If you were a newbie combatant....

What are the things you would find most confusing/challenging/frustrating about combat without a system?
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  • edited February 2013
    Being able to keep up with the people that do automate their curing allowing them to attack as quickly as they possibly can, having to learn every single affliction and its corresponding cure and instantly knowing this information, and then initially dying a lot very quickly.

    Just everything that Cooper said though, basically. Would be great if a server-side curing system was released and the sale of systems was prohibited.

  • AchillesAchilles Los Angeles
    edited February 2013
    1. Finding a user-friendly client
    2. How to create alias/macros/triggers in said client
    3. Accumulating all the affliction lines
    4. Combat spam
    5. Paying for minimum skills needed to experience some success in combat (bi trans for some classes, even tri-trans for some, plus survival/weaponry/vision etc mix)
    image
  • Curing. By a mile, curing.
  • MishgulMishgul Trondheim, Norway
    keeping up with the amount of afflictions would be near impossible, unless retardation was involved, and even then keeping temperament in retardation isn't easy.

    -

    One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important

    As drawn by Shayde
    hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae
  • MishgulMishgul Trondheim, Norway
    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.

    -

    One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important

    As drawn by Shayde
    hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae
  • edited February 2013
    No, there'd be no posers left in combat in achaea. This is taking trolling too far, sorry Jacen. Achaea combat would not be worse off if that scenario was made a reality. There did used to be a time when people did not use systems, and as mish said, it was just -different-. Not any less fun. 

    It's not like a person who plays achaea for a few hours everyday can't make an automatic sipper over the course of two weeks. Hell, it's not like people can't release manuals on how to do the small things like that, and I'm sure they would if such a thing happened!

  • AchillesAchilles Los Angeles
    manual combat was a lot of fun back in the day, RIP telnet

    For the most part 1v1 is narrowed down to a few optimized kill strategies from the mid-upper tiers these days.
    image
  • AchillesAchilles Los Angeles
    @Cooper - Actually a client like Zmud actually cost money back then, half the people were on telnet and AOL dial up.  

    It has evolved from a high pressure typing contest (or just master using ! x100) into a whole new beast
    image
  • edited February 2013
    Sarapis said:
    What are the things you would find most confusing/challenging/frustrating about combat without a system?
    I wasn't a combatant, but I manualed my way to 80 as a priest and took my curing test against Iocun. The most difficult parts are A) recognizing afflictions, B) prioritizing them, and C) doing this quickly while still maintaining an offense. The fact is that if your system immediately reads a line and applies the best cure according to its logic, it is a huge boon defensively and offensively. It essentially solves the three problems I mentioned above. 

    Manualing everything also means that all your actions (sipping, applying, mossing, herbing, smoking, lighting, etc.) are effectively on the same "balance," and that's your typing speed. This means that someone who doesn't have a system will have to make decisions that other players don't have to, such as deciding whether to attack or whether to sip or whether to eat an herb. They'll also be doing it slower, too, because people can't process information (especially through combat scroll) as fast as a computer.
  • Someone on Newbie channel recently asked how he could stand up better/faster when bashing.  He was in my house so I asked him if he'd got any help a few minutes later.  He hadn't, so we illegally used a party channel so I could walk him through setting up a basic trigger on the Achaea site's html client (I use Mudlet, btw).  Once it was working for him, I mentioned systems to him and told him to look around the forums if he was interested in one later, and that some people eventually learn to build their own.  Without a system, standing up is hard for a newbie.  
  • edited February 2013
    It's pretty easy to make triggers to get you to auto stand when proned or waking or on bal/eq, apply mass/caloric/mending, sip health/mana, writhe when appropriate and light/smoke pipes, allowing you to maintain an offence and cure herbs and resto salves manually, among a few other things. I wouldn't get caught up too much on only either having systems as they are today or absolutely no auto-curing at all. Just because there are no immediately available systems to purchase that instantly do everything for you, it doesn't mean you can't develop your own efficient way of dealing with curing afflictions.

  • Achilles said:
    @Cooper - Actually a client like Zmud actually cost money back then, half the people were on telnet and AOL dial up.  

    It has evolved from a high pressure typing contest (or just master using ! x100) into a whole new beast
    Really? Zmud was shareware when I first started mudding ~15-20 years ago.
  • AktillumAktillum Philippines
    edited February 2013
    Everything Cooper said. +1. Summed up everything.

    Manual-style is dead. Zmud is ancient. Modern latency has made combat rely on reacting in milliseconds. I feel gimpy with a 0.168 latency when I'm trying to stick aeon, or something.

  • Achilles said:
    Eld said:
    Achilles said:
    @Cooper - Actually a client like Zmud actually cost money back then, half the people were on telnet and AOL dial up.  

    It has evolved from a high pressure typing contest (or just master using ! x100) into a whole new beast
    Really? Zmud was shareware when I first started mudding ~15-20 years ago.
    If I remember correctly you got like 30 free uses (some people didnt turn off their computer/close client as a result) before having to buy a full license otherwise it cost $20-25.  
    Hm, that might be right. I know I used it more than that, but that may have been by repeatedly redownloading it.
  • Yeah but den like people might think for themself and work out why dey getting owned by illusions and den work out how to get around dat init.

    or they could just rely on you for the rest of their combat life course

  • AktillumAktillum Philippines
    edited February 2013
    I used to get mad at SVO till I realized you have to RTFM and configure a whole lot of stuff out of the box if you don't want to get pwned. I just scratched the custom prios surface a few weeks ago.

  • XerXer Langley
    I started making my own system when I first started out, and I got to about the point where I had a semi-usable system on my own fairly quickly, with respect to venomable afflictions (At least, I think it passed basic functionality with Garao haha), but I had trouble developing how I wanted to work out priorities on the fly automatically (by which I mean the system chooses priorities for you "optimally" depending on the "situation"). Then I saw Omni 3.0 come out - Thanks Carmain! <3 - and it saved me the rest of the hassle of finding ALL THE OTHER AFFLICTION LINES. God, I didn't realise how many they were. Omni 3.0 is quite nice to someone with a passing interest in CS and decided to take some courses in it at university - I had enough knowledge and knowhow to work out some personal scripts, and modify Omni extensively to add to my offense and make it easier for me to use/change defensively midcombat. 

    If I didn't know how to code at all... I probably wouldn't be able to do some of the more advanced scripts I have yet, but I think I would have been able to modify Omni - it just would have taken a fair bit longer to read through the code and change things here and there. I wasn't around for manual combat, so I can't say anything on that front, but I can't really say I can imagine it at this stage. 
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    e^(iπ) + 1 = 0
  • edited February 2013
    @Sarapis: A newbie combatant finds frustration in steps.

    1) Dying before you know what happened.

    2) Catching on to afflictions, but not curing them in time, or not being able to survive the pure damage.

    3) Surviving long enough to do something, but struggling to make even a dent in your opponent.

    If you're looking for ways to improve this, a few things may help. Public explanation on how afflictions work together, and how locks works. HELP HEALS, HELP CURELIST, and HELP CURES are a good start, but afflictions are typically what overwhelms newbies - both the giving, and the taking, of them. Those might help with 2&3.

    The trigger packages wouldn't be a bad idea. Something simple, but still able to give them time to do -something-  and see more of combat than immediate death. That might help with 1&2.
    Current scripts: GoldTracker 1.2, mData 1.1
    Site: https://github.com/trevize-achaea/scripts/releases
    Thread: http://forums.achaea.com/discussion/4064/trevizes-scripts
    Latest update: 9/26/2015 better character name handling in GoldTracker, separation of script and settings, addition of gold report and gold distribute aliases.
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