- It is not my intention to remove sharecads from Clan Lord, but the macro's popularity lead me to scratch my head and wonder if there could be an in-game alternative.
- I have no intention of removing @env.textLog or any other macro features.
- I recognize that healers are dependent on shares.
- I recognize that some healers use sharecads to harvest shares for experience rather than for the action of healing. In my opinion, this is an exploitation of the macro. A clever macro scripter could address this issue by adding a personalized blacklist of healer names to their copy of the macro.
- I recognize that Clan Lord's sharing system has numerous limitations.
This last point has been on my mind for a while. Off the top of my head, I can see five general functions of a share:
- Share a portion of incoming experience with other players
- Makes for efficient healing from healers
- Notification when a player falls
- Opt-in on a function (i.e. ledger training, mystic teleportation)
- Subtle, mystical benefits
I have another, more-radical idea: wouldn't it make sense to simply separate healing from sharing? Bluebie healers may remember the early moonstones in which it was unnecessary for a patient to share with a healer. Why not return to this healing mechanic? Such a mechanic would completely eliminate a player's obligation to share a healer, and it would eliminate the healer's dependency on shares in order to do their job. This change to the sharing system would remove point 2 from the above list.
If a healer is no longer dependent on shares for efficient healing, then how would a healer earn experience?
My other even-more-radical idea is to overhaul the experience system. Under this revised experience system, healers would earn their own experience for their accomplishments in healing – and I don't mean the walk-on-lava-and-then-self-heal type of healing. I envision healer experience working thusly: when a fighter gets credit for killing a monster, then the healers supporting that fighter also receive assistance credit for killing that monster. If the fighter instead vanquished the monster, then all healers supporting that fighter get assistance credit for vanquishing that monster. Everyone still loses when a fighter slaughters a monster. This experience would be completely independent from shared experience; sharing players still receive and enjoy shared experience.
And why limit this revised experience system to just healers? The mystic who supports a fighter with balance and accuracy boosts is also contributing to a group in a meaningful way, so when the fighter earns experience through the assistance of a mystic, then that mystic will likewise earn experience. Players who contribute to the group enjoy the rewards from their contribution.
I probably don't need to say it, but I'll say it for the record: this idea is vaporware. It's just a drawing board concept, and one with numerous problems at that. Area healing (asklepian) suddenly becomes a very powerful tool compared to point healing (cads) and contact healing (bursts/moonstones). Why bother moonstoning one fighter (x1 experience) when a healer can asklepian eight fighters (and receive x8 experience)? Furthermore some healing styles tend to support the fighter after the battle rather than during the battle (horus moonstoners), while other healing styles specialize in damage absorption/self-healing (rodding). How would experience be fairly – and legitimately – assigned to these healing styles? How do we address the problem of those healers who spot-heal a fighter just to get credit for a kill (which is almost identical to those healers who spot-heal a fighter to get a share under sharecads)? This rough idea needs a lot of polishing.
And lastly, this whole zany idea would be no small undertaking. It's easy for me to exclaim "just overhaul Clan Lord's experience system!" but in truth the enormity of such a project absolutely terrifies me. This would be a major, major project in which More Could Go Wrong Than Could Go Right.
But eliminating a healer's dependency for healing shares, and eliminating a healer's dependency for experience shares would also eliminate the need for the sharecads macro, wouldn't it?
Posts
"How would experience be fairly – and legitimately – assigned to these healing styles?"
ReplyDeleterandom half baked answer: splash XP island. oooooo sounds sexy i know.
bastardize the esteem scripts. remove any notion of gain esteem and add more XP value per splash by a TON. for the monsters themselves on the island are actually worth no XP themselves.
everyone around gets the same amount of XP. no circle shares, no share the brick/hunt leader/healers only. of course.... this solution while in theory easier (and by easier i mean less coding & more Copy & paste) would still be an insane amount of work to go through epicly long list of beasties in the game and retool them like this. also the math involved in calculating how much XP to next rank through all the ranks to balance monsters & figuring out how to work out slaughtering monsters, ect. after a certain point in theory the you gain experience for helping take down a blah blah blah is replaced by a you fail to learn anything from your help in butchering the poor thing.
ya know that or scrap slaughter levels all together so long as you are
revamping the XP system
I really like the idea of an offhand item (or necklace maybe? not many things using that slot either) that augments healing from unshared healers to be just as effective is a pretty flippin good idea too.
and yeah totally would eliminate the "need" for sharecads (hint there is no actual need) been gettin along 10+ years juust fine without it.
