Exploits, Cheats and Hacks.

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Re: Exploits, Cheats and Hacks.

Postby cnl » Mon Mar 13, 2023 4:55 pm

I think Vege is right, there's nothing stopping you playing the way you want to play right now.

Create a new clan called *classic*. Setup your clan rules. Players must start from level 1. Following items not allowed: no 6x40 artifacts, no proc weapons. No energy drain. No eq from outside classic chars. If as you say people want to play like that - you can right now. And you can play your classic chars sometimes when your classic buddies are on. And you can play your other chars some other time. You can have your cake and eat it. If there are these players you say would jump onto a sloth classic server but aren't playing now, just jump into a clan. have fun. Why worry what other players are doing?

I often thought about creating a clan called *bare metal* for people to play with limited scripting. All healing and attacks by hand. No triggers beyond some minimal feeding/drinking automation ( I hate eating / drinking by hand). Anyone AFK - they really rudderless. Sometimes I would play on this, sometimes not. And it's voluntary. You choose to do it or not. Kind of a long term, when I'm in the mood for it project. Chip away over years. Maybe I would be the only member and I'm ok with that.

Actually, I had another idea for being able to create a new char in iron man mode with perm death on shock. This may be a bad idea (tm) leading to much distress :D maybe this not a good idea for mental health

In Sloth sometimes people do things I don't like. I used to get rather upset about it but why. I'm just here to have fun.

I definitely had a lot of fun as a new player clawing my way up. But Vege is right - it is a natural progression to Sloth that you will eventually get more powerful - because otherwise what are people spending time doing? It's hard to motivate people to play for years with no tangible increases in power and if those increases are there - you will have people who obtain them. because that was the goal.

I do think there's an opportunity and a need for challenge to be re-injected into the game for powerful characters. revamp some areas. make some new epics or retool existing ones. new challenging areas. But I also think the trajectory of sloth has been necessary and ultimately good for the game.
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Re: Exploits, Cheats and Hacks.

Postby Hung » Mon Mar 13, 2023 5:03 pm

cnl,
You should apply for the job at Blizzard.
Imagine, how much money they could save if they had such magnificent adviser as you, who'd tell them that instead of making WoW classic, they could simply tell players to make a clan with constraining rules.
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Re: Exploits, Cheats and Hacks.

Postby cnl » Mon Mar 13, 2023 5:08 pm

cnl,
You should apply for the job at Blizzard.


lol :lol:
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Re: Exploits, Cheats and Hacks.

Postby stinker » Mon Mar 13, 2023 7:58 pm

I think that having discussions like this as a player base is very healthy, so long as we stick to the discussion.

I don't think that breaking something that is working as designed is the right thing to do. I think doing that in order to harmonize. or balance the mud causes more problems than it helps. I too have played on and off for many years and this most recent return to Sloth has been 2019-present where I've leveled two 9x40 chars but not using remort tokens (some think I'm crazy for that, I call it just uninformed :lol:). I have to admit when I came back and someone said "let's go drain" I was like, what is this witchery you speak of?

My characters are not the best drain classes either (Wa/Cl) and (Ba/Ne) but they can, given enough time to find eq and set up the right eqsets. It takes time to do that, and actually not die. I'll be the first to admit, I'm still not great at not dying at vens when I go, either.

I think the suggestion to balance the mobs so that they're not able to be taken advantage of so easily and let people drain during regular group cycles makes good sense. I like the proposal made by Driven. It still keeps the spirit of the spell, and it helps the lower characters without blocking the larger characters from using it.

I also like the idea of optional ways to obtain mana, I think game evolution like that makes good sense as well. Some smart mage worked with some powerful necromancer to turn infuse soul into a mana + hp potion (Improved Infuse Soul). This is a potion solution but unlike what exists it gives the players power to control when they get it - much like energy drain would. Or even a spin off the druid canopy that made it more portable, some type of druid aura that they could pump up the team's mana regen by +25 or something as they go for a few ticks, rather than parking for it.

When you make changes to take away power from something you have a tendency to swing it the other way completely. Now, I have no history that tells me that the person that implemented "Sanctuary for the soul" or "Sanctuary for the body" intended it to work differently than it does, but if they didn't - it makes no sense based on the help files. I could see if it worked as it was written with Bards being able to hold a song throughout battle it would be incredibly powerful especially with the right instrument. As it is now, it's completely unusable solo, and really only benefits big groups at the biggest mobs (ok, I use it on little-ish mobs in big groups too but that's cuz I hate being struck with lightning or burned in fire). Again, I have no history - but in the testing I've done, if this was intended behavior the song writer planned for a huge group of 9x40s to attack big mobs with a character singing this song on repeat to a point they can't do anything else. Seems silly, right? Maybe they meant that or didn't think it through. I think if we take the same stance with energy drain because the vens are not small drains like other mobs in the game we risk ruining the spells intended function.

