Starr Long Discusses Chaotic Aspects of SOTA Combat

Add no loot cause of insurance system as in WoW and UO AoS and this game will not be for the felucca players that enjoyed open PvP and risk vs reward, it will be a game for the trammel players.

 

And i guess its good they call it a spiritual succesor instead of direct cuz i have a feeling the lore is the only familiar thing to uo players. I have hope for LB but even he isnt prone to bad calls. Hell id be happy with a direct UO remake

 

Hmm - I think that the poker analogy is actually pretty good.

A 'pro' poker player will play lots and lots of games, learn the various probabilities of different cards coming up, the statistical 'strength' of each hand, etc - but he will never have control over what cards he has, or what cards his opponents have (unless cheating, of course ). As such, the poker player is forced to react to the cards dealt, and to try and make a winning hand.

Of course, the system outlined by Starr is a bit more complex than poker (what with pinned skills, combo skills, variable card limit, etc) but it still has a similar element, in that you have to react to the cards you have and the circumstances you're in. A good player should be able to react better than a bad player, make better use of the cards they've been dealt, or spot that they have an inappropriate deck loaded, and swap out to something better aligned to winning the current fight.

That said, it'll be interesting to see how the approach actually plays out.

 

If you listen to any of those champion poker players explain the game, though, they will tell you that you DON'T try to build a winning hand, and while they do respond to the cards dealt, it's far more a subtle and complex playing of the OTHER PLAYERS. Not a system represented by the cards at all. When to bet, how to bet, how much to bet, when to fold, when to raise, when to call, these things are known to the poker champ, and not the newbie. They will indeed get the same hand dealt, but the champion has a set of skills that open up interaction options to him unknown to the newbie.

In SotA, the proposed cards ARE our way of interacting. I won't be able to bluff a mob into thinking I have a great reversal, and while some limited form of bluffing might work in PvP, if it is a bluff, I will soon enough find my self the target of someone who ISN'T BLUFFING.

 

The poker analogy is great for a card game but combat is a totally different game. As someone who has been a practitioner of martial arts I don't feel this system represents the "chaos" of battle. I have a set of skills that I use regularly and if for some reason I were not allowed to use them I would lose a fight. I've practiced jab, cross, hook many times. Why would I suddenly not think to use them. Front kick, roundhouse, sidekick; they all come naturally to me. But you're telling me the only techniques I seem to recall right now are spinning hook kick, hiptoss, backfist, upset knifehand strike and palmheel. I don't focus on those techniques so they would not come to me in an actual fight.

I feel this system is the opposite of realism. If I go into a fight I WILL know how to do the things I've been trained to do, the things I've drilled and used before.

Realism would be having a set of skills selected that just doesn't fit the scenario you find yourself in. Real life example; I have a kickboxing set selected because that's what I'm good at but I find myself up against a wrestler. In this fight I quickly find myself on my back being pummeled with no answer because my set isn't built for this fight. If I'm lucky enough to keep my feet under me I have a good shot at picking this guy apart or dealing heavy damage from a distance with my kicks but that's only if his set lacks a solid takedown attack.

In games like WoW you would never have this issue because your tool bar can be expanded to fit every ability you know. Now if you could limit the number of abilities that you have access to that would make it better balanced and actually more realistic. I have a very large arsenal of abilities but if I were to be attacked on the street I would fall back on just a handful of them because those are the ones I practice and those are the ones I'm good with. MMA fighters all know the same techniques but they all have their focus as well. When Anderson Silva knocked out Vitor Belfort with a frontkick, no one saw that coming. Every martial artist knows how to throw that kick but Anderson was the only one with it in his set that day. I like the idea of changing things up but this randomness of the deck just doesn't work for me. If I see an opening to throw a front kick it shouldn't matter if its currently available or not, I know how to throw that kick.


This may have been said before but I couldn't make it though all the pages of this thread.

 

I agree with chucky_t - As someone with similar experiences as him, this 'chaos of battle' system is artificial chaos...that is really unnecessary and could end up being more frustrating than it is worth. As a combatant, you always have your arsenal available but it's up to you to decide what to do and when, based on many different factors. Although intending to mimic realism, it does not. However, I can appreciate what this was intended to do...change combat up a bit and make it more unpredictable...

