|Gear : Skill ratio to combat effectiveness| A combat system and gear system discussion

Hey I think I remember seeing something similar to this post in the past but it was more orientated to diminishing gear in favor of casuals. That is not what this is about.

I am talking about the combat system. I haven't experienced alpha 1 and I can't tell just from videos how much of the combat is skill based and how much is gear-based.
By gear-based I mean: How much does the game allow you to win a duel purely according to the gear difference between you and your target. On the high-end of gear-based combat systems, they allow you to win your duel purely by auto-attacking your opponent - World of Warcraft and other of the same type MMOs. On the low-end of gear based combat systems, gear mostly determines your playstyle options but if the gear difference is too big then your chances are pretty low but still aren't null - Remnants from the Ashes, Counter-Strike Global Offensive. Middle ground games I would say might are: League of Legends etc.

So what would you like Ashes to be?
Low-end gear based? Let gear give us certain abilities, certain perks, certain options, access to certain playstyles with their according advantages and disadvantages but let most of the outcome be determined by how the player utilizes it and the level of his raw skill.
Middle ground? Let gear determine 50% of every outcome but allow for skill difference or situation good outplays to tip the balance.
High-end gear based? Let gear determine most of the outcome.

I personally think that aiming for a High-end gear-based model would be a mistake. This turns the game into a kind of a speedrun collectable contest (Who puts the most hours to grind out his gear or gets lucky for it to drop by chance fast). Blizzard tried balancing this out exclusively for the PvP content by the stat "Resilience" and creating arena-specific gear. Players then started combining the arena gear with certain PvE items (trinkets, rings, etc) which give interesting and useful utility abilities or buffs on proc or on activation or just give a very big increase on a particular stat in which case the player trades defense(resilience) in favor of better damage or healing.
This helped but it still didn't make PvP feel really skilled based, interesting and visually appealing. That's why a pro scene never really took off in WoW like it did in LoL and CSGO despite WoW having a similar size player base. Some may remember that iconic moment in WoW's pro scene when at the finals the victory of one pro player was taken away by a very unlucky miss on a very important damage ability. Missing in WoW is chance based for those who don't know and in PvP its generally low percent chance. The miss being on a very important damage ability is what makes it even more unlucky because it might as well have procced on a auto attack and the victory would have been his. It could have not missed at all as well. The point is his victory was taken away purely by chance and there was nothing he could have done to avoid this or do better. This event killed a lot of the pro scene in WoW from what I remember because people felt that the game didn't offer truly skill-based PvP. Rather they felt it was too influenced by luck.

Ashes of Creation is trying to take the MMO genre towards the player-driven content direction and it's making PvP and incentives to PvP the basis of this direction of player-driven content. This is great and that's why I think Ashes should steer towards either a low-end or middle ground gear-based system and focus on making PvP outcomes feel for the most part in player's control and make gear important only in the sense of it affecting playstyle and giving access to abilities and utilities etc. rather than making gear mainly just a boring threshold which you need to spend countless hours to grind out in order to get access to dungeons or be on par to fight someone. I fully support the sentiment that it should matter how much game time you've spent in the game on your gear. A middle ground or low-end system still allows for hours spent in game to matter. It's going to matter (A) because the game will be more based around player-skill progression, so if your hours are spent on improving your skill, trying different playstyles, trying different tactics etc then your playtime will matter (B) because low end gear systems actually allows gear to keep enough of it's relevance but it puts the emphasis on how the player decides to utilize it rather than it just being just flat stats. It makes gear more meaningful. For example in Ashes from the Remnants after defeating a boss it would drop a boss specific weapon/trinket/crafting material. This weapon/trinket/crafting material(after crafted) would give you access to one of the boss' abilities or something identical to the boss. This allowed players to combine different armors and different boss weapons and trinkets to create their own very unique playstyles around their own very unique builds. Middle ground gear systems compromise between the two extremes. It allows gear to be both a flat stat and something that can influence playstyle and give abilities. Its done by making gear very one-stat orientated. By buying a certain item you are basically buying it either for it's very high stat increase on only one specific stat or for it's passive or active effect. This allows for players to modify their playstyle and champion abilities and that's what makes it meaningful. It's changing the playstyle or champion abilities. It's not just flat overall stats increase like in High-end gear-based combat systems acting like a threshold a player must reach to be able to complete certain content. No! The gear, even when acting as just a stat increase, gives enough control to the player for him to be able to do something creative and skillful with it.

Also imagine these two scenarios:
|High-end gear-based system| Player running at you from a distance in the battlefield. You recognize his gear. You are familiar about it's stats and which dungeon its from. You do a quick comparison with your own gear and realize you don't stand a chance. You run.
|Low-end/mid-ground gear-based system| Player running at you from a distance in the battlefield. You recognize his gear. You are familiar about it's active and passive effects. This gives you time to think about what this player's possible playstyle is and what you could expect in terms of race + class + gear combination and what you could do to counter him.
This is so much more vitalizing and intriguing. Even if I recognize that he has like some very rare gear pieces I still probably wouldn't run from this player because I will be too interested in seeing what playstyle he has constructed for himself with his choice of gear combination. Maybe its good but he is still new to handling it and I'll beat him? Maybe my gear is inferior but it's abilities combined with my skill + race + class versus his race + class + skill counters him or is viable enough for a interesting fight.

