Is it a good idea to make it so an AP cannot get charges by harvesting willing cabal mates? This seems grossly easy to abuse.

Doesn't seem like a major issue, and when it has been an issue before, it was addressed. Regardless of criticism directed at a possible tough ap at the moment, the main factor in their success is a very high level of competence. And FWIW I hate this character both IC and OOC, but I can recognize when I am outplayed.

"Tough AP" is subjective, but here are some numbers:

+------------+------+------+------+---------+------------+
| Character  | PKW  | PKA  | PKD  | Charges | DeletedOn  |
+------------+------+------+------+---------+------------+
| Fjodir     |  126 |   13 |   17 |     168 | 2011-12-06 |
| Lamayinn   |  102 |   38 |   18 |     147 | 2010-05-07 |
| Cabakso    |  123 |   68 |   78 |     146 | 2012-11-26 |
| Pandol     |  101 |   98 |   42 |     135 | 2011-04-01 |
| Cawr       |  102 |   45 |   31 |     119 | 2011-01-31 |
| Hildara    |  124 |   17 |   21 |     112 | 2011-03-04 |
| Delaed     |  115 |    6 |    1 |     104 | 2015-04-30 |
| Shiloh     |   97 |   47 |   47 |     101 | 2010-12-01 |
| Althamael  |   69 |   41 |   51 |      98 | 2014-04-20 |
| Karak      |   91 |   42 |   19 |      97 | 2011-01-22 |
| Ankhran    |  100 |   34 |   16 |      96 | 2013-12-05 |
| Noviask    |   81 |   24 |   41 |      95 | 2013-06-03 |
| Tralgdar   |   55 |   44 |   91 |      80 | 2014-11-04 |
| Mortanis   |   68 |   16 |   21 |      71 | 2010-09-03 |
| Shudo      |   84 |   24 |   36 |      66 | 2011-11-20 |
| Khaahd     |   66 |    8 |   15 |      63 | 2011-04-25 |
| Jeikdurr   |   76 |   21 |   10 |      58 | 2010-04-27 |
| Ychram     |   88 |    5 |   33 |      55 | 2015-02-05 |
| Daymond    |   55 |    7 |   14 |      52 | 2013-07-18 |
| Saguntius  |   61 |   14 |   62 |      52 | 2013-12-12 |
| Eletar     |   41 |   20 |   21 |      43 | 2014-09-03 |
| Ragloghlin |   47 |   14 |   18 |      43 | 2012-09-12 |
| Eidiol     |   40 |   40 |  101 |      42 | 2013-07-18 |
| Grezoosh   |   38 |    1 |   16 |      37 | 2013-07-18 |
| Ghulrat    |   68 |    1 |   20 |      36 | 2014-07-10 |
| Rawvos     |   35 |   10 |    8 |      34 | 2010-05-29 |
| Sakilan    |   39 |    1 |   21 |      34 | 2010-07-03 |
| Dartis     |   26 |    9 |    3 |      33 | 2010-05-10 |
| Finley     |   24 |   18 |   14 |      32 | 2013-09-21 |
| Nighden    |   32 |   12 |   18 |      32 | 2014-01-17 |
| Varuuz     |   35 |    2 |    9 |      31 | 2010-11-18 |
| Madoc      |   27 |   12 |   62 |      30 | 2013-05-02 |
| Hanna      |   28 |   10 |   13 |      29 | 2012-09-15 |
| Suttun     |   17 |    6 |   63 |      27 | 2013-03-22 |
| Sevastyan  |   20 |   17 |   24 |      27 | 2012-09-20 |
| Irvai      |   27 |    5 |   25 |      15 | 2014-12-31 |
| Azophet    |   39 |   10 |   22 |      13 | 2010-04-04 |
| Inverox    |   13 |    5 |   64 |      11 | 2012-12-23 |
| Drexazar   |   17 |    8 |   14 |      11 | 2011-06-14 |
| Mayeena    |   21 |    1 |   15 |      11 | 2011-01-31 |
+------------+------+------+------+---------+------------+

All of these characters should have published PBF sheets for those who want more information.

