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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
A 6 second stun shouldn't exist.
Stuns should be limited to no more than 3 seconds, under any possible situation.
Soft CC can be longer.
And as I said above, your ratio of hit/miss is pointless as that should be determined by character stats.
I would take a 3 second stun that has a 100% chance to hit if I have maxed out my to-hit chance and am against someone that has put no effort in to increasing their resist, yet has a 50% chance to miss if I have not put any effort in to my to-hit chance and am against someone that has put some real effort in to increasing their resist.
The reason it is not possible to balance is because of the nature of it. If it were 0.1 seconds, it is still a stun that simply can not be resisted.
Why are you trying to dumb down the game by removing an aspect of character building?
I'm totally down for the suggestions Beau present and for the "dumbing down" that you're accusing. I disagree that this is actually dumbing down or impossible to balance though.
Do you think that complicated systems are inately good?
There are plenty of examples where simplifying systems makes for better gameplay. Just look at modern WoW. The most recent expansion is riddled with complicated systems and they just announced a few days ago that they are eliminating several of them. This is conaidered to be a good thing by pretty much the whole community.
I am sure we could all think of.kore interesting, creative, and fun ways to build and customize our characters than how often we randomly do or do not get CC'd. We're not even arguing for ALL CC to be removed from RNG. Just that some forms would be best not left up to chance because it's more fun.
The system you are throwing your lot in with is suggesting that some CC be able to be resisted, and some CC not be able to be resisted.
I am saying all CC should be able to be resisted - with a stat that is easy to understand the effect of. This is in the exact same way that spells will be able to be resisted.
As as such, the system I am suggesting is by far the less complicated of the two. It is using one system as opposed to using two systems.
And as I said, once you get into a fight, those numbers become fixed, right?
Character building is an extremely trivializable skill. The most effective character builds will immediately get propagated through the internet and copied and the only thing differentiating players will be how well you can pilot it. This isn't like your home game of D&D where the rest of the world will never find out about your secretly optimal genius build. If your character is more effective than everyone else's, you will be inspected without your consent, the footage of your character performing will be studied, and copied, and then you'll lose to people with your build but better at pressing buttons.
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/311948/#Comment_311948
The game isn't going to be appreciably deeper because you can increase a stat that makes you randomly resist specifically high-impact ccs.
As for why I want that removed, I believe you've asked this before, but:
For me personally, I find fun through three main avenues listed in order of importance: self-improvement, hanging out with friends, and winning. I've written a little about this in the abstract in http://beaushinkle.xyz/posts/intrinsic-fun
I'm probably a little abnormal for MMO players in that I don't especially care about artificial rewards (the game giving me gear, titles, prestige, etc), but those typically come with being really good at stuff, which naturally follows from heavily focusing on self improvement and winning, and having a crew of likeminded and similarly dedicated friends.
You may be horrified to learn that I skipped all of the dialogue and cutscenes in my ffxiv playthrough so I could get to the savage/extreme content asap. I had only a vague idea of what was going on with the plot, and then caught myself up on the lore/story by reading the wiki and watching the cutscenes in 2x speed on youtube. Efficiency, baby.
I don't expect for the genre to cater to me, and in fact, I think MMO's are in a really unenviable place where they have to cater to a bunch of people who want to play them in a whole bunch of different ways, which dilutes the focus.
To your question: Why do players like beau dislike it when high-impact stuns are resisted? It dillutes the self-improvement. Did I make the right play, but lost because I got unlucky? Did I make the wrong play but won because I got lucky? It puts a layer of random separation between cause and effect. Now I can't just tell that I played better than the other player by nature of me winning, I have to go back and check how relatively lucky we each got.
It hurts my ability to win. Since I'm generally the better player, I'm going to be the one getting hurt by variance. In a RNG-less environment, I'm typically winning, so my opponent only stands to gain by adding in luck. If they get bad luck, who cares! They were going to lose anyway. If they get good luck, now they just might win.
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/312361/#Comment_312361
http://beaushinkle.xyz/posts/randomness-is-lazy
In games with fairly simple character building (all iterations of WoW, as an example), it is fairly trivial. Even Archeage is fairly simple in terms of character building compared to many games.
In a game with deeper character system, such as Path of Exile, things are not as straight forward. While players post builds, and others do use them, no one is arguing that these builds are the best you can get. Builds that are posted are generally builds that are easily accessible - and once you have access to better gear, the gear you do and do not have will usually dictate your exact build.
