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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
In your example of two players attacking each other every second, there are either 360 or 480 RNG rolls per minute - or either 6 or 8 rolls per second if you prefer.
Line by line:
"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."
citation needed. speculation at best. your own hypothesis presented as fact
"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."
appeal to emotion, not really relevant to the argument
"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."
Wat. You can just like, go to a different part of the absolutely gigantic world or hang out in the town for a while.
"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."
To a degree, right? The last time I remember running the numbers for area landmass of the server and expected server population, I was seeing that the player land density wasn't going to be especially high. Especially if people were going to be mostly crowding together in hotspots. It could totally be the case that you don't often see the same faces unless you choose to.
"If you have a high win rate, that means someone has a low win rate."
This is true to a degree. It could be that a lot of people have slightly below average win rates, but yeah, I get where you're going. It all has to balance.
"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?"
I'm assuming you want me to say 'quit the game'. And I think that's what happens in a lot of cases and isn't healthy for MMO populations. That's why we want to make sure that there's still underdog mechanics and that the winrate for better players vs worse players doesn't get out of control. I don't think we need miss% on CC's to do this, but we've talked that to death.
Other answers here are 'seek help from allies' or 'work on a different goal', 'try to get better', or 'dont flag'. This is also, broadly, what the karma system is for. if someone can't get away and doesn't want to fight, they can just not flag up and their opponent will eventually go red.
"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."
The game I want to play is an open world game, and you don't get to decide that for me.
So, yeah, "rolling a 1" on a heal due to RNG is part of the fun of an RPG.
Failing is part of a good story.
Explain one underdog mechanic that doesn't have this as it's goal. I mean - that is the exact point of an underdog mechanic.
The reason why RNG on CC is a good tool to use to this end (it is not effective in itself to be the only underdog mechanic) is because it still keeps things in players hands in regards to how they build their character.
Actually it feels bad to win due to luck. It feels dirty, like one should apologize to their opponent, because it doesn't make sense to take pride in an outcome that was decided by luck.
This is why tennis players universally hold up their hand and apologize to their opponent when they hit a net cord, and the ball dribbles over the net for them to win the point. They don't feel good about it since it was luck that caused them to win the point,
I know that there are people who actually celebrate and enjoy the feeling of beating someone not due to skill, but rng. Those people are a disgrace in my opinion.
RNG on a CC in regards to an opposed roll isn't luck - it is your planning of putting stats in to what ever increases your chances of resisting that CC at work.
Essentially, it is your plan coming together - and I assume most of us love it when a plan comes together.
What you wrote is: "However, in this alpha, there was no 'hard' CCs."
The Alpha One had Stuns and Stuns, by your own admission, are hard ccs.
I dunno why you're trying to deny that.
It is still luck. Even if you built a character with 99% resist, because there's a chance that you'll get unlucky and won't resist at a critical moment. There's still a chance that you get screwed by rng unless the resist chance is exactly 100%. So you end up in the same scenario regardless, unless the balance is designed that the total effective dps or dmg resistance (accounting for resist probabilities) is higher by getting this chance to exactly 100% instead of anything lower. It is highly unlikely that this is the case though, and good players will be forced to not choose this route even if they hate the rng component.
We don't even need to inject this rng, which feels bad to players, into the system. The resist % stat system doesn't even add any depth to anything once you do basic math to figure out the optimal dps or armor accounting for resist chances. It's not necessary, and it is quite easy to design better systems that give players more agency without the need for rng (abilities that give stun resist armor). This keeps the outcome in the hands of the players, not luck.
RNG does not feel bad to this player.
Ashes is an RPG; not a MOBA or FPS or Fighter.
Nope, it is still luck. It is binary if it's 0% resist or 100% resist, 0 or 1, binary. The system you're describing isn't binary and it feels bad to normal people when your opponent fails to resist on a percentage chance pure rng roll, which results in the opponent getting unlucky and gives the player the win.
That was the point you were trying to make originally, and I still refute it.
You can plan for something to happen, but if you still fail due to an rng roll, then it is literally still luck.
It's not binary. You can better your RNG results by building your character for what you want.
Planning isn't luck.
I'm so tired of having to explain obvious facts to people. It's just not worth it, because they won't be able to comprehend any points with basic fundamental misunderstandings. Sorry, I only say that to explain why I might stop responding to some posts in the future.
I totally cede the point that the idea behind underdog mechanics is to give the worse player the ability to win. The ultra meter in street fighter 4 (you can only use a particular ability after you've lost most of your health bar) accomplishes this same thing without RNG. My main problem with it is that it accomplishes this in a really lazy way. It removes player agency - there's nothing either player can do once the stats are set - the CC's either get resisted or not, they can just hope their stuff works.
If I'm understanding the sorts of numbers we're all reasoning about correctly, something on the order of 1/100, then when we're throwing out like ~6 crowd control abilities per fight, then the probability that none of them get resisted is ~94%. If you get in 10 fights, you still have a ~53% chance of never seeing a resist across all of those fights. I just don't know why we'd want for there to be this random 1-in-100 chance for this very-important ability that works almost all the time, that you form your gameplay around to just randomly not work. I just keep wondering "why is this fun?".
If the answer is "it has to be this way in order to make sure that the less skilled don't leave", then I point you back to the above stats. With a 1/100 chance to resist, there's a 53% chance that you don't even see a cc resist in 10 consecutive fights. Even if you see a CC resist, it might not change the outcome of the fight, as you're so keen to keep reminding me. So, how much is this actually making the worse player win? More, certainly, but how much more?
I'm saying that if this is the goal, we should accomplish it in other ways. Hopefully ways that preserve player agency. Hopefully ways that are more fun than making people see "resist" pop up on their screen when they use their important cc ability with their cool animation.
