In regards to the "distracting" nature of the deck system:

Could you please provide a link? No he said, she said, but a real source?

 

As Mike already aptly put it: No, it's not.

I mentioned PvP because in any MMO, if combat makes PvM bad but PvP good, you still get both PvMers and PvPers. You have to complete quests, so you grind out the PvM as needed. But if the combat is so bad that it's not fun for PvM or PvP, you get neither. I laugh that the last time I actively PvM'd in UO was 1999, and everything since then was basically PvP and making money off of contracts and looting. PvM was terrible in that game. But the combat was stand there and wail against NPCs, or joust them or spam EVs or "all kill". In PvP, the combat system was (and still is) one of the best systems out there. So if you needed gold or whatever, you could PvM and it was just dull, but the PvP was amazing, and so you had people doing both. The role-play, crafting, housing and sandbox nature made the dull PvM tolerable, and a huge thriving PvP community existed on top of it.

I'm a PvPer, yes, but after being on these forums, I honestly could care less for most of the community here and by extension PvPing on SotA. I just want to be able to play it single player and enjoy myself. But I won't waste time on top of the money if the combat is annoying, I have plenty other games still to play and many more come 2016.

That's your bias showing. "Every other button mashing MMO"? "Jumping, spinning and spamming attacks"? Just because you have zero reaction skills in video games doesn't mean people who outpace you are just monkeys facerolling their keyboards. They hit specific hotkeys at specific times to handle specific, tactical issues to overcome or counter a variety of combat situations, simultaneously occurring in the chaos of open PvP and quickly ascertaining what will kill them immediately versus what will kill them over time or down the line. That takes mental aptitude as well as physical reaction speed.

Your son doesn't have to look at anything because he knows what he's doing. You belittle his skill as button-mashing when the reality is he's trained himself to know his cooldowns by pure memory, knows every single key combination and the skills they're linked to, plus the muscle memory and control to accurately use them efficiently, on top of having the focus to react without panicking.

Your son holds skills that people a hundred years ago would have an aneurysm over by the sheer complexity and you write it off as "button mashing." That's insulting.

On a side note, I've been gaming since '88, and I've never had a gaming mouse. I still do just fine with three buttons. No game should require peripherals on top of standard inputs without supplying it or coming out and saying that a peripheral is necessary. Star Citizen supports TrackIR and will support Occulus Rift, but neither are necessary to be good or even the best at the game.

Wrong. Not every MMO is a static, button mashing fest. UO certainly was not, and that was from '97. ArcheAge wasn't either, by far, especially considering mounted combat, glider intercepts/death-from-above, ship combat and so on. There is always a "best rotation" for anything; it's called efficiency. There will always be a min-max for anything in life, and video games are no exception. Do you cook? When you cook your favorite meal, one that you've mastered and pride yourself on, do you decide you're going to pre-heat the oven to a different temperature first? Something lower, or even higher? Then when you realize it isn't hot enough or it's too hot, do you decide to then put it to the correct temperature that you already know is perfect for making that dish after wasting an hour knowing it wouldn't heat up to the correct temperature?

Do you change the seasonings and spices from what you learned was the perfect combination to make it the tastiest, just because the rotation of using the same spices for this great dish makes it boring to cook? I'm not saying trying something different to improve it from time to time, experimenting, but if you were cooking this great dish for friends and guests, you wouldn't experiment on them by adding something completely new to the dish that could ruin it, would you? I think we all know the answer to that.

How you build your deck is not tactics, it's strategy, and vaguely at best. Not because TCGs don't have strategic value, but external factors like player positioning, environment and maneuvering don't matter when you're playing M:TG. They do here, or at least potentially, but when you cannot guarantee having a specific action available when you need it, even though you know what to do, how to do it and planned for it, then combat gets diluted. I'm not going to pick up attacks that push people away as a warrior because the circumstances for it being useful (knocking someone off a cliff, creating distance from a tougher melee foe) won't always correlate with the availability of the skill (drawing a Heal when I want to throw them from a precipice, or a Pull when I'm trying to knock them back). The tactical elements of the skills are therefore rendered inefficient, and it's wiser to simply take DPS, nukes, heals and mezzes instead of tactical glyphs that cannot always be practical.

Even if you were to belittle competitive and engaging gameplay, the notion that the geriatric, inbred cousin of the hybrid hotbar that we call the "locked hotbar" would allow for any kind of button mashing is pretty hilarious. The cooldowns, lack of combos, lack of stacking and limited slots makes the locked hotbar the most effective way of curing insomnia.

