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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
Why are you asking for this? No one is contesting the duration/resistance link. No one is contesting that you can't raise resistance.
I don't know how many more times you need me to agree to this before you stop writing it.
Retail World of Warcraft has no way to give yourself a %chance to resist a stun or spell as a player, but there are racials like hardiness that reduce the duration, and items like sephuz.
According to you :shrug:
I don't mind a little RNG on final damage calculations, but I do not at all like the idea of skillshots having a %chance to actually work.
(Although TBH, this would be such a cheesy way to excuse netcode conflicts HAHAHAHA)
Complete immunity means there is no RNG involved in the %chance for the CC to apply, its a net 0, it will deterministically never apply.
Aren't we all sinners?
The key thing to do is figure out whether or not the thing you're looking at is impactful enough and frequent enough that the central limit theorem has time to do its magic.
If a warrior with a huge slow 2h axe changes a mage and can swing twice and if they crit both times, kill them, then you probably need to adjust your crit model (or something)!
In other words, "I'll just try to slip in an agreement without conceding my mistake."
What you seem to be saying here is that Stun resistance should just be a temporary magical prep for combat rather than something that a character builds through experience. Which makes some sense if what you are creating is primarily just a tournament game.
But, RPGs are primarily about building up characters based on their experience and how all of that effects the narrative.
Well, you got ice cream out of the analogy. Isn't that more fun?
Let's go line by line.
B: "You're advocating for creating a situation in which a stun has a 1/1000 chance to fail."
C: The amplitude is debatable, but yes, and the chance of failure is both non-zero and mitigatable to some less non-zero probability.
B: "I'm saying that such a mechanic has pros and cons. "
C: We're both saying that.
B: "On the plus side, you get to be immersed, and players like crowe get to have more fun. "
C: I like this point. That really should have been the natural conclusion of your argument.
B: "On the con side, players like beau have less fun, and in competitive situations, sometimes that 1/1000 chance crops up at an important moment and makes things really unfun for some folks."
C: There's a little more to unpack there. You're assuming you're always at the negative effect of the stun miss. So there's a positive to offset your 'not fun,' losing a competitive scenario is worse than winning. Yes, it's possible that a 1/1000 chance to miss a stun occurs in an arena, but if that's the only factor in the loss, there are other non-RNG factors for your team to focus on. Same thing in soccer, the goalie isn't the single point of failure for all goals scored in all soccer games.
B: "You say it's normalized, but that's relative."
C: Well sure. But do you really want to debate what's absolute in fantasy gaming mechanics?
B: "It isn't in all MMO's. It isn't in WoW."
C: Pretty sure there are plenty of circumstances in wow where a hard cc doesn't land exactly when you need it to. This is just adding one more possible condition in that array.
B: "Even if it were in all MMOs, is that tradition that we have to carry forward?"
C: I don't think we need to fall prey to precedence as a sole criterion to include it in Ashes, but precedence is worth considering when attempting to argue that it's a novel concept in competition, gaming, etc.
Edit: Honestly, this: "players like beau have less fun" is probably the most compelling argument in this thread. And is the place where you and I find the common ground to sort the salient from the semantics.
So WHY is it less fun?
I have no idea where this is coming from. I don't care at all how this gets justified in-game lore-wise. Not even the slightest bit interested in that discussion.
And MMORPGs are primarily about piloting a character through adventures either solo or with friends. The RPG elements are severely de-emphasized.
In RPGs, a key aspect of the narrative is that sometimes shit happens to the characters and there are catastrophic failures.
If it's just an FPS or a fighter game... that doesn't matter - those will be focused on player twitch skills.
Steven says that he wants bring the RPG back to MMORPGs.
That's what I'm telling you.
That's why, in Ashes, the RNG for Active Combat will be considerably reduced. It just won't be zero.
I completely disagree, but I'm also thinking this was a flat-footed response, given the statistical nature of your previous posts and some of the references back to Elitist Jerks. The statistical development of a character over time is still a core aspect of MMORPGs, saying otherwise will only beg the spirits spreadsheet cowboys to unleash numerical wrath upon us all.
Not especially, but that's what normalized means. You're claiming it's okay for ashes to have stun resist% because a bunch of other MMOs do to. I think this is pretty weak.
All of those are player-controlled and are part of the game's depth. We want to be able to make it difficult for our opponent to be able to execute their plans!
But they aren't de-emphasized because they have to be, and some people prefer to emphasize them more again.
That may not result in a game you want to play, but that doesn't make it less valid.
