Chris' Release 8 Ramblings!

You gave us some good fights last weekend. The problem with full loot is that it tends to frustrate the less competitive players too much and makes too many people avoid pvp entirely. I think the ransom system proposed might be a good compromise.

 

There's always a worse game/scenario. I simply meant to express my concern that the monetary barrier is less of an issue for the kind of offender that would abuse such weakness (I'd be more than happy to elaborate my concern in private since I would not want to seem like I'm suggesting a form of abuse, but I'm sure these people know very well what they are doing without me delivering ideas). 2500$ is an easy investment in that "business" and like Chris described it, that would buy you more than a year of constant "kill everybody" PvP advantage.
Not to mention that it would be a shallow consolation to know that the person who killed me and looted my precious item is going to be banned sometime down the road, as another user expressed in a different thread.

 

It will also take some time to level up a character to make it usable for pvp. I also hope that Portalarium will add a number of lengthy quests that can not be short cut before anyone can actually enter a pvp zone or become pvp flagged. The longer the time investment needed to create a pvp ready character, the more it will hurt when that character gets deleted for cheating/exploiting.

 

sounds like nice endgame talk

 

In the days when MMO combat in other games has become about standard skill rotations, this is a very refreshing approach.

The pattern recognition and short term memory is the thing though. Will we simply be counting cards hoping for that card we need to come up on top? Or will we see patterns emerge for certain situations. For example, if a foes hit points are less than 20%, will we begin to see finishing skills more frequently? If my health is full, will I need see that heal pop up, but will if I am at less than 50%? It will be interesting in the future to hear more about the 'smart' aspects of this system.

 

That would be much more in line with Chris 'racquetball example' as well, since the available reactions are situational, rather than purely random (randomness is certainly a factor, but it's weighted randomness). I like it! A lot!

 

Interesting questions, and actually that makes me wonder a few things about the deck system : how are the glyphs actually dealt (and that would be a question to Chris I guess) ?

- does the card analogy go as far as "shuffle up and deal" the glyphs when entering combat (your deck is randomly shuffled and the order the glyhps come up is predetermined) ?
And thus, shall I see my whole deck pass by before a new shuffle occurs ?

- or is every glyph coming up randomly selected with equal chance among our deck (ie, one chance in a million to keep on drawing the same 5 glyphs all through a fight ) ?

 

Very good point. This is what is wrong with Chris' analogy. Random is neither realistic nor fun nor does it create game play that emphasizes tactical skill. Contextual would make a lot more sense. If skills available on the combat bar would change according to the combat situation we would have something that resembles realism. That extremely powerful kick just wouldn't be possible when your character is already nearing exhaustion, while something else could become available when you are facing your enemy's back etc...

 

Actually, no.

Your argument is almost like the people that say "everything happens for a reason" because they can't bare the thought of random pointless chaos being "the reason" that bad things happen. Chris's analogy is spot on in terms of realism. Random nonsense happens all the time. Sports teams routinely win championships because of randomness. It's just the way the world works.

Now as far as game mechanics go, I agree that it would be cooler if there were more variables that changed due to combat situations, but that doesn't have anything to do with skill. In fact for some people it will only help them create scripting more easily to avoid skill based checks altogether.

So please, tone down the "that's not realistic" and "random is bad" talk.

 

Randomness is good and realistic, but there is a difference between random and random. The environment (more often than not) influences the odds of random behaviour and that's what has been suggested. Take a look at a dice. Completely random, right? What if I were to slightly alter one of the edges? The result is still unpredictably random, but the odds have suddenly changed drastically (and predictably).
Now if we look at any given sport, the ultimate choice of action is random, but the possible basic selection of actions to chose from depends a lot on the situation. It is a lot less likely to see somebody trying "Coup de Grace" on a victim that is completely healthy than on a victim that is next to finished, hence why not reflect the odds in the glyph generation algorithm? You could still end up with the CoG glyph on a healthy enemy, it would just be less often. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

You can lock Coup de Grace. In fact, you probably should. You now only need 1 glyph instead of five, thus freeing up additional glyphs that could be used the rest of the time during combat.

It's really a fairly balanced system at the Glyph "deck builder" level.

 

Ok, so I lock that.

Now how about the obvious. I am standing 40' from a dude and want to use a bow skill.

Out of combat, sure. All the sudden combat pops, cards start flying past me. I get no "range" attacks. Why?

Do I really need to lock those too? Ok, now I got 2 things locked. And heal... ok three things....

You see where this is going? If I have to lock it all myself, because of situational combat, how is that better?

And the more I lock, the less "random" slots I have which translates to less chance to pop something useful from the random deck pulls i.e. less slots, less cycling the cards.

And the punishment for locking is currently way overboard. I know that will change, but the mechanic is still going to remain the same, like the song.

 

Why would you stay on a combat area out of combat mode? With combat mode activated, 8-10 glyph slots, some of them (1-2) locked and the possibility of discard glyphs, i dont see how you would have NOT any chance or alternative.

 

Not all combat is against Players. I said "out of combat" not out of combat mode. Obviously I need to be in "combat mode" waiting for a proper "ranged" card to attack and prompt a combat to start.

You can easily spot MOBs at a distance, like the elven area, and stand away and fire at them to "trigger" combat.

So the suggestion is that I scale up my slots, which costs investment.

And it seems the answer to the reduction of random versus actual knowledge about your skills, or how/when to use them in situational combat, is to also lock slots (after increasing the number of slots).

This does not sound like a good way to:

A) Focus on specific actions/choices (since I ironically have to spend more points on FOCUS for slots to increase my chance at a chain pull of cards)
B) Allow highly specialized builds to exist, like pure Archers

 

Several off-topic posts removed from this thread.

Glad to see we managed to get back on topic.

 

Look, it would a little difficult to show you that you are not correct. Maybe if i could show you a gameplay video would be easier. But i cant, so ill try with words .

If you accept the fact that there are 16 skill trees + 1 focus tree, then you can see that there is only a little possibility to craft a real "pure" combat style. You will almost always take glyphs from 2-3 or more skill trees. On this context, the focus tree is what really allow the existence of more specialized combat styles.

 

I like the idea of an increased chance for certain glyphs based on the situation. It could also work really well with counter skills (hypothetical example: if a person you are targeting just cast a spell at you there is a good chance of "block spell" skill popping up). There could be (focus) skills dedicated to increasing this chance.

 

I like this, even if i think that would be difficult to get the right interpretation of the right moment for the glyph to pop up.

it could be called "Epihany" or something like that.

 

Isn't this all covered with the ability to have multiple decks?

 

So do it. You can prove me wrong, but you are not going to do that?

Highly focused builds seemed to work extremely well for sword fighters this go around.

Did you not play R8?

Sword+Board, or straight Sword == death in armor. That is highly specialized.

Who says that 2-3 trees out of 16 is not specialized?

3/16 = 18.75%.

How is only using 18.75% of ALL the available skills, of which you probably won't even use all those (4x+ copies of each, average of 10 skills per tree is over 120 cards), not specialized?

Given that you can use maybe half that amount, you'd have to even specialize within those 2-3 trees, dropping the % even more.

I don't think specialized means what you think it means.