Gear should give creative choice, rather than it just being threshold for content, because this gives the game more depth and because it gives a more meaningful feeling of the gear itself.

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Sylvanar

What's stopping someone from simply copying a person who has put ton of effort in figuring out things and thereby disregarding most of the figuring out part you have emphasized so? Suddenly a new player can practice that playstyle for couple of hours and be almost on par with the experienced dude cuz stats wont have too much of a significance.

What's stopping a small group of relatively low geared players from ganging up on an experienced player and straight up owning him/her? Because again stats wont have too much of a significance and 2v1 changes from being hard to impossible. There might be some exceptions but they definitely wont be norm.

As far as scenarios are concerned, "Player running at you from a distance in the battlefield", what battlefield are you on that you can see your opponents gear, figure out its intricacies and then compare them to your own gear and then decide whether to run or fight all the while the opponent still hasn't reached you? I dunno if this is possible for anyone other then couple of MCs in anime.

While giving items spells and effects has its merit and figuring things out is fun, stats matter otherwise why bother with stats at all then? Just have static values for hp and mp.

The only thing I feel on board with is that the items dropped by bosses should reflect its origin.

While gear should give creative choice it NEEDS to be threshold for content too, else everyone will only bother with what they want and can ignore the rest of content with no repercussions. It gives more choices, not depth when that depth is entirely ignorable.

People who want to stand on top and without having to put effort screaming "skill! skill!" have come to wrong genre. There are plenty of other genres where skill and time invested have no correlation. Ex: Fps, Moba, etc.

Grind is implicit with MMORPG and not a choice.

Caww

The outfit/costume system may well hide a lot of the visual clues being referenced for rare gear. The gear-to-skill balance was heavily discussed in the recent running "Protecting Casuals" thread if anyone wants more insight into community views.

Birthday

Sylvanar wrote: »

What's stopping someone from simply copying a person who has put ton of effort in figuring out things and thereby disregarding most of the figuring out part you have emphasized so? Suddenly a new player can practice that playstyle for couple of hours and be almost on par with the experienced dude cuz stats wont have too much of a significance.

What's stopping a small group of relatively low geared players from ganging up on an experienced player and straight up owning him/her? Because again stats wont have too much of a significance and 2v1 changes from being hard to impossible. There might be some exceptions but they definitely wont be norm.

As far as scenarios are concerned, "Player running at you from a distance in the battlefield", what battlefield are you on that you can see your opponents gear, figure out its intricacies and then compare them to your own gear and then decide whether to run or fight all the while the opponent still hasn't reached you? I dunno if this is possible for anyone other then couple of MCs in anime.

While giving items spells and effects has its merit and figuring things out is fun, stats matter otherwise why bother with stats at all then? Just have static values for hp and mp.

The only thing I feel on board with is that the items dropped by bosses should reflect its origin.

While gear should give creative choice it NEEDS to be threshold for content too, else everyone will only bother with what they want and can ignore the rest of content with no repercussions. It gives more choices, not depth when that depth is entirely ignorable.

People who want to stand on top and without having to put effort screaming "skill! skill!" have come to wrong genre. There are plenty of other genres where skill and time invested have no correlation. Ex: Fps, Moba, etc.

Grind is implicit with MMORPG and not a choice.

This is a troll reply I am guessing. Due to many inaccuracies in the statements.

Caww

That's not really a troll reply but a strong opposing opinion, the whole gear/skill balance discussion really lights this forum up.

Sylvanar

Birthday wrote: »

This is a troll reply I am guessing. Due to many inaccuracies in the statements.

If you cant even comprehend someone else's point of view then there really isnt any point to bothering with your post, now is there?

I would ask what part of my reply you found to be trollish or "inaccurate" but your reply signifies all the weight I should be giving your thoughts. You have come to the wrong place if you are looking for a bunch of Yes-man.

Birthday

Caww wrote: »

That's not really a troll reply but a strong opposing opinion, the whole gear/skill balance discussion really lights this forum up.

If it remains on the level of opinion then it's just that - opinion. It's not an argument. Having an opinion is great but opinions are as useful as shit on a stick pretty much.
You are correct to assess that it's an opinion because it's devoid of logic and facts.

Here I'll break it down:
"People who want to stand on top and without having to put effort screaming "skill! skill!" have come to wrong genre. There are plenty of other genres where skill and time invested have no correlation. Ex: Fps, Moba, etc."

He is saying that skill and time invested have no correlation and he gives fps and mobas as examples. If that were true how is there a pro scene there? He is basically saying that any newbie can go and beat up pro players like they are nothing. That's what "skill and time invested have no correlation" means. There is no two way of understanding that.

