Report 1807

Report #1807
Skillset: Discernment Skill: Assess/Contemplate/Discern
 Org: Hallifax Status: Completed Sept 2017
Furies' Decision:
Solution 2, potentially with Veyils' suggestions
Problem: Many classes are heavily reliant on the information given by discern,
assess, and contemplate (I'll just group them under discern for now) to make
decisions as to what to do with offence. For example, manakillers need to
discern to know what mana level their target is at so they can catch them when
they are below the threshold required. However, the command to discern needs to
be sent to the server and the information received by the client before the
player can actually use it. This basically inflates the balance time players
have based on how high their ping is, as well as making it so that stratagems
can't be used as freely in these situations. Given how important balance times
are generally seen to be, this report seeks to close the gap between low and
high ping players when using a class that is reliant on discern.
[A: 7 R: 5] Solution #1: Make discern/contemplate/assess not require
 balance/equilibrium.
[A:15 R: 0] Solution #2: Make a new syntax for discern/contemplate/assess with
 the FREE modifier after it (e.g. DISCERN FALAERON
 FREE) that can be used while off balance/equilibrium,
 with a 1 second cooldown in between.
[A: 1 R:10] Solution #3: As per solution 2, but instead of a cooldown,
 increase the mana cost of doing this by 50%
Player Comments:
---[Falaeron on 9/4 @ 01:14 sets as pending]
---[Tarken on 9/5 @ 19:41 writes]:
Solutions 1 or 2 are my preference. Solution 3 would be an improvement but I
don't feel its reasonable for high latency to pay a tax when they're already
inately disadvantaged, so would prefer to avoid that if possible.
---[Veyils on 9/6 @ 19:49 writes]:
I would not like to see regular discern change from how it is but I'm not
opposed to setting up new ways. Would reject solution 1. Solution one would be
bad for high ping players overall as spamming is an effective tool and this
would cause discern to have a huge mana drain when spammed. Solution 2 with a 1
second cool down would allow folks to spam it a bit and not get wrecked.
---[Veyils on 9/6 @ 19:53 writes]:
I dont see how this is going to really help high ping players like me though. If
I discern free when i'm off balance I'm going to have to discern again when im
on balance against because there is a high chance that someone has already
sipped or healed up. You need to discern when your ready to do the attack to
make sure your attack is effective. This wont really change how mana killers
operate in my eyes. We'll still have to do it on balance and still get stuck
with the discern/send command to absolve/enemy sips between the absolve command
being entered and the skill hitting. I'm not opposed to the report just the
solutions provided wont actually fix the problem proposed.
---[Falaeron on 9/7 @ 20:28 writes]:
Right now there are two choices when it comes to discern strategy: 1) You just
discern in front of every attack and stratagem your attacks anyway, meaning your
most up to date discern information will always be out-of-date by however many
seconds your attack's balance timer is. 2) you only stratagem your discern but
wait for your client to receive the information from the server before sending
another command to the server to make your actual attack. This means your real
balance timer is actually 1.5 times whatever your ping is, and your discernment
will be out-of-date by about 0.5 times your ping.
---[Falaeron on 9/7 @ 20:35 writes]:
By making discern usable off balance, you introduce a third strategy, which is
to discern around 1.5 times your ping before you expect to get balance back, and
in the time between receiving the information and getting balance back, queue up
a stratagem with the attack you want to do based on this information. Sure, this
doesn't fix everything for high-ping users, but it allows people to continue to
use stratagems for their attacks at the cost of slightly outdated discern
information. Of course, it'd not really be possible to time this perfectly, so
let's just say most people would discern around 2 times their ping before
balance comes back. At 0.3s ping (which is actually lower than what I've heard
some people consistently get), on a quick attack balance of 3s, you're still
only looking at 0.6s vs 3s, five times the difference.
