Goblin Squad Member
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Lag is certainly an issue...but I don't regard it as ANY MORE SIGNIFICANT an issue for Freindly Fire then it is for MOST OTHER combat mechanics that exist in MMO's today.
- Is Lag an issue if it causes you to miss a heal on the main tank when the "boss" has just walloped him and is getting set to wallop him again?
I agree to that, no matter what lag is an issue that can and will cause mistakes to ruin your day. I also think that processing on the client side is a horrible solution that will cause more problems, either mass influx of cheating, or mass influx of false positive checks for cheaters, that will result in honest players being punished.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I agree to that, no matter what lag is an issue that can and will cause mistakes to ruin your day. I also think that processing on the client side is a horrible solution that will cause more problems, either mass influx of cheating, or mass influx of false positive checks for cheaters, that will result in honest players being punished.Lag is certainly an issue...but I don't regard it as ANY MORE SIGNIFICANT an issue for Freindly Fire then it is for MOST OTHER combat mechanics that exist in MMO's today.
- Is Lag an issue if it causes you to miss a heal on the main tank when the "boss" has just walloped him and is getting set to wallop him again?
Agreed on the client-side stuff. Client side should basicaly be UI & Presentation Layer... all the important application logic aught to be server side.
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Goblin Squad Member
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One other solution, that may be less metagamey and more strategy. What if different crafted types of armor can grant heavy resistance/immunity to certain types of energy, and there were reasonable quanities of types of armor. IE before a big battle a town decides "OK our wizards want to focus on lightning damage this time around, everyone use lightning resist armor" etc... It keeps the feel and a smart army would alternate (to keep opponents from guessing the type of energy they are using).
Possibly even allow a paper rock scissors system in the armor where say an armor can be crafted as a water type, that grants immunity to fire, but weakness to lightning and normal damage from acid, if the enemy correctly plots out and plans accordingly they can make your life hell, but if they plan wrong you have an edge. (obviously what enchant you are using should not be plainly visible, but possibly determinable by seeing the effectiveness of different attacks).
This armor itself should obviously take a while to change, to prevent it from rapidly being swapped out mid battle once it is figured out what gear is on the table, but possible strategies could be used in a large scale war by equiping different groups differently, and attempting to send the right group of your troops to the group of enemy troops they would be most effective against.
Not an exact science and may or may not be a good idea, but it could offer interesting strategies.
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Goblin Squad Member
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One other solution, that may be less metagamey and more strategy. What if different crafted types of armor can grant heavy resistance/immunity to certain types of energy, and there were reasonable quanities of types of armor. IE before a big battle a town decides "OK our wizards want to focus on lightning damage this time around, everyone use lightning resist armor" etc... It keeps the feel and a smart army would alternate (to keep opponents from guessing the type of energy they are using).
...
in EVE, caldari militia lured their gallente opponents into a smart bomb trap (smart bombs create bursts of aoe damage; it doesn't affect firing ship, but it does affect friendlies). basically, caldari used specific smart bomb to generate specific damage and tanked themselves against that damage.
fireworks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlZ0EcsneSg :)
of course, strategic significance is low, as it easy to counter, but tactically, with a bit of bad judgment from their opponent, it gained them a victory.
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Goblin Squad Member
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One other solution, that may be less metagamey and more strategy. What if different crafted types of armor can grant heavy resistance/immunity to certain types of energy, and there were reasonable quanities of types of armor. IE before a big battle a town decides "OK our wizards want to focus on lightning damage this time around, everyone use lightning resist armor" etc... It keeps the feel and a smart army would alternate (to keep opponents from guessing the type of energy they are using).
Possibly even allow a paper rock scissors system in the armor where say an armor can be crafted as a water type, that grants immunity to fire, but weakness to lightning and normal damage from acid, if the enemy correctly plots out and plans accordingly they can make your life hell, but if they plan wrong you have an edge. (obviously what enchant you are using should not be plainly visible, but possibly determinable by seeing the effectiveness of different attacks).
This armor itself should obviously take a while to change, to prevent it from rapidly being swapped out mid battle once it is figured out what gear is on the table, but possible strategies could be used in a large scale war by equiping different groups differently, and attempting to send the right group of your troops to the group of enemy troops they would be most effective against.
Not an exact science and may or may not be a good idea, but it could offer interesting strategies.
Yeah....thats a nice mechanic. I'm all in favor of things that make for deeper strategy in gameplay. To me that includes Freindly Fire type effects.... as well as ways to mitigate those effects. Simply not putting your freinds in the burst radius of such an effect is one way of mitigation...but it's not the only possible one.
Something like what you've described in having freindlies coordinate the protections/resistances against that type of attack is another form.... and of course it does add that interesting twist to PvP. The sword & sorcery version of "Oh S%#$# Captain, they have our shield modulation frequencies!"
