iccer wrote: » Mag7spy wrote: » Not going to do a giant post just do a long story short. If the comment was I haven't seen that in action yet but I hope or would like to see complex mechanics with action style game, it be a different convo. It is because it was said Its impossible to ever do action combat on high end raid. Action combat isn't just dodging, and you can have dodge mechanics in a raid. I liek tons of stats in my mmo as well and something i also find is lacking in action mmorpgs and there is no reason they can't include it. Unsure where this random information came from removing mechanics because it is action based, don't believe a single person has said that in the thread. There must be a reason for why those things usually aren't included though. If you can just stack up a bunch of tank stats, use passives and shields to further boost your defenses, then...you wont have to dodge or do anything other than keep aggro, and you will just rely on being tanky, and your healer keeping you alive. There must be a reason why these games are often more shallow when it comes to this stuff, rather than simply being "devs haven't thought of adding it". The thing about removing mechanics is on the last 2 pages. It's not necessarily about removing mechanics, but about having different encounters and ignoring certain mechanics depending on the encounter. Primarily about action combat in tab-target encounters and how certain action combat mechanics would be useless essentially, or not used (which I for some reason translated as them being removed).
Mag7spy wrote: » Not going to do a giant post just do a long story short. If the comment was I haven't seen that in action yet but I hope or would like to see complex mechanics with action style game, it be a different convo. It is because it was said Its impossible to ever do action combat on high end raid. Action combat isn't just dodging, and you can have dodge mechanics in a raid. I liek tons of stats in my mmo as well and something i also find is lacking in action mmorpgs and there is no reason they can't include it. Unsure where this random information came from removing mechanics because it is action based, don't believe a single person has said that in the thread.
NiKr wrote: » Mag7spy wrote: » Some people aren't built the same. Same people years ago would have thought it was impossible to be sending rockets to other planets and such. Not all designers are the same at the end of the day, some don't have that desire to push the limits of their own designs and create something new. One of the reasons why the mmo genre has been stagnating. Rather then tackle challenges its easier to copy what someone else did that was popular. I'm no designer or a dev, but I'd bet money that they have literally nothing to do with the stagnation. But some dumb execs (just like the ones that Azherae mentioned) most definitely do.
Mag7spy wrote: » Some people aren't built the same. Same people years ago would have thought it was impossible to be sending rockets to other planets and such. Not all designers are the same at the end of the day, some don't have that desire to push the limits of their own designs and create something new. One of the reasons why the mmo genre has been stagnating. Rather then tackle challenges its easier to copy what someone else did that was popular.
Azherae wrote: » PenguinPaladin wrote: » Azherae wrote: » Actually now that I've gone back and reread your posts and noted that many of them were edited to soften them after I responded to their original form, I ask two things. 1. Are you the type that generally reacts quickly and then expands on it later? 2. Given that it happened THIS time, was there a specific reason why I was supposed to take your responses more 'nicely/whole' than they were in their original forms? I'm absolutely good with ditching any animosity and updating my model of you to be 'respond to you slower once you've had time to decide if you actually want to add to a post'. Im type #1 all day every day.... i have dyslexia so when i complete a thought, i post it, and immediately edit it and reread it for mistakes, and almost always continue further Then I apologize to you entirely for getting into this state. idk if it affected you but I will absolutely admit that it completely annoyed me, and therefore you got those reactions. I would like to have a more civil disagreement on 'the meaning of the difficulty implied by having to dash around to heal', but I also don't need to engage on it. So for you if you care and anyone else, the other part of 'dash up perfectly' is that if this is my main healing skill (for some reason) and there is damage to two different people who are physically distant from each other, I perceive that there is a meaningful difference in difficulty and risk to heal both those people using "Close Range Heal" vs "Long Range Tab Target Heal". I would like the option to take that risk and get very good at doing so. I would also like this to be rewarding enough that it is worth risking doing it even though obviously sometimes it will fail and lead to suboptimal outcomes. I would like this option to be one that is not a terrible idea/death sentence in top-end raids. As you said, you did agree that whatever balance was required to make it so, was fine with you, and I reacted to the comment about 'walking being hard for me' and did not address your stance of agreement. For that, I can only offer to be more mindful of your response style.
PenguinPaladin wrote: » Azherae wrote: » Actually now that I've gone back and reread your posts and noted that many of them were edited to soften them after I responded to their original form, I ask two things. 1. Are you the type that generally reacts quickly and then expands on it later? 2. Given that it happened THIS time, was there a specific reason why I was supposed to take your responses more 'nicely/whole' than they were in their original forms? I'm absolutely good with ditching any animosity and updating my model of you to be 'respond to you slower once you've had time to decide if you actually want to add to a post'. Im type #1 all day every day.... i have dyslexia so when i complete a thought, i post it, and immediately edit it and reread it for mistakes, and almost always continue further
Azherae wrote: » Actually now that I've gone back and reread your posts and noted that many of them were edited to soften them after I responded to their original form, I ask two things. 1. Are you the type that generally reacts quickly and then expands on it later? 2. Given that it happened THIS time, was there a specific reason why I was supposed to take your responses more 'nicely/whole' than they were in their original forms? I'm absolutely good with ditching any animosity and updating my model of you to be 'respond to you slower once you've had time to decide if you actually want to add to a post'.
