Next Fight Night:
Saturday, October 27 at 1600 U.S. Eastern (1300 Pacific, 2000 UTC)
Next Fight Night Builds:
Level 6, 16900 gold, Level Adjustment race required, no Prestige Classes. Levelup lever is in the start area.
Server Status:
Up and on the ADL.
Of note that the test server redeploys with the latest under-development haks server every night, even though it tells connecting clients to use the live version haks; this might result in quirky displays while creating characters. As a rule, you shouldn't take anything that looks suspicious.
(this won't be entirely consistent from week to week; we have some players who would like to participate for whom convenient times are mutually exclusive with convenient times for others interested)
Summary: On some nights, I host a small event on the ALFA Test Server, configuring it to point to the live version autodownloader for the evening and pitting fake/test characters against spawns. I try to make use of variety in these fights, so that I don't host an 'all undead' or 'all trolls' night, though the time it takes to set and reset fights means that an event will usually have three or four 'primary' fights, with resetting the fights with adjustments or coaching to see how it affects the outcomes. There are a few expected advantages of the event:
- It is fun in the actual sense of the word-- consequence-free violence in a familiar setting provides light-hearted amusement.
- It provides practice in combat for the player participants, making it less likely that they suffer a real character loss due to lacking player proficiency (as distinct from lacking character proficiency, which is a decidedly-more-valid reason to die).
- It provides insight into the behavior of the AI, both from Obsidian and the ACR, allowing for improvements and debugging of the behaviors in realistic scenarios.
- It provides a reasonably-controlled method to assess the actual challenge of known creatures from Dungeons and Dragons once they're translated to the specific medium that we play in (that is, not everything can be translated perfectly into the Aurora engine, and even if we do there are fundamental changes, like having real-time combat; the best we can say is that we'll try to get it close to what Forgotten Realms says it is).
- It produces templates for our DM teams (that is, I'm making things for fight night; I don't intend to keep them to myself).
-- Currently none.
Erfs to Come (and why they're not available yet):
-- Low-level hobgoblin adventurers (the tanks only meaningfully restrict one person's mobility)
-- Wraiths (they don't like using their touch attack; their touch attack will be a shadow's touch attack until the v1.89 release)
-- Zombified Soldiers (not quite as mindless as I would like)
-- Colliseum-style arena (scripts to prevent monsters in the pit from attacking people in the stands aren't working)
-- Hydras (require scripted way to get more than the default attacks/rd)
Results from previous fights in the replies, for interested parties.