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
That was such a bad takeaway and exactly what I would have expected your response to be lmao.
"Putting a label on things is limiting to those things"
And you actually, unironically responded with
"Fuck you, I'm putting this label on it, and it can only have things associated to this label"
It's actually hilarious. You're so afraid of innovation and change for the better.
You don't have to have RnG on CC to have RnG in the game. Having all elements of the game having RnG I would argue doesn't work well in practice. I'd also argue RPG core is more about stats than necessarily having lots of RnG for making interesting builds. There's probably a reason why all the big MMORPGs dont have RnG on CC skills. In practice it sounds nice to have a cool build that combats CC but in reality when your CC keeps failing and you end up dying it's frustrating.
So dodge is a defensive stat you build to mitigate damage and abilities. It's historically modeled as an all-or-nothing sort of event because that's what it intuitively is. You dodge the attack so you should take no damage right? Well I've already explained why this is frustrating and how dodge could be replaced by a percentage reduction to damage (and CC too I suppose.) What I now want to show is how applying this all-or-nothing behavior to other stats is silly, and why nothing should behave like this.
Consider the old tried and true Fire Resistance. Since the beginning of time, it has always been modeled as a flat reduction to damage. If the dragon breath attack deals 100 fire damage and you have 50% fire resistance, you take 50 damage every time. Works and is intuitive.
Now think if for some reason we wanted to change fire resistance to be similar to dodge. Let's also imagine that a player has 100 hp. Now, as long as you have anything less than 100% fire resistance, there is a chance of just instantly dying without anything you can do to change it. How would you feel if you brought out maxed out fire resistance gear and had 99% fire resistance, and the dragon just instantly annihilates you. Was it that your fault? Did you just need to build more fire resistance? I say no. Clearly someone who prepares for the encounter properly shouldn't have to leave the outcome up to luck. With 99% fire resistance you should take only 1 damage and beat the encounter every time.
Now back to dodge and miss chance. While again, dodge seems more intuitive as an all-or-nothing mechanic, the same frustration as dying to the dragon breath is still there. Build full evasion and you're still going to be hit with stuns from low accuracy people at key moments. On the other hand, build full accuracy with 99.9% hit chance, and you're still going to whiff game deciding hits because the law of large numbers doesn't care how much you prepared. Nor does the 1 hp boss monster you miss 3 times in a row before you die to it.
Converting dodge into a flat, predictable outcome removes frustration, while keeping stat building just as relevant. Evasion can be a flat reduction of damage and CC, while accuracy can be the counter stat to counter the reduction. You could still build a high evasion tank that is extremely difficult to kill without accuracy, but would die fast to someone that has built to counter you.
I certainly don't want pvp to be about hoping my most important moves don't arbitrarily miss while my opponents don't, even when I have the better build and better skills.
What in the world does that have to do with the argument at all?
Are you implying there's randomness to dodgeball? Because there's actually not lmao.
It'd be one thing if you said Kickball where maybe wind-factor could be considered RNG
hahahaha - love it.
Lol, no. It goes back to a conversation he and I had earlier in the thread that he's alluding to above. Basically, that a dodge doesn't result in a miss, but a hit with greatly reduced damage (what is usually referred to as a glancing blow). I just had this amusing picture of what that would look like on a dodgeball court.
There is randomness in dodgeball though (as there is in all sports - and combat btw).
Fodderplay puts it pretty well IMO.
Then there are some very real technical limitations we have to deal with. 500 players battling in close proximity over a single point in a castle siege, all with different server ping etc. will for sure cause some desyncing and culling issues. You can't have a purely twitch skill based CC defense system if you can't even see the attack coming on your screen due to technical issues, even though your character might see it coming (if it was real).
As with all things, the devil is in the details. I don't think anyone would seriously advocate for a 50/50 chance of resisting a CC. But I think rolling that natural 1 should be a thing. Shit happens sometimes. And I think a character should be able to spec into CC resistance, either in the form of straight up resisting it, or at least only get reduced effect or duration. Spec'ing into that should obviously come at a cost of something else. This fits the genre perfectly too.
I think Tritri has a good point about differentiating the types of CC in terms of being resisted. So I'll just be lazy and say: Ditto what Tritri writes below.
This is true, but I'd like to make a distinction between randomness from human behavior and randomness from a system. Keeping with the analogy, while you could say it's "random" if my opponent decides to dodge left or right and if my hands slip while throwing the ball, these all are things I can work on to get better. With enough practice I won't slip anymore, and I can get better at reading the opponent. But my opponent can get better at reading me, and this is where the fun comes in. I wouldn't personally consider the matches being decided by luck, even though you could argue that the result can be modeled as a chance to hit or miss.
The other kind of bad random would be if the ball would just for some reason change directions during flight. Even if I had the ability to choose a better ball that does that less often, I would still feel cheated every time, no matter how infrequent it is.
I do like me some dodgeball though.
