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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
Hahaha. Totally, except they won’t be NPCs. We’ll still be talking about this at my Freehold. You’re welcome to join anytime, beer on the house.
It’ll be the tavern with the poster ‘You can’t have rangers without RNG.’
Other than shifting the order of events around and changing the numbers, I don't actually know what your new game changes. In either case, it sounds like you're getting it. Without the extra d100 roll at the end, the faster slapper wins straight up. After the d100 roll at the end, the faster slapper wins less. There's only 3 situations worth considering:
the luck factor only really helps out the slower slapper here - variance always helps out the worse player.
If you want to make your game about adapting to randomness and rewarding players for doing so by making them win more I think that's a great mechanic! There's a handful of ways to do that, but a simple one is by giving them an ability that gives them random but equally good buffs that needs to be reacted to in non-overlapping ways. Now, when I press my ability I don't know what I have to do next and I have to plan for it, but the I never get lucky/unlucky, the situations are just different and then the game can test my ability to adapt to randomness.
I know you prefer to answer vaguely, and it must be frustrating to be hounded to answer in such precise terms, but...
Yes/no: Do you think that miss% in CC's (for games that have CCs) is a strict requirement for a game to be considered a MMORPG?
if the above is yes:
Do you think that WoW, GW2, and ArchAge should not be considered MMORPG's because they lack this trait?
All good. When you do, I’ll answer your other questions. 🤗
It is all abilities in Archeage that can be resisted, not just CC's.
Basically, the game treats CC's the same as all other abilities, which is an acceptable but not optimal (imo) way of going about things.
Hey, if you want to stop talking, no one is making you. This seems like a super lame way to do it.
If there is a frog item in the game, I am leaving one every time I visit your freehold, just as a memento.
That’s an interesting take on what I said. 🤨
The difference between our examples is pretty clear. I agree with your three bulleted outcomes, but that’s not the difference.
And further, care to continue any of the other completely unrelated conversation bits that you've held up over this weird line about me thinking that the games are relatively similar?
Crow has a personal preference for RNG to show up in combat situations in MMORPG combat. They like the design, think it'll be more fun, and want it to be in ashes. All good so far. Most folks are okay with RNG in most cases, but some really hate it when stuff that can decide matches (like crowd control abilities) have a random chance to miss. In order to justify it's inclusion beyond just "me and folks like me like it and think it'll be more fun", there are three main arguments that I've seen:
In order for the first argument to be effective, one needs to show that the following is true:
The situation where the attacker's crowd control fails but they adapt to it failing correctly is favorable to the situation where the attacker's crowd control succeeds but they adapt to it failing incorrectly. If this isn't the case, then it's better to be lucky than to be good (though being good still helps!). I've never seen this be the case in modern MMO design (not saying it can't!). Usually when your CC gets resisted things are just bad for you (you're out mana and a longer cooldown with nothing to show for it).
The second argument is totally valid. Lesser skilled players will enjoy being able to get wins against better skilled players via luck. They might get frustrated when their own CC's get resisted, but they'll probably appreciate always feeling like they have a chance as the underdog. That said, I advocate other ways to create underdog potential than specifically giving high impact crowd control abilities a %miss.
The third argument is wack. When World of Warcraft released, you could resist stuns. Eventually they took it out. It didn't stop being a MMORPG that moment. Guild Wars 2 has never had a %chance to resist crowd control. It's always been a MMORPG. Imagine that you take your-favorite-mmorpg and patched it so that all of the crowd control abilities didn't have a %miss. Instead, whatever %miss would have been applied now reduced the duration instead. Would it change the balance? Yes, absolutely. Would it change the genre of the game? No!
So here we are. Crow already knows this, and that's why when I asked them, they didn't answer directly. Instead, they pulled a politician and talked about how "randomness is essential to rpgs". They're stuck. If they say "yes, if a game has no %miss on cc's it's not a MMORPG" then that's a super brittle position and they know that. They don't want that position. If they say "no, a game can have no %miss on cc's and still be a MMORPG", then they lose ground on the definitional front.
(all of the above is speculation, of course)
One CC shouldn't determine the outcome of a fight. If it does/can, then that CC is too powerful as an ability - even in an evenly matched fight.
The point is, this is a critical moment, and this fight is now decided by whether not this stun lands. This sort of situation will keep coming up, over and over.
Instead of the the fight being decided based on RNG on the spot, maybe it’s who has the upper hand or who needs to disengage. Now you’re playing catch up and need to burn an extra defensive. You’re behind on the cooldown game. Etc.
To your point, you can absolutely reduce the frequency that this occurs by decreasing the impact of crowd controls!
Not once.
While I don't disagree with you in saying that the very edge case scenario that you are talking about here would suck, you are only even in that situation - by your own admission - as a result of many other RNG rolls.
As such, the fights outcome isn't a result of one roll of the dice, but of many rolls.
You can't just complain about the last one.