There is a better way, that's what we've been talking about. PvP as an issue was brought up once, maybe twice, but for the most part the system is being criticized for how it affects PvE. You can get more interesting battles: up the mob AI. Give mobs a variety of interesting skills. Make water monsters extremely powerful in water and swamps, where they dive under and trip you or try drowning you. Have pack monsters become stronger and pull off different attacks the more they have with them, making a pack of raptors dangerous in groups of 3 or more but easier to handle singular or even teams of raptors. Give AI the ability to change weapons for human mobs, or run away and look for a bigger weapon to fight you with - or even surrender!

That makes for dynamic, tactical, immersive combat, not trying to figure out if your 1 key is Thrust, Heal, Stone Fist or Summon Fire Elemental.

 

So personal! So passionate! Makes me chuckle though.

Because when someone has to get personal to make a point, are they really making a valid point in the first place? We can agree to disagree. The combat system in no way negatively affects PvE. My reaction skills in THAT area and my ability to adapt are just fine thank you very much!

Peace!

Fionwyn Wyldemane
Pax et Veritas

 

The problem people have with the draw system is that it doesn't fix this. You still know exactly what the best skill rotation is to output the most damage, the only difference is that instead of simply pushing the button to make it happen you now whack a mole the button when it peaks it's head out of the bar.

I think there is general agreement in the MMO community that we want more interesting combat where we don't just stand across from a monster and fire off abilities until it dies. The core to making combat more interesting though is the possibility of failure. You need to be able to lose for combat to have tension and be interesting. This means the most essential aspect of interesting combat is that the monster wins if you do something wrong. In the current system there is simply nothing to get wrong for people who are quick enough to never miss a stack. To anyone who has no problem sorting tiles as quickly as they crop up the system simply offers nothing interesting, just a lot of busy work to do exactly the same thing you would do in a game like WoW.

 

That's ironic.

 

This is a solid point. It's something that I think we take for granted. Yes, failure means we have to pay attention and think about our choices, and there is always a chance for failure (well, except when you're wearing full augmented plate and just ignore all damage coming in while you're talking to your spouse in the next room for 20 minutes). But the chance of failure is pretty obscure. Yes, you can make mistakes and lose, but due to the way the system is, the mobs have to be forgiving. They can't be moving around a lot or trying to flank you or making you run and juke to chase them down. They don't ambush you or do anything truly interesting, so it really is only how fast you can stack and chain attacks.

The only "mistake" you can make is not being fast enough, which is a twitch problem at its core, the very thing they're trying to avoid as giving the definitive advantage in a fight. It's self-defeating that way.

 

No, that's an observation. But please shall we continue this dance? Or shall we agree to disagree and call it a draw?

Peace!

Fionwyn Wyldemane
Pax et Veritas

 

yep i did. and my plan is to stay here much longer than that. sooner or later those that have the bad attitudes will leave the game, and leave our community. that day, we will throw a party. in game of course.

get it right. i do not feel like your arguments hold much value when you cannot understand a simple fact and correct your opinions when "new" data arrives. here is a screenshot, taken just now, of the current windows build.







you have a preconception, a snapshot, that you have created in your mind - and it is not evolving with the game. when your mind has the flexibility to do that, and incorporate it into what one can easily see as the vision of the devs based on the steps they are taking while creating the systems that are not yet in place...then maybe just maybe i may allow you to have a modicum of influence on my opinions. until then...

*plonk*

 

This pretty much hits it on the head.

 

The "bad attitudes" are the ones that would be paying for that party, Sheol. Or what I like to call them: paying customers.

So someone tells you their fully functional albeit buggy and feature incomplete game is in a stage that is unanimously attributed to a fundamental testing of individual concepts isolated from the other elements in part or in whole, and you believe it for no other reason than they said it despite a quick google search coming up with a pretty clear definition of the difference?

I got some oceanfront property in Arizona you might be interested in.

 

Will keep looking for the first source, but since we're talking about a while ago, I can only (so far) cite Chris referencing this here:

As far as most of us know, they're still leaving things askew to keep people looking at dynamic decks as the preference. Unless you can find the moment they've actually made the change to put things in balance. That, honestly, should be good enough for you.

I'm not either. The lack of immersion, the game-ish-ness of it, the way it peanlizes exploring (new situation that would require a new set of tacitcs even though you had all the skills? take some time out and build a new deck... if you survived), the time and money spent balancing it for a fraction of who aren't using the locked deck, how it takes me out of the story to focus on the deck play....

That's off the top of my head.

Honestly, I'm waiting to hear what things we need a random draw for. What it does that's so great.

 

Expanding on this, one of the problems with failure is you have to know how you failed. With deck combat the question is did you do something wrong during the battle? Or did you just get a bad draw? Or did you build a poor deck?