Oh my bad lol
Though I disagree that there is any RNG in dodgeball, as everything is determined by what the players actions are. But I'm also a Determinist in real life so that might play into that.
I don't understand this argument about it being about twitch skills. tab target MMORPG pvp is more about using your skills at the right times and managing cool downs, not really to do with twitch skills.
Agreed. When I think of RNG in this context it isn't like your second point (which definitely would suck, and result in walking away from the game). It's much more like your first example. I can take steps to mitigate some of the possible aspects that could take the match away from me: better gripping shoes, agility training, 12 different grips for throwing, etc. But I can never reduce chance to 0%, that is: a sure thing. Could be environmental, or my opponent, or how I'm feeling that day, or some uber-weird carom, you get the point. Those things that cause friction in any contest are abstractly represented in a figure we call RNG.
In the end we're having the same philosophical discussion across multiple threads and concepts.
Some subset of people perceive lack of RNG as lack of any driving force for timing, decision making, or interaction between the ways players make moment-to-moment choices.
A different set of people going 'wait no, that's not how that works, the determining factor is decision making'.
If one wants to argue 'player's ability to rapidly make decisions and notice situations should not be the important factor in RPGs', that's different. 'Rotations' and 'optimized meta builds' are not innate to mostly-deterministic gameplay, that happens when the gameplay isn't built around moment-to-moment decision making options to begin with.
And why do we not build games like that normally? Because RNG.
Dont say Absolver, as even if we consider it a valid game to compare to, all we need to donis point to how shit the game is, and how unpopular it is and we can then all say we want better for Ashes.
Even worse, most of the combat is exactly the same once you get in to it. Sure, you create a build, but then that build plays. A small number of the boss NPC's (I forget their name, it's been years) have some tactic that occasionally requires you to temporarily break away from your established method (which is a rotation by another name), but this is only occasional, and is a minor detour when it does occasionally happen.
So, even if we assume that the game you are bringing up is a fighting game despite the publisher not calling it one and even if we assume there is no RNG in it when there is a small amount, what we are left with is something we dont want to emulate anyway.
I am a big fan of taking aspects of games that they do well and highlighting that one thing. There are even aspects of WoW that I have highlighted as being good in the past.
Absolver has no such aspects to it that are worth raising up and saying "do this thing".
The game in its entirety is shit.
As to other examples that have been given - fighting games (real ones), while they have little in the way of RNG, they also have little on the way of character builds.
Since my point was that a game can not have worthwhile character building without an amount of RNG in combat, it is perfectly valid that we discount fighting games in general, as the person I was actually in this discussion with has done.
So please, enlighten me. You claim that I have ignored other games without RNG elements, yet with character building- which other games have been bought up that I have ignored?
Sorta. I don't think this topic is as clearly fundamental as say the 'stun topic.' I don't see this argument as 'skill' v. 'RNG' - i.e. skill and RNG are mutually exclusive. I see this as a question of prioritization and presence. Skill IS the most important factor in pvp. So are stats. So is gear. And there is the presence of some element of randomness, which can be mitigated to a certain degree, but never to 0%.
The game with the 8.5 review on polygon no poor reviews on the side bar for google search 71 % positive reviews on Steam and at least 60 different combat styles if you count the sword play.
But sure it's shit because you say so.
But in my opinion missing due to the game deciding that I miss, even if I could reduce or increase this chance by building and itemizing differently, firmly falls into the second category. Sure I have some control over it, but if I have the optimal build and miss, I can't go "well this was my fault and I can improve on this."
In any case it looks past this point it just becomes a point of preference. If you don't mind rng you can nudge in your favor, then there's not much I can say to contest that. Poker is quite popular I hear, and it has rng involved.
Poker is a great example btw - as professional players approach their wins as an average across many games, and their fortune isn't made or lost because of a bad draw on the last card.
I believe Noaani's argument is that the game is bad because not enough people reviewed it. It doesn't matter what the people who like the game think, if... something.
I can now say with clarity though, without feeling like I'm just attacking due to bias.
Noaani thinks Absolver is bad because Noaani is bad at Absolver, or bad at understanding Absolver. Not sure which, and it probably doesn't matter. The game admittedly does not do a good job of explaining itself to a person who doesn't play fighting games at the 'higher than mashing' skill tier.
But the specific complaints and 'points made' indicate this pretty clearly.
Idk, just in case anyone outside my group puts any weight on things I say, there you have it. When you don't know how to play fighters, you conclude that the games are about 'spamming' and 'repeating things', particularly when the game is trying to 'make it so you don't get immediately destroyed due to your lack of understanding'.
The game makes it possible to win by 'repeating rotations' because otherwise even less people would play it. Ashes doesn't have this problem because it isn't a fighting game, and adding a few more decision elements and removing RNG on certain things will not make it one.
