If you were a newbie combatant....

Xith

Combat channel sounds good. Like a consolidated form of the old Class channels.

Jhui

noob combat channel sounds nifty

Lianca

Combat channel would be great, I can't see some sort of guide addition working, there is so much to cover and so much based on opinion or experience. FT (fight tells) and perhaps an arena mode that could do half speed/quarter speed would be great.

Antonius

Mishgul said:

there was a time when systems weren't allowed, at least not public ones. I wouldn't say combat was any less fun though, it was equally challenging in different ways and the fights were a lot shorter.

That's never been true since I began playing. The Market channel used to be full of people advertising curing systems until they were deemed OOC and advertising them wasn't allowed any more. You could still sell, or give away, curing systems - you could have even done so publicly - provided you didn't advertise it on an IC channel.

Mishgul

I don't understand if you are trying to say that you havent experienced this or you played achaea since day 1 and i'm wrong or what.

Antonius

@Sarapis: Wikis are absolutely awful to edit, especially for people who aren't familiar with doing so. I can't really blame anybody for not wanting to do so. It would be an absolutely monumental task to get it to a point where the combat information is complete enough to actually be useful to a truly new player. I might look at covering the Paladin stuff (that's about the only class I know enough about these days to cover) over the weekend.

Additionally, how much information are you and the other IRE staff willing to provide to help with this? Simple things such as exact lesson costs for each ability in all of the skills would be nice to include and allow people to better budget their lessons (especially initially), but that's not exactly easy to obtain in-game.

Zeon

I don't really like the idea of an ooc combat channel. Most if not all Houses and cities have some combat clan and means of teaching those interested how to fight. Even though being good at achaean combat is an ooc skill, I don't think that means it explicitly has to be learned ooc (though obviously it can).

I do think having information such as how balances and afflictions work (game mechanics) available via the achaean wiki would be a good idea. Though I would hate to see tactics and such described there.

Averi

agreed with @Zeon. I feel like I've met a lot of my ic best friends through asking for combat help. It's also a great conversation topic. 

Maybe instead of a combat channel add in an ooc triggers/help channel? usually when newbies need help with those things I direct them over to one of @Vadimuses's clans but now I have no more clan spaces for those. It'd be nice to have a world-wide ooc channel for these things. 

Edit: Then again, that's probably what the combat channel will end up being used for? as well as basic balances and stuff. 

This comment was rather pointless. >.<

Valden

The spam and arguments that go on across my combat channels is bad enough as it is with only 2-3 people talking. I would hate to think what an Achaean wide channel would be like.

If you made a newbie channel style combat channel It would take something away from the combat Houses, one of the major things a House does is train its members to fight and while "combat" may be an OOC skill, learning to fight and defend one's self is a great IC character arc that leaves you with all sorts of connections to other players (Mentors, rivals, partners).

I think that most of the issues are House responsibilities that need to be addressed in an IC fashion. To go in line with this, having information about mechanics and other combat concepts available in OOC channels (Thinking Wiki here) needs to be about to augment the IC training, teaching the Player about how the game works rather than teaching the Character how to fight.

Xer

I'm pretty much working on an IC text on combat right now - granted, it's meant more for raid combat, than the intricacies of single combat. A comprehensive guide for every class, though it's going to lack information on classes I don't have much access to like Priests, Paladins, and the like. My single combat text is also in the works, but given everything I already have to do, it's sloooowwwwww work. To be honest, given how long combat's been going on for, I'm surprised at the lack of combat texts around. It seems like nobody has any interest in writing anything - scrolls for combat clans, texts, anything really. And I don't even mean OOC things like reflexes and triggers. The entirety of my texts are all IC abilities and skills that can be discussed normally. Anything that's pretty much OOC talk involving systems and the like, I say, "That's beyond the scope of this text" >.> (and tell them to ask more experienced members).

