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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
I think what you're talking about is represented by having different matchup charts for different skill levels of play, and folks already do this too. For instance, if fox vs falco is 50:50 between top players, that doesn't necessarily mean the matchup is even between beginners or intermediates, and in fact, it isn't. Falco has an easy to execute and difficult to deal with laser game that heavily favors the falco in beginner and intermediate levels of play, which makes the matchup a lot closer to 60:40, and maybe even 65:35.
Once fox starts to get really good, they can do all of their take-laser setups, start optimizing their punishes on falco (which is more difficult than falco's combos), start using directional influence to get out of falco's combos, etc, and the matchup evens out.
What we don't want to do is just give up and stop putting things down on paper just because it's complicated.
Right - so a particular team is going to have goals relative to another team and the map, right? So then if that same exact team plays 100 straight seiges against the same players and that same map, they might end up being like "okay, this isn't working, we have some glaring weaknesses with this composition, we should try to address those by making some adjustments".
Then, you adjust, replay your 100 games, give your opponents a chance to do the same thing, and repeat. Eventually through this sort of trial and error on that same map you sort of settle on a meta, right? Even if the map is really complicated, even if there are objectives, even if there are tacticians, and different roles, and 250 people, etc.
I think there's a good chance that sieges are infrequent enough that players won't think this deeply, and that 250 people is too big of an ask to try to do optimization on this level. That doesn't mean everything I've written on a theoretical level about balance being a nightmare is wrong though!
Oh, for sure! As you said, there absolutely can be game designs where the emergent play is that you end up with all-in strategies that resemble large-scale rock-paper-scissors. So rather than big-powerful well-rounded comps (like we see in wow battlegrounds), you have gimmicky cyclic blind-pick giant-rock vs giant-scissors and the actual 'game' is the blind-pick itself. All depends on how the numbers shake out!
I'm not saying that a summoner/cleric should not be able to summon a tank summons. I'm saying that it should not do nearly as good of a job as a summoner/tank that is geared to tank can do.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by a pug only design... But what you're describing sounds like the summoner is the 'just in case' Band-Aid role for the party. If the tank goes down he can throw out a tank if the healer is overwhelmed he can throw out a healer. If anything I feel like that game play of "good, but not as good as the real thing" would lead to them being sidelined. Think about the way people choose talents in current games. Very rarely do you have someone choose the talent that is the 'just in case backup' that may or may not get used. Most people focus on the consistent output when they're choosing something. Why would I take a summoner just in case my tank goes down unless I don't have any faith in my tank being able to do his job. I would rather take another mage or ranger for better DPS.
I feel like they should be able to do a role just as good as any other archetype but only if they lean into that style of play for their character. A summoner/tank should be able to tank like a tank. Sure he can still throw out a heal summons to assist a healer in certain spots, but the effect of this of that healer should not be nearly as good as a summoner/cleric with healing gear on at healing output.
I don't know about spreading stats, but I definitely hope that your minions scale based off of your stat choices.
I think if it was a cut and dry split up points that that would make them super susceptible to AOE.
My defense of 100 just got split 5 ways and then a mage hit me with one AOE spell and I got deleted.... Sounds like all risk and no reward.
Lol
Fair
This did start from your archtype supply and demand concern though.
A big part of it is adaptation on the fly. In a 250vs250, you don't make a plan and carry it out regardless of what the opposition is doing. This would have to be what you did in order for it to be a blind-pick type thing.
Rather, you have a plan, you have some counters ready for what you think the enemy may do, and you have an understanding that there is a good chance that all of this may be thrown out the window if the opposition does something unexpected.
The best laid plan only lasts until first contact.
The idea of a blind pick like you say here becomes basic impossible by the time you have scaled up to 8 players, let alone 250.
It has been said by Steven himself in Dev q&a that when a summon dies the stats are instantly returned to the playable character, this implies that the stat pool of a summoner and minions are somewhat shared.
crowd control is the generalization. Summoners/ Minion type classes are basically extra bodies to spread damage.
"Many other classes will have crowd control and probably do it better" yes
Summoners should never be as effective as a single primary class.
That should be the trade off, You the player must sacrifice you personal effectiveness for the ability to have pets...
I don't see why this is hard to comprehend. Or how you can possibly balance the class any other way.
Spreadsheet DPS has its place but it will never account for player ability or random events.
I don't think you have to worry about that. There is Crowdcontrol already posted in some of the abilities. i think in fact that small group pvp will be based around control rather then burst dps or burst healing. And within those control parameters, i'm sure there will be healing debuffs, mana drains / burns slows stuns etc.
