Climb Fence Bypass via Command Spam (2024)

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When climbing a fence, there is a chance to fail and remain in the current room.

There is also a chance you succeed and begin walking to the direction past the fence.

You can basically ignore the fail chance by spamming the climb command until you succeed.

Obviously there is the rule 4.A no command stacking.

However, the speed of spamming a command is subjective to players.

To remove any such ambiguity and create fairness...

I would suggest:

Add a timeout/delay when a player fails so they can not climb again until the timeout finishes.

Advanced suggstion:

Based on stats, the timeout might last a duration based on ability to regain composure, maybe they fell from the fence.

Maybe add more flavor the fail message if this is added.

But why. There is nothing to suggest a failure state (like a catastrophic fall that happens in other circ*mstances), and what failure means is going to vary based on the context. Did you fall off the fence? Is it always a fence? Does this apply to every possible context where a character might climb directionally, or does it make universal assumptions?

I don't understand the impulse that players so often have to want to time-gate actions that have no reason to be, especially when there are already guardrails and penalties.

Command cooldowns are dated design and make the game feel horrible to play and should be a development option of last resort where there is absolutely no alternative in my opinion.

Couldn't one possible implementation be exactly like movement from room to room.

Player begins walking in a direction. After a delay, they proceed into the next room.

In this case, player begins climbing. After a delay, they proceed into the next room.

Or after the delay, they fail and remain where they are.

Or put this another way: What problem would that solve or in what way do you think that would make the game more fun to play?

If a character tries to climb something once and is told 'you can't seem to make it', they might make assumptions about the context of that one event happening in a certain way and every other climb being comparable... but what about a character crossing the whole city and climbing five or six or twenty times, or another character doing the same but every day? Suddenly something that might've seemed simple cause and effect in one instance becomes a huge headache.

Movement delays and movement time outs are like the number one thing players point to as making the game feel unresponsive or dysfunctional, unless there is some major and widespread gameplay dysfunction that arose from climbing I can't see even more controls on it making gameplay any better.

But movement delay is literally part of the game?

I pointed this out because the immediate climb response of fail and ability to immediately reattempt circumvents the stat check being made to determine if you climb or not.

Just make the stat check occur after the typical movement roll. Then the player can immediately try again if they fail. All solved. And I hardly see how this is any inconvenience. This is literally the same as walking from room to room and changing the stat check to occur after the delay.

You've imagined a specific type of situation occurring (that not succeeding a climb means your character has fallen off a fence or wall or ladder or other climbable surface) but there is actually a really wide variety of contexts across the game for this type of movement and even this outcome doesn't imply anywhere a character has fallen which is a very specific outcome that happens with climbing already.

In other instances, climbing multiple times in somewhat brief succession is not only permitted but functionally necessary. I think longer cooldowns and more fail states on climbing would make certain activities and certain areas go from mildly arduous to outright dangerous without there really being any real reason for them to be.

Enforce stat roll outcomes or let players somewhat ignore stat rolls.

If a place is dangerous to cross due to this suggested change, it probably means its working right. It means a player who can't climb well who runs through a junkyard chased by dogs will have significant risk escaping when attempting to climb the fence.

Sounds like it is working.

It's more like there are already guardrails, both IC effects and rules (@rule 4.A isn't lip service, it's actively monitored and enforced), and more are not necessary because the leeway that players are given helps allow for many gameplay edge cases that are completely valid but fall outside of the specific scenarios you're thinking of.

Codedly fencing players in (pun unintended) through very narrow interpretations of how skills will be used should be an absolute last resort in my view, Sindome is an extremely complex and dynamic game and what a player can be doing moment to moment can be varied and require some slack from the code at times to not be too limiting of what should be plausible outcomes.

Code should, whenever possible, be enabling players to be doing interesting things rather than holding them back and burdening them with downsides for no real fun benefit. Downsides added for the sake of having downsides kind of plagued updates for a while and I would hate to return to that myself.

I will say that failure to climb these particular exit types (not all climbs are the same) already have a penalty for failure. It the higher the failure to success ratio is, the longer you will be delayed. It might not matter in a lot of cases but if you are running to safety and fail this check even one times that can equal death.

I am not against a very short timeout being added (no more than a second in my opinion). At the same time I feel that this really does need to be carefully considered.

I also think 0x1mm brings up important factors. It's not only that movement can be a bane to many of us for whom a tiny slip up can result in a loss, even death, to our PC. It's also something I recall being brought up frequently by new players. I understand why we 'pace' movement but it can be a pain in the ass. For everyone. Even doing mundane shings.