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Ideally, there would be an area of full damage, and then damage would fall off to zero around the edge. The caster should be able to see what area will be targeted as part of the decision to target it. I still say that the client information can include "cast fireball centered at x,y,z from position x,y,z at time T hitting A,B,C,D." The server can validate this almost as easily as it can determine who is hit- check to make sure time T is within the acceptable lag limits, then look at the position at time T and determine who was hit, and compare to the client-side list. If odd behavior starts coming from a particular client, then initiate second-tier hack detection.
What exactly is second tier hack detection. With lag everything is possible, in many different games I have seen situations like this
. . . X . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . Y . . .With Y being a player and X being the enemy, both of them showing that distance appart while both are swinging melee attacks and hitting each-other. Someone with a bad connection can have this happen numerous times. How can you clearly determine whether it is cheating or lagging? People who lag severely, usually have bad connections, meaning it happens frequently for them so frequency isn't a good margin of detection, if they are accidentally hitting people in FF, they generally should just not play an aoe character, (same reason that people with bad connections do not play healers in most MMO's), but if you are going to randomly ban them because it looks like hacking that is not a good system to use.
Second-tier hack detection uses screenshots of the game window, hashes of the game executable file, and the list of locally running processes, or comparing packets received with the server with packets sent by the game software (assume that packets received but not sent by the game were sent by a cheater program). All of these can be implemented in a way which cannot infringe on the privacy of the player; there are more invasive mechanisms which provide true positives faster but can infringe on user privacy. Odd behavior would be "This client has a latency time of 175ms but is casting using information 4000ms out of date."
If you want NO determination to be done client-side, just have the client include what information was used to cast the spell: "Fireball at X,Y,Z from position X,Y,Z based on information f1e2ab45" and let the server determine those in the area at that time in the past; historical information would need to be kept only for the length of the lag buffer. For effects which target creatures rather than points, the client simply says which creatures are the targets, and lets the server handle line of sight and effect determinations.
We've gone very far afield from "should friendly fire be present" to "how should it be implemented in both a technical sense and user experience sense?"
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Goblin Squad Member
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We've gone very far afield from "should friendly fire be present" to "how should it be implemented in both a technical sense and user experience sense?"
That is the key question I think. If it can be implemented in a reasonable fashion without requiring too much resources (both development time and server side) I think most people will accept and even appreciate it.
The problem is that some suggestion are of the kind "friendly fire is always a positive thing in game" (an dome are the opposite, "always a bad thing") independently from how it is implemented.Most of the posts are against that kind of idea.
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@ KitNyx
The grid idea is reasonable, but that would require some level of third person "bird view".
How common is that kind of view in a MMORPG?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well, I was actually thinking from the normal MMO, 1st person or slightly over the shoulder perspective. The way I envisioned it would be like hunter traps in WoW, with the reticle you can place on the ground. I agree this can sometimes be hard to see, but this is why I thought the players within your reticle should light up too. This gives you a vertical sighting tool too.
Actually, really good point...maybe instead of a 2-d reticle on the ground you see a semi transparent 3-d dome or sphere with those who might be hit flashing red or green...making it easier to quickly spot target. This would allow you to target into open space too...like over peoples heads or in the sky. This makes sense if there will be aerial combat or combatants. I could see a guild of gnomes using many fireballs at 3 meters height...just high enough to avoid singeing gnomes...
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well, I was actually thinking from the normal MMO, 1st person or slightly over the shoulder perspective. The way I envisioned it would be like hunter traps in WoW, with the reticle you can place on the ground. I agree this can sometimes be hard to see, but this is why I thought the players within your reticle should light up too. This gives you a vertical sighting tool too.
Actually, really good point...maybe instead of a 2-d reticle on the ground you see a semi transparent 3-d dome or sphere with those who might be hit flashing red or green...making it easier to quickly spot target. This would allow you to target into open space too...like over peoples heads or in the sky. This makes sense if there will be aerial combat or combatants. I could see a guild of gnomes using many fireballs at 3 meters height...just high enough to avoid singeing gnomes...
aye but when you go to flying, now you waaay add layers of depth to aiming, from an over the shoulder cam, how do you differentiate, 30' ahead 6' up, from 65' ahead. only way I can really see is birds eye view, then with added buttons for height, even this is massively time consuming however.
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Goblin Squad Member
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We've gone very far afield from "should friendly fire be present" to "how should it be implemented in both a technical sense and user experience sense?"
Well of course, the verdict is in the air still on is it a good idea (actually answering that question would require us to know the combat system with some degree of detail). So what's left to discuss, is 1. Without friendly fire how to discern friend from foe, and with it how to aim and how to give AoEs some degree of usefulness.