"Grind is implicit with MMORPG and not a choice"
I never said that we should take out grinding. I only said that grinding shouldn't be the only basis for outcome of PvP battles. I said that the game would benefit from a system which allows for player creativity and a system which allows skillful use of class to influence the course of battle. WoW-like high-end gear-based systems don't permit any kind of player creative building and creative use of gear. It's a very repetitive and long linear experience of replaying over and over again the same content until you get lucky and the right piece of gear drops for you. When it does you are done and now can steamroll people. Why not allow for player creativity and skill in the mix to steer things up a bit? It wont stop the holy grail that is the grinding in MMOs because players will want to have all gear in order to be able to experiment with different mixes of gear and find the one that creates the most fun and optimal playstyle for them. If anything this type of system can stop old dungeons and raids from becoming irrelevant when new content comes out thanks to a player creative way of mixing gear abilities and stats.

"While gear should give creative choice it NEEDS to be threshold for content too, else everyone will only bother with what they want and can ignore the rest of content with no repercussions. "
This is entirely wrong. This is exactly what is happening now in WoW and other MMOs with many expansions. Old content is barely ran. The only reason anyone runs old WoW raids is to just experience nostalgia or to get a transmog. Everything from every old expansion gets completely ignored because the threshold get raised when the new expansion hits and you can suddenly replace your top tier gear which you grinded for months with some blues or some other shit like that from the new expansion. No one goes to grind old content and just breezes past it, just focuses on leveling his char to the new max level and hitting the new zones, dungeons and raids to get the best gear. Sylvanar's claim that gearscore(threshold) is incentive to grind old content in high-end gear-based systems is untrue. Players just fly past all that content, aiming at just leveling.

"While giving items spells and effects has its merit and figuring things out is fun, stats matter otherwise why bother with stats at all then? Just have static values for hp and mp."

I never said that items have to absolutely be stat-less. I mentioned games like LoL where there are stats but stats that are given by gear are given to the player in a way which allows for him to creatively and analytically to decide which gear he wants according to his champion and according to his enemies and role. There are also stats in Remnant of the Ashes. Hell even Counter-Strike has stats. Never said anything about deleting stats. I am encouraging Intrepid towards an approach where they focus their efforts into creating interesting and creative item passive and active abilities and creating gear that gives stats in a creative way rather than wasting their time in repeating the old MMO module of forcing their developers into becoming human-calculators who try to crunch the numbers on old and new gears with every release of an expasion. Intrepid is hiring high quality staff and Steven and his team have tons of creativity why not focus all that high quality manpower into creative thinking rather than to bog them down completely into the same old number crunching balancing every MMO has?

"As far as scenarios are concerned, "Player running at you from a distance in the battlefield", what battlefield are you on that you can see your opponents gear, figure out its intricacies and then compare them to your own gear and then decide whether to run or fight all the while the opponent still hasn't reached you?"

This was actually a hot discussion and still is, I believe, in the forums. The discussion is addressing if skins will prevent proper decision making when it comes to the question if you should attack/fight/defend against a player or not. Because if skins cover up gear and someone attacks you, you can't know for sure if you want to stay as a non-combatant or not. If skins didn't cover up gear then you'd see the player's gear and if he looks like somethign that came out of another dimension, you'd surely come to the conclusion that he has end-game gear and you are going to get steamrolled either way.
In WoW you used to be able to distinguish if someone has end-game gear easily because that sort of gear was very nice looking and very unique when compared to any other item in the game. Now with transmogs that isn't the case. So yea his claim that it's impossible to do any of this unless you are a MC from anime is completely troll and absurd. Specially if one knows about the transmog contests which Asmongold holds where he clearly displays his intensely huge game knowledge by naming each piece of used transmog by only looking at the model. So yea it's possible to do it and many others can do the same that Asmongold does, maybe not as accurately as him because he has been playing the game so much, but still others can do it with fairly good accuracy too. Yet again Sylvanar's claim is untrue.

"What's stopping a small group of relatively low geared players from ganging up on an experienced player and straight up owning him/her? Because again stats wont have too much of a significance and 2v1 changes from being hard to impossible."
A small group should be tough to beat. It shouldn't be a breeze just because you are highly geared. You have multiple enemies coming at you. You should be expected to not only wear armor but to be actually worthy of it. Besides Sylvanar's claim is again untrue at the very base of it because even in WoW when there isn't a gear difference a skilled PvPer can handle a 2v1. Yea it's not a steamroll but it's doable and you can search up some youtube videos of WoW arena fights to see that it's possible. So if sylvanar is worried about 2v1s then there is not point to worry if he devotes enough time to polish his PvP skills, not only just mindlessly grinding end-tier items.
And again, like I said in the previous debunking of Sylvanar's claims, I am not saying NO STATS. He is again making untrue claims about what I have said.

"What's stopping someone from simply copying a person who has put ton of effort in figuring out things and thereby disregarding most of the figuring out part you have emphasized so? Suddenly a new player can practice that playstyle for couple of hours and be almost on par with the experienced dude cuz stats wont have too much of a significance."

