General Category > A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2

AVWW Beta 0.928 "Achieving The Leading Causes Of Death " Released!

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Dizzard:

--- Quote from: MouldyK on April 15, 2012, 05:26:28 AM ---If I get Achievies in this version, when (if) I can transfer the game to Steam when it is 1.0, will I have to get them again? :)

I told myself I would stop playing for a week until 1.0, but these goodies are just too nice, especially the mana. :D

--- End quote ---

I've been a bit like this too, although not entirely out of choice.

I'm hoping to wait until 1.0 and start a new game fresh. Although I'm having a peek now anyway. :p

Terraziel:
I have to say that I'm not a fan of the mana regen change, but I think part of that is vagueness over "mega-spells".

The example given was Launch Meteor, but Launch Meteor has half the mana cost per second of even Launch Rock, and can be fired infinitely by anyone with the mana to fire it (and 120 mana isn't exactly a high bar), I was actually surprised to see it counted as a "mega-spell", I would imagine Creeping Death is in the list too and I used that as a basic spell with the lower mana regen, now it can also be fired infinitely and it has sort of lost its lustre.

As it stands the range of spells that can't be fired infinitely is limited not to high cost spells but to low cooldown spells (e.g Tidal Pulse and Forest Rage) and even those, accepting that forest rage isn't actually firing as fast as it should be, can be made spammable by a couple of enchants.

In case you are wondering why I'm hung up on how often things can be fired it's because rarity is what makes things feel special, if your "mega-spells" can be used like basic spells then that is exactly what they are, basic spells, why would I use Fireball when I can use Fireball XL5 just as often?

The overall point is that if you want "mega-spells" then you need to do mega-spells. I already have an old mantis up for changing Creeping Death, as i recall the initial (disregarded by me) suggestion was doubling the mana cost and tripling the damage, with the lowering of mana totals a cost of 400 would actually put it in Mega-spell territory.

keith.lamothe:

--- Quote from: Wanderer on April 15, 2012, 12:28:30 AM ---A request, I'm not sure how to password the server and what not.  I've been trying to 'claim_admin_rights' and I keep chatting it without it doing anything.  Obviously I'm doing it wrong.  I read through the wiki and my understanding is I need to type that in with the server password... however, I can't figure out where to setup the server password.  Can someone point me in the right direction (I assume Toll knows how to deal with this if he gets a chance).

--- End quote ---
I just checked the wiki and yea, I'm not sure what happened there, but the info was pretty garbled.  Just fixed it up a bit (guess I should do that in the in-game documentation too).  Here's the corrected/updated info relevant to your question:


--- Quote ---'''Note''': entering a server command is done by entering "cmd:" (without the quotes) into the chat box followed by the command name (and parameters, if any).

'''claim_admin_rights''' Entered via the chat window, followed by the admin password set by the owner of the server.
 
This command will allow you to do administrative tasks on the server such as banning and kicking players, and adding and removing various permissions for players. In order to successfully claim admin rights, you must get the server password from the person running the server, as the password can only be set or changed by them.

* Note: this cannot work at all unless the server has an admin password set.  For security reasons the admin password cannot be set or changed from within the program; to set the admin password:
** Close the game.
** Using a text editor, open the settings.dat file in the RuntimeData directory in your AVWW installation.
** Add a line with "AdminPassword:" followed by whatever password you want.  The password is case-sensitive.
** Restart the server
** Now claim_admin_rights (followed by the correct password) will work.

* Note: These rights are removed when the player is logged out of the server.
--- End quote ---

keith.lamothe:
On the mana-regen thing:

Anyone who's felt it was too slow previously, how much had you tried mana-cost-reducing enchants?  Granted those can take a while to find, just wondering.

x4000:
About the mana regen thing, here's my reasoning:

1. Previously we had two systems for making powerful spells slow to cast: mana and cooldown.  That's redundant, a little confusing, and mostly just annoys new players with small spells.

2. Mana, it seems to me, would be more interesting as a "do I have the capacity to cast this at all" sort of meter.  That's something that doesn't overlap with cooldowns at all.

3. For the next week, my most ardent concern is the new player experience -- making the new player experience fiddly so that the hardcore players get something more fun later is a Really Bad Idea (tm).  At PAX it was really apparent how frustrating it was to get that "not enough mana to cast X" popup a bunch.  It's simply not any fun, and 100% definitely had to be fixed.

4. I look at balancing stuff like this almost like a chemistry equation.  When you change one side of the equation, then it puts the other side out of balance, sure.  So now we have some problems at the upper end.  But at some point you have to pick some variables that you say "these are fixed and are now correct, and we'll balance the rest around them."  When you keep shifting all the variables at once, it's really hard to come out with a balanced equation.

5. What I mean by #4 is that the new player experience has to be good -- and therefore the mana regen can't be painfully slow from the start.  End of story.  We're going to frustrate people left and right if we do that, and so we just simply can't do that.  This is our fixed variable: mana needs to regen pretty darn fast, there's simply no two ways about it... so now it's time to balance the rest of the equation around that.

6. My rationale is that, contrary to some of my prior thinking, there's not really any good reason to use mana as a limiter as how frequently you can cast the smaller spells.  If you look at most Metroidvania type titles, you get infinite shots with your basic stuff.  I think we had too many spells where you had to be overly conservative of mana because of their rate of usage.

7. Going along with that, however, I think we still have too narrow a spectrum of spell mana costs; which is right in line with what you were saying, Terraziel.  We need more of a spread in terms of mana costs, which will do two things: 1) it will make certain spells closed off to low-mana characters; 2) it will make it so that the high-mana characters who want to use those spells actually get right back into the situation of having to watch their mana a bit and be careful, because while the regen rate has been doubled, if we double the mana costs of a spell then we're right back to where we were before with that spell.

8. So you can almost infer that nothing changed from #7, but that's not right either.  The difference being that suddenly we have a lot more variety of spells: stuff that is cheap and infinite-fire and that anyone can use; stuff that is middle-cost and which a lot of characters (but not all) can use, and which works more or less like things previously did; and stuff that is substantially higher-cost and where a high-mana character with the mana-regen enchants is going to be a really interesting new kind of glass cannon; and then finally the really ultra-powerful spells (of which we currently have none), where perhaps only super-high-mana characters can even cast them all, but they are devastating when they are used.

9. The trouble is, as I noted in the release notes, I've not really added those other spells yet, and nor have I gone through the current crop of spells to shift them around much.

10. Oh, and cooldowns are still around and are all kinds of useful for the mega-spells, too.  We already use pretty long cooldowns on these for the summons, but for really powerful spells we could do some pretty crazy stuff with these.  The worry of being able to spam a mega-spell because of mana regen rates is not actually something to worry about, because cooldowns give us perfect flexibility on that front.


TLDR: My goal is to both make the new player experience smoother, and actually to give more complex and deeper options for advanced players at the same time, and I think that the changes so far are a really solid step in that direction.  I hate making players play one way, and the mana balance was getting in the way and making a lot of things feel same-y that shouldn't have.

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