And yeah, the overall fight wasn’t determined by one CC, that’s objectively true. But, one cc determined the end of that fight. It can feel even worse if the probability is low like 1/100, where most fights you don’t even expect to see a resist, so when you see one at all you’re probably straight up unlucky.
I think I mentioned it in the other thread, but the rng for a cc resisting is so much higher variance than something like an auto attack critting. You might do 50 autos during a fight but 6 ccs. You might have a 20% crit rate but a 1% cc miss rate. When a auto crits, it’s kinda nice. When a cc misses, it’s devastating.
Super swingy
Don't do that. They are not directly comparable like that.
In open world PvP, if you "win" by the last ability, you have lost because now you are out, exposed, almost dead and there are no doubt others that saw you fighting that are waiting to see if there are easy pickings left over.
Honestly, in an open world setting, it you "win" with less than half of your HP left, you basically lost. This is why it never happened in years of playing Archeage - a game that is actually comparable to Ashes
Also, WoW has those exact CC's that shouldn't exist. A 6 second stun is absurd.
If you finish a fight with less than half HP you didn’t basically lose, you won, you’re just in a potentially bad spot for the potential next fight unless you can heal up, which also happens often enough 🤷🏻♂️
Neither of those take away from the idea that sometimes fights are close, which honestly I have no clue how you’re trying to contest
The reason fights in open world MMO's are never close is because neither party wants that to happen. If a fight looks like it will be close, it is more common that both parties will back off than it is that they carry on fighting. It is in both players best interest to not carry on a fight that they could win if it would mean they are an easy kill for someone else.
This is why arena concepts simply don't hold true in open world games - and why most of what you talk about has no real place in Ashes. You have no idea at all how people will play Ashes, how people will react to different circumstances, because you have never played a game that comes even close to being what Ashes is likely to be. You are trying to project your experiences of other games over on to Ashes, without taking in to account the massive differences in what the actual players in a given situation will do.
The only real games that experiences from can transfer over to Ashes with any meaning are Archeage and BDO. Even L2 doesn't, because the gaming community is vastly different now to what it was 18 years ago. WoW and New World absolutely don't and it's laughable to suggest they do.
It has happened to me, and it will happen to me again. I don’t know what to tell you 🤷🏻♂️
I dare you to say WoW...
If you want to put money on it, then I'd be willing to go through albion streams and find moments when open world fights came down to sub 5% health. Do you disbelieve that if I went through enough streams that I would be unable to find such events? Because a single clip should be enough evidence, right?
It especially happens when one character's build is better at chasing tthan another characters build is good at escaping and both players know this, so disengage is pointless and you fight to the death. Those fights to the death can turn out close.
It can also happen when the players just don't want to run away for any number of reasons (pride, practice, greed, etc).
I've never played archage, but I've seen videos. It looks like the mobility is super high, and so I can totally see how if someone doesn't like the fight they can just jet out of there when things look dicey, so I can see how you had the experience that you had. What I'm asking for is a little bit of flexibility in that just because you played a particular game in the genre in a particular way, doesn't mean that other games in the genre have to be played in that way by all players. The general idea that "players in the open world can have close fights to the death" should hopefully be a pretty uncontroversial one!
You can hopefully, at least imagine two equally matched tanks in ashes deciding to duke it out to last hit, right? If they were both feeling a certain kind of way about each other
Now, we can talk theory, and about situations we imagine, but at the end of the day even if something happens occasionally it isn't really something that needs that much thought.
I mean, I could get you to go through Albion streams (do people still play that game?), but even if you find situations where it does happen, it doesn't mean anything. I'm not going to waste your time in suggesting you do that.
Right now, the argument against RNG on hard CCs is that on occasion it may cause you to lose a fight. What is being forgotten here is even if we accept this, literally the same number of times it causes someone to lose a fight, it causes someone to win a fight - and so that just isn't a reason at all.
Feels bad for one player, feels good for another player.
Even if we wanted to argue that point, we still need to willfully disregard the many other RNG rolls in the encounter that - had they have been different - would have altered the outcome of that fight.
So, at best, your argument of one roll determining the outcome of a fight is actually 100+ rolls determining the outcome of a fight, all with player choice providing input on both sides of that opposed roll. Your argument that it sucks to lose due to RNG is now a case of someone wins, someone loses.
And all of that is still only something that - at best - is an occasional occurrence.
I'm so confused. Your claim is that "there are never close fights in the open world" right? Wouldn't I have found a close fight in the open world? How would that not mean anything? If you want to stop going down this silly path I'm totally game. I don't want to go down this path either and would rather drop it entirely.
I don't think that's being forgotten. In fact, I talk about this explicitly! here: "appeal to increased casual inclusiveness via increased variance" and here "The second argument is totally valid. Lesser skilled players will enjoy being able to get wins against better skilled players via luck. They might get frustrated when their own CC's get resisted, but they'll probably appreciate always feeling like they have a chance as the underdog. That said, I advocate other ways to create underdog potential than specifically giving high impact crowd control abilities a %miss."
