Dygz wrote: » People concoct conspiracy theories about why the game is doomed unless the devs adopt their solution to their fabricated dilemma. People familiar with the game design concepts explain how the game design already has solutions for the concern. If the conspiracy theorist is not swayed by the game design, the only thing left to do is wait to see what actually gets implemented. That's the nature of game forums while the game is in development. Something cannot be "already fixed" before it's created. But the concern can be covered in the design - as in the designers are already aware of the concern and have plans to deal with it. Solo really just means not in an adventuring party. You don't need tons of time to participate in a Monster Coin event. And you don't have to formally join an adventuring party to participate. Same thing for Caravans. Same thing for Sieges. There are plenty of ways to not formally be in a group - but also jump into a battle with a bunch of people and stop whenever your time is up. You can also have friends who will help you acquire competitive gear whenever you play. Even casual solo players can make friends with helpful Gatherers and Crafters who have shops and taverns. Even casual solo players can get a variety of help from guildies. Again - regardless of gear disparity - if Corruption does not deter ganking as promised, the game is doomed in any case, but... When you die as a non-combatant, you lose a portion of your resources. It's the same portion as when you die from being killed by a mob. If people lose 50% of resources gathered in focused 90 minute farming for just one death from a mob, casuals will not be playing this game in any case. Regardless of gear disparity.
VmanGman wrote: » One big concern I have for AoC is that gear will end up providing too much power. AoC is already a game that will greatly reward those who play a lot which is why I believe that it is imperative for gear to only account for at most 20-30% of a character's power. People will enjoy grinding out their gear even if each piece gives small increments of power increase. These small increments of power increase will allow the bulk of the population to not feel like they are so out geared that they cannot even come close to competing.
VmanGman wrote: » This is very important because when those casual players will die over and over to a hardcore player that severely outgears them without any chance of fighting back, they will be very likely to just quit.
Chime wrote: » As a casual player, I don't agree. Anyone who is able to dedicate more time to playing a game should reap the rewards. I wouldn't expect or want to have equal gear etc. to someone who has put way more effort in it than me. That's not fair. It's an instant gratification issue> I want the same thing as that person even though I put in a 3rd of the time. If I'm in an instance where someone is trying to kill me and I know I'll get killed and can't beat them, I'll just not hit back and let them get corrupted. That's part of the system, or I could fight and just know that I'll be at a loss. Every MMO has casuals, even if it's not designed for them. I've also seen games thrive better when there is a good RP community compared to those that don't. Not everyone has to be end tier or meta.
VmanGman wrote: » MMOs, especially, when they are the size of AoC, need to be designed for casuals because they make the bulk of the population and if the game isn’t p2w also the bulk of the income.
Noaani wrote: » VmanGman wrote: » MMOs, especially, when they are the size of AoC, need to be designed for casuals because they make the bulk of the population and if the game isn’t p2w also the bulk of the income. This is something that is stated often, but I actually disagree with it. This discussion revolves around the notion that a casual player has the worst equipment possible at the level cap - and I see very few players with such gear in any MMO. If we are talking about people with average gear at the level cap, then the entire premise is pointless.