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Goblin Squad Member
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aye but when you go to flying, now you waaay add layers of depth to aiming, from an over the shoulder cam, how do you differentiate, 30' ahead 6' up, from 65' ahead. only way I can really see is birds eye view, then with added buttons for height, even this is massively time consuming however.Well, I was actually thinking from the normal MMO, 1st person or slightly over the shoulder perspective. The way I envisioned it would be like hunter traps in WoW, with the reticle you can place on the ground. I agree this can sometimes be hard to see, but this is why I thought the players within your reticle should light up too. This gives you a vertical sighting tool too.
Actually, really good point...maybe instead of a 2-d reticle on the ground you see a semi transparent 3-d dome or sphere with those who might be hit flashing red or green...making it easier to quickly spot target. This would allow you to target into open space too...like over peoples heads or in the sky. This makes sense if there will be aerial combat or combatants. I could see a guild of gnomes using many fireballs at 3 meters height...just high enough to avoid singeing gnomes...
Well, it would always be centered on the direction you are looking...but I agree, how then to control distance in that direction...
I would say we've gone from discussing "Does friendly fire suck?" to "How could it be implemented so that it doesn't suck?"
Server-side verification of the area is a good idea, as is the WoW style place-and-click method of aiming. Maybe make the area you target visible to all your allies, just so they know what's coming.
What I'm still not sold on is the "twitch" aspect it would bring. One thing I really hate about Cataclysm is the ramped up frequency and danger of twitch mechanics. I would prefer that be a small aspect of PFO. (Sure, you should still have to get out of the fire on the ground, but not get out in one second or you're dead.) My concern is that even with the discussed measures, friendly fire will replace encounter-initiated twitch mechanics with player-initiated twitch mechanics.
The resist armor idea goes the furthest toward alleviating this concern, but I don't really want the mages (on either side of the fight) dictating what everyone needs to wear, and thus having a monopoly on strategy.
I guess it depends on how powerful the AoEs are, and by extension how much damage players can generally take and receive before dying. If the pace of battle is as fast as WoW, I don't think it will work. But if you slow things down, maybe it would work.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The resist armor idea goes the furthest toward alleviating this concern, but I don't really want the mages (on either side of the fight) dictating what everyone needs to wear, and thus having a monopoly on strategy.That's a non issue. The CO will be deciding both what spells the wizards bring and what you will be wearing. On the uptick, it's his fault if you die horrible inglorious deaths.
Indeed, also I'm imagining battles to be larger scale, say 50-100v50-100, and then squadrons/parties of 5-10, In other words You could have a fire team, an electric team etc... The wizard dosn't determine which armor you wear, the armor you wear determines which wizard you join. As well each armor could be crafted in each type, or another idea, lets make it an amulet of resistance so that it isn't effecting your specific armor.
Friendly Fire, for some things - preferably at a higher level where griefers would have a lot more to lose (compared to coming straight out of the gate and fireball your lvl 1-3 party) and where some level of competency might be expected.
You could pull off some really interesting game mechanics with friendly fire in this fashion.
Friendly fire is absolutely essential for two reasons:
1) The immersion: How can you feel like a world makes sense if you're regularly getting pummeled by fireballs to no effect? This will feel WoWish and lame.
2) The tactics: Friendly fire is a HUGE part of game tactics, especially with casters. If you get rid of it, you won't just be making things harder or easier, you'll be dumbing down the game.
I have seen "fireball at your feet" servers on NWN and NWN2 for ages. I couldn't find friendly fire servers so I quit both games, simple as that. I will not play this game unless there is at least a server with friendly fire and really, there shouldn't be friendly fire servers and non friendly fire servers. People who want to run around throwing fireballs near their allies should just play WoW
Immersion in and of itself is not a good enough reason to include any mechanic. Example: everything we type should be translated by the server into Common, and then we should all have to skill up Common to understand one another. That would be incredibly immersive, but a very bad idea.
you'll be dumbing down the game
Sigh. If I had a nickel for every time someone said this, maybe I wouldn't hate it so much.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Immersion in and of itself is not a good enough reason to include any mechanic. Example: everything we type should be translated by the server into Common, and then we should all have to skill up Common to understand one another. That would be incredibly immersive, but a very bad idea.
you'll be dumbing down the gameSigh. If I had a nickel for every time someone said this, maybe I wouldn't hate it so much.
Indeed, actually I believe the winning quote that we are so sick of is
This will feel WoWish and lame.
