that already exist in my UI....
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Excellent. I'll admit that I am not very familiar with the intricacies of the interface you developed. Something about the Enhanced Client makes me feel uneasy, so I do not use it often.
A crucial part of the goal is to educate the player about the game. Help them understand the mechanics and use that knowledge to prepare themselves for future endeavors. One of the most rewarding aspects of games like UO is accomplishing something, without looking up a step-by-step guide on the ins/outs of the task. You should only need to seek help if you get stuck. In addition to indicating the monster's toughness (Barding Difficulty) and slayer vulnerabilities, you could also indicate which damage type to use against it (its resist weaknesses) and its damage type dealt (which resists to have on your armor). A player would benefit more with this information, than to have it buried within a complex formula behind an arbitrary number.
This is the general information I believe to be useful for hunting:
- How tough is it?
- Barding Difficulty is a good indication of this.
- How can I do the most damage per swing?
- Its Weakest Resist allows one to maximize their damage by targeting that resist.
- Its Slayer Vulnerability allows one to add more damage increase to each hit.
- How can I best protect myself?
- Its Damage Type indicates which resists need to be the highest, to reduce the incoming damage.
- What spells can I expect to be hit with?
- Knowing which spell skills (Magery, Necromancy, etc..) it uses mitigates any surprises during the fight.
- Does it use poison or other special attacks?
- Knowing how lethal its poison attacks are allows for better preparation and mitigates surprises.
If someone remains ill-prepared even with this information, then there is some other intangible factor in play. I have seen alot of people just simply assume something based on other, unrelated games/sources. For example, I often see characters easily dispatched by a Cu Sidhe. They will run up to it, get bit really hard, get bleed attacked, bit again in their panic, and die. Once I resurrect them and discuss what happened, the most common assumption is that it deals physical damage, because it is a "big dog" like in other games. Any seasoned hunter/tamer can tell you that in fact they do not do any physical damage, rather 50/50 cold and energy damage. With the information above, that player may have taken some steps to better prepare them selves for the Cu Sidhe.
Your present UI in the EC is fine. Devs should have just taken the essential parts from it, included it within the default client and called it a day. I fear all these nonsense "extras" are just gonna add bloat and actually degrade the user experience. Don't add stuff for the sake of adding stuff. Keep it simple and keep it good.
Barry Gibb I like what you say 
That sort of info sounds useful, trying to go further than that may not be good for the game and is certainly going to be very difficult to do reliably.
Maybe do the sort of info display that Barry is suggesting now and then see about adding the difficult bit later?
I've a feeling that toons differ so much in their skills/equipment/buffs that it wont be possible to do a reliable comparison.
The Old Man
That sort of info sounds useful, trying to go further than that may not be good for the game and is certainly going to be very difficult to do reliably.
Maybe do the sort of info display that Barry is suggesting now and then see about adding the difficult bit later?
I've a feeling that toons differ so much in their skills/equipment/buffs that it wont be possible to do a reliable comparison.
The Old Man
This is basically already there in the target info
as I said: do not mistake my UI with the new default one
The title of this thread peaked my attention... I'm a mathematician by trade. In particular, my job is to turn data into insights.
I truly believe a player is their own best judge on which monster they can wrangle. You can give a new player an awesome character and the best suit ever made, but if they don't know how to use it, they won't even be able to take Barracoon. However, there is a HUGE utility in providing that player a way to compare monsters, say, "If you can kill an orc, you can also probably kill a troll, because they're similar in difficulty." I recommend you move forward with this latter approach.
What I'm seeing is there's a lot of different ways to implement this. When I start thinking about the details I wonder...
Which is more difficult: a troll or an orc? and Why? What sets them apart? How about a lich and a demon?
Often times, the most difficult part of a project like this is simply gathering the data. When the data doesn't exist, we have to farm it. Here's an approach for a more robust solution than just simply looking at barding difficulty:
That's my 0.02.
I truly believe a player is their own best judge on which monster they can wrangle. You can give a new player an awesome character and the best suit ever made, but if they don't know how to use it, they won't even be able to take Barracoon. However, there is a HUGE utility in providing that player a way to compare monsters, say, "If you can kill an orc, you can also probably kill a troll, because they're similar in difficulty." I recommend you move forward with this latter approach.
What I'm seeing is there's a lot of different ways to implement this. When I start thinking about the details I wonder...
Which is more difficult: a troll or an orc? and Why? What sets them apart? How about a lich and a demon?
Often times, the most difficult part of a project like this is simply gathering the data. When the data doesn't exist, we have to farm it. Here's an approach for a more robust solution than just simply looking at barding difficulty:
- Survey current players for the difficulty of a decent number of mobs (everything from a serpent to Navery and beyond); ask them to rank the mobs' from 1 to N in terms of difficulty. After compiling the surveys and comparing them to the monster's stats, you will likely find some trends (e.g. creatures with STR<200 are exclusively in the bottom 1/3, those with necromancy are ranked significantly more difficult than a comparable mob without necro). Using these trends, you should be able to create a function --one that can give you a weighting scheme for the mobile stats/skills. This should provide an reasonably accurate, player-informed rating of a mobile's difficulty. A player can then say to themselves, "Well I took down a 5 yesterday, maybe I could try a 6 today!"
- When a player dies, log the names of all mobiles actively aggro'd to the player, log the "So and So was killed by a _________" message, log the player stats/skills, and log the player location. You should be able to use this to get a rating on a.) the most deadly mobiles, b.) the most deadly locations. You could use this data to inform a 1-to-N list of most difficult monsters based on a particular skill set, and then just do a lookup of that list when a player wants to know difficulty rating.
That's my 0.02.
This statement is spot on. Monster difficulty is highly subjective. The real trick is to turn a set of subjective data into an objective result. @LowdownandShifty has presented (what I believe) to be the only way to proceed with a monster difficulty assessment, using an user jury, beyond simply using the barding difficulty as a benchmark. An User Jury is a very effective (yet time consuming) method of soliciting feedback on a complex system, since it naturally incorporates various backgrounds and skill sets (i.e character templates and player skill).
@The Old Man has an excellent suggestion in post #104. Present the core monster data first, then work on adding the difficulty assessment bit in.
Ummm, thieves always have been...at least on Siege. Bring back perma grey!!!...la