Constructive Criticism of 6 month demo Combat Card System

Chess is just a LITTLE bit simpler than single combat between two people of disparate skills, using a variety of weapons, up to and including magick. In real time. Utilizing varied terrain.

 

I would disagree entirely with that idea, that innovation is great if it solves a problem. Innovation is great in coming up with new ways of doing things that haven't been tried before. Going through with it even if it's not as good as what we had before is where the problem lies. If your controls suck and you can't fix them then yes, that is not a good innovation, revert, revert, revert. The same is true with this combat system, you can't shoot down an idea on the launching pad without trying it out first. How many times have people said, "that'll never work" and then they prove everyone wrong by succeeding? Quite a bit, and those success usually turn into huge break throughs. To try to kill off this idea before it can even be attempted is insanity. We can try it, we can decide if it actually works or not. They will go with a different system if this doesn't work. I see no reason why a system like this can't work in real time just because you haven't seen it. Are you worried you are too slow to react and think? Are you worried you wont be good enough? Because there will certainly be plenty of strategy in deciding what to use and when to use it. You can claim burning someone down will be the best way to win in pvp but you could be surprised how well a defensive deck holds up, or one with the right number/type of heals/defense does. It all takes balance. Obviously going all burn wont work if the heals give you full restores. and you are sitting there with no heals. (and that wouldn't work, heals can't be that powerful... obviously...)

I am a PVPer, but not a "hardcore" pvper, as in, don't spend the majority of my ingame time doing pvp, but I tend to be good at it and do it daily in games that I play, and I always choose open world pvp if given the option. I did quite well in LoL.. and that is only pvp, basically arena style.

 

I think this is why I fight against having to spell stuff in conversations and all the weird key hunting stuff in combat. It's dragging me into very left brain activites, when I really want to approach something with intuition and creativity. It's just annoying enough to take me out of the flow state I want to be in. I don't see hitting a small number of keys in combat as boring, because the last thing I'm thinking about is the sequence of keys, my mind is trying to be open enough to react and consider possibilites multiple moves deep.

 

Chess is an initial input with a finite set of possible transitions and states. Nothing in computers is infinite. So, while games might have more moving parts, there is still a finite set of inputs and transitions and states.

 

We totally can. That's why thought experiments exist. To find problems and assess whether or not a plan is worth continuing down before you get too many resources invested in the system.


Because more often than not, the people who are saying "Um... Are you sure you want to do that?" are asking because they've thought the scenerio through and have found problems with the execution of the idea. It's OK to continue if you have reasons those issues are not valid in this case, or if you've built work arrounds for them. While we may be on the verge of a "Eureka" it feels far more like Edison's: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

But it's folly to wave your hand and dismiss everyone who hasn't tried it yet as "well, you just can't know". We can know. The same way we know you can't drive a car across a lake. We don't need to do it first to know this. There are fundimental flaws with the concept that make it a bad fit for that type of situation. And we've pointed them out. In multiple places, with multiple reasons, for multiple scenerios. Why it's bad for PvP, why it's bad for player agency, why it's bad for simply Role-Play, why it's bad for immersion, why it's bad from a game-play stand point.

Over, and over, and over again.

When we finally saw it, and it was exactly what we'd been saying it was, the only Dev comment in response has been, well, we wanted a better UI for it. Here's the thing... it's not about how it looks, it's about how it works. If they had come back and said that we were wrong about how the mechanic worked, or how much control we'd have, that would be one thing. Instead we get "Yeah, we know that's an issue, and we're trying to figure out how to make it work."

What concerns us, is that they're going to get so hung up on making it work, they're going to do 1/2 of what they could have done with combat if they had just let go early and gotten a better idea. The old saying "when you're up to your ass in alligators, it's easy to forget that the initial objective was to drain the swamp" really applies here. At a certain point, they need to stop fighting the aligators, and just make a fun combat system.

But the real nail in the coffin for this, and why I'm pounding on this so hard is the question: What's the harm in just seeing it out?

Because Alpha is not tomorrow. Because waiting until they're too far committed is a recipie for rolling back to the status quo at best and not for something unique. Or worse, riding out a bad idea because there isn't time to undo it. This isn't an experiment of gaming that can succeed or fail, and we'll be happy with the results either way. Old school gaming in the general, and Lord British's reputation in the specific are on the line here. His last two flops are blamable on the publishers. This one isn't. It's one thing to roll the dice on reverting things like conversation to an old school system because many of his backers bought into this for the reason of "we liked it better before".

