Traps are a bit stupid :D

Deichtine

Traps are kind of stupid.

I've just recently taken up tracking and been playing around with it to get a few numbers on things and such.

Trapping an area is such a big advantage, no ones going to deny that, for any kind of event its a huge delay for the attacking team to push through traps to get to the enemy. Even if you have a number of trackers with you its still a balance to take down the trap. Similar to breaking melds.

For wild nodes/domoths/villages or such I could pop up there early and trap the entire place and then I could easily hop around and force my enemy to trip/deal with every single one of my traps.

Personally I'm not seeing why a tracker should be able to give such a big advantage to their own team by acting days or like even weeks in advance. It's not like you can put a meld up there two weeks before hand can call it a day.

Also I've been timing it and it can take roughly twenty minutes to disarm and retrap an already trapped area. Which sounds like a lot of fun doesn't it

I was thinking why not make it so that all traps are taken away at the start of an event? The village code has it available to trigger to remove traps on a certain event so it dosn't seem like it'd be that hard(hopefully) that for example once a village/wildnode/domoth starts all the traps are removed from the area.

Traps would still be useful and powerful and if you give your enemy 20 mins to trap up the entire area then sure they get an advantage, if not then smart use of a smaller number of traps would still be very useful for a team but its no longer a case of the entire area is spam covered in traps.

I know a lot of people like keeping them up 100% for defense of cosmic/elemental etc planes so they can still do this but

What would peoples thoughts on this be?

Enyalida

I agree. Page @Xenthos.

Shedrin

Keep in mind Report 1534 has been approved: "Solution #1: Make all traps per-room instead of per-exit. Make pits fire on room entrance, not exit."

This will make traps less onerous, though may not completely solve the issue.

Deichtine

Shedrin said:

Keep in mind Report 1534 has been approved: "Solution #1: Make all traps per-room instead of per-exit. Make pits fire on room entrance, not exit."

This will make traps less onerous, though may not completely solve the issue.

The same issue is there, its still a huge delay etc. That change just fixed the in room combat pit spam to counter tumble and such.

Falaeron

Make traps decay after a reasonably short amount of time (30 mins?)

Enyalida

There was a report up to that effect already.

Xenthos

Enyalida said:

I agree. Page @Xenthos.

I thought you were an envoy.  Do you not read envoy reports?  You know, the ones where I argued that traps are too strong and could use changes-- and not changes that make them stronger?

PS: Being able to trap an entire area up for your team in a few seconds is making them stronger.  Making them per-room instead of per-exit is a good first step.  We can see where to go from there.

PPS: Removing traps from event areas is fine, and I don't think you will find much opposition to that.  My opposition to auto removal has been more in terms of defense and the like-- an enemy force walking in and full pitting an area in 3 minutes is way, way too much to be either fair or fun.

Synkarin

just make traps not decay in your own org area. Defense problem solved

Deichtine

Synkarin said:

just make traps not decay in your own org area. Defense problem solved

Reset on event start or non decay in home territory would sort of work out the same give or take, either sound good.

Deichtine

I mean it seems like everyones sort of in agreement with this in general.

Make it so!

Enyalida

Be chill. I agree wïth his premise. When the same problem with some of the same solutions came up in a report, you did not support it. Therefore if @Veyils wanted input it makes sense for them to get some from you. Go on the attack all you want though.  

Synkarin

Reset on event (domoths, wildnodes, village revolts, flares)

Non-decay in org territory (so defenders have them up)

Anything else decays in 1hr

Also - maybe the coalbin thing should only allow one free comm pit a day (instead of unlimited free pits)

Xenthos

Enyalida said:

Be chill. I agree wïth his premise. When the same problem with some of the same solutions came up in a report, you did not support it. Therefore if @Veyils wanted input it makes sense for them to get some from you. Go on the attack all you want though.  

If by "some of the same solutions" you mean "none of the same solutions."  Veyils isn't suggesting an auto-decay timer (which was the part I objected to in that report, for the reasons stated above).

And I did, in fact, support solution 1 of that report.  So, basically, you really did not read the report before making commentary. 

Leolamins

Synkarin said:

Reset on event (domoths, wildnodes, village revolts, flares)

Non-decay in org territory (so defenders have them up)

Anything else decays in 1hr

Also - maybe the coalbin thing should only allow one free comm pit a day (instead of unlimited free pits)

Alternatively a simpler solution is just to reduce the effect of the pits.  Remove broken legs from pits, reduce stun time or reduce climb time.  

Leolamins

(Out of combat for a while so no idea of the state of play and if this has changed)  However if room effects are being looked at, demesne effects are the really over powering effects.  These should be addressed in parallel rather than creating another imbalance but removing one skills power but leaving the other in place. 

Deichtine

Pit traps just have a 4 second climb out time there's no afflictions or stuns to them. its more just the sheer delay they do.

