Constructive Criticism of 6 month demo Combat Card System

Randomly clicking skills is about as much fun as russian roulette

 

If you are randomly clicking skills you aren't playing properly in this game or any other game. You should decide which skills you use as they come up and which you wont, based on your remaining focus and your target and what your next skills might be (saving for combos). and how much longer you'll have that ability available. (don't want to save too long for a combo or it'll drop)

 

I like this thread about being "Constructive". It's been a little negative lately and I'm also responsible.

Honestly I've probably posted 50 to 100 messages about the combat system... I don't know about you guys, but my talking about it doesnt' make me feel better. Also I think the dev team has heard us since we argue the same things again and again.

My hope now is honestly to see the community come to terms with it for the time being, and focus on encouraging the development team a bit. We've argued so much I can only imagine that if they keep reading this stuff they are exhausted right now. I'm sure they are busy working on the alpha build, but probably feeling a little discouraged.

Not to kill people's freedom of speech, but the time is probably good to remember what is good about this game and why we pledged. Let's take some time to also create some threads that reinforce what we DO like about the game so far, which is also feedback they need to hear. Also they deserve the encouragement.

 

@Bubonic, have you had time (what with the scene jam this weekend) to further develop your idea?

 

My suggestions for enhancing the card system: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/magic-in-sota.3078/page-7#post-68056

Got squished into the magic thread but, could be used for non-magic.

 

no i haven't... chris mentioned last week he was preparing a large response to the combat subject, so i was waiting for that

 

Thing is, what they put in the demo is what they currently HAVE, and that comes from the direction they are GOING in. If I hire a guy to build me a house, and three months in I notice that the structure is five stories tall and there is a sign that says "apartments coming soon", I think I have a right to be suspicious. It suggests a direction that I dislike.
What they could have done instead, if the card system wasn't up to presentation, was to FAKE what LB wanted to show. I mean, it's not like we were measuring their awesomeness by what their character accomplished, or thinking "I could totally have one shotted that wolf with MY fireball". If LB had said, "Here is my avatar holding a picture of his mother. It's a unique custom item, you cannot have one. At least not one that summons lightning, now I will blow up those twenty cows with the picture of my character's mother. You will never get this." and then moved on, I think that might have been the most popular part of the vid! We wouldn't have minded.

They could have instead just faked the combat, and then edited what they wanted going on over the top afterwards, and instead of saying "This isn't ready yet." LB could have said "This is totally fake, but it's how I envision it working." and that at least would have let us know where we were going, but what they chose to show us is what we didn't like. As a result of that, we are complaining that we don't like what we are seeing. The progress note supports our distrust.

Just thought I'd toss this at you, Venger, and see if it made any difference in your thinking there:

I like where you are aiming at, Mishri, but please consider how much TIME it takes to do all those things. This isn't gonna be a turn based strategy game. If we are in PvP, and I see you first, you aren't going to have time to think about what's happening. I don't WANT to give you time for your UI to populate, I want to jump you, possibly with friends backing me up, and stay behind you, off your screen, and use disables and slows and impairs, and make it hard for you to fight back, because I'm TRYING TO MURDER YOU. The current UI will leave you helpless against that, and if you were going to carefully plan your opening, I've got bad news for you. This point is intended to address PvP issues in general, I actually have no desire to ambush gank Mishri, assuming he actually PvPs at any point.

If the PvE combat doesn't let me do this, I will be really sad. If it doesn't MAKE me do this, I will be really sad. When, as a WoW player, I reached the then pinnacle of raid tanking, and was holding Arthas without difficulty, I changed how I ran other challenges. I would charge into a heroic ON MY MOUNT with a pug group behind me and my buddy healing and face pull every mob leading up to the boss, then turn and fight the lot of them. I didn't do this JUST to show off, I did it to make things more interesting for me, because WoW had long since started it's cataclysmic de-evolution into "stand face to face with the mob till it dies". I want to dance. I want to innovate. I want to use terrain, and unusual consumables. I want to tag a mob that I can EASILY solo, and pull it into a PvP encounter with me, so that I can try to sick it on my opponent, which will necessitate my not building any more threat on it.

If I'm busy waiting for the right cards to come up, and then trying to use them before their timers expire, that will really impair my ability to do anything other than stand face to face with the mob till I get the right random skill, and then the mob will die.


