[CF-Devel] town portal (RE: CVS commit: maps/city/misc)

[Tim Rightnour]

On 26-Feb-02 Yann Chachkoff wrote:
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      If I remember well, there was a crossfire compile-time option to activate 
     
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      "backfire effects" for failed spellcasting, but I've never seen it on a
     
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      public 
     
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      server. We could reactivate and modify it a little to allow more "dangerous" 
     
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      effects (like The Void) not only for the Town Portal, but also for all other 
     
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      "high level" spells.
     
     
Well.. I actually disagree with that.  Again, using the mud as my base of
reference, we found that generally, the backfires, even though they were pretty
cool, and seemed relatively balanced, really pissed off the players. 
Basically, here is the problem:

Player A fights monster A:

Monster A can fire lightning at the player all day long, with no fear.  if the
monster dies, it doesn't care, it repops.

Player A however, has limited mana, and if it dies, it's a very upsetting
thing.  The player has a spell which he painstakingly learned, and now attempts
to use against the monster trying to kill him.  Oh look, he rolled 00, he just
blew his arm off.

This is just like critical hits/misses.  It's very upsetting to the players. 
It throws millions of balance problems into the equasion.  Players absolutely
hated the spells, and stopped using them entirely until we took it out.

I suggested the void, because it's a specific solution to a specific problem,
one which was being abused on our mud, and looks to be abused on CF.  If you
think about it, the portal is a kind of "cheat" for the player.  He can avoid
things that he would normally have to encounter.  The player is willing to risk
the void, in order to cheat past the rest of the maze.  However, a normal
spell, like say meteor storm, is not a form of cheating, it's just a high level
mage causing lots of fire.  The void is designed to balance the cheat out.

I don't mind if you take a certain spell, and find a logical and just backfire
for it, on an individual basis.  Think of the void as "a rift in space time
caused by the portal".  But I think each spell should be evaluated one at a
time, and determined if it needs a backfire or not.  I do not agree that we
should penalize spellcasters in general.

As yourself, why is it that nobody runs the backfire code.  :)

---
Tim Rightnour <
     
     root at garbled.net
     
     >
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