General Various suggestions

Here are a list of various suggestions that I humbly put forth:

1. The Archbishop shouldn't need the spell that insta-kills creatures; by that point in time he's already incredibly powerful and can just kill monsters in a few shots. Also there is no incentive to level hell's ritual to any higher level, because it actually makes you *weaker* the higher level it is. Why would one want a spell that makes one weaker? The casting time is negligible anyway.

2. There ought to be better areas for gaining experience, other than the south.

3. The default text speed (non-instant) should be much faster (e.g. 3 seconds per paragraph). Typing -quest questname could replay the cutscene in slow-mo for the person who typed it.

4. Mana regeneration is so fast that there is nothing to do with it. My spirit is always full of mana. My hero is always full of mana. There ought to be items with interesting effects which require mana; e.g. items which activate lesser versions of the Prophet's shield, or Wands of Healing with slow regen time -- preferably a new item class like "tome" which gives you tomes which use up lots of mana.

5. The items available at the shop in the desert should probably respawn, so many players can get the same item in a very long game.

6. After people play for a bit, they stop caring about gold and items and just leave them because the items are so low-level. Low-level items should probably depop after a short amount of time to avoid map clutter.

7. Dispel tends to dispel good buffs. Dispel runes aren't useful. Likewise all runes except "Move Fast" are very underpowered -- e.g. it would be useful if the cure powerups cured a *percentage* of your HP.

8. Eventually the potions the chemist makes are no longer useful. After about 3 hours of play, only X-potions and Super-Ethers(?) and Nectars are useful, and after around 7 hours they're only barely useful; after you get the Ultimate Weapon, only Elixers are useful.

9. The Archbishop is a very evil character. It would be nice if there was an alternative to the Archbishop that was more good-inclined, e.g. an Archmage, that had the same teleport ability, but spells of a different flavor (e.g. Nature's Calling [summon], Time Frost, Sky Ritual [hell's ritual], Zodiac [same]).

10. The Archbishop's summoned units, when cast, block the pathing of the Archbishop. Ideally they should have very little size.

11. Almost all attack spells for all characters pale in comparison to the regular attack bonus you get when mastering and supermastering classes. After mastering a few classes, one can kill a corrupted treant in literally a second, but it would take a minute of casting your class's most powerful spell to kill it.

12. The "save string" (serialization of relevant gamestate) could use upper/lowercase characters for compression in case the string gets too long. For every integer x you want to save, with range between xMax-xMin=xRange, you convert the integer to binary (e.g. item1=152,item2=12; 256 possible items; squireLevel=5; 128 possible levels). Then you concatenate all the binary representations together ([binary for 152 with 8 digits]-concat-[binary for 12 with 8 digits]-concat-[binary for 8 with 7 digits]=10111011010110100110110*). Then you perform some sort of reversible hashing of the string if you want to prevent cheating. For example, one could apply a reversible hash function F to it with a range of between 0 and 62^X, where X is the number of characters you can fit in the -load XXXX...X syntax (so for example you know you will never need to serialize more than N bits of information, then you leave yourself M=N+10 bits to play with, and find a function that takes your original N bits and makes an N+10 bit string out of it; now any attempts to modify the code will be successful with probability 1/1024). Then you convert this number to base-32 using the characterset [a-z][1-6] (e.g. if M is a multiple of log2(32)=5, then take every chunk of 5 binary bits and convert it to a character, e.g. 00001=a, 00010=b, ... 10000=6), then add dashes every once in a while (e.g. 5 characters) to make it easier for people to enter text.

* = not necessarily correct, just made up a number that had the correct form

The net result is that you can now fit much more information. In the past you might have had "17-18-115-115" as part of your previous serialization code to represent roughly 8*8*8*8=3600 bits of information, now you can have something like "p9d" to represent 32^3=27000 bits of information. You can expect your serialization strings to shrink dramatically. Then you would be able to do things like serialize quest information, and have an option to remove quests that everyone has done. Or you'd have enough space to let people keep items on their Spirits of Gaya or keep items in their Houses.

13. Bug: Items do not sell for crystals when they say they do.

14. There ought to be things one can buy only with 80+ crystals. Things which aren't necessarily too powerful but fun, like teleports.

15. Bug: The ultimate weapon says it requires lv99 to use, but it actually requires lv120.

16. It would be nice if the quest to turn in the water materia did not forcefully take your water materia from you.

17. It would be nice if one did not have to reload each class every time one plays and click though choosing all the skills in order to get mastery and super-mastery. (Related bug: If you click through your skills quickly and acquire mastery, then switch to another class, you may not get super-mastery for that class. This is because there's a slight delay in checking for super-mastery.)

18. The game tends to constantly split everyone playing into two groups. This is probably a bug in the WC3 engine I'm guessing.

19. The turtle should be shareable, e.g. it should have an ability that is "Give control of me to target player". Or even better, there should be a shop with "[cost 5000 gold, 1 crystal:] Make a baby turtle that grows into a big turtle after its timer runs out."

20. The teleporters should also teleport your Spirit of Gaya (else they take a long time to path across the map). Teleport spells should also teleport your Spirit of Gaya for the same reason. One trigger which would accomlish this would be: "Is hero within X distance of his last location? If not, teleport his Spirit to him." (Currently the Spirit can act as a scout; if this is not desired an alternative trigger would be: "Every Y seconds, if Spirit is not within X distance of hero, then teleport Spirit to hero.")

Hope these random suggestions help. Great map; thanks.

[Titan]

10) Move the units?
12) Play 0.8.7.9
17) Its not a bug, you just wait until you acquire ult master..
18) Has to do with alot of the GUI triggers.
20) Thats actually a bug, gaya should insta port next to you. (notice if you run from your gaya, and get too far away, it insta ports next to you.

[Exitilus]

Sounds like some good, well thought out suggestions.

I agree mostly.