That's surely a lot :)

From least to most:

Irvai never made it past level 40, deleted after losing his biggest weapon at around 20ish charges. Lost as many as he won, not really a big scary A-P.

Suttun was a punching bag, I had a truly terrible connection back then, I'd generally drop link for 10-15 seconds at least once every 3 minutes. Not great for PKing without allies. 16 of the 27 charges he had were from the leader of scion suiciding to a failed applicant as a consolation prize. Lost it to a quicksand trap + gank on eastern the next fight I had.

Madoc was my second A-P to reach hero and the first to get any PKs. He con died not long after getting fire control, never reached 10 charges in a single weapon.

Ghulrat was awesome in the midranges and definitely tough, but not tough enough not die to to a bash/wrath/cutoff tag-team and lose the biggest weapon of 24 charges. Deleted at 40 after losing a second weapon of around 20 to dirt/disarm/logout. Has best kills:assists ratio on that list, shoutout to myself.

Eidiol was my first Dreadlord, right after Madoc. Again got charges by persistence alone, don't think I reached 10 charges in a weapon with this one either, don't think he can be called tough.

Saguntius was my first 'succesful' AP, helped a ton by a gift of 100 gold by Destuvius as a lowbie. Lost my weapon at around 30 charges, ranked up to hero range, and about doubled my PKlosses without adding to my PKwins. Tough for a while, then a punching bag afterwards. Never made it to 51.

Ychram is the top of the list of APs I played, again very dominant in the midranks, then lost a 30 charge weapon, became anathema, entered hero range and inevitably the wins dried up and the losses stacked up. I have the sense that I may well have given a better acount of myself at 51 than with previous attempts, but got hacked before I reached it.

Since I began playing several years ago, the number of characters on that list above Ychram is five (by total PKwins, two). They were played by Shaapa, Twist, jmc, Torak and Vonzamir.

The impression I got from playing against or alongside Tralgdar and Althamael was that they were like my early attempts mostly winning fights by persistence and reliance on imperial allies, but Tralgdar was better at it and Althamael was much better at it.

The overall conclusion is that in the past few years (or in the history of the game as I've seen it), a lot of people have played A-P's but only a select few players have succeeded in making them really formidable.

Tralgdar was very dependent on cabal powers and I envisioned having shaman around to get my dispel bash on when I rolled him which didn't happen much. I may have had a few weapons over 20 charges, but I didn't keep them long. My effectiveness dropped a lot when I wasn't dread lord and pretty much disappeared altogether once I was anathema and I got to lightning control one or two deaths before I con died. I'll go with drow if I ever play another.

Just in case my suggestions were misunderstood...

I wasn't arguing for making charges more difficult to collect in the aggregate.

Was just trying to mitigate the potential for abuse and reduce the incentive for A-Ps to multi-kill people who don't know what they're doing.

Some people are going to multi-kill regardless and nothing I suggested will change that. But maybe we can help out the guy who wants to collect charges but also wants to be a good sport.

It's arguably pretty lame and in the past it's been dealt with in-character.

If it makes a difference to you though, such a change wouldn't have made a lick of difference for any active anti-paladin.

Of course having a mate get made anathema so you can farm him is totally legit :P

I doubt there is anything shady going on in that regard at the present moment.

Though of course I cannot tell, but what I will say is having a buddy to charge from would be hugely helpful to any ap. firstly you get the charges themselves and the help towards controls. Secondly you become free to kill the solo real enemy in your pk range much more often. Otherwise you may just be left with a guy you can't take charges from.

That would not be an efficient way to pile them. And if your buddy has amassed nice PK ratio to be worth many charges, most likely he will be reluctant to the idea of feeding you charges (I don't know if that happened in the past though), not to mention that his charge worth will diminish quickly this way.

It's probably never going to be possible to completely shut down shady collusion. Especially if there are multiple people involved (e.g. alternate killing them). Here are some other ideas off the top of my head that could be put in place:

1. No charges for killing someone with zero PKs. Also have a ratio requirement that starts at 50% when the # of PKs is small, but goes down to maybe 40% as the # of PKs grows. There are some characters who are active in PK and have some success but also die alot. Those characters should still be worth something.

