I fully understand that people would want to be able to pause a hardcore game and I would like to enable it. The question is how. There are issues of practicability and also of effort required to do it. So here are the options:
- You can exit the deathlands when you are in the spawn-area. There would not be a portal (since I cannot rebuild it every week) but a command that checks where you are. Effort: Small. Practicability: Limited. You would have to come back to the center each time.
- You can exit the deathlands wherever, by command. When you re-enter, it will teleport you back to the place you were. Effort: I am not even sure it’s possible. There is a risk that it would teleport you always to the surface. I can try surely and see how it works. Also, this version would require to check for your health. I don’t want people to bail on a fight. Practicability: 100% – if possible.
So what I will do now is to implement version 1) since version 2) would require 1) to be in place anyhow (i.e. a command). Let’s see how that works and then see if version 2) is needed and possible.
To prevent option 2) as safe belt in case of battle/whatever, it may be accompanied by player losing all their inventory (dropping them, actually – whoever finds them, takes them).
That could somewhat balance “leave from battle” scenario. If someone wishes to pause, let them be in a safe place, remove all inventory and then teleport out with command.
Also, teleport command shouldn’t be possible more frequently than, say, once an hour.
a) Emptying the inv. is very tricky. I cannot make people drop the stuff. I can only wipe it. b) anything like a timer is also very work-intensive. So I rather just check that the health is high (80% or so) and otherwise disable the command.
Some thoughts about PVP in our hardcore world:
– As it is not a RT synchronised event, people will always be able to log off from a battle anyway, whatever level of health. Battle log-offs are frowned upon in hardcore worlds, but here you can’t prevent it, because there will always be real life situations interfering (at least for me ;p).
– You can be fleeing a battle and still have health higher than 80%.
– If we ever make this ultra-hardcore (as I think we should ;p), then you can be at 3 hearts left of health for a long time before you manage to make golden apples/potions, without being engaged in any fight.
– Some people might not be willing to fight.. if you corner them into fighting anyway they will not play. Alley suggested a penalty for each kill, for example.. :).
– If we go ultra-hardcore, then even if the other party logs off or flees, at least you have the satisfaction to have injured him, as hearts will not be free.
– One solution to the problem might be to have a scheduled end of game “meet-up” before the reset, in which all survivors are tp’ed in a closed or very small zone and sort it out.
– I am sceptical about alliances, I think it’s better if each player has the same chances.. I would prefer to ask for no alliance, no material/information exchange. Only form of cooperation would be truce (people seeing eachother not fighting).
Otherwise, at first option 1 seems like a pain, but it also has an interesting kick to it: it kind of forces players to stay relatively close to spawn and therefore increases players meetings so maybe it’s not all that bad in the end :).
I think I just did ultra-hardcore. I disabled health-regain. Please check if it works and tell me if there is anything else that needs to be done to do ultra-hardcore.
I took a jump and sacrificied half a heart of my health on the hotel of science (I’ll probably lose more later for much more shameful reasons).. and it did not regenerate, so it seems we have a functionnal ultra-hardcore world :)
Watch your steps, turn up the volume for skellie sounds and look out for gold!
Note: if people find it too difficult, then we might alternate regen-hardcore/ultra-hardcore.
Thanks anyway for setting this up so fast for us to test.
I think it makes more sense to have to travel back to the spawn in order to leave the Deathlands. It gives a more vanilla feel to it instead of teleporting, and also gives Unc a break instead of working out the second idea. :)