Duel Engine

[Exile]

It's not so much an error more something that is troubling me, I was having a go on it just now and it occured to me with the relative balance of my stats in magic and strength there are situations in which it is favourable for me to be using magic as my attack type.

Take the duel I notice it in, PF vs Queen.

While I'm not certain of the numbers that determine damage 92 str versus 112 def is probably less preferable to 84 magic versus 60-something mdef I would think (I could be wrong still I suppose). Also I would note that it's not so significant to the high level duellers since they often go one way or the other in regards to magic and strength but it does affect mid-card fighters like myself.

Anyway I wanted to inform you of this since it was getting to me, perhaps it hadn't occured to you that situations like this would crop up or you knew but can't do anything. Either way this has given me some peace of mind on the matter, thanks.
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Cry woe, destruction, ruin, and decay -
The worst is death, and death will have his day.

[Milan Fiori]

The system is pretty basic and that's why it does that. It chooses the higher of the magic or defense stat and attacks with that. If Sars ever decided to make it more advanced, an option of what to attack with might come into play or other factors.
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Be awed by our prowess!

[Exile]

I know it chooses your attack based on which of magic and strength is highest, your post really didn't give anything new to me at all. My point was to question whether it was conceivable to code the fight to take place using the higher discrepancy between magic and mdef or strength and pdef and whether or not that would even work in all cases remains in doubt to me at the moment (since 500 str versus 400 def would probably do more damage than 202 mgc versus 100 mdef even though the magic discrepancy is higher and that's before you start thinking of the difference between a devastating (400+ str) critical compared to a normal critical you get from that magic score).

It possibly bears a little looking into anyway if the admins think it's at least a feasible idea. With all the work they have to do already it doesn't matter if they don't but there is the potential for this to work in the engine and as it can decide battles it could be important that it works to it's fullest capacity for the overall enjoyment of that too. The duel engine is good as is, I enjoy the stats and having a fight with people who annoy me in the forum I'm just thinking of things to improve it possibly is all.
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Cry woe, destruction, ruin, and decay -
The worst is death, and death will have his day.

[Wataru]

Well, I know it's not that easy to figure out which discrepancy is really higher. Look at it this way. Two fighters duel each other. Each has 100 strength, 100 magic, 50 defense and 50 magic defense. The difference between each is 50 points, so you would assume damage is equal, right? Wrong.

MDEF soaks up magic damage a lot more than DEF soaks up physical damage. A lot more. FOr a long time I was doing 0 damage using magic to attack opponents with a lot lower stats than me. This may seem like magic is a bad stat, but, as SARS Ad-Minh said when I PMed him about my 0 damage probelm, it is usually much easier to raise magic than it is to raise strength. So I guess it all comes out in the wash.
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[Exile]

I do get that Wataru, honestly. Mine was a very basic example because I don't know how the actual formulae work so I'm obviously not up to exploring what kind of things it would take to in fact do this, SARS knowing that is the one able to look and see if this is feasible. Like I mentioned I don't have a clue if this is too difficult to do or not but I was just putting the idea out there.
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Cry woe, destruction, ruin, and decay -
The worst is death, and death will have his day.

[Aurelien]

PF, the problem is that the duel engine was meant to be quite a simple way to determine the duel winner. It's not meant to be complicated like you wanted it to be. So for the example of PF vs Queen duel, if you use magic, you'd probably deal less damage than if you use physical attack simply because as wataru mentioned, MDEF protected the duelist a lot more than DEF.

Another example is duel between you and me. Your MAG minus my MDEF is still higher than your STR minus my DEF. Yet, I bet you'd deal 0 damage if you use magic instead of physical attack (that deals 6-10 damage to me). So disperancies between magic or physical isn't really necessary the one that determines which attack would deal more damage.

To know which one deal more damage, the duel engine has to calculate both physical attack and magic attack, and then compare the two to decide which one deals more damage. While it is possible to do so, I think it'd be quite a task to change the system especially at the moment where the admins seem to be quite busy already with the potch system, exploration results, and battle results.

So I think it's not *too* difficult to do (it's definitely possible), but I don't think it'd be modified in the near future. And technically speaking, if we want to make things to be even more realistic, we might be better using iscalio's Duel Tournament formula (maybe a little bit modification) because it'd actually give a chance of weaker members to win and not as pre-determined.
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~City-States of Jowston and Tinto Republic~
06.06.2004 - 20.01.2008

[Exile]

I know it's quite simple (well, in the way it picks which attack I wouldn't want to belittle the overall workings and formulae) I'm just trying to make life difficult for SARS and complicate things, heh.

I thought about what you stated earlier about choosing the highest damage by calculating both and picking the bigger but I realised that would double the amount of work the system is doing, that's not something I'd like to encourage since it might slow down other things. To what has been brought up about the difference in the effectiveness in mdef and pdef I cannot refute, it's a good point I didn't think about, glad a couple of you brought that to my attention. While I think this idea of mine might still have some useful implications somewhere down the line like I said before I'm just thinking of things that might improve it rather than saying it's an error so much, probably could of put this in the site content discussion now I think about it but then less people would have replied I bet!

[Beecham]

I should point out, if this is the method to determine the winner of a duel for the battle system, it might be important for PF's suggestion to hold some weight. To be as fair as possible. Of course, not knowing how to code in php, I don't know how difficult this is any more than PF does, so don't take this as a criticism of the existing system or in any way a demand on the administration's time. Just a suggest is all.

[Aurelien]

Harukaze, unfortunately, it has always been more about practicality than total fairness (not to say that it's unfair btw). So while PF's suggestion does hold some weight, it's not *that* important at all because the current duel engine is quite fair and most definitely not unfair.
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~City-States of Jowston and Tinto Republic~
06.06.2004 - 20.01.2008