Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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
Then, in my opinion, the God of Fate thing does not translate well to action combat or aimed abilities. A lot of popular modern rpgs with action combat have gotten rid of this because it feels bad for the player. You can still have character progression and stats matter just as much without rng, so not having rng in modern games does not affect its identity as an rpg.
Dark Souls is an ARPG.
While the genre still contains the "RPG" acronym, they haven't been true RPG's since Diablo. They are action games first and foremost.
I think this is a pretty egregious no-true-Scotsman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
What is different about dark souls from an rpg? You got me curious about your definition of rpg now.
First of all, Mario Cart is a casual game played almost exclusively between friends. It is inappropriate to even discuss such a game here in any serious manner. Even though some people probably take it too seriously, that is not the design intent of the game.
Fortnites bloom is not randomization for the sake of randomization. It serves a very specific purpose, and so doesn't fit in this discussion.
Super Smash Bro's - Nintendo run tournaments are 100% about promotion of the game and all of it's features. The fact that the community doesn't use it is the telling aspect here - it is not appropriate in a competitive fighting game.
Ashes will see the better player win most of the time - this is not up for debate and having an amount of randomness in the combat will not alter that.
The game will have a gap in player ability - but unlike games that rank players and match them up to similarly ranked players, all players are in the world, and any one player can chose to target any other one player as often as they like.
So, while in a fighting game, you may come across someone significantly better than you on occasion, once you've had your match, you then go on and fight someone else. In an MMO, once that player has seen that he can dominate you, he can(and likely will) just attack you when ever he sees you as he knows it is an easy win.
If player skill were on a scale of 1 to 100, in a fighting game, players that were perhaps 2 or 3 points apart at most may be competitive against each other.
An MMO needs to bring that up to players that are 20 - 30 points apart being potentially competitive against each other - and randomness is the best way to do it.
The better player will still win most of the time, but the less good player stands a chance.
Again, in an MMO, this is ESSENTIAL.
Hey now, to be fair Dark Souls isn't made by Scottish developers.
Can you specify what you mean by point differences? Are you referring to skill points achieved from gaining higher levels? I disagree that the lower leveled character should have a fighting chance against someone with a large level/skill disparity. Why do you think this is essential in an MMO? This, along with the inability to separate RNG and RPG in SOME areas seems really weird and nonsensical to me. I'd really like some clarification.
ARPG is a fairly well defined game genre.
It is more focused on action than on RPG.
While one could get semantic and argue that it is/should be included in discussions in regards to RPG's - such discussions should not be needed on a forum that is specifically about MMORPG's.
The difference between ARPG and RPG is no more significant than MMORPG and RPG. Your attempt to dispute this comparison does not make sense and is not semantic. These are all RPGs and the example is totally valid.
I see no point in replying to the rest of your post.
I just fail to see the difference between it and action combat focused mmos (other than the 'massive' bit) so you'll have to pardon my ignorance of your quixotic view point.
In order to fit in to the above as you suggest, it needs to be a new point that I have never made before. Since I have made it before (the fact that I do not include ARPG's in discussions about RPG's, as they are different genres) kind of means it doesn't fit.
My mistake. I somehow missed that the first time I read through. (Writing on mobile so my quotes might have some errors.)
I'd still appreciate a better explanation on why comeback potential in such a large skill disparity is essential in MMORPGs. At least one example of where this is the case or where prescendant has been set that this is ESSENTIAL would be really helpful.
In a game like Ashes, the best player in the game is free to attack the worst player in the game as often as that best player wants.
The rest should be obvious from there.
The larger the range of player skill that is able to be at least somewhat competitive in an MMO with open world PvP, the more competitive PvP in that game will be.
Again, this should be obvious.
Alright, so games like Dark Souls and Skyrim are technically ARPGs. So if Ashes has hybrid combat, wouldn't it be a HRPG (no weeb jokes plz)? Or HMMORPG? If a lot of ARPGs don't have rng misses on aimed abilities, then Ashes doesn't necessarily need have them either if they both have action combat.
It all goes back to what I was saying before: Rng is strongly correlated to how abstract the combat is, not whether it has rpg in the genre description.
Sheesh. It would be nice if everyone felt comfortable enough in their position that they would just answer straight-forward questions, especially when the answer can be typed in a couple words or less.
