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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
I'm not sure what game you are playing but don't you still have to turn around and face your opponent to user your attack? You are forcing the user to do another action to perform their attack.
Not only are their several example of games that don't care about your facing, some of which Atama brought up, there are even games that do care about facing, that let you attack without facing on certain abilities. WoW, and SWTOR to name a two.
I don’t hate soft lock or games where you target like an FPS. I’ve played plenty, like TERA and SWL that are fun, I still play SWL (I have a lifetime sub) and I think the game is improved since becoming more action-oriented. It’s just not objectively superior to play that way.
Please make sure you actually read and understand what you’re replying to
.05s =/= .5s
Tab targeting systems almost always have more depth than most players realize - and I am only talking about the targeting aspect.
Most (good) games will have options to target the nearest and cycle through as standard actions, but then there is the option to only target mobs that are currently targeting you, mobs that are targrting others in your group/raid, mobs that have dealt damage to you, mobs that can heal, mobs that can stealth and mobs that can call others.
If you set this up in a way that makes sense to you as a player and that fits the role of your character, it is FAR more useful than manually targeting could ever be. Good players use the tab target system to prevent things going wrong - bad players think they are good because they click target mobs faster after things have gone wrong.
On the other hand, if you do nothing at all to set it up and leave it to where tab targets the nearest enemy and then continual presses target the next further away enemy, what you end up with if mobs are on the move is an unintuitive and unresponsive mess of a target system - but that is the fault of the player, not the game.
I think you'd have a better chance using an eye tracker and webcam to get the game to identify what you're looking at specifically, and combine that information with a soft lock.
Even then, the game might get confused (would be neat AF though!). I'd say the absolute easiest is to allow hard lock targeting for group members/ally targets and NOT for enemies (and don't allow hard targeting for enemies). Meaning you could hard target an ally while aiming at an enemy, clerics/support who also DPS might keep their hard target on a tank while actively trying to hurt enemies separately.
yeee he's clearly trolling...I don't want to think otherwise. Never minding that and focusing on the topic, as I said before by quoting what Steven has said, we will have the option to tie the reticle to the mouse movement. Now, if we had that 'action stance' + using the tab key to select a target, that'd be beyond moronic and clunky tbh.
You want to have traditional MMORPG camera and spam your tab key to select targets like in a game from decades ago? Go for it. There will be the option. The game after all tries to attract some traditional MMORPGers (who imo are the biggest obstacle for the genre to move forward) as well.
I'd suggest picking mostly AoEs instead of reticle based action abilities for your action bar. (for your other 25% of abilities)
Then you’re absolutely full of crap.
You read .05s as half a second and you’re really trying to act like I’m the one being ridiculous?
Revelation had a soft/hard lock action/tab combat rolled into their action combat control scheme and it wasn’t really bad by any means.
I didn’t heal with it but I know a lot of people that did with great success. Made it so you could just aim everything if you wanted but if people/mobs were stacked up you were able to tab to specific targets so your heals or targeted damaging abilities would hit who you wanted.
That game was a giant slew of disappointments, but the combat was pretty fun.
You on the other hand have the delusion that in 1/20th of a second you can spin around, target an enemy, and activate an attack. You either have absolutely no idea how fast that is or you’re trolling, either way you pulled it out of your ass.
For the sake of context, a really good frame rate for an MMO is 80 fps. That is extremely good. You’re saying that you can spin around and attack in the time it takes for a game to render 4 frames of animation.
Or get a stopwatch and time .05 seconds. Which is extremely difficult to do. Hell, on my phone I can’t even tap fast enough on one finger to start and stop a stopwatch in that time. The best I can get is .1 second. And you claim you have superhuman speed and can spin around and attack an enemy almost as fast as a computer can render it.
Again, you are completely full of it. I thought you were talking about a half a second because that’s physically possible. Now it is clear you have no idea what you’re saying, and any shred of credibility you want to claim is gone. Try not to make up completely insane and impossible claims next time you want to present an argument.