I don't know what sort of timeline you're envisioning, but I'm thinking like 2-3 years down the line when the builds are mostly figured out, there's a website that keeps up-to-date meta information and folks have nearly-optimal meta builds. It's less about "building to taste" and more about 'which flavor of meta am I playing'. In that sense, there's just meta matchups and the numbers become more or less fixed. There might be slight variance in what the top builds are using accuracy vs evasion wise, but I really don't think that'll be the case. Do you disagree here? Willing to go down this path if you are.
Yes, but not the kind of winning due to luck that makes you feel bad.
It kind of needs to be dumb luck to feel bad.
Remember, luck is nothing without preparation.
You can't explain what you want because you use poor logic.
The real question is you want patterned pvp or pvp with rng elements? let's stick to that and not talk yet about "that situation when i was low hp bla bla bla..."
me i prefer the latter with items/armor sets giving resist to certain debuffs/cc etc... so you can "choose" and build you character around what you wanna resist more. for example a healer might wanna resist stuns mostly.
Also i am clearly asking... Can 100% land rate even work? how would a fight on a tight gate on castle siege would look if 5 people aoe stun 100?
Ashes will be all about the big fights. Alliance vs alliance. that means 300 vs 300. i am sorry but i cannot imagine 100% land rate on cc with 300 people on each side. (or don't want to tbh)
So, Steven addressed this issue on one of the livestreams when he was stun locked by 50 people. The solution he proposed is not rng. Keep track of the time of the last stun, and resist any further stuns x seconds into the future. This system prevents the perma stun lock with no rng involved.
I think there's a bunch of ways to handle this. You can put in a diminishing returns system so that every time you get hit by a CC, the next CC applies for less time. This makes it less effective to chain CC's together. If the goal is to make it so that a few people don't get stunned out of 100 (like what would happen if there was a 1% miss chance), you can make it so that the closest X people get stunned for the full duration, and then the next closest Y people get stunned for half duration up to a soft cap, so you can't stun more than say, 50 people or something.
Without trying to be snide, it's very similar to imagining 99% land rate on cc, but just with 1% less missing!
Edit: Some of the CCs, if not all, also do damage when applied. The move would be too overpowered to be 100% effective at all times, whilst giving damage, giving time and giving downward spirals.
RNG is not a solution to stun locking.
Edit, doing this would be like replacing your tires because your car won't start - so of course that wasn't the solution he proposed for it.
It sounds like you're envisioning a game where you repeat the same move over and over and crowd control the opponent to death. Am I on track? I was imagining a game where those sorts of abilities have cooldowns to make that not possible. Like you might be able to hit someone with a 2 second stun, but you can only do that once every 20 seconds.
As for the miss% chance, what sort of numbers are you thinking about there? 1/20? 1/10? 1/5?
if the above is yes:
Do you think that WoW, GW2, and ArchAge should not be considered MMORPG's because they lack this trait?[/quote]
Huh. I actually thought my answer was specific and rather absolute. I guess I’ll break this down for you.
I think RNG is an essential element to an RPG
I think RNG needs to be applied to all abilities
Hard CC’s are an ability
Hard CC’s need to have RNG
With respect to WoW and GW2, they are MMORPGs. They do not apply RNG ubiquitously, they are still classified as MMORPGs. Do I think of them as less an RPG than Archage: yes. Do I want Ashes to be a better RPG than WoW or GW2: yes.
I hate the DH rule. Therefore, I prefer the NL. Do I think the AL plays a lesser game of baseball, yes. But do I therefore think the Yankees aren’t a baseball team? No.
Will I always root for a NL team over an AL team: yes. If I were part of a discussion board to start a new baseball team in my area would I argue for a NL team: yes.
Btw: I don’t find you frustrating, because you don’t frustrate me. But I do find your argumentation style tiring, for the same reason I find terriers tiring.
Normally, I would take a toon, strike a Test Dummy and glean the combat parameters. I would then either accept the parameters or ask for adjustments from the Devs. It is not prudent for me to relate a risk of failure chance because the theories are still theories. All I can say is that I would consider the CC Train to be a standard feature in large scale PvP, where, there will be more than one person with CCs. Therefore, in my mind, it doesn't matter if one CC is stopped or not because you can still request another CC attempt. Without RNG, then all CCs will always land and in such a circumstance there is less tactical analysis, less adaptation and less need to build a competent team.
We currently have nothing except Diminished Returns to deflect CCs. Therefore, you request to remove RNG from the CCs means there is no counter to the request. We might see new Stats and CC Reduction or CC Resistance, but, I severely doubt CC Reduction will reach more than 50% or CC Resistance will reach more than 50%. If the threshold is 50% then you could face a situation where 1 out of 2 CC attempts fail on a specific target.
Those numbers - all of them - look about right. As well as some higher ones, and some lower ones.
Depends on the stats of the players in question.
I don't understand your phrasing with the word "need" as the word "need" is commonly used. How can it be that RNG is "necessary" and "essential" for it to be a RPG if, by your own words, it isn't? RNG on abilities isn't "necessary" and "essential" since the game would still be a MMORPG without RNG on CC? It's just, in your opinion, "better" and "more fun", just like you think the designated hitter rule makes the amerian league a lesser game of baseball.
Thing is, that is also all you have to say no RNG - you just prefer it. Where your argument falls flat though, is you haven't provided any suggestions for alternate systems to replace RNG on hard CC - systems that accomplish everything that RNG would do.
We don't have to bet with money. I just want something out of you. If you're sure you're right, then this is free for you, right?
I'm willing to bet that I haven't read it.
I purposefully kept out of this thread for a good 6 pages or so.