Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Knockdowns and knockbacks and such are much more acceptable than stuns.
This might sound hypocritical at first (and I've been careful about talking about this particular part of the topic because I know plenty of people would use it as a "gotcha" argument without thinking it through) but from the start my entire argument is that players losing all agency and continuing to be "punished" without any agency in a situation that doesn't make much logical sense outside of "it's a game mechanic" is the issue with stuns. Knockdowns, knockbacks and anything that the player easily rationalizes as "oh, it makes sense that I can't act right now" are far more acceptable.
Now obviously that's not a blanket statement, because too much knockdown or other similar effect becomes essentially just a stun or an equivalent agency-denying mechanic. Just like how I argued sleep is slightly more acceptable than stun, for some of the same reasons knockdowns and the like are better than stuns.
Some people would counter this (and have already in this thread) with "well you can get stunned in real life so why isn't a stun an acceptable rationalization of losing agency?"
The answer is that if you get stunned in real life, you've lost the fight. The fight is over. You get punched in the face and "stunned" and then you just get pummeled while you struggle to recollect yourself.
That's not fun in real life either. It's not fun for anyone watching who wanted a decent back and forth fight. It's only satisfying to the guy who punched you, and that was my argument from comment #1.
Imagine watching UFC and you're expecting some big satisfying fight, but one of them lands a good punch early on that leaves the opponent "stunned" and just lays into him. That's hardly as satisfying as a good back and forth.
Edit: @JamesSunderland seems I answered your comment in this reply to George Black as we posted at the same time lol
And about the spearfishing and other game mechanic requests, those will never end. There is no "best time" to implement change in that scenario. Players will forever request endless extra mechanics to a game, doesn't mean you can't make the mechanics you do have as good as possible
So from my understanding, you're not against stun. You are simply against "stuns" that arent portrayed in a visually pleasing way? I mean I can get behind that. A stun as a "knocked-down" effect is the same mechanic, just with more visuals than an effect above the head. And for the record, once you start going for too-realistic combat, the game starts to lose fluidity and for the most part becomes less of a game and more of a chore just to make an attack, which leaves gameplay feeling sluggish and bland instead of fast and flashy. And to argue more realistic effects and reactions in a game, a fantasy game with magic and whatnot, isn't focused on how fun the game can be, just how "real" it can be. Need to find a balance where it looks good enough but the mechanics arent too constrictive to cost good gameplay. The drift forward with attacks is a perfect example of, sure its more realistic but the gameplay sucks.
I'm against stuns that are stuns for the sake of stuns. Visually pleasing is just a small part of it and a slight mischaracterization of my argument, though I understand what you meant.
A knockdown that lasts just as long as the animation is is a stun for that duration yes, but it's a knockdown with a clear purpose and reasoning attached to it.
If the knockdown is too long and the character is just rolling on the ground struggling to get back up it's effectively just a stun. (ie: Reinhardt's ultimate in Overwatch knocks you down but then you're just lying there... stunned)
To clarify, knockdowns and knockbacks and such are rarely longer than .5 - 1.5 seconds and if they are any longer they usually become irrational/unreasonable and you enter the territory of the player thinking "why won't my character get up any faster so that I can play the game?".
If the player loses control of their character because of a typical stun, where the character just gets hit by a spell/ability and can do nothing but stand still/freeze up for a duration, that's an irrational restriction that only exists because "game mechanic".
If I was to take the previous UFC fight example, even the "stunned" or "dazed" opponent can still react somewhat. They don't lose all agency, unless people are saying video-game "stuns" are the equivalent of being "knocked out", at which case the fight should be over anyways because your character becomes a non-combatant.
That all being said, I do still think even such things as knockdowns should be limited in their implementation. While they aren't the "gameified" stuns, they are still short and easy stuns and I personally think that the more minor CC's (root/slow/push/pull/silence/disarm/etc.) should be used in their place wherever applicable as I've argued in the OP.
I don't expect stuns and stun-like mechanics to completely disappear, I just believe less loss of agency is better overall for gaming. Again, this is my personal opinion, and I know many people disagree.
And that's fine, it's pretty clear that around 25% of players are going to ditch this game when the gameplay is properly defined.
The big question is if the other 50-75% will be 'correct enough' about what makes a successful MMO, for the game to not just fade like so many others.
The first part of it atleast.
Aren't we all sinners?
If it’s @Dreoh, the volume of my laughing. 😈
They cannot fight. They cannot run. They might be able to stagger a bit, just barely able to refrain from being knocked down.
