Originally Posted By: Shadowraith
Hmm, this has shifted way off the original topic (still a good thread though).

So regarding party prompt, what would you envision it looking like?
So... moving this to a new thread.

 Originally Posted By: Harold
That sort of thing could probably be accomplished easier by prompt or combat settings that updated you on the status of party members in the room with you, I'd think. "Slowing down combat" or whatnot is great for reaction time, but apart from being pretty crappy in terms of fun (Great, now I have to wait for 5 seconds between swinging so I'll be here for 30 minutes) it's also not terrifically effective for keeping you up-to-date on your party's status.

Similiarly though, typing "party list" every round is useless. An updating status box though would be ideal if it could list a number of things going on at once in short hand. For instance,
  • Relative Health (same status indicators we currently use in party list),
  • Negative Status Effects (P for poison, B for Bleeding, KO for uncon, etc),
  • Relative Damage Being Sustained Per Round (colors on names would probably be fine here. White for no damage being sustained, bold cyan for little, cyan for some, green, magenta, blue, and red for massive damage per round),
  • Damage inflicting (Again colors might be useful here. The party should probably be graded amongst itself though, rather than the damage level being inflicted being shown)
among others I'm sure I haven't thought of.

I don't know how parties are concepted, but this group-combat option could be concepted as simple observable phenomena (Look, Drey's turning green. He must be poisoned.), calling out to one another (Luna yells, "It keeps retreating from my attacks, but is paying no attention to Sabu's!"), or magical means.

A box containing this sort of information that would pop up once per tick as a status update is what I'm envisioning. It should be streamlined so as to include the most information possible in the least amount of space. The forums don't lend themselves to ascii art, as they remove excess spaces automatically, but a pretty basic outline that allowed for user customization would be all that was needed really.

 Originally Posted By: Drey
If I want people to see my hp/max hp, I could do that but my devs and xp would probably be useless to most. If I were casting a lot of spells my mp, or % of mp left might be relavent. And I would think any alerts would probably be useful.

That way people could share, or not share information to their own liking.
I don't agree that there should be the same information available as your regular prompt, but some similiar information decidedly combat-oriented would be great. Instead of your hp/mp current/max, a percentage of health akin to what's displayed in the party list, or even just a color of the person's name for each 10% of life remaining as an indicator would be more appropriate. The same sort of indicator for mana remaining could be relegated to a box in front of the name of the person at 20% intervals since mana is less important to most people than health, in the heat of battle.

 Originally Posted By: carmy
The party prompt would be sexy, and being able to customize it is really key I think. I could see the party prompt being a really ugly mess of spam, the ability to streamline it in some way that suits everyone would be necessary, especially for big parties.

Actually, I think there should be a distinction made between party and combat grouping. Because, I've been in parties of 10-15 people, and I wouldn't want information about 15 people on my screen if I'm fighting with 3 of them. Maybe we should be able to select the players we want to see, or perhaps form a different grouping than a party...
Carmy makes a good point about the requirement that it be streamlined. Low/Med/Hi should probably cover most damage dealing/receiving, hp remaining, hits landing, or whatever else we determine would be good information.

I think a lot of good arguments can be made for giving raw numbers in this sort of command, but I would be fully against that. The idea should not be to min/max group combat until everyone's leveling twice as fast as they used to, but to make it possible to effectively group together for battle.

Returning to what I think a command like this would look like in practice (and keeping in mind that the forums will butcher anything I do here), I'm using the color coding of (from worst to best):
  • red
  • bold red
  • magenta
  • blue
  • green
  • bold blue
  • cyan
  • bold cyan
  • bold
  • none
for no other reason than I just made it up.

The *** indicates mana level. It's a percentage from 0-100.
Name exactly that, the player's name, but is color coded according to the intervals established above.
DIn is the damage received each round, and is relative to the damage all party members are receiving each round such that if only one person is being damaged at all, they are always taking High damage, but the color coding for this round goes up or down based on it's position as lesser or greater than the amount taken last round.
DOut is the same principle as DIn, but deals with damage dealt.
Stat is status effects, and includes things like stun(S), poison(P), burning(Bu), bleeding(Bl), drowning(D), crippling(C), unconsciousness(KO) or anything else that's having an effect on combat, health, or skills.

A sample I'm hoping the forums can handle:
*** - Name - DIn - DOut - Stat
84 - Drey - Hi - Med - PBlS
100 - Muod - Med - Hi - None
15 - Ruck - None - Low - None

In this example Drey is at 84% mana, 20-30% health, Sustaining high damage in compairison to everyone he's fighting with - but this round sustained substantially less damage than he did last round, is dealing Medium amounts of damage with respect to his party members - but this round dealt a good bit more than last round, is poisoned, bleeding, and stunned.
Muod is at 100% mana, 80-90% health, sustaining medium damage in compairison to the other party members - but this round sustained very low or no damage in compairison to last round, is dealing high amounts of damage - but this round dealt a great deal less than last round, and currently has no status effects on him. Etc.

I hope this helps, even if it's too long to read. heh
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