Best examples of Action Combat? Starting to Feel Like Tab > Action

Yours truly is trying a lot of different MMO's lately, and it's starting to feel pointless to have an Action-style combat system in a real MMORPG.

Now, I've tried Lost Ark - which is probably the end-all of Action-style combat systems. I didn't stick with it (80 hours, according to the tracker) because Lost Ark feels like a single-player game. It's almost akin to a 2D-scroller, except you can move in all of the compass directions. The most useful insight it provided is that Action-style combat really isn't very useful against a single opponent, since the game is capable of not registering that you're trying to hit the enemy; it's true usefulness seems to be in fighting against groups of enemies. However, most MMO's will let you tab-target either yourself or a single enemy, and then fire off an AoE ability, in fighting groups.

Since enemies in MMO's tend to gather directly around you or bunch up together in small, cloistered groups that you can just AoE, is it really necessary to HAVE Action-style combat in an MMO? Isn't it more of a hack-and-slash game feature?

Just started trying Guild Wars 2 - which in previous forums-threads, some people identify as Action-combat, while others identify it as Tab-targeting. I've come to define GW2 as Action-combat, since you don't have to have an enemy targeted to use your combat abilities, and your weapon swings freely - damaging any enemies in your way. I've already tried Lineage 2, since AoC is supposed to take a lot of inspiration from it's systems, and just find it too static/old now to really get into, as a new player.

Are there some really good examples of Action-based systems anyone can recommend? I'm not enjoying the feel/gameplay of GW2, atm.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Tyranthraxus

Azherae wrote: »

Well, that certainly brings us closer to an understanding of what your preference would be relative to what you don't find important/interesting.

I haven't played Fighter in NWO, I play Rogue mostly, so I can't speak to it one way or another. How much does 'the range' of abilities or 'needing to interact with spacing consistently' factor into your enjoyment or lack thereof?

Until yours truly has 100+ hours, I'll withhold judgement. One of the really neat things mentioned in multiple NWO videos is the emphasis that the more-experienced players put into stressing the point that each class's unique combat feel is uniquely different.

So far, the difference in the abilities' different spacing is somewhat negligible. As someone who grew up on the old-style D&D computer games, I'm eager to get to the point of knowing the game's feel and navigation well enough to try the Mage's abilities, or the Ranger's; Both are presumably more-based upon ranged-style DPS, and given that a lot of the enemies encountered so far tend to swarm you, it'll be interesting to come to know what off-sets exist, to counter being physically mobbed.

Ludullu

Sol Raven wrote: »

Most of it seems to not have been well documented on YouTube. I do have several gank/grief videos that I showed friends, but most of my Shadowplayed footage of larger fights has been deleted or not transferred from my old hard drive. What I do have is pretty uninteresting and short, and shows practically nothing of value due to my gear difference at the time.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8nMH5G9tNY8

If those are all players, then this reminds me a lot of the times when one OP party on russian official servers would toy with a whole guild just for fun. Not as much of an utter destruction, but considering that it's 9 dudes going against (alleged) ~170 - they definitely killed more than they should've

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SYNbR-mvfU

Sol Raven

NiKr wrote: »

If those are all players, then this reminds me a lot of the times when one OP party on russian official servers would toy with a whole guild just for fun. Not as much of an utter destruction, but considering that it's 9 dudes going against ~50 - they definitely killed more than they should've
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SYNbR-mvfU

Very nice, and yes, all players. I have fond memories of getting a mass PK gank squad formed to inevitably lure in the cavalry and duking it out for sometimes hours with another 5-20 man group looking to protect their faction farmers.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Pointing you again to my above point about EQ and EQ2 always adding new content (seriously, coming up to 29 expansions for EQ - when L2 has had the equivalent of 4 in it's entire life). What this does is take a game that burns bright - and would thus burn fast - and gives it more fuel. This results in a game that burns bright, but also burns long.

You keep dismissing L2's updates, but each of them added new mechanics, new gear, new mobs, new bosses, new locations (which brought new castles and fortresses in the older updates), new skills and rebalance to old ones, with some updates changing the world completely or adding new races and classes.

Sure, an L2 update may add new mechanics, gear, mobs, etc.

An EQ or EQ2 expansion adds all of that as well, but they also add an entire new continent. Or a new moon.

Do you see the scale difference here?

I dunno how fast AA got its updates, but in L2 you could fight the same person across several updates and get different results because of the class rebalances or new gear that either of you acquired or new people that either of your parties got (cause usually you'd be pvping in parties instead of 1v1).

But you are still against the same player, with the same basic skill level. Sure, they may have different tools, but they have the same "AI" (or just "I", as it isn't artificial in this case).

This is literally no different to a game adding a new PvE encounter with slightly different abilities, but the same general plan for how to use them.