I was thinking about this from the first note you had about sharing - and of course, it was mostly healer related; however, I can think of several functions for sharing related to mystic abilities - sharing a mystic could do one of several things for a hunt:
ReplyDeletepass information about fallens (if the mystic chooses)
relay sungem thoughts to those on the mystic's thinkgroup list (if the mystic chooses)
relay information about xyz (if the mystic chooses) [fill in the xyz with mystic ability]
only those shared get the benefit or greater benefit of the share to mystic (boosts,etc).
information about the surroundings (if...)
etc. (ports work that way already! port if only cross-shared w/porting mystic).
oh wait, maybe those are some of the subtle benefits!
I've done a bit of thinking about issues like these (see my Sentinel thread aptly named 'Overhauling the Experience System') but things seem to get complicated very fast. (Just like this post, which I intended to be a short one, believe it or not.)
ReplyDelete1.
It seems that the healing efficiency function of shares exists to ensure that people share healers. So if this function was removed, some sort of experience system overhaul would be unavoidable.
2.
An overhaul that didn’t use shares would be something like you suggest – giving out experience according to performing certain actions. However, since players can contribute to a battle in so many different ways that are difficult to quantify, it is impossible to grant experience in perfect proportion to their contribution. The game needs a simple way of making an educated guess as to when a player is contributing. We see this with fighters: you get experience if you hit a difficult monster once, which obviously doesn’t begin to cover every contribution a fighter makes. But, we make do with this system because tagging at least approximately matches up with times when a fighter is contributing.
So, the challenge of an experience overhaul of the sort you talk about is finding something healers/mystics do that approximately corresponds with the times they help a party and hopefully also with the degree to which they help a party. In your idea for healers, this experience-yielding action is healing an individual fighter for any amount of time. As you note, this is unfortunately pretty unrepresentative of how much the healer helped, especially as it rewards the healer for the number of people they momentarily healed and not how much healing they did.
So what happens if we give healers a proportion of a tagging fighter’s experience according to how much they healed the fighter? One problem I can think of is that there would be an incentive to make sure fighters always took a few hits to maximize healer experience (sounds like a perverse incentive to me). And of course, Horus healers, rescue healers, rods and the like get missed out.
Due to considerations like these, I suspect there is no way to fairly reward healers based on actions they perform ((except perhaps by making the system excessively complicated by having it track and weigh up a large number of contribution indicators – e.g. Is the healer taking damage? How much defence and health training do the people they’re healing have? How long since they took damage? How long has the healer been healing the same fighters against the same creature? What tool is the healer using?))
As for mystics, their contributions are so varied and complicated that I think there is very little hope for a mechanical way of measuring them at all. (For instance, we don’t want to incentivize having all Fighters Balthus-boosted at all times at the cost of seldom doing anything else.)
In the light of all this, I think the sharing system *for the purposes of experience distribution* has some very positive features, as the judgements of when players deserve experience are put in the hands of people (i.e. the players themselves), who are far more intelligent at judging contribution than the game could ever be. (Indeed, how else could we reward locating mystics and rescue healers.) Of course, this all takes place under the guidance of incentives provided by the need to share healers and mystics if you want to enjoy their abilities to their full potential.
3.
If overhauling the experience system by directly rewarding healer and mystic actions is not viable (and I am inclined to think it is not) it seems that we need to keep healing efficiency as an incentive to share healers or find a good alternative.
My overall point: if healing and sharing were separated, we would need to find another powerful incentive for people to share healers, instead of reworking the way they get experience.
-Feodoric
P. S. Wouldn’t the easiest solution to the sharecads issue be just…..more share slots?
@Feodoric you went to far down the rabbit hole.
ReplyDeletethere should be a way for mystic to give or extend shares(when there around and shared)