A general Achaean Wiki isn't going to work too well I feel, because different people have different ideas on how combat works - and it's highly class dependent anyways. Even how to cure is different because one has to take into account passive curing abilities, and other such nonsense (YES NONSENSE ). I'm not saying texts and the like would make it much easier, but I do feel like an IC database for each city would make a lot more sense, and appeal to the "flavour" of combat as well that different people and cities have.

As for an OOC Triggers/Help channel, we have something like that for Mudlet, in the Mudlet clan channel - and that's pretty good to be honest. The few times I've asked around, people have managed to help me out/set me on the right track. So that might be an idea there

Blujixapug

I PKed curing manually at a fairly high level a few years ago. I guess around 2005-2007? I wasn't Mark, or a frequent raider or otherwise much of a fight-picker, but I fought many Marks and other high-level PKers in and out of arena. I wasn't winning constantly but I won enough to consider myself successful. I had extensive macros, aliases, echoes, highlights etc to permit this. I also played a very simplistic class (sylvan - out of grove, of course) that allowed me to juggle the intensive defense/curing with my class's simplistic offense, more easily than I could have as something offensively complex like serpent.

Some skills and situations were simply not possible to keep up with, eg. darts traps, nightmare + deadeyes, level 3 dirk dstabs with a certain style of illusions (it was easy to ignore many system-targeted illusions, but others would trigger my highlights and confound me visually with the volume of spam), but I could play defensively and shield or tumble out of the darts trap, or transfix the apostate, or... like, bitch out the serpent for being an artie-whore and just avoid fighting that person. Other skills and situations like fast rapier knights, occultists, blight shamans, and fast-breaking tekura monks were difficult to keep on top of, easy to slip up and get irrecoverably behind against, but possible with practise to fight and beat. In some situations I even had an advantage, like retardation vibe.

It was very fun and rewarding.

The last 3-4 classes Achaea has released are all classes (in fact, the only classes) that in my opinion it is not feasible to fight against curing manually: bard, apostate, blademaster (somewhat), alchemist. They are all incredibly affliction-heavy, churning out many and rapid afflictions, and that was always the most difficult/impossible thing to deal with, simply due to the limitations of reflexes, registering information, and moving fingers to input reactions. Systems and the assumptions regarding them have narrowed that threshold between possible and optimal, in terms of Achaea's cure balance system.

Antonius

The point of the Wiki should be to give people all of the information they need to make decisions, not to tell them which ones they should be making.

Prioritising afflictions isn't possible if you don't know what they do, how they're cured, what classes can give them, etc. Working out strategies to use your abilities, or defend against others, isn't possible if you don't know the conditions in which they can be used, how long it takes to recover balance/equilibrium from them, etc.

A brief example of the kind of things I'd be including for Impale; numbers aren't necessarily accurate, information isn't necessarily complete:

Impale
Skill: Chivalry (links to the Wiki page for Chivalry)
Lesson cost: 500 lessons
Requires:
 - A sword wielded
 - Balance and equilibrium
 - The target to be prone, paralysed, or entangled
Affliction: Impaled (links to the Impaled affliction page)
Prevents:
 - The opponent standing, dodging, moving
 - You from moving
Balance time:
 - 3 seconds (nimble)
 - 3.5 seconds (otherwise)

One of the problems is that other people are going to have different opinions on what should be included, and if nobody is willing to provide timings and other important parts, the whole thing fails.

Aerek

I would be extremely skeptical of a "combat channel" simply because of the massive amount of misinformation out there. Cyrene has a Cyrene-only  combat channel to facilitate this, and sometimes it's painful to sit and watch the bad advice or inaccurate information that's handed out, and sometimes I just don't have the time to sit and argue about why curare/aconite is not the best combo evar. Sometimes I do, and the channel degenerates into 4 different people offering 4 different opinions on the facts. That's in Cyrene, a close-knit city where everyone more or less gets along and respects each other. A public channel could easily be a nightmare of egotistical trash talk and completely inaccurate information presented to newbs trying to learn.

@Maethros, I expect all 500 questions on my desk by Monday, or I will HDF you back to HR 4. @Nim can come too, as long as she's not asking me about ass-backward Blademaster limb counts. Do not handicap yourselves by not asking questions. Some of us enjoy answering them.