When you realize that you are fighting other people and not just a collection of abilities that has a specific class name, most updates and patches (unless the game is doing massive rebalancing that is inherently a bad thing for the game) don't change all that much.

Why would I, as a pvp player, care about the other player winning though? If I lost - I still lost, no matter if I lost in pvp or pve. Your example of 1% of wins in pve is literally the same as some newb only winning once against a better/more geared pvper out of 100 fights. Except for some reason people leave when that happens, while they continue bashing their heads against a dumb mob for 100 more times.

For you, sure. The thing is, when you are developing a game (or talking about game development), you need to consider both the individual experience, and the collective experience.

Except it takes way more time to create content than to consume it. And if devs make content that takes months to clear, people complain that it's too difficult/grindy/etc. Which is why most companies these days just make fast content and are ok with people leaving the game until the next batch of content comes online.

And you have hit the nail on the head as to why WoW doesn't add as much content as it should.

The problem with this as an argument though, is that if any one game (EQ, EQ2) manage to create enough content, then the argument is clearly null and void.

All an argument about the disparity between time to create and time to complete content boils down to is a developers desire to have a good game.

The way SoE (EQ and EQ2's developer for the bulk of the time I played) got around this was by having multiple teams. They would have a team working on the expansion for the game, and one working on the live game, providing updates, fixes and new content. Then when the expansion launched, the team that worked on that expansion moved over to the live aspect, so they were supporting the content they created.

All of a sudden, you have enough content developers able to develop enough content for players.

And how many of those games were faction-based and had free PKing of the opposite side? From what I've heard, not that many people complain about BDO's pvp system because it's way closer to L2's/AoC's karma/corruption one, so people can't just freely genocide others which allows casuals to enjoy their game w/o worry, while hardcores enjoy their own fights. Though maybe I just missed those complains, so if you have any source for them - I'd love to see it.

There were masses of complaints at the start. Then those people left.

Now the people that are left playing the game are those that want that PvP.

I never said there aren't people that want PvP in an MMO. I said there are not enough to support more than two AAA MMO's at a time, and that support is likely to be limited to a very small number of servers of the size Ashes wants to have.

What is the reward for those who fail to clear an instanced super difficult boss 100 times in a row? What keeps them coming back each time? They're losers for a 100 consecutive times, so why don't they just leave the game, just how pvp losers do (at least you claim they do)? Is it the potential reward? The dim light at the end of the loser tunnel?

If we are talking about top end PvE, you don't need a reward for it. There is a penalty to it (death penalties, obviously). However, this acts as a rebalancing - as in order to even get to that top end PvE content, you need to complete the previous content and so are probably doing quite well. You are far ahead of almost all other players in terms of gear, and probably in terms of player wealth (barring crap mechanics like WoW has/had).

These many deaths on that hardest of content knocks people at the top down to allow those below a chance to catch up a little. This is opposed to PvP, that knocks those at the bottom down even further, and rewards those at the top and allows them to increase the gap.

I assume you can see what I am talking about here, and why it is an inherent issue if a PvP MMORPG wanted actual mass appeal rather than to just appeal to PvP fanatics.

Why not have the same reward for pvp? If anything, that's exactly what Ashes is trying to do. The reward is caravan, castle, node, loot, pvp-event-based rewards, etc etc. You can lose 99 times in a pvp battle, but get the reward on the 100th time. Except what's different, from you doing the same thing in pve, is that you're fighting against people rather than a mob.

{disclaimer, we do not know too much about how caravans work, I am writing the following based on the idea that if your caravan is destroyed, certificates for said caravan drop. As we know that not all materials are lost, I am assuming 50% are lost and 50% are kept by the owner of the destroyed caravan - but are to be found at that same origin point}

Lets say I fight you for 100 caravans, and I win 99 of them.

That means you never get your goods to their destination, and I end up with 49.5 caravans worth of goods at your origin point, and you have that same amount.

However, you put the time and effort in to collecting all of that material, while I was out doing other things, progressing my character in other ways.

Basically, I took all the character progression you worked on for yourself, and I took half of it.

If we assume that I also completed a similar amount of character progression in the time you gathered those materials, that means between the two of us, I ended up with 75% of the character progression we both worked on, and you ended up with 25%.

Again, this is the better player (me) getting further ahead. All this means is that you have even less of a chance with your next 100 caravans, because I am getting better faster than you are.

Now sure, you can get friends and all that, but this same concept scales up to group, guild and alliance level. If my guild is constantly beating your guild in PvP and taking some of your stuff, we are better than you to start off with, and are also progressing faster than you.

It's literally kicking people when they are down.

