Response to Brokkr

Ok.

So, there’s more than one kind of griefing. One is basically, “holy shit I can abuse this by rolling up a high strength dwarf and randomly kill people...hehe.” Someone obviously put thought into that. That’s high strength griefing.

There’s also “I didn’t get the character I wanted, so imma go out with a bang!” griefing. That’s where a player gets stats vastly different than what they had in mind. They don’t necessarily bop someone over the head in a tavern. They may pick a fight and poison someone or get involved with a populated clan to start, let’s call it drama, until they get killed off.

You make a better balanced stat mechanic and/or give people the ability to more or less make the character they wanted from the beginning, you eliminate some of that.

Man, talk about selective reading to straw man me. I definitely put in my post "not defending the way strength works".

But I get it, you've got a brand to protect here. So keep shilling your rhetoric instead of conceding a point here and there.

Sometime last year, some joker made a number of dwarf warriors and went on a PKing spree. Due to the way bludgeoning weapons work, a character with EX/AI strength will typically knock someone out in two blows if they hit one of the stun locations (i.e. not limbs). Since most characters don't walk around the city armed, it was trivial for him to just step up to someone and attack them, killing even skilled fighters in two combat rounds. Since the first hit usually reels, there was nothing the victims could do. He was able to walk right into the Gaj and kill people sitting at the bar faster than NPC soldiers could even run into the room and stop him. Not sure who all died this way, but it was enough to the point where people still talk about it like 6-7 months later. I know one was a fully branched ranger with maxed parry and so on. When a newly created character with a stock bazaar weapon can waltz into the bar and instakill skilled fighters, something's wrong with the code.

It's not just about that particular griefer, though. Throughout the years, this sort of shit has happened too many times to count. That one case was just the most egregious example because it was clearly someone just all-out griefing with throwaway dwarves, suiciding them to take out a number of chars that way. It's by no means the first or the last time we see max strength characters do absurd things that equal the kind of coded power you would normally expect of high-karma options. I've tried it myself and it's completely ridiculous how much damage you can do just because you rolled top strength. Doesn't need to be AI, either. Exceptional is good enough to two-shot the average human char with etwo bludgeoning, and if you take a heavy combat class and you prioritize strength, you're almost guaranteed EX strength.

People mention things like poisons or locking someone into your apartment to kill them, as if the existence of these other methods of PKing solves the game's problems with unbalanced strength. Does it really need to be pointed out why that makes no sense? For one thing, the only poison that is immediately deadly is peraine, and you don't just get peraine. Anyone who has actually worked with peraine knows that it's something you save for the most important occasions. The other poisons take time to work and can be solved with a tablet. The target might resist the poison. You have only a chance to proc poisons and could go half a fight without doing so. Paralysis has a chance to break with each subsequent hit. Meanwhile, doing huge damage with every swing is universally useful, takes no effort, can't really be countered except with select spells, and isn't some rare and expensive luxury that you keep in a special sheath for the day when you need to maximize your chance of winning a fight.

And most importantly, strength works marvellously with most of the other killing strategies. It's not like you need to choose between strength and poisons, and it's not like locking the apartment door makes the victim drop dead instantly. You still have to win the fight, and if you're hitting really hard, you're way more likely to win the fight. Backstab is a lot less deadly without high strength. Archery gets a damage bonus from strength, not from agility. The inflated damage that comes from high strength is responsible for far, far more succesful PKs than poisons and archery and all the other shit that can be used. There's a reason why dwarves are the preferred race of twinks and powergamers, and why half-giants are the "endgame goal" for shitty roleplayers who need some coded gimmick to lend them relevancy.

You don't have to have high strength to kill somebody, but if you don't, there's a very limited number of ways you can do it, and if you do have high strength, you'll have a much higher chance to succeed unless your method is fireballs. I'll fight an elf with a heramide dagger over a human or dwarf with max strength and a storebought club any day of the week. That elf's gonna poke me for three damage and I'll have thirty seconds to either kill him or run away somewhere he can't reach me, or just swallow a tablet. That dwarf's gonna take me out in two or three blows, and odds are good that if he got me while I was unarmed, I'll be reel-locked from start to finish.

high on his own farts, is friday makes another nonsensical post that fails to address anything of meaning. incapable of forming any independent thought, he instead attempts to ape back a 'no u' by responding to my 'you missed the point post' by accusing me of gaslighting/strawmanning/whatever other buzzword he pulled from reddit this week.

wow it's weird how a 0 day character with high strength is able to PK people so easily. i can't believe he was able to do that without poisoning them in a locked room, riposte is supposed to equalize this stuff!!!

another dumb and disingenuous post from the gdb's brightest.



your post was a strawman. like, an actual strawman, not what you call everyone else's posts when they point out how dumb you are and cite reasons why you're wrong. hence why i made fun of you for going "NO UR STRAWMANNING ME" and using words you don't understand but saw other people use on the GDB. i literally pointed that in the first two sentences:



multiple posts later and you still can't prove the existence of your made up antagonists.



hey, check it out, we can put into context to the statements i was rejecting! it turns out I was pushing back against your retarded mewling that 'strength prioritization is not the optimal strategy for people who use hide/sneak'! because (surprise) it is!



you then try to address the clipped quote with this:


oh ok. what is this point for strength, what is this exact number? i'm very curious to know, because it would completely contradict the code. calling it right now: isfriday will never give a number.



incredible. who would have guessed that while trying to PK someone, you should work as hard as you can to quickly incapacitate the person? amazing, we got a bonafide genius on our fucking hands boys. recruit allies to help us kill someone? holy fucking shit, someone call the pentagon and let them in on this awesome secret!



imagine being such a bumbling fool that you try to call someone out for posting "too quickly" while ironically doing the exact same thing. that is isfriday, the man with the child-like mind that is here to give us pro-tips on PKing like "use poison" and "block the exists". Weird cool, okay. Pretty flex, bro.

As someone that also likes to masturbate to my own sense of intellectual superiority, a slow gentle stroke will generally get better results than the furious, barely intelligible spewing you're going for here. I know it doesn't seem like that in the heat of the moment, but just try it. I think you'll find your dick will thank you.

You might follow Jeshin's example.