Xith

Yeah, if any public channel were added, combat would make sense. But it'd have to be specified as newbie combat, with combat theory clans existing elsewhere for people to exchange their advanced concepts.

Yue

Why would you add a public combat channel?

There are House-specific, City-specific, and class-specific combat clans already.

Iocun

Agreed with @Aerek. I remember the serpent class channel. It was predominantly populated by five groups of people:

- Newbies asking questions, many of which did not really pertain to this channel and should be covered IC.

- People deliberately misleading or mocking newbies for their questions and ending every sentence with "join a house".

- People actually trying to be helpful but offering loads of bad advice due to being rather clueless.

- Random people using the channel as a general OOC channel and talking about their TV preferences.

- People using the channel to create some sort of weird sense of class unity that hovered precariously between IC and OOC.

Cooper

@Sarapis

We already have "wiki" files in game. They are ab files. They are just -extremely- vague and not very helpful.

Eld

Players maintaining accurate combat info on the wiki will also be complicated by unannounced changes to mechanics.

Valden

Eld said:

Players maintaining accurate combat info on the wiki will also be complicated by unannounced changes to mechanics.

That's what disclaimers are for.

Vadimuses

Antonius said:

The point of the Wiki should be to give people all of the information they need to make decisions, not to tell them which ones they should be making.

Agreed. On that note, the fact that the game has a policy of secrecy on the data does not help newbies. For example, traits descriptions are completely useless if you're deciding which trait is better: they don't state the hard facts that traits are. A newbie has to ask around OOC for information, to be directed to forums long gone with a post that Sena made. It's not on the wiki, it's not easily accessible, and it's no good if you're confused between reinforced and receptive body.

Vadimuses

Valden said:

Eld said:

Players maintaining accurate combat info on the wiki will also be complicated by unannounced changes to mechanics.

That's what disclaimers are for.

Yes, if the administration actually did them. Achaea is notoriously bad with them and unnannounced changes still happen.

Valden

Vadimuses said:

Valden said:

Eld said:

Players maintaining accurate combat info on the wiki will also be complicated by unannounced changes to mechanics.

That's what disclaimers are for.

Yes, if the administration actually did them. Achaea is notoriously bad with them and unnannounced changes still happen.

I meant disclaimers on the wiki, along the lines of "This is player researched information and is subject to change without notice".

Eld

Valden said:

Vadimuses said:

Valden said:

Eld said:

Players maintaining accurate combat info on the wiki will also be complicated by unannounced changes to mechanics.

That's what disclaimers are for.

Yes, if the administration actually did them. Achaea is notoriously bad with them and unnannounced changes still happen.

I meant disclaimers on the wiki, along the lines of "This is player researched information and is subject to change without notice".

Yes, and any such information would come with one, whether this was an issue or not. But from the standpoint of those of us who might edit such a wiki section and try to keep it up to date, a disclaimer doesn't do anything to mitigate the difficulty.

Edit:
I guess what my original statement points to is more that there would need to be a decision made on how strongly the administration wants to sponsor such an effort.
If it's purely player written, with no additional input from the higher-ups, you've basically got a distillation of information that's mostly available on the forums if you know where to look. This would be very useful, but subject to all of the caveats that apply to getting info from the forums as it stands, re: incorrect or incomplete information
A potential step up from that would be to have player-written wiki section, but with the admin reviewing articles and pointing out at least where things were flat wrong (and possibly providing a little extra information to those writing the articles).
Or you could have an essentially admin-driven repository of information, to which they could solicit player contributions. In that scenario, you could still probably get the bulk of the articles written by interested players (probably a lot of the same people who already do a lot of research and post it to the forums), but with an admin commitment to review them before they go up to weed out misinformation, and to update relevant articles when unannounced changes went in. Of course, if they were already doing that updating, there would be little reason not to announce the changes at the same time, so not sure if that would be on the table.

