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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
Yes I understand that you believe that, and I'm asking you just one thing.
I can make it so that when you block, SOMETIMES you should use your fastest move to defend yourself, and sometimes you should not use it or I will be guaranteed to do 1/3 of your health in damage, and the only way you will know which of those things happened is if you can somehow figure out which Active Frame of MY move hit, within 1/3 of a second.
I would like to understand how YOU do this, and how you believe a person is supposed to do this. Remember, I, the attacker, am controlling which thing happens in some VERY subtle way. If you would like a video I can provide it. Or to rephrase it as a multiple choice question if you will humor me, here are the answers I can think of:
a) That is impossible to do, for the attacker, because that's not how fighting games work. (this is the trick answer, don't pick this one, because I can prove it is how they work)
b) That is bad design if the attacker can ever do this in an ambiguous way
c) People can just tell one frame difference at the moment it happens
d) I have never played a game like that and I would need to think about it more
e) Other (Please Specify)
I don't wanna derail here, but you keep saying I'm manipulative or dishonest and I would like to clear THAT up with you at least.
You should be able to feel the frames of the move and the speed. If you have been hit by it before you simply use a faster move and should be able to tell the speed as a gauge mid fight.
It is pretty obvious what moves you have are fast when you know your command list. Without this you aren't going to be able to throw people off that are trying to predict block your attacks based on frames they expect.
Which in a actual fight against skilled players this is a different fight, compared to normal players that the person blocks and predicts their movements based on the frames they expect which can lead into you getting countered with a opening.
None of this has anything to do with mmorpgs btw. If a mmorpg had combat this complex trackers for mmorpgs would mean nothing it would be all skill. Wouldn't matter if you know dmg, what was coming, hp, etc. Skilled player wins every fight.
I agree that it's a false comparison up to a point, so let me ask you this instead.
If Ashes is supposed to be Action Combat skill, and it starts to matter in Ashes because of how action Combat works (it matters in BDO, the community has been arguing about the frame data for Sorceress for years) will you have the same perspective on frame data readers as on Trackers?
This is the thing I'm trying to understand. Action Combat means that you need MORE frame data information and less Combat Tracker information, but it does not change the problem, unless you think frame data readers are fine because they somehow require more skill to use than trackers.
There are active blocks and direction attacks, dodges (skill) it is shown in the last AoC combat stream.
The last Basic Melee livestream showed us that they are testing Active Block and there was a backdash on Fighter that would not even be allowed in most fighting games due to being too broken in terms of its frame data.
If they keep going in this direction, Ashes will be more frame data heavy than literally any game I know except Under Night.
I honestly don't care about frame data at all or who has access to it that is fine to me. Unsure what you are trying to get at here...
I have a issue when you are using trackers to read all information about skills and abilities from mobs and other players in form of a tracker which is beyond a combat log.
Two different things all together to me.
Also Sorceress is stupid no class (game) needs iframes like that remove them. That isn't a fight.
I wont rate active block until I see Bard and see the buffs. The last active block was a wall conjured by the tank class and that did sweet fuck all. Admittedly, it went against Mage levitate which has since been removed.
Ok, now I completely concede that I understand your points all this time.
If you don't care about people having Frame Data in Ashes, then what you have been saying is completely consistent and I apologize for every time I have derailed you from representing your perspective with my insistence on trying to equate your dislike of Trackers with a dislike of 'information that players use to improve their combat after the fact'.
I know you don't care if I'm cool with you or not, but I promise to bother you less, now that I know this.
Nah, we're talking about 'Fighter held up a sword against an attack and mitigated damage from the attack and then recovered from block stance', and 'fighter used a backdash that moved them 8 character widths in 5 frames and recovered for another 25 frames' which is enough to dodge almost ANYTHING honestly.
Have you not seen that video at all?
EDIT: Here, it's at 6:45, the glorious backdash. I remember having the 'WTF' reaction followed by the Thor 'Yessss!' meme.
Its fine I'm not stressed about it, if you want to understand my mind set I'm just highly competitive. I don't like advantages given in the form of tools. If trackers are really inevitable and their game design can't stop it id rather as long as possible for it not be ripe with them at first and see what the devs do, in making the game they want.
People that have skill, and ability to achieve what they want without assistance is just something that I have respect for. And why I can't get behind tools that "remove" a lot of the work to get there.
Though if combat is very akin to mmorpgs in the past and doesn't rely on any kind of bonus of action combat ya trackers will be effective and you may get a FF situation.
Unsure if you have experienced moments like that against people that don't feel like normal type players in the slightest. And being able to skillfully pull out a win and become better than you were instantly.
