Shattered Kingdoms

Yes. My case would be defenders rallying together because they hear the city is under attack by shouts, but they're not sure who is attacking.

On the other hand, the enemy all have 1 person in mind to kill so when the groups meet, attacker group all target 1 person while defending group is pretty much at a loss of whom to target.

Good thing with prone is that your leader can now gtell 'KILL X' even if he is bashed, but still.

Aye, I was more thinking in group combat though, or in the situation where a caster with multiple pets is also in a tribunal.

For example, a charm is in group combat, someone initiates combat, the caster first has to order his/her charm to attack before they can start aiding combat, wasting those valuable initial 1-2 rounds of combat order lagged out.

Or in the scenario a caster is solo, with a charm, a pet, and a tribunal NPC. Tribunal NPCs don't respond to order all, so the caster would have to go through two rounds of ordering, or an initial cast, and then an order, to make sure all his pets are assisting.

EDIT: I just read a post that answered two of my questions.

I still think it's a fine idea, I'm just curious to see exactly how it would work in implementation before I vote for certain.

Yeah, that's definitely an advantage for the more organized group. Assuming, of course, everyone is at keys, paying attention, and actually manages to attack the assigned target.

If a group can manage to coordinate an attack like that, I'd simply have to call that skill and acknowledge a job well done.

And another step away from fair play, though.

Its not about organization, its about sneak attacking, and winning.

My initial feeling was the mercenary in the front rank with sword/board would auto defend, since the rank behind him had engaged/been engaged in combat. But I honestly don't know how easy that would be to code or implement. And, frankly, that might defeat the whole purpose of removing auto assist.

Since, in practice, you'd still have people auto assisting, but it'd be limited to specific ranks/positions within a formation. F1 would auto assist M1 and B1, but not F2/M2/B2 or F3/M3/B3. I think it'd probably be easiest and slow combat the most by just forcing everyone to manually assist, even if the rank behind them is attacked.

I don't see how every player in a group manually attacking the same target can be classified as anything other than organization.

And fights are rarely, if ever, fair. This change would actually make it more likely for you to survive a surprise attack than if the enemy party had the benefit of auto assist.

Finney owns this thread also. This would immensely help with surprise gank squad attacks.

I just want to take the time to say that the Gameplay forum today is getting blowed up!

The guy infront of whoever is being attacked would still be able to just rescue him and then be included in the combat, and if whoever was behind him is wielding a reaching weapon, naturally he would still be fighting whoever started to hit him in the first place. (Also this wouldn't break sanc, whereas him typing kill xxx would)

One issue I can see however, is that in fast paced pvp, which undoubtedly most pvp still would be, alot of "bad rp" would naturally arise. I am thinking in the case of fighting people with obscure adjectives, or lawmobs/charmies with obscure names. Take for instance CoN lawmobs (no this isn't a whine about them, just using them as a random example)... they're called Losquez, Ghazzaz and Aposomething obscure that I can in no way remember nor ever will probably.

Meaning that in a stressful situation, me attepting to spell apoopinmypants in a gtell instruction, would result in a bunch of people not being able to target it. Because of this, I would of course be inclined to gtell Everyone strike Apo! or Attack apo! This would be a slippery slope on the path of gtelling attack cross-e or attack limp, attack brown-h to give people the shortest easiest instructions available.

I am not saying I am naturally opposed to this, seeing as a gtell "channel" during massive group pk isn't where I'd expect to find "leet" rp, but it should still be considered imo.

You realize of course that this will stop even the makeshift last minute defense groups from showing up, knowing that they face doom in the face of a prepared group.

They still do, this day. This would probably kill them off completely.