Shattered Kingdoms

Sure, if you're not in formation. But if you are? Seriously?

It's not as if being in formation means you're holding hands and right next to each other. There's enough room for Joe the scout to unload a volley of arrows from a longbow, Jim the rogue is running around in between formations shanking people. If Jim the rogue is disguised as dark-haired, and ninja'ing into the middle of your formation to hamstring people, seems pretty reasonable you might, in the heat of battle confuse him with your dark-haired friend. (Especially when you didn't ICly take the second to GLANCE and be sure of your target.)

There's plenty of IC ways to explain such a futz up.

ETA : I don't really care about this either way. But that note needs to be a rule or not, IMO, and not a 'you might maybe get in trouble for this if you do it and the wrong permanewb cries about it'. If it's to apply to <cabal ability>, I'm sure the imms will let the right people know. Changes to cabal abilities aren't public knowledge, after all.

We are in absolute agreement.

As for using tribunal guards: imagine defending against attackers, seeing a soldier using acid blast against his other soldiers and having no way of targeting him. That is abusing the mechanical limitations of the code.

No, there are ways to target him. Glance, info, look, consider. All tools available to newbs to solve this problem and figure out who's who if they're interested in learning to play the game.

Hell, the situation you just mentioned RP-wise seems like something that might reasonably happen in the chaos of battle.

But what if you have two people in the same formation that both are named Molly and both look like Molly and you can't tell which is the priest and which is the tank? Glance, info, look, consider aren't going to help you. You can try circle stabbing one and then the other, if you have that sort of skill available to you, but this is going to cost you what I think is significant time (if you can even target 1.[player name] and 2.[player name]. I've never tried.

Now if you have two people attacking you, one called The Butler, and one called Smelly Goblin, you still have to figure out which is which before attacking, but you at least have some ability to do so by seeing Smelly Goblin reciting prayers while The Butler stabs you with his sword or something.

The attackers still get the advantage because we have to spend at least a round or so getting our stuff together and figuring out who is who. You still obfuscate and surprise while leaving a viable chance your opponents can figure it out, even if it takes them a bit of time and may still get them killed due to their reaction time.

EDIT: In reality, if a group of people had that sort of advantage I am sure they would milk it for all its worth. But I think in some cases, realism takes a hit in order for the game to be playable and enjoyable to multiple opposing sides in a conflict.

Do you people even know how the glance command works?

Based on the first paragraph, I suggest you go use it some. Let's assume there are three of Molly.

'glance molly'

Molly and Molly are behind her.

'Glance 3.molly'

Molly is in front of her, with Molly behind.

'Glance 2.molly'

Molly and Molly are in front of her.

I don't think it's hard to figure which is the tank. The more comments here, the more this seems like a L2P issue.

The only potential problem I see is multiple melee people who look alike and not in formation.

This is a good chance to pitch a feature I've wanted for a long time.

It would be nice if the game could parse target.formation to target the appropriate formation position of the target's group.

So, for example, if I "cast 'harm' Molly.M2," I would be casting harm at the person in M2 of Molly's formation... which may or may not be Molly. Things like Molly.front, Molly.behind would also be interesting to have available as potential relative targets.

Yes, a L2P issue .... You're honestly arguing that you will have time to sort Mollies while in melee with another group and that you have a reasonable expectation of even seeing the outputs of those glance commands at the speed of combat spam?

Something like this would be awesome and make a lot of the whinning even more unnecessary.

I definitely like this idea.