Shattered Kingdoms

I understand the reasoning- everyone has five abilities, except us. I think that instead of 'counting' cabal abilities, we should 'measure' them. As woahboy pointed out, most cabals run around with 1-3 useless abilities. The Fist is a good example, and I'm pretty familiar with it.

They have five abilities, though I don't think that any class will find all 5 of them to be useful. I didn't find the last three to be very useful.

Ability #3 wasn't that useful in PvP due to constant lag from bashing or being bashed, which created a high demand for actions when I already had a long list of useful actions to choose from as a merc. Ability #4 wasn't that useful either- it lags a lot and only adds 1 attack with ki strap spec, haste and appropriate mood. Kind of like kick, its small damage for big lag. This ability is still probably all around useful for people who aren't ki strap spec mercs or spellcasters. Most Fists seem to be one or the other. Ability #5 is only useful in specific situations, and can kind of be a longshot. Used improperly, it can be a great way to save your enemy's life.

From a powergaming perspective, just two Hammer abilities- the passive one, and the very mana-consuming one- are probably more useful to any front row character than the entire Fist skillset. Mechanically, just due to the superiority of Hammer at resisting bash, I would only recommend the Fist to casters and caster hybrids who want more defense against reach weapons and arrows, or for PvE, which it is great at.



TLDR:

Don't count your cabal abilities, measure them- in private forums.

Let's talk about CRS.

Your assessment of cabal abilities is ... Interesting.

So, do you think CRS would be better with mechanically enforced peak hour scheduling and a general rebalance to accomodate that?

The ceiling of the CRS experience is created by players, not by mechanics.

For example, offline raiding wouldn't be an issue if people didn't choose to do it.

Put on your Six Sigma thinking caps and consider whether any of these changes would actually effect change.

They probably would only serve to adjust the difficulty of CRS for a section of the playerbase and not, in fact, address the difficulties in the system.

CRS currently has a pretty flat difficulty formula, one which is determined by how many relics the inner guardian has, how much coin the cabal has, and how many attackers there are. This new CRS would have a difficulty determined by the competence of the defenders.

I don't have a Six Sigma thinking cap, so why you don't you tell us how to improve CRS?

Why don't make that if the inner guardian is defeated with a number of players from the faction of a less than a certain number, whatever that number would be lets say less than 3, then the artifact can't be taken but that group gets some sort of bonus for like 24rl hrs. If there are 3 or more people to defend the artifact can be taken.

The key for me is a methodology which does not encourage people to log out (or avoid logging in) as a way of defending their relic.

Let's start by claiming we can measure the competence of defenders.

Since we can assume any given performance is a sample of true performance, we can say that observable abilities are normally distributed.



This means that we could model the likelihood of success of a task of known difficulty by a participant of known ability.



However, we aren't actually interested in success from a game theory standpoint. What we're interested in is engagement as a metric, and this is an interaction effect.



From there, the DMAIC process suggests that monitoring and optimization of processes is a simple practice of measurement and informed alteration.



... Not a patch job of siege camps, scooby doo labyrinths, or other constructions. I fail to see where your OP idea actually even measures the defender ability you claim it would depend on.

The ultimate challenge of CRS as a play model is that it is opt-in for CTF offense and opt-out for CTF defense. No changes in difficulty will impact this.

I agree with this in theory, but the result of the current system is that people wait for enemies to log out (or avoid logging in) before they attack. I would have -liked- to be online during the attacks on my stronghold, but I wasn't.

If these attacks would have been visibly scheduled beforehand, I would have been there. I'm sure the other side can say the same thing.

Grep, troll harder.

If you think the use of standard human performance technology ideas is trolling, you should probably go read some books. This isn't rocket surgery: we're talking about human decisions, not mechanical systems, whenever we're whining about CRS.

CRS can be fixed in one help file in accordance with Dulrik's methodology. Dulrik and the others know how to approach me if they're interested in continuing that discussion.