2. No charges for killing someone who is also the last person you killed. AFAIK this already exists.

3. No charges for killing someone again within X number of RL hours since the last time you killed them. Make X at least "1" or "2", but I could see it being as high as "12" or "24".

If you're worried about nerfing unholy bless then tune up the formula for how many charges a given character is worth so that the ones who are worth charges are worth more charges.

Something else I'd like to see: divide the number of charges by the number of people assisting in the PK, even if the A-P gets the last hit. Round down. So when you gang a guy worth 1 charge you get 0 charges.

nt

>It's probably never going to be possible to completely shut
>down shady collusion. Especially if there are multiple people
>involved (e.g. alternate killing them). Here are some other
>ideas off the top of my head that could be put in place:
>
>1. No charges for killing someone whose PK total is less than
>max{5, floor{AP-level / 5}}, or whose ratio is < 50%. So at
>hero you'd only ever get charges for killing someone with a
>positive ratio and at least 10 PKs. Potential down side:
>there are builds that are dangerous enough to amass kills but
>also die alot; maybe they should still be worth something.
>Think reckless rager berserker. So maybe lower the ratio
>requirement to 40%.

Food for thought: right now, that formula would result in less than 25% of active 30+ characters being worth one or more charge. That number gets even lower for hero range.

>2. Zero charges for killing someone who is also the last
>person you killed. AFAIK this already exists.

This does exist.

>3. Zero charges for killing someone again within X number of
>RL hours since the last time you killed them. Make X at least
>"1" or "2", but I could see it being as high as "12" or "24".

We could do this but not without quite a bit of work or doing it in a way that I think would be a bad implementation. This would probably be a good idea, though.

>If you're worried about nerfing unholy bless then tune up the
>formula for how many charges a given character is worth so
>that the ones who are worth charges are worth
>more charges.

I don't know. Multiple people have in the past year so said that APs aren't variable anymore because of the low(er) numbers and whatever else. Evidently they were wrong, at least to some degree. If we implemented something like #1 then we would probably want to adjust the formula a bit, but otherwise I wouldn't be worried too much.

>Something else I'd like to see: divide the number of charges
>by the number of people assisting in the PK, even if the
>A-P gets the last hit. Round down. So when you gang a
>guy worth 1 charge you get 0 charges.

I could perhaps get behind this. If we did, I'd probably define assisting as "people targeting the victim when they died" versus using the damage/combat tracking code that calculates assists in PBFs because that stuff is always going to be a bit wonky.

Having said all that, while I'm all for more abuse-squashing and generally removing cheesy-ness from how charges work, I don't necessarily think anything is "broken" or in dire need of change/fixing and so I'm not inclined to make any drastic changes today or tomorrow.

> Food for thought: right now, that formula would result in less than 25% of active 30+ characters being worth one or more charge. That number gets even lower for hero range.

Yeah, I edited the original post. The set of characters I'm thinking about, i.e. those who have either completely opted out of PK or who aren't very good at it, probably won't even have one PK much less 5 or 10. My goal was to remove the additional incentive for anti-paladins (above and beyond those that exist for other classes) to repeatedly kill people who just aren't very good at PK.

> We could do this but not without quite a bit of work or doing it in a way that I think would be a bad implementation.

Would it be easier if you used "victim's hours played" instead of "RL hours"? That might actually be better. Using RL hours a guy could get killed, log off, log on again 24 hours later, unghost, then get killed again and be worth charges so long as the AP had killed someone else in the interim. Using "victim's hours played" prevents this.

> Having said all that, while I'm all for more abuse-squashing and generally removing cheesy-ness from how charges work, I don't necessarily think anything is "broken" or in dire need of change/fixing and so I'm not inclined to make any drastic changes today or tomorrow.

I wouldn't say the unholy system is "broken", but IMO it could be improved further. Could leave the calculation of charges alone and just implement the victim-hours-played restriction and the divide-by-people-targeting-victim logic.

One possible reason to use combat-tracking code: AP sleeps guy, AP and friend attack him and get him near-dead, guy teleports then dies to AP's plague/poison. Even though friend wasn't attacking the victim when he died, he still played a huge part in the death.