The first question is the same question all combat systems have, and it rests solely on the player, gets answered pretty quick, and because of the short gap between action and lesson the player learns them rather quickly.

But with the next two, it takes multiple failures before you learn because you just can't be sure. It could be one or the other. You might also get lucky and not fail in the first fight adding to the murkiness of knowing if your deck is good or not. It simply isn't a fast enough lesson to be an enjoyable one. The long time it takes to build a deck, untested, then try it in a fight only to find out then if your time was wasted is not an activity most players will enjoy, nor does it make them feel heroic, or truly smart. It's book keeping, and (again) goes against LB's design philosophy of getting you right into the game. Even after you're invested, this should still be a philosophy followed.

 

I say give us standard hot bar. It's popular in many other games because it works so well. Honestly no point in being different in this regard just for the sake of being different. Having to type to npc's to figure out quests with no exclamation/question marks makes this game different enough. In other games I've played, WoW, Final Fantasy, Age of Conan, ArcheAge . .I've never once heard any one say, this hotbar is boring or anything derogatory about having a hotbar. .. Just give us regular hot bar, make improvements to animations and give us more options to juke and dodge out of our opponents range/damage area with improved rolls, backflips, give us ability to frontflip and I think we'll be good.

Or just go back to UO style and let us tie our abilities to whatever keybind we want.

 

I'm honestly unclear how this combat system has any less immersion than any other combat system that uses a toolbar. And I'm not clear how the combat system penalizes exploring. Or how figuring out a new set of tactics is so different than any other game where you play a class and have to figure out your skill rotation.

Opinions and preferences differ. For example, I left WoW right before the release of Cataclysm because of the way the skills were revamped. The use of socketed gems, glyphs, enchants, etc all had to be rebalanced and I wasn't having any of that on 8 different characters. And yet plenty of people stayed and simply adapted. So there's the rub - no matter what game you play, there is going to be a need to adapt to certain game mechanics either before, during or after release. That is just the nature of MMO's and games in general.

The deck system in SoTA is slightly reminiscent of Magic the Gathering or even the old D&D board game. How? Because in those games, no matter what deck you had, no matter how you built your character, there was a *random* element to them. You never new what card you'd pull at a given time or what your dice roll would be. Perhaps carrying that type of concept over into a MMO is too *retro* or to much of bucking the bland MMO combat systems currently in place these days for the tastes of some people?

Opinions and preferences differ and I still have no clear idea how to make the SoTA combat system any better. I would just hate to see it revert to the *same old same old*.

Peace!

Fionwyn Wyldemane
Pax et Veritas

 

Immersion becomes greatest when you no longer think about the controls, but instead simply think about what you want to do. For players who are highly adept with a hotbar system activating the abilities they want becomes like typing words, you just do it without thinking about every individual button push. This is lost with the glyph system, because you have to look at the bar to see what button corresponds to what at any given point in time.

The issue is how the randomness expresses itself. Instead of actually giving you an element of unpredictability to combat all you're doing is rearranging tiles in an effort to reduce the randomness of the inputs. You know exactly what glyphs do what in your deck, you know exactly that they will crop up at a certain frequency, you know exactly if the situation calls for stacking, discarding or using them, and you know exactly what your deck does. So you're not making decisions, you're just as much on autopilot as you are in any other MMO. Nothing is different except having to constantly babysit the hotbar instead of just forgetting that it exists while playing.

 

Good points! Sadly, I have always had to *babysit* the hot bar and the fact that you usually have six rows of a hotbar clogging up the screen makes it hard to *forget it exists*. The immersion is less about combat and more about role-play. What you view as, "rearranging tiles in an effort to reduce the randomness of the inputs" I view as "stacking tiles in an effort to maximize the powah of my skills, ie, glyphs."

To which I say - To each his own. I will continue loving and supporting the SoTA combat system in its current form and hoping that whatever changes *might* be made down the road are not the kind that put it back to a generic, boring and utterly bland MMO *just like all the others* combat system.

Peace!

Fionwyn Wyldemane
Pax et Veritas

 

I think the main difference in our respective experience is simply how we perceive standard hotbars. To me and I think most people who dislike the glyph system the standard hotbar isn't something we even notice. We are simply so good at controlling the some two dozen hotkeys of your average MMO that we never look at the bar or even think about it in any other way than a convenient way to bind hotkeys and check cooldowns. If you say you feel like you have to constantly pay attention to the bar even in a standard MMO I can see how this would be more interesting if the bar does something else than just sit there, even if it's just a little tile matching.

