Serious Concerns About Hang Pens (ALSO AFFECTS PVE COMBAT)

[Greater]

There was a lively discussion last night in the pvp realm about the changes with hanging up in combat.

As I understood it, here's what will happen when you hang:

Any player or monster in combat with you will be given a free round to swing at you before your character disconnects.

I have serious concerns about this being implemented. This changes the entire way the realm will have to be played A-Z in the pvp realm, and not in a positive way. It will become so easy to kill people on script that solo scripting will become almost non existant, and the only way to survive will be to script in massive packs and fight with whoever attacks you every time. Doing otherwise is essentially guaranteeing that you will lose everything you're carrying plus one life. People being rerolled will also become much more common, and while rolling people out of the game is part of the game, having the potential to do it at such a fast pace and with such ease threatens the long term health of the pvp realm.

Even if you avoid pvp completely, this change will affect you in combat with monsters as well. Imagine a high percentage chance of just auto-dying when your script hangs from low health due to a monster.

I hope we can have some discussion about this before it goes in. While I greatly appreciate the recent work that Vitoc and Gardner have put in, I also recognize that this particular change could have a dramatically negative impact on everyone.

[MudHunter]

This seems to be a bit of a over reaction to the hang bug solution.

If anything yeah, let the round fire on mobs, somehow. Since the issue is people using the hang bug to oad up rooms without being touched. but making it so that in pvp people can script kill you vastly easier.... Not a great idea.

[Vitoc]

Good discussion so far.  Let's have it here so everyone can stay up to date and participate without having to be at the keys for live gossip conversations.

Sounds like MH is suggesting only mobs get that "free round" which could probably be doable but would look weird/confusing to the attacker.  "Why didn't my round go off?"

Just for clarification, the reason I was leaning towards putting the punishment on the act of hanging (nothing is decided yet) rather than on reconnect was to prevent hanging as a solution to all problems.  I realize it's a common tactic, but it's a chicken-shit way to avoid pvp in pvp realm.  It abuses connectivity to perform an action outside the scope of the game for a tactical advantage.  Ideally, you couldn't disconnect just to hide from a situation.  Ideally, to disconnect you'd have to have your character in a safe place and have some buffer of inactivity before the player can leave the realm effectively taking his/her character out of harm's way until they reconnect.  This is common in all online games.  Hanging/disconnecting/combat-logging is always frowned upon because it destroys the spirit of the encounter.

Now, mmud/gmud is a bit of a different animal than most other games because it is so script-heavy.  There's no getting around it, 90%+ of characters' lives are afk scripting.  While script-killing is arguably also cheesy, are you willing to give up effectively forcing someone to stay online during a live pvp encounter just to protect your own afk scripting and auto-hang?  Maybe you are.  I don't have a horse in the race.  I do remember how frustrating it was in pvp when someone was at the keys and all they had to do to escape the situation when you had them right where you wanted them was hang up.  Then it was sitting in a room for hours in the hopes the person finally came back in.  That's not pvp anymore; that's sitting around for hours.

Regarding this effecting pve also, whatever we do we can definitely make whatever solution we come up with configurable per realm.

What other possible solutions do we have?

[Greater]

What about something like this?

When a player hangs up while in pvp combat, one of the following penalties is chosen at random:

-.1% total experience - Wouldn't lower level below the currently trained level, but you would still have to earn it back plus the exp for next level to train again. This would obviously be more punishing the higher your experience.

1-80% HP loss - You could lose almost nothing, or lose almost everything. Nearly every disconnect in pvp combat would be a diceroll. Exact % chosen randomly.

Drop 1 random item - Self explanatory

Disconnects while in pvp combat could maybe have a displayed message like when a pvp kill happens. Maybe something like:

Coarsehorse has been penalized for disconnecting in PvP combat!


Edit: There is always the option of just having the basic flat -hp %.