On something like friendly fire, that is something that has rarely been implimented in any game, loong before WoW. Honestly I would, and have said, right now with how very very very tiny our knowlege of the games mechanics, abilities, skills, and combat type, we just don't know. Both decisions have people who are standing up saying "I won't play if it isn't this way" Depending on power/cast time/speed of players/layout of terrain/style of defenses/alternate spells available, there are so many variables right now about how the game will work that we cannot even begin to make a guess on what will and won't work. The developers aren't going to chose either option because a few people on the forum "Won't try the game if it isn't this way". I believe the way Ryan and the gang are planning is they will evesdrop in finding actual suggestions for ways to make things work, decide which ones fit with the plan we don't know, throw out the ones that don't fit in with the mystery plan and that's it.
If you want something implemented, I suggest giving ideas as to how to help make it work, I've given ideas on how either side can be implemented. Bottom line for friendly fire is it can be used to diversify tactics if implemented right, and it can also be so much of a liability that it only eliminates tactics, if it is implemented wrong.
Myself I would like to see it implemented if it can be controlled, however I would rather have it not exist, then have it exist but be implemented in a way that all AoEs are dud skills that few get, and the few that do don't dare use them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Server-side verification of the area is a good idea, as is the WoW style place-and-click method of aiming. Maybe make the area you target visible to all your allies, just so they know what's coming.
This is an interesting idea and could be the equivalent of yelling "Grenade!". If you were able to see the attacks of your allies, no reason to limit it to AoEs...You could avoid walking into bow shots by being able to "see" a transparent trajectory path of where your allies are aiming...like you would see the transparent AoE sphere. Maybe there is a passive combat/situational awareness skill that makes this easier to see. It could be one of the benefits of being in a team as opposed to just being on the same side in a conflict.
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It could be one of the benefits of being in a team as opposed to just being on the same side in a conflict.
This. If the technical hurdles can be addressed (let's say they have for the moment) then such a simple thing as looking at the PF rules and seeing if the affect of A or B (e.g. but not only Fireball) effects ALL within it's radius does mean team work will make AoE spells either work well or suck - as in D&D since time began. Given teamwork is at the core of an MMO (else why not just play Skyrim) I fail to see the problem.
Always catering to the lowest common denominator is what boils my goose.
Arguments revolving around combat constantly involving dumb-arsed people playing Wizards that in every battle spam constantly Fireball (or its like) on their own party is ridiculous. Will it happen, yes now and then, mistakes happen. Will it be the main determining factor in every combat making the game shun all Wizards - I doubt that.
I do agree that a FF and non-FF server would be the ideal answer - but given Ryan's blog it'll be one server for all initially.
S.
PS: To new people to the thread - we are ONLY talking about the things in the PF rules that would effect friends in combat. UNLESS you are playing optional rules arrows/bolts/ranged touch spells CAN NOT hit friendlies...
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Goblin Squad Member
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Apologies if this has already been said but
Number one reason (in my opinion) for not having friendly fire is..
PFRPG = A game played on a tabletop between friends who (hopefully) respect each others opinions and wants and are their to have a consensually created imagination fueled recreation session.
PFO = An online environment full of complete strangers most of whom are likely to have little if any concern for anyone elses game experience.
and with the greatest good will in the world when providing the second game environment it WILL become abused by the annoying uncaring minority.
Now, being zapped when your party Cleric kicks off a positive channel energy heal because you munchkinned and rolled a Dhampir.. thats entirely different :D
True, but one other factor you aren't keeping in mind, PFO is intended to involve large teams etc... Even in the short duration teamwork is a factor. Yes the wizard should have concern for what happens if the full plate warrior in front of him drops dead, even assuming that he does not care about ever seeing that warrior again, and teaming up with him in the future, in the shorter run, that warrior is all that stands between him and the red dragon he is facing. Working with that warrior is his only shot at getting treasure within horde as well.
Much like for the healer in any other game, there is nothing stopping him from taking a break and dancing while the party is fighting that epic dragon. but if the party dies, 1. He is probably next, 2. he will not likely get the reward and 3. He will very soon be blacklisted.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Apologies if this has already been said but
Number one reason (in my opinion) for not having friendly fire is..
PFRPG = A game played on a tabletop between friends who (hopefully) respect each others opinions and wants and are their to have a consensually created imagination fueled recreation session.
PFO = An online environment full of complete strangers most of whom are likely to have little if any concern for anyone elses game experience.
and with the greatest good will in the world when providing the second game environment it WILL become abused by the annoying uncaring minority.
Now, being zapped when your party Cleric kicks off a positive channel energy heal because you munchkinned and rolled a Dhampir.. thats entirely different :D
That argument applies equally well to any other feature that could cause inconvenience to others. Since features like "Able to interact with other players." can't be removed from the game, the question becomes "Can we implement this well enough while minimizing the negative effects?"
If we start pulling major features entirely because of what griefers might/will do with those features, then we are preemptively griefing ourselves.