Random but i guess that is my tangent on that kind of frame stuff why sure knowing frames can help but there is still more to it then just knowing frame numbers in a battle, or being able to feel it and what you need to do to overcome their pressure.
Normally I expect you to discredit or say I'm not skilled so I don't talk about this, since I don't want to get into an argument with you about it.
I am the type of skilled player who has reached the point where she can mostly only improve by knowing the Frame Data (either through experimentation or directly using the things provided by Training mode to check it).
Yes, there is 'more to it', but my experience is that you do reach a point where you have to know in order to see more options or you're just guessing. If you believe that it's better for people to just guess, I understand your perspective. I don't think they make Fighting Games like that anymore, but I'm not going to say 'no, you're wrong'.
I think I've been trying to tell you that good PvE feels like that too, but I understand your reasons for not believing me about that.
Not going to say you are unskilled unless there is a comment I feel discrediting my own skill on a game. Which then the next option after that is to simply fight each other if it gets that far.
Exactly what information is it you think a tracker can read about skills?
It isnt going to make you instantly better. You still have situations like you explained where you are looking like you are going to lose and so you need to be good enough to change things up to overcome your opponent.
Knowledge of a game and skill in a game are complementary. Neither one can ever replace the other, but either one can enhance the other.
Would that work or is it still too simplistic? Cause I feel like you could still put in reactionary actions into the bot, and at the end of the day pretty much any player action is just a reaction to whatever the boss does.
Orrrrr, would pro-active actions work? As in, "players have to hit the boss with particular abilities which will result in one of several responses from the boss, which then determine what players gotta do next".
And you clearly let everyone know you plan on making $$$ off the game in some way. . . jfc
"Well- since we agree that skill should be rewarded, then the answer is no, that is not okay- because that lack of access to data is preventing that gap in player skill from players that will better leverage that data, and acquisition of said data is not tied to skill level to be able to compensate for this (due to its impossible nature for most people to naturally obtain)."
Data is accessible through experience. You can play a fighting game and figure out the windows/ animations to minute degree, for example. Down to the frame.
So there is a huge skill gap between those that can gain 'data' from experience and those that can't.
You can gain data from inputting a certain way, failing, then slightly altering what you're doing and getting through it. You can deduce that some window is smaller or larger, or something lasts longer, all from experience.
There's many ways to solve problems and gain knowledge from experience lol. . . and it creates a skill gap.
It's not intellectually dull either. You can literally compare your experiences, actions, and analyze them.
This is closer to something that works in my experience.
A different way to think of this might be what I do for training mode in fighters.
Boss has Inputs A, B, C, D, E chosen completely randomly.
Boss will do something different when B follows A, than when B follows B. That gives you 25 options.
But let's say that whatever follows BB takes so long that it 'skips a count'. So you can only see BB twice in a row if it 'selected B four times'.
Then add some player inputs in terms of what abilities they hit with. You can do it by expanding it to FGHI, or just 'if you hit the boss a certain way while it's selecting B it will change B to A'. So you could 'make sure that the boss only chooses AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, BUT you could only do this if you 'knew it was going to select B' or 'did the ability because you saw it use CA and know that AB will kill you but AA wouldn't' (while still having to worry about AC, AD, AE).
A human will adapt to this using their intent, status of the team, and teamwork, in a different way than most bots will, but still not be in a situation where they have no control and zero predictability, nor (if you found this to be negative) in a situation where 'absolute randomness whenever' was possible.
In this situation a Tracker would do much less for you in terms of 'figuring out the boss' because you would already know the odds of any specific thing happening (they're all about 1 in 25 and you can reduce them through your own actions when your abilities to influence it aren't on cooldown, to get it down to 1 in 5).
But now the player's side is constantly finding having to find new ways to adapt to whatever is happening, and the Tracker is only doing what I (personally) am used to it being for. Allowing the player to look back at a specific point in a long fight and think "Oh, I could have done this better even considering the randomness", or of course 'Dammit Carl, you missed the proc six times this fight, you know you're supposed to leave the adds to someone else when EB is happening' (some people need a tracker for this, some don't).
Devs could then 'lower the odds of CA, technically, by making it so that CB and CC take so long that any CA following it never does CA'. Maybe if it's like, a dragon, CCC causes it to do an extra long breath blast, etc etc.
Then just set whatever win conditions you like and change 'damage' to be 'something that affects the selection'.instead of 'something that kills the boss'. Cooldowns alone would generally mean that you need the same number of people anyway, but now you've removed that visible 'Input->Output' part of the Runes thing.
