Guesswork - not fun

Maybe I'm too analytical, but I'm finding not KNOWING how my stats affect my character to be rather frustrating. I see a lot of posts on what DA, DR, DAvoid mean - but they are just educated guesses.

Likewise, not understanding if I should build +2 Int armor or +0.2 Magic Damage armor is silly - it takes way too much effort to craft a piece of armor to not understand the basics of what it will do. Using this example, presumably +2 Int will boost my Focus, Focus regen, and spell damage, but there is no current way to know by how much. e.g. If I'm trying to build a pure DPS mage, am I better off with +2 Int or +0.2 Magic Damage? I would HOPE the +0.2 MD would be the better choice... but there is no way of knowing.

Likewise, I'm currently fooling around with +DEX armor, rather hoping it will boost my Attack Skill. It appears too... +2 DEX boots boost my Attack by 2 point (per the char. stats screen). However a +2 DEX chest piece makes an 8 point difference?!?!? Wielding my Halberd actually drops my Attack Skill by 1 point?

The above is null and void if I just missed the post explaining these basics.

Is anyone else frustrated by this?

edit: Knowing "units" would be great too. Sometimes the numbers appear to be percentages ("Ruby Gem" - 10% additional fire damage... but it should up under R19 as a 0.1 stat bump). Using the above example, +0.2 Damage Avoid is only meaningful if you know the scale... For instance, I wouldn't waste time building (5) pieces of armor to get a total of +1 Damage Avoid if the scale was 1 to 100..., but on a 1 to 10 scale that is significant.

 

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...please-clarify-and-explain.35912/#post-425238

Agreed Information please

 

I think "not knowing" is holding back testing quite a bit.

I think all the math is overly complicated actually and is holding back testing and preventing balancing quite a bit.

How hard does this have to be really? Stick sword in player, does damage, the end. I'm not trying to be snarky here, I really believe it's that simple but we've over complicated it - needlessly.

One solution, imo, would be to either move away from the complicated math and 50k variables. Or give players access to how everything works. Because 3/4 of the time I couldn't tell you how it was supposed to work, or if the way it was currently working was part of the design or not.

For example, my dex is 29.3. Is that because I have Moon Worship and I'm in a basement? Or is that not even working right now? Is that because my DEX training is 33, or is that not working right now? Is that because I have an active spell that increases my dex, or is that not working right now? How much exactly are all these things supposed to increase my dex? WHO KNOWS?

It's really a lot of wasted time. It feels like we don't have a good overall approach to testing some of this stuff. Recipes and crafting suffer from the same problems.

So I'm forced every release to make bug reports and give feedback that is valid, but may not be super helpful to the developers because it comes out like "this is OP and I don't like it". Whereas in order to get quantifiable data that might empirically prove that what I'm saying is correct, I'd have to 1. Know how it's supposed to work in the first place, and 2. spend hours proving that what I was seeing wasn't just some kind of random event and was in fact statistically probable that the mechanic was broken.

That's a poor use of willing testers, and I can tell you from briefly being in the scrum, no one is doing that on a regular basis there either.

 

I could not agree more
Not only is this a correct view, but what also happens is we end up arguing with each other about what something is or isn't supposed to be doing based on the information we don't have, and have extrapolated

Could not have explained it better myself

 

Amen! At least show us the internal variables being used so we can figure out cause and effect. You can talk it away during Beta - but its making Alpha testing more of a guessing game then it needs to be. We want to HELP, not spends weeks trying to "get a feeling" if something works better than something else. Just lay it out for us and we will let you know if its working per design.

 

As all the others above have said, "not knowing" is holding both us - and you - back.

You want good feedback, give us access to the data for evaluation.
Want us to help balance what you've coded, then let us know what the numbers are so we can tell you if what we're seeing is what you're expecting us to see.

We're all in this together. We're a team, and as a team - we all need to be on the same page...

 

I agree.

The big amount of unexplained stats in SotA always made me feel uncomfortable for the reasons stated above... From my point of view it's like it stopped in the middle of an intersection; if the player isn't supposed to know what they do, what's their purpose? just hide them and use cualitative descriptions to make the players know what an item do; for example instead of +2 dex call it of agility (minor), or make our character "think" stuff as he dons the armor "hm, i feel agile by wearing this" or by changing from leather to plate our character could think "i feel like i can mitigate more damage, but i will dodge less". Even when i'm not sure that's how it works, it's how logic tells me it should work.

On the other side, if the stats are there to stay (i kind of like that, but that just because i enjoy knowing the numbers) tooltips explaining what they do or a help screen or even a section in the instructions may be enough for us to know if they are fulfilling their purpose.

I can settle with any of these options, but having stats and not certainly knowing what are them for is unsettling.