The real difference is that in a video game, the character is stunned while the player is not, so the player feels like they should be able to actively do something to remove the stun.
Knockdown is a bit ore visually interesting, but it's basically the same thing as a stun.
Seems like you think a Knockdown gives the player more a sense that they are doing something that can make the character stand up more quickly... as if the character won't standup on its own unless the player makes the character stand up. (I don't think in Ashes, the player can do anything to make the character stand up...the character will automatically stand up as the effect wears off).
Stun is typically a short duration.
Chain stuns are problematic.
Other than possible visual effect difference, no difference at all.
Both are character action disablers, some games have them on separated debuff categories in order to make resistances or duration reductions for one to not affect the other.
Aren't we all sinners?
Soft CC to Hard CC
slows to staggers/stuns etc
If they're going to have hard cc with AoE abilities, it's going to be grief for many players as HARD CC will be the decisive meta in large scale PvP.
Yeah.
As I have said in the past, it sucks that the Wildstar solution to CC in MMOs not being fun never got picked up be other games. They took an old shitty system and made it fun.
I can remember times when I was disoriented and still able to make some clutch plays in PvP. Such fun. I miss that games PvP so much.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
This would heavily depend on the amount of methods to deal with CC(duration reductions, chance to avoid/resist CC, instant cc removal skills or straight up CC immunities) provided by Ashes.
Aren't we all sinners?
yay! someone gets it!
Now put it all together with being able to hard CC and focus fire with large scale group pvp on single to multiple targets affected regardless of node or castle siege scenario where most players would be grouped around a choke point with siege weapons regardless of collision.
Now that aside, if they plan to make AoC a burst DPS game like retail WoW or ESO where combat is a battle heavy on big heals and/or heals per second
OR
if they did it where heals have less weight and players die easier.
It is hard to say as they havn't really fully implemented or expanded on healing and damage mechanics yet. But putting together large scale numbers and hard CC, usually ends up in griefing.
Ashes has a Passive Skill for Disable Defense. Seems likely we can craft gear with Disable Defense.
If we can build our characters to significantly reduce the effects of Stun, having Stun in the game should be fine.
(It will be interesting to see whether there are Bard Active Skills and augments that can reduce the effects of Stun.)
This depends heavily on the game. "Percentage chance of failing a non-movement action". "Percentage chance of failing a movement action". "Ability to move but locked from abilities". "Can use ability that normally allows movement during ability, but prevents movement when paralyzed".
Do y'all want another BDO? A game where the meta is so based around this that they had to limit how much CC Resistance you could even build, and as a result of that, anyone who doesn't have it in certain matchups literally can't do anything?
Most will just go 'no, I am sure they can balance it'.
Consider that it isn't 'all these MMOs that try to balance it just have developers that don't know what they're doing' or 'all these players just suck and don't know how to properly build characters'.
Because BDO devs definitely ignore 'casual' players on matters of PvP. Those players, by nature of the game, are just not even relevant to most balance considerations. And the meta in BDO as of two streams ago was indicated to be 'people just build basically max Knockdown resist and it invalidates certain classes that use Knockdown'.
And in the end, after all that, because it is 'chance', it's random whether or not you win or lose any given engagement that relies on CC or CC resistance.
You know why games like BDO end up like that? Arguments like this. Just 'sitting around the table in the developer's conference room' instead of on a forum between players.
And you know how we know this? They admitted it, reluctantly. That when they get balance change requests from the community, those requests contain more detail and understanding of game mechanics than some of the devs themselves have, despite their efforts.
BDO's problems stem almost entirely from legacy stuff that they needed to take out, which combines poorly, and the current developer lead is slogging his way through literally months of surgically cutting out entire chunks of discordant ideas to make a better game.
If Ashes isn't going to be balanced for 1v1, any stun longer than 0.2- 0.3 seconds is a problem. Even with CC diminish. Even with CC diminish after one stun. Unless you want only that stun and basically no other CC, which is fine too, and then you still can't go over 0.5 seconds.
It's literally not worth the devs' time to add even one full Stun and then spend probably months 'fighting off ways players exploit it to instakill enemies'. Let the CC be 'naturally countered by the choices available to the class' and not some RNG that then has to also be tuned. At least then when the inevitable 'it's your fault, git gud' responses to people who complain, happen, the responders might actually be right and the community won't devolve into a 'Developers caved to the casuals and nerfed Thing I Like/Relied On' and the emergent toxicity of that.
