Like I said however, we're terribly off topic.
On that note, next week's topic will definitely be related to grinding as I believe we've reached a natural bridge here.
Ok, so, what I was trying to get at is that, I don't believe there is any simple catch-all method of reducing the reliance on the fight button without completely devaluing it, all other things being equal. My proposed solution would be to revise the number and quality of encounters, so that players never feel the need to settle into a rut; however, you make a good point about grinding, and I can definitely imagine many core rpg gamers being upset if this feature were completely removed. I think your ideas for training and/or optional areas would mitigate that, but possibly at the cost of throwing off the balance we've just worked to achieve.
Can you provide an example of a situation a player would chose not the maximum dps way ???
1) A player would only replace the 1 button max dps macro only if a situational effect grants him more damage.
Thus bots are always better than human players, because they can always follow the max damage rotation, automatically following the damage buff "ifs".
Note: a monster forces you to cancel the "max dps strategy" only if it kills you. If it doesn't kill you, it is cheaper (timewise) to finish it as fast as you can and heal to full in 1sec with no resource costs after the battle finishes.
I think here you are making a lot of assumptions about the nature of the game and the nature of the player. Not everyone is going to approach even a traditional rpg in the same way. Nowhere is it implied (and it's often not the case) that mashing fight will provide the maximum damage per second, and in a turn based rpg I find it unlikely that most players even care about dps in terms of strategy, rather, when playing strategically a player will consider damage per turn and enemy damage per turn, but if the player starts thinking in terms of dps they have probably already abandoned all strategy. On the other hand, I agree that once a player settles into a one-button rut, they will probably not break out of it unless the game forces them to. But, I don't think that's because they
want to play in such a single-minded manner, I think it's just because the game allows them to.
I dont agree, just because a game is bugged doesn't mean that everyone that uses this system is bugged.
Oblivion was bugged because :
1) unlimited hp monsters : regenerating trolls were unkillable and took hours to kill, and it was only a crappy trash mob, that you met every 10 steps.
2) unlimited damage monsters, 1 shot : Also there were some fiora humanoid monsters that just 1shotted you with their elemental spells.
In my game a lvl 1 monster is as hard as a lv 100000 monster when you fight em at same level. Why is that ? because i don't switch their monster type, a goblin remains the same, just higher level.
I wasn't implying (nor do I believe) that Oblivion was 'bugged', just that the incentive to improve was reduced (not removed entirely) compared to the other Elder Scrolls games. Also, the goblin thing is basically what I was getting at. If level in your game is just an arbitrary or abstract concept that will be manipulated at will to balance difficulty, fine, but if level is a number intended loosely to measure the combat prowess of a creature (as in D&D) then it just seems silly to say that the goblins gain levels to match my own. Certainly, some goblins might have higher and others lower level, and the average level might change as the game progresses, but not implicitly as my characters develop, otherwise there is no benefit to developing my characters (and no, I don't agree that people want bigger numbers just for the sake of bigger numbers, those numbers have to mean something to be interesting at all).