Shattered Kingdoms

The grind problem is more that the combat doesn't require much involvement. Fighting classes pretty much just watch the screen go by, when not bashing a spellcaster. Magic classes get to hit the up arrow to repeat their last spell. If there were any reason to change your mood or aim as the bettle progressed, that'd be more entertaining.

But changing combat is hard. I'm in favor of increasing the number of quests, myself. In particular, there are some interesting NPCs to kill, like the tower priest in the Trefani (sp?) keep near at the Northern/Uxmaln border. Virtually no one does because it's terrible XP given the difficulty. But if there were an XP bounty, that'd make a good one-time adventure. I believe we have lots of places like this, and it'd be significantly more fun and RPish than killing the same NPCs over and over and over.

Unless you're like me, and you're spamming it, and then you die because you can't stop in the middle of combat and type flee


Which leads me to this suggestion: I would love a "stop" command. It doesn't make sense that if someone sends you a tell in the middle of concentrating on a spell you stop immediately, but you can't even stop yourself from uttering words once you've begun to think about them? Wouldn't you just put down your hands and stop casting the spell? This would have saved me an FS flag.

How hard would it be to implement a "stop" command?

Sadly, not trivial, because of how the Merc codebase was originally written to handle timed commands. I could do it, but it seems like a lot of effort for not very much gain.

I think it would be used frequently.

Far more frequently than pemote.

Any player who's played a caster can probably tell you of a handful of times that this would have come in handy.

When I played, I used pemote all the time.

Well, in your absence there is a void of pemotes. Come back, Baldric!

I'm not sure if my thoughts on this are valid or not ... but here goes ...


I don't accept that fighters just stand and watch the screen during battle. For one example, they spam the 'bash' command just as much as spell casters will spam a spell.

I don't agree with a 'stop' command.

I believe it makes sense that a very difficult spell/prayer/action carries with it a lot of momentum, such that it takes a long time to happen and can't easily be interrupted in the process.

I take the point of spamcasting ... but actually ... although I do this myself ... this doesn't make a whole lot of sense ICly. I spam cast a prayer that fails often, to make sure it hits ... and once or twice I've died because I really should have stopped trying to hit and started healing ... but I take that as my fault for spam casting. In real life you couldn't line up 10 - 20 prayers ... and in any case, many times over I've seen the message "You abandon your prayer to flee" ... which makes perfect IC sense ... and seems to be what you're asking for with the 'stop' command.

Does this make any sense?

I've idea logged this before cause I totally agree!!

Pemote>stop.

*runs to hide from the incoming chairs

Pemote was a few lines of code. Adding a stop command would require rewriting a large portion of the command interpreter. Not equivalent.