Azherae wrote: » I really should put my own posts into the analytics when I run them, but I'm not about to write a new script for the other tab, so I can't quickly find the last time I explained it. Therefore short version, with crunching in the spoiler tag. Things we 'know' as of Alpha-1 indicators and other claims. I'm treating 'a page worth' as 'not going very advanced'. 1. Weapon Procs are enough of a system that they can probably be considered to matter and weapon attacks will be an option. 2. TTK is intended to be 30-60s or so 3. 20-30 hotbar slots, let's guess 15-18 attack skills 4. 15-18s cooldown on many skills 5. Tab Targeting is a thing. So logically Intrepid: 1. Expects a player to take a bit over 3% of their health in damage per second as an average in a fair fight. 2. Doesn't expect most fights to contain more than 2x uses of most of the skills 3. Intends for players to strike with their weapon sometimes, enough so that it's worth putting points into that, so I'd guess at WORST 25% damage from weapon attacks (but I'll actually sorta-ignore it from here on) We don't know what the cooldown of Dodge will actually be, but players have given lots of feedback that they don't want high mobility, and similarly we are at 'Split Body' with huge hitboxes/attack cones, making actually missing in a way that we can force, less likely. Even assuming evasion, that gives us some number of uses of skills at the lowest, if 20 hit, at 4% damage each, and melee works decently, opponent dies. If we ignore melee, then 25 skills total. Let's be 'generous' and assume that skills take 45 frames maximum, to animate, so 0.75 seconds, around the point where the 'windup half' is reactable. At a 40% or higher gear gap, even if we take it down to '40% gear gap only results in 25% extra damage', then the higher level person goes from 4% per skill on average, to 5%, and only needs to land 20 skills. A player whose personal skill and accuracy rate is 90% but with lesser gear could land 25 of 28 skills for 100% damage. The player with the 5% damage per skill only needs to land 20 of the 28 skills, still requires almost 75%, though. But we don't give endurance rewards, so, if we assume TopTierGear player has equal skill and lands 90% of attacks, they only need to do 22 attacks. NormalTierDude would have to force 5 mistakes beyond the 10% 'miss rate' for this to even be close. Can players manage to force opponents to make a mistake every 6 seconds in a low mobility game? I think so. Unfortunately all of this was based on offense stats only, and as soon as TopTierGear has better defensive gear too, this is a blowup, requiring someone to force their opponent to make a meaningful targeting or judgement mistake every four seconds or less. Extending the factors by lowering the accuracy rate below 90% doesn't actually help NormalTierDude, it makes it worse, especially if Intrepid's plan is anywhere based on 'improving the damage of skills because people miss' (because it will almost certainly increase the multipliers for other reasons, if it doesn't, skill actually will trump gear by a LOT). It would explicitly rely on the opponent being inexperienced and not knowing what they're doing, or the execution difficulty of the game being enough that stress points actually affect this. But Tab Targeting is a thing. A gear gap of 20%, then resulting in a 12% difference in damage, makes TopTierGear need to land 22 attacks, and have to do at least 24, extending the survivability of NormalTier for roughly 3-4 seconds on average, or, if you look at it the other way, giving them 24 chances to force an error instead of 22. They could win here by forcing 3 total errors, within '24 seconds'. Add in the defensive gear again and they probably have to force 5 errors still in order to win, but TopTierGear still had to make 3 additional meaningful attacks, which still takes 3-4 seconds. 5 forced errors in 27-28 seconds is cutting it close, as it should. To do the 'calculation' the other way, just assume TopTierGear isn't that good at the game yet and makes these errors on their own unforced, and NormalTier is a 'casual' who can't exactly tell when they caused it and when it was just their opponent's skill lacking (but they at least have the skill to hit with their own attacks). In case A, TopTierGear has to make 5 mistakes in order to fail to kill in the time it takes NormalTier (high skill) to kill them, in case B, they only have to make 3 mistakes for it to be even. From there you can add an easy multiplier scale. If both players are at 80% accuracy rate, STK (starting from all previous premises) goes up to 32 vs 25 in case A, and 32 vs 28 in case B. If you started from 'make sure the TTK is 30s even at an 80% accuracy rate, then you're now at '7 mistakes in 30s' vs '4 mistakes in 30s' If instead you went '30s is the fastest TTK for a perfect high (90%) accuracy fight' then simply extend by 'the time it takes to do the 5 additional attacks, which we will set at 6 seconds for simplicity: '7 Mistakes in 36s' vs '4 mistakes in 36s'. But this is, again, before counting for TopTierGear's better defensive stats, which will always raise the number of errors one must force (let's say 9 vs 6). The ratios actually stay the same here, for the most part, until you get to the point where you need to start saying 'this game's accuracy is so volatile that distinguishing forced errors from unforced is difficult'. I have no opinion on if that's something to consider here. Human error rate in competitive games of this type depends on a lot of things, but the distance between '1 mistake every 10 seconds' and '1 mistake every 6 seconds' is pretty large. This WOULD have been my 'proof' if the premise itself wasn't off.
