I've never heard anyone saying players would leave if you cap them at 25... all ROM muds by default do this... the fact that a player can have a natural (example) strength of 25, with an eq mod of 19, is irrelevant for the sake of gameplay, because with very few exceptions, the code doesn't count any of this extra... the only thing I can think of off the top of my head that's the exception to the rule is hit/damroll being affected by stats... I can't remember which stats influence those those values, I think str is for hitroll or something... and if you max your strength and then cast giant str, your str will still be capped at 25, but you'll get an extra couple of points on your hitroll... but other than that, pretty much everything in the game calls get_curr_stat, which caps the value at 25 max... the main problem you may have is balancing the entire game itself... you can probably fix the eq given enough time, but if items are that powerful on there, there are probably mobs that are powerful to require items like that, so if you fix the items, you'll slow down leveling and probably increase pdeaths, at least until you fix those mobs as well :D this will probably have more of an impact on players than you fixing their eq stats... if they're used to power leveling and you slow them down they may get annoyed, but once mobs are fixed as well it'll seem like normal play to them... by the way, if you cap the stats at 35 instead of 25, you'll probably lessen the appearance of stat-tinkering, but again, the code only uses the first 25 points of any given stat, 99% of the time anyway...
You might want to try writing commands that show you what items are the most powerful... you could take something like vnum and modify it to take arguments so you could do a command line something like the following: vnum obj affect str 5 which you could then parse, get 'affect' for the object name and branch off an if-then statement to handle it, and loop through all the obj_index_data and the loop through all of the affects on each item, searching for any item that has a strength affect of 5 or more, and then output the item vnum and short descry, possibly even the offending affect, so you'd see like: [1022] gauntlets of insane strength Str: +9 That would definitely help you hunt things down faster, and you could make a similar thing for mobs that would check for stats like hit/damroll, level, etc... to try and find all of the overpower mobs and fix them as well... Just a few ideas on how to proceed :) Richard Lindsey -----Original Message----- From: Alderon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2005 5:25 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Player Stats I just wanted to let you guys know that I actually agree with the fact that the best way to fix the problem is by fixing all the offending equipment and weapons. The reason I posted about fixing things in the code is because until I know all my choices, how can I choose the best one? :P Now...concerning all the bugs that Richard Lindsey pointed out, and the fact that some of you believe that players will leave if I cap them at 25...how about capping at 35? Will the same bugs present themselves? Players will have a small buffer, and therefore be a bit happier with the change. I inherited this mud a long time ago, and it was severly unbalanced. Now, we're trying to change that. I've seen pfiles that have a stat maxed at 25, and then an eq mod of 19. I find that very disturbing....and broken. In closing, I agree with the need to change eq. The big problem is that when I code a workaround, players don't need to actually know things have been changed, or how. When I revamp the eq and take away a lot of their "power", that's when they'll get mad and leave. Code changes can be invisible to the end player....eq can't. -- ROM mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe here ->>> http://www.rom.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rom