And if the problem is "one side wins and gets stronger, while the other loses and has to catch up even more", then it's on Intrepid to balance the system in such a way that the winning side has diminishing returns.

The thing with diminishing returns in this scenario is that it is still rewarding the player that least needs the reward (the winner) and punishing the player that most needs the reward (the loser). All diminishing returns means is that the rewards get smaller - they are still going in the same direction though.

You know what the funny thing is. Most people who still play L2 usually hop between new servers every few weeks or a month. So in a way, L2 went the way of the sessional games. Yes, there's a few big private servers that have been up for years at this point and they have quite a few thousand players there, but those are usually a rarity because it takes a lot of money and time to properly set up a server that would support thousands of people playing it for that long.

And obviously Intrepid should aim for the latter situation

No, they shouldn't aim for that later solution. L2 has private servers like that because they are not viable for the company to run - because they are all invariably (as far as I know) running older versions of the game.

If Ashes ends up as being a game where the only way you can play it in anything resembling the way it is designed is by playing on a private server, then I think we should all agree that this is the definition of a failed MMORPG.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Do they not see/know the range of the ability because of the UI? Cause L2 just had a "range" descriptor on abilities, both for distance moved and aoe radius. You had abilities that had a tab target and worked as you explained in the example, or you had pure action that worked based on your character's direction and you had to know/feel the distance to properly hit your target, which imo is the skill-testing part of the ability.

EQ2 had many abilities like this.

As a Wizard, my biggest single spell would do damage in a 5 meter cone in front of me (keep in mind, a wizard is usually sitting back 30 - 35 meters). There was no telegraph or physical representation of the area of effect of this spell, so you needed to understand what 5 meters meant in game, but also work out what the cone radius was for it.

So, in order to use this ability, not only did we need to find a way to move in to the target without losing DPS (need to be stationary to cast almost all of our spells), but we also needed to make sure that when we got close we were not directly in front (most harder mobs dealt damage in front of them), but we needed to know

To make this even more interesting, the spell could hit three targets at once - meaning you not only needed to stay behind or beside targets, but you needed to try and get three targets within this very small cone shape for which you have no actual representation of, and need to simply work on your understanding of what the area of effect actually was.

Does this count as an action ability based on your above description?

NishUK

EQ keeps getting brought up but I haven't known a single soul that as played it in 20 year bumbling around mmo's career, could be strictly an NA thing I don't know.

I just feel it's against universal friendliness to bring it up, I bang on about UO a bit but I don't go into it too deeply + I'll bring up it's flaw immediately but atm everytime EQ is brought up it's like this is the perfect example of content?

I'm also trying to drive in the fact that an mmorpg doesn't even need to drive massive amounts of expansive content to maintain interest. I really do feel this is that damn PvE favoured crowd again....honestly, I am sick to death of these dinosaurs denying potential (I'd prefer the p2w Whales at this point!).

I feel be making a new thread when I can be arsed, tired of people being split and I'm going to attempt to make some people be on the same wave length because some of you are cursed by your past experiences...

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

Sure, an L2 update may add new mechanics, gear, mobs, etc.

An EQ or EQ2 expansion adds all of that as well, but they also add an entire new continent. Or a new moon.

Do you see the scale difference here?

Well then either literally all other devs are so damn lazy that they can't just keep pumping out expansions on the same scale as EQ or EQ by its nature is easier to make those kinds of expansions for. Cause if the game was so successful, obviously other companies would look at it and try to copy its success, but, as the history has shown, it's probably impossible to pump out that much content for a game that requires more developmental time. Though I'm not a dev so I wouldn't really know.

Noaani wrote: »

But you are still against the same player, with the same basic skill level. Sure, they may have different tools, but they have the same "AI" (or just "I", as it isn't artificial in this case).

This is literally no different to a game adding a new PvE encounter with slightly different abilities, but the same general plan for how to use them.

You do realize that you've described predominant majority of mmos, right? And I somehow doubt that even EQ made brand new AI for each new monster across their huge 29 expansions. So me battling against a person that's using new abilities would be the same as you fighting against a new mob that might have some new abilities (though even that doesn't always happen). Except you know what the difference is? I got new abilities too, which makes my opponent react to them in some new way, while the mob AI won't change.

Noaani wrote: »

When you realize that you are fighting other people and not just a collection of abilities that has a specific class name, most updates and patches (unless the game is doing massive rebalancing that is inherently a bad thing for the game) don't change all that much.

Except those rebalances work in pvp games. With mobas being the perfect example of that. Mobas keep being relevant exactly because they have changes to their "classes" and items. That is what keeps the game fun and the experience "new". If classes never changed across decades of playing - the game would be utterly solved, pvp would be utterly boring and pve would get solved within days just because players would know the upper limit of their class and would use it to figure out how to beat the mobs. Afaik that's exactly what happens in WoW prepatch tests (or however they're called). Which is why Bliz have been resetting their dps boosting systems each patch, because that would change how classes play and would make players spend a bit more time figuring shit out (though it usually gets leaked/datamined either way).