Yes it happens that players copy builds from Pro Players. Yes a player can practice the same playstyle. However the rest of the claim is untrue. No, a player can't get skilled enough to beat you just after practicing a couple of hours. Neither in MOBAs and neither in FPS. Give a couple of hours to a newbie to train with a new champion and build and pit him up against the creator of the champion+build combo who has been practicing it for weeks or months while developing the said combo. You'll see the newbie flop to the floor every time. This Sylvanar claim is untrue, because if it were true then again pro players and high ranked players would be easily beaten by bronze and silvers who are given a list of the build and a couple of hours to train. Which we know is not the case. There have been MOBA sites leaking Pro player and high ranked player builds for years and yet bronze and silvers can't beat pro and high ranked players. This claim is not only untrue but it also contradicts his latter claim that skill doesn't correlate with time spent.
Also if some player doesn't want to be creative or doesn't feel very creative why not allow him to copy? This has been the case in every MMO and game ever. Even in WoW where in early days you could be creative with the talent trees even then sites leaked "the best specs". So this Sylvanar claim is untrue again. Because this copy-pasta thing isn't something unique to the low-end/middle ground gear-based systems. It's actually very common even in high-end gear-based systems. There are even guides out there for what specific trinkets and PvE and PvP gear mixes are best for WoW arena. So this is always a problem, no matter the system. Thus can't be an argument against the low-end/mid gear-based systems.

This is what I mean by saying that Sylvanar's post is troll or at best a very uneducated opinion.

Voxtrium

Here it is.
In AOC there needs to be a large enough difference between a lvl 5 with common gear and a lvl 50 with epic gear, a difference that a lvl 50 can feel like they have distinct advantages and don't have to worry about the lvl 5. If you make the lvl 5 comparable to the lvl 50 in PVP you will remove the desire for lvl 50.

A lvl 50 theoretically can have many advantages before the gear are taken into account. Played purely with abilities the lvl 50 might have the thieves guild, his religion and his 2nd class augmenting his abilities making him more powerful and customized to their playstyle. So fighting with fist/spells alone a lvl 50 player will likely win this combat excluding everything else.

A single lvl 50 player should never be balanced for in a game like AOC, if they did balance for a single player you would remove the desire for healers, tanks and every variation in between. So discussing the balance in a theoretical 8v8 (AOC stated they will balance for 8v8s), and assuming you have a balanced and coordinated team on both sides but one has 8 lvl 25s and the other has 8 lvl 50s. The lower level group has achieved augments for their second class. Skill alone, the veteran players will likely win but include their augments from unique social aspects of the game and that gap win widens without ever including gear stats.

Now the question is, how large should the gap between gear stats be from floor to ceiling?
We already know the gap exist with 0 gear stat, skill and ability augments play into that.

"certain abilities, certain perks, certain options, access to certain playstyles with their according advantages and disadvantages but let most of the outcome be determined by how the player utilizes it and the level of his raw skill."

This is what your advocating for, however this system would be atrocious for the long term health of the AOC community. It means that i could grind to lvl 25 with my buddies and immediately be comparable to every player in the game. It means that a group of lvl 2 players have been given basic gear they can go to the nearest gathering area and PVP a group of lvl 21 players who has been gathering and played the game for 40 hours and kill them and take their loot. Perhaps that lvl 2 group has 10000 hours of prior gaming experience and 2000 hours on MMO's and maybe played Beta 2. To me that would be a terrible scenario.

What I advocate for -
AOC needs to find the balance to make end game content rewarding to keep the hardcore playerbase. They also need to provide the same quality of content to every player who will be "just playing" when they get on without any intent or desire to ever reach the top end of the game. A 50% stat advantage of max level content vs base level should be appropriate because it means that each tier of gear should have noticeable buffs to your stats but also provide other players who are within reasonable range of you in terms of gear to combat you without needing to "run" every time they see a guy with the gauntlets of Godlike Warthunder.

This allows for players who have played the game casually for a significant amount of time to actually be competitive with the hardcore player while still giving that hardcore player who has put in the grind for the endgame content the feeling that they have an innate advantage. Players should be competitive to people within a tier or so of gear and 10 or so levels. You remove those advantages and you remove the desire for late game content. You make the gap too wide and you remove the casuals desire to play the game that is built around PVP. A gap to wide means a hardcore no lifer might just 1v8 and gap to small and you have the lvl 2 guy killing a lvl 21 or worse.

You want a balance trust me, AOC knows this and more and has stated similar. Lets see what they come up with instead of continuing the ring around a rosy conversation that has encompassed gear and what advantages it should provide.

I know you stated low/mid tier for your argument - obviously we agree on mid tier and i listed why, i disagree with low tier and also listed why.

Birthday

Sylvanar wrote: »

Birthday wrote: »

This is a troll reply I am guessing. Due to many inaccuracies in the statements.

If you cant even comprehend someone else's point of view then there really isnt any point to bothering with your post, now is there?

I would ask what part of my reply you found to be trollish or "inaccurate" but your reply signifies all the weight I should be giving your thoughts. You have come to the wrong place if you are looking for a bunch of Yes-man.

It's not just a part. If it were just a part I would chalk it up to poor cognitive skills or low knowledge. It's your whole post.
I broke down all your claims in the above reply. I am quoting you now so that you may read and learn so that you can structure your arguments better in the future so we can have true discussions if you truly aren't a troll.