It is, actually, the primary thing that causes what I perceive as a divergence.
Some players will see 'losing their Node due to a cumulative negative ingame RNG as an opportunity for a great story'.
Some will see it as the most unfair nonsense they have experienced since (insert terrible unfair nonsense here).
Which is Ashes for, though, is the question? I'm starting to bet on the first.
There is a separate Duration for the Immunity buff itself.
And that is significantly different than "If you turned 5% stun resistance into 5% reduced stun duration, you turned a rng stat into a deterministic stat, but you maintained character build vs character build and preserved player skill vs player skill."
No, you're confusing your rebuttal with my point. I want stun resists because I think having some uncertainty for all combat is a good thing. The only reason I brought up other implementations of this was to call out your specious scenario depicting this as novel.
Awesome. This adds one more layer of depth to "to make it difficult for our opponent to be able to execute their plans!"
Oh, I fully believe that Ashes will have way more RPG in it than WoW does. But I also think it will be much more of a game than something like FATE or GURPS 4e, or Steven's choice: Pathfinder.
Then... what exactly are you doing? Working to convince a specific solo-style player whose focus tends to be on the story experience, that their specific idea of what randomness should cover, is not good for the game as a whole?
You want stun resists because you think having uncertainty for all combat will be fun. I think it won't be fun. I've provided reasons why, and how I think we ultimately just want to play different sorts of games, and how that's okay.
Not awesome. Now you can play worse and win because you resisted a stun. Or play better and lose because your stun got resisted. Again, you're allowed to prefer this, and I'm allowed not to, just as you're allowed to prefer to play super smash bros with items on and I'd rather not.
Yeah, more or less. And failing the ability to convince them, the discussion itself has been seen 1,500 times and I think I've presented my case well. I'm confident that I've persuaded people who just lurk that would normally be on the fence. Maybe in the future, people will link to this (like how I've linked to 5 year old forum posts that I've read that I never participated in).
All I can really do is present what I believe to be true in the most honest and strongest way I know how to do!
I think you mean "100% chance to resist or 100% Duration reduction for the stun" but thats just semantics.
What the immunity rng-less aspect is or does is unchanged.
Yep, you are correct, because if we could take this %5 in a vacuum, it is not a simple switch in terms of balance as 5% chance to resist stun from 100% chance is far more powerful than 5% reduced stun duration(example: from 2sec to 1,9sec), because the %reduction to duration does not determine if it is a RNG setting or not, and the %chance to resist would mean the creation of the possibility of making the %duration reduction 100% in an instance.
Aren't we all sinners?
Oh, absolutely not identical on a balance level. Sometimes the -%duration is low enough that it's effectively useless, and sometimes it's high enough that it lets you act soon enough to avoid a devastating followup (like priests often wear sephuz in wow to avoid the dragon's breath -> sheep setup i mentioned earlier).
Spoken like a true Samurai!
As long as you're either 'having fun' or 'achieving your goal', I'm happy for you.
If primarily what you are doing is tournament-style gameplay without an epic narrative, of course RNG is not going to be great. The focus is going to be on player twitch skills v player twitch skills.
RPGs are focused on building up characters as they gain experience.
Which means if I want a character to not experience something like Stuns, I'm going to build the stats as the character gains experience to become more resistant to Stuns. And, yes, that is going to emulate the real world.
You might have seen less resistance if you started with the example of the temporary Immunity buff.
That is significantly different than what you suggested: "If you turned 5% stun resistance into 5% reduced stun duration, you turned a rng stat into a deterministic stat."
100% Immunity is not a 5% Reduced Stun Duration.
True, in their own way %chance and %duration are complex tools that are hard to balance, certainly one of the reasons why i love skill design so much.
Aren't we all sinners?
But, I think it's not semantics.
Immunity = 100% Resistance 0% Duration emulates reality
Immunity = 0% Resistance 100% Reduced Duration is a very odd concept.
The hero's journey is represented well through node progression mechanics and random world events. I don't see what this has to do with combat mechanics. There is no reason to have random chance be an 'unlucky thing'. Why not just balance it towards 'lucky things'. Let your own lack of skill be the low point in your adventures. Your own lack of skill is going to cause plenty of low points in the immersive experience as is. That's my posit to you pro-rng people. Why apply rng to situations that must be bad for someone rather than ones that are generally good for everyone?
You really think you're gunna become a god like execution being that won't have failures happen based on your own bad strategy or execution? I just don't see why it's necessary, thrilling, or epic to have it taken out of your hands given all your reasoning about how it improves immersion.