Tvistor

Okay, wall of text:

Lessons:

The first thing I found extremely frustrating was definitely the lesson barrier. You see, I started out like "Hell yes, serpent assassin? That sounds like the most badass thing I've ever --"

Enter six months of getting lessons, stage right. I'm still not sure how I even stuck around for that long. The cost of buying lessons is so insanely prohibitive for someone that doesn't know if they want to stick around. I was fairly active in the Naga while I was there, and frankly speaking we had gotten used to having few active combatants around.

So you know, they'd join up, and they would be like "I'd like to be an assassin.", and they would get saddled with me teaching combat.

You poor bastard. I'll teach him slowly so he can pick stuff up as he buys lessons. "<mandatory Mhaldorian derogatory terms for slaves>, let's talk about curing."

We talk about curing, illusions, and what constitutes a venomlock.

"Okay, I'm going to go spar now."

And then they want to try sparring, and everything goes to hell. First, they need to get a system, which I generally have to explain OOCly (it's cute when they fumble around helplessly in the arena, but they asked me how to fight, not how to be cute). I direct them to a free version of Omni. I imagine they're already starting to get overwhelmed at this point if they aren't familiar with Omni.

Then it's just a goddamn barrage of "Well, actually, you need envenom for that." "Yeah, you can't actually secrete scytherus yet." "Hypnosis doesn't really work until you have enough lessons to bypass vision."

That's the point where people either give up completely or gradually fade into dormancy while gaining the lessons.

Much like Daslin's mother, it's a significant investment in money for an uncertain amount of enjoyment.

Systems:

I started combat as a pre-traits Tsol'aa serpent without any arties. It was like flossing my brain with acid and steel wool, but still tolerable in some ways because of Vadi-M. There were a lot of gross illusions I could get away with that really helped with my disgustingly slow doublestab speed. That's definitely becoming less of an option.

I think it's good that people are being introduced to combat in a world where they can't rely on the fact Vadi-M doesn't cure X when you do Y, but it has also made the entry barrier for combat a lot higher in my opinion. For instance, it'll switch to kelp priority if you ever stick slickness, so I have to start explaining kelp stacks a little sooner that I'd otherwise want to. I also have to launch into some of the nuances of herb priority, anti-illusion checks and determining when your opponent is ignoring certain lines, or if they simply have a check that's causing them to ignore illusions.

That's all great for them if they stick around, but it makes them less likely to stick around in a lot of cases. As a serpent, it's not uncommon to find people who have no idea what you're trying to accomplish offensively, but can just waltz through it unharmed if they have fitness, good latency and Svo, and you didn't buy an artefact dirk. The ways Garao showed me around this, because he's a genius, I hesitate to use because they'd be fixed if someone sent Vadi a log.

And of course, as a newbie I definitely hit a point where I felt combat was nearly totally automated. Now I realize that it requires player input, even if it's just to whore shield a bit, but that was a deterrence to me as a new combatant.

Actual abilities:

I should clarify here that I acknowledge radical shifts in the core mechanics of Achaean combat, like herb balance and curing certain afflictions, can't be changed without shattering the delicate equilibrium we all rest upon, in the Earthsea style. I'm just saying this really jarred my enjoyment of combat early on.

Achaean combat doesn't really work on anything approximating logic in most cases. Balance issued aside, I realized that many, many things in combat didn't work in a way I thought they would at all. Paralyzing venoms are a mild inconvenience without enough speed to stack with them. People hold their breath forever through noose (which is super impractical anyway). Everyone sips health vials every five seconds (I figured they'd be used like other cures -- somewhat sparingly). All of that really served to push me away from conflict initially. It really doesn't feel anything like being an assassin or whatnot until you're good enough to just wreck certain people, which isn't always going to be an option. There's no clever moves like poisoning food in a kitchen and murdering some guy (setting aside the fact everyone just respawns). That kind of thing would be totally unfeasible, but that's what I was hoping for in a text-based game -- the freedom to do things that would be totally impossible to script into a video game. Obviously I had my expectations set too high.

