The state of infusion

[Klapaucius]

The current way infusion mechanics play out doesn't sit right with me. I like the idea of territory control, but I'm not remotely on board with what's actually happening. This is prompted by the multipliers that were used to bring a tile from 500 evil to 500 good in a single raid. That's 6 people spending a full AP cycle on active infusion just to be able to plant a SH again.

My core issues with the current infusion system:
- active infusion will never be fun (I know this is a biased opinion, but it's also objectively true :p)
- putting feet on the ground to take control of an area shouldn't be actively detrimental like it currently is
- The balance is out of whack, and there's a bunch of extreme multipliers to passive infusion which lead to unreasonable situations
- No-one should be losing over 1000 points of infusion from being raided
- Passive infusion being tied to xp means that xp-rich characters do a lot of infusion, and xp-poor characters do very little. Finding mechanically absurd ways to maximise xp leading to also maximising infusion is a bit silly and inherently breakable IMO

Here's my proposed revamp:

Step 1: Remove active infusion completely

Step 2: Revoke the current passive infusion mechanic
- Divorce it from the xp system completely
- Remove all skills that affect passive infusion, except maybe the current infusion skill and greater infusion. These can have the effect of giving 1.5x/2x passive infusion respectively. There isn't any need for massive class/character differentials in this space, it should be about faction/alignment coordination, not leveraging a bunch of skills IMO.

Step 3: Add new passive infusion triggers:
- Just standing on a tile: +1 ever 4th tick Physical presence should be the biggest factor
- Killing someone of a different alignment (i.e. they're infusing to a different alignment to the tile) on a tile: +5. if you kill someone before they've been there for 5 hours, they lose infusion overall
That's it. Encourages factioned players to camp out to infuse, but therefore also encourages factioned players to hunt down enemies, particularly in their own territory. Revitalize hunting skills and hiding strategies at the same time. Win-win-win IMO.

Bonus step: Add some factional objective based methods for infusion:

For instance:
- Getting raided: -100 infusion or so. Some counterinfusion is fine in this situation. That would be total of ~200 points of infusion lost from losing a raid, including the kills. So if you get raided 3x in a row without staying in control of the square for any appreciable period of time, you'll lose the square. But you'll never end up at like 500 infused in the opposite direction as a result.
- factional defense event: basically a king of the hill style situation where a faction nominates a place and time, and it becomes a battleground at that time. The faction surviving on that location after the battleground becomes active gets a big infusion dump there+on the surrounding tiles viewtopic.php?f=14&t=326
- Outposts. You plant an outpost with a ward and forts. If you defend it for 24-48 hours idk exactly, the 5x5 square around gets infused, by like 500 in the centre and less in the outer areas. This allows a faction group to coordinate an infusion dump, and gives other factions a chance to nip the problem in the bud.

Note the theme of these is that all types of characters can usefully participate. Support, pets, attackers, tanks, scouting, and PLANNING are all going to be essential for success in these types of events.

[Goliath]

Overall, it sounds interesting.

[Lychwood]

I agree with a lot of things here, and have a lot of thoughts bouncing around about it that I'd need some time to work up into a proper response. I will say that I strongly agree with your basic premise: infusion capability should be more or less the same for all classes, and the main factor in success should be player organization rather than optimizing your build composition for it. If this is supposed to be a meta-goal everyone is invested in, then everyone should be able to meaningfully engage with it.

I also really like the idea that physical presence should matter. This is probably the best lever we have among the existing mechanics to encourage people to get out of their SH and into the broader map. Once you push that angle, I think it will help things like barricades feel less superfluous. If you're trying to manage ward-less pseudoforts, barricades are gonna be a must.

On top of that, I think that some kind of visible or trackable interface to see the territory shifts in real-time would make a big difference from an engagement standpoint. If people can see the fruits of their labor they're going to be more incentivized to keep going. I know it's probably a *bear* to code, but having a minimap of the plane color-coded by alignment (red-blue-green or what have you) would get people infusing just to see their little region get bigger.

[tremor3258]

While I like this for individual tiles, do you have suggestions on what to replace the mass tile holding endgame powers DOs in particular currently get?

[Stoopkid]

While I like this for individual tiles, do you have suggestions on what to replace the mass tile holding endgame powers DOs in particular currently get?

I don't think this needs replacing. The benefits are only to the DO and any DOs they are vassaled to and it requires a lot of upkeep to hold a territory above 60% evil. If anything there should just be a similar endgame mechanic for good holding territory

[Wassail]

All these steps look really good to me. I agree it would incentivize more interesting gameplay and strategies as already described above and remove some of the 'gaminess' right now which leads to the aforementioned weird strats to maximize or defend from infusion. (Ie, I'm an Archon, I'm going to do 5 damage exactly to farm defusion with my word up, I'm going to reroll mortals to heal for 2x infusion, I'm going to split my large faction in two so there are less bodies in a SH, etc).

Two additional suggestions -

Keep tile flipping XP, given to the passive infuser. This further incentivizes claiming and boots on the ground. Not sure if infusion would still bounce but if it does and that flips no XP for that.

Make bloodhound and psychometry cheaper or just roll them into infuse (or sense magic!?). This involves more people in the winning mechanic without them having to pay CP for it. Which most are unwilling to do.

[RKBBQ]

Really liking all of Klap's suggestions. Just wanted to +1 it before putting more thought into a full response, but I've been thinking something along these core lines too. Active infusion is awful, and time-based passive infusion makes things much more fun.

Every action should have a meaningful counter that has meaningful recounters, and this model does all of that, while also incentivizing out-of-hold gameplay without making holds worse (and also makes holds a powerful tool for establishing beachheads, which encourages raids). No notes.

[Southall]

+1 to almost everything in this thread.

I'd be a lot more invested in the infusion meta-game on both sides if it involved actively playing the game more - leaving the SH is something I'd love to see incentivized more. It'd unlock more build diversity - at the moment hunting/survival skills feel superfluous to the raiding meta, and this gives them something to do.

"If this is supposed to be a meta-goal everyone is invested in, then everyone should be able to meaningfully engage with it." - Lychwood's hit one of the core issues with infusion on the head - if you want to play the infusion game, you need to:
1) Pay a minimum of 20 CP to play the game, and another 20 CP for meaningful QoL on info, and another 30 CP to see under the hood.
2) Give up on progressing ranks if you want to contribute to the active infusion game.

If you want to help your faction progress in the active infusion game and you're a no-rank or low-rank character, it's a bad experience. You're paying a CP tax and making no progress towards off-setting that tax. High-rank characters can afford to dump all their resources into the infusion game, but it feels like a punishment for people who haven't been in the game for a long time.

Some of these features seem like major overhauls that'd be impossible to implement by this breath. But stuff like having physical presence contribute the most to infusion (passively infusing every tick just by existing) seems smaller in scope, and would go a long way towards making infusion feel more like a natural part of the game, rather than encouraging gimmicky abuse cases.

[tremor3258]

Genuinely if the infusion game is supposed to be the big end game should have never given mechanical benefits to only one side.

[Alkasyn]

IMO as-is, it's a boring mechanic that I'm not interested in participating in.

The proposed changes would make it so I participate in it via things I'd otherwise be doing. That's fine.