Shattered Kingdoms

The code change is simple -- if the user passes a second argument as one of the enchantment types, then the enchantment only succeeds if that particular type is rolled -- otherwise, the "Nothing happens" clause is implemented, and the current level / number of enchantments remains the same. Fading and blowing up still occur at the same rate as traditional enchantments.

The reason is also simple: enchanting is one of the few real time sinks left in SK; and unlike its spiritual successors, we're not paying to play, so there is no real reason to put us into a Skinner Box and force us to press the lever.

A sample scenario: my priest desperately needs more willpower to avoid being put to sleep, but any gear that I enchant invariably either winds up with a pile of resistance, or several enchantments of fortitude and protection: while these are typically desirable attributes, to my end they are a complete waste of time. As it stands, I've acquired a set of "great willpower" items which will take up to four enchantments with a reasonable degree of success, and over forty iterations I was never able to achieve even two added willpower. The whole of the process consumed well over eight hours during a week-long period. Ultimately, this has led to a decrease in game time predominately due to the overwhelming sense of frustration associated with this pseudorandom but necessary task.

The ability to type "cast 'enchant armor' belt willpower" and only succeed in willpower enchants would drastically lower the amount of time and "reacquiring" trips I have to make (and frustration / hours wasted) to gain said items, and ultimately allow me to enjoy the otherwise rich experience of SK.

I tried hard, very hard, to argue for this.

I discovered, during the heyday of my crusade, that many agreed and, in fact, had gone before me.

I finally and tragically realized this was not going to happen any time soon.

The impact to game balance could be a reason. The philosophy of time investment in payoffs could be a reason. The coding overhead could be a reason.

All the reasons in the world do not change the fact of the current situation, and you have my support and sympathy for wanting such a feature.

I will disagree with you on some points, though. This game is all about timesinks, and this is demonstrated in the time requirements for holding items and titles and even immortal status. When I played a sorcerer, I, too, thought briefly that enchanting was the only timesink. And then I learned about rare items, about grinding out GM, about the lack of any offline seeker systems for allegedly player-run organizations, and so on and so on. Not to say any of these are inherently bad, evil, or good.. just that they inherently exist.

Any environment combining random chance and time will reward invocations of the law of large numbers. The only negative reinforcement to spamming anything in this game is that your time is lost, and in the case of xp, ambiguous instances of diminishing and capped returns.

Dulrik has expressed that he believes gains, especially advantages, must be purchased with blood and tears.

Turn the chess board around, though, and consider who WOULDN'T wear a suit of 400 saves if this system were in place? Forced arbitrary scarcity is one of the most ubiquitous and fundamental balancing elements in this game.

While I personally believe the playing philosophy of the SK community is more represented by constructivist social environments, I doubt debating that is anything you wanted to do when you substantiated your very sound line of reasoning. Games are at their very core about wasting time; I cannot agree with the article's sentiments that some sort of skill development is the be all end all of game quality. Case in point: who respects people who can count to six and click lifebloom? Who respects charming Lathron? Who respects lifting 500 lbs? All skills are not equal. It is a poor standard to judge a game on.

I have come to believe the problem with the enchanting experience isn't so much the time itself as it is the opportunity cost: some of us simply do not gain satisfactory fun units from the time units we give to the process. Rather than making the process take less time, perhaps there could be other more accessible ways to make it more fun-per-unit-of-time? Doing something over and over again doesn't have to be seen as soulless and evil. Just look at sex, for example. An "eight hour grind" can be something to look forward to.

I will also give you a piece of practical advice: life is a Skinner box.

Your proposed change would have dramatic and unnecessary effects on game balance.

There are only a few spells that make it necessary to enchant your armor. This is because, once affected by these spells, a character has no recourse and is, either practically or actually, already dead. Granted, they don't all have the same success rate or deadliness, but they share in the finality of their effects. They are:
* Sleep
* Finger of Death
* Petrification
* Charm Person

Rather than buffing enchant armor, I'd suggest just bringing the casting times, success rates, and secondary avoidance chances (mostly just applying to charm person) of these "I win" spells into line.

If you buff enchant armor to solve an imbalance issue with these few "I win" spells, other spells like blindness, slow, weaken, curse, etc. etc. will get unnecessarily wimped. All of these debuffs have easily obtained countermeasures that a character can carry around, adding layers of tactics and preparation to the game.

Alternatively, one other suggestion I've heard that I thought had merit was to remove enchant armor entirely from the game, again weaken the "I win" spells, and all of a sudden you have a reason once again to go exploring (assuming some balance were applied in terms of loot quality vs. area difficulty). The problem with this one is that it requires a lot more tweaking.

My two cents.

I agree with jhorleb. The problem is that you HAVE to enchant your suit, and that's only the case because of certain spells. These spells should be harder to resist.

Charm person is the big one, imo, and still needs a massive nerf.
Sleep is the next biggest offender and deserves a nerf.
Petrification and FoD might be okay as they are, but a slight nerf to success rate might be called for.

Finger of Death, but for that one triple scroll, is not something I often hear complaints about.

Charm person should be split into two spells: charm NPC, and charm player. The balance issues are very different for either category. We ask too much of the mechanic to be balanced across such a diversity of applications.

I cannot speak to the mechanics of sleep, save for that they are annoying to be a victim of.

Removing enchant armor would promote a massive brokering of information and hoarding of items. There is already a huge pile of useless objects in the game: why add to it through a change like this?

Or, if I'm just honest:

Removing enchant armor makes my dress-up characters even less viable in combat.

Good point about removing enchant armor grep.

In terms of the "I win" spells, I agree that it's really just charm person and sleep that are the main culprits. I just wanted to point out all of the instakill spells for comprehensiveness' sake.

How is sleep so bad? Maybe back in the day when a successful sleep spell meant a shaman or necromancer could throw every malediction in the book on a character, but now any action automatically wakes a character up.

Unless you botch it up like I did the last time, a successful sleep (especially when cast by a sorceror) should = death because you have a chance to kill everything else in the room and then wake/bash the sleeping person into oblivion.

In order for sleep to be death, it must be followed by a successful one-hit-wonder, in your argument.

That scenario is more telling of bash than it is of sleep.

I wrote out a long post about how to nerf sleep, petrification and charm person in good ways, but then I remembered that enchanting is [REDACTED] and needs to be fixed. Enchanting is definitely the stupidest thing that remains in the game right now, and has been the reason that many old, great players have quit: Because they didn't want to spend 10 hours enchanting or bugging someone else to enchant their stuff because they got jlooted by someone on a power trip. Honestly, I'm surprised to see so many veteran players come to the rescue of the enchant armor spell. They, of all people, should full well know that it's mind-numbingly boring and game-killing.

For sleep, staves of it, especially the Mira staff (wtf were you smoking Mira?), are the biggest offenders by far just because of their unlimited potential combined with zero concentration cost in group PvP. There shouldn't be any sleep staves in the game above level 40 or with more than two charges.