Chat and combat log

[CMaster]

This is nothing some intelligent design couldn't render a non-issue. Wow is far 'busier' and the combat log is still of use in that.

I could be wrong, but I don't think automatic weapons are especially common in WoW? Being shot at by say, two spider bots, or stacking barrels up on chaos cave mobs would result in a combat log that is exceptionally fast scrolling, to the point where it wouldn't be useful to the player. There's also questions to be asked about which information to display - if you turn on the current logs, you'll see about 6 lines of info per hit (depending on a few factors). Not all of those would be desirable in a live update, but you have to pick which. These issues could all be worked around, but I think it would end up as a misleading/unhelpful abstraction by the time you'd actually got to the point where the logs were actually readable.

[borl]

This is still pretty simple to solve with sensible data consolidation and presentation.

Edit: Although the more I think about this, the worse the ratio of effort to benefit seems, what with all the changes the client would need.

[CMaster]

This is still pretty simple to solve with sensible data consolidation and presentation.

Not really simple. Rather fraught even.
Yes, you can consolidate the data.
But the more you do so, the more abstracted it is from what's going on and the less actually useful it is.
So, the rapid-fire weapons issue can be smoothed over, because all rapid-fire weapons are burst-based. So you could report the total damage for the burst, rather than the individual hits. However, what if you also wanted to provide some information about damage resistance - would you use an average value? The combination of resistances changing over time (and they almost all do) and the fact that not all shots in a burst hit mean that the damage from each burst is going to seem oddly inconsistent. What about when each hit applies a DoT effect? Report that for each hit, or just DoTs in a burst? What about DoTs over all? Report for each "tick", or just a summary at the end of each DoT? (Either way could get a mess when dealing with a heal + stacks from something like the AK). The AoE issue - summarize by just reporting total damage done - almost a minimum of useful info there - but imagine the number of reports you'd have to deal with otherwise. It's quite feasible for an APU to stack up 4 or 5 barells, each damaging 10 targets every "tick" - and some of those attacks may then lead to multiple targets DoTed.

Again, you can compress, consolidate, discard elements of this to get it to something that's actually processable by humans rather than moving at silly speed. But at the expense often of either removing any information that would actually be useful, or giving players rather misleading impressions about what's going on. My call on it is to say "stick with floaty damage numbers".

[borl]

Apologies for the short reply, I'll expand on this later but I need to rush out. You are focussing on the consolidation aspect, and the idea of a scrolling log. Consider presentation also, maybe have a look at WoW addons such as Recount. Although this is why I made the point about adding complexity to the client. The main issue here is that a simple solution would be needed in order to be easy to implement in the client... but a more complex solution (in terms of modification to the client) would be required to actually be of any use. I flat out disagree that a solution is impossible though.

[CMaster]

Apologies for the short reply, I'll expand on this later but I need to rush out. You are focussing on the consolidation aspect, and the idea of a scrolling log. Consider presentation also, maybe have a look at WoW addons such as Recount. Although this is why I made the point about adding complexity to the client. The main issue here is that a simple solution would be needed in order to be easy to implement in the client... but a more complex solution (in terms of modification to the client) would be required to actually be of any use. I flat out disagree that a solution is impossible though.

Yeah. I guess with filters, graphs, etc you could do a lot with it. Although it starts to feel more like doing statistical analysis than playing a pew-pew game. Course, it's then not easy to implement something like that well in the really clunky interface that is the Neocron RPOS.

Maybe a nice, long-term goal for Neocron devs (once worst of bug fixes and balancing is out of the way) would be a major interface overhaul, the target being more of an API that player-developed interfaces can connect to, than any "one true interface" itself.

[borl]

Lets take a stab in the direction of as simple as possible to implement, just to see where we end up.

Uh... F13 now brings up a rpos menu item for simple stats gathered by the client locally. An item description style box which shows how much total (session/lifetime?) damage your character has taken, broken down by damage types. Nothing fancy. This would be good enough to help anyone work out what damage types they were taking from different mobs in PvE at a glance. I can't say I wouldn't use it from time to time.

[borl]

I can't say I didn't have NC3 in mind more than NC2 CMaster