[Vile]

This is probably the single biggest change gameplay wise in the recent history of gmud/mmud and I love it.

Everyone has become used to hanging up to escape trouble. Now the game will have to be played differently.. more skillfully and thoughtfully. Give it a go.

[Teferi]

I might be wrong here, but the "hang bug" issue is primarily PVE related.  Hanging in PVP (while someone has combat on you) gives you a hang penalty.  The issue is where people can hang repeatedly and move long distances in tough areas without having to combat mobs.

I'd suggest fixing the movement without combat issue, this is not possible on majormud for whatever reason, and changing pvp to drop items again.

[Darlik]

I think a better solution if it could be implemented would be to set a max number of relogs per hour to like 3.  This would prevent people from abusing the hang bug in pvp or pve..  Also, just set pvp to drop an item as sell as lose a percentage of life.  If a delay on hangup stays it will make going evil next to impossible.  The only reason people will not go crazy rolling people is because if they go evil then they will get rolled.  Maybe if this were a hand play no AFK mud then such a penalty would be viable. 

[Stalkerr]

Why did we bump a 7 year old thread?  Is there actually a real issue you were trying to address?

[Greater]

The thread isn't 7 years old.

[Hurricane Omega]

The forums server had several hours or more with the date set to 2007 when it first came back up.  These posts are only a few days old and not several years.

[Zetetic]

My recommendation would be to add a flat penalty for disconnection. I'd say 10% of max HPs for a non combat engaged hangup, and 20% for a combat engaged hangup. I'd also add a separately configurable option to allow a single equipped item to drop if hanging up while engaged in PVP - and by engaged in PVP I mean you have the PVP flag against your name that allows the other person to attack you for free, not just engaged in combat.

I dislike random scaling of penalties due to how badly you can be screwed over on a roll of the dice.

I'll also note that I only want those harsher penalties (item loss) in use in a realm that has PVP considerably more balanced than it was when I last played. I haven't been in since before the sixth swing was re-added, so I have a poor idea of how my suggestions would affect the game as it is now. If anyone can tell me how many rounds the average combat based PVP engagement is now, I'd appreciate it.

A 10% of max HP penalty on hangup is enough that you can't use it with any regularity, and it will make life a little harder when scripting.

The only concern that I do have is how this will negatively affect classes/races that have few HPs to begin with, meaning that people in those classes already have enough trouble escaping from bad situations. For example, an Ogre Warrior hanging up at 100/300 HPs is left with 70 HP - probably enough to survive a round of combat in a lower level area. A similar level Mage hanging up at 60/180 HPs
will have 42 HP - probably not enough to survive that round of combat. Still, we can but test and see how whatever changes we make go. We're unlikely to get it right on the first iteration after all :)

[Tayte]

My wife had something that sounds to have had some of the same problem, I had thought it was POTS... which is another heart related thing.  Eventually through some non-standard medicine (holistic doctor) he was able to get her back to nearly normal health through diet physical therapy, supplements and some other things.

This was after completely exhausted on traditional medical routes.... over basically 100k in testing etc... for them to tell us they didn't know what it was.  If you are interested he's in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.  Most of his stuff is not covered by insurance, but I paid about 5k over 4-5 months total for him to bring her back to normalcy.  I'd be happy to share.

She started with legs tremors, then hand tremors... She didnt have seizures as much as she had full body convulsions.... and hyper-sensivitity to touch, sound, any kind of stimulation would send her into convulsions.  Eventually she was unable to walk at times.

I will pray for you daily. If that Dr. sounds like its worth a shot for you, let me know.  It worked for her when they basically spent all that money and said "we don't know".  I also thought he woudl be a hocus pocus doctor and was up for anything, but didn't expect anything.

-Tyler

[Jumpin Jack Flash]

Uhmmm.....what?!?!?

[Torque]

my guess is he was perusing topics as a guest, saw gard's post, logged in to reply to it, and it brought him back to this topic unbeknownst to him