 

Agreed in the past, still agreeing today.

It makes no sense to test and debug, if we have no specs of how things should work.

 

Im against this because then all it becomes is a race to who can have the best stats

 

And of course this data will not be shared , copied, posted, printed.

It will stay untouchable for other to copy and abuse.

You can trust us.

 

It's already a race, we just don't have a map showing where the starting line is, or where we're supposed to go to finish.

If someone handed you an alien device and didn't tell you want it was used for or what its limitations were, then said "test this and provide feedback". That would kind of be what we're doing right now with some of these systems.

Are polearms supposed to do 50 points of damage? Why are daggers useless? Who knows?

 

In a single player game? That demographic doesn't care.

 

I play single user, I care. I care about my time and balancing that as a function of game play. Yeah, I could spend a week of evenings gathering ore and scrape to make a full set of plate - and do. The question becomes which variety (+INT, +DEX, +STR, +MD, etc.) - I'm not willing to spend two months making each combo and somehow trying to figure out which is helping me the most. Two many other stats change along the way for any test to be definitive.

We don't need exact damage calculations, just relative weights and basics like impact DEX has on attack success, or INT on magic damage. We need enough to be able to, say, balance the multiple aspects of a +INT build vs the presumably pure magic damage value of a +0.2MD build. I would HOPE the MD build does more DPS, if it doesn't, its strange to even have the option - but right now, we have no way of knowing.

 

Even if they keep some of the mechanics behind the curtain, it would be nice to have a "debug" screen that showed all pertinent data. Something that you could pull up like the V screen but with useful information. I have been in focused betas that have done this. A screenshot gave the dev team tons of data. You could also switch to wireframe and other dev only formats to help test. This was incredibly useful to see what was active and resolve some of the very questions asked above. "Oh, I see you have such and such a spell active that is why you are different." "Hmm, daggers are actually doing no damage and with damage reduction they are healing the MoB, we'd better report that." Now, we only guess.

Can this be abused, yes. However, easy access to this information now makes it harder to utilize later. Once things go live, take away all the tools. Simple. And as for the direction that will remain, is that bad? In RL if I want to know how to become a better bread baker there are several ways I know to learn that skill and get better. I don't have to wonder if studying Latin will increase my IQ and make me a better baker. But in SotA, who knows?

 

The context of my response is that in single player mode, you cannot see other players nor their stats, so therefore, "a race to who can have the best stats", from a competitive perspective, can't be known.

I agree that knowing the stats, at all, is ideal. But there is no race if you're the only runner.

 

Could you be a bit more specific regarding what data it is that you are concerned might be shared, and how sharing that data would compromise anything.
Do you have any examples in mind?

 

I regard the data that chris creates to determine how all skills, stats, armors,delays - interact with each other something to stay a secret to keep the fun of us gamers exploring it and the fun of finding the personal build.

So if you open up your calculation system you ruin this. And you basically need to directly make it public on the webpage to avoid early disadvantages for all the gamers not aware of the math system of SotA combat.

So thats why i said ironically that he can truly trust us to keep this information secret.

The moment you open it i can see soon websites telling me exactly the one build to rule them all. All fun of trying out gone.

The frustration some argue is just for me trying to make the game again more babysit.

Let us know all. From the start.

Richard told us about how cool it is if you are the first to find out how to craft a new item. You might be for some time the only on knowing.
Well game is not released and we have sites flooded with guides and information all over the place.

So at least let story and how combat calculates stay a myth.

What the OP is calling frustration - i call exploring and fun.

The first weeks after a game is released had always been the best. All of us equaly clueless.
But then the gaming changes very fast into - study the internet. Avoid doing a wrong build - read guides not to waste time. Use the webcalculater to find your best combat build.


When the game SotA will be released it will be different. The new gamers with us will be confronted with a mass of fandata about all and everything of the game. They will feal like joining a game 2 years after release.

 

As people mentioned it is fun to get behind the exact dmg calculation to find out how to max ur dmg output.. getting behind the myth...
But right know you could rename dex str and int into hobo globo and fobo. We need to have a base from where to start with out testing and experimenting.

 

In my opinion, I might agree, if we weren't in alpha. But in alpha, we need to know the details of how it works to verify it's working.
Removing that detail now is doing a disservice to the quality of the game. The testers need to know the input and output to be able to verify things are working as intended.

 

I don't even know why we are having this discussion.

Sure, finding out details is fun and exciting.

But this is not a game we play. It's a game we help develop, for Odin's sake! We *NEED* to know if doing 10-20 damage with death touch is working as intended or should be reported as bug!!!

The fun comes when the game ships, not now. Now is just a job made incredibly harder with people mistaking this phase for the real game.

How can anyone even THINK of "races", when there are wipes is well beyond me.