Equilibrium for Honours

Nim

@Santar: If you have a finite amount of uses for any given time frame, why even involve equilibrium? Give people a storage of X checks (perhaps ten), and have them regenerate at a rate of one per X seconds (perhaps five) or something, or just all at once or something. If you try and you're out, you fail.

Kyrra

I used to honours random people a lot while toteming to pass the time. Balances suck

Aktillum

I'm all for anything that nullifies data-mining and in fact I think we should all go back to telnet. You kids and your fancy NDB scripts, back in my day we couldn't even see what we were typing.

Khairt

Now is the time to increase the price of diadems to 2000 credits and add honors eq waiving to the list of benefits! Go team go! Less functionality for the proles, more for me! #moustachetwirl

Rispok

Khairt said:

Now is the time to increase the price of diadems to 2000 credits and add honors eq waiving to the list of benefits! Go team go! Less functionality for the proles, more for me! #moustachetwirl

My moustachios are longer than yours. Hooray for separate honours balance!

Mortori

Rate-limiting the use of the HONOURS command has definitely had a non-negligible effect on Achaea's responsiveness.

One of the things we use to monitor the performance of the game is checking the "input latency" of Achaea, which is basically the amount of time Achaea waits, on average, to execute a player's command and then be ready to execute the next command the game receives.

Prior to the HONOURS change, it was not at all uncommon to see the latency hovering around 60 ms, with peaks of up to 120 ms. Since the change, I have yet to see the latency go above 50 ms, and frequently see it sitting around 20.

This is good news. While a difference of 30 ms is virtually indistinguishable to the naked eye, it means we have headroom to add interesting things. Every single thing that happens in Achaea and every command that every player enters has an effect on the latency, and latency creep is always a concern when we're evaluating the viability of additions to the game. This change has given us room to play with, now.

Conslo

Ryldagh said:

What I'm getting out of this is ... it allowed you to pretend to have a better memory than you actually have.  I mean, if you can't immediately know where someone lives just by looking on them, then how are you ever to have to learn how to roleplay in the roleplaying enforced game?

This isn't reality we're talking about; I also can't close my eyes and know where someone is located, is that justification to remove farsee? In fact, in reality I can't know where someone lives, or how old they are, just by knowing their name, like, at all, time consuming or not. So this doesn't have anything to do with memory, or less to do with at least.

I'm talking about this as a significant diminishment of honours as an ability. My super natural abilities as a character used to include instinctive and immediate knowledge of certain properties of everyone who's name I heard. Now that ability exists in a much lesser form; requiring distinct conscious effort every time.

If you want to argue about augmenting my bad memory we can talk about NDB as a tool, to which I'd likely agree, but tools also exist in reality to make more available information we can access anyway. For a concrete example: I could have an address book with all my contacts and their phone numbers, but instead I can just tap the first few letters of a persons name into my phone to call them, alleviating the need for the manual lookup.

Greys

I've noticed that I am now less likely to find out who someone is. Someone passing by who I don't know? Is it really worth disrupting what I am doing now?

Airmed

I'm a Novice. I am using WALK TO ELEUSIS because a higher ranking member of my new House told me to come meet them. While walking, I HONOURS them to try and discern an appropriate title to address then by, since it was not given over the House channel when they requested my presence. Suddenly, I'm not walking there anymore. This is a rather minor annoyance, but an annoyance none-the-less.


I'm a Novice. Where I stopped walking was in Eleusis' defendable. There is a raid going on. My name seems familiar to one of the raiders. Due to the equilibrium cost associated with HONOURS, nobody raiding takes the time to determine whether I am a combatant or not. An arrow flies in to the room, striking me. I realize I am sleeping. I try to wake up, but discover that I have just died for the first time since joining the realms. I am sad, and dislike this experience.

Good change?

You can judge for yourself.

Santar

There's no real excuse for them not having fixed the honors issue to not be such a massive inconvenience yet.

@Sarapis @Tecton

Putting y'all on notice.

Make a better workaround than this EQ bullshit.

Antidas

Agreed with above comments. Would be very easy to put it on its own timer - there's absolutely no reason why it shouldn't or hasn't been done, as far as I can tell. Taking EQ to honors people is a massive annoyance

Rispok

I believe after enough time has passed we all agree that some form of delay on honors is fine.

Putting it on balance or eq or pipe or tree or salve is not fine.

Aerek

If the point of giving HONORS an EQ cost was to stop players from flooding the server with QWHO dataminers, giving it its own timer doesn't accomplish that Folks would still run their datamining scripts in the background, since an independent HONORS balance wouldn't affect their gameplay at all. It would take 5 minutes to check 200 names instead of 10 seconds, but the flood of HONORS commands from dozens of players would persist, and continue to clog up the server queues.

Iocun

As someone who always disliked the steady increase of metagamey information-gathering mechanics that bypassed actual interaction, I welcome anything that makes honours a pain to use.

If the honours command was changed so it could only be done from Suliel, I'd be fine with that as well.

And if we're talking about "the old way". The "old way" I remember is from when citizenship didn't show up in honours at all.

