Mark Libenson wasn't a very social man. Living almost the entirety of his life alone with as little interaction with other people as possible. For him, Quest Online is his true home.
But - why make the magic system that way indeed? Well, the only thing I don't agree with is level-locking access to this feature to max-level - everything else makes sense. Of course the arcane abilities would use their own language. Of course it would be a pain to wrap your head around how it works. It's called the goddamn arcane, isn't it? If you're going to be a master of it, of course it's going to take effort and years of time.
One thing I often - practically always - see in video games that feature magic of any sort, is that if you're underleveled for a particular spell or ability, you can't use it at all. That doesn't make sense, does it? A 10yo can't drive a minivan (can he both see the road and reach the pedals?), but it shouldn't stop him from trying to. The results would probably be either hilarious or tragic, but such is life, isn't it?
*** edit 2020-05-08 *** In other news, a ten-year-old actually stole his parents' minivan and went on a merry car chase (going as fast as 55mph/90kmph the wrong way) with the police. He took his 4yo sister along for the ride. Kinda proves my point, doesn't it? *** /edit ***
Attempting a spell you're wildly underleveled for should result in totally unpredictable effects - including MP exhaustion, HP damage, possibly even death. If you're just slightly off-par however, it should usually work, though at reduced effectiveness and increased MP cost.
The intent was that you had to craft the spell perfectly for it to work. If even a single character were out of place in your coding, the spell would fail, and you would lose the XP invested into its creation. There was no debugging program available to prevent this.
Now that is unreasonably severe. I mean, an XP cost that would be forfeit for not being able to pull off a critical coding success, on top of all of the hours spent on crafting it? Also, as a programmer myself, that's a handicap I'd consider "breaking" for the functionality, making the entire thing generally not worth going into at all, unless you could gain administrator-equivalent abilities through it!
Writing good code takes time, effort, and repetition - even if you are good enough to mostly get things right on the first try. Out of all the other coders I know, I know exactly none that would be able to pull this off without investing hundreds of levels into failed attempts, and exactly that number of them would be willing to give this a go more than once after learning of these penalties for failure. And some of these people I consider some of the best (though I'm aware that only really speaks to my ability, not theirs...), and in my mind - if there's anyone who'd have a good chance of succeeding in this endeavour, it'd be one of them.
I'm pretty sure all of them, despite some being avid MMO gamers, would consider this "not even barely worth the effort" - especially considering that the initial cost (which I assume would only increase for upgrades) is already literally the highest XP cost in the game.
I'm sorry, but this doesn't sit well with me at all. Such a feature would only be geared towards people who literally spend their entire lives in the game, and how many among them would be able to pull all of this off (including taking extra time to pre-spec their stat progress so that the character wouldn't be useless for this purpose)? It's like the devs don't want people to use it - by making it punishingly difficult bordering on impossible. In my opinion, there'd realistically be at most two gamers capable of using this to any effect, at any time.
Also, if this really works like a programming language, then the code to create a spell is probably incredibly complex in symbol meaning relationships. I mean, if you can't copy-and-paste stuff around, you either need to have a dictionary at hand, or the code needs to be compact. I can't imagine trying to code several dozen pages' worth of complexity, in a situation where I can't debug it w/o cost, can't export and copy-paste... this is ridiculous! I'm not sure the human brain is geared towards storing and processing that sort of complexity, no matter how good you are. It's just not in our nature, and I doubt 200 years are enough to influence this by a meaningful margin.
Though, in the end, I'm sure there'd be at least one forum where you'd hire people to run XP for you, and where you'd discuss this coding language, include stuff to copy down... and eventually some kind soul would just create an online generator. You can't put a "kill code" inside a language that would discern what it's being run on, unless it's incredibly interwoven w/ the game code itself! Any sufficiently advanced simulator should be able to replicate the virtual machine, and that'd signify the end of that particular race...