Even EQ2 has a character build system complex enough that most players don't run the exact same build, as even the makeup of your group within a raid will determine what the best build for you is.
None of the games you have listed that you played have particularly good character building, so it may well be that you are speaking somewhat out of your depth here.
Also, I am still not going to your website. If there is an argument there you want to make, make it here.
Edit; also, you did that thing again where you questioned something that was said, but in quoting it you cut off the clarification that was given, and then posted (this time with a meme) as if that clarification was never given.
At best, this is disingenuous of you. Please stop doing it.
Sorry, I should have been more explicit. Im arguing there should be NO system to change these stats in character builds which is much more simple. The balancing might be more challenging to get the CCs right, but the devs can handle that. Give me something more interesting and interactive to customize my character with than passive avoidance stats that don't actually accomplish anything over the long term but make specific instances of gameplay feel bad.
And to be clear, I don't want all RNG gone. It absolutely has a place and I recognize that Jeff has stated it will be present in all facets of the game. I just don't think it is necessary, nor his intention that it be involved in every skill or action.
I'd hazard that character building in Ashes will be orders of magnitude easier than in PoE (if not, would you like to talk about optimized pvp builds dunking on non-optimized builds in the open world?). Simulators like https://www.simulationcraft.org/ can be crafted that fully implement all build options for a game like ashes and we'll see every option explored billions of times after the game has been out for a few years. I want a game that'll last decades. Character building gets solved.
https://github.com/beaushinkle/blog/blob/main/markdown/randomness-is-lazy.md
if you want a publically trusted website instead of nice formatting
Any skill that is not subject to RNG is a skill that good players will flock to, as they understand how to make use of that specific facet of it, while less good players do not understand this.
Thankfully, I seriously doubt all skills will have a chance to randomly fail and I would be very surprised if the majority of the community shared your desire for this to be the case.
Do you agree that customizing avoidance stats isn't very fun or interesting and that maybe we could trade those for something else? I'm down for some passive built in stats in some cases but don't really care change them with talent point or anything similar.
You are wrong about SSF in PoE - most players (especially at the top end) are fully engaged in the games trading.
However, you are correct in regards to items - and item selection (along with skill gem selection and placement in PoE) is all a part of character building.
Even if PoE had competitive Pvp (which you are right, it doesn't), it wouldn't alter the fact that as a character building system, it is not trivialized in the manner you suggested all such systems can be.
While I agree that Ashes will be less deep than PoE in terms of character building, I have absolutely no doubt that players running PvE optimized builds will get absolutely dominated by players running PvP optimized builds.
This is as it should be.
As to the simulation you are suggesting will happen in Ashes - such simulations require the game have a fairly open API that allows people to pull data in order to feed the simulation. Ashes will have no such API, and so such simulations won't be a thing in this game.
I am still not going to your website, nor any other link. It isn't to do with "trusted websites" or anything like that (I am more than able to deal with anything that may come my way by simply visiting a website). Rather, it is to do with if you have an argument to make in this discussion, make that argument in this discussion.
Yes we have, and if you recall I pointed out that a 0.1 second stun with no chance to resist is enough to allow a good player to win more.
If we want to explore this even further, your methodology of as long as good players aren't beating bad players too often - how exactly should Intrepid be quantifying that?
Sure they will.
Melee attacks can be blocked or avoided - is this a new concept to you?
lol
Okay? They're able to use a 0.1 second stun better than a worse player. So? The 0.1 second stun is less effective than a 1.0 second stun, so overall they would win less with a 0.1 second stun vs opponent-with-another-build than with a 1.0 second stun vs opponent-with-another-build.
We're not trying to balance mirror matches here. We're trying to make sure that worse players aren't losing too often.
Of the cuff, they could just randomly sample people's win/loss records on a daily basis in the open world and measure variance. If the game is too hardcore, then variance (is Wikipedia okay?) will be high because the elite players will be like 90:10 and the noobs will be 10:90. If the game is too casual, then variance will be really low because the elite players will be like 55:45 and the noobs will be like 45:55.
----
Also, just so we're clear, is this your claim?
It's impossible to balance ashes around having cc's with no rng. Despite the fact that you can
- increase the cast time
- decrease the cc duration
- make it cost more talent points
- make it cost more mana
- increase the cooldown
- make it cc yourself for some of the duration
it's impossible to configure any of those dials in such a way that the game will support worse players winning often enough or preserve meta build diversity. But! But! If you give CC's a miss% chance it fixes it.Just checking.