JamesSunderland wrote: » Azherae wrote: » I really should put my own posts into the analytics when I run them, but I'm not about to write a new script for the other tab, so I can't quickly find the last time I explained it. Therefore short version, with crunching in the spoiler tag. Things we 'know' as of Alpha-1 indicators and other claims. I'm treating 'a page worth' as 'not going very advanced'. 1. Weapon Procs are enough of a system that they can probably be considered to matter and weapon attacks will be an option. 2. TTK is intended to be 30-60s or so 3. 20-30 hotbar slots, let's guess 15-18 attack skills 4. 15-18s cooldown on many skills 5. Tab Targeting is a thing. So logically Intrepid: 1. Expects a player to take a bit over 3% of their health in damage per second as an average in a fair fight. 2. Doesn't expect most fights to contain more than 2x uses of most of the skills 3. Intends for players to strike with their weapon sometimes, enough so that it's worth putting points into that, so I'd guess at WORST 25% damage from weapon attacks (but I'll actually sorta-ignore it from here on) We don't know what the cooldown of Dodge will actually be, but players have given lots of feedback that they don't want high mobility, and similarly we are at 'Split Body' with huge hitboxes/attack cones, making actually missing in a way that we can force, less likely. Even assuming evasion, that gives us some number of uses of skills at the lowest, if 20 hit, at 4% damage each, and melee works decently, opponent dies. If we ignore melee, then 25 skills total. Let's be 'generous' and assume that skills take 45 frames maximum, to animate, so 0.75 seconds, around the point where the 'windup half' is reactable. At a 40% or higher gear gap, even if we take it down to '40% gear gap only results in 25% extra damage', then the higher level person goes from 4% per skill on average, to 5%, and only needs to land 20 skills. A player whose personal skill and accuracy rate is 90% but with lesser gear could land 25 of 28 skills for 100% damage. The player with the 5% damage per skill only needs to land 20 of the 28 skills, still requires almost 75%, though. But we don't give endurance rewards, so, if we assume TopTierGear player has equal skill and lands 90% of attacks, they only need to do 22 attacks. NormalTierDude would have to force 5 mistakes beyond the 10% 'miss rate' for this to even be close. Can players manage to force opponents to make a mistake every 6 seconds in a low mobility game? I think so. Unfortunately all of this was based on offense stats only, and as soon as TopTierGear has better defensive gear too, this is a blowup, requiring someone to force their opponent to make a meaningful targeting or judgement mistake every four seconds or less. Extending the factors by lowering the accuracy rate below 90% doesn't actually help NormalTierDude, it makes it worse, especially if Intrepid's plan is anywhere based on 'improving the damage of skills because people miss' (because it will almost certainly increase the multipliers for other reasons, if it doesn't, skill actually will trump gear by a LOT). It would explicitly rely on the opponent being inexperienced and not knowing what they're doing, or the execution difficulty of the game being enough that stress points actually affect this. But Tab Targeting is a thing. A gear gap of 20%, then resulting in a 12% difference in damage, makes TopTierGear need to land 22 attacks, and have to do at least 24, extending the survivability of NormalTier for roughly 3-4 seconds on average, or, if you look at it the other way, giving them 24 chances to force an error instead of 22. They could win here by forcing 3 total errors, within '24 seconds'. Add in the defensive gear again and they probably have to force 5 errors still in order to win, but TopTierGear still had to make 3 additional meaningful attacks, which still takes 3-4 seconds. 5 forced errors in 27-28 seconds is cutting it close, as it should. To do the 'calculation' the other way, just assume TopTierGear isn't that good at the game yet and makes these errors on their own unforced, and NormalTier is a 'casual' who can't exactly tell when they caused it and when it was just their opponent's skill lacking (but they at least have the skill to hit with their own attacks). In case A, TopTierGear has to make 5 mistakes in order to fail to kill in the time it takes NormalTier (high skill) to kill them, in case B, they only have to make 3 mistakes for it to be even. From there you can add an easy multiplier scale. If both players are at 80% accuracy rate, STK (starting from all previous premises) goes up to 32 vs 25 in case A, and 32 vs 28 in case B. If you started from 'make sure the TTK is 30s even at an 80% accuracy rate, then you're now at '7 mistakes in 30s' vs '4 mistakes in 30s' If instead you went '30s is the fastest TTK for a perfect high (90%) accuracy fight' then simply extend by 'the time it takes to do the 5 additional attacks, which we will set at 6 seconds for simplicity: '7 Mistakes in 36s' vs '4 mistakes in 36s'. But this is, again, before counting for TopTierGear's better defensive stats, which will always raise the number of errors one must force (let's say 9 vs 6). The ratios actually stay the same here, for the most part, until you get to the point where you need to start saying 'this game's accuracy is so volatile that distinguishing forced errors from unforced is difficult'. I have no opinion on if that's something to consider here. Human error rate in competitive games of this type depends on a lot of things, but the distance between '1 mistake every 10 seconds' and '1 mistake every 6 seconds' is pretty large. This WOULD have been my 'proof' if the premise itself wasn't off. I really like the idea of stating the things we know as premisses even tho some are more like 'assumptions' as guessing the number of attack skills and their cooldowns through the number of hotbar slots is kinda iffy taking in consideration that items, mounts, pets and etc might take slots. i see something more along the lines of 12-16 attack skills, especially taking in considering the "75% action or tab skills + 25% tab or action skills" numbers fit better. "1. Expects a player to take a bit over 3% of their health in damage per second as an average in a fair fight." I understand the logic behind this one(3% per sec and 90% in 30 sec) but it assumes a certain homogenization of skills damage/animation length/cooldowns ignoring outliers or things like critical hits so it kinda throws a wrench in the engines of the crunshing spoiler section, even taking averages in consideration messing up alot of the equations in the amount of mistakes allowed. If the game goes for a very homogenized damage/animation length/cooldowns across the skills and for way less RNG factors(which i don't really expect), i would be pretty conviced of 40% gear gap being on the higher end of gear disparity and 20% being a way more reasonable number, your post certainly made me realize that there are circunstances where VmanGman's "20-30% being significant" can make way more sense even if some conditions are required to be met.