Mag7spy wrote: » It is a lot more work for developers to do and money is king at the end of the day. Trying to do high end action pve content and pvp content as well, with all the stats and design and action mobility. It is a lot for a designer to be able to handle as you have to balance it for everything. Its more work on all departments which means it cost more money as well. But to the developer that does it, even in a hybrid form I think that has giant potential. Though we will see what happens with ashes as it will be the game that does have action combat as well. One of my other issues is if people think the pve content is too easy or not mechanic heavy enough and blame action combat. AoC is trying to accomplish a lot, heavy PvP and PvE, its normal to think both them will suffer a bit compared to a experience more catered to one over the other.
iccer wrote: » Mag7spy wrote: » It is a lot more work for developers to do and money is king at the end of the day. Trying to do high end action pve content and pvp content as well, with all the stats and design and action mobility. It is a lot for a designer to be able to handle as you have to balance it for everything. Its more work on all departments which means it cost more money as well. But to the developer that does it, even in a hybrid form I think that has giant potential. Though we will see what happens with ashes as it will be the game that does have action combat as well. One of my other issues is if people think the pve content is too easy or not mechanic heavy enough and blame action combat. AoC is trying to accomplish a lot, heavy PvP and PvE, its normal to think both them will suffer a bit compared to a experience more catered to one over the other. Yep, it's a lot more work, which is why it's easier to implement it with a tab-targeting system, that can be made good and not boring...or a hybrid system. So imagine they can't have both, which one would you prefer? 1. Having a really in depth class/gear/stat system that allows for a lot of customization, with high end raid content, but with tab-targeting vs 2. Having, in your opinion, great combat that is action-combat, but without that much depth and complexity. I know what I would pick. I don't think action-combat is necessarily bad for endgame PvE, again Lost Ark is a good example (but again it's top-down and it doesn't feel like an MMORPG). But there are certain things that just don't work at all or don't work like they do in tab-targeting games, and we've touched upon one of those things which is tanking. In Lost Ark you also don't have tanks, a lot of bosses move around a lot (honestly WAAAAY too much, to the point you spend half the time just chasing them around).
Mag7spy wrote: » Honestly then I'm going with the combat for pvp then because that will keep me entertained if I'm forced to pick one. But Id rather have ashes so what they are doing and do hybrid in a balanced and fun state.
iccer wrote: » Mag7spy wrote: » Honestly then I'm going with the combat for pvp then because that will keep me entertained if I'm forced to pick one. But Id rather have ashes so what they are doing and do hybrid in a balanced and fun state. Yep, that's totally fine, and you see where some of our differences come from. We are looking for different things in an MMORPG, and that's fine. Myself I'd take the first option 10/10 times. I'd also have what Ashes seems to be doing, as I can still have all of that customization and complexity. It just depends how far into one or the other system they go, and the way they implement it. If it's just the basic attack, with dodging and having to aim certain skills in a way that's action based, that's great. They also seem to have an action-camera option (just like GW2), so that additionally works great for people like you who prefer action-combat, as you will have a reticle in the middle, and will have to aim majority of the abilities. Overall it's gonna boost that action feel even more. For everyone else, action camera can stay turned off, and we can enjoy tab-targeting gameplay, with occasional skill you have to aim in certain direction/area, or a certain thing you have to dodge (though I'd honestly prefer not having to do it a lot).
Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » At the end of the day, you are trying to say something can not be done and all it takes for you to be wrong is for someone to do it. Do you really think that in the future, there will never be an action game with the same amount of raid variety as you find in the tab games you are thinking of? Indeed, all it takes is one developer to successfully do it and I would be proven wrong. I wouldn't have made this argument if I thought it was possible without compromise. You could have any tab encounter in an action game. Yes, you could claim it's bad that it doesn't leverage any of the action elements but that doesn't change the fact this is possible. You would have the same encounter variety in the game. Well now, we have a philosophical argument here. If you have an action combat system, and you remove all action elements, do you still have an action combat system? To me, the answer is no. Further to that, if you have to compromise your combat system in order to have content variety, you have some fairly major issues. This also comes under the point I made about not having to have such compromises. Who said those are the only encounters? Just because it has the large variety of tab encounters doesn't mean it can't have other encounters that use more action elements of the system, creating even more variety. Well, I don't want that. I want my Action Abilities to be important in more encounters. I don't want to have to respec to Tab abilities to be effective on hard encounters and I don't want to just be standing there using none of the strengths of my Action Abilities because they're borderline useless in easier Tab encounters. If your response is 'well don't do that' then I as the "Action Combat Raider" now don't have a raiding scene. I would very much like one. I'm not arguing for how the encounters should be. All i'm doing is arguing against the idea that action encounters can't be as varied as tab ones, which noanni has claimed. Surely you have played ONE of the more recent difficult group Action games enough to understand why one would claim that, though? I'm not even saying you have to agree, just give some example other than 'this can just be made easier' or something. Doesn't even have to be an MMO, since, after all, they usually aren't. If we are talking 'mechanical variance that can't just be cheesed by a monolith of a single class avoiding a main mechanic', you absolutely will lose variance in terms of a raiding scene because raids are tuned to be hard and doing a raid suboptimally (more than 10% below tuning) is increasing your failure chance by a LOT. "Can I hit the Dragon in the head with my Magic Hammer when the Dragon also requires me to dodge to reduce damage?" is the 'challenge' when using an Action Skill (let's assume the last stream showed an Action skill). There are two ways in general to design this, either you NEED to hit the dragon in the head as part of the encounter or