However, I believe that you would have an even better experience if we could find some way to get you to experience games more like we do, where every action is simply natural, and you don't feel like there are abstract controls between you and what's going on in the game at all. I don't think that can be accomplished with the glyph system though, since that system takes us to a place where even people who are MMO natives don't feel that immersion they usually feel.

I don't want to seem like I'm talking down to people who aren't so good with hotkeys that they don't need to think about them. I definitely understand where their frustration with the standard hotbars is coming from, and why the interactive hotbar might seem more appealing. I just think everyone deserves a chance to experience immersion, and the current system isn't letting anyone have it, and certainly isn't granting it to more people.

 

Immersion happens when what's happening in the interface, screen, and game mechanics all jive together. When they don't, you're reminded that you're just sitting in a chair, pressing a button. With this system I've taken the time to have my character learn a skill. I have the equipment to use the skill. I'm presented with an opportunity to use the skill. But, if I didn't do a completely arbitrary thing of putting it in my deck/plan of "Skills I want to use today, and how likely I am to use them" before I left the inn I don't get to. It doesn't fit with the way I would expect.

And, lets say I did remember to put it in my deck. There's still a chance it won't show up because.... reasons.

AND

Once it's time to use all these skills instead of looking at the cause and effect of those skills. I'm completely invested in the interface, and not the game. I'm not saying any game is perfect at that, but most games with a bar, I eventually can stop looking at my fingers and interface to make it work. That's before getting to the fact that to make combos work I absolutely have to pay attention to the bar, it's too cumbersome to look away from.

On hurting exploration... by having to decide what kind of battles you'll fight before you leave with deck design, you will probably not want to just take a chance and explore somewhere since you might not have the right deck for it. When RNG is so heavily stacked against you, you're less likely to roll the dice and see what happens. And when it takes so long to set up that custom deck (it's quick to click, long to plan), you won't get into that area quickly.

Yep. Games evolve over time. I'm curious how you'll react when new skills are added or changed and you have to revamp all your decks every time that happens.

As for adapting to new mechanics before/at release... I think you underestimate the breadth many of us have of game and play styles. I'm actually trying to think of a type of game I won't play on sheer principle, or a mechanic I won't try out of hand. More on that, after this comment...

A pale shadow of MtG. I've owned a LOT of MtG cards over the years, and currently own all the Dominion games and expansions, and a few deck building games beyond that. I like them. I get the fun of that.... but there's several things that make this fail to live up to what those games pushed out, and offer no other mechanics to shore up the loss.

1) MtG has an insane amount of different cards. Building your own deck, even with net decks, is possible because small tweaks let you really personalize it even if you have a core build. SotA simply doesn't have that number or skills.

2) MtG is compelling because of the collecting nature of the game as well. With SotA it's building, not collecting. You're never stuck with a set of skills because that's what the booster opened.

3) MtG works as it's an abstraction level higher than the game view of SotA. It's not dealing with the in your face elements of battle, but a large scale one where lands come into play. That distance from involvement makes it OK.

4) All deck games have a quick turn around on a loss with no lasting penalties. Each battle is it's own moment in time. A failure in one battle has no bearing on future battles. With SotA, having RNG go badly and getting you killed will have a lasting effect on your character, even if it's just slowing down XP progress.

Tell me why. Because here's the deal, if you're chasing new, this will fail when enough time passes that it's not new. This system has to stand on it's own. What is the reason it can? It at best is a flat trade on tactics, and at worst limits them. It keeps you more involved in clicking things, but at the expense of watching what's going on. It creates more balance in combat, by putting a ceiling on player skill and handing the rest over to game control. And the extra cost of all this is it breaks immersion.

Help me make all that worth it over the same old combat, but 100 other re-innovations in the rest of the game.

 

Key points from above: with a hotbar, you can turn the entire UI off and go based on muscle memory, cooldown knowledge, combat experience and general over-head blips of damage to know (generally) how you're doing in the fight. If you're good (or if you want), you can do that and still play the game just fine (I don't even see hotbars when I play; I minimize them down to nothing where I can). SotA specifically forces you to use a hotbar, as otherwise you cannot know what keys are what glyphs and when they're available. Locked hotbar, yes, you can do that, too, but at the cost of being inefficient and castrated in your options for character development.

Not to mention, with a locked hotbar, you focus entirely on the game, and with the mobs leaving a lot to be desired, that can be just as bad as staring at the cards.

 

And because of the nature of the deck system, when using the locked bar some skill points need to be spent each level in things that don't benefit the locked bar, AND you still have to limit your skills to what will fit in one bar, not just have yourself available to use what you know when you know it.