Azherae wrote: » JamesSunderland wrote: » Azherae wrote: » I really should put my own posts into the analytics when I run them, but I'm not about to write a new script for the other tab, so I can't quickly find the last time I explained it. Therefore short version, with crunching in the spoiler tag. Things we 'know' as of Alpha-1 indicators and other claims. I'm treating 'a page worth' as 'not going very advanced'. 1. Weapon Procs are enough of a system that they can probably be considered to matter and weapon attacks will be an option. 2. TTK is intended to be 30-60s or so 3. 20-30 hotbar slots, let's guess 15-18 attack skills 4. 15-18s cooldown on many skills 5. Tab Targeting is a thing. So logically Intrepid: 1. Expects a player to take a bit over 3% of their health in damage per second as an average in a fair fight. 2. Doesn't expect most fights to contain more than 2x uses of most of the skills 3. Intends for players to strike with their weapon sometimes, enough so that it's worth putting points into that, so I'd guess at WORST 25% damage from weapon attacks (but I'll actually sorta-ignore it from here on) We don't know what the cooldown of Dodge will actually be, but players have given lots of feedback that they don't want high mobility, and similarly we are at 'Split Body' with huge hitboxes/attack cones, making actually missing in a way that we can force, less likely. Even assuming evasion, that gives us some number of uses of skills at the lowest, if 20 hit, at 4% damage each, and melee works decently, opponent dies. If we ignore melee, then 25 skills total. Let's be 'generous' and assume that skills take 45 frames maximum, to animate, so 0.75 seconds, around the point where the 'windup half' is reactable. At a 40% or higher gear gap, even if we take it down to '40% gear gap only results in 25% extra damage', then the higher level person goes from 4% per skill on average, to 5%, and only needs to land 20 skills. A player whose personal skill and accuracy rate is 90% but with lesser gear could land 25 of 28 skills for 100% damage. The player with the 5% damage per skill only needs to land 20 of the 28 skills, still requires almost 75%, though. But we don't give endurance rewards, so, if we assume TopTierGear player has equal skill and lands 90% of attacks, they only need to do 22 attacks. NormalTierDude would have to force 5 mistakes beyond the 10% 'miss rate' for this to even be close. Can players manage to force opponents to make a mistake every 6 seconds in a low mobility game? I think so. Unfortunately all of this was based on offense stats only, and as soon as TopTierGear has better defensive gear too, this is a blowup, requiring someone to force their opponent to make a meaningful targeting or judgement mistake every four seconds or less. Extending the factors by lowering the accuracy rate below 90% doesn't actually help NormalTierDude, it makes it worse, especially if Intrepid's plan is anywhere based on 'improving the damage of skills because people miss' (because it will almost certainly increase the multipliers for other reasons, if it doesn't, skill actually will trump gear by a LOT). It would explicitly rely on the opponent being inexperienced and not knowing what they're doing, or the execution difficulty of the game being enough that stress points actually affect this. But Tab Targeting is a thing. A gear gap of 20%, then resulting in a 12% difference in damage, makes TopTierGear need to land 22 attacks, and have to do at least 24, extending the survivability of NormalTier for roughly 3-4 seconds on average, or, if you look at it the other way, giving them 24 chances to force an error instead of 22. They could win here by forcing 3 total errors, within '24 seconds'. Add in the defensive gear again and they probably have to force 5 errors still in order to win, but TopTierGear still had to make 3 additional meaningful attacks, which still takes 3-4 seconds. 5 forced errors in 27-28 seconds is cutting it close, as it should. To do the 'calculation' the other way, just assume TopTierGear isn't that good at the game yet and makes these errors on their own unforced, and NormalTier is a 'casual' who can't exactly tell when they caused it and when it was just their opponent's skill lacking (but they at least have the skill to hit with their own attacks). In case A, TopTierGear has to make 5 mistakes in order to fail to kill in the time it takes NormalTier (high skill) to kill them, in case B, they only have to make 3 mistakes for it to be even. From there you can add an easy multiplier scale. If both players are at 80% accuracy rate, STK (starting from all previous premises) goes up to 32 vs 25 in case A, and 32 vs 28 in case B. If you started from 'make sure the TTK is 30s even at an 80% accuracy rate, then you're now at '7 mistakes in 30s' vs '4 mistakes in 30s' If instead you went '30s is the fastest TTK for a perfect high (90%) accuracy fight' then simply extend by 'the time it takes to do the 5 additional attacks, which we will set at 6 seconds for simplicity: '7 Mistakes in 36s' vs '4 mistakes in 36s'. But this is, again, before counting for TopTierGear's