NOW for those people who are looking for POSITIVE input to this thread. I refer you to the section of me quoting myself (don't worry, I used lube, and washed my hands), where I pointed out that a good macro system could give us SOME ability to control the UI randomness without removing it from the game entire, and then there is PrimeRib's point about having there be "target locations", where a given type of card will always spawn for a certain keybind, and then there is this, which I have also seen some versions of:

What IF, instead of the cards being the base abilities and actions, they represented a secondary, but very influential series of buffs and debuffs FOR those abilities. What if FIREBALL wasn't really a spell. There is no area nuke ready to go in the game. But there IS a fire spell, where you throw fire. Alone, it's a tag, a pull, a ranged placeholder while you find something EFFECTIVE to do with your MP. But the random cards, they have spell mods that let you turn that fire spell AOE, let you give it ignite and burn for DOT, invert heat to cold for a SNARE... then using the random cards wisely and with some foresight is still important, but technically, your sword is on 1, your fire spell is on 2, your heal spell is on 3, your protection spell is on 4, etc, and you put them there, and you can move them around as you wish, and they will always be rooted THERE.

Or, as I posted in another thread:
What if the cards themselves WERE resources of a sort. You may have your setup on your hotbar and keybinds and macros as you like, but each skill will consume one or more cards. You cannot use the skill unless it's cost is displayed on the cards currently dealt. If you use a BIG ability, and it consumes 8 cards, then you are gonna be SOL for a while as your cards re-deal themselves. If you build your deck real careful like, you can virtually guarantee that one or two powers will be up all the time and spammable, but not the really amazing effects, and not MORE than one or two. At which point it becomes a tradeoff consideration, "I could cast my blinding poison cloud, but the same cards would let me whirlwind with my greatsword twice, which is enough time for more cards to come up..."

And if those fail, there are always Gerbils.

TL;DR Gerbils. It's all about the Gerbils.

 

We must be talking about different combat systems. IN SOTA as it is now it's random, that leaves no planning, just guessing. Can I get the second ability that triggers my special in time? Only rolling the dice will tell. You don't know what your next skill will be and if you get the second skill you need to trigger the special you have no idea where it will appear on your toolbar!

 

Ofcourse there is planning, it isn't purely random, you know what you have in your list or deck or bag whatever they call it. You know what's come up so you know what's left and so you can calculate on the fly the odds that your next ability will be what you need for a combo, gone through 20 of my 40, i hvae 4 fireballs left, so 1 in 5.. odds are that ability I just drew I will be able to combo with my fireball. Unless they go with the option of putting abilities back in which I'd be against because then it would be this random unpredictible thing you are claiming. You do know where it will populate, it's in sequence. 1234567890. So if your combo ability came up at 3 odds are before it comes back to 3 to flip to a new ability/skill it will be there. The runes look different enough you'll notice it coming up without focusing all of your attention on the bar. (they could always give us the option of arranging it however we want or making it appear around the enemy if we want, if you don't like the location. They could even make them somewhat transparent)

 

It doesn't matter "what you have left". It's not random and discards what's been done, if you're a fighter you can have multiple attacks and randomly you can get the same attack a few times in a row. My main attack maybe on cooldown and a secondary attack be ready but instead you get parry. No way to plan around that.
Mages, first question would be. If I have spells that I don't carry components for will they cycle through my toolbar? If I equip only spells I have components for what happens when the regents run out? Will it still cycle through and be useless?
And no, it doesn't matter if things pop up in order from 1 to 10. Because you have no idea what's going to pop in 1 through 10 and the periodicty of each one. To start it might go 1 through 10 but what happens if you use 5, will it remain there grayed out or will it be replaced by another ability. Random means different things will appear at different times and places. If all your abilities are set 1 through 10 and always come back to the same toolbar key that isn't random.

 

I'm sorry, but do you work for JPL or something? Most of us cannot calculate odds like that IN OUR HEADS, "on the fly". We also have no idea if the entire deck plays itself out, or if it's actually just an algorhythm that presents cards based on total odds of one showing up, with no memory of what's come so far.

Even when playing MTG, during a long game in which I wanted to figure out what my odds were of top-decking the card I wanted, I'd have to check my graveyard to be sure of what I had left. In a real time fight, where there IS no graveyard, I do NOT have time to go calculating odds. My strategies will be based on my remaining resources, what buttons are available to me RIGHT NOW, and the rest is spent paying attention to my opponent and the surroundings.