Botom line is, we don't know enough of the classes yet to determine of everyone having mana is a good or a bad thing. But i'd rather see that my resource drain / burns works on all classes then on only some
I don't think there will be a meta. Because you seem to forget 2 things.
1) As soon as a meta in pvp is established and the majority of players start using that meta, There will be a new meta formed to counter that. Untill that becomes the new meta, and then a new one is formed. in a continues cycle
2)If theres a meta thats beeing developed that stagnates the game in some way, its the creaters responsibility to either buff or nerf some things to break that meta. .
If not Siege, and you have open world control, I personally would 'attempt to minimize time spent by my group in map locations that don't favor us', with the understanding that if we needed to go on the offensive, the opponent will do the same.
Caravans is the same. It's just 'push the payload', you choose the chokepoint where your group has advantage, to the best of your ability.
Theoretically there's no issue with the concept that balance is a nightmare, but there is no 'answer' to this in MMOs at all other than to do this. Not even relatively homogenized games manage it. So the question is what you want them to do beyond what they have 'said' (or I guess, based on the interpretation I offered)
Maybe worth clarifying my position here. Do you agree with my definition of what balance is, and that my assessment that smash melee is an extremely unbalanced game (even in 1v1s)?
Because I love smash melee, and think it's a great game. A game can still be good, even if it's heinously imbalanced. It's just that in the process of including all of these unique characters with different properties, and in the process of having so much potential and skill expression, it's the case that some ways to play end up better than others.
So it winds up being the case that fox, falco, marth, and puff are better than donkey kong and bowser.
We also got extremely lucky that the top 5 characters in smash melee all have even matchups against each other. You can play any of those 5 characters and never feel like you're doing yourself a disservice, or that you'll lose a tournament because of your character selection. You don't have to worry about "having a bad bracket", where you randomly got put into unfavorable matchups. You can just pick falco and have not a single matchup worse than 50:50 across the entire cast.
Some games have definite top tiers, and those top tiers have a RPS dynamic between them, and that's obnoxious.
Anyway, the point here is that I think folks believe that they'll be able to choose to play whatever team composition they want in an 8-man setting or in a 250-man setting and that this will not be like willfully choosing to play bowser in smash melee.
I don't think the 8-man bracket will be balanced, and I don't think the 250-man bracket will be balanced. The comps will matter, and the matchups won't be even. It will be like the whole-cast smash melee matchup chart and not the top-5 melee matchup chart.
If it was balanced, then you could pick whatever comp you wanted, and you would have 50:50 matchups (or close to it) across the board.
That's what I think isn't getting through, and I don't think folks are seeing it, and I find that really confusing/frustrating.
This is an opinion, not an observation of fact.
RPS is perfect balanced. It is even more perfectly balanced than chess (there is a bias in chess to the player that moves first, RPS has no such bias).
You may not like how it is balanced, but it is balanced.
This comes down to semantics. If you choose to define balance as "there is no option that is strictly dominant", then RPS is balanced. If you define it as "the matchup chart consists of nothing worse than 65:35 matchups", then it's not balanced at all. It's incredibly unbalanced.
So for instance, I consider the following game
to be "imbalanced with no dominant option"
and this game:
to be "balanced"
whereas you'd presumably consider both to be balanced?
edit:
The reason that the closeness-to-50:50 definition useful is because of how it informs player behavior.
If all of the options are balanced 50:50, then you can pick whatever you'd like according to your own style/taste with assurances that whatever enemy you run into, or whatever bracket you find yourself in, you'll win or lose based on your skill and their skill.
The more "balanced" the game is, the freer you are to make your choices based on flavor or aesthetic rather than having to play something you're less interested in because you seek power.
On the other hand, if "balance" is strictly about "lack of a dominant option", then the RPS thing technically fits. Now, when you show up to the tournament as rock, your first two matchups in the bracket can be against paper, and then you go home 0-2 and there wasn't much you could have done about it.
Likewise, even though there's not a dominant option, if you know your server (or local scene or whatever) has tons of "rock", you now feel compelled to not play "scissors", and potentially play "paper", even though you'd much rather play scissors than paper.
Only one of these is balance.
As an example, imagine RPS where rock has a 65% chance to win against both paper and scissors, and paper has a 65% chance to win against scissors.
This would fit your second definition of balance, yet is very clearly not balanced.
Creating a game where all classes are equally balanced against all other classes, where there is the choice of build within each class, and where each class feels unique is simply not possible.
Developers have a choice. Sacrifice player build choice. Sacrifice class uniqueness, or sacrifice balance in the ma er you are talking about.
Games like you are talking about sacrifice player build choice. This is fine, most players do t want to spend hours coming up with a build in a fighting game.