My whole thing is that this comes down to taste. I argue against those who try to claim that cc needs to be governed by RNG for reasons other than "they would prefer it". I have a preference for more competitive games and games where the better player wins more often. Where less about winning is left up to the roll of the dice and more is left up to player agency and the decisions they made. I tend to be okay with randomness so long as there are sufficient events (like normal attacks) over the course of a fight so that the variance smooths out.
I also tend to be okay with variance so long as the difference between unlucky and lucky isn't huge (like the difference between an attack critting and hitting from a win-the-fight perspective small relative to a cc missing). It just feels like extremely weird game design to me to intentionally design your game in such a way that when players are actually playing it, some person's important counterplay has a 1% chance to just not work and there's nothing they can do about that. But again, that's just my taste. The game will still work fine if that's there, it'll just be worse, in my opinion.
We seem to agree that making it so that CC's can randomly fail makes it so that the better player loses more often than they would otherwise. You probably want more of that in general happening than me, and when it does happen (less skilled players beating more skilled players), I'd like for it to happen for other reasons, but I think we've exhausted that conversation.
Do you also agree that the definitional argument is complete nonsense?
Say that you have two classes that are about to fight, one class has 100hp, and attacks for 2 damage every 1 second. The other class has 50 hp, attacks for 2 damage every 1 second and can do a 10 second stun guaranteed once per fight. Which class wins?
If the damage is Burst Damage, the most manoeuvrable will win the fight because they will reduce incoming damage and often get the last hit.
If the fight is a static fight, the initiator will win the fight.
If the fight is a ranged fight and projectiles are not instant - both players would die.
If the fight is a melee fight, then the most accurate will win the fight.
What RNG does, it prevents these scenarios from being constant. If the scenarios are constant, there is no possibility of skill determining the fight because the outcomes will always be the same. If the outcomes are always the same, then the combat will become stale. If I can determine a duel before I fight the duel, then there would be no point to the duel.
I also believe a 10 second stun is too powerful, but, I have seen self defence abilities in which the caster becomes stunned for 10 seconds in a bubble of immunity. In such a circumstance, the stun would not affect the fight outcome, only the fight length.
You suggested that you were considering spending what would amount to far too much time going through streams of various games to find cases to prove a point. Rather than just leaving you to do that, I reiterated that doing so would only see you deal with the first of three points that I have made, not all the points I have made.
If you want to go and find those fights, I am not stopping you, I am just pointing out how futile it would be, as even if you did find a number that were in games that were appropriate, it doesn't actually mean much in the whole scheme of things.
I hope you don't just assume people only ever have one dimensional debates... If an open world MMO had the same win ratio for top players that a game like Starcraft has, that MMO would last months at most.
Unlike games like this, you are not fighting people in some enclosed corner - you are fighting them in their world. Where they go to escape after aa hard day at work, or a less hard day of study.
Unlike a Battle Royal, MOBA, FPS, or any game other than an open world MMORPG, there is no getting away from people other than getting away from the game.
Rather than having tens or hundreds of thousands of people you play against at random, in an MMO like Ashes you are going to see the same people day after day.
If you have a high win rate, that means someone has a low win rate.
What do you think people with low win rates do in games where they can't get away from the person that is always beating them?
The game you want to play is not an open world game. The design goals of a successful open world game simply do not mesh with what it is you are saying you want in a game.
In the above example, there's no RNG. The two players stand still and every 1 second they do 2 damage to each other until one loses all of their HP. No accuracy, no miss chance, etc. Who wins?
If you don't want to math it out:
The 100hp guy gets stunned for 10 seconds and takes 20 damage during that time putting them at 80 hp.
Now it's an 80 hp person vs a 50 hp person and they each do 2 dps to each other until the 50 hp person goes unconscious. The 80 hp person will win with 30 hp left. This (hopefully) illustrates that having a guaranteed CC doesn't mean you have a guaranteed win, since even though the 50 HP player had a guaranteed (and ridiculously long) stun, they lost anyway.
The reason any of this is relevant is because there's plenty of games (like WoW and GW2) where classes have guaranteed CC's but don't have "guaranteed wins" or however that would work. Sometimes the other stuff that the other classes can do is powerful enough that they can win anyway (like in the example I provided, the other guy's 50 hp advantage was powerful enough to make them win without a stun). Sometimes both classes have a guaranteed CC, and how can both classes each have a "guaranteed win"?
There's also ways to design your game where players can avoid your CC without making it rely on RNG. For instance in WoW, there's no chance for a mage's polymorph to be resisted, but if a shaman thinks they're about to be polymorphed they can use grounding totem when they suspect the spell coming to nullify it.
There are some things I think all classes should have: a Buff, a debuff, an interrupt, a silence, a cc, some attack abilities and also a trinket. However, the current classes we've seen don't suggest it will happen. I can't really theory craft about the current classes because hard counters aren't present - we've only seen 3 or 4 primary archetypes.