Early Public Access Schedule: Release 7 and Q3 Update

You still haven't answered the question. Pretend for two seconds that PvP was enabled on R6 right this second. What precisely would you test for balance? What would the benefit be?

Why you can you not answer these questions if you're adamant that PvP has to be added immediately?

 

Wow. I suddenly suspect you don't know PvP or balance at all. Chess is a game of mirrored abilities and pieces. That is boring and makes for really poor PvP. Are you suggesting that SotA PvP should operate like chess simply because you perceive chess to be complex and yet balanced?

 

Lots of things.

But I'll name one very important thing....If dueling was in right now, I'd be able to test if dueling worked with all the other elements of the game. Dueling being the foundation for all PVP, this has to work before anything can be added to it. Not the balance of combat but the functionality of dueling.

It's just like anything else in the game. But since PVP is a core element of the game...it has to be in the game now so we can build on it. Jumping is not a core element yet it's in the game now and we're testing all kinds of things with it.

 

No, I'm not listening to you because I see no value in testing a system before pre-requisite systems are in place to a sufficient level of planned functionality to support said testing in any meaningful manner.

 

Chess is the most balanced game I can think of. It's also a very good game. A challenging game.

Ya know what's not balanced? Traditional MMO PVP. Do you know why? Because it's usually built with a poor foundation that wasn't designed for PVP and then developers go "well it would be really cool to have this thing in combat" and they put it in. Then it gets "tested" and proven to be completely unbalanced, and they say "well you know what would be really cool to balance that out?" this other thing. And the cycle continues...

SOTA couldn't go wrong modelling its combat and pvp after Chess...that game has been popular and successful for hundreds of years. What's the alternative? Shadowbane 2?

 

You're entitled to be wrong as much as you like.

 

You keep saying we need to test balance. And balance is no where in your answer. Now you're back-tracking and despite all previous posts insisting the reason we need PvP in now (before combat) was that if we didn't, it wouldn't be balanced. Now you're saying we don't need to test for balance.

Worse yet, now you're saying the purpose of a test would be merely to make sure the placeholder you put in works. That is a pointless test because you'd be ripping out the placeholder to put in real systems later, rendering all past testing utterly worthless.

So this crusade you're adamant about is that we should waste developer time and cause further delays to put in placeholder systems merely to test that a placeholder works as a placeholder because you're upset at other delays?

Chess is a terrible metaphor. That's like saying Tetris is a great game, so SotA needs to be like Tetris.

Chess is a system where two sides have exactly the same pieces and rules. There is zero need to balance a system that is identical.

SotA cannot be compared to chess because your character will not be identical to mine. We don't have identical abilities (pieces).

 

As are you.

 

enderandrew, I'm confident that the developers will see my point even if perhaps they don't agree with it.

I want to be wrong. I want to be proven wrong as opposed to having a bad game. But I'm also confident that if nothing changes and the devs continue with this mentality they will only prove me right and years from now as we're complaining about the inherent lack of balance in the game, the devs will remember this exchange and say "yeah, he was right, and someone should've listened to him." But that will be of no comfort to me.

Let me be perfectly clear, I'm in no way saying PVP needs to be rushed into the game just for the sake of having PVP. I'm saying that you can't have good PVP if you throw it into the game as an afterthought - which is exactly what's going on now.

The end.

 

The developers are professional software developers (as am I). They won't see the merit in putting in needless placeholder systems that provide no benefit and delay real systems to assuage fears. They will design the best system they are capable of and trust in their ability to design that system.

You're worried that SotA will play like WoW and other games, despite designs already being laid out publicly proving that is not the direction of the game. Your fears don't seem to be founded on logic.

I'm not saying I know for a fact that SotA will have great combat and PvP. That is hard to say until combat is really fully implemented. The placeholders we do have are pretty meaningless. I don't want more. I want real implementations, and that means waiting.

 

*ahem*

Perhaps you guys could consider stopping the poking at each other in this thread and go and do so in one dedicated to the PvP discussion instead (I'm sure someone could start yet another), rather than the pages of back-and-forth here that's going nowhere?

Or at least agree to disagree, and wait to see if you get some more detailed info on PvP once E3 and all the associated stuff is over and the team can breathe again? Arguing about whether PvP should or should not be introduced sooner than currently planned seems pointless until the devs give a bit more detail about their reasoning and what they are currently working on with regard to combat of all kinds. It may not be as bad as some of you think, but there's no way to know until they tell us more.