Most MMO developers only put data on the client if they want players to have it, as they know any data on the client will be known to players, in general.
Crowdsourcing is possible, but inaccurate. Doing it the hard way - your data will be outdated before you finish. And now you have a game in which developers can only work on balance on one ability at a time, and need weeks worth of data to make each individual adjustment on each change.
You can't use variance like this to determine the impact of one change if there are multiple changes, and again, if there is only one change it means Intrepid can only work on balancing one ability at a time.
Keep in mind, a conservative estimate of the total number of abilities + augments + ranks in Ashes will result in around 20,000 individual ability combinations.
This is correct. It is impossible.
On the other hand, adding in randomization along with player agency in regards to gear and build allows players to balance it for themselves, in a manner they are individually happy with.
This also has the added side effect of requiring players that either want the best chance of landing CC or the best chance of resisting CC needing to sacrifice something in their build to achieve that. This will likely mean that a rogue (for example) will have the choice between absolute top end burst damage and CC that mostly land, or CC that almost always land and burst damage that is not quite as high but still fairly decent.
If you then add invis as an opposed stat )your invis stat vs my see invis stat), then you may need to make serious sacrifices in burst damage with your rogue if you want good invis and good CC.
Why would they not be able to change multiple abilities at once? I'm not going to off the cuff design their data gathering methodology for measuring how effectively they've hit their balance goal for "bad players should have a shot against good players". That's an unreasonable ask of me. That's something they need to have regardless of whether or not they want miss% on CC's.
On crowd sourcing being inaccurate? Because if they make two changes and then measure variance, how do they know which change to attribute that variance to?
Honestly, it's like you didn't even think that one through.
I've heard of these novel concepts. My hope is that they would be active abilities because it's more fun and interesting than random avoidance stats.
I was referring to a skill or abilitiy's inate chance to fail. I'll be surprised if this is the case for everything, including skill shots outside of mechanical error.
Oh my goodness. I think that's all I've got there if you're that sure. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if your extreme confidence is at all warranted.
This problem reminds me a lot of something I did at my last gig - hyperparameter optimization
While they game absolutely will have active abilities for avoiding and dodging and such, it will also have passive stats for defense.
Skills should not have an innate chance to fail, as I have said many, many times, everything that is RNG should allow player input on both sides (so, an opposed check - your relevant stat vs mine, with an amount of RNG).
This means that if your relevant stat is high enough over mine, then you have absolutely no chance at missing, meaning the ability itself has no innate chance to fail.
Devs can balance more than one thing at a time. Is this a new concept to you?
Not using the method suggested they can't.
If my computer is running slow, and I clean out the radiator and uninstall some RGB software and then run some more benchmarks, I can't accurately attribute any gain in performance to any one of those two things that I just did. If I want to know which of them made the biggest difference, I need to perform one, benchmark, perform the other, benchmark and then compare.
Nope, but I have two out of those three on my team.
I understand it will be tab and action combat. GW2 has a similar combat system and virtually no avoidance stats. It isn't a requirement of the genre or combat system to be riddle with RNG. It has its place in some abilities but thankfully, we have the technology to pick and choose how significant that RNG is for different abilities or whether it should exist at all.
I don't think spending skill points on avoidance stats is fun, engaging, or interesting. It often comes with the opportunity cost of missing out on puting those points towards something more valuable, fun, or engaging. I say we just don't bother with it. Give me something better.
Developers balance more than one thing all the time. Would you like me to find you some patch notes of this happening?
If you are arguing that they cannot balance an ability to a specific win rate with those dials, I fail to see how adding RNG to the mix changes this at all. If anything, it makes it more complicated and more difficult.
You can run bayesian inferencing to become exceedingly certain about which components of a system are causing an effect without testing them in isolation by updating the hypothesis that the component is the problem component each time it shows up in a test where the problem occurred. After enough tests, you become more and more sure that you've got your culprit(s), without ever having to go one-at-a-time.
In either case, it's all totally irrelevant because we're debating flaws in my off-the-cuff answer to how to measure how much worse players are winning. I'm not married at all to this model, and it was just an illustrative example rather than a real proposal.
It's hard to get more difficult than "Impossible".
He's not going to visit the Wikipedia link.
Crap, yeah. Have to keep it in-forum.
From my perspective, it does have to be one of these two though.
I did not say developers can not balance more than one thing at a time - I said they can not balance more than one thing at a time using measured variance.
So, which is it, dense or deceitful?