Airmed

@Aerek: not necessarily true:

If you HONOURS, there is a bal check. If that fails (You are off balance), a simple line is sent back informing you of such. That is minimal processing overhead, compared to when you HONOURS and pass the balance check, and then the actual HONOURS routine is called, presumably doing a database lookup, some string formatting, and then piping that to the output buffer. Depending on how efficient that routine is (or isn't), spamming HONOURS while off balance is still going to cost the server exponentially fewer cycles, resulting in significantly less lag generated from spamming HONOURS then how it was before the change.

Vakvyr

A good deal of this thread is pinpointing exactly who is shit at raiding.

I don't know what ndb is. Game is fine without it.

Vakvyr

Seriously though. A lot of you have implied that you'd rather accidentally kill a newbie than honours someone manually. I don't mind the eq loss because of this reason. If you rely on a datamining to make sure you don't kill random people, you should rethink participating in raids.

Kreemuv

Edit: in response to the newbie killed in Eleusis. - Meh. One of the more memorable things for my character was wandering Shallam as a clueless level fortyish priest who was kind of bored from hunting and feeling like there was nothing to do, only to wander through a raid and dying. This made achaea feel like something much more than a bashing treadmill, and inspired me to get stronger and learn a little more combat. Which resulted in me getting a couple lucky kills later on some good enemy combatants, which resulted in them hunting me down after the raid, where i stood no chance. Going on my first ever raid into Mhaldor and somehow coming away with like three guard kills by spamming smite. Having a good(i think) monk combatant ask me and another clueless priest to Kai him up during a raid, only for us to nearly smite him to death, lol... A death in this game is nothing. A bit of danger and excitement, and realizing there's more than hunting and novice house reqs might just keep some around, and turn a novicewho might have otherwise just gone through alt after alt, into a character of merit. Or, quit the game like me, but have fond memories at least.

Borran

I heard the HONOURS command was bogging down Achaea- We should just delete it! It's an OOC way of gaining information about other people. #deletehonours

Airmed

@Kreemuv: Being level 40 and killed while wandering through a raid because you're bored is not the same as being level 11 and killed in your first hour in the game while trying to complete basic TASKS.

Edit: it breaks roleplay and immersion. Was their any IC reason for me dying? No. Just laziness and -- apparently -- a broken mechanic. It's not a big deal, certainly not the biggest issue with this HONOURS thing, just sharing my personal experience. If it's a side affect of this change, it should be noted, because I wouldn't want similar interactions to deter other new players from sticking around. Dying for no reason in a game where there are enough ways to legitimately be killed is not a positive experience.

Merador

People have been accidentally killed in raids since forever. You did not die because of a 1 second balance cost on honours. Anybody that's saying a 1 second balance loss on honors is enough for them to kill random newbies is talking nonsense. It's really not hard to check.

Airmed

Ha! YOU just killed me in a raid, while I am quietly getting a history lesson from one of Eleusis' denizens. YOU, Merador, just dragged me out of the room I was in, into your death squad, and killed me. Thank you so much for proving my point.

You Just said, "It's not hard to check." and then you killed me, INSTEAD OF CHECKING. Clearly, the 1 second equilibrium balance was more than you were willing to spend, and you are a liar.  

Klendathu

To be fair, he never said he checked, he just said that using the eq cost as a reason not to check was invalid.

Merador

You were accidentally brought into the room during a brawl by adduction (a passive vibe, which didn't target you intentionally at all). Somebody called you as a target, I swapped to you and hit you once and you died. The same would have happened whether honours were free or had a 1 second balance cost. There's a significant difference between accidentally hitting somebody in the middle of action (where people didn't tend to check honours before, even without a balance cost) and purposefully summoning somebody into the room to kill them.

Aktillum

lolol that was actually my adduction vibe, I had it set up behind @Merador/Jhui/Dunn/Mizik/Yiwen so I could beckon them from one dir while our LoS was hitting them from the other. Poor Airmed was sitting south of it, minding his own business.

Santar

Never understood why people gripe more over accidental newbie deaths than anyone else.

Airmed is level 11. Go kill 3 pixies that take 1 bashing attack a piece to kill, and there's your xp back.

Not saying it's right to grief/waste people's time, but that death was accidental and cost you 30 seconds of experience at most.

Kreemuv

Airmed said:

@Kreemuv: Being level 40 and killed while wandering through a raid because you're bored is not the same as being level 11 and killed in your first hour in the game while trying to complete basic TASKS.

Edit: it breaks roleplay and immersion. Was their any IC reason for me dying? No. Just laziness and -- apparently -- a broken mechanic. It's not a big deal, certainly not the biggest issue with this HONOURS thing, just sharing my personal experience. If it's a side affect of this change, it should be noted, because I wouldn't want similar interactions to deter other new players from sticking around. Dying for no reason in a game where there are enough ways to legitimately be killed is not a positive experience.

It breaks roleplay and immersion that sitting on the same block as an invading war party in your quite militant city is not safe? It's a whole lot more immersive in my mind than a group of blood thirsty soldiers halting all area attacks because that guy who just walked by might not be a soldier. Yeah if they abused it it can be messed up, but take it for the learning experience it is. Literally nothing was lost by this death, newbie death xp lost is the easiest to regain. And you might now recognize a few signs which will help you avoid this fate when a death might actually matter more in the future. Achaea centers around combat in one way or another. Many people enjoy it who are non combatants, but learning to deal with stuff like that can make the rp that much more rich. As well as knowing that you are never completely safe. It's a game. And one random death is basically never a horrible thing.