You should never want a highly polarized view of your MMO.based on its by the moment mechanics. Industry has had 20 years to learn this.
BDO is an excellent example of how not to balance CC, BDO's action combat is so far apart from conventional MMORPGs that i believe it is possible the only one were no CC at all could be justified due to its combat style, extremely fast killtime and insanely fast paced combat where a mere 0.5-1 sec CC feels like an eternity.
I Don't think Ashes would face the same CC balancing issues as BDO in this regard.
Aren't we all sinners?
This was such a predictable answer.
"Ashes is a different game."
That's not how that works. Two DECADES. We KNOW that's not how that works.
Player A has 2000 HP, Enemy A has CC, Enemy B has a 700 damage spell, enemy C has a 600 damage Sniper shot.
If Enemy A has Stun as their CC, Player A cannot do anything about an incoming 1300 damage. If the trio is even slightly coordinated, Enemy A is already lining up their own attack to finish this.
If you say 'well other group members should do something', they have 1.2 seconds in Ashes because the game is fast and dynamic and that 700 damage spell casts in less time than that. Even if they also have Stun.
Contrast this with any other CC. Even Sleep would let Player A mash some instacast defensive skill like a maniac and hope that Enemy B and C are out of sync a little. Root would let player A at least 'throw out big damage or an Ability-Prevention CC of their own to stop one of the two'. Any CC that locked abilities but didn't lock Mobility and they can at least try to get out of the spell.
If you have to combine 2 different CC, the response time of the other team increases because there are now two people not doing damage immediately, and maybe they can do something.
Stop defending the least balance-able form of CC in gaming because nostalgia or whatever. Stun was described as a 'standard' mechanic called 'you skip a turn'. Guess what? All those games where 'you skip a turn' are garbage. Over 50% of them die or get relegated to the casual/tryhard dichotomy pile. That analogy wasn't even applied to MMOs, which is amazing since frankly every other game where 'your opponent skips a turn' also has it as an incredibly unbalanced move in which both players just try to reach that point first.
I'm not here writing essays about this and complaining because I care about Stuns themselves. I am doing it because I'm exactly the sort of optimizer that calculates every possible advantage in games like this and uses it to wreck metas. And I don't like games where the meta is easy to do that to. I want a game where it is finally actually impossible to.
This is a common thing in MMOs. When your 'crazy optimizer min-maxers' warn you that you are about to do something that will make things devolve into trash, you listen to them because they are the ones that will ruin it if you don't. If not me, then one like me. It happens in WoW, it happens in TERA, it happens in nearly every game that has enough of a meta to talk about.
If your answer is 'well I'm sure there will be a counter to this', just remember how nearly no MMO is balanced well enough, and how many people with literal 16 page number crunched spreadsheets tabulating dozens of hours of testing data, post on forums.
I'm that person. I'm telling you that you can either ditch stuns, or get another messed up MMO where the players who aren't crippled by the system tell everyone else that they should just 'get better' or 'develop new strategies' or 'improve their team comp'.
Never works. Min-maxers are always ahead of that. If there was a better comp, or more than one meaningful counter, they'd be playing something else.
The difference between me and them is that most of them want to abuse everyone else, or at least don't care, so they have no reason to stand up to this and ask for their own power to be removed. Or they get shouted down like this and decide that everyone else just likes being abused so they should just lean into it.
I am the monster people make me into, at times like this, so I'm gonna bow out before I 'turn' again, because I want to believe that people care more about proper results than their nostalgic ego-tripping, but the most likely response is gonna be that I'm the one ego tripping, so whatever.
They are either very short or requires proper set up thus providing other player for meaningful counter play against it and proper effort by the one who tries to apply it. As it allows windows for outplay and promotes mechanical skill and thinking beyond 'ability rotation'.
It also tends to diminish sense of unfair mechanics and reduces general grieving even if said party lost the engagement.
@Azherae covered a lot. Hard CC in majority of cases is just lazy combat design. Which restricts counter play, windows of opportunity, coming back from being behind. Lots of aspects which makes PvP exciting to engage with. Also reduces sense of achievement from ability to play well and offsets the reward more to "pwning" other players. Which is not a trait which adds to sustainability of the player base.
Player A isn't going to die because of a stun. Player A is going to die because it's 3 on 1.
Ok, Mister Mega Meta Monster, you used BDO as an example for CC Balancing, when BDO can be considered one of the games with the worst CC balancing.
