add a preparation time

[hulk]

French:
Il serai bien d'ajouter un temps de préparation 5 minutes voire plus ,a la création de posions et aux enchantements,
cela donnerais un peut plus de réalisme, et sa éviterais par exemple la possibilités
d’augmenter sont intelligence a volontés en allant acheter les ingrédients de posions d'intelligent a "Aunius Autrus" ,
il suffit en suite d’alterner achat d’ingrédients, consommé la posions ainsi créé en revendre quelque une pour pas être a cour d'argent.
et on fini par avoir une intelligent dépassent les 16000 , ce qui permet de créer des posions extrêmement forte.
si un temps de préparations étais ajouter avants l'ouverture de la fenêtre d'alchimie pour simulé le temps de préparation ...
les effets magiques non permanent serais annulé , et éviterais la montée en puissance des posions créé.


on pourrais aussi imaginée que boire plus d'un certain nombres de posions , engendrerais des grave problèmes (malus voir mort) , de la même manière
que lorsque l'on mélange les médicaments, des effets secondaires graves peuvent survenir.

En espèrent avoir étais claire dans mon explication.

English:(translate google)

It'll be good to add a preparation time 5 minutes or more a creation were asking and enchantments,
it would give a bit more realistic, and would avoid such a possibility
increase are intelligence wills going to buy smart were asking ingredients has "Aunius Autrus"
simply by following alternate purchase of ingredients consumed asked ourselves created resell some one to be a money courtyard.
and we ended up with a clever exceed 16,000, which can create extremely strong were asking.
if a time preparations were added fronts open the alchemy window simulated preparation time ...
nonpermanent magical effects would be canceled, and would avoid the rise of created were asking.


we might as imagined that drinking more than a certain number of asked ourselves, engendrerais of serious problems (malus see death), in the same way
that when mixing medications, side effects Gave may occur.

In hope to have was clear in my explanation.

[Greywander]

Ta traduction est plein de gaffe. Lesse moi voire si je peux fait mieux que Google Translate. Excuse mon français rouille; ça fait trop longtemps que j'avais le parle.

Translation by an [admittedly out of practice] French speaker:
It would be good to add of preparation time of 5 minutes or more to the creation time of potions and enchantments. It would add a little more realism and avoid the possibility of freely buffing your Intelligence by purchasing the ingredients for Potions of Intelligence from Aunius Autrus. Simply by purchasing the ingredients, consuming the potions created with them, and selling a few of said potions back, and you'll never be short on gold. And by the end of that you'll have an Intelligence of 16000 or more, which allows you to create extremely strong potions. If a little preparation time were added after opening the alchemy window to simulate preparation time... temporary magical effects would expire and avoid the increasing strength of potions created.

One could also imagine that drinking a certain number of potions might cause serious problems (even death), in the same manner that taking a bunch of medications can have serious secondary effects.

Hopefully I have clearly explained everything.
End translation.

I can vouch for the issue here. A while back I started playing Morrowind again and discovered just how broken alchemy is. It's literally the only skill you need in the game, as you can buff all your attributes to absurd levels which makes skills redundant. I remember being able to boost up to three attributes per potion by about 300 each for around 30 minutes. And these potions pay for themselves quite easily. As you can see, adding a simple preparation time of 5 minutes or so wouldn't actually fix the issue (since you can easily make potions lasting longer than 5 minutes), although it would lessen the effect. What it would fix, however, is another exploit involving using a spell to buff Alchemy/Enchant/Intelligence by 1000 or so for 2 seconds, long enough to open the window and craft 100 potions or enchant an item.

The other idea of adding negative effects when consuming multiple potions is a good one though, and one that already exists in Skyrim with the mod Chasing the Dragon - Toxicity and Addiction. Perhaps some of these ideas could be used to make a similar mod for Morrowind. That said, this would be up to modders to make, not the OpenMW team as it's not an engine issue.

[Chris]

That said, this would be up to modders to make, not the OpenMW team as it's not an engine issue.

I dunno, they way you're able to recursively create and stack buffs on yourself does sound like an engine issue. Create a Fortify Intelligence potion with a high magnitude and short duration. Drink it right before opening the alchemy screen, and make a better Fortify Intelligence potion (since Intelligence influences how good your potions are). Drink that, and make an even better Fortify Intelligence potion. Do that a few times, then you can make potions to fortify your other stats by thousands of points for several minutes.