Chess is an example of a game that sacrifices class uniqueness - both sides are exactly the same.
By definition, MMORPG's need players to be able to have a say in the build of their character (this is what the RPG actually means, it does not mean role playing in the way many do). This means that choice is not ope to MMORPG's.
Uniqueness is also not a great thing for developers to sacrifice.
This only leaves perfect balance against all classes, where developers can quite happily balance in an RPS manner, knowing 1v1 balance in an open world game is pointless anyway.
Then one way to measure such a thing might be "subtract 50 from all of the matchups. take the absolute value. then average the scores. the closer to 0, the more balanced it is"
Another way to measure such a thing might be "add up all the scores in a row to get a character's strength, take the standard deviation of all of the character's strengths. the closer to 0, the more balanced it is"
RPS has a character strength standard deviation of 0, but an extremely high measurement for the first one. melee top 5 has an extremely low score for both ways to measure.
See where this is going?
Honestly, in terms of an open world game, the concept of matchuos is irrelevant.
Actual 1v1 is really rare in games like this.
I honestly don't know why you are so fixated on it.
99.9% of all PvP fights in Ashes will be won by the side that has more players. That is just the nature of open world PvP.
As I have said many times, this is why Intrepid can happily not concern themself too much with 1v1 balance.
I hope this is the last time I have to explain this, because it isn't the first.
I keep talking about 1v1s, because "falco" is a useful stand-in for "your 8v8 team". Your whole 8v8 team is, itself, a single fighting game character, and has a matchup against every other possible 8v8 team. The bad, non synergistic 8v8 teams are like "bowser".
So, if there are three characters in 1v1s: fox marth and puff (f, m p), then you can create the following 2v2 teams from those: FF, FM, FP, MM, MP, PP. Those 6 teams are now each their own "character" in the matchup chart, and all of the same matchup logic applies.
The number of characters grows as teamsize grows, and the number of matchups massively grows as teamsize linearly grows.
By the time you get to 8v8, you have billions of matchups, so the chance that there's no dominant team, or no dominant handful of teams, is slim-to-none.
Instead, the cream will rise to the top, and you'll either have to play the meta or be at a disadvantage.
edit: on a selfish personal level, this doesn't bother me. I'll play whatever the meta is and this design decision will just make me win more, because other folks aren't willing to do that. I do think it directly clashes with their goal of "there is no meta, play what you want and it'll work"
the more choices there are, the more oppressive the meta and cookie cutting gets, not less
In terms of 8v8, the dominant team is the one that can bring a friend and make it 8v9.
This is open world gaming.
To which part?
It's possible to do a matchup chart for 8v9, there's no rule saying that the charts have to be symmetric. There will also be plenty of circumstances where 8 people run into 8 people and duke it out, and so knowing the best 8-man crew is still useful, so it may not be wise to just dismiss it straight up.
Further, on a theoretical level, which is where the design I'm talking about is actually taking place, all of this stuff is still important.
Open world is the only PvP in Ashes that matters. Sieges are - as far as I know - open world.
Can you even point to a non open world 8v8 situation in Ashes?
I was exploring it by talking about how different bracket sizes have different numbers of matchups - how 1v1 has less matchups than 2v2, which has less than 8v8 and so on.
edit: sieges are hugely impactful, i would definitely put them in the "they matter" bucket. It's what the game will be balanced for, after all!
edit 2: re-checking the wiki, I'm not currently finding the quote that was giving me the impression that this is the case. I see it says "balance is group-focused", but not specifically "siege focused". mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
I agree sieges are impactful, but as I said, as far as I know they are open world.
Steven uses the term "battlegrounds" in relation to sieges, and so many assume this is an instanced PvP setting. In Ashes though, a battleground is a part of the open world where corruption does not apply - the area around a caravan is a battleground, as an example.
I am aware of why you are talking about limited numbers, but nvn in open world games isn't really valid.
if they're open world, how are they limited to 250 v 250?
I'm not developing Ashes, so I don't know.
What I do know is Intrepid talk about battlegrounds in sieges, and battlegrounds in Ashes are an open world concept.
Or is it the first 250 people to show up? Or are there no player caps? (I'm pretty sure there are caps)
So even if it technically takes place in the open world, I can't just stroll in as a random non-chosen-non-citizen and mess with the battle, so it's not really open world, right? Or am I missing something here? Now I feel super confused.
But yeah, assuming, that sieges will be 250v250 (and not random mismatched numbers like 271v318), then you're back to matchup charts.
Each possible 250-man-team is represented by 1 character. There are a lot of characters. There are even more matchups.