I also don't like just pumping up non-caster classes and basically using them as defacto healers to just keep going constantly and I do a fair amount of leading larger groups. That's not to say if they come to the group with mana, I won't use it. I think using characters for their prime/second classes makes the most efficient use of their abilities. Now, there are plenty that disagree with me on that and I'm ok with that. We're allowed to have different opinions on things.

I find drain (meaning visiting AH vens) to be really pointless in the bigger groups. Some of the players already buying and having mana that regens super-fast or spent time designing their character intended for groups means we can flow for a long time without drain. In fact, leading several quest sized groups I almost never go there, it's counterproductive for big groups - as mentioned dead players and non-casters end up with less mana than they started with. That said, the mages that follow me often run empty after an area or two until we pass a mob they can drain, or they go off and drain themself, or they hold off casting and regen as we run, which they then miss out on possible xps/gold/honor/etc.

All of this to say I think there are likely good ways to fix the vens without breaking the ability to drain within the game. It may mean that the primary way to get mana shifts, which isn't necessarily bad as long as enough ability remains to make solo draining possible.

(P.S. If you do go to work for Blizzard, cnl- let me know if they need QE directors)
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Re: Exploits, Cheats and Hacks.

Postby Vegetable » Mon Mar 13, 2023 9:11 pm

Vegetable,
Considering your experience, you should know that playing pure solo is very far from being equal to playing SlothMUD of old days.


Yup, I get it that grouping is how most players (me included) get xp in the past. However, there was a time when the mud was semi-dead I was forced to solo my way to 9.40 or beg people to follow me so I can get a group of 4 people running xp to boost my warcry. Sometimes it's because we don't get enough active players, sometime it's due to the timezone I'm playing from. I'd say half of my xp on Vege is from solo runs. It is also the time I learn more about the area and tricks in the mud. Now, I'd say most of the reborn char (or even a properly geared 9.40 char) can get XP faster solo than in group. Just need to know what area to hit. I like to have the option for solo and group xp.

cnl,
You should apply for the job at Blizzard.
Imagine, how much money they could save if they had such magnificent adviser as you, who'd tell them that instead of making WoW classic, they could simply tell players to make a clan with constraining rules.


I'm not against having a separate server for classic play or even a trial server to test out new stuff before it gets rolled out to the main game. If the admin has time to do that, great. We can't compare sloth to wow. If sloth is a billion-dollar enterprise with a big team of developers, yes, by all means, run as many servers as you want. I'm not sure sloth has the manpower to work on 2 servers right now. After all, having a separate server won't impact my gameplay on the current server. From what I read just on this post, seems like there is a lot for immort to do if we want to rebalance drain, char progression and area difficulty. Blizzard probably won't create a classic server if they have only a handful of players either.

I find drain (meaning visiting AH vens) to be really pointless in the bigger groups.


I agree with this. It's only good for small to mid-sized groups and solo runs. You won't have enough vens to fill up the whole group anyway if the group is big.
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Re: Exploits, Cheats and Hacks.

Postby jayclimbs » Mon Mar 13, 2023 10:11 pm

Just somehow vaporized a long post, so long-to-short:
If I were trying to code something to rekindle interest in caster classes, it might very well end up looking a lot like drain as it is currently implemented. So: good job, Maniac and whoever else worked on it.
A possible tweak that would be inline with the game's design: apply a small bonus amt of mana for mage/necro primes, a small reduction for Wa/Mo/Th primes, and a "baseline" for all other classes.
Whatever is done, pls preserve the ability of "youngn's" to successfully drain. Tapering off the chances at higher level is great, but if there's a weakness of Sloth currently it's making the little guys a positive part of groups, and it's very easy to make that even worse with careless tweaking.
Finally, for those who think the burgeoning 9x40/9x40-reborn ranks indicates that gameplay is now easy:
First: the good old days weren't always good. I for one, having run both a "standard" character and a "token child" character, am hard-pressed to revisit non-token character play again. It's not bad early on, but those final 20 or so levels are just plain awful. Why suffer? It's a game, the concept is enjoyment.
Second, much of that perception is misconstrued due to COVID and the subsequent isolation laws. When that went down, playing Sloth became my main recreation. It was easy to play a *lot* - and nearly impossible to do much else. We all needed the escape, we used it, and consequently more of us played more, getting a group going was easier, keeping it going was easier, and most of us leveled rapidly. Game changes probably played a very minor role in the leveling rate.
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