The problem is, individually these things make sense... the smarter you are, the better potions you can make. And you can make a potion to temporarily fortify stats, like intelligence. But in tandem, it creates a feedback loop that the engine doesn't account for. And worse still, both of these things are things the game expects you to be able to do, so where does it stop being intended behavior and turn into an exploit? Where does it turn the game from being fun into being boring and unchallenging? Rather than creating freedom, it creates a restriction; it's telling the player "don't try your best, because you'll break the game". So for players that have fun by trying their best, it punishes them for it when they cross that invisible threshold. It's a similar problem I have with the lockpick minigame in Oblivion and Skyrim... it's easy for me to get through hard locks despite a low character skill, so it punishes me for trying my best. And one of the easier ways to fix it is to put a limit on it (don't allow attempting the lock when your character skill is too low for it).

Personally, I'd like to see a limit on the magnitude and duration of potions you create. Yes, this means at some point increasing your intelligence won't result in better potions. But TES games aren't designed to have your stats go from 0 to infinity, so having a limit where you don't get better at something as you go higher makes sense. Allowing the actual skill and attribute levels go higher will still be useful because it'll protect you from stat drains, but that doesn't mean you automatically get better at everything.

[SquireNed]

I dunno, they way you're able to recursively create and stack buffs on yourself does sound like an engine issue.

I don't actually think so. It's an error in a single little component in the game, and it's something that may not even be entirely unintentional. Now, there would be ways to get around it (hard caps, soft caps that make the exponential growth less important), but trying to alter the engine to work in a different way because of an exploit in a spell effect being applied through potions is a little silly.

Yes, there's a feedback loop going on, but it's the sort of thing that theoretically could happen (adding a potion toxicity like the Witcher or some hard limit would stop it, but neither of these things seem to exist in the Elder Scrolls universe). I'm not entirely sure I like the whole argument "we have to crush this thing that's a gameplay mechanic because people might ruin their own experiences"; I think it's telling players that "if you try your best, you'll find clever ways to go beyond what we expected". If you want to separate player and character knowledge, you can do that. I don't think player skill-based minigames like Oblivion's are a fair comparison here; if you want to not recursively boost your character, you can simply not do so, while you will pretty much always wind up being forced to participate in those skill-based minigames.

If you want to limit it, it could be a mod thing. I can guarantee that actually putting in a new engine-based limitation is exactly the sort of thing that OpenMW will not do, because OpenMW doesn't plan on being an engine exclusively to play TES games, and because it's the sort of change that OpenMW developers have stated again and again will not happen because it falls outside the scope of the project.

[DestinedToDie]

I don´t care for alchemy myself, but a lot of players love making those 10389642 for 29890 seconds int potions. If you stop players from doing this, they will simply play on the vanilla engine and ignore OpenMW because OpenMW blocks them from playing the way they want.

What you could hope for is the post 1.0 dehardcoding, where you can sever the alchemy connection to intelligence stat as a mod rather than a hardcoded engine change.

[aesylwinn]

Personally, I would like to see a mod that takes the toxicity route Greywander mentioned. Sure, you might be able to make a potion that raises your intelligence a lot, but you're not likely to take it if you'll die 3 seconds afterward.

[Cramal]

Maybe adding a variable "time spend when making a potion", and another "time spend when enchanting an object" can be a good idea.

Their default value should be 0.

But if a modder or a game-maker want to change their value, it would be easy for them.

However it looks like somehting that should take place in the post 1.0 hard-coding time.

[Chris]

I don't actually think so. It's an error in a single little component in the game, and it's something that may not even be entirely unintentional.

I think it is unintentional, since they fixed it (or at least made it harder to do) in later games.

I'm not entirely sure I like the whole argument "we have to crush this thing that's a gameplay mechanic because people might ruin their own experiences"; I think it's telling players that "if you try your best, you'll find clever ways to go beyond what we expected".