better defensive stats, which will always raise the number of errors one must force (let's say 9 vs 6). The ratios actually stay the same here, for the most part, until you get to the point where you need to start saying 'this game's accuracy is so volatile that distinguishing forced errors from unforced is difficult'. I have no opinion on if that's something to consider here. Human error rate in competitive games of this type depends on a lot of things, but the distance between '1 mistake every 10 seconds' and '1 mistake every 6 seconds' is pretty large. This WOULD have been my 'proof' if the premise itself wasn't off. I really like the idea of stating the things we know as premisses even tho some are more like 'assumptions' as guessing the number of attack skills and their cooldowns through the number of hotbar slots is kinda iffy taking in consideration that items, mounts, pets and etc might take slots. i see something more along the lines of 12-16 attack skills, especially taking in considering the "75% action or tab skills + 25% tab or action skills" numbers fit better. "1. Expects a player to take a bit over 3% of their health in damage per second as an average in a fair fight." I understand the logic behind this one(3% per sec and 90% in 30 sec) but it assumes a certain homogenization of skills damage/animation length/cooldowns ignoring outliers or things like critical hits so it kinda throws a wrench in the engines of the crunshing spoiler section, even taking averages in consideration messing up alot of the equations in the amount of mistakes allowed. If the game goes for a very homogenized damage/animation length/cooldowns across the skills and for way less RNG factors(which i don't really expect), i would be pretty conviced of 40% gear gap being on the higher end of gear disparity and 20% being a way more reasonable number, your post certainly made me realize that there are circunstances where VmanGman's "20-30% being significant" can make way more sense even if some conditions are required to be met. Actually, I agree with this, but I didn't want to start there because making the assumptions you are willing to make brings the game closer to most fighting games and further from most MMOs that also have a design that can consistently or reasonably lead to a 30s TTK while still fitting the situation most players seem to have liked. So if we're continuing the discussion, I would have to ask if I can reference the outcomes from my other game genre, as I've often got meaningful pushback on that, though according to my data, never from you.I'm quite happy to make a 12-15 skill assumption, it's my expectation. The important factors for highly rewarding gameplay are all there with a smaller attack skill lest. Most things are made worse, a few are definitely improved. As I noted, I also am on the side of not actually believing that the problem is real, and in fact think that 50% gear power (leading to 25% damage gap) may not be enough. If you pull up the old 'whiteboard' from the big combat discussion thread, it wouldn't work, but I have to make a lot more assumptions. I'd prefer to, because they are what I consider the 'correct' assumptions and expectations. Disparate skill damage bursts using a standard bell curve spread across 16 skills would make certain Fighter builds very hard to counter. The 30s side of TTK 'belongs to them'. Part of the issue when you don't homogenize is simply 'where do forced errors come from'? If we don't want BDO, then the amount of 'proper evasion or reactive escapes' can't be too high, which implies they're on cooldowns, but that could mean that the player can be placed in a situation where they don't have enough defensive skills to even meet the thresholds for the 'required forced errors'. That makes the game very much 'both swing at each other in a brawl and hope you can make your opponent miss something big with one of your defensive skills every so often'. Alternately, it's very 'aha you happened to dodge my big attack and now a big chunk of my chance of winning this fight is gone', which brings us back to the 'fighting game' thing most people dislike (but seemed to be the case in Alpha-1, which is what these are based on) Fighters would generally have rapid, reactive counters to other people using escape based defensive skills (that's where the design doc ends up, with Fighters just 'ignoring' things like defenses or kiting by using gap closers, stance breaks, and occasionally CC) and this means that for Fighters to be 'good' (not against other classes per se, basically 'at their job'), they need to have a decent number of these, probably 'more than or equal to most mobility builds. This can be built around, but not while Summoners are part of the game, which is another huge explanation. Summoners and the presence of their pets are one of the things that have to be taken into account the most with the 'possibility of homogeneity', because they practically 'must' do this sort of '3% per second' damage. Any specific thoughts, or shall we call it 'done' here? I'm always happy to do these, they're never wasted effort/time for me, but idk for others.