Birthday

QuiQSilver wrote: »

Here it is.
In AOC there needs to be a large enough difference between a lvl 5 with common gear and a lvl 50 with epic gear, a difference that a lvl 50 can feel like they have distinct advantages and don't have to worry about the lvl 5. If you make the lvl 5 comparable to the lvl 50 in PVP you will remove the desire for lvl 50.

A lvl 50 theoretically can have many advantages before the gear are taken into account. Played purely with abilities the lvl 50 might have the thieves guild, his religion and his 2nd class augmenting his abilities making him more powerful and customized to their playstyle. So fighting with fist/spells alone a lvl 50 player will likely win this combat excluding everything else.

A single lvl 50 player should never be balanced for in a game like AOC, if they did balance for a single player you would remove the desire for healers, tanks and every variation in between. So discussing the balance in a theoretical 8v8 (AOC stated they will balance for 8v8s), and assuming you have a balanced and coordinated team on both sides but one has 8 lvl 25s and the other has 8 lvl 50s. The lower level group has achieved augments for their second class. Skill alone, the veteran players will likely win but include their augments from unique social aspects of the game and that gap win widens without ever including gear stats.

Now the question is, how large should the gap between gear stats be from floor to ceiling?
We already know the gap exist with 0 gear stat, skill and ability augments play into that.

"certain abilities, certain perks, certain options, access to certain playstyles with their according advantages and disadvantages but let most of the outcome be determined by how the player utilizes it and the level of his raw skill."

This is what your advocating for, however this system would be atrocious for the long term health of the AOC community. It means that i could grind to lvl 25 with my buddies and immediately be comparable to every player in the game. It means that a group of lvl 2 players have been given basic gear they can go to the nearest gathering area and PVP a group of lvl 21 players who has been gathering and played the game for 40 hours and kill them and take their loot. Perhaps that lvl 2 group has 10000 hours of prior gaming experience and 2000 hours on MMO's and maybe played Beta 2. To me that would be a terrible scenario.

What I advocate for -
AOC needs to find the balance to make end game content rewarding to keep the hardcore playerbase. They also need to provide the same quality of content to every player who will be "just playing" when they get on without any intent or desire to ever reach the top end of the game. A 50% stat advantage of max level content vs base level should be appropriate because it means that each tier of gear should have noticeable buffs to your stats but also provide other players who are within reasonable range of you in terms of gear to combat you without needing to "run" every time they see a guy with the gauntlets of Godlike Warthunder.

This allows for players who have played the game casually for a significant amount of time to actually be competitive with the hardcore player while still giving that hardcore player who has put in the grind for the endgame content the feeling that they have an innate advantage. Players should be competitive to people within a tier or so of gear and 10 or so levels. You remove those advantages and you remove the desire for late game content. You make the gap too wide and you remove the casuals desire to play the game that is built around PVP. A gap to wide means a hardcore no lifer might just 1v8 and gap to small and you have the lvl 2 guy killing a lvl 21 or worse.

You want a balance trust me, AOC knows this and more and has stated similar. Lets see what they come up with instead of continuing the ring around a rosy conversation that has encompassed gear and what advantages it should provide.

I know you stated low/mid tier for your argument - obviously we agree on mid tier and i listed why, i disagree with low tier and also listed why.

I never claimed anything about level. This is a gear, combat system and skill discussion thread. Nothing to do with level. Leveling is good. It keeps old content alive.
I never mentioned level. So your claim is something completely irrelevant to my thread.

Yea of course a level 2 shouldn't be able to steamroll a level 50 just because level 2 has 10000000 hours in MMOs and 2k in ashes. Level 2 should be doing level 2 stuff - quests about helping farmers, gathering herbs etc. They shouldn't be able to go and steamroll a guy who is level 50 and has killed many dragons, giants and all kinds of creatures, has done tons of workout and training and has access to many abilities, spells and skills while the level 2 has 2 spells in total and has only been killing boars up to now. Duh
Leveling is a good threshold for content. Its immersive, it's not too repetitive because you can start as a different class and race in a different zone and it becomes a whole new experience. Leveling is a great threshold that should stay. It's what makes RPGs RPGs.

Goalid

Birthday wrote: »

I personally think that aiming for a High-end gear-based model would be a mistake. This turns the game into a kind of a speedrun collectable contest (Who puts the most hours to grind out his gear or gets lucky for it to drop by chance fast).

The gear race and gear maintenance (whether from item decay or catching up to a new meta) is such a huge part of MMORPGs. Open World PvP, Wars, Raids, etc. should have a large degree determined by your gear, and your gear should have to be leveled by interacting with raids, PvP, gathering, crafting, and the economy. Otherwise, entire parts of the game lose their incentives. I need to have a master crafter make me BiS armor, but those mats have to be gathered from specific locations around the world, and the recipe for the crafter is obtained from a raid boss. The way my node got those mats were by caravan, which means that we need PvPers to defend the route. Without gear determining your power, then a lot of those systems lose their weight.

