. When an enemy is engaged, you attack and resist attacks normally, as the mechanics work now. When an enemy is not engaged, while you can still attack them, you do so at a greatly reduced level of skill (say, approximately two steps lower, so expertly gets knocked down to efficiently). This means having an advantage in numbers is now far more useful than it was before, but only if your opponents are of similar skill and equipment already. Now, you can only engage one opponent at a time, and if you attack that opponent, the engagement is locked for a certain amount of time (say, one full day). You can set your character to auto-engage an attacker (the default) or not. This means that if you attempt to gank a force that you don't actually outnumber, you're going to be obliterated when your gank target's buddies wake up and can engage you at-will, while you're still locked onto his corpse, your engage for the day having been used up already, allowing his friends to avenge his death by cutting you apart as though your combat skill were two steps lower than it actually is. Being critically outnumbered is still going to lead you to getting ganked, as it should be, but focusing fire is no longer the optimal strategy for evenly-matched (or outnumbered!) armies.

Three: Okay, so far we've just made life Hell for the defenders, right? They get dragged into a locked building, get mega-gibbed by attackers they can't hope to engage all at once, and the attackers need not fear reprisal because there's a locked door between them and justice. Okay, so justice needs a battering ram, then. Literally. Breaking down doors needs to be something that's just not that hard to do. Have a battering ram (should be no more difficult than the average hut to craft, to insure that even small towns will have one), have it require three or four people to man, and then allow it to break open doors rendering them permanently open until repaired. The defenders can now bring superior numbers to bear against their opponents.

Now, I'm returning to this game after a long absence, so my memory of things is foggy and I'm sure many things have changed since then. Please make sure that I've got the implications of this figured out. First, with no reason to drag people anywhere as the battering ram makes it easy to open locked doors if you have three people and a sense of urgency, battles now take place in the middle of the town. Second, without the ability to hide from defenders, the ability to gank on the part of the attackers is greatly reduced, and as focused fire is rendered an intensely sub-optimal strategy, you're more likely to see wounded people fleeing the battlefield or surrendering before they can be killed. Thus: Hospitals. Yay hospitals. Finally, roleplay is not only doable, since you've nothing to do before logging off but type up some RP for the battle, but it's also critical for attackers to allow weak villagers to survive and make it clear that they have no intention of picking off the weaklings so long as they don't get involved in the fight. Numerical advantage is a big deal, so shouting "drop your weapons and surrender or we'll kill you all!" before you start picking off the guys with menacing weapons means the dude with a bone club might just shout "I surrender!" and drop his weapon and not try to stop you while he robs your town blind or installs a military dictatorship or whatever.

Does that sound about right, or am I missing something here?