risk wiping, or if the skill was Tab, hitting the dragon in the head is either not possible, or not a thing that involves physically orienting your character correctly in the case where the dragon spins, moves, turns, for any reason. If the Tank is keeping the dragon completely still, Action and Tab are almost the same now, right? Which means either Action gets a bonus to SOMETHING (Accuracy, effect, damage, whatever) becoming optimal, or it gets little or no bonus (Tab is now better for those few moments where the thing does spin). Yes, you CAN make a bunch of varied encounters in Hybrid, but 'well in this one you need to hit the Dragon in the head and in this other one you don't NEED to hit it' does not cover 'variety' to me. As a designer, you have to understand why claiming something is impossible because of what another game did is illogical. If you don't want a class cheesing a mechanic then don't let them cheese the mechanic... Maybe you could give an example of what you are thinking about because that comment confused me. In the rest of your post, I don't understand the point you are trying to argue besides the balance of tab and action abilities in ashes, which i don't think is relevant. Not only am i just talking about action combat in general but in ashes, i don't think fights will be designed differently based on preferred combat style. What are you trying to get at? As a designer, I am telling you that claiming something is impossible because you know enough about the limitations of the thing you study and design is the literal definition of logical. This stance is almost unbelievable. Logic is specifically 'conclusions following priors using a system to understand them'. Logical deductions are not guaranteed to be facts and do not have to be facts, they are the way you work out what is most likely to be true and how you can work around it. Since my claims have priors and yours don't (at the moment, I will be glad if you bring them), the burden of 'logicality' here is not on me. But a more serious question. Are you one of those people who will actually go 'I think it is possible' when the consensus of those who do something for a living is that it isn't? I am very aware that such people exist, I've met CEOs like that. They're no fun. Also they ruin themselves. My point being that I don't expect any 'level of person' to be immune to this. I've worked directly for 'that guy', a person who doesn't even write code and insists to programmers 'This should be possible it seems so easy'. If you're in that camp, so be it. I personally have been in this industry (not game dev directly) long enough to never assume that even the top of a multimillion dollar company has any capacity for using reason in this way. I hope you can forgive me for similarly not assuming it about you.
mcstackerson wrote: » Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » At the end of the day, you are trying to say something can not be done and all it takes for you to be wrong is for someone to do it. Do you really think that in the future, there will never be an action game with the same amount of raid variety as you find in the tab games you are thinking of? Indeed, all it takes is one developer to successfully do it and I would be proven wrong. I wouldn't have made this argument if I thought it was possible without compromise. You could have any tab encounter in an action game. Yes, you could claim it's bad that it doesn't leverage any of the action elements but that doesn't change the fact this is possible. You would have the same encounter variety in the game. Well now, we have a philosophical argument here. If you have an action combat system, and you remove all action elements, do you still have an action combat system? To me, the answer is no. Further to that, if you have to compromise your combat system in order to have content variety, you have some fairly major issues. This also comes under the point I made about not having to have such compromises. Who said those are the only encounters? Just because it has the large variety of tab encounters doesn't mean it can't have other encounters that use more action elements of the system, creating even more variety. Well, I don't want that. I want my Action Abilities to be important in more encounters. I don't want to have to respec to Tab abilities to be effective on hard encounters and I don't want to just be standing there using none of the strengths of my Action Abilities because they're borderline useless in easier Tab encounters. If your response is 'well don't do that' then I as the "Action Combat Raider" now don't have a raiding scene. I would very much like one. I'm not arguing for how the encounters should be. All i'm doing is arguing against the idea that action encounters can't be as varied as tab ones, which noanni has claimed. Surely you have played ONE of the more recent difficult group Action games enough to understand why one would claim that, though? I'm not even saying you have to agree, just give some example other than 'this can just be made easier' or something. Doesn't even have to be an MMO, since, after all, they usually aren't. If we are talking 'mechanical variance that can't just be cheesed by a monolith of a single class avoiding a main mechanic', you absolutely will lose variance in terms of a raiding scene because raids are tuned to be hard and doing a raid suboptimally (more than 10% below tuning) is increasing your failure chance by a LOT. "Can I hit the Dragon in the head with my Magic Hammer when the Dragon also requires me to dodge to reduce damage?" is the 'challenge' when using an Action Skill (let's assume the last stream showed an Action skill). There are two ways in general to design this, either you NEED to hit the dragon in the head as part of the encounter or risk wiping, or if the skill was Tab, hitting the dragon in the head is either not possible, or not a thing that involves physically orienting your character correctly in the case where the dragon spins, moves, turns, for any reason. If the Tank is keeping the dragon completely still, Action and Tab are almost the same now, right? Which means either Action gets a bonus to SOMETHING (Accuracy, effect, damage, whatever) becoming optimal, or it gets little or no bonus (Tab is now better for those few moments where the thing does spin). Yes, you CAN make a bunch of varied encounters in Hybrid, but 'well in this one you need to hit the Dragon in the head and in this other one you don't NEED to hit it' does not cover 'variety' to me. As a designer, you have to understand why claiming something is impossible because of what another game did is illogical. If you don't want a class cheesing a mechanic then don't let them cheese the mechanic... Maybe you could give an example of what you are thinking about because that comment confused me. In the rest of your post, I don't understand the point you are trying to argue besides the balance of tab and action abilities in ashes, which i don't think is relevant. Not only am i just talking about action combat in general but in ashes, i don't think fights will be designed differently based on preferred combat style. What are you trying to get at?
Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » At the end of the day, you are trying to say something can not be done and all it takes for you to be wrong is for someone to do it. Do you really think that in the future, there will never be an action game with the same amount of raid variety as you find in the tab games you are thinking of? Indeed, all it takes is one developer to successfully do it and I would be proven wrong. I wouldn't have made this argument if I thought it was possible without compromise. You could have any tab encounter in an action game. Yes, you could claim it's bad that it doesn't leverage any of the action elements but that doesn't change the fact this is possible. You would have the same encounter variety in the game. Well now, we have a philosophical argument here. If you have an action combat system, and you remove all action elements, do you still have an action combat system? To me, the answer is no. Further to that, if you have to compromise your combat system in order to have content variety, you have some fairly major issues. This also comes under the point I made about not having to have such compromises. Who said those are the only encounters? Just because it has the large variety of tab encounters doesn't mean it can't have other encounters that use more action elements of the system, creating even more variety. Well, I don't want that. I want my Action Abilities to be important in more encounters. I don't want to have to respec to Tab abilities to be effective on hard encounters and I don't want to just be standing there using none of the strengths of my Action Abilities because they're borderline useless in easier Tab encounters. If your response is 'well don't do that' then I as the "Action Combat Raider" now don't have a raiding scene. I would very much like one. I'm not arguing for how the encounters should be. All i'm doing is arguing against the idea that action encounters can't be as varied as tab ones, which noanni has claimed. Surely you have played ONE of the more recent difficult group Action games enough to understand why one would claim that, though? I'm not even saying you have to agree, just give some example other than 'this can just be made easier' or something. Doesn't even have to be an MMO, since, after all, they usually aren't. If we are talking 'mechanical variance that can't just be cheesed by a monolith of a single class avoiding a main mechanic', you absolutely will lose variance in terms of a raiding scene because raids are tuned to be hard and doing a raid suboptimally (more than 10% below tuning) is increasing your failure chance by a LOT. "Can I hit the Dragon in the head with my Magic Hammer when the Dragon also requires me to dodge to reduce damage?" is the 'challenge' when using an Action Skill (let's assume the last stream showed an Action skill). There are two ways in general to design this, either you NEED to hit the dragon in the head as part of the encounter or risk wiping, or if the skill was Tab, hitting the dragon in the head is either not possible, or not a thing that involves physically orienting your character correctly in the case where the dragon spins, moves, turns, for any reason. If the Tank is keeping the dragon completely still, Action and Tab are almost the same now, right? Which means either Action gets a bonus to SOMETHING (Accuracy, effect, damage, whatever) becoming optimal, or it gets little or no bonus (Tab is now better for those few moments where the thing does spin). Yes, you CAN make a bunch of varied encounters in Hybrid, but 'well in this one you need to hit the Dragon in the head and in this other one you don't NEED to hit it' does not cover 'variety' to me.
mcstackerson wrote: » Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » At the end of the day, you are trying to say something can not be done and all it takes for you to be wrong is for someone to do it. Do you really think that in the future, there will never be an action game with the same amount of raid variety as you find in the tab games you are thinking of? Indeed, all it takes is one developer to successfully do it and I would be proven wrong. I wouldn't have made this argument if I thought it was possible without compromise. You could have any tab encounter in an action game. Yes, you could claim it's bad that it doesn't leverage any of the action elements but that doesn't change the fact this is possible. You would have the same encounter variety in the game. Well now, we have a philosophical argument here. If you have an action combat system, and you remove all action elements, do you still have an action combat system? To me, the answer is no. Further to that, if you have to compromise your combat system in order to have content variety, you have some fairly major issues. This also comes under the point I made about not having to have such compromises. Who said those are the only encounters? Just because it has the large variety of tab encounters doesn't mean it can't have other encounters that use more action elements of the system, creating even more variety. Well, I don't want that. I want my Action Abilities to be important in more encounters. I don't want to have to respec to Tab abilities to be effective on hard encounters and I don't want to just be standing there using none of the strengths of my Action Abilities because they're borderline useless in easier Tab encounters. If your response is 'well don't do that' then I as the "Action Combat Raider" now don't have a raiding scene. I would very much like one. I'm not arguing for how the encounters should be. All i'm doing is arguing against the idea that action encounters can't be as varied as tab ones, which noanni has claimed.
Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » At the end of the day, you are trying to say something can not be done and all it takes for you to be wrong is for someone to do it. Do you really think that in the future, there will never be an action game with the same amount of raid variety as you find in the tab games you are thinking of? Indeed, all it takes is one developer to successfully do it and I would be proven wrong. I wouldn't have made this argument if I thought it was possible without compromise. You could have any tab encounter in an action game. Yes, you could claim it's bad that it doesn't leverage any of the action elements but that doesn't change the fact this is possible. You would have the same encounter variety in the game. Well now, we have a philosophical argument here. If you have an action combat system, and you remove all action elements, do you still have an action combat system? To me, the answer is no. Further to that, if you have to compromise your combat system in order to have content variety, you have some fairly major issues. This also comes under the point I made about not having to have such compromises. Who said those are the only encounters? Just because it has the large variety of tab encounters doesn't mean it can't have other encounters that use more action elements of the system, creating even more variety. Well, I don't want that. I want my Action Abilities to be important in more encounters. I don't want to have to respec to Tab abilities to be effective on hard encounters and I don't want to just be standing there using none of the strengths of my Action Abilities because they're borderline useless in easier Tab encounters. If your response is 'well don't do that' then I as the "Action Combat Raider" now don't have a raiding scene. I would very much like one.
mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » At the end of the day, you are trying to say something can not be done and all it takes for you to be wrong is for someone to do it. Do you really think that in the future, there will never be an action game with the same amount of raid variety as you find in the tab games you are thinking of? Indeed, all it takes is one developer to successfully do it and I would be proven wrong. I wouldn't have made this argument if I thought it was possible without compromise. You could have any tab encounter in an action game. Yes, you could claim it's bad that it doesn't leverage any of the action elements but that doesn't change the fact this is possible. You would have the same encounter variety in the game. Well now, we have a philosophical argument here. If you have an action combat system, and you remove all action elements, do you still have an action combat system? To me, the answer is no. Further to that, if you have to compromise your combat system in order to have content variety, you have some fairly major issues. This also comes under the point I made about not having to have such compromises. Who said those are the only encounters? Just because it has the large variety of tab encounters doesn't mean it can't have other encounters that use more action elements of the system, creating even more variety.
Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » At the end of the day, you are trying to say something can not be done and all it takes for you to be wrong is for someone to do it. Do you really think that in the future, there will never be an action game with the same amount of raid variety as you find in the tab games you are thinking of? Indeed, all it takes is one developer to successfully do it and I would be proven wrong. I wouldn't have made this argument if I thought it was possible without compromise. You could have any tab encounter in an action game. Yes, you could claim it's bad that it doesn't leverage any of the action elements but that doesn't change the fact this is possible. You would have the same encounter variety in the game. Well now, we have a philosophical argument here. If you have an action combat system, and you remove all action elements, do you still have an action combat system? To me, the answer is no. Further to that, if you have to compromise your combat system in order to have content variety, you have some fairly major issues. This also comes under the point I made about not having to have such compromises.
mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » At the end of the day, you are trying to say something can not be done and all it takes for you to be wrong is for someone to do it. Do you really think that in the future, there will never be an action game with the same amount of raid variety as you find in the tab games you are thinking of? Indeed, all it takes is one developer to successfully do it and I would be proven wrong. I wouldn't have made this argument if I thought it was possible without compromise. You could have any tab encounter in an action game. Yes, you could claim it's bad that it doesn't leverage any of the action elements but that doesn't change the fact this is possible. You would have the same encounter variety in the game.
Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » At the end of the day, you are trying to say something can not be done and all it takes for you to be wrong is for someone to do it. Do you really think that in the future, there will never be an action game with the same amount of raid variety as you find in the tab games you are thinking of? Indeed, all it takes is one developer to successfully do it and I would be proven wrong. I wouldn't have made this argument if I thought it was possible without compromise.
mcstackerson wrote: » At the end of the day, you are trying to say something can not be done and all it takes for you to be wrong is for someone to do it. Do you really think that in the future, there will never be an action game with the same amount of raid variety as you find in the tab games you are thinking of?