There are actual reasons to add randomization to a games systems to make the game more playable.
Same with fighting games and smash-with-items. Same with shooters and fortnite-with-bloom, or tf2 with all of the wacky stuff that happens there.
This is a tautology. The better player wins more often in all games. If they won less often or equally often, how could they possibly be considered "better"? The actual question is "how much more often does the better player win"?
If a 99th-percentile player plays against a 1st percentile player and wins 51% of the time, the game has extreme variance is probably little more than a glorified coinflip. If a 99th-percentile player plays against a 95th-percentile player and wins 99% of the time, then the game is probably competitive to an oppressive degree - think if fighting games were best-of-1000 instead of best-of-5.
Trying to figure out exactly where you want your game to land on the "how often should better players win" curve is a super important design decision. I think MMOs should make it so that the better player wins less often than your average racing game, fighting game, moba, fps, etc. Does this position surprise you?
That said, how we go about making it so that "The better player will still win most of the time, but the less good player stands a chance", is the actual interesting part. There's a lot of dials we can turn. It sounds like you want to specifically turn the dial that makes it so that high-impact CC's have a chance to fail. I want to turn that one off, and turn other ones instead. Does that sound reasonable?
Just out of curiosity, would you consider the addition of randomization in games systems as an "countermeasure against repetitiveness, predictiveness and staleness in its systems"?
Aren't we all sinners?
Huh? Just because no one has called you yet on excluding ARPGs from RPGS by calling them not "true" RPGs, doesn't mean that it's right.
With that being said, if you were a level 30 player and somehow by chance lost to a level 10 player because of random chance being ESSENTIAL for competition in an MMO, would you hold that L with pride?
When you are sitting around in your living room with the same group of friends (the core group of players Mario Cart is designed for), there is always going to be one player that is better. That randomization is what keeps the people that are not that one person sitting down playing that game, as there is a chance they could get some luck and win the next race.
This is literally the same reason MMO's with open world PvP need randomization - the only difference is the people are not sitting on the same couch. No it doesn't, because any other position would be ridiculous. The problem with this is that if you leave the randomization off of any one aspect of the game, those better players will latch on to that, and the less good players wont.
This means any effort you put in to those other dials is far less effective. The more of an impact this effect that you keep RNG off of, the worse it is for the game.
Everything needs to be subject to some RNG, the amount of RNG is subjective, and player should always have a means of shifting it in their favor.
RNG in a game like Civilization exists to prevent these three things - though the game also offers multiple game modes to meet that same end.
When you are sitting around in your living room with the same group of friends (the core group of players Mario Cart is designed for), there is always going to be one player that is better. That underdog mechanic is what keeps the people that are not that one person sitting down playing that game, as there is a chance they could get some luck and win the next race.
This is literally the same reason MMO's with open world PvP need underdog mechanics - the only difference is the people are not sitting on the same couch.
Why does this necessarily have to mean this? Abilities can be tuned and balance passes can be made. I have faith that the devs can build a game where the underdog feels like they have a shot even if there's not a 1/1000 chance that the better player's stun randomly doesn't work.
I'm assuming this is a rhetorical question.
If you have a single CC ability in a game that has no RNG, when every other ability in the game has RNG, all the top players will know about that ability (the less good players are unlikely to even understand what RNG is about).
This means you have given a strong ability to the best players in a game where you are trying to even things out some.
It is literally having the opposite effect of what you want to be doing.
It wasn't a rhetorical question - I'm wondering what you're actually afraid of gameplay wise. Like yeah, better players will gravitate toward those abilities and they'll win more often in the short term. Intrepid will do a balance pass and see that build-which-includes-that-ability is performing too well and nerf it a bit. And repeat.
as win rates higher that are usually extreme detractors to player numbers(cosidering same level and gear but difference in skill level)
Taking in consideration Play fighting experiments and articles in terms of win ratio
(Here is an article for a more profound understanding: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13420-017-0264-3 )
There is a reason why the vast majority of competitive games have systems Like MMR(far from perfect) to prevent such win ratios by limiting the skill level of opponents you can go against.
Aren't we all sinners?
It's just not zero.
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 Bard
Steven says he is bringing the RPG back to MMORPG.
And, he's leaning more towards Tab Target than Action in that if they can't get the Action to feel right, he's going to scrap it and just have Tab Target.