Noaani wrote: »

And you have hit the nail on the head as to why WoW doesn't add as much content as it should.

The problem with this as an argument though, is that if any one game (EQ, EQ2) manage to create enough content, then the argument is clearly null and void.

All an argument about the disparity between time to create and time to complete content boils down to is a developers desire to have a good game.

The way SoE (EQ and EQ2's developer for the bulk of the time I played) got around this was by having multiple teams. They would have a team working on the expansion for the game, and one working on the live game, providing updates, fixes and new content. Then when the expansion launched, the team that worked on that expansion moved over to the live aspect, so they were supporting the content they created.

All of a sudden, you have enough content developers able to develop enough content for players.

How exactly does EQ(2) manage to have enough content for a year off of one expansion? Is it long grind? Is it difficulty? Is it "clear what's there and wait for more" approach? Are there hardcore players that clear all the new content within weeks/month and then do whatever they want? What does the daily gameplay of a normal EQ(2) player consist of?

Noaani wrote: »

There were masses of complaints at the start. Then those people left.

Now the people that are left playing the game are those that want that PvP.

I never said there aren't people that want PvP in an MMO. I said there are not enough to support more than two AAA MMO's at a time, and that support is likely to be limited to a very small number of servers of the size Ashes wants to have.

BDO is also ridden with p2w, bad gaming practices, RNG OE fest, huge siege lag (afaik) and a slew of other problems on top of it having a pvp system - and even with all of those it's still a relatively big mmo. Yes, obviously not wow/ff14 size, but also not the same as countless 100-500 player ones either. So if Ashes comes into the genre and manages to deliver on their promises w/o most of the issues listed above - I'd assume it'll be successful enough.

Noaani wrote: »

If we are talking about top end PvE, you don't need a reward for it. There is a penalty to it (death penalties, obviously). However, this acts as a rebalancing - as in order to even get to that top end PvE content, you need to complete the previous content and so are probably doing quite well. You are far ahead of almost all other players in terms of gear, and probably in terms of player wealth (barring crap mechanics like WoW has/had).

These many deaths on that hardest of content knocks people at the top down to allow those below a chance to catch up a little. This is opposed to PvP, that knocks those at the bottom down even further, and rewards those at the top and allows them to increase the gap.

I assume you can see what I am talking about here, and why it is an inherent issue if a PvP MMORPG wanted actual mass appeal rather than to just appeal to PvP fanatics.

I mean, tbh, what I see is just hardcore players being hardcore, while the more casual crowd doesn't even try to clear that top lvl content because they realize they can't. And from what I've seen of not even top difficulty boss clears in WoW - that is exactly the case.

Noaani wrote: »

{disclaimer, we do not know too much about how caravans work, I am writing the following based on the idea that if your caravan is destroyed, certificates for said caravan drop. As we know that not all materials are lost, I am assuming 50% are lost and 50% are kept by the owner of the destroyed caravan - but are to be found at that same origin point}

Lets say I fight you for 100 caravans, and I win 99 of them.

That means you never get your goods to their destination, and I end up with 49.5 caravans worth of goods at your origin point, and you have that same amount.

However, you put the time and effort in to collecting all of that material, while I was out doing other things, progressing my character in other ways.

Basically, I took all the character progression you worked on for yourself, and I took half of it.

If we assume that I also completed a similar amount of character progression in the time you gathered those materials, that means between the two of us, I ended up with 75% of the character progression we both worked on, and you ended up with 25%.

Again, this is the better player (me) getting further ahead. All this means is that you have even less of a chance with your next 100 caravans, because I am getting better faster than you are.

Now sure, you can get friends and all that, but this same concept scales up to group, guild and alliance level. If my guild is constantly beating your guild in PvP and taking some of your stuff, we are better than you to start off with, and are also progressing faster than you.

It's literally kicking people when they are down.

From my understanding, caravans will most likely be used by guilds or at least big groups of people, because they're meant to transfer huge volumes of goods and I'd assume a random casual player wouldn't just have x100 their inventory of resources on him out of nowhere. They might have x10, but that's why there's mules which will be way safer than caravans (assuming the corruption system works as intended obviously).

And those who join guilds and/or big groups of people would probably be more hardcore than your everyday casual player. And just as the hardcore pve players, they should be ready to lose more than those casual players. And if the gear tier system is properly balanced, they should have better chances in a fight than 100:1. But even if it is 100:1, the diminishing returns should play enough of a role so that that 1 win is way bigger for the weaker side than that 100 is for the winners.