---[Veyils on 9/8 @ 01:54 writes]:
I get where your coming from and this just reminded me of an old idea that would
essentially solve this ping issue. Game side if statements are a thing in some
games i've seen. If we had something like "DISCERN Danquik <50 MANA TOADCURSE
Danquik ELSE LASH Danquik" then that would basically fix the problem statement
totally. I'm not sure how viable this is but it sounds like an awesome thing to
have.
---[Danquik on 9/8 @ 02:08 writes]:
I can get behind Veyil's idea
---[Falaeron on 9/8 @ 04:07 writes]:
Would definitely be for that idea if it's viable. I just assumed it'd be too
difficult to take into account every single use-case for something like this
---[Danquik on 9/8 @ 14:13 writes]:
Could probably make it simpler with 'discern <target> <option 1> <option 2>',
but you are adding a lot to discern suddenly with the other new args report for
discern coming through
---[Danquik on 9/8 @ 14:15 writes]:
Also by doing this you are removing the cost of failure in some instakills, as
you should never fail a vitals insta with this method. Whether this is a good or
bad thing is debateable.
---[Danquik on 9/8 @ 16:12 writes]:
The other thing that dawns on me with this, and makes me think on second thought
maybe it's not such a good idea, is you can then just always do 'discern
instakill else attack' and at that point you might as well just have the game
always instakill if it can on your attack since you are basically removing the
element of human error anyways
---[Ejderha on 9/8 @ 16:32 writes]:
I think Danquik's last point above is really good, and makes me not like Veyil's
idea much at all. I think the original report solutions are all good - they will
require some cleverness to use well in order to regain that 1.5*ping time, but
would be doable. I think my preference is for Sol2, but that might be because I
think discern spam is annoying.
---[Xenthos on 9/9 @ 02:59 writes]:
I have to agree that I don't think being able to do a server-side if/else is a
great idea on this at this point.
---[Veyils on 9/9 @ 18:31 writes]:
Well right now you can do that if you have good enough ping Danquik. You can
discern/assess on every action and respond accordingly. I know of quite a lot of
the american side folks with good connections who perform every action based on
assess/discern triggers. Its not viable for folks with a delayed response time.
In game if statements would level the field I guess.
---[Aeldra on 9/11 @ 11:45 writes]:
Hmm, I am not sure how I feel about the solutions. I agree the problem exists. I
generally would wonder if we would not at least remove the third party line on
discern then to prevent people just being spam-fed on the receiving end. Hmm,
maybe solution 2 with a 0.5 second delay, so you would basically be checking it
once while you're off balance / right before you think your eq comes back...
thinking about it, generally solution two is my preferred to this. You'd
basically have to time it around your ping and your perception as to when you're
going to get balance/eq back, but it might be a good thing. Server side ifs: on
the one hand cool, on the other hand I agree with Danquiks assessment of their
problems. They'd need some form of cost attached and then we'd be putting people
with bad pings on the bad side again.
---[Shedrin on 9/14 @ 14:04 writes]:
I wouldn't mind server-side script like that. I don't think it'd complicate
things any more than it is, just move things from client to server. Otherwise
any other solution doesn't seem like it could address the problem as well.
---[Shedrin on 9/14 @ 14:04 writes]:
I wouldn't mind server-side
---[Veyils on 9/14 @ 16:11 writes]:
Yea I mean in general folks with good ping can run their entire offense off
discern/assess where as folks without can't. Server side IF statements would
remove this in the same way that stratagems remove the command delay.
---[Ciaran on 9/15 @ 14:09 writes]:
Just to note, you could achieve something similar by making all mana/ego/health
instakills do nothing on fail (no balance/power loss), but I'm not convinced
that it's actually good for the game. To counter my own feeling, people with
really low ping never really have to worry about this though since they can just
trigger off discern and be confident that it'll work. It's just awkward. You
can't really balance around different pings. Low ping will have a big
advantage, or we end up oversimplifying everything. /Sorry for being rambly.
I'm still not sure how I feel about this.
---[Moi on 9/18 @ 04:08 writes]:
I honestly like Veyils's suggestion in the comments best. Out of the provided
solutions, 2.