[CF-Devel] 2x2 - Avatars

[David Hurst]

On Sun, Nov 11, 2001 at 05:13:53AM +0100, Andreas Vogl wrote:
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      dnh wrote:
     
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      > [...] I tend to take the roll of fixing balance problems (see many
     
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      > additions of weapons, resistance changes etc.). I have been playing
     
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      > through all the less popular gods (and some popular ones). [...]
     
      
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      Most of your stuff is quite nice, really.
     
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      I greatly appreciate your creativity and effort.
     
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      What bothers me a little bit though is that every one of your checkins
     
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      makes CF a certain degree easier.
     
     
Everything we add adds more options and in a way, makes the game easier. The changes I make are to very specific things, for example I change Gnarg, I change wraiths and I change random shields and gloves. Why? because after playing through with these gods, with these races, I find that comparitively they are not even close to balanced. Now I understand that to a degree many things should be alittle harder, alittle bit less powerful, but there is a range. If something is to hard, we may scare people away, if something is to easy people may get bored and leave.

When was the last time you played a wraith out of interest? When did you last play gnarg to level 110? Was it any fun? I certainly didn't find it so. Now this is my own subjective view, and it may well differ from others. That is why I always ask peoples opinions on a commit and invite people to change as they see fit. I do not add these items with the express wish of leaving my change as final. In many cases I add things which I want people to change.

In terms of avatars I certainly didn't make it easier in a few ways. Firstly I halved their health. Try using the avatar of gnarg, its rubbish.. but it least it is bug free and uses a pretty image =). Same for gaea and ruggilli but to a lesser extent.

Making things hard certainly isn't the answer to making Crossfire fun and more than making it easy is. We could make kobolds have dragon breath, and goblins cast healing spells. It wouldn't be any fun at all, things like this need alot of balancing regularly to keep them up to date compared to the rest of CF, otherwise more items will be added instead, or a new spell will be added. Alot of things in CF have been all but forgotten, when was the last time anyone used archery?

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      One-square avatars, more resistances, added artifacts
     
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      to the random lists, increased god bonuses... - As long as there
     
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      is no compensation, all this stuff makes the process of beating
     
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      the game faster and easier.
     
     
Apart from the fact that I haven't touched god bonus for about 2 months, I simply don't agree with this. I finished CF alot faster before PR and I enjoyed it immensly, as you to did AV. I am finding I don't enjoy pupland so much now that it is so hard and fast. I am not saying you have made a mistake or that this is all your fault, but I really do think it is important to keep this sort of thing in perspective. Vun of -40 fire??? How the heck would you manage to play the game that long that you could be bothered actually finishing it? ;)

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      I'm not sure how others think about this point. However, I'd be
     
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      happy if we could maintain some basic difficulty level for CF without
     
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      doing branch-offs.
     
     
Well the level of difficulty certainly hasn't been maintained, I don't know why it is suddenly so important.. ? Perhaps I missed something? If you think these are errors on my behalf, I will revoke my work.

dnh