Let's take a party of super hardcore top lvl players that could win those 100 times vs a party of 2 gear tiers lower dudes that miiight win once if they play their hearts out while the top bois are slacking.

As you've said, the weak party was probably out gathering shit and not really progressing too far, because they'd hoped to sell their gatherables for some good cash and progress that way. Their gear would be in good shape and, even if it decays a bit, it's fairly cheap to repair cause the gear itself is cheap.

The super top tier strong party has been bashing their heads against uber mobs and bosses and dying in constant pvp for those mobs and bosses. They've spent a shitton of money on gear repairs and have restocked their uber costly gear several times due to its decay. They make way more money doing all that stuff rather than attacking some weak caravans. But on the off chance of them getting super bored (though I doubt that's possible), they decide to attack such a caravan.

They go to a lower leveled node to catch some weak caravan and they come across that weak party of people. They attack the caravan, fight it out with the weak bois, might not get decay on their gear cause they probably didn't really die in that fight (if the system works only on death), but they did spend a fair bit of time doing that. And all that they got from it was 50% of some mid tier resource that barely covers their wasted time.

Now there's 2 possibilities. The strong bois could say "what the fuck are we doing wasting time on this shit?" or "let's repeat this 99 more times just for the hell of it".

The weak party is a bit sad because they lost half their shit (if we assume you're right on how caravans work), but they were prepared for the loss, because if they weren't - they coulda just ran mules 1.2 times and been completely fine. They could now also choose, risk it again or go run the mules.

If strong bois decide to leave, weak bois are fine either way. If strong bois stay, weak bois will lose once more and then definitely run mules to cut their losses as short as possible in their situation. So in the end strong bois lose out in any of those setups, mainly because their level of progress requires them to do way more important stuff than attacking some random casual caravans.

And if instead of the top lvl super strong bois it was just a party of dudes whose gear is only a tier higher than the weak bois' gear - the ratio wouldn't be anywhere close to 100:1 (again, assuming that gear tier balance is good) and the stronger bois would lose out more because of gear decay, which is now way more probable, considering that the power lvls are similar. And even if the strong bois still win way more times, the weak bois can always just run mules which would mean that strongs have wasted their time not farming better places.

If Intrepid manages to have this kind of diminishing returns for the stronger players, I think pvp losses won't be as prevalent. Obviously a few casual players might try running their caravans completely solo, get ambushed and die, and then leave the game because of it, but that's just the nature of the game. And I hope Intrepid has a good tutorial that suggests running a mule before trying out a caravan.

Noaani wrote: »

The thing with diminishing returns in this scenario is that it is still rewarding the player that least needs the reward (the winner) and punishing the player that most needs the reward (the loser). All diminishing returns means is that the rewards get smaller - they are still going in the same direction though.

Relatively speaking, the same applies to the difficulty scaling of pve. A hardcore player has more time to spend on the game. Which leads to him being better geared, which allows him to bash his head against top lvl content for a long period of time. And he spends a ton of time doing so, meaning that the reward-to-time spent ration is most likely way smaller than what it was for all the previous gear tiers. One might call it diminishing.

The casualer player has less time so even getting the pre-top tier of gear is already a hassle. And each failed attempt, trying to get that gear, impacts the casual player more than hardcore player's attempt at top lvl content does to him. And usually, as I said before, this leads to the casual player stopping their attempts and either leaving the game or just being content with whatever they have.

If they leave, it's the same as if they left due to pvp, if they stay to enjoy other sides of the game - the corruption system should prevent anyone else from interrupting their enjoyment.

Now we obviously have the bigger pvp picture of node sieges that lead to freeholds getting raided and all that, but I think that's a discussion for another time.

Noaani wrote: »

No, they shouldn't aim for that later solution. L2 has private servers like that because they are not viable for the company to run - because they are all invariably (as far as I know) running older versions of the game.

If Ashes ends up as being a game where the only way you can play it in anything resembling the way it is designed is by playing on a private server, then I think we should all agree that this is the definition of a failed MMORPG.

I think you misunderstood what I said there. I meant that Ashes should try to be the game that has years-long strong communities that stay in the game not only for the game, but for the company of themselves. I hope Ashes doesn't take several huge shitty turns that lead to people wanting classic versions of the game and/or make their own servers. I want this game to succeed because it's the only mmo I see myself playing, considering the absolute state of the genre currently.

Noaani

NishUK wrote: »

EQ keeps getting brought up but I haven't known a single soul that as played it in 20 year bumbling around mmo's career, could be strictly an NA thing I don't know.

I just feel it's against universal friendliness to bring it up, I bang on about UO a bit but I don't go into it too deeply + I'll bring up it's flaw immediately but atm everytime EQ is brought up it's like this is the perfect example of content?

