Candor Battle in rEvolt

A place for players to do role playing, discuss their guilds, etc.

Candor battle should have...

Poll ended at 06 Oct 2020, 18:13

...Unlimited time.

4
29%

...Unlimited waves.

3
21%

...Endless Survival (Hocus idea)

7
50%
 
Total votes: 14
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jesusalva
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Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by jesusalva »

So, Candor Battle Quest code is mostly finished, but there is a... question, a small detail which I wanna know what yall think about it.

In TMW Legacy, the battle have unlimited time, but a limited number of waves. Difficulty is also mostly constant.

In Moubootaur Legends, however, it is the opposite. The battle have a limited time, but unlimited number of waves. Difficulty is variable, and players get to choose the difficulty level which they find more fun in playing (there are six or seven difficulty levels)

Both will have scoreboards, but in Legacy-style, it will register only the name of the one who paid the fight (or maybe the MVP), and classify by time taken to finish. In Moubootaur Legends style, every char get their own entries, and classification is done by farthest wave reached*.

*: While "Easy" mode allows players to get better rankings, it is not so enjoyable or challenging as the more difficult modes.


So, what do you prefer?

It is indifferent for me, but implementing both modes would likely add quite some overhead (and gumi might not like the performance drop and it already uses a lot of variables, and he definitely will think it is harder to maintain)... But hey.

Cake or Cookies?

I definitely do not mind adding this extra overhead if it will be more fun this way. :P

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Hocus Pocus Fidibus
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Re: Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by Hocus Pocus Fidibus »

I would like to propose another method: Endless waves (progressively harder) and unlimited time. Only the last player standing can get on the leader-board. The board itself is sorted by the amount of XP this player made.

Edit: Made it into the Vote as "...Endless Survival (Hocus idea)", thx Jes^^

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Re: Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by Micksha »

Hey,
unlimited sounds good for Endgame. Just not sure about XP sorting - Support players will be lost again. Can we add every player joining, and sort per max round reached? Only one entry per player?

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Re: Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by jesusalva »

Micksha wrote: 29 Sep 2020, 17:29

Hey,
unlimited sounds good for Endgame. Just not sure about XP sorting - Support players will be lost again. Can we add every player joining, and sort per max round reached? Only one entry per player?

Yes.

(And give a prize for last standing person based on max wave reached)

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Re: Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by Hocus Pocus Fidibus »

Micksha wrote: 29 Sep 2020, 17:29

Hey,
unlimited sounds good for Endgame. Just not sure about XP sorting - Support players will be lost again. Can we add every player joining, and sort per max round reached? Only one entry per player?

Me like that.

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Re: Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by Livio »

jesusalva wrote: 29 Sep 2020, 15:22

In TMW Legacy, the battle have unlimited time, but a limited number of waves. Difficulty is also mostly constant.

No, if you take too much time you will gradually lose health.

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Re: Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by Hello=) »

In TMW Legacy, the battle have unlimited time, but a limited number of waves. Difficulty is also mostly constant.

I have to admit this statement isn't fully correct: each round can be 2 minutes max, level limited to about 2100, therefore finite number of rounds takes finite amount of time and therefore "limited time", though it "win by running monsters to death" (a rather funny feat, eventually achieved by few ppl). You don't lose health - if you keep moving (it's anti-cheat feature: some smartasses got idea it's cool to sit in arend and do nothing useful for gameplay, getting boss points anyway - which is quite wrong in regard of encouraging MMO gameplay).

I hope this thing also supposed to have "winnable" modes? Because, you see, losing battles is, generally very discouraging in terms of MMO interaction: once battle lost and everyone/most ppl dead, "they had it enough" and MMO action ceases. Which isn't good in terms of gameplay. So I'd say "primary" modes have to be "winnable" and at least somewhat "rewarding". But as some extra to occasionally try this "last man standing" is definitely nice idea. Still, I hope things wouldn't be set in stone, so if other/even better ideas would come - why not?

P.S. if someone crazy enough, lol, damn, how about CTF (PvP-enabled) mode/arena? :D (well, I can imagine coding something like this in MMORPG is very challenging though, and I never seen RPGs doing that, so I'm not sure it's viable idea - and yet it can be fun).

