Does anyone else HATE the proposed card system??

Asguard: Precisely. How are you going to be able to keep track of all of this onscreen in the heat of battle? I was hoping for a relatively clean UI as well

 

I can't wait for the alpha so we can quit bitching about the card system and start working toward fixing it.

 

Everything I've seen about the combat system has either confused me or made me less enthusiastic about it. If there was something that people could actually get hands-on with, or at least see in action, I think that would help a lot. It just doesn't sound fun from the descriptions they're laying out.

 

Can't fix something we don't know is broken, but yeah, alpha is what we need!

On the other hand, what else are we going to waste our time and energy discussing until then? Housing??
I wish they could release more clothes and armour so we could discuss fashion options. *Sigh*

 

You are correct. We don't know for certain it's broken. We do know there are some concerns about it, and without knowing more about how it works it sure seems like it could be broken.

 

We know it's broken.

The same way my wife could know green was a better color for our dining room than orange was.

Some of us can envision how the details they've confrimed play out, and put them in place and fill in the gaps with the only possibilities available.

Just to be clear, here are the concerns (that I remember, if I missed one, chime in):

1 - adds boredom by removing player agency IN battle. Just clicking what the game made available to play out isn't MORE interactive.
2 - creates a new mechanic and layer of complexity (deck building) that doesn't have immediate feedback on it's effectiveness, wasting time and confusing people new to the game.
3 - removes some of the fun of PvP. If two characters are equal in all regaurds, stats, equipment and decks, it should be player skill that determines the winner. Not luck.
4 - actually adds to characters using a smaller subset of skills because they won't want to risk "weak" skills comming up at the wrong time.
5 - penalizes the player through focus loss for switching to skills sets they know and need.
6 - forces the player to take extra skills in the mix to fill out their decks and not just spam the same one or two.
7 - reduces the usefullness of mages by letting wands always be usable, thus controlling what spells are available, but mages have to just hope.
8 - discourages exploration by making it undesireable to go somewhere new incase you don't have a bag for what's in there.
9 - can be frustrating to lose because your skill didn't come up. It's less frustrating to lose if it's my fault.
10 - by simulating 'human error' it doubles it's effect since a human is already making errors on the other side of the keyboard.
11 - Losing to chaos can be fun if the turn arround and consiquences get reset quickly. In an epic length RPG, living with the consiquences of loss shouldn't be undone that quickly, making losing to chaos something you remember unplesantly for a good length of time.
EDIT:
12 - It randomizes the UI in such a way that it takes my eyes of the combat. (PrimeRib)

The pros I've seen:

1 - It's new.
2 - I like the thought of not knowing what's going to happen.
3 - Deck building can be fun.
4 - It's not the WoW forumula.
5 - It more accurately simulates combat.

The other rebuttals I've seen:

1 - We don't know enough.
2 - Trust the team. They know more than us.

Not important to all this, but

My Rebuttals:

Since I'm sure most of you have heard me on this already, I'll just put it all in a spoiler tag. Spoiler alert, I think we should drop the system.

Spoiler

Other rebuttals first. Other 1, I answered above. Some people DO know enough even though there are some blanks. There's no way to connect those dots that doesn't break a lot of things. When it comes to trusting the team, they are the ones who said "We're opening this up to you guys because you guys have ideas we never considered, and want you to be a part of this."

Pros 1& 4 are essentially the same and can be answered with the same reply: There are other new things we could try that don't bring in as many flaws off the bat. They'd get us closer to awesome from the start and not feel like we're building a house in a swamp. The only way we can get it built stablely is to fill in all the swamp parts, leaving us to ask, why didn't we just build it in dry land in the first place?

Pro 5 I can honestly say from someone who's been in both real, and mock combats, and teaches fighting, this is simply not true. Real fighters have all their tools available to them, and will use the most effective technique for the situation, not just randomly decide which one they'll use from a subset of their moves that they listed out the other day. They will vary their tactics as the battle changes (friends join in, fall, the terrain changes, etc). It's all done purposely and knowingly, not chaoticly. If a technique or skill requires a certain situation to exist, then the fighter will create that situation, and not just wait hoping it will happen.