You have a poor grasp of how combat functions if you think the enemy is somehow invisible before I decide to attack it. I’m not reacting to a spontaneously appearing mob, I turn to pop off a quick hit to the enemy behind me when I see it charging an attack, then turn back to my primary target in one fluid motion. That’s a straightforward and easy thing to do, and altogether it might take a quarter of a second after noticing it to turn, attack, and turn back.
Go throw your temper tantrum elsewhere.
If you wanted a discussion, then you wouldn’t be complete ignoring the fact that I gave comparable speed to a tab click. And whether you acknowledge it or not, it’ll take more time to tab target for the same process I just described than it takes for action combat.
For every target swap, tab will always have an extra button to press.
If you like that, then you should a few videos about Lost Ark from TheLazyPeon. It looks amazing and has nice gameplay, but is sadly restricted to russia and asia. (TLP has a tutorial on how to play it no matter where you are)
Fractured is another game that is based no clicking that looks good
He didn't mention invisible enemy anywhere in the quoted post. I read it, twice.
You're also fabricating unmentioned details in the scenario you're claiming you can accomplish. Assuming an opponent behind you is one you've had time to recognize and plan a proper response using tactics rather than a snap reaction (which is what Atama was initially setting up as a scenario).
On top of that, you are still claiming super human reaction speeds. It takes "the average human" (in this particular case, pretty much all healthy humans. Reaction times are very... consistent) .25 seconds to react to visual stimulus. In the time it takes a normal human to perceive a threat, you are able to perceive, register, plan a response, and execute that response? You may be able to pull that off if you react to an audio stimulus, which drops almost a full .1s off your reaction time, but that's assuming you can achieve precision aiming based on audio alone.
Furthermore, your response requires coordination between left and right hand. That means communication between left and right hemispheres of your brain. Tab+Action can be performed with just the left hand, meaning zero communication and zero chance to miss or foul key press sequence. How does this work out? When you use two hands to type on the keyboard, you'll often have typos. That's because the two halves of your brain must constantly communicate with each other to coordinate your key press sequence. You'll notice that the typos almost always involve key press sequence issues when pushing a key with one hand, then the next key with the other in rapid succession. That means YOUR response requires the initial reaction, followed by moving the mouse, timing the action perfectly in motion, and resuming the spin to re-engage another target. Sounds all smooth criminal like, but that's a really REALLY tough claim to prove there chief.
You might think "Well I have buttons on my mouse set for action buttons! So I'm only using one hand and thus one hemisphere!" Nope. You'd have to have the left half of your brain specializing in both spatial awareness AND calculation, which is incredibly rare. If you were one of those rare cases, you would not be wasting your life arguing on a forum, you'd be making YouTube videos of sinking baskets from the bleachers like a boss. Meaning you're two hemispheres are still having to communicate just because you are adding the aim to your action sequence, while tab target completely eliminates that step all together.
Atama is absolutely correct, in the scenario he presented, tab target is much quicker than spin+aim+action.
Your argument about brain communication is so funny, because all it does is prove you wrong.
The left side of your brain is the part that controls the right side of your body. That part you insist has to tell your right-brain what to tell your mouse hand, is actually directly in control of that action. So using your own theory of brain-communication being a bigger detriment to gameplay than extra button presses, tab is inherently slower because the left brain has to signal the right-brain which controls your left side, on top of requiring more button presses.
In a combat sequence of attacking then returning to your original target:
Action combat: plan, turn cam, action, turn cam.
All done with the left side of your brain using an MMO mouse.
Meanwhile, tab: plan, brain communicates, tab select, action, tab select.
Requires both sides of the brain communicate because your left hand is controlled by the right side of your brain. Add another step of brain communication if you use an MMO mouse for abilities. Add another step each time target selection is incorrect.
It’s not throwing a temper tantrum to shred your foolishness with facts. I’m sorry if that made you mad (but not that sorry).
Whether or not it is faster to turn, target, and click a key/button than to do the same thing with a tab key and then a key/button is going to vary from individual to individual. It’s going to depend more on comfort than anything else. And you’re splitting hairs about fractions of a second that don’t matter. I reiterate my original point; it’s a matter of taste and there is no objective “better” method.