But going down a road with such strong opposition of people not just scared about somethign new, but with legitimate complaints about how this will negatively affect their enjoyment, doesn't seem worth the risk. I bought in at Kickstarter becasue I support the team and believe in them and that they'll do the right thing, but in this particular case, that means standing up to them and saying "You're wrong here. Take a different path."

 

There are plenty of things that are infinite in a computer - a loop can run for eternity. Yes, yes, comptuers compute finite numbers- and the world we live in is certainly not discrete, but there are ways of achieving 'infinite' processes with recursion n' stuff.

Aren't there states in chess where both players cannot make a move? In essence, they're trapped in a loop too, or maybe you'd just consider it a tie...

If we're talking about complexity, Chess has 10^80~ board-states. If Chess is simpler than real time medieval RPG gameplay, then our game must offer a comparable number of states.

For comparison, in Pokemon, you've got 4 moves to a pokemon, plus you can switch to 1 of 5 pokemon in your team. This produces 9 potential moves at a given turn, so if an average game of pokemon has 10 turns, there are many possible unique states... each move increasing the number of unique states by a factor of 9... that's certainly bigger than a game like Tic Tac Toe, which only has <750 states. This is even if we don't consider an opponent's moves. Yeah, I've not done the actual math behind the complexity, but even if 1 pokemon faints every 6-8 moves on average, it's a pretty complex game (also take into consideration there are 700+ pokemon to wield in battle, at least half of them potentially viable, with at least 10 or more moves on avg to a potential move pool) -- it's pretty easy to approach Chess in terms of complexity. Checkers is 10^40 boards, for ****'s sake. Checkers. A child's version of chess.

It's harder to more cleanly define a 'state' in a real time game though. But, for instance, you can argue an RPG is more complex if you talk about the number of strategies available. Look at Path of Exile's skill tree, for example, you've got 100 nodes for your build out of 1300, so 1300 choose 100, which produces a number that's 10^151, or many orders higher complex than Chess... of course, this is fuzzy math, since I've not tried to calculate unique builds for that game, which would... well... be almost utterly impossible I think. As it is, we've not mapped out Chess yet, it's too big of a set.

tl;dr? Don't bring complexity into this ****, it's a pointless argument with a lot of work to make your claim valid.

 

We need moar Pokémath

 

I have to respectfully disagree with your stance.

Combat is still at its earliest stages, and only Chris and Starr have probably conceptualized what 'ideal late game' looks like using the current system and in what ways the system can evolve.
I don't think anyone on the team could possibly be fully confident about how the system might work out in PvP, but I see enough potential there get a decent prototype ready for the alpha.
I would assume feedback - along with testing, is much more valuable than speculative feedback based on 15 seconds of footage.
"Game making is like making sausage" and all that, sometimes you just gotta try something out and see how the whole package comes together.

 

I should probably post something somewhere, I've never seen anyone analyze the game.

 

The problem is the core concept is a bad one. It's just broken at step one. It's about taking control away from the player and turning it over to the game. It creates all the problem areas I've stated above, and have gone into detail many times.

The feedback from many of us is based on far more than 15 seconds of footage. The devs have spelled out the core mechanic. You earn skills, then select a subset of those to be 'available' (somtimes multiple times to affect the % chance of the next step) and mixed with the possibility of blank draws from armor and weapons, and then those are randomized and thrown at you randomly as the game dictates them as being 'ready'.

Long story short, friend dies and you know resurection? tough. you don't have it in the draw and you can't cast it. A bunch of low level enemies arround you and you know cleave? Tough. Not in your bag. You can switch to your back up bag.. .but that costs you focus and doesn't guarantee you'll get it anyway.

What this all comes down to is you can do everything right, build exactly the deck you should, and lose anyway. Expect frustration and swearing from the players when that happens.

It's interesting if it happens once, or in a game where the game resets immediately after a loss, and losing has no real lasting consiquences. It's ok to lose to luck when that happens. But in a game with a perpetual character, that's not a good idea. It will grow old quickly, and not be a good thing.

For example, if I said I was making sausage with tainted meat, do we really need to see how it comes out? Or can we just accept that piece makes the sausage inedible?

There's plenty of info out there given to us through hangouts and posts about what they want to do with this. It's a simple matter of asking yourself "how will that play when..." and running through the scenerios. At best, the things I see are a lateral move, but more often than not, they're not things I'd classify as fun.