 

Right. I think that's the issue with this system. I know people hate randomness, but it's misplaced. Randomness is fine when both players can proprely take it into account.

In a real-time combat system, you don't have time to think, so you don't have time to process what's going on. Thus, randomness takes what little control people have away from them.

The combat system needs to be much much slower than what was shown, or it has to remove the randomness, or introduce another mechanic that balances all this...

 

That is not true. In preparing for combat you drill and drill and drill, you do that so as your actions/reactions are instinctual. When someone yells "grenade" you don't sit there and consider your next move you do as trained and get done. Those that failed at training die.
When your gun jams you take cover and attempt to clear it. All these things you're trained to do so when you get into combat you move on instinct because in the heat of battle thinking can get you killed.
That being said, looking at my toolbar trying to figure out what is where and if it's available will get you killed. Because I guarantee the computer program you're going against isn't having the same problem.

 

I just want to cast what I want and when I want to given the constraints of mana and cooldowns.

What I don't want is a random number generator creating 10 random options for me, that creates very slow and clunky pvp sessions.

On top of all that, not even knowing what key you need to hit is just crazy.

 

The really scary part is that I have been following the combat system for a while and not a single pro-card person had been able to come up with a decent valid reason why it's better that giving the player complete control.

 

I've given several very good reasons. It's more fun when you don't know for certain what you will do next. Just like in any game involving chance. There is a reason people enjoy dice games and card games. if you dont like dice games or card games you might not like a system where you can't predict exactly what you will be able to do next. I think one of my better examples would be Warhammer 40k, you plan your army but you don't know what your enemy will bring so you bring what you think would be best, you then have to tactically place your armor and then execute your plan and dice rolls can make or break the game, but usually your superior tactics win out. It wouldn't be as much fun if there wasn't that dice roll in there. There are games like that out there, where everything is set and measured so it's pure strategy/tactics, but I don't like it as much.

For the demo my guess is that combat was over much faster than your average equal level fight. average fights in MMos are what? like 30-40 seconds? if your maximum deck size is 30-40 that means you will see every ability at the current rate by the end of an average fight.

As far as ability to calculate odds on the fly, I guess I might be not the norm scored quite high on the ACT (31 on math in 1998, 29 composite) I do most things much faster than most people can... I work as a Network Engineer and I frequently get that response, Wow, that was fast.

 

WH40K, MTG, etc. are TURN BASED. Not real-time.

 

While I respect your opinion that you feel that is more fun, I don't feel it's fun, nor has anyone I've explained the system to. Every person I've explained it to has said something very rude that I'm not going to repeat here, because it would break the forum rules.

Not for EQ2, WoW, Rift, GW2 or similar persistent multiplayer online games.
4-8 casts is typical, 12-15 seconds for a same-level single-NPC solo fight. Easy enough to test, pretty much all of them have free trials. I'm being generous though, in some games today, solo fights are much, MUCH faster.

Spoiler: details

And yes, fights in SotA, if they're ever longer than that, will be seen as "too slow" by everyone who's played those games. It's an uphill battle against a very strongly entrenched opinion base. Also, they're not wrong, depending on other mechanics. If you need 5000 leather for a goal of some kind in the game, and it takes 30 seconds per fight, and another 30 seconds for Gathering via Field Dressing, guess what? You need to spend 5000 minutes per leather, if you're trying to reach that goal, alone. And that of course does not address travel time to the next target, resupply, etc. Conservatively, it would likely take 160 hours to gather those 5000 leathers.
And then there's lumber, ore, metal, bone, horn, scales, etc. Combat time is a big deal.

 

Yeah, I don't really agree with that either. Perhaps a better rephrasing would be that its more fun for YOU when you don't know for certain what you will do next.

Personally, I prefer planning and strategy.

 

This is a game, not a simulator of real life combat. Even if we're trying to create 'realistic' elements for a game, we cannot expect players to employ in-battle strategy if they are not given time to think. What you're describing is good for a 'twitch' game like Call of Duty or Counter Strike, which are realistic military shooters that have very little grand or short-term strategy. For a game to have fun, enduring combat though... that's strategic... well, strategy requires thought. And thought requires time.

Any time you're solely justifying features because they emulate real life in some capacity, there's a problem, because we aren't buliding a simulator here. There's a reason our characters don't have to piss and ****, a reason why their skills don't actually wane with age, et cetera