Hmmm, sounds interesting. Will wait for more chapters before I read though.
wwwwwwwwwwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttttttt.............. JESUS-KUN WTH ARE YOU DOING IN THIS FIC!?
Big Hat Logan.
I can already tell this story is going to be fucking fantastic just from this first chapter
That sounds familiar, somehow...
But - why make the magic system that way indeed? Well, the only thing I don't agree with is level-locking access to this feature to max-level - everything else makes sense. Of course the arcane abilities would use their own language. Of course it would be a pain to wrap your head around how it works. It's called the goddamn arcane, isn't it? If you're going to be a master of it, of course it's going to take effort and years of time.
One thing I often - practically always - see in video games that feature magic of any sort, is that if you're underleveled for a particular spell or ability, you can't use it at all. That doesn't make sense, does it? A 10yo can't drive a minivan (can he both see the road and reach the pedals?), but it shouldn't stop him from trying to. The results would probably be either hilarious or tragic, but such is life, isn't it?
*** edit 2020-05-08 ***
In other news, a ten-year-old actually stole his parents' minivan and went on a merry car chase (going as fast as 55mph/90kmph the wrong way) with the police. He took his 4yo sister along for the ride. Kinda proves my point, doesn't it?
*** /edit ***
Attempting a spell you're wildly underleveled for should result in totally unpredictable effects - including MP exhaustion, HP damage, possibly even death. If you're just slightly off-par however, it should usually work, though at reduced effectiveness and increased MP cost.
Now that is unreasonably severe. I mean, an XP cost that would be forfeit for not being able to pull off a critical coding success, on top of all of the hours spent on crafting it? Also, as a programmer myself, that's a handicap I'd consider "breaking" for the functionality, making the entire thing generally not worth going into at all, unless you could gain administrator-equivalent abilities through it!
Writing good code takes time, effort, and repetition - even if you are good enough to mostly get things right on the first try. Out of all the other coders I know, I know exactly none that would be able to pull this off without investing hundreds of levels into failed attempts, and exactly that number of them would be willing to give this a go more than once after learning of these penalties for failure. And some of these people I consider some of the best (though I'm aware that only really speaks to my ability, not theirs...), and in my mind - if there's anyone who'd have a good chance of succeeding in this endeavour, it'd be one of them.
I'm pretty sure all of them, despite some being avid MMO gamers, would consider this "not even barely worth the effort" - especially considering that the initial cost (which I assume would only increase for upgrades) is already literally the highest XP cost in the game.
I'm sorry, but this doesn't sit well with me at all. Such a feature would only be geared towards people who literally spend their entire lives in the game, and how many among them would be able to pull all of this off (including taking extra time to pre-spec their stat progress so that the character wouldn't be useless for this purpose)? It's like the devs don't want people to use it - by making it punishingly difficult bordering on impossible. In my opinion, there'd realistically be at most two gamers capable of using this to any effect, at any time.
Also, if this really works like a programming language, then the code to create a spell is probably incredibly complex in symbol meaning relationships. I mean, if you can't copy-and-paste stuff around, you either need to have a dictionary at hand, or the code needs to be compact. I can't imagine trying to code several dozen pages' worth of complexity, in a situation where I can't debug it w/o cost, can't export and copy-paste... this is ridiculous! I'm not sure the human brain is geared towards storing and processing that sort of complexity, no matter how good you are. It's just not in our nature, and I doubt 200 years are enough to influence this by a meaningful margin.
Though, in the end, I'm sure there'd be at least one forum where you'd hire people to run XP for you, and where you'd discuss this coding language, include stuff to copy down... and eventually some kind soul would just create an online generator. You can't put a "kill code" inside a language that would discern what it's being run on, unless it's incredibly interwoven w/ the game code itself! Any sufficiently advanced simulator should be able to replicate the virtual machine, and that'd signify the end of that particular race...
Welp. Discord made Quest Online. Confirmed.