Pros 2 & 3, on the other hand, are legitimate couter points becuase, they're opinion. Obviously some people think those things are fun. But they don't get us any closer to handling the problems that come from trying to shoe horn a card game into a real time RPG combat in a persistant world. Keeping the code and creating it as a deck building mini game will still let players enjoy these systems without inflicting the problems I listed at the start on the game. This could be a fine system in something turn based, or an areana style game where each battle is it's own thing, and the the world effectively resets and you do it again. This isn't that.

As for solutions to the problems I've listed above, almost all of them are stop gaps that solve the symptom, but leave other problems intact. And in almost all cases they involve removing the randomness from part of the combat. If you do that, no one will use the random part of combat (see problem 7). If I have a set path to a safe, but un spectacular win, vs a spectacular win, but high risk... players won't take the risk. You have to force them to do that, and most of the time it's done by tempting them with an all too tempting reward on the other side, making the failure something the player blames on themselves, and not the game. Some people will always blame the game, but in this case, they'd be right as leaving them to their own skill would have resulted in victory for the player.

 

I love it when games do auto-chains, procs, combos right on the same key. You still get the flavor of different stuff going on, but the action mirrors intent. You're not fighting the UI. In RIFT, people could put the whole skill priority in a macro and bind it. Again, this doesn't bother me. It's "skill" to some to have the perfect binds, but I'm willing to trade this off so that I can focus on dodging or circle strafing or anything but my keyboard. So I really have no problem at all with making this a deck and randomizing it. But this assumes that these skills have the same intent - doing lots of damage.

I want another button when there's a true other decision to make. I'm choosing to forgo damage to defend myself. I'm choosing to dodge. I'm choosing to attempt some kind of cc/interrupt. I'm choosing to use a risky "finisher" type skill, knowing that I put myself in a bad position if it gets countered. These can be randomized as well. But I still want my intent respected.

I don’t have a problem with decks, I think they’re cool. I don’t have a problem with the randomness of effects. I don’t have a problem with not getting the skill I want when I want it. I do have a problem with randomizing the UI layout and randomizing intent->action.

 

@PrimeRib - Thanks... forgot that one. Added it to the list.

 

To be nitpicky, technically, you don't know it's broken. You don't know all the missing parts. You are assuming what is in the holes.

Now, don't assume I'm all "happy happy, they know what they are doing." The system does look like it has major problems and those need to be resolved. I'm just resigned to the fact that they aren't changing these things until they have a chance to show us the implementation. It's one of RG's babies, he wants to see it through.

Also, green is always better than orange.

 

@Lonestranger

Yeah, I do. I don't need to see the muffler of a car to know the spark plugs are missing.

If you can point to me one of my issues with the game that can change without throwing out the randomness... I'm all ears. Fixing those issues requires either circumventing or abandoning the random aspect of combat. The question only remains will we just walk back to the industry standard, or will we still try to find another new thing to get out and try before it's to late. The sooner we let go of the bad part, the faster we're on to another idea... and honeslty, the less bad press this game will get.

Or they could just be saying "tough, that's the game we want to make." Which won't go over well either.

I'm sure RG wants to see the game through to the end. Is anyone debating that? We all want to see his game come out. We all want to see him and the team succeed. The question is what game will come out the other side? Your point falls under the umbrella of rebuttal #2. Trust the team, they know more than us...

Do they? I'm sorry I don't take that as a given. Many of the rest of us have quite the chunk of knowledge about this stuff in our skill set. It's why they've been so willing to open up and work with us on this stuff.

And as if to prove how wrong you are, you say this:

With the exception of my dining room, that statement is simply untrue. I can't take you seriously any more if you're going to spread such lies.

 

I'm not disagreeing with you that there appears to be problems, and randomness is the biggest part.

I'm just saying you are misusing the phrase "I know it's broken" when you really should be saying "I assume it's broken."

You are also not quite understanding what else I wrote.

When I say "see this through" mean see it through to Alpha. I don't think they are going to budge, regardless of how you or I think they are incorrect, until they (meaning RG) have a chance to show it to us in a playable form. That's not saying they know best. That's me deciding to save my energy until I have something to complain about based on actual experience with the system. [/quote]

In this case, yes, they know more than us. They know exactly how it is coded and how it feels when you play it. Does that mean they know what's good for us? No. Does that mean the system is a good one? No. Think on a strictly logical level. They know more about it because they have an implementation in front of them. We don't, so while we can talk about it probablly works, we don't have each and every variable. Like my example above, if you didn't understand it, that last .057% of unknown can actually be very important.