But yeah...I can also envision scenarios where you'd end up "counting" people who had very little to do with the kill. So you're probably right.

>One possible reason to use combat-tracking code: AP sleeps
>guy, AP and friend attack him and get him near-dead, guy
>teleports then dies to AP's plague/poison. Even though friend
>wasn't attacking the victim when he died, he still played a
>huge part in the death.
>
>But yeah...I can also envision scenarios where you'd end up
>"counting" people who had very little to do with the kill. So
>you're probably right.

I agree, but this ends up being a game of whack-a-mole I don't care enough to play. We've dialed it in close enough to rely on for most things, but it's never going to be super accurate (or fair) and I don't want to deal with the bitching when people get "screwed" by it.

I suppose we could massage the data a little by throwing out characters who did less than X% of damage to the victim and less than Y negative affects (e.g., poison, blind, etc.) on the affect when they died. I'm not sure that'll ever make it to the top of my list, though.

Santa Umiron!

You already have the alternating kills mechanic to stop A-P's hunting down the same guy over and over when he's the only one in range.

If it was a 'can't do it more than once an hour' thing, I'd think that should be replacing the existing mechanic rather than working alongside it. As it stands you can kill the same character twice RL days apart and not be rewarded for it.

You lose charges when some dude hits the guy you slept to wake him. So the ap has a tougher task and yet the reward is being reduced.

Sometimes the ap may be ambushing 2 sets of enemies fighting each other. Should he lose charges when they are in groups of 3 and he is alone?

In general though I would be in favour of an anti gang charge reducer. I'd probably add to it that an ap with beneficial effects or healing from another PC should get reduced charges.

>You lose charges when some dude hits the guy you slept to
>wake him. So the ap has a tougher task and yet the reward is
>being reduced.

We might be able to cleverly work around that, but eh. Like I said in another post, I don't think it's worth the effort given how upset people are likely to get if/when a corner case negatively impacts them. You people get moody.

>Sometimes the ap may be ambushing 2 sets of enemies fighting
>each other. Should he lose charges when they are in groups of
>3 and he is alone?

Eh.. that's too situational. If an AP jumps two dueling groups and all parties involved immediately redirect onto the AP then we certainly don't want to punish the AP for winning. On the other hand, if the fight essentially falls apart and the AP has his pick of 2-4 hurt / jacked up people then it's hard to say how big of a trophy the AP deserves (for sheer braun anyway, there's obviously some tactics that may or may not be involved there).

>In general though I would be in favour of an anti gang charge
>reducer. I'd probably add to it that an ap with beneficial
>effects or healing from another PC should get reduced
>charges.

That seems reasonable.

It's a lot of tinkering and tuning for something that's actually not very relevant most of the time, though.

You'd better also bind charges to character, not weapon, so they don't lose them when with their guns after going through all the proposed trouble to get charges.

That will almost certainly never happen. That said, neither will (in our opinion) charges be too much "trouble" to acquire.

Controls are the permanent they can't take them away from me reward for being a successful AP. The fact that weapons can be taken out of play is a mechanic that's crucial to the class and would be even if charges were noticeable "harder" to get.

The suggestion was rhetorical.

I can't help but wonder if the mechanic used to allow ragers to spellbane ap progs has given everyone the ability to save vs the non damage ones though. Making controls a lot less useful. Nevertheless still useful since you can in theory exploit more vulns.

Few things;
One of the benefits is it allows you to go and kill the previous guy you killed again, when you otherwise couldn't (at least for charges).

Secondly, people with good pk ratios quite often take risks close to deletion because they aren't afraid to die and are interested in their charge worth if they do end up dying.

Thirdly some people are very willing to act as lapdogs, in return for handouts (say).

Just so we are clear though I am not saying any if the above is occurring here (I've seen no strong evidence either way). Just observing that it can be done and does bring not insignificant benefits, that extra 20 hp can help the snowballing.

Also, their worth doesn't drop off that rapidly with deaths.

Honestly sometimes you can days without finding anyone who's worth even a single charge.