There's a difference between intended mechanics, unintended solutions, and exploits. Finding clever ways the developers didn't think of to solve a problem is one thing, but finding an exploit that gives you a clearly unfair advantage over the challenges the game provides is another. Otherwise, you can say the same thing about any bug that gives a player an advantage (should OpenMW fix the bug where you can get a 100% clear underwater view when you put the camera at just the right height? or shouldn't it be allowed to have a better underwater rendering method that doesn't rely on a crude "if(cameraPos.z < waterHeight)" check because it's a clever trick players found?). Any bug a player can unintentionally step into to create a bad experience for themselves is something that should be fixed, IMO. Don't forget that not everyone that'll play with OpenMW is a Morrowind guru who knows exactly what to avoid to keep from unintentionally cheating, and stumbling across such exploits can make the OpenMW engine seem buggy and unpolished.

I don't think player skill-based minigames like Oblivion's are a fair comparison here; if you want to not recursively boost your character, you can simply not do so, while you will pretty much always wind up being forced to participate in those skill-based minigames.

Like I said, fortifying your intelligence via potions, and having your intelligence determine how good potions you make are, are completely intentional mechanics the game is expecting you to use. The problem is, there's no measures in place to stop it from getting out of control. The only way to avoid it is to either not play with alchemy, or intentionally keep yourself crippled while using it (because if you're trying to avoid an exploit like this, you'll likely overcompensate just to make sure you don't accidentally do it, leaving yourself worse off than normal). It's the same problem with those minigames. You can either avoid the problem and just not pick locks, or limit yourself to such a degree that you're sure you're not getting into places you shouldn't with your skill level (which also means you likely won't try to get into some places you'd otherwise be able to if it was balanced properly).

putting in a new engine-based limitation is exactly the sort of thing that OpenMW will not do, because OpenMW doesn't plan on being an engine exclusively to play TES games

Which is actually a good reason for it to. People enjoy exploiting Morrowind out the wazoo and have a long history of doing it, which is why community attempts to fix bugs haven't been quite as successful at being standardized as later games, despite the numerous bugs that have been individually fixed and are constantly mentioned and asked about (nobody can agree on which bugs should be fixed, because different people like exploiting different bugs and don't want to see their's patched in the defacto patch compilation, so such compilations have trouble gaining traction in the community). But not every game OpenMW will handle is Morrowind, and not every game will want to be exploitable like Morrowind, so what can such games do to fix an exploit in the engine mechanics this without fixing the engine?

You are right in that it will likely never happen, if for no other reason than because few people would actually try to fix it. But OpenMW has stated it will fix engine bugs, and as long as this buggy behavior is part of the engine, it's a bug in the engine.

[SquireNed]

I think it is unintentional, since they fixed it (or at least made it harder to do) in later games.[/quore]

I'm not sure that's an ironclad argument. There was a several year gap between Morrowind and Oblivion, and a serious shift from the feeling of unbridled exploration to providing a more "polished" gameplay experience.

There's a difference between intended mechanics, unintended solutions, and exploits. Finding clever ways the developers didn't think of to solve a problem is one thing, but finding an exploit that gives you a clearly unfair advantage over the challenges the game provides is another. Otherwise, you can say the same thing about any bug that gives a player an advantage (should OpenMW fix the bug where you can get a 100% clear underwater view when you put the camera at just the right height? or shouldn't it be allowed to have a better underwater rendering method that doesn't rely on a crude "if(cameraPos.z < waterHeight)" check because it's a clever trick players found?). Any bug a player can unintentionally step into to create a bad experience for themselves is something that should be fixed, IMO. Don't forget that not everyone that'll play with OpenMW is a Morrowind guru who knows exactly what to avoid to keep from unintentionally cheating, and stumbling across such exploits can make the OpenMW engine seem buggy and unpolished.

I think that you're getting this blown way out of proportion. It's not like someone can unintentionally do something that they realize is a majorly cheesy method. Of course we should fix bugs in the engine (like shoddy rendering code), but that's not in any way the same as game mechanics. The alchemy/spellmaking/enchanting system, for better or for worse, is a game mechanic, and it's one that is exploitable inasmuch as any game mechanic will be exploitable by sufficiently skilled entities.