 

Yeah, that in no way answers my point, or my response to your criticism, and seems to imply that I am comparing two games. I'm not. My original point was that REAL life was beyond the ability of any computer or program we can currently make to simulate, and with you bringing in chess, I pointed out that two people fighting in open terrain has more complexity than any chess program ever written. Saying that chess and video games are similar is a complete red herring.

 

I have doubts that the implimentation would really be like that in-game, that stuff just sounds like groundless speculation.
The kinda stuff I'd need to "see to believe".
I don't have Dev+ access so maybe you know some stuff I don't, but from what I've seen of the combat system so far its still too early to tell if the 'random' factor will really matter that much.

The thing about newer combat systems that interests me more than 'control' or 'strategy' are any new gameplay mechanics they intend to use.
Regardless of what it looks like right now, none of that will matter in-game if a huge factor in the combat system still hasn't been revealed or if it actually changes over the course of playing.

Considering we still don't have a lot of the finer technical details I can only assume its either not ready to talk about yet, or its something RG and the devs want to hold back on so they can fine tune everything before showing it off.

 

Yeah, I'm gonna get myself a LOT of flame for this one, but I think it's worth it. You know who would have REALLY loved it if we'd used this philosophy with him? Adolph Hitler. Yeah, I know, putting every Jew, Gypsy, Homosexual, and political dissident in an OVEN sounds awful, but you didn't give it a real CHANCE. Hell, for all I know, his ideas really would have worked, and the 5% of the Earth's population that he didn't butcher would have truly enjoyed the world he made, and repopulated Earth, and it would have been vastly better than modern day, we wouldn't have any more wars, we wouldn't be pumping out greenhouse gasses, we wouldn't have HIV or two hundred different types of cancer, and we would have achieved a worldwide morality of peace, love, and honor.

But if I were to be presented with the opportunity to go back and find out, I'd still ask my father's side of the family to flee Germany while the Fuhrer was still getting warmed up, my mother's side of the family to enlist and help fight him, and I'd support the world in general bombing him into goo. Because his ideas were bad. They were bad when he wrote Mein Kampf, they were bad when he rose to political power, they were bad when he sold the German people on them, they didn't ever stop being bad.

This randomizer thing is not nearly as bad as the Third Reich. It really is small potatoes, not even in a league with any act of human barbarism. The gangbanger who ambushed me and punched me in the face for his initiation probably did more to damage humanity than this UI concept ever will, and he said he was sorry after he punched me.

But all that doesn't make this a good idea. And it doesn't justify asking all the detracters to shut it. We see problems ahead. The very fact that we are posting rather than bailing means that we intend to try Alpha. I for one, however, would be much assured to see a post from someone in the dev team saying "Hey, we heard you, we are rethinking the random card UI, give us a few weeks and we'll present a totally different concept for how it can work, with less random and more control."

 

Believe it.

I do have Dev+ access, and have seen some things there, but I also don't say anything here I haven't seen them say in other places like the hangouts, or durring the kickstarter.

 

Thank you for explaining how complex Chess is. Computers do a great job playing at master level. They can fight PvP too, if someone bothered to program them to do so.

 

More complex, not impossible. You just break it down until you have managable pieces that are easier to solve.

 

I have faced some of the computers that were programmed for PvP, I've never seen one that

1) didn't get special stats or powers or custom movement rules to account for it's lack of ability.

2) beat me.

I'll say it again, there is no point in trying to program the game to simulate real combat, it's just too complex for a computer or program within our current capabilities to handle.

Did you even read my post before you started quoting me and arguing?

 

[rewind, play] More complex, not impossible.

 

Given the current state of computing and programming on Earth, at this time, in this dimension, completely impossible.

Maybe when I've got grandkids we'll see that kind of computing, but there isn't even anything on the horizon that could PRETEND to be able to run a full sim Earth and keep track of every little thing going on, or give a UI that allows the kind of freedom and choice we all enjoy in the real world.

So yeah, I don't mean it would be complex, I mean it's NOT POSSIBLE.

 

Again, I'm not saying you have to "solve" PvP. You just have to program the computer to look ahead so many 'turns' and learn from it's mistakes. Recognize based on patterns what the opponents most likely moves will be. As long as you keep feeding it players and don't reset it's memory, it will become a PvP master (in other words, a great AI geared for combat against a player). I'm sure you weren't PvP pro when you first started.