BTW, are you truly willing to deny "Ashes is a different game." in comparison to BDO?
The hypothetical examples you wrote are meaningless and ludicrous for not taking in consideration:
1) The assumption that the CC will Hit
2) Anti-CC Methods previously stated
3) It's a goddamn 3 v 1 scenario
IDK man it just seems like you've been so hurt by CC in other games even tho you make it seem like you're a godlike meta min-maxer that was supposed to understand and use the anti-CC mechanics and methods provided by such games, in the end it just seems like your personal opinion over the subject.
Aren't we all sinners?
To add to this I would point out his argument is a concern for solo play, or at least his example is. Which Steven already stated the balancing will be based on group play not solo. Group dynamic tends to make a point of being able to save a teammate that is CC locked.
Some ideas I had for thematic CC based off of classes:
Bard: main CCs being sleeps/charms. I envision a sleep spell where the bard plays a song and over 2-3 seconds the enemy falls asleep.
Cleric: I feel like silences fit really well in the cleric role. I’m not entirely sure why, just feels cleric-y to me.
Mage: I really liked the initial idea of the black hole sucking people in. I think it needed to be tweaked but I wish they didn’t just turn it into a slow. Something like it pulls you in so you’re slowed, but you can still escape, but if you just stood still it would pull you to the center. This is one where I can see a variety of CCs just by the nature of the elements they wield.
Tank: love tanks having pulls. Feels bad ass. This is one of the few targeted ccs I’m down with. Not sure why just am. Knock downs stuff like that
Fighter: disarms. Knock backs. Some heavy attacks causing disorient effects. I really love what someone mentioned about disorients messing up your directional keys. Sounds interesting and I like it.
Summoner: Fears. Big scary summons going grrrrrrr.
Ranger: various traps, roots/snares
Rogue: blinds, poisons that make you weaker. Dirty tricks and the like.
Just some thoughts I had while reading the threads.
That's right.
But you know what?
Eso factored in the concerns that people had regarding CC taking you out of control for a period of time.
I am not sure if you are familiar with how they addressed it.
There is a function that costs let's say MP called break free with 5s cooldown and immunity to CC for 5s.
As soon as ANY CC lands on players they click "break free" and are out of CC. Which means that ALL THE CC HAVE THE SAME EFFECT: an enemy loses control for 0.5 seconds or less and they are back on the game again.
Sleep? Break free
Stun? Break free
Root? Dodge roll. Free again.
Fear? Break free
Lava cc? Break free
Lightning cc? Break free
Arrow cc? Break free
Ranged cc? Break free
Melee cc? Break free
All those fancy animations (well you cant see them in eso because every player can animation cancel every action after 5 minutes of playing the game) and their secondary effects are just lip service.
All the cc does in that game is a 0.5s loss of control and a waste of some MP every 5s.
Now I ask the people that are against hard CCs. Is this want you want? A list of CCs homogenized due to the universal counter "break free"?
But I also want to see classes have SOME specific CC counters.
Example: tank has shield slam to put target into stun for X seconds. Fighter has resolute stance to reflect the stun to the tank plus X dmg.
Rogue eats the stun in the face and gets disorientated.
Mage has sleep. Casts sleep on rogue, but rogue has focused mind. Rogue clicks focused mind and becomes invisible for X seconds and takes the mage by surprise.
But a smart mage would use a blowback CC on a rogue. The rogue doesnt have blowback counter. Gets blown back and eats a fireball in the face.
An archer however has a blow back counter. And while being blown back the archer shoots 2 arrows dealing X dmg.
Active abilities that you can clot in a 20 ability hotbar. You select which tools you think might be better for the way you want to play.
Not stats spreadsheet builds with 6 ability hotbars and boring, pre determined rotations.
Not heavy armor has melee resistance but magic weakness builds which means it's a matter of luck what weapon your enemy has.
Kind of old school PnP spells per day method. I think the original GW was a little like this, but it's been a WHILE...
However, combat is one part of mmos. And I think that shallow mmos like bdo and eso make up for the lack of depth with emphasys on adrenaline based combat.
I think AoC should pick and choose either tab or action. There is benefits to both, and with a bit of imagination there can be a great combat system that brings out meaningful and unique looks to the choices people make regarding classes, weapons, ability choices etc etc.
Either focus on action combat for adrenaline immersion, or go with tab and create a new awsome set of abilities for the 64 class system.