In order to make alchemy work "as intended", you would have to make serious changes to the way that it works, and even then you'd be stuck with a variety of ways around the limitations on the exploit. I'm also pretty sure that you will figure out that you're cheesing a game mechanic when you figure out that mixing an intelligence potion after drinking an intelligence potion gives you an incredibly boosted number, and you leave the realm of anything else in the game.

Basically, it's not like Morrowind gives you a ton of times to unwittingly overpower yourself. It pretty obviously works on mostly a 1-100 scale for skills and attributes, and that's not hard to figure out.

Like I said, fortifying your intelligence via potions, and having your intelligence determine how good potions you make are, are completely intentional mechanics the game is expecting you to use. The problem is, there's no measures in place to stop it from getting out of control. The only way to avoid it is to either not play with alchemy, or intentionally keep yourself crippled while using it (because if you're trying to avoid an exploit like this, you'll likely overcompensate just to make sure you don't accidentally do it, leaving yourself worse off than normal). It's the same problem with those minigames. You can either avoid the problem and just not pick locks, or limit yourself to such a degree that you're sure you're not getting into places you shouldn't with your skill level (which also means you likely won't try to get into some places you'd otherwise be able to if it was balanced properly).

I really don't buy this. I played Morrowind for a long time before I really started delving into it, and at no point during that time did I even know that the alchemy exploits existed. If your argument is that intelligence potions (or recursive intelligence potions) are game-breaking, it's not hard to avoid exploiting that: don't craft your own intelligence potions or don't craft a recursive intelligence potion.

Which is actually a good reason for it to. People enjoy exploiting Morrowind out the wazoo and have a long history of doing it, which is why community attempts to fix bugs haven't been quite as successful at being standardized as later games, despite the numerous bugs that have been individually fixed and are constantly mentioned and asked about (nobody can agree on which bugs should be fixed, because different people like exploiting different bugs and don't want to see their's patched in the defacto patch compilation, so such compilations have trouble gaining traction in the community). But not every game OpenMW will handle is Morrowind, and not every game will want to be exploitable like Morrowind, so what can such games do to fix an exploit in the engine mechanics this without fixing the engine?

You are right in that it will likely never happen, if for no other reason than because few people would actually try to fix it. But OpenMW has stated it will fix engine bugs, and as long as this buggy behavior is part of the engine, it's a bug in the engine.

This is not an engine bug. This is a bug in a game mechanic that Bethesda designed as part of the engine. An engine bug is something like the camera height not being associated with a model's physical height, or disintegrate not impacting item durability if a value less than 1.0 is given on its per-tick effect because item durability is an integer.

In this case, Bethesda designed a complex game mechanic that has the potential to be exploited because of the fact that it can impact its prerequisite skills and attributes. Your argument (and other alchemy nerf arguments) is either that the mechanic needs to be hard or soft capped, or that it should not be able to impact its prerequisite skills and attributes.

OpenMW emulates this game mechanic because it's part of Morrowind's core functionality. OpenMW is not a project that is designed to change game mechanics in and of itself, though Post-1.0 it will attempt to facilitate reasonable changes to these game mechanics.

These are not the sort of things that OpenMW has ever dealt with; alchemy is working as it did in Morrowind, and OpenMW will not change vanilla Morrowind behavior unless it is explicitly working in ways that are not intended. If you want to go and make an alchemy mod, you should feel more than free to do that. I'm not sure if alchemy can be altered meaningfully in OpenMW-CS yet to do what you want, but you certainly can impose some sort of limitations that would accomplish what you desire.

I don't think your argument that few people would try to fix it is necessarily true; there are certainly people here who have discussed such a thing in the past. However, I think the more proper way to put it is that fixing it is outside the domain of OpenMW. OpenMW is an implementation of the game engine, nothing more. Additional features are good, but not what the current goal for the project is.

[DestinedToDie]

I quite agree with SquireNed. If we treat alchemy as an engine error, then...

Boots of Blinding Speed? You can cast a 100% magic resist for 1 second, then equip the boots for no negative effect. Nerf Boots of Blinding Speed?

You walk tediously slow at early levels. Engine error?

The moment I can´t complain about slow walk speed, being able to run around with 300 speed on higher levels and craft 419180 int for 12890 seconds potions it just ain´t the Morrowind experience.