JamesSunderland wrote: » i see something more along the lines of 12-16 attack skills
Caeryl wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Caeryl wrote: » Again you keep claiming it’s “playing more = better gear” which shows us all that you fundamentally misunderstand how RPG progression works. A players has to be highly skilled in order get powerful gear. That could be PvE skill, PvP skill, or market trading skills, but it isn’t just time that is getting them that gear. You can keep shouting till you’re blue in the face that it’s the time investment that makes you perform badly, but it demonstrably isn’t. I can play a game for 10hrs/wk at the hardcore level, and someone else might play 40hrs/wk at the casual level. In your world, that casual who doesn’t do hard content somehow has access to top tier gear where I wouldn’t even though I spend my time raiding and scavenging rare materials. Raw time spent doesn’t matter remotely so much as how players use that time, and skilled players will use their time wisely to advance themselves. Gear is the reward for skill, and yet you want to pretend it’s “unfair” that unskilled players don’t get the same benefit of top tier gear. I'm not sure if it matters if it's time or skill, there will most likely be players that won't have good gear and if scaling is too high, they wont be able to reasonably participate in pvp until they improve their gear. As i see it, the goal is to still allow top tier gear to give benefits, just not to such an extreme that people can only compete with others that are in their tier. The more people who can have a competitive fight, the better. Gear is going to account for approx. 50% of total combat power, as per Steven’s goal. Basic unenchanted gear at level 1 might be 1% of that 50. Just level increases might take you up to 10% at lvl50. Upgrades to higher armor tiers might be another 5-10% each, enchanting might be the last 5% of the 50. It seems a safe bet that the majority of players will be at 2 or 3/5 for tiers and have mid rating enchants at their level, which would put them about 20-30% of the combat power, about half+ of the total combat power they could get from gear. That seems perfectly reasonable to me for the average, non hardcore player, and it’s most certainly competitive for large scale PvP events.
mcstackerson wrote: » Caeryl wrote: » Again you keep claiming it’s “playing more = better gear” which shows us all that you fundamentally misunderstand how RPG progression works. A players has to be highly skilled in order get powerful gear. That could be PvE skill, PvP skill, or market trading skills, but it isn’t just time that is getting them that gear. You can keep shouting till you’re blue in the face that it’s the time investment that makes you perform badly, but it demonstrably isn’t. I can play a game for 10hrs/wk at the hardcore level, and someone else might play 40hrs/wk at the casual level. In your world, that casual who doesn’t do hard content somehow has access to top tier gear where I wouldn’t even though I spend my time raiding and scavenging rare materials. Raw time spent doesn’t matter remotely so much as how players use that time, and skilled players will use their time wisely to advance themselves. Gear is the reward for skill, and yet you want to pretend it’s “unfair” that unskilled players don’t get the same benefit of top tier gear. I'm not sure if it matters if it's time or skill, there will most likely be players that won't have good gear and if scaling is too high, they wont be able to reasonably participate in pvp until they improve their gear. As i see it, the goal is to still allow top tier gear to give benefits, just not to such an extreme that people can only compete with others that are in their tier. The more people who can have a competitive fight, the better.
