Possibly a Cabbage's Flamebate Posts

Fix Hackers

Zeta Posted:

Hackers can do… oh wait, they can’t do anything.

Exactly the problem. Average damage may be high enough for the clbum to be playable, but the clbum isn’t interesting compared to other clbumes. What do hackers do in combat? They attack and sometimes they heal themselves. Now this is probably what other clbumes do in combat, but Hackers do this because it is the only thing that they can do.

There’s nothing interesting about Hacker skill builds, since you only have free pbumives and and the one skill tree. Trolls have three skill trees (two for attacks, one for buffs), Camwhores have three (two for attacks, one for healing), Emos have three skill trees (two for attacks, one that consists of only one skill but it’s a really interesting skill). A lot of the skills in the trees for other clbumes may not be very good, but it at least encourages strategic respeccing (e.g. when Trolls get the good Evil attacks, they can use haxl to take the points out of TXT attacks and spend them on something else.) For Hackers, it’s really just “buy all the vandalism hax” (except maybe avtr, since it’s proc cost is huge), and then allocate the rest of your points to your stats however you like.

Would it be ridiculous to develop two attacking trees and one “other” tree for Hackers? If I had my druthers and could wave a magic wand to make neat things happen in this game, I would do the following:

Hackers get one tree for normal, comparatively high powered attacks (just normal hacker attacks like we have now).

Hackers get one tree for low-powered attacks that do damage over time (i.e. they “poison” forums with their hax).

Hackers get one tree that temporarily debuffs threads, reducing their statistics in ways like “thread takes more damage”, “thread does less damage”, “thread hits less frequently” etc.

The first skill tree would be things like ipz since posting somebody’s IP is really only going to **** them off the once. The second skill tree would be things like avtr and bg since if you mess with people’s avatars or the forum background, that’s going to **** people off until whatever vandalism you engaged in is fixed by the forum admins (represented by the damage over time lasting a limited number of turns, it could even reduce gradually until it expires because people are eventually going to get used to the new “My Little Pony” background). The third tree could represent things like DDOS attacks that gimp forums by making it harder for other people to post and similar hackery.

If the current attack power or the hardware hackers get would need to be nerfed in order to make this a reality in a way that hackers aren’t woefully overpowered, I would welcome that. It would just be neat if there was something about Hackers that made them interesting beyond “their secondary stat is a major liability” and “they can equip a lot of good equipment.” If my druthers, above, were had, I wouldn’t mind in the least if Hackers were the least powerful of the four core clbumes, they would at least be significantly more interesting to play than they are now.

Similarly, I would like it if the non-attacking abilities of other clbumes were fleshed out a little bit. IMO, the way to make combat with forums more fun is not to make forums harder by increasing their damage, pwnage, or whatever it’s to make it so there are more different things that you want to do or be able to do in combat than you can reasonably manage. So there are choices involved that are not “alternate the most powerful attacks, heal periodically”.

It used to be that Hackers were an appealing clbum since they could do ye gods ridiculous damage and nuke threads with ease and tremendous carnage despite their other shortcomings. With their damage having been brought back to the pack, they really could use something else that makes them interesting.

Maybe making combat something other than “spam powerful simple attacks and heal as needed” could be a project for episode 3 design, who knows?

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Fix Hackers

Really what Hackers need is something other than conventional attacks, which are amusing to look at but are not very effective compared to those of other (non noob) clbumes. I know that during Episode 2 design there was talk of having Hacker attacks do damage over time (like how the endopatch heals you, but the other way around), but that didn’t make it into the final package. Adding am “attacks continue to do damage after the turn in which they’re used” ability to at least some of the Hacker attacks would both serve to make the clbum less weak and more interesting. I mean, other clbumes at least have multiple skill trees. Hackers deserve something more than vandalism hax.

Stronger forums are not fun.

