Suggestions

So, I've been thinking about this a lot recently and I feel like a lot of people are going to be against this, but please hear what I have to say. I feel it would be really beneficial to players, particularly disabled players, if we had an auto-battle system for the coliseum.

As an example, I have a group of conditions that affect my bones, muscles, and joints. (among many other things, but those aren't relevant here) Because of this, I have limited mobility in my hands, and repetitive activities (like continuous mouse clicking) are very painful and put me at risk of damaging/injuring my hands. There're even risks of muscle tears and dislocations, which aren't uncommon things for me.
Because of that, doing things here like battling in the coliseum, playing at the fairgrounds, interacting with familiars, and putting things up for auction are very difficult and painful for me. I'm also incredibly broke most of the time because I'm not able to make money very often, sigh.

Side note: I can accept that there probably isn't much that can be done for the fairgrounds aside from like, making them much easier and more rewarding and therefore require less time and exertion. Though I don't know how open to that others might be. Also maybe there can be a page for petting multiple familiars at once, and a page for mass-auctioning things? I feel like that could help with those issues.

As for the coliseum and auto-battles, I don't know much about coding but I'm sure this would be pretty difficult and take a long time. But it still would be tremendously appreciated if this eventually became a feature in the future.
As for how it would work, it would probably need to be customizable so that dragons can generate breath, use a pre-selected ability, generate breath when it runs out, continue using the same ability, etc etc. If we wanted to get fancy we could possibly even register patterns to have them use their abilities in a (more or less) set order, or even set strategy guidelines for what style of battle they should focus on.

And to anyone who might be thinking "but then the game is just playing itself!" or "that makes things too easy!", auto-battles only really help with grinding. Your dragons wouldn't be able to do anything they couldn't do without you, instead they'd just be mindlessly using their abilities. Even if someone were doing the grinding themselves, it would be pretty much the same thing, mindlessly clicking up and down and up and down, for potential hours. The only difference is that being able to put the game on auto-battle gives people who normally couldn't grind the chance to do so, so that they can enjoy the rest of Flight Rising without causing themselves severe pain and risking hand injury from all those small, rapid, repetitive movements.
I mean, a lot of RPG's are trying to cut out needless grinding or offering auto-battle mode, right? So why can't we have that here, in the interest of being more accessible to us disabled folks? And I'm sure even non-disabled people are having a lot of pain and could potentially injure themselves from the coliseum.

Thank you.

@SoloMali

I'm very unsure about this. Autobattle could be very easily abused by players that wouldn't need it. On the other hand I can see where you are coming from. I injured myself from constant colitraining during a very intense push.

Would a keyboard addition for the coliseum help you? quite a lot of people support being able to controll battling through the keybord instead of the mouse. This would help a lot of people while still requiring them to actually sit in front of the coliseum and do something.

Support. Sort of. This goes along with my suggestion to reduce clicking because most actions require 3 to 4 clicks to complete. I don't have a disability, but I do agree that spending significant time grinding or training does make my hands ache sometimes.

There are a couple of things that might make auto-battles in monster fights difficult. I do play an MMORPG that does allow this as long as it's not a multiplayer situation that requires input from more than one player. So Monster Battles is ideal in that respect. As far as I can tell, the game I play "learns" your preferred moves in mob fights and uses those when you click the auto option. Otherwise it defaults to certain presets that make sense to the system for using your basic skill, special attacks, and enhancements based on your "energy" available and move priority. Maybe something like that could be implemented here.

BUT the difficulty I see is that in this other game, the targets are random. You can't choose, like you can here. I don't know if your target preferences could be learned here or not. That seems like a massive amount of programming to me. There's also the issue of potions, which the other game just ignores in auto mode. There is probably also a problem with fleeing. The other game locks you into a battle until you or your enemy is dead, so that's not an issue.

I REALLY like the idea of using the keyboard. It still requires you to be at your device to press the buttons, but you wouldn't have to move your mouse all over the place, which would reduce some pain and fatigue. The other game I play also has this implemented, assigning certain numbers or letters as hotkeys for specific action slots. You can use the keyboard or the mouse/touch option as it suits you without having to toggle between (both are always active).

@Ismaiel, @Stormhawke

Keyboards, unfortunately, don't work for me. Just holding my hands out over the keyboard puts a lot of strain on my hands, arms, and shoulders in a way that's very damaging to the muscles etc in them. Plus there's the issue of having to constantly press keys in addition to that. Most people with my condition/s, as well as other conditions, have this same issue.

I fully support hotkeys for other people, but it isn't a solution for all of us.

Edit: Oh also, I don't really understand how auto-battle could be abused but could you help me understand that? I didn't even consider, to me it just seems like cutting out needless repetitive motions.

[quote name="SoloMali" date=2015-08-29 11:11:52] Edit: Oh also, I don't really understand how auto-battle could be abused but could you help me understand that? I didn't even consider, to me it just seems like cutting out needless repetitive motions. [/quote]Automatic actions simplify scripting for bots.

@SoloMali

Maybe there are different ways of outobattling out there - I'm not sure. The one I'm thinking about would be a option in the coliseum or the account where it says 'autobattle' and then you'd just have to select a venue and everything else is done by the pc/device.

It could (well.. will) be abused in the way that peopl start up autobattling and leave the pc online while they go to school/work etc.
They could let the coli battle on its own for up to 23 and a half hour. From rollover to rollover.

It would completely crash the system -serverstrain and economity wise.

I hope we can find common ground and a solution that somehow requires the players input but reduces it so much it is not taxing on players.

@Ismaiel

Mm yeah, that's understandable.

How about being on a timer that requires players to restart every 30 minutes or so? Or something to that effect so that you can't actually leave your computer unattended, but you don't have to be constantly clicking/pressing things to make any progress.

Or how about requiring the player to press continue after every battle or even few battles? Even with RPG's that have auto-battles, you still have to run around to encounter monsters, it could be similar to that.

No support for automated battles, reasons:

• Devaluates Coliseum drops because drop chances can be compensated with extreme amount of time.
• Devaluates exalting by taking out the variable of time, making XP farmed irrelevant.
• Any check against passivity can be broken by mechanical or scripting measurements.

Flight Rising is a game focused on various activities. Making these activities passive contradicts the game's purpose. If you seek a game that you can play passively with as few input as possible, then Clicker Heroes, Time Clickers or Tap Tap Infinity might be a better choice for you.

@SoloMali

The game requiring you to click/choose 'next' would defenitely be something. Maybe coupled with a 'redirect' every hour or so that the player has to navigate away from that 'prooves' that there is a player on the pc and not a machine wildly clicking the same spot were the next button comes up.

That would still require shoving the mouse around but it will be significantly less then mooving it constantly.