[crossfire] Release 1.12

[Mark Wedel]

Lalo Martins wrote:
> quoth Mark Wedel as of Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:08:38 -0800:
>> Lalo Martins wrote:
>>> As far as I've seen, the only change that breaks character
>>> compatibility is the combat rebalance.  So until/unless we hear from
>>> the code leadership, let's assume the rebalance won't be in the
>>> release.
>>   As far as I know, the combat rebalance does not break character
>> compatibility - old characters can get loaded and played fine.
>>
>>   The main issue is that the play experience is radically different, and
>> so players not ready/aware of these changes my incur many deaths.
> 
> Okay... a few questions, then, as you're the one who knows those changes 
> best :-)
> 
> - Won't old characters be excessively strong (or weak) compared to 
> rebalanced ones?  Or will the differences balance out in the bottom line?
> 
> - Won't old characters be excessively strong (or weak) when fighting 
> rebalanced monsters?  Or will the differences balance out in the bottom 
> line?

  Most of the rebalancing work was done by modifying archetypes, monsters, and 
some code.

  An old character that was level 100 in 1 handed weapons would still be level 
100.  But the meaning of being level 100 is different - before it might have 
meant a wc of -50, now it might be a wc -20 for example.

  I don't think there are many/any values stored in the player file itself. 
Clearly, the changes to the code will affect everyone.  Changes to the archetype 
will affect everyone.

  The issue would be any custom objects on maps that were updated - old version 
could be better.

  And the other issue, as mentioned, is that the old character might log in with 
speed of 1.5, wc -50 and weapon_speed of 4.0, but with the rebalance, speed may 
be 1.0, wc -20, weapon_speed 1.5.

  I don't think new vs old character will have any issue - the main difference 
would be play experience is quite a bit different.  A character may be used to 
hacking through monsters at a rapid pace, and not find they move much slower, 
and thus things could be more deadly (it may be that with the rebalance, the 
appropriate level to take on certain monsters is different than before)

  Note that part of the rebalance was a new experience table with slow 
advancement.  If that is made active on old servers, characters may now be in a 
case that they do not have sufficient experience for the level they are, and 
thus lose several levels at login.

  Other changes:
The stats for players is a fixed total instead of a range.  IIRC, this fixed 
total is near the upper end of what the range was before, but not the very top. 
  It does mean that players who were sufficient patient may have gotten higher 
starting stats than are achievable now.

  The other change is generator limits - I believe this was mentioned, but some 
number of maps may need to get updated, as they should have unlimited generation 
and break if they don't have unlimited generation.

> 
> - Can the changes be easily calculated without human intervention?  If 
> so, I could just write a script to do that.

  As said above, I don't really think there is anything to recalculate (maybe exp).

> 
> - Do you feel it's worth shipping this in 1.12 without the magic 
> rebalance (which, if you have the time, would follow in 1.13)?  Or is it 
> better to wait and ship both in the same release?

  I'd ship both - otherwise things are unbalanced in various ways.

> 
> - How well would the (archetype) rebalance work without the corresponding 
> server changes?  Would it work at all?

  I'm not sure.  One of the server changes was changing how wc for players was 
calculated (it increased really fast before the change).

  As such, the AC of many tough monsters were made worse, to compensate for for 
the lower WC of the character.

  I'm not sure how well things would work.  They would probably work in the 
sense that the server wouldn't crash, but you could have cases where characters 
are unable to hit monsters - the lower attack speeds (in server code) would mean 
the comparatively, monsters would be tougher than they were before (other than 
archetype changes, they were not weakened).

  I'd consider such an environment untested/unsupported.  One would have to do 
some actual playtesting I think to see how things work out.

  I did a fair amount of playtesting in that rebalance - this monster seems too 
tough, this not enough, and made various adjustments.  I suspect the biggest 
issue is that many of these adjustments were finely tuned - in general, I tried 
to target a fighter hitting a monster about 25% of the time.  If due to server 
changes, a fighter now hits that same monster 50% of the time, he is now hitting 
it twice as often, and monster is that much weaker.

  So based on AC, WC, etc of various monsters, I'm almost say for sure that some 
would be considered very easy for the experience they get, and others would seem 
very hard because they were adjusted for the new way server calculates things, 
and not the old way