mcstackerson wrote: » Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » At the end of the day, you are trying to say something can not be done and all it takes for you to be wrong is for someone to do it. Do you really think that in the future, there will never be an action game with the same amount of raid variety as you find in the tab games you are thinking of? Indeed, all it takes is one developer to successfully do it and I would be proven wrong. I wouldn't have made this argument if I thought it was possible without compromise. You could have any tab encounter in an action game. Yes, you could claim it's bad that it doesn't leverage any of the action elements but that doesn't change the fact this is possible. You would have the same encounter variety in the game. Well now, we have a philosophical argument here. If you have an action combat system, and you remove all action elements, do you still have an action combat system? To me, the answer is no. Further to that, if you have to compromise your combat system in order to have content variety, you have some fairly major issues. This also comes under the point I made about not having to have such compromises. Who said those are the only encounters? Just because it has the large variety of tab encounters doesn't mean it can't have other encounters that use more action elements of the system, creating even more variety. Well, I don't want that. I want my Action Abilities to be important in more encounters. I don't want to have to respec to Tab abilities to be effective on hard encounters and I don't want to just be standing there using none of the strengths of my Action Abilities because they're borderline useless in easier Tab encounters. If your response is 'well don't do that' then I as the "Action Combat Raider" now don't have a raiding scene. I would very much like one. I'm not arguing for how the encounters should be. All i'm doing is arguing against the idea that action encounters can't be as varied as tab ones, which noanni has claimed. Surely you have played ONE of the more recent difficult group Action games enough to understand why one would claim that, though? I'm not even saying you have to agree, just give some example other than 'this can just be made easier' or something. Doesn't even have to be an MMO, since, after all, they usually aren't. If we are talking 'mechanical variance that can't just be cheesed by a monolith of a single class avoiding a main mechanic', you absolutely will lose variance in terms of a raiding scene because raids are tuned to be hard and doing a raid suboptimally (more than 10% below tuning) is increasing your failure chance by a LOT. "Can I hit the Dragon in the head with my Magic Hammer when the Dragon also requires me to dodge to reduce damage?" is the 'challenge' when using an Action Skill (let's assume the last stream showed an Action skill). There are two ways in general to design this, either you NEED to hit the dragon in the head as part of the encounter or risk wiping, or if the skill was Tab, hitting the dragon in the head is either not possible, or not a thing that involves physically orienting your character correctly in the case where the dragon spins, moves, turns, for any reason. If the Tank is keeping the dragon completely still, Action and Tab are almost the same now, right? Which means either Action gets a bonus to SOMETHING (Accuracy, effect, damage, whatever) becoming optimal, or it gets little or no bonus (Tab is now better for those few moments where the thing does spin). Yes, you CAN make a bunch of varied encounters in Hybrid, but 'well in this one you need to hit the Dragon in the head and in this other one you don't NEED to hit it' does not cover 'variety' to me. As a designer, you have to understand why claiming something is impossible because of what another game did is illogical. If you don't want a class cheesing a mechanic then don't let them cheese the mechanic... Maybe you could give an example of what you are thinking about because that comment confused me. In the rest of your post, I don't understand the point you are trying to argue besides the balance of tab and action abilities in ashes, which i don't think is relevant. Not only am i just talking about action combat in general but in ashes, i don't think fights will be designed differently based on preferred combat style. What are you trying to get at? As a designer, I am telling you that claiming something is impossible because you know enough about the limitations of the thing you study and design is the literal definition of logical. This stance is almost unbelievable. Logic is specifically 'conclusions following priors using a system to understand them'. Logical deductions are not guaranteed to be facts and do not have to be facts, they are the way you work out what is most likely to be true and how you can work around it. Since my claims have priors and yours don't (at the moment, I will be glad if you bring them), the burden of 'logicality' here is not on me. But a more serious question. Are you one of those people who will actually go 'I think it is possible' when the consensus of those who do something for a living is that it isn't? I am very aware that such people exist, I've met CEOs like that. They're no fun. Also they ruin themselves. My point being that I don't expect any 'level of person' to be immune to this. I've worked directly for 'that guy', a person who doesn't even write code and insists to programmers 'This should be possible it seems so easy'. If you're in that camp, so be it. I personally have been in this industry (not game dev directly) long enough to never assume that even the top of a multimillion dollar company has any capacity for using reason in this way. I hope you can forgive me for similarly not assuming it about you. You can't imagine taking any of the the tab games mentioned, converting them to action, and adapting their content? I don't think this is necessary but what makes content varied is kind of subjective so this seems like the easiest way to argue it. At first, you could just translate the player combat to use hitscan/raycasting instead of tab. This is more to help you imagine the transition process but I think it works as baseline action since you are now aiming. If, as a tab game, it was considered varied, it should still keep that variety but no longer be tab. From there, you can make further modifications to make it more "action" and make sure you compensate where necessary so you still have the variety of the base game had. If there are any mechanics you don't think can be translated then please bring them up and tell me why
Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Azherae wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » Noaani wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » At the end of the day, you are trying to say something can not be done and all it takes for you to be wrong is for someone to do it. Do you really think that in the future, there will never be an action game with the same amount of raid variety as you find in the tab games you are thinking of? Indeed, all it takes is one developer to successfully do it and I would be proven wrong. I wouldn't have made this argument if I thought it was possible without compromise. You could have any tab encounter in an action game. Yes, you could claim it's bad that it doesn't leverage any of the action elements but that doesn't change the fact this is possible. You would have the same encounter variety in the game. Well now, we have a philosophical argument here. If you have an action combat system, and you remove all action elements, do you still have an action combat system? To me, the answer is no. Further to that, if you have to compromise your combat system in order to have content variety, you have some fairly major issues. This also comes under the point I made about not having to have such compromises. Who said those are the only encounters? Just because it has the large variety of tab encounters doesn't mean it can't have other encounters that use more action elements of the system, creating even more variety. Well, I don't want that. I want my Action Abilities to be important in more encounters. I don't want to have to respec to Tab abilities to be effective on hard encounters and I don't want to just be standing there using none of the strengths of my Action Abilities because they're borderline useless in easier Tab encounters. If your response is 'well don't do that' then I as the "Action Combat Raider" now don't have a raiding scene. I would very much like one. I'm not arguing for how the encounters should be. All i'm doing is arguing against the idea that action encounters can't be as varied as tab ones, which noanni has claimed. Surely you have played ONE of the more recent difficult group Action games enough to understand why one would claim that, though? I'm not even saying you have to agree, just give some example other than 'this can just be made easier' or something. Doesn't even have to be an MMO, since, after all, they usually aren't. If we are talking 'mechanical variance that can't just be cheesed by a monolith of a single class avoiding a main mechanic', you absolutely will lose variance in terms of a raiding scene because raids are tuned to be hard and doing a raid suboptimally (more than 10% below tuning) is increasing your failure chance by a LOT. "Can I hit the Dragon in the head with my Magic Hammer when the Dragon also requires me to dodge to reduce damage?" is the 'challenge' when using an Action Skill (let's assume the last stream showed an Action skill). There are two ways in general to design this, either you NEED to hit the dragon in the head as part of the encounter or risk wiping, or if the skill was Tab, hitting the dragon in the head is either not possible, or not a thing that involves physically orienting your character correctly in the case where the dragon spins, moves, turns, for any reason. If the Tank is keeping the dragon completely still, Action and Tab are almost the same now, right? Which means either Action gets a bonus to SOMETHING (Accuracy, effect, damage, whatever) becoming optimal, or it gets little or no bonus (Tab is now better for those few moments where the thing does spin). Yes, you CAN make a bunch of varied encounters in Hybrid, but 'well in this one you need to hit the Dragon in the head and in this other one you don't NEED to hit it' does not cover 'variety' to me. As a designer, you have to understand why claiming something is impossible because of what another game did is illogical. If you don't want a class cheesing a mechanic then don't let them cheese the mechanic... Maybe you could give an example of what you are thinking about because that comment confused me. In the rest of your post, I don't understand the point you are trying to argue besides the balance of tab and action abilities in ashes, which i don't think is relevant. Not only am i just talking about action combat in general but in ashes, i don't think fights will be designed differently based on preferred combat style. What are you trying to get at? As a designer, I am telling you that claiming something is impossible because you know enough about the limitations of the thing you study and design is the literal definition of logical. This stance is almost unbelievable. Logic is specifically 'conclusions following priors using a system to understand them'. Logical deductions are not guaranteed to be facts and do not have to be facts, they are the way you work out what is most likely to be true and how you can work around it. Since my claims have priors and yours don't (at the moment, I will be glad if you bring them), the burden of 'logicality' here is not on me. But a more serious question. Are you one of those people who will actually go 'I think it is possible' when the consensus of those who do something for a living is that it isn't? I am very aware that such people exist, I've met CEOs like that. They're no fun. Also they ruin themselves. My point being that I don't expect any 'level of person' to be immune to this. I've worked directly for 'that guy', a person who doesn't even write code and insists to programmers 'This should be possible it seems so easy'. If you're in that camp, so be it. I personally have been in this industry (not game dev directly) long enough to never assume that even the top of a multimillion dollar company has any capacity for using reason in this way. I hope you can forgive me for similarly not assuming it about you. You can't imagine taking any of the the tab games mentioned, converting them to action, and adapting their content? I don't think this is necessary but what makes content varied is kind of subjective so this seems like the easiest way to argue it. At first, you could just translate the player combat to use hitscan/raycasting instead of tab. This is more to help you imagine the transition process but I think it works as baseline action since you are now aiming. If, as a tab game, it was considered varied, it should still keep that variety but no longer be tab. From there, you can make further modifications to make it more "action" and make sure you compensate where necessary so you still have the variety of the base game had. If there are any mechanics you don't think can be translated then please bring them up and tell me why Your first line here is incredibly hyperbole to me at this moment (mood). I do not wish to engage here, but I absolutely am not against trying to have a productive discussion on it. I posted a different thread, in which I hope I can come to a greater understanding of exactly what you are saying/believe and why, if you're willing to engage there. I feel like our perspectives are currently too far apart for this to be a productive use of time. I'll gladly come back to this later.https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/52939/lets-theoryraid-1-jormungand-vs-xenojiiva#latest
mcstackerson wrote: » If there are any mechanics you don't think can be translated then please bring them up and tell me why.