Another useful part of it in Ashes (for example) is that you COULD theoretically spawn a boss with a different subset of A, B, C, D, E each time, and the combinations change, without players having to literally guess every moment. e.g. if you see Ice Breath, you know that at least two of the boss' 'slots' are 'Push' and 'Ice', so you can immediately start guessing/adapting to what the rest of their kit will be (this has nothing to do with bots, they would do that too, this is just a bonus).
I understand and agree this can be done to a certain degree-
Maybe I am just missing something, but how would you be able to get conclusive data if you have no baseline or reference point? There could always be variation on the opponent's end that can throw off your judgement, such as when the action was inputed. Since there is no way to know that, it would give you false info that you base your own moves on, so you would never have a way of figuring that out through experience 100%.
The moves are basically static in every game. So are one's own. A person's sense of time can be very tight. 1/60th of a second tight. Tighter. That's just how it is.
BURN
I get it, obviously you can use the results of an interaction between two moves to deduce the properties of a move.
Im saying that for the comparison to be legitimate you have to isolate those 2 moves as factors.
How can you do that when there is variation, down a single frame, for when someone is inputing a move. You may be comparing moves that were input at different times, giving you wrong info. Yes you can get a general idea based on the timing of when you would expect someone to input a move and comparing that timing of how long it takes for your own moves to respond after an input. This will never be a consistent way of judging down to a single frame. Its just impossible for most humans to distinguish between individual frames through feeling.
You are asking how someone can focus on the interaction of two characters down to the frame in a highly repetitious and basically static game.
You do not know much about what is possible or impossible.
Human click reaction time can consistently hit .1 second (1/10). Perception alone is easily quicker.
Here is a random guy at his desk using an online test:
I otherwise do not know what you are trying to say about inputs.
So basically I am saying
1. You can judge a moves properties based on its interaction with another move.
2. There are more factors than just the move itself that can throw off your judgement based on that interaction, because the interaction will be different depending on those factors, causing variation in your relativity-based judgments
3. The lack of knowing "when" an input was made is such a factor, causing an unequal comparison
4. If you could reverse engineer each move by testing your input vs when it happens in the screen for a given move, then that would help with isolating the moves themselves, by knkwing when a move is inputed to make your comparison between 2 moves during an interaction.
5. There is no way to do this down to a single frame. You can click an input and see when your move happens on the screen to get a general idea of that window, but this would require more precision than the example video you provided to "feel" this window. Thats not to mention the fact that you wouldn't be able to further disect that window to distinguish between input delay/move startup frames/etc.
6. This means you wouldn't be able to reverse engineer a move to know exactly how many frames it takes for a move to startup, therefor you would never know when a move was actually inputed whem comparing 2 moves during an interaction. Therefore any info gained based on said interaction will have variation relative to when that move was inputed, meaning you won't have consistent relative results to judge your own move's properties.
Unless I am missing something, feel free to explain how this would not be the case.
Hard to say right now, an active block is in the game, cause in the melee showcase, it was shown to us. Alpha one wasn't a test of combat and systems, it was really a network test. Combat at this point is likely totally different. Friday will tell us a lot for sure.
just showed you .1 second click reaction time and perception is much faster than that. 60 fps = 10 fps x 6.
You are saying people can't see singular frames on 60 fps.
People can slow things down (to them) and experience the frames lol
People can see the variations of successes and failures. You just play the game and get good.
Fair enough.
For that particular premise I could agree then that perceptive skill could be better fostered without the data.
But, I can't automatically say im in favor of having a greater reward for those who have naturally better perceptive capabilities, than those who don't, because of the implications that the other types of game skills are reliant upon those perceptive capabilities, that not all people may have.
The lack of perceptive skill in that area could deny access to information certain players who could better leverage that information than someone else, but be denied that skill-expression due to the difference in perceptive abilities. My personal preference for skill-checks, is in player decision-making. Based on this I can't say I would want the skill-check on perceptive ability to be so large that only a very small percentage of players could properly be tested on their decision making skills, which I personally would prefer to have at the forefront. This is preference so im not saying you are wrong, just that I disagree.
That is assuming there is a choice that needs to be made. I do think perceptive skill, especially situational awareness, should be rewarded. You could have both skill-checks which would be ideal in my opinion. This would require simply toning down the perceptive based skill-checks to a more accessible level to not require frame perfect perceptive awareness to gather the data required for improving in other areas of the game.
- regardless of how we feel about that particular aspect- whether that particular premise alone, in favor of providing players with certain data, is enough to outweigh the others outlined ealier, is another issue.
I don't think the combat will be like a Fighting game lol.
If you're working in a large group and engaging in combat there is necessarily a perception component to it though that is engaging. It's the one place perception and proper reaction/ response should be rewarded, if anywhere in the game.
If you want to reward decision-making, reward strategy and tactics in group combat, and in civ-building.