Every time I bring up EQ or EQ2 (at least lately) has been as a counterpoint.

As an example, if someone says that the issue with PvE games is that developers can't make enough content for players and point to WoW as an example of this, I simply point to both EQ games as a counter example of when and how they can.

The games are not perfect, it's just that when they are being talked about here they are having their best aspects mentioned.

This is why you won't here me talk too much about EQ2's crafting system, (or EQ's at all). There are far better out there, so why bring them up? Just because I have a lot of experience with them doesn't mean they are worth talking about. That said, EQ2's crafting content - as opposed to the crafting system - is probably the best I have seen or heard of. I do not know of any other game that has what can be accurately described as an epic quest series for crafting.

I'm also trying to drive in the fact that an mmorpg doesn't even need to drive massive amounts of expansive content to maintain interest.

An MMO doesn't in order to keep a small core group interested.

Any MMO wishing to have mass appeal does need a massive amount of content.

This is why games like EQ and EQ2 still have a fairly large number of servers (about 10 each), whereas a game like Archeage has fewer (6 right now - populations are comparable) despite being a much newer game with much more current public awareness. (ignoring WoW here as the server structure of that game is largely unimportant due to cross server content and ease of transfer).

This is also why when you search for a list of L2 servers, you are presented with private servers rather than ones that the developers/producers are operating.

Based on the objective data, it would seem that it is obvious that producers/developers of games that add large amounts of content manage to maintain more populated servers than games that add less content.

The notion of L2 having so many private servers is an argument (from Intrepids perspective) to literally not do what they did in regards to player retention - and the core factor of player retention to most players is new content (true for any genre).

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

Does this count as an action ability based on your above description?

In my "definition" of it, as long as the ability doesn't require a target - it's an action ability, cause you just do the action. If you had to target something and then move around to use it in the best way - that's still tab.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Does this count as an action ability based on your above description?

In my "definition" of it, as long as the ability doesn't require a target - it's an action ability, cause you just do the action. If you had to target something and then move around to use it in the best way - that's still tab.

That being the case, EQ2 is about 25% action combat.

Ludullu

NishUK wrote: »

EQ keeps getting brought up but I haven't known a single soul that as played it in 20 year bumbling around mmo's career, could be strictly an NA thing I don't know.

I just feel it's against universal friendliness to bring it up, I bang on about UO a bit but I don't go into it too deeply + I'll bring up it's flaw immediately but atm everytime EQ is brought up it's like this is the perfect example of content?

I'm also trying to drive in the fact that an mmorpg doesn't even need to drive massive amounts of expansive content to maintain interest. I really do feel this is that damn PvE favoured crowd again....honestly, I am sick to death of these dinosaurs denying potential (I'd prefer the p2w Whales at this point!).

I feel be making a new thread when I can be arsed, tired of people being split and I'm going to attempt to make some people be on the same wave length because some of you are cursed by your past experiences...

Eh, it's the same as me always using L2 in my examples or wow andies using wow. It's just what's near and dear to Noaani's heart because they've played 10 years of it. And EQ did in fact inspire a ton of stuff in the industry, so it obviously did some things right.

And just as I try to show the best features of L2 here, Noaani tries to show EQ's best feature too. And that many big expansions that kept the game alive for this long is in fact a huge accomplishment and imo completely justifies its mention.

But yes, afaik EQ(2) were an NA thing, cause before getting into the bigger internet in the 2010s, I haven't even heard of it. And even after hearing about it, it was very rare to see a person that played it. Kinda same with L2, though L2 is rarely mentioned due to its low size, while EQ is just an older game, with EQ2 getting low recognition because it came out around WoW (same as L2) and we all know which game is more popular.

Azherae

Just throwing out there that you shouldn't use 'rebalances' as reasons why MOBAs and similar games stay alive. That's two parts combined to achieve that effect, neither of which actually has basically anything to do with the normal player's PvP experience.

1. Renewed interest because people need time to try to understand it and see if it has somehow made their skill level more viable (nearly never actually does this, but some get to imagine it does, long enough to train more or realize they were just on a bad streak)
2. Shakeups in the meta mean that you can swap to something you consider more powerful easily (at the beginning of every match) and keep playing even if you are incorrect in that assessment, especially if you happen to win against one of those people who is doing the same thing but with a less suitable character.

Fighting Gamers know this situation all too well, people flock to new games because they haven't learned their 'tier' in those games yet. Often the reaction is just 'I was below average at all those OTHER games before but maybe THIS time, there's a CHANCE!' (of course discounting the fact that their fundamental skills are lacking and if they do win it's by ignoring this fact as much as possible through some initially-hard-to-counter mechanic).