 

Baron Drocis Fondorlatos. Jumping, yes every easy to implement. Likely not much more difficult than implementing dueling pvp or non-consensual pvp. Jumping is needed early in design because it completely changes how you have to build the world. PVP doesn't depend much on world building - however, fun areas for pvp are necessary. I think we've already seen a lot of areas in the game that would be great for setting up ambitions or attacking someone from a difficult to reach place. I think they are considering PVP with every area they make and every skill they create. I think some of them are particularly well geared towards pvp. So I believe they are designing and planning systems around pvp.

If they implement pvp now with a dueling system do you think those ambition areas would be fun? Someone might think, what's the point, I knew we were going to fight, we agreed to a duel so I saw him there before. But obviously these areas aren't designed for dueling. But long term we can see they are considering those things.

They are clearly building a game system with pvp in mind from the start. Just because it isn't implemented doesn't mean it's an afterthought. Features added on the end of development doesn't mean they were the least important. Indeed, I'm sure many times the last features are the things that give it the finishing touch that makes everything they built up to that finally work well together.


I understand what you are saying, you build a game to be played one way, then when you try to make it so it is played a different way it simply doesn't work. Like if Thunderstone(card game) was suddenly turned PVP, instead of fighting the dungeon we fight the other players. It wouldn't be balanced and really wouldn't work as none of the systems were designed to function like that.. yeah you can probably change a few rules and make it work but it's not nearly as much fun as Magic: The Gathering which is centered on player vs player and the game was designed from the start for it.

That isn't what we are doing here. This is like if magic: the gathering didn't have instants yet, so you could only play cards on your own turn. And people were saying this game isn't designed with the intention of letting players play cards outside of their turn and it's just turn based. Well luckily all along they had been planning on it, they just needed the mechanics of how those resolve(last in-first out on the stack didn't make much sense to me till much later with new cards that actually had interesting triggers if those things happened in reverse order) and to create the cards. Now they are in and you can play an entire game outside of your turn (except for your first land), and it works well.

I think many of the pvp specific zones can't be created till we get pvp in and we see things such as distances , line of sight, and things like that matter. But again, we can't do that till we have combat skills in so we can see how well they work in those circumstances (or make sure they don't work without line of sight type thing) What if we decide later on to create a falling boulder earth spell, the higher you are physically than your opponent, the more damage it deals. Very interesting high difference's like Chris' crater scene would be awesome for that. But right now it's not in the game, and balancing that spell with the area simply means making sure the height and damage bonuses aren't too extreme. Just because that spell isn't part of the original design makes it unblanced and never will be balanced. It just means that individual spell either needs balancing or removed.

 

Well, I totally missed that one. I was thinking there was some concern that PvP was somehow getting left out of the game, which it's not. I'm sure there's some math involved with future additions of hits and spells becoming all equaled out, but we have to invent them "all" and their playing field in order to do that (read all other smarter posts above for much more coherent thoughts than mine )...
"It's still much too early for a great many things"<---<<< that fact needs to become commonly well known by a great many people...
But even I get a little antsy about it
~TL~

 

Well, I have to disagree. I think that jumping is a core element of the game, it is hard (if not impossible) to get to some places withou jumping. It is possible, yet difficult to get through Riya's maze without jumping. It is almost impossible to take some stairs (in the upward direction) without jumping. And in some of the sewer levels you have to jump if you do not want to be hurt by that poisonous water. Also if you want to get on the top of almost every rock you have to jump. It is important to balance height of obstacles around the ability to jump. Distance between platforms have to be determined based on the lenfth of the jumps. So I think that jumping should be considered as a core element of the game.

The game might be built with accessibility in mind, though I doubt it, so jumping is really important element. If nothing else it will help you to find shortcuts through housing lots

I am glad that jumping was implemented early. There should be falling damage though and I hope there will be some landing spell otherwise getting down from the Tesla tower will be quite painful.

 

I love you dude but this is where your argument falls apart.
Chess is the best, most balanced one-on-one "duel game" in existence. Yes, one reason is because the pieces are identical. Don't think of this, in the Shroud metaphor, as everyone playing the same character, but rather that our decks and equipment layouts are, in basic theory, identical in technique and power. This follows along with the more horizontal leveling model we've been promised. This doesn't mean "I have a long sword +1 and so must you to be balanced", this means that our respective weapons, armors, and skills are balanced *with each other* to such a tight level that as long as we don't have a bunch of unspent skill points, for instance, our characters, same level etc, once fully rested, SHOULD BE ON A 100% LEVEL PLAYING FIELD.