N.B. CTF stands for Capture The Flag, a rather funny team play mode often seen in first-person shooters. I don't see what fundamentally prevents it in MMORPGs in 3rd-person mode (not sure if someone implemented it ever though). Technically it like a team vs team "PvP" with extra goal of stealing enemy's flag (normally they are of 2 different colors, matching teams, but it's an abstraction) while guarding own base to prevent enemies team from stealing your flag. Person who "steals" flag is "flag carrier" and obviously becomes #1 target for all enemy team at all costs (so it grants some adrenaline). If flag carrier shot, flag returns to where it's belongs, it's base. If flag carrier makes it back with enemy flag to their own base while own flag stays there, team wins round. At this point state is reset and new round begins. Killed players eventually respawn and rejoin to maintain overall heat of battle, but obviously getting killed interferes with goals a lot, so if enemy team manages to arrange kills in a strategic fashion they achieve objective with far less impediments.

On game mechanics layer I can imagine whole thing can even be tracked by server scripts only - though it likely quite complicated and I'm not sure how fast it can respond.

Seems some even play it in real life, outdoor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_the_flag

What's the point? In this thing it's not enough to just kill all enemies you meet. It rather takes some tactical and strategic thinking and team play to win - that's what makes it a bit more funny than ruthless carnage alone. Usually it implemented the way it possible to lose even despite being good at killing enemies if team gives no crap to mentioned goals and killing right ppl at right places at right time. Some few random deadly monsters doing random kills can probably make thing a bit more fun as well.

p.s. on 2nd thought, I guess I shouldn't vote for...Unlimited time since totally unlimited time allows player(s) to "usurp" quest exclusively. I'll think there should be global timeout in any case to prevent "DoS attack" approach. Yet, somehow voting doesn't lets me to change mind on that...

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Re: Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by Reid »

Candor has proven over the years to work pretty well as is, we should maybe add the default behavior to secure the gameplay feature, and once it all works, we might create derivated "modes" that could voted out or randomly chosen at the start of the battle.

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Re: Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by Hocus Pocus Fidibus »

I disagree with this: If we can be improve something we should do that and not just take the old because it kinda worked ok'ish.
Other candor run modes (including legacy mode) could be implemented later, true, but if that is a good idea (overabundance of possibilities might do more harm than good imho for several reasons) is another discussion.
The benefit of "Endless Survival" is, that it can remain as is and will always give players the possibility to break former records. The way legacy is there will be a record quite fast that is not beatable because the limit in rounds and/or monsters.

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Micksha
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Re: Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by Micksha »

I agree with Hocus. The work of writing a script has to be done anyways, so if there are ideas for improvement, it is the time to discuss and add that right away, when preparing the script. As soon as a script is implemented, changing it will be double work. Additionally we have many more features and possibilities now, compared to what we have on Legacy, and if possible we should use and take advantage of that.

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Re: Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by Ledmitz »

I've never understood the Candor round system on Legacy. There are more rounds than there are mobs. I've discussed it with players many times and no one understands it. Candor was a hit because it forced players to stat better for survival in a game where dying, basically, meant nothing other than a minor inconvenience. It also promoted co-op among the players, but in it's early days boss points had no reward so there was little a runner would gain other than feeling good about being a support role. I could argue the same about tanks at the time, to a degree, but that was solved with the Rage skill. Years later boss points could buy a prize, which was a nice addition and very specific in nature.... nice.

I love that Capture the Flag was mentioned by t3st3r, but would rather see this on an open field somewhere or just any other map that is used specifically for co-op modes like CTF or even team battles which would make PVP way more fun and eliminate this rock, paper scissors situation that seems to happen among the individual classes when they fight one on one or in a free for all situation.

So basically, an original mode that is revamped to make progression easier to understand. I like that Candor is finite in one way or another. Other modes would be nice, but because it is Candor, it ought to still revolve around survival, whereas other things on Legacy more or less copied Candor to a degree, like the 3 crypt bosses. These other modes could be done on maps like these to make going to a map a little more predictable... for instance.. I hear an announcement for Candor.. I go to support, but when I get there, I realize the mode is PVP or last standing and maks my trip a waste of time. Something else to note on 'last standing' is that there should be a required number of players to start which exceeds that of other current quests OR better yet... the more player levels you have in the cave determines the final prize.

All these other modes are awesome, but diversifying content makes the game more fun because a change of scenery, for a change of modes makes travel necessary.

Regardless, the current round system of Candor on Legacy provides no useful info to the player. There is no final round given. There is no bigger reward for surviving more rounds so all the announcements could simply be removed or replaced with dialog from Parua that may hint at how much progression players have made. Making it humorous is even better.