NiKr wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » If there are any mechanics you don't think can be translated then please bring them up and tell me why. Any random environment hazards that come from your perspective's back, while you're attacking a specific part of the boss. In tab your camera is usually waay further away from your character, so you see more of the environment, so if there's a horizontal attack coming towards you from behind - you'll probably see it. In action your camera would be way closer because you need to properly target different parts on the boss (proepr utilization of action combat features), and if something comes from behind your back w/o your knowledge and, potentially, oneshots you - I'd assume most players would consider that unfair, while for tab players that's just a mechanic that makes the encounter more fun. The flipside would be, a small fast mob jumping around you making you target it properly and dodge its attack actively. In tab that shit would be the dullest thing ever because you just target it, press "def/evasion buff" and unload, while in action (I would assume) this is a fun active gameplay. At least that's how I see it as mainly an outsider of hardcore pve. Also, the first example works in the context of dps maximization, where you have to look at the target to constantly do top lvl dmg so you can't just be looking around with your camera.
mcstackerson wrote: » If a player is supposed to know the attack is coming then moving the indicator or changing how it's telegraphed isn't changing the mechanic in my opinion. It's the same mechanic, you are just making a slight change to how the user is being warned. Making players be aware of their surrounds or covering different angels for each other can also be an intentional way for the mechanic to function.
mcstackerson wrote: » Yes, if you want to make a mob feel like it would in a tab scenario, then you could have it function that way, even if it's visually jumping around, it's hit box could be in the area it's jumping.
Mag7spy wrote: » This can be done in action combat. If you are trying to make a encounter so random and dangerous people can die from all a 360 area, tab target camera is not going to save you. It will just be chaotic and annoying since it won't make any sense. There is always mechs that make sense in raid content, doesn't mean attack all happen in the same cycle but it will make sense and be fair along side the mechanics.
Mag7spy wrote: » You can zoom out with a action camera as well btw....
NiKr wrote: » mcstackerson wrote: » If a player is supposed to know the attack is coming then moving the indicator or changing how it's telegraphed isn't changing the mechanic in my opinion. It's the same mechanic, you are just making a slight change to how the user is being warned. Making players be aware of their surrounds or covering different angels for each other can also be an intentional way for the mechanic to function. But that's the point though. In a tab mmo, the random attack from somewhere makes you react to it, and that attack can come from pretty much 360 degrees around your character. If you wanted to warn action players, that attack would only come from their cone of vision, or the ground indicator would be ginormous so that they can't miss it. At 5:30 in this video the dragons make a dash. There's no indicator where the hit will happen and by the looks of it the aoe is pretty big. I dunno if their order is randomized and obviously this is a non-combat mechanic of the fight, but there's a few such dashes earlier in the video where they dash during the fight. As you can see from the camera pov, the visibility is huge so you can see where the dragons stand and can figure out where you gotta stand. In action, I'd assume you'll have a much narrower fov so it'd be more difficult.https://youtu.be/kGReBbXnynQ?t=330 And if I was trying to do a difficult encounter, I'd randomize position and order of these dragons, so player have to react on the spot. Yes, you can have this kind of stuff just in the player's vision, but then it limits the design possibilities a lot. It also brings down the difficulty of the encounter because you're still just staring in one point, while 360 dangers would require you to pay attention to the entire screen. You could also say "just let shotcallers call those dangers out", but I'd imagine a 40-man raid will have a tooon of things to call out, so a randomized mechanic on top of all the other difficult mechanics would make it really difficult to call everything out correctly w/o making VC a mess. Ideally you'd have personal responsibilities on top of raid-wide ones, and I'd say that being completely aware of your surroundings should definitely be one of those responsibilities. mcstackerson wrote: » Yes, if you want to make a mob feel like it would in a tab scenario, then you could have it function that way, even if it's visually jumping around, it's hit box could be in the area it's jumping. Mm, I'm not sure if I understand what exactly you're saying here.
NiKr wrote: » Mag7spy wrote: » This can be done in action combat. If you are trying to make a encounter so random and dangerous people can die from all a 360 area, tab target camera is not going to save you. It will just be chaotic and annoying since it won't make any sense. There is always mechs that make sense in raid content, doesn't mean attack all happen in the same cycle but it will make sense and be fair along side the mechanics. Well, to figure out if chaos is not the way to go we'd have to get Noaani to tell us about some super hard raids from EQ2 and whether those had chaos or just rng that players played against. But we know that Noaani won't tell us shit Mag7spy wrote: » You can zoom out with a action camera as well btw.... How far though? Especially in the context of "you need to target particular parts of the boss in front of you by aiming at them exactly. Btw, @Noaani I was thinking about this and got curious. Back in L2 no one cared about raid videos because the fight was super easy and you just needed people and gear to win. In FF14, from what I've heard, no one cares about showing their clears because the game is so difficult mechanically that it doesn't matter if you know the mechanics, cause you still need to execute perfectly in order to beat the encounter (I believe WoW's raiding races are similar). So I got curious where EQ2 was on that spectrum, considering that you've said multiple times that people didn't release videos to prevent others from clearing some raids. Was the reason for that some super secret mechanic during the raid that you had to figure out? Was it a particular party setup? Was it particular actions that players had to make? All or none of the above?
mcstackerson wrote: » Who said those are the only encounters? Just because it has the large variety of tab encounters doesn't mean it can't have other encounters that use more action elements of the system, creating even more variety.
Mag7spy wrote: » Because you can have more happening means you can have more levels of difficulty based on however they design it. How can you not see that?
