No more self healing...wtf devs???

[muffel]

I think that a healer should be able to heal himself with #inma again. But but not that easy as it was. I dont know excatly how much mana points it costs to heal others with #inma. I think its about 10mp. To heal himself should be more expensive. Here are some suggestions...

#1 Lets saying healing himself costs 25% from MP for the "first time". If a mage heals himself again in a time about ...60 seconds?... the healing should need much more mana points. Lets saying it should need about 50% MP. And if he need to heal himself a third time after 60 seconds (from the second time) it should decrease his MP to 0. Only if he waits 60 seconds, the healing should cost 25% again.

#2 Without a delay. But a mage is not able to heal himself to 100% with #inma. For each time he heals himself, it would increase his HP just about 1/3 of the rest he needs for 100%. And it costs more MP if he wants to heal himself from 50% HP to ~66.6% HP (thats + 1/3 from 50% to 100%) than from 10% HP to ~40% HP (thats + 1/3 from 10% to 100%).

The time and the costs of mana points are just for example. I didnt think about the values a long time. Maybe one of these suggestions could be a "mid-way" for level-2 healing. I still would like to see more powerful healing spells for higher levels ^^

Sorry for my english. It isnt my native language

[Acegi]

I think the developers have explained themselves quite well enough. As an ex-archer-mage I feel the full brunt of this fix (trust me I was very reliant on inma for snake pit). However I also know that it is possible to survive without magic since I only started learning magic after lvl 80 for the sole convenience of inma.

I'm one of those "new" players too who didn't know that the inma self heal was a bug and took it for granted. If this was a random attempt at just "balancing" things out then I would be one of the first to start massively complaining. However it was decided awhile ago even if most of us newer players didn't know about it so it's not an attempt at balancing.

From a game story point of view and what I understand, inma (otherwise know as "lay-on-hands") is based on the idea that you lay your hands on someone else and heal them by transferring your health to them using up mana for this magical transfer. The intention therefore was that inma was a help others spell not an infinite loop for easy survival. It shouldn't be taken that this is just an excuse for the fix because this idea was set down long ago and just wasn't fixed. Perhaps even some of the developers liked the bug too...

To today's argument that this game is still within testing I think is a very valid one which we've come to forgotten because a lot of us have enjoyed the game so much and have thought of it more and more as stable. It has already been mentioned that some more warning would have been appreciated so that players didn't feel unreasonably treated. It should be completely clear that this game version is 0.0.29.1 which means changes are not only inevitable it should be expected.

I think Kill3rZ made a very good point too about changes in that this fix should have come with other changes not several weeks before releasing something big (presuming the major changes like magic lvl3 will arrive then). There is virtually no way that making such a drastic fix to the game didn't warrant some thinking about when best to do it. Having this fix diluted by positive things such as new magic spells would have been far more acceptable. Given this backlash I would hope that in the future fixes that will have such negative effects to public relations would be better scheduled.

The message to walk away with here is that whilst changes are expected and inevitable it is the player's best interest to learn to adapt and for developers to be more careful about when changes are done. I hope the explanation of inma will alleviate some tension and maybe we'll see other more desired changes sooner rather than later.

[Macias_P]

The developers may explain themselves. It's that "critics are irrelevant" thing that started my bullshit detector. Inma allowed mages to get to places they otherwise wouldn't, thus getting exp when healing them. Lum takes a while to heal, so it's no use in places like the snake pit.

Adapting to changes it's not only a player's job. Also, the pre-alpha thing is not a good excuse to ignore player comments. Players are the testers of the game, also one of the best features of it. Their opinion is (or should be) considered to be very important. Developers should think that adapting the game to players is part of their job.

[Booth]

I was an archer without using inma and i did quite fine. So the rest of the archers should quit crying.

[Jumpy]

why alliances are not created as the party style?

warrior accompagn and protect mages to the places they can't reach...

etc etc etc

+1 to have places where
mages can't go without warriors
warriors can't go without mages
archer can't go without mages
etc etc etc

think it's great
that would also give a meaning to higher levels as they would have a chance to reach those places alone

then we'll play together
according to the skills and habilities

Regards

[Krist]

well...I wouldnt be crying exept I based my stats on as a archer with enough intel to use inma because of how effeicent it was well now its gone *sigh* If it was a long going bug well I should probably suck it up and start using potions or something. : /

[fate]

Macias_P,

Well, you can call whatever you like irrelevant. But complaints are not irrelevant because:

a) They are not always subjective.
b) They are not always anecdotal.

Both points are correct. I meant to say that the data present in individual players' complaints is necessarily subjective and anecdotal. While the complaints in this thread have all been subjective and most of them have been anecdotal, this is not a general property of complaints. Sorry for getting that wrong in my post!

Please note that I never used the word `irrelevant,' and as far as I know no-one called anything irrelevant here.

The developers may explain themselves. It's that "critics are irrelevant" thing that started my bullshit detector.

I don't recall anyone making that statement, and I don't think that anyone believes that. But as I tried to explain (poorly, I admit, as I wrote this post in the middle of the night), we (a) already know that some people are unhappy (though this by itself doesn't help much, since people are always happy when they feel that their powers are being reduced) and (b) are very much aware of the possible option of reverting the change. We are also aware of about a dozen other possible ideas (such as adding new spells, new items, disabling magic entirely for the time being, making stat resets free, to name some of the less likely ones) and several other matters that need to be considered. As I tried to point out, some of these additional matters were pointed out in this thread, so despite the high noise-to-signal ratio we had here some good came out of it.

It seems to me that the object of dissatisfaction with my post is the following line:

(f) We try not to register complaints as relevant data, since complaints are subjective and anecdotal. Complaints serve as motivation, though.

(again, sorry for having `subjective and anecdotal' as attributes of `complaints' when they should have been attributes of `data'.)

What I tried to say here was the following:

(1) Telling us that you, too, are unhappy doesn't help; we already know that people are unhappy, and we know their reasons. If a complaint is valid (as this one might or might not be), then it makes no difference whether one person is unhappy or one thousand.
(2) Compared to the experiences of all players on the server, the quantitative information implicit in your complaint is insignificant and too likely to be skewed to be of use in our analysis.
(3) Posting things that bring no new ideas or insights (i.e., `complaints' but not `creative ideas') doesn't help us in any way.

My goal with this line was exclusively to discourage posting `me too' style things or accidental trolls in this thread.

I hope that that clears up the matter. Sorry again for attributing the two adjectives incorrectly, and thanks for pointing that out!

-- fate

[Kage]

Less QQ more Pew Pew

[fate]

Hi,

we've had a look at the numbers, and what we found points to a considerable need for balancing. This will likely affect all principal play styles. As suggested in this thread, healers have the hardest job right now. However, archers and primarily offensive magic users (which we've dubbed `warlocks' for now) also have areas in which they do worse than other styles.

Over the next week (time permitting) we'll be reducing the effect of some existing spells to make them better fit the range they are intended for (up to level 50). We have found that some spells are still vastly overpowered in certain level ranges. In exchange, we'll give higher-level magic users something else-- probably a set of `bridge spells' that will disappear once magic level 3 is released; we will have to figure out the mechanisms in more detail.
For archers we have something else in mind entirely, though we still need to test our ideas for practicality.

On top of all this vagueness, nothing that I just said is definitive-- we may yet change our approach if we find a better solution along the way.

More ideas are welcome, but other than that, all we need is time to implement these changes.

-- fate