EDIT: Endless survival. This is everywhere already.. They GY, the Crypt, places in Kazai caves, BUT I have an idea for a stage like place that could be endless, but I'd rather make it unwinnable. As of now.... voting is again tough because there isn't an other section and endless can be easily misunderstood.

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Re: Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by Kage »

Ledmitz wrote: 30 Sep 2020, 15:29

I've never understood the Candor round system on Legacy. There are more rounds than there are mobs. I've discussed it with players many times and no one understands it.

Hi, I was the one who originally created Candor. To provide a bit of insight into how Candor's levels work is each mob type is assigned a value, for example, the most difficult mob is assigned a value of 243, while the easiest has a value of 1. Summoning a mob drains the pool of points for that round of combat.

Hope that clears up the confusion!

As far as the limit, 2200 was an artificial limit I placed on the script to prevent it from just looping forever given if someone managed to forever kite the mobs or something. Didn't want things spawning forever. I never actually envisioned players managing to beat it, unless it was an entire server effort. When I first created it Jack-Os were quite powerful compared to the average player. Ultimately it was there to serve two purposes, a gold sink, and to give a more interactive way of grinding. Jack-Os had the best XP, but had limited spawns, causing players to fight over getting XP. When it was released Candor was one of the best sources of XP.

Someone mentioned there should be a reward for beating it, so I added boss points, which was more intended to be a prestigious thing. The idea being other bosses to be added to the game.

In my second boss encounter, I created the spark battle (which was never added, because people just complained about it). It assigned "blue" and "red" to player colors, if players of opposite colors stood near each other, they both would take damage. There were also pillars assigned to each color, the idea being to stand near your color. Sparks would then be summoned, pre-color defined to help players pick which color to draw to them. Players would then be randomly reassigned color, requiring people to re-position periodically. Early testers were more interested in telling me how it was an awful idea instead of providing useful feedback. Pretty sure that's when I stopped working on the game.

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Re: Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by Hello=) »

Kage, there is no reason to be frustrated if people don't understand what you do or why. It even routinely happens to large transcontinental monsters like Google, despite they have resources to investigate feature feasibility before coding it. Say, does someone remembers "Google Wave"? Googlers thought it's cool thing. World had different idea. Hardly a reason to totally give up. Reshape, rethink, reconsider and come back empowered, no? :P

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Re: Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by WildX »

I can understand how it can be frustrating when people provide feedback almost always in the form of complaints. It happens everywhere, but I see it more in gaming communities where players tend to see themselves as more knowledgeable on the game than developers. What makes them act even more entitled and often rude towards devs is that sometimes they are actually right about what they're saying, but they're not saying it in the best way or don't see the bigger picture of why certain things can't or shouldn't be changed.

When that happens in an open source environment it's particularly discouraging because the satisfaction in what you've created is your only reward. Google employees will still get paid at the end of the month. A lot of devs have left discouraged because the community response to their efforts was very negative. Thankfully I haven't seen a lot of that in a while here, but it definitely has been the case in the past. What has improved is probably community engagement.

tl;dr: be nice to devs. "It sucks" is not feedback. :)

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Re: Candor Battle in rEvolt

Post by jesusalva »

Kage wrote: 29 Nov 2020, 14:28

In my second boss encounter, I created the spark battle (which was never added, because people just complained about it). It assigned "blue" and "red" to player colors, if players of opposite colors stood near each other, they both would take damage. There were also pillars assigned to each color, the idea being to stand near your color. Sparks would then be summoned, pre-color defined to help players pick which color to draw to them. Players would then be randomly reassigned color, requiring people to re-position periodically. Early testers were more interested in telling me how it was an awful idea instead of providing useful feedback. Pretty sure that's when I stopped working on the game.

Just wanted to mention that I actually have the original source code of this one (I've obtained it with the Land of Fire Team). Was planning in rewriting it to use the new Battlegrounds system on Moubootaur Legends (so you would actually see a blue and a red square over players head*) but ended up having other priorities. In the end, everything supposed to use the Battlegrounds system ended up in a huge archive pile, and the system was only used once in ML, as part of the Hurnscald Liberation Day event. (non-repeatable event which happened in 2018. As a fun fact, all forks of ML would re-enable the event by default. You need a char called "Saulc GM" and a char called "Monster King" - Send MK char to Lieutenant Paul and make sure it is using @monsteringore, then send Saulc GM to Tulimshar. Travel to Hurnscald is only possible in ML once this event is finished.)

*: It would also cause PvP to be only possible among peers of different color and allow monsters to be spawned with a team assigned to them.

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