Apply the above to a game where opponents who play better actually gain concrete mechanical advantages over you over time, and they both fizzle out pretty fast.

Competitive games work in this model of longevity because they don't have persistent gear in them.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

But yes, afaik EQ(2) were an NA thing, cause before getting into the bigger internet in the 2010s, I haven't even heard of it.

I'm not really sure what to tell you here - both games had/have EU servers, including specific English language EU servers. I spent about 18 months raiding with a UK guild on an EU server in EQ2.

I guess it's a case of seeing what you see. The first time I heard of L2 was when we had people join our guild that were ex-L2 players. I didn't know it existed because I wasn't looking at or for a new game.

If you played L2 at the time, you wouldn't see a whole lot of EQ or EQ2 players around - because they would have still been playing EQ and EQ2.

Selo

Sol Raven wrote: »

No MMO has been able to satisfy my PvP needs since BNS (Blade & Soul).

Combat in BnS was extremly bad though.
It was all about who could click as many buttons as possible while dodging and strafing.
Only a very small % of players could play that well, and it made ALOT of players quit.

Noaani wrote: »

NiKr wrote: »

But yes, afaik EQ(2) were an NA thing, cause before getting into the bigger internet in the 2010s, I haven't even heard of it.

I'm not really sure what to tell you here - both games had/have EU servers, including specific English language EU servers. I spent about 18 months raiding with a UK guild on an EU server in EQ2.

I guess it's a case of seeing what you see. The first time I heard of L2 was when we had people join our guild that were ex-L2 players. I didn't know it existed because I wasn't looking at or for a new game.

If you played L2 at the time, you wouldn't see a whole lot of EQ or EQ2 players around - because they would have still been playing EQ and EQ2.

Yea EQ and UO were much much bigger in EU than L2 and even bigger with DaoC.
Problem why players dont meet them is becouse people from EQ/UO/DaoC etc generally avoided the "WoW kids" XD
WoW players generally started playing in their teens with other teens that had not played any other mmorpg either

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

Competitive games work in this model of longevity because they don't have persistent gear in them.

I'd say that depends on the gear-to-class balance. The RPS of the class system can be cycled through by adding counters in the form of abilities and new gear stats.

The first example that comes to mind was a new upgrade to old gear in one of the L2's updates. Before that updates there was a fairly big problem with Berserk class and its OP stuns. So in the update NCsoft added a new upgrade to an older set of gear that gave 50% stun resist. The class itself didn't really go down in power. They could still overpower hard mobs and could still proc quite a few stuns in a crowd (cause it was an aoe dash stun ability), but the overall impact of that class became less, because a ton of people upgraded their old sets.

Now that's obviously a fairly direct nerf to a failed piece of balance (that being the OP stun ability), but I'm just saying that updates in mmos can still influence the pvp matchups w/o impacting the whole game too much.

Noaani

Azherae wrote: »

Just throwing out there that you shouldn't use 'rebalances' as reasons why MOBAs and similar games stay alive. That's two parts combined to achieve that effect, neither of which actually has basically anything to do with the normal player's PvP experience.

1. Renewed interest because people need time to try to understand it and see if it has somehow made their skill level more viable (nearly never actually does this, but some get to imagine it does, long enough to train more or realize they were just on a bad streak)
2. Shakeups in the meta mean that you can swap to something you consider more powerful easily (at the beginning of every match) and keep playing even if you are incorrect in that assessment, especially if you happen to win against one of those people who is doing the same thing but with a less suitable character.

Fighting Gamers know this situation all too well, people flock to new games because they haven't learned their 'tier' in those games yet. Often the reaction is just 'I was below average at all those OTHER games before but maybe THIS time, there's a CHANCE!' (of course discounting the fact that their fundamental skills are lacking and if they do win it's by ignoring this fact as much as possible through some initially-hard-to-counter mechanic).

Apply the above to a game where opponents who play better actually gain concrete mechanical advantages over you over time, and they both fizzle out pretty fast.

Competitive games work in this model of longevity because they don't have persistent gear in them.

I'm sure I've said this before, but while it is rare that you and I share the same view point, when we do I am often impressed at how succinctly you are able to express it.

Now, I am of the opinion that this doesn't mean an immediate death knell for a game like Ashes. To me, the best chance this game has of long term, massive success (which I would count as a sustained 1,000,000+ subscriber count for 5 or more years) is to provide those players that are losing (and will continue to lose) a good enough game experience regardless of that loss.

This is the foundation of basically every argument I make on these forums.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

I'm not really sure what to tell you here - both games had/have EU servers, including specific English language EU servers. I spent about 18 months raiding with a UK guild on an EU server in EQ2.

I guess it's a case of seeing what you see. The first time I heard of L2 was when we had people join our guild that were ex-L2 players. I didn't know it existed because I wasn't looking at or for a new game.