Orange is quite possibly the worst color ever. I love brown. I love yellow. But I do everything I can to make sure that orange is banished from my house.

Spoiler

 

Oh, I know we're getting it in Alpha. We're going to see this show up there. What I'm hoping is that secretly someone somewhere in the back is going "Holy sh.... this isn't going to work. I'm going to start plan B now, so that we don't have to settle for status quo." And then we can get on to that quickly after this blows up on the launch pad.

Still wrong. Halloween in general, pumpkins specifically, Fires, tigers, cheetoes, recees wrappers, and fall leaves. Orange is the color of awesome.

 

Yea, they already have the time blocked out in the schedule, so someone (Starr probably) said there is a good chance they will have to revamp combat. I agree, I hope someone is sketching out a 'more traditional yet still innovative' idea.

I like pumpkins and tigers and fires and recees and such. (Cheetahs are more yellow, right?) I must conceede, there are three pumpkins in the house. My main focus is to keep clothing and regular house decoration as orange-free as possible. It's my job to counter all the orange Giants crap here in the Bay Area with green and gold Athletics gear.

 

Perfect answer

 

They have time blocked out to walk it back to standard. I'm not sure they have time blocked out for Plan B.

The problem is they can't say if they do, because it looks like they don't support the system, and that would doom it to failure. Right now there's still a chance (a smmmaaalllll chance) that I'm wrong, and if they commit, they can make this work. It's to late to back away from that jump, they've already left the ground.

@Praefectus - Thanks.

 

For all those saying Trust RG he knows what hes doing, sure he made U7, SI and U4. However he ALSO made U8 and U9, he can make mistakes just like anyone else can and this is one. Doesn't matter if its his baby, I have had really stupid ideas that I LOVED but my other half could see were just dumb from the start.

 

I'm not saying RG can't make mistakes, but a fair share of blame for U8 and U9 should go to EA.

 

I thought pagan was awesome! Even tho it coulda been awesomer

 

Blind faith will only get you so far. But that's not what they're asking of us, otherwise they would not have forums for us to give feedback. If you choose to stay silent, you're not making the most of their offer to engage with them.

Having said that, go into it with a healthy dose of skepticism and offer ways that it can work via constructive criticism and feedback. Turning your back completely without giving it a chance is also opposite of what they're asking of us. I've offered my tweaks on how this could work. But we are making A LOT of assumptions about how this will work with only 10% of the info. They've only given us an outline and purposely not answered specific questions or provided details yet until they've hashed it out some more. I'm hoping we can dig more into the details prior to Alpha.

I believe they will have a Plan B, C, D, E...and whatnot before ditching this completely and going back to a more traditional system. We have over a year to go, and I think we should be ready to participate and playtest it and patch it and tweak it and playtest it 10x over to see if this will work. I expect that them going back to a traditional system is going to be a last resort. They didn't have a knee jerk reaction and drop this based on forum feedback. What makes you think they'll drop it so easily once we start playtesting it? Screaming that the sky is falling on day 1 is going to happen I'm sure but won't be very constructive. They'll want to look for the true constructive feedback outside of that noise. Submit your bugs, your tweaks, etc. and be prepared to playtest it repeatedly.

I'm excited and can't wait! Until then, let the hopefully constructive discussions continue!

 

My responses in Red. I can honestly tell you I'm not trying to be a troll. When Starr Long said game designing is like making sausage he was Fing right!

I wouldn't be concerned if the system wasn't completely random. If it could at least learn your style and have probabilities of what skills you would want to play at a certain time it would be reasonable. Random is just not good. Also using it for spell casting makes me sick to my stomach.

I really don't want the developers, and the rest of the community to hate me, but I have to be honest or my feedback wouldn't be true to my heart. I've been very critical of a few things lately and I hate to do so. I feel like an outsider, but I feel strongly about what I've said and I'm hoping the best.

I hope these issues are fixable or that they have a really good backup plan if they don't. Purely Random = bad game design.