Achaean combat is definitely way more balanced than the combat in the other IRE games, but I have to say the other IRE games definitely have the more interesting skillsets. Achaea has the largest playerbase, so maybe balance is the way to go, I'm not qualified to comment on that.

I'm still discouraged quite heavily in some ways because Achaean conflict lends itself towards forcing people to lose by essentially griefing them, but I don't think that's something novices deal with, and probably for another thread.

I'm gonna go get some orange juice, peace.

tl;dr Combat is Daslin's mother.

Jacen

Well if everyone's agreeable to expanding the Wiki and putting in more specific numbers, why don't we take some volunteers, distribute Sena's info among them, and start buffing the wiki?

Ada

... or just bring back Matsuhama and Scions!

@Ellodin, @Rean I'm tagging you guys for the heck of it *hides*

Sena

Trying to maintain a wiki with anything more than the most basic, easily-checked information on what abilities do is going to fail without far more transparency and admin assistance, and giving out specific details on numbers and mechanics is something that has almost always (Clementius being the main exception) been firmly denied in the past. Wider access to the test server would also be a huge help, but the information available would still be very limited.

The game is completely flooded with misinformation and just a lack of knowledge (I wouldn't be surprised if less than 5% of players even know how a bell tattoo works, and I couldn't figure out what grove watch did for years, because I couldn't find anybody in Eleusis or the forestal houses who knew), there are a lot of things that players can't reasonably test for themselves at all (such as several traits, and the entire dodging mechanic), and as Eld said, there are occasionally massive, unannounced changes to important things.

It would be different if we had hundreds of players willing to thoroughly test everything, but there are really only a few at the moment.

Nim

@Sena: Given the nature of wikis, it's hard to consider an incomplete or inaccurate wiki to be the same as a failure. I think you could only write off a wiki as a failure if it's outright impossible for it to ever reach an informative state, and even easily-checked basics could be useful enough.

However, you are right that there's a very limited number of people who could edit it. However, I think part of the wiki's purpose would be to correct that very issue, so I think it's too early to write it off as a failure. I think the bigger issue isn't the number of people willing to test things, but the number of people willing to help maintain the wiki at all. As @Sarapis said above, the wiki seems to be slightly inactive. With any luck, though, adding gameplay information to the wiki could increase more interest in its existence, but that might be too hopeful of a thought.

But you do raise up a good point about administrative assistance. @Sarapis said the administration would be willing to lend support. Thus, my question is, what kind of support?

ETA: @Aerek: Thanks for the offer, but right now, I'm not even sure what questions to ask. Partially because I haven't been around that much, so combat stuff is kind of a dim memory for me, but also partially because a lot of the things I've learned lately are things I didn't even realize I didn't know before learning them, like... when someone told me that tumble goes through ice walls. It was like, huh! Not something I would have even thought of!

Sena

Nim said:

@Sena: Given the nature of wikis, it's hard to consider an incomplete or inaccurate wiki to be the same as a failure. I think you could only write off a wiki as a failure if it's outright impossible for it to ever reach an informative state, and even easily-checked basics could be useful enough.

I didn't say the wiki in general would be a failure; even just including the AB files for every ability would be very useful. Attempting to maintain a higher level of information (things like balance costs, probabilities of random effects, damage formulae, and other detailed information on mechanics) would be unsuccessful though.

Nim said:

I think the bigger issue isn't the number of people willing to test things, but the number of people willing to help maintain the wiki at all. As @Sarapis said above, the wiki seems to be slightly inactive. With any luck, though, adding gameplay information to the wiki could increase more interest in its existence, but that might be too hopeful of a thought.

For something like this, 2-3 dedicated editors would be perfectly sufficient for maintaining the wiki, if they actually had all the information to maintain it with. Managing the wiki isn't the problem at all, it's having the information to put in it in the first place.

Yue

something like this please : http://wiki.lusternia.com/Skills

browse the rest of their wiki.. I think something similar for Achaea would be reasonable