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Comments
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
We should very clearly keep having it.
Cascades of quicksilver light streak across the firmament as the celestial voice of Ourania intones, "Oh Jarrod..."
That being said, automation is also a problem because at that point, you're not playing against a person, you're playing against an AI... and that would be fine if people didn't try to take credit for their AI being good
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
You very much can take credit for something you coded, working the way it's meant to and doing what it was made to do. That's like saying DeepMind can't take credit for the effectiveness of AlphaZero being able to demolish top Chess/Go players.
They can. They wrote it. That's how coding things works.
If your argument was, "They can't tell others they're good, when in reality it's their AI killing people for them." Then that would be an entirely different story.
While it's true that a poor fighter can whip out the right piece of code and instantly be dangerous, I find that person a whole lot less dangerous then someone who whips out their credit card and purchases a set of artifact weapons. Combat is balanced well enough that there are ways to react to fast, precise affliction offense that I can learn, but there's a point with lessons and artifacts where there's simply too great a difference in mechanical capabilities for it to be a remotely fair fight. Obviously artifacts matter less then skill at the very end of the day, but artifacts can replace a good deal of skill, which is exactly the problem that people have with automation.
It's also not like we're sitting here debating a raw telnet connection versus a full coded offense. Even the most proudly manual player likely uses automated curing, a limb counter, a robust alias system, and a system of echoes/highlights set up to help them keep track of what's going on. That's a very different thing then full automated offense, of course, but those are still scripts that help replace certain skills, and which create barriers between the people that have them and the people that don't. That's gotten massively better in the last few years with serverside curing, svof, and a whole array of free limb counters, but that just goes to show the extent to which having some measure of automated assistance is just assumed. It would take far more skill to parse successful limb hits and count all six limbs without any code to assist it, after all, but it doesn't seem like anyone's mourning the loss of those particular skills.
Full offensive automation definitely has its own unique problems, but I think it's silly to suggest that achaean combat was somehow pure and entirely skill-based until it came along and messed everything up. There's always been the option of instant gratification replacing skill for people with the money, and code was replacing certain skills that people once had to learn manually since someone put in their first trigger. The automation people lament now is a matter of degree, not the root cause.
edit: rereading, what I meant is people taking credit for their AI's kills. Moving on..
As as an example, I switched to Shikudo monk about a month ago. I still haven’t coded any combos. The only thing I use it for is to KILL @TARGET.
I've always found a fair number of people defend artifacts, really, and argue that they don't make -that- much of a difference. Certainly, plenty of people get upset at the suggestion that they should ever be made less impactful.
If you're calling my post whataboutism, though, I don't think you read it very well. My argument isn't that offensive automation doesn't have its own problems (I specifically said that it does, several times), or that it doesn't contribute to the issues that people are talking about (it clearly does). I'm arguing that the problems people are bringing up with combat as a whole have not been solely, or even primarily, caused by this particular development in automation.
Basically, I think if we compared modern achaean combat to a hypothetical 100% skill based environment (raw telnet connections, no artifacts, equal skill investment, equal stats/level), I think that automating one's choice of afflictions is only a very small part of the factors reducing the impact of skill on combat, one that gets a disproportionate amount of the blame for the overall problem due to its relative newness instead of its relative impact.
Certainly, if artefacts affected group combat more than automation, you'd see the heavily artied but not so automated cities dominating much more.
Either way though they're both bad but one of them is the business model and the other is something not even the admins like.
In fact, if I know someone manuals their whole offence, many defensive tools become incredibly more effective and it becomes a lot easier to survive (looking at you shield tattoo).
I've dabbled in using AK, automating my affliction selection as a Shaman. I didn't like it, and when I was firsting starting combat it turned me away from ever using Shaman to lock and playing the vodun cheese game instead. I still have it on my profile today for when I use Shaman, but I rarely ever use it, opting instead for my aliases and using Shaman solely for group combat.
There are definitely some skills in this game that really feed into the automation mindset, and as discussed earlier in this thread, Stormhammer is definitely one of those. Even with an alias to help you out, typing 3 different targets to maximize the skills dps is going to be tough for most to do. Further more, keeping track of people in room versus out of room, as the skill won't fire if all you sent it with 3 people and all 3 aren't present. This is becoming a bit of a side rant that I'd love to see Stormhammer tweaked or made easier to work with. Anway.
A successful manual combatant, be it prep or not, will always seem more skilled to me than someone who spends their time writing and tuning their system. And I'm very glad the direction the admin are taking in making new classes or tweaks that benefit the manual combat, even if people still automate them.
Don't even get me started on group automation, which I do not believe is healthy for the game.
Added to that, some classes simply need certain skills/artifacts. You won't get far without any capacity to fly, or without leap/mountjump in some form, let alone without the abilities that survival gives, since those are all things that combat is balanced around having.
Now, I'd agree that the situation is significantly different in group fights, where automation becomes far more of a force multiplier then artifacts could be. Though even there, earrings/wings/lyre/urn and other artifacts make a -massive- difference.
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And before anyone tries to say I'm lying about being manual - I have a fully automated system, but it sucks horribly because someone gave it to me and then quit the game years ago (so its no longer updated) and I only ever use it for huge group fights when I lose track of what affs someone has in my head. I'm not a good coder, so its not within my capabilities to fix it, and I don't care enough to pay someone else to try to fix it. I've found that for 1v1 or small group situations, I can manual far more effectively than my automation can.