Also Noaani is wrong about how exactly 'builds' work in fighting games too, because every character is a 'build', most games have between 16 and 40 of them, and the ones with 16 usually have literally 'choices you can make about which skills you have to use', sometimes more than 3.
Older Soul Calibur even has entire modes where you can use different weapons, and New Soul Calibur have entire 'build your own character from a base' modes. The reason those characters get outlawed in tournament play is exactly the reason they would be allowed and encouraged in games like Ashes. To make it easier to rapidly figure out how to fight them without randomly losing to the strengths build you don't understand.
Honestly I'm surprised this is even still being presented as a point given how many obvious holes there are in the stance. Are people seriously expected to just believe 'no, there are no examples, it's the fighting gamers who are wrong!'?
Polygon 8.5 is a fairly cheap result to buy.
71% is not very high.
60 combat style isnt hard when each style is fairly shallow.
Oh, that link wasn't to the Stun topic, I just didn't feel like reproducing the example from the Melee Feedback topic so I linked it instead.
If the game makes it possible for you to literally 'see the attack coming' and then to 'dodge the attack', the abstraction isn't required. All it does is then make it possible for a player to 'execute their attack perfectly and then miss the attack'.
But this thread is about CCs and I'm not really invested in whether or not Evasion chance vs Accuracy on other strikes is a thing here. If a CC is a skillshot, and the person using it does it correctly and then it fails because the other person put on a gear piece with a 5% resistance to that CC, then meta builds and balance issues are going to pop up way faster than if they put on a 5% CC reduction gear piece.
And again, we know this, because BDO.
Did you know that the Windfall style in Absolver allows you to dodge literally every single attack that comes at you if you can see it coming (or guess right for the faster ones.) Where are your rotations now?
Because the whole point of an RPG is that the character can be more intelligent than the player and better at spotting than the player, and better at accuracy than the player and better at dodging than the player.
If ny character has a very high Dex, that should increase my character's Dodge chance or my Accuracy chance via RNG. That should not be 100% reliant on player twitch skills. Even in Action combat.
I guess I have not been following the "decision making" argument at all.
I don't know how that is intended to be relevant.
Seems to me that a tournament is going to focus on player twitch skills, so of course they would try to minimize the effects of character builds.
Noaani is just being a pointless derail.
For anyone else who cares, find the 'rotation' and the 'RNG' and that's where you have effectively gained the ability to see whatever Noaani is seeing. If you don't find it, well...
If character skills can meaningfully trump player skills, the game should be Tab Target. And I'll be happy to play that too, because boy do I love massive Accuracy Down on enemies while building for evasion.
Satisfying. For me of course.
In Ashes, if you want to significantly mitigate RNG, you focus on Action.
But, there will still be some RNG. It's not going to be 0%.
"RNG is always going to play a role in Ashes of Creation whether that be in PvP or PvE, but one way to mitigate that is through the action system. The action system is going to be far less sort of dependent on those you know dice rolls and there'll be far more in your own hands. They won't ever completely eliminate that but it's a way for us to sort of reward skilled play versus sort of tactical strategies type play."
– Jeffrey
Basically, I have been trying to get back on the topic, while two of you just cant seen ti let your derailment in to talking about that piece of shit game go.
We should all tell Intrepid to drop what they are doing and implement Absolvers combat system, because that will make the game way better!
Now, unless you agree with this statement, I do not understand why you are continuing to push this derailment.
If you do agree with the above, let's discuss that.
The reasons you have given are all centered on the popularity of the game, and not any actual discussion beyond 'it is shit' without giving reasons why. If this is how you implement mechanics in a game, then maybe Ashes should have battle passes and randomized instanced matchmaking - Fortnite does that, and it has the most reviews of anything out there.
Maybe try to engage on why they are bad design decisions instead of making it a popularity contest. Adding a feature to your game only if it passes a threshold of popularity is a great way to make something bland and boring.
I do want to address these two points, but I will start by first off saying that at least the game series you talked about (the Soul series) is a fighting game series. So, well done for that,you are doing better than others just with that
The first point above, in regards to builds, I would consider these to be characters or classes, not builds.
A build requires some for of, well, building. If the player has no options, they are playing a character. If they have few options, they are playing a class kit, if they have many options, they are playing a build.
You may not think the distinction is important,but I absolutely do. An MMO with only characters or class kits is simply uninteresting.
To the second point, I am not saying fighting games are wrong, or the people that play them. I am saying that fighting games are right for fighting games, but qring for MMO's.
MMO's attempt to offer a completely different experience to what fighting games offer. One of the key aspects of that is in player choice in terms of a build. As you rightly point out yourself, fighting games that do have builds (which are still far more limited than MMO builds) marganilize that feature of the game anyway, as that is not what those games are about.
What this means is that unless someone can add in the ability for players to create their own builds in to a game with the combat system of a fighting game, you cant just assume that this combat style would work along side the ability for players to build and gear their characters with the granularity that MMO players would expect.