Birthday wrote: »

...a pro scene never really took off in WoW like it did in LoL and CSGO despite WoW having a similar size player base. Some may remember that iconic moment in WoW's pro scene when at the finals the victory of one pro player was taken away by a very unlucky miss on a very important damage ability. Missing in WoW is chance based for those who don't know and in PvP its generally low percent chance. The miss being on a very important damage ability is what makes it even more unlucky because it might as well have procced on a auto attack and the victory would have been his. It could have not missed at all as well. The point is his victory was taken away purely by chance and there was nothing he could have done to avoid this or do better. This event killed a lot of the pro scene in WoW from what I remember because people felt that the game didn't offer truly skill-based PvP. Rather they felt it was too influenced by luck.

This has nothing to do with how important gear is. This has to do with abilities having a chance mechanic, which the Alpha One did have. Crowd control success rate, critical hit chance, and %chance to hit were all a part of the Alpha. This can be a problem, but... I don't think this has ever been an issue in the Poker scene. If we want to make matches fairer, just have them be best of 5. Even in real life sports and esports where there "isn't luck", there still is. Your ability to perform physical feats, whether it be on a keyboard in SC2, or getting the perfect curveball as a pitcher, has some degree of human error we can attribute to chance.

Birthday wrote: »

Gear should give creative choice, rather than it just being threshold for content, because this gives the game more depth and because it gives a more meaningful feeling of the gear itself.

Gear can give both horizontal and vertical progression. It's not a choice of one or the other. And I think you're mistaken, people feel better about their gear in games like WoW more than GW2. If you want a place for eSports, then Ashes' arenas should have the option for balanced gear like Lost Ark does. I also expect that people will be interested in wars on competitive servers, maybe that eventually can be turned into an eSports event. I know for a fact if a server I'm not on is having a war over a metropolis, I'd love to view the event.

tautau

This discussion isn't one I much care about, but when @Birthday says:

"Yea of course a level 2 shouldn't be able to steamroll a level 50 just because level 2 has 10000000 hours in MMOs..."

he should realize that he isn't coming across as someone with decent analytic skills but rather as someone who exaggerates and depends on puffery. Why? 10 million hours in MMO's, which at 16 hours a day 7 days a week is over 1,712 years of play time. Why not just say 'lots and lots of MMO play' instead of using an impossibility as an example?

Birthday

Goalid wrote: »

Birthday wrote: »

I personally think that aiming for a High-end gear-based model would be a mistake. This turns the game into a kind of a speedrun collectable contest (Who puts the most hours to grind out his gear or gets lucky for it to drop by chance fast).

The gear race and gear maintenance (whether from item decay or catching up to a new meta) is such a huge part of MMORPGs. Open World PvP, Wars, Raids, etc. should have a large degree determined by your gear, and your gear should have to be leveled by interacting with raids, PvP, gathering, crafting, and the economy. Otherwise, entire parts of the game lose their incentives. I need to have a master crafter make me BiS armor, but those mats have to be gathered from specific locations around the world, and the recipe for the crafter is obtained from a raid boss. The way my node got those mats were by caravan, which means that we need PvPers to defend the route. Without gear determining your power, then a lot of those systems lose their weight.

Birthday wrote: »

...a pro scene never really took off in WoW like it did in LoL and CSGO despite WoW having a similar size player base. Some may remember that iconic moment in WoW's pro scene when at the finals the victory of one pro player was taken away by a very unlucky miss on a very important damage ability. Missing in WoW is chance based for those who don't know and in PvP its generally low percent chance. The miss being on a very important damage ability is what makes it even more unlucky because it might as well have procced on a auto attack and the victory would have been his. It could have not missed at all as well. The point is his victory was taken away purely by chance and there was nothing he could have done to avoid this or do better. This event killed a lot of the pro scene in WoW from what I remember because people felt that the game didn't offer truly skill-based PvP. Rather they felt it was too influenced by luck.

This has nothing to do with how important gear is. This has to do with abilities having a chance mechanic, which the Alpha One did have. Crowd control success rate, critical hit chance, and %chance to hit were all a part of the Alpha. This can be a problem, but... I don't think this has ever been an issue in the Poker scene. If we want to make matches fairer, just have them be best of 5. Even in real life sports and esports where there "isn't luck", there still is. Your ability to perform physical feats, whether it be on a keyboard in SC2, or getting the perfect curveball as a pitcher, has some degree of human error we can attribute to chance.

Birthday wrote: »

Gear should give creative choice, rather than it just being threshold for content, because this gives the game more depth and because it gives a more meaningful feeling of the gear itself.

Gear can give both horizontal and vertical progression. It's not a choice of one or the other. And I think you're mistaken, people feel better about their gear in games like WoW more than GW2. If you want a place for eSports, then Ashes' arenas should have the option for balanced gear like Lost Ark does. I also expect that people will be interested in wars on competitive servers, maybe that eventually can be turned into an eSports event. I know for a fact if a server I'm not on is having a war over a metropolis, I'd love to view the event.