If you played L2 at the time, you wouldn't see a whole lot of EQ or EQ2 players around - because they would have still been playing EQ and EQ2.

I mean, I'm not saying that EQ didn't exist outside of NA, I'm saying that the popularity lvls weren't the same everywhere. I'm from ukraine and have played with the bigger part of all CIS countries in L2 for 12 years and just talked to a ton of people from those countries about mmos. Not one of them ever mentioned even trying EQ. But every single one knew L2.

As is evident from Ashes forums/reddit/discord - only a select few have played L2, and that's considering that L2 is one of the inspirations for the game and has been namedropped by Steven himself in multiple interviews/streams. So in theory any english-speaking L2 enjoyer would at least try to follow the game. And the fact that out of hundreds of different vocal people in this community barely a dozen have played L2 shows that its western influence was very low.

So what I'm saying is that both L2 and EQ(2) had their audiences in several places, but had way bigger in some places while way smaller ones in others.

Selo

Yea the old eastern block have always played more Asian games, Maple Story etc. While West Europe has been focused on NA mmorpgs

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

I mean, I'm not saying that EQ didn't exist outside of NA, I'm saying that the popularity lvls weren't the same everywhere. I'm from ukraine and have played with the bigger part of all CIS countries in L2 for 12 years and just talked to a ton of people from those countries about mmos.

That explains it a bit better then.

SoE never really focused at all on CIS countries. There was a minor effort with a Russian version of EQ2, but they did a poor, rushed job of translation, had little in the way of support, and didn't offer physical copies of the game as far as I know (the game was a multi-day download for me for a few years).

The game had a solid French, Spanish and Italian community, along with English speakers from the EU, for the entire time I played it, but I can't say I ever came across any other European language speakers.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Competitive games work in this model of longevity because they don't have persistent gear in them.

I'd say that depends on the gear-to-class balance. The RPS of the class system can be cycled through by adding counters in the form of abilities and new gear stats.

The first example that comes to mind was a new upgrade to old gear in one of the L2's updates. Before that updates there was a fairly big problem with Berserk class and its OP stuns. So in the update NCsoft added a new upgrade to an older set of gear that gave 50% stun resist. The class itself didn't really go down in power. They could still overpower hard mobs and could still proc quite a few stuns in a crowd (cause it was an aoe dash stun ability), but the overall impact of that class became less, because a ton of people upgraded their old sets.

Now that's obviously a fairly direct nerf to a failed piece of balance (that being the OP stun ability), but I'm just saying that updates in mmos can still influence the pvp matchups w/o impacting the whole game too much.

Well then let's actually circle back from both directions because this is pretty useful to talk about.

In an Action-y game with Ashes' goals, when a class or the meta gear that class wears is nerfed, no matter how justifiably, the overall landscape of the game changes. In those cases the question is not 'will the dedicated players who pay enough attention to realize the implications of this, appreciate the change'. It is 'will the players who were losing interest or stopped playing, see this as meaningful, return, and stay'.

A change in game landscape affects those who are active and playing. It increases the engagement for externals and 'peripherals' only through things like streams and that one thing that MOBAs and FightGames do differently.

And from the other direction then, you mentioned BDO earlier so I'll reference that.

When BDO makes big balance changes, one of the first things they do is make it much easier for every single player in the game to 'reroll' to a new class at least once. This decently mimics the MOBA and FightGame function. "You think your character is better now? Great!" "You think a different character is strong now and that we messed up balance and you know how to win? Great!"

Both those types play more, and the game flatly gives them the ability to do this by letting them transfer skills, weapons, and the fact that all classes in the game can wear the same armor (there's only like 10 individual Glove slot options in the entire game, of which a whopping 3 are viable). To them, this is a beneficial structure.

Take a Tab based game now where gear and build trumps your twitch skills and even pattern recognition abilities. Basically just make gear determine more. But your main Archetype is set, and BiS for Cleric and BiS for Ranger are totally different gear pieces. The group sitting on the giant pile of gear due to winning more often before, can adapt faster, and so they win again, and they can do this without any meaningful change to their actual ability to play.

Ashes will probably never let this happen. The most we'll get is the change of perception of 'what's the best Secondary Archetype', 'what's the best in slot for this archetype', or 'what's the best team comp'.

None of those things reset the situation because your opponents were winning due to 'Dominance Skill' not 'Instance Skill'. Most people can do that analysis. If you 'need to fight in PvP against strong enemies to learn and improve', but those enemies are too strong for you to see if you're improving (or in some cases, even get a chance to improve), most people can see this as a losing situation and stop. MOBAs solve this by 'matchmaking' and 'resetting'. MMOs provide neither.

Child Item