SimplyTHEBEST Posted:

Now, lets take a look at how hard it is to pwn PrayPal. IIRC, PrayPal threads have between 2k and 3k pwnage. 3x that would be 6-9k pwnage. It does about 20-30 damage to me, so it would instead do 60-90 damage at the 3x modifier.

I don’t agree with this analysis. If you multiply the pwnage of the thread by three and also multiply the damage the thread does by three, you’re multiplying the damage that you take in pwning the thread by a factor of nine. Since by multiplying the pwnage of the thread by 3, you make it so that players take three times as long to pwn it, so they get hit (on average) three times as much. So if the damage you would take were unchanged, you would already be taking three times as much. But if you also triple the damage the thread deals, you are taking three times as many hits at three times the damage, and 3x3 is 9.

Increasing the pwnage or increasing the damage is both fine. But when you do both, you have to realize that the difficulty increases compound each other. So if you really want forum A to be three times as difficult as forum B, doubling the pwnage and doubling the damage dealt by forum B for forum A would be a much more reasonable way to do so, as it results in only four times as much damage taken as opposed to nine.

Stronger forums are not fun.

Last night, I did Firewall and it wasn’t the first time I had done it, but it was the first time I had done it after the series of nerfs. Before, it was a relatively straightforward process. I maybe had to heal a couple of times, but I could hit a nice pace. This time, I there ended up being a lot of back and forth (which is good), and I used a bunch of consumables (which is fine), but the major problem was that according to my visit history it took 891s (just short of 15 minutes) to pwn the forum. Difficulty and expense are both fine, but it’s my personal opinion that this is a somewhat unreasonable degree of tedium. The thing that made it not fun wasn’t that it was hard, and it wasn’t that I needed to spend flezz on consumables. The problem was more that it was fifteen minutes of hitting number keys, and the payout wasn’t nearly worth that much of my time.

So I would heartily support changes that make the game more fun. Whether that makes it harder or easier or whatever. But fifteen minutes of 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 1, 6 etc. is not fun. I think that’s beyond my accepted tolerance of “grinding”.

Fix Hackers

Just got done pwning firewall. It wasn’t hard, or interesting but this sticks out: “Time Spent in forum: 891s”.

Holy goddess was that tedious. The outcome was never in doubt, it just takes forever when your attacks are only doing 200-400 damage to threads who have 6000 ego.

Flezz Sink Idea: Community Pot

While this might be a good idea, it’s not really a flezz-sink. No flezz is actually leaving the game, it’s just moving from my pocket to yours (or vice versa). In fact, in order for this to be really successful, people have to have a reason to play it. As it stands, the only reason that anybody would toss their flezz in the pot is in hopes of winning even more flezz. As long as flezz is kind of worthless, there’s no compelling reason why I would want a ton of flezz.

POLL: The new Peen system.

I think the current system would be fine if it just said something like ’ 7.12” (27) ’. Indicating that my relative length is 7.12” and my total number is 27. Both pieces of information have merit, and getting the second one shouldn’t require counting like it does.

**** deliveries?

Did you do so by pwning the same forum four times? There’s a cap on “deliveries per unique forum” these days, so you’ll get 1/4 of what you would otherwise if you just grind the same forum and have good cha and luck for roll.

Operation: Wife Beater

Evil Trout Posted:

None of my changes should be considered final at this point, although I have overwhelming stats about Camwhores and Hackers being far more powerful than the other two core clbumes.

The thing I’m curious about is if you determine that clbumes A and B are about equally powerful, as are clbumes C and D but the A&B bracket is significantly more powerful than the C&D bracket, how do you know whether A&B are too powerful or C&D are too weak? As in, how can we be sure that the best solution here is to weaken Hackers and Camwhores instead of buffing Trolls and Emo Kids? Perhaps both are in order? I mean, it’s not as though the game (particularly the late game) is particularly challenging for anybody except Re-Res or Permanoobs.

Certainly, I think that the solution of “buffing Trolls and Emos” is going to be the most popular solution to the inequity here, though there is power creep to consider.