Human error and chance mechanic coming from the system are not one and the same thing as you claim. Skill lowers human error chance. Systematic chance is built in mechanic which basically substitutes human error because MMOs realized that making every spell and attack a tab target spell makes the game unbalanced and unimmersive because tab targeted spells and attacks have no human agency in them wether they'll hit or not because the game controls the targetting acuracy. If it were player controlled acuracy then there'd be no need for a hit chance mechanic because players would be missing due to human error. Hit chance systems are just a unappealing and dated mechanic created to substitute human error because back when WoW and other MMOs was created and set the standard for MMOs the technology wasn't advanced enough to allow for player to be able to target their attacks on their own without creating a lot of Desync and lag. Now it's different. We have many MMOs that pull it off.

On your other claim that gear race and maintenance is what makes MMOs good. I am not saying to remove that. Wether it's low, mid or high gearbased system there is always going to be a gear race and maintenance. New content hits and new gear comes out and people will race for the gear but in low and mid gearbased games this race doesn't just finish with equipping the largest set. No, once you get it now it's a race to create the meta because the game doesn't tell you how to play in such an linear way as "Just equip the new best gear". No it's saying "Hey we added more items. Go check them out and figure out new great item + class + race synergies. So there is still going to be a race but it's not gonna end with the mindlessness of grind and equip. Instead that'll be only the first step. Second step will be to creatively synergies the new items with old items.

Birthday

tautau wrote: »

This discussion isn't one I much care about, but when @Birthday says:

"Yea of course a level 2 shouldn't be able to steamroll a level 50 just because level 2 has 10000000 hours in MMOs..."

he should realize that he isn't coming across as someone with decent analytic skills but rather as someone who exaggerates and depends on puffery. Why? 10 million hours in MMO's, which at 16 hours a day 7 days a week is over 1,712 years of play time. Why not just say 'lots and lots of MMO play' instead of using an impossibility as an example?

Troll reply

Goalid

Birthday wrote: »

Goalid wrote: »

Birthday wrote: »

I personally think that aiming for a High-end gear-based model would be a mistake. This turns the game into a kind of a speedrun collectable contest (Who puts the most hours to grind out his gear or gets lucky for it to drop by chance fast).

The gear race and gear maintenance (whether from item decay or catching up to a new meta) is such a huge part of MMORPGs. Open World PvP, Wars, Raids, etc. should have a large degree determined by your gear, and your gear should have to be leveled by interacting with raids, PvP, gathering, crafting, and the economy. Otherwise, entire parts of the game lose their incentives. I need to have a master crafter make me BiS armor, but those mats have to be gathered from specific locations around the world, and the recipe for the crafter is obtained from a raid boss. The way my node got those mats were by caravan, which means that we need PvPers to defend the route. Without gear determining your power, then a lot of those systems lose their weight.

Birthday wrote: »

...a pro scene never really took off in WoW like it did in LoL and CSGO despite WoW having a similar size player base. Some may remember that iconic moment in WoW's pro scene when at the finals the victory of one pro player was taken away by a very unlucky miss on a very important damage ability. Missing in WoW is chance based for those who don't know and in PvP its generally low percent chance. The miss being on a very important damage ability is what makes it even more unlucky because it might as well have procced on a auto attack and the victory would have been his. It could have not missed at all as well. The point is his victory was taken away purely by chance and there was nothing he could have done to avoid this or do better. This event killed a lot of the pro scene in WoW from what I remember because people felt that the game didn't offer truly skill-based PvP. Rather they felt it was too influenced by luck.

This has nothing to do with how important gear is. This has to do with abilities having a chance mechanic, which the Alpha One did have. Crowd control success rate, critical hit chance, and %chance to hit were all a part of the Alpha. This can be a problem, but... I don't think this has ever been an issue in the Poker scene. If we want to make matches fairer, just have them be best of 5. Even in real life sports and esports where there "isn't luck", there still is. Your ability to perform physical feats, whether it be on a keyboard in SC2, or getting the perfect curveball as a pitcher, has some degree of human error we can attribute to chance.

Birthday wrote: »

Gear should give creative choice, rather than it just being threshold for content, because this gives the game more depth and because it gives a more meaningful feeling of the gear itself.

Gear can give both horizontal and vertical progression. It's not a choice of one or the other. And I think you're mistaken, people feel better about their gear in games like WoW more than GW2. If you want a place for eSports, then Ashes' arenas should have the option for balanced gear like Lost Ark does. I also expect that people will be interested in wars on competitive servers, maybe that eventually can be turned into an eSports event. I know for a fact if a server I'm not on is having a war over a metropolis, I'd love to view the event.

Human error and chance mechanic coming from the system are not one and the same thing as you claim. Skill lowers human error chance. Systematic chance is built in mechanic which basically substitutes human error because MMOs realized that making every spell and attack a tab target spell makes the game unbalanced and unimmersive because tab targeted spells and attacks have no human agency in them wether they'll hit or not because the game controls the targetting acuracy. If it were player controlled acuracy then there'd be no need for a hit chance mechanic because players would be missing due to human error. Hit chance systems are just a unappealing and dated mechanic created to substitute human error because back when WoW and other MMOs was created and set the standard for MMOs the technology wasn't advanced enough to allow for player to be able to target their attacks on their own without creating a lot of Desync and lag. Now it's different. We have many MMOs that pull it off.