Caeryl wrote: » Again you keep claiming it’s “playing more = better gear” which shows us all that you fundamentally misunderstand how RPG progression works. A players has to be highly skilled in order get powerful gear. That could be PvE skill, PvP skill, or market trading skills, but it isn’t just time that is getting them that gear. You can keep shouting till you’re blue in the face that it’s the time investment that makes you perform badly, but it demonstrably isn’t. I can play a game for 10hrs/wk at the hardcore level, and someone else might play 40hrs/wk at the casual level. In your world, that casual who doesn’t do hard content somehow has access to top tier gear where I wouldn’t even though I spend my time raiding and scavenging rare materials. Raw time spent doesn’t matter remotely so much as how players use that time, and skilled players will use their time wisely to advance themselves. Gear is the reward for skill, and yet you want to pretend it’s “unfair” that unskilled players don’t get the same benefit of top tier gear.
Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » With how the node system open and closes dungeons/raids, how many raid tiers would be feasible? Do you really think they should further divide by player item level? I think it is very feasible. Easy, in fact. I also don't consider difference in gear quality to be much of a divider - this only really applies in very rare and specific situations (pick up content with a poor leader, for example). Is it that bad of thing for dungeons to be more about mechanics and group coordination over stats? Yes, it is. If content were just based on player skill and not gear at all, then players can just go straight to the hardest encounter and beat it. Skill based difficulty in PvE content isn't a linear thing. You don't learn skills and build upon them - you learn the skill for one encounter and it is only ever really of use on that encounter. If players do not need gear from the third tier in order to be able to run the fourth tier, if they don't need gear from the second tier to run the third, if they don't need gear from the first tier to run the second - then to pend players will all skip the first three tiers. This is a fairly big deal.
mcstackerson wrote: » With how the node system open and closes dungeons/raids, how many raid tiers would be feasible? Do you really think they should further divide by player item level?
Is it that bad of thing for dungeons to be more about mechanics and group coordination over stats?
Kai37 wrote: » Intrepid could lean into developing/tweaking systems to encourage a diverse experience so that even if something like what you have mentioned does happen, it happens to a limited degree. This could solve your ultimate problem; casuals having such a poor experience, to the point where they quit; without using gear as the mechanism of achieving it, which in turn doesn't hurt the hardcore.
mcstackerson wrote: » To get that many tiers, you would need to divide the content among them when content is already being divided among nodes. That would mean that there are less content for people to do.
Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » To get that many tiers, you would need to divide the content among them when content is already being divided among nodes. That would mean that there are less content for people to do. Content isn't really divided between nodes. Just like in every other game, you will travel to other areas to participate in the content there. If skipping tiers isn't a bad thing, why should Intrepid even bother developing those tiers? This is like saying skipping the level range between 20 and 30 isn't a bad thing - why do they exist if they can be skipped?
mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » To get that many tiers, you would need to divide the content among them when content is already being divided among nodes. That would mean that there are less content for people to do. Content isn't really divided between nodes. Just like in every other game, you will travel to other areas to participate in the content there. If skipping tiers isn't a bad thing, why should Intrepid even bother developing those tiers? This is like saying skipping the level range between 20 and 30 isn't a bad thing - why do they exist if they can be skipped? Yes, I'm saying they shouldn't develop that many tiers and focus on more horizontal rewards.
Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » To get that many tiers, you would need to divide the content among them when content is already being divided among nodes. That would mean that there are less content for people to do. Content isn't really divided between nodes. Just like in every other game, you will travel to other areas to participate in the content there. If skipping tiers isn't a bad thing, why should Intrepid even bother developing those tiers? This is like saying skipping the level range between 20 and 30 isn't a bad thing - why do they exist if they can be skipped? Yes, I'm saying they shouldn't develop that many tiers and focus on more horizontal rewards. The thing is, horizontal progression like you describe are still tiers. If there is a ring that has physical protections, that ring is an upgrade rather than a side grade if you are taking on a mob that deals mostly physical damage. This is actually one of the key ways tiers in games are introduced without excessive power creep. You run a base piece of content and all the rewards have strong fire resistance - not necessarily upgrades to gear you have, but useful if you need fire resistance. Then the next piece of content requires strong fire resistance. You can't take on that second piece of content until you and your raid have enough loot from the first. That fire content rewards you with high cold magical resistance, and the next zone requires that cold resistance. All of a sudden, without actually increasing the power of characters over all, you have three distinct tiers where one needs to be completed before the next can be completed. The question then that you need to ask is - if there is a zone with that physical ring and there are no mobs that deal physical damage, is it actually even a side-grade in terms of PvE? If there is no content on which it is needed, it is unnecessary. If there is content on which it is needed, it is an upgrade and thus you have tiers starting to form.