EVERYTHING else comes from player skill. A layout should simply be your selection of chess pieces, how you use them is what makes PvP interesting. This is why balance in RPGs are so important. It's impossible to balance people across a level gap, but it's NECESSARY to balance them within the same power zone. And to an extremely tight level, at that. So much so that yes, a pvp battle should feel like a chess match. Not prodding a corpse with a blade until he bursts and gold flies out.

Saying that chess is a terrible metaphor is not a good idea. Every game creator should aspire to recreate the thoughtful possibilities of a chess duel.

Saying SotA should be like Tetris is "irreverent lol" but totally missing the point. Unless you're talking about inventory management.

 

There is no special balance magic with chess. Any game where the two sides have identical abilities is balanced inherently because the sides are perfect mirrors of each other.

A character in SotA in heavy armor with little magic wielding a polearm is not identical to someone in light armor with daggers who is a magic user. They are not remotely identical.

So a chess metaphor falls completely flat.

 

But you're not looking at it far enough back as a metaphor then.

The core idea is that everyone starts on a level playing field. Everyone SHOULD have an equal chance, given their "stuff" (equipment/skill layout), of beating the other player in a one-on-one duel. We're talking about having a simplistic but dynamic combat system that allows two people to have a battle of wits (and obviously a battle of dexterity at some level). If you've played high-level fighting games at a tournament level you know what this is like (see Tougeki videos for good examples)

On the second level, we CAN say chess needs balance: the pieces themselves. While some pieces are UNDOUBTEDLY more valuable than others, the other pieces are created with the rules for the other pieces in mind. Bishops go diagonal and rooks go lateral. Pawns are slow but can upgrade and they're cheap. Knights are weird. It's easy to add one or two rules to chess and break it - what if everyone started with two queens? Or four? That's the kind of balance you don't care about in single player but is blatantly obvious in player duels.

Obviously there are many factors involved: Are all skill points allocated? Is the player properly equipped for his level?
To illustrate my point with numbers, lets imagine cards as chess pieces, the way Shroud probably will once it's all set up. Lightly armored magic user with daggers might have 2 blade, 2 light armor, 6 magic. A heavy armor polearmed guy with light magic might be 4 polearm, 4 heavy armor, 2 magic.
As long as those cards are balanced with each other, and no one item they have does massively more damage, and they're fully rested, they're kind of equal, right? They each have ten pieces and if the game is done right, the duel that ensues should be a quick and exciting display of knowledge of the game crossed with wise on-the-fly decisions.

Everyone's saying the same thing, just in a different way. Numbers shouldn't matter on the surface, RNG shouldn't win duels, duels should involve tactical choice and not number mashing, needs to be tightly balanced.

 

tekkamansoul Said;

Not prodding a corpse with a blade until he bursts and gold flies out.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hey, that's not a bad idea! "The new Piñata Attack card" I like it
We also must remember that our cards will add something of a chance element aye?
~Time Lord~

 

Actually there are many variations of chess with rules changes and they remain balanced because the two sides still have the same pieces and same rules. One of my favorites is reverse chess, where the pieces all move the same but the goal is to lose your pieces. And if you have the opportunity to take a piece, you're required to do so.

http://www.chessvariants.org/

A rook isn't magically balanced against a bishop, which is why there are scoring systems that give different points for each. The only balance is that both sides get the same pieces.


SotA should be well balanced if designed well, but balance is not a given or inherent when players have different gear, skills, etc.

 

I'm with enderandrew on the chess topic. It would be like if Black's pieces moved differently from white's pieces and so you would learn the strengths/weaknesses of each side and try to exploit that, then also try to balance it because the black king can now move 3 spaces forward/backward, 2 on diagnols, and 1 left or right, and the white king can move 2 spaces in any direction along with changes to all the other pieces and now you are trying to balance out the moves on each side and someone is going to figure out that the best side is white and using a certain strategy is nearly impossible to beat.

If everything is exactly the same then it is like chess. Your skills are all the same across all skill trees but has a different color (fire=red, water=blue, etc). that would be like chess.