Falaeron

Tbh if you land in a pit with even a single enemy in the room you probably want to climb rocks.

Shedrin

Pits do stun and break a leg if you don't have levitation.

Breandryn

TIL about levitation

Rivius

I thought I made a report asking for traps to decay in non-org territory that got a lot of backlash. Hrm.

Anyway, one trap per room sounds interesting. Might make things a little more fair.

Xenthos

You made a report asking for traps to decay everywhere, including org territory.  You also made an original version of that report and deleted it, wiping all the comments, which was the biggest part of the backlash.  Yes, a comment later talked about not auto decaying in org territory, but that was not a part of the initial proposal-- and it is not the same as an area being cleared at the start of an event, either.

Shedrin talked about possible options ahead of slapping up a report and came up with some things almost all of the Warrior envoys liked (I think only the UG objected to the one-per-room).  I absolutely agree that one per room should help streamline things, and hopefully make tracking less of a "primary" skillset that you are doing all the time in favour of being a support set.  We should be able to make further adjustments as needed, but I am anticipating this being a pretty fundamental change to the trapping meta.

While not explicitly stated, I am also pretty sure that it will cause a one-time wipe of all traps in the game.  Don't think there is a good way to convert from one system to the new... certainly not one worth the coding time.

Luce

I was thinking it'd probably just be switched so that moving forward each pit made or maintained would check per room instead of per exit and then the old ones could attrit naturally so the comms (such as they are) aren't wasted. It'll be confusing for a bit, and some places will still be OP, but eventually it'll settle out properly.

Enyalida

Xenthos said:

 Do you not read envoy reports?

"Solution #3: Add in a decay time for pits if placed in territory that is not within the 

trapper's organization. I suggest 4 hours at this time. In this way, trackers need to 

constantly be proactive about pre-pitting an area, rather than have traps be active for 

weeks at a time. Alternatively, have the pits deactivate over this time and simply require 

reconcealing rather than disarming."

Xenthos

You do realize that you can edit reports after writing them up, until the 15th, right?

Do you not know how this works at all?

Edit: And to edit, as I originally stated, he had another version of the report and deleted it and all its comments in their entirety so that the admin wouldn't be able to see our concerns with what he was proposing.  Heck, since it was deleted we can't even copy/paste snippets from that one here, as it is Gone.  So, yeah.  There was backlash.  And it is pretty understandable that there was, in my opinion.

Enyalida

You can comment on reports in their final form from the 15th all the way to the end of the month. The point of the pending to finalized period is to solicit comments on how to adapt and improve the listed solutions in the report. You then have a period of up to 16 days to comment on that final form. That's how this works!

Regardless of the comments on a previous version of the report, the solution presented by people in this thread to satisfy your concerns WAS in the final version of the report - if you actually read it. It and other resolutions to the issues you raised were brought up in the comments and promptly ignored. 

Anywayyssss. Decay timers are a good idea for a lot of reasons, and making org territory traps not decay is a pretty good compromise. There are other possible solutions or refinements that would resolve objections to decay timers, but that's a pretty good blanket start. I also rather like removing traps on the start of events. With the changes to melds dropping on the caster's death and earlier changes nerfing the power of shrines in conflict areas, things have overall moved gradually away from pre-made insta-fortresses, which I believe will in the long run make combat more dynamic and less reliant on having a small core of people who do nothing but constantly prep the entire game so that they merely have to show up to swing a massive advantage to their side. So yeah, let's do that stuff. 

Shuyin

Yeah, then we can go back to helping me destroy bixes.

Shaddus

Lerad already destroyed scrying, so why not.

Xenthos

Shaddus said:

Lerad already destroyed scrying, so why not.

Lerad did not destroy scrying.  He wrote a report to try to address a random ninja change implemented by a programmer that was not announced, asked for, or even really wanted by a lot of us.  Instead of just undoing the ninja change, they decided to go with the current situation.

Would have been far easier and better to just put it back to where it started, imo.

Luce

Wait, what?

Deichtine

Xenthos said:

Shaddus said:

Lerad already destroyed scrying, so why not.

Lerad did not destroy scrying.  He wrote a report to try to address a random ninja change implemented by a programmer that was not announced, asked for, or even really wanted by a lot of us.  Instead of just undoing the ninja change, they decided to go with the current situation.

Would have been far easier and better to just put it back to where it started, imo.

What Luce said? I'm curious about what happened?

Xenthos

The admin gave us all a mindfield artifact to buy.  After a couple of months there was a ninja change so that if either party was on Prime, Mindfield (both artifact and skill version) stopped working unless a declare was in effect.  This basically disabled both because all someone had to do was go to Prime before farscouting (because who declares before scrying, and who declares the person scrying them?).

The report was intended to address this change to require declaration on the side of the person being scried that was neither announced or asked for.  The end effect of the decision was to swap need-to-declare from scryee to scryer.

Would still be better to just put it back the way it was to start.