You're the one who latched onto a thrown out number when the whole entire point was to say both the act of turning the cam and reaching for tab take the same minuscule amount of time. But tab requires at least one an extra button press every time someone switches targets, which means it will obviously take longer for the one using tab targeting to adapt to a changing fight, by simple virtue of being required to press more keys to achieve the same result as another player who doesn't have to hard lock onto their target first.
By that logic, Die Hard (with Bruce Willis) is the best game out there, as it requires no key presses at all.
Soft targeting sucks for when there are multiple targets in the same area. Tab targeting is far superior in these situations, but ONLY if the player sets it up. Players that complain about tab targeting are players that have not set it up.
If there are not multiple targets in the area, the targeting system used makes no meaningful difference.
Based on that, tab targeting is better.
Someone you otter know.
I'll stick my nose in your debate of these "0.5s of actions" since I find it intresting. I think that we all agree, we can all do it whether it is tab targeting or something else. If we are ready and expecting the ennemy, it should be quicker than normal, if not we will be obviously longer to react. Depending on the situation we are in, the time needed to react will change a lot.
I got no ideas how our brain functions while playing, but some years ago I was playing an FPS and an ennemy came into my sight, I made his brain explode with one bullet only by reflexes, realising it only half a second later. I know that all of you had the chance to experiment something like this, at least one time in your life.
So acting very quickly is realisable. The question it rises is : is it possible for us to react that quickly everytime ?
I think not, or the player needs to be trained especially for this kind of situation, training it until it's all muscle memories and your brain have nothing to do with it. Which means you either are some sort of superhuman or some machine. So it's only doable. I trained myself in some game to this kind of situation, I can't do it everytime and if I do it without expecting it, it was always slower than when I expect it.
Back to the main topic, to me the tab targetting is still the best because there is parameters to make it very easy to use and convenient like someone said above. On some MMO's you can even mark targets with numbers & set a shortcut to target the number you want to hit. As long as there is the right tools, in any situation given the tab-targetting make the fights more convenient (as long as the fighter is prepared and handle the tab-targeting properly).
The soft-targetting is nice when you don't have that sort of parameters, since the tab targeting alone would become a pain in the ass. But it could be completely useless depending on the class you play and the format of the fight, what if you do a large scale battle and you need to focus a very specific target. Good luck hitting the good one when there is more than 50 players in your screen that runs everywhere.
Setting up tab targeting requires an unruly amount of keybinds. Target closest enemy, target target of my target, target farthest enemy, target closest ally, target farthest ally, target lowest health ally, target enemy targeting me, cycle closest -> farthest, cycle farthest -> closest, etc etc, there could be literally dozens, while a soft lock system lets you use your own eyes and brain to follow target selection and prioritize on your own.
Soft targeting is faster. It doesn’t mean you become completely unable to miss like tab does, which is why tab targeted abilities won’t be getting cc attached, but I’d argue nothing should guaranteed to hit outside of ally healing and buffs.
If you approach a large group of enemies all packed together, you should be using AoEs, not attempting to burst down one in the huddle with homing bullets. If there’s a priority add somewhere in there, you get to spend time clicking into the mob of adds to lock on them (because tabbing through sure won’t get you anywhere fast in an enemy huddle).
If someone doesn't like action (which I assume includes soft targeting), go 75% tab. If someone doesn't like tab, go 75% action. Then you only have to ignore 25% of your abilities to play exactly how you want.
No class really has a need to have more than three or four target options for the role they are performing.
A tank has no need to have a keybind to target the lowest health ally, as an example.
This is why game developers don't set these keybinds up, as every class will need a different setup, and that setup can often change based on the role you are performing at that time (an example would be that a tank will want different targeting keybinds while they are main tank to when they are off tank).
A player that knows what they are doing will have all of their targeting options set up with variations of tab and tilde keys (and Esc in some games that allow for it), along with alt, ctrl and shift modifiers, and they will have different profiles set up for different roles they are playing in the group or raid.