That being said, to play a little bit of devils advocate here: I started getting into combat with the automated system before I got good at manually locking, and it actually helped me a fair bit by showing me what sort of things I should be doing when I do try to manual.
Minifie's line, "I wonder how many people have levels of automation but think it's still manual, and how many people have an auto system but claim to be full manual," feels apt here. Part of my point was that the current idea of "rudimentary class knowledge," as Keorin referred to, includes essentially perfect curing, including smart usage of tree.
For anecdotal examples of this, I call upon my own experience as a non-artefacted fighter.
There have been many notable fully artefacted people who, while they were certainly dangerous against middling fighters, were not as effective against the top class in the game. If it makes the point more relatable to those who actually experienced fighting against them, Cain, Xenomorph, Lideron, and Veldrin might be a few whose names are still recognizable. The amount of pressure their artefacts gave them certainly increased the difficulty of fighting against them relative to how they would be without artefacts, but they were really quite beatable, even at level 70 sub-3200 health tritrans+survival (focus is good for the aconite part of aco/curare: fc, eb).
People who had both top class artefacts and top class skill were of course more dangerous than people who had one without the other. Characters like Rennyn and Dumah come to mind here, though I may be biased when it comes to positive evaluation of these people because of other factors. Their artefacts gave them increased pressure and quicker set-up time, yes, but they also knew how to finish a fight without those advantages. The gear augmented their pressure and made them more challenging to fight than other skilled players with fewer artefacts, but there were few people who had that level of ability to begin with, so the artefacts did not seem to matter as much (at my skill level) as they do now. That's where the difference was made.
There were other advantages back then, as class choice had far more of an impact on effective ability to fight in one on one. Though there may be fewer people working on and developing combat ability now than ever before, I think that among those who fight, a wider range of classes participate in combat; that is thanks to massive changes over the years to give every class a feasible way to kill. Besides artefacted maul incinerators like Grandue or Batang, how many Druids even tried to fight past the "I can cure paralysis" level before?
There has been a parallel paradigm shift when it comes to the apparent design philosophy behind Achaean combat. Fights are not necessarily "faster" because balances themselves have become quicker, and fights don't necessarily end more quickly because of decision-making assistance. Classes, speaking as a whole, have had their offensive threats boosted because of an aversion to the incredibly drawn-out fights that would occur between two fighters who were able to play the correct defense or had an insufficient offense.
Even "prep" classes had a correct defense to play against them, one that would generally result in nullifying the finish; back then, it was based on little things like finding an appropriate time to begin a finishing sequence or playing a fake strategy for the first few finish attempts to bait an incorrect reaction out of someone. Human tricks for human minds, you see, so lend me this moment to wax nostalgic while I howl at the moon.
And at the top, there certainly were fights that would not end because of the pure defensive ability displayed between two fighters. I had excruciatingly long fights with Tynil that ended on random events like a falcon knocking someone off balance eight times in a row after two-and-a-half hours of fighting, or myriad games of rampage or FFA that came to a close based on a game of rock-paper-scissors because people did not want to spend the requisite time or effort on fights that did not matter. For my taste, this was fine, and it engendered a certain respect; shades of Hector and Ajax exchanging sword and girdle after a day's duel, you see.
So, rather than looking at only one factor like automation, the offensive-leaning design philosophy behind Achaean combat has also brought about more of these quick fights with easily-pressed advantages, where defense or recovery can seem more reliant on the RNG of escaping a room hinder rather than some timely action. Pure speed reigns over clever timing now, so unlike a real fight between skilled boxers. Still, I'm not sure if a more defensive design philosophy is the best solution to this either, if only because botting will result in infinitely long ends to arena events.
On a completely different note, Reyson made a point regarding OOC condition affecting IC effectiveness. In the Iliad, there are points where certain warriors are favored by some God or other on the field, even outside of Paris' shot on Achilles. Sometimes, I've wondered if that was just an old way of saying "torn ligaments did not bother him as much today." I've seen it posited that Mickey Mantle played most of his career on a torn ACL and MCL, an all-time great in spite of serious injuries for which there was no surgical procedure. We may all have different levels of "athleticism" when it comes to Achaea, but those who have the inborn and developed ability to rise to the top would do so regardless...in my ideal world.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
Any person who tracks current afflictions in their head is a manual fighter.
An automatic fighter, in the primary attack of the class, uses the same input to produce a different result.
A manual fighter constructs the attack at time of input. Does that mean construction of a UI that tracks afflictions but allows you to change the selection priority on the fly should be considered a manual fighter? See here.
An automatic fighter can be further categorized.
A constructor is a player who designs, in the main, a methodology for interacting with their character's tools and leverages this to make quicker preplanned decisions at time of use.
A designer is a player who carefully curates and updates their selections of tools, be it input or visual, despite allowing their tools to do most of the heavy lifting at time of use.
A modifier is a player who attempts to alter and appreciate the underlying tool that they are using in an effort to achieve better results.
A user is a player who uses the same input to try and produce a different result each time.
Carry on.
Being this close to such a huge milestone is making me incredibly happy.