On your other claim that gear race and maintenance is what makes MMOs good. I am not saying to remove that. Wether it's low, mid or high gearbased system there is always going to be a gear race and maintenance. New content hits and new gear comes out and people will race for the gear but in low and mid gearbased games this race doesn't just finish with equipping the largest set. No, once you get it now it's a race to create the meta because the game doesn't tell you how to play in such an linear way as "Just equip the new best gear". No it's saying "Hey we added more items. Go check them out and figure out new great item + class + race synergies. So there is still going to be a race but it's not gonna end with the mindlessness of grind and equip. Instead that'll be only the first step. Second step will be to creatively synergies the new items with old items.

Troll reply

Veeshan

Gear should play a roll for motivation for progression however the increase shouldn't make you unbeatable to those less geared.

Skill should play more of a roll in the outcome however gear should help.

at max level i think the best ultimate gear shouldnt be more than 30% power gain over the crappiest max level set so like in normal mmo terms the difference between green blue and purple gear should be like 10% max per stage kinda thing. So if a green piece gives +10 str the blue would be +11 and purple be +12 so there insentive to progress gear however the vertical gain isnt huge so people in lower tier stuff is always able to compete/win fights if they play well.

Dygz

I think a person cannot just "practice someone's playstyle and be just as good in a few hours as someone who put a ton of effort into figuring things out".
That's assuming the person has access to the exacts same gear and weapons and enchantments and social org, racial, node, religious and class augments.

Ashes combat is not merely about an individual build.
Ashes combat is about how a player synergizes their character's skills/abilities with the other characters in their group.

But, sure, players could gift newbie friends with BiS gear that took other players tons of time to acquire.
That is fair game.

hleV

I'm gonna be talking about level/stats here, but it's the same with gear (stats come from gear, no?).

I know it's unpopular opinion, but I really don't like PvP scaling in MMORPGs. And I'm a PvP-centric player. Skill should be important, but only against opponents in your level range.

It invalidates the effort I spent on making my character stronger. Newer players that didn't put any time and effort to progress their character should not have any business matching a veteran with high stats.

It breaks any in-universe logic, too. Imagine: I'm level 50 and I'm pretty much equal to a guy that's level 20 when it comes to PvP. in PvE, I oneshot level 35 mobs, but the other guy gets oneshot by level 35 mobs. That's just dumb.

I don't just want a PvP game. I want a good PvP MMORPG, the RPG part included. Therefore stats should matter. Scaling makes weak characters powerful and powerful characters weak in PvP. I want to play the RPG and have it matter. There should be incentive. Not just join an arena and whatnot at level 20 and not care about the rest of the game.

Better design the game systems in the way that it wouldn't require scaling:
High level players shouldn't need the resources from low level areas, but if they happen to go there, lowbies should be aware that in case of PvP they're not gonna prevail.
PvP gamemodes should either be split in level tiers or require you to be at a certain level to participate (otherwise they'd get destroyed due to stat difference).

So essentially, at endgame where players are at similar stats, it should all come down to skill. But no lowbie vs maxed out being equal in PvP nonsense, as that removes "RPG" from MMORPG.

Noaani

Birthday wrote: »

tautau wrote: »

This discussion isn't one I much care about, but when @Birthday says:

"Yea of course a level 2 shouldn't be able to steamroll a level 50 just because level 2 has 10000000 hours in MMOs..."

he should realize that he isn't coming across as someone with decent analytic skills but rather as someone who exaggerates and depends on puffery. Why? 10 million hours in MMO's, which at 16 hours a day 7 days a week is over 1,712 years of play time. Why not just say 'lots and lots of MMO play' instead of using an impossibility as an example?

Troll reply

Actually, it was one of the most valid points in this thread.

Earlier on, you claimed that opinion in this thread was worthless. This means only objective fact is left to discuss.

Then you come out suggesting a person may play this game for 1,712 years - in a thread where you have basically attempted to limit things to objective only discussion.

Where does this leave anyone other than just considering you as a joke?

Taking it back to the very first reply in this thread - a well thought out reply by all standards. You dismissed it as being a troll reply because it didn't automatically agree with what you were saying.

Since it was well thought out, well written and took some actual time, there is no way it was an actual troll (troll posts are inherently short), If there were indeed some inaccuracies, it is your role to point them out and attempt to correct them.

Dygz

Ashes doesn't have an endgame.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "skill". You seem to mean player "skill" rather than character skill.
I don't think people at max level have similar stats. I guess in some fashion all skills have a cap.
Max level characters may be at some kind of similar power scale/level.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "equal in PvP" unless what you mean is standing toe-to-toe in direct 1v1 combat. Especially in a game focused on rock/papers/scissors.
To me, RPG means that a skilled roll-player might be able to craft a lowbie character that can kill max level characters. That might not be by standing toe-to-toe - especially if the lowbie character excels at kiting and burst damage while the player with the max level character isn't skilled at mitigating kiters and the max level character is built to deal with kiters with burst damage.

Also, in Ashes, combat is just one form of PvP among several.

Noaani

Dygz wrote: »

Ashes doesn't have an endgame.

Fun fact; when you hit the level cap in Ashes, the game automatically unsubscribes you and uninstalls itself.

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