Why try to simulate the chaotic nature of battle using rules that limit player abilities? Instead, perhaps flip that around and add features that are added things players can do to add chaos? For example, why not give players different offensive/defensive stances that are better or worse at defending against certain abilities? Really, then the chaos is player driven...I wouldn't want to use ability B when you are in stance X...so I have to critically think and switch up my tactics and choose to use a different ability or switch stances myself. I'm not really suggesting how to do it here....just that the same feel can be achieved in another way that might be perceived as less restrictive.

Lastly, I can see the need to add a chaotic element in PvE, however, a good AI can do that (if you can set aside the processing cost). In PvP, this chaotic element really already exists...which may imply that if you are finding combat in PvE not chaotic enough...perhaps what you are looking for is an opponent that thinks... With that being said, all of this, of course is my opinion and despite my nervousness of how they are currently implementing combat...I'm willing to give it a try to see what they have come up with.

 

I'm still a little wary of this system, but I do like that it would reduce macros on combat.

 

Any comparison between mmo combat and poker is a lose for the mmo

 

I've been playing some SWTOR lately and I can tell you I spend more time looking at which button I need to hit next after cool down instead of watching the fight.
That does bug me.

 

Me too. I play marauder and most of the time is looking at the hotbar so i cant imagine this sustem being better when it already out of hand in a game that doesnt use it and seemingly will require more concentration. I want to watch the combat and damage numbers not the hotbAr. How can i tell what ability to use wheb i cant even read the damage

 

Just out of curiosity, what do you have against macros?

 

They reduce skill required to play and somewhat penalize players who don't macro. What's the point of playing if it isn't really you playing and you just macro a rotation of abilities for combat?

 

Macros are ruining the game! The advantage of the one who gets the better macro. The game should be setup and internal macros that anyone can customize yourself. By type of use last object - the ultimate goal and so on.

 

I understand that thought, but urge you to consider that what you are describing is not just "macros". The game could include such functions, and some games do, not to mention outside software cheats, bots, and hacks will always be programmable. What makes the game's macros a problem or a boon is not the name 'macro', but the rules under which they can be written.

I think that if writing macros IS a skill, wherein rules must be followed, give and take exists, then they can be a valuable part of the game. Just, don't give them powers that a player couldn't have without the macro.

@zavb9lov...um, how can macros be ruining the game? It isn't PLAYABLE yet.

 

zavb9lov is using a translation service to speak in English, from Russian I believe.

Most likely the tense is a "lost in translation".

 

Likely a game if designed right would have no need for macros. It just opens up an arguably system to abuse.

 

Thanks for the clarification. I'm really amazed at how friendly the people here

 

While I recognize that the tense may have been intended as [macros WILL ruin this game], my actual point is that they aren't, yet, and that they might not. Every key bind is a macro. Every time you have a spell or command on a quick access cast is a macro. Not all macros are bad. If game balance is pursued in the creation OF the macro system, and players are given the ability to build macros that do some things, like quicktargeting yourself, or a known friend (prepared in advance by name), that's not so bad.

Really, the only time that macros TRULY ruin the game is when they are given power the player shouldn't have had, such as when no limit is placed on how many actions they can attempt, or when they are given 'if>then' logic capability. I'm all in favor of limiting botting macros, but I remember having a truly complex macro system on some of my past games, so that I could have three sets of buttons in the 1-5 slots, one normal, one holding shift, one holding alt, each with extra work spent finding just the right place on the keys, so that I always had something ranged in 1, something aoe in 3, etc.

In some cases, those macros had casting rotations, taking exceptionally slow abilities that did essentially the same thing and pairing them off, so that I didn't have to have a button dead for eight seconds after use, but could do SOMETHING with it. In some cases they combined two abilities, such as a self buff that armored me and a self buff that healed me, so that I got maximum effect out of two abilities that I always used together anyways (and it's worth noting that in the example I'm thinking of here, the abilities were DESIGNED to be used simultaneously, you could have them keybound next to each other on 7 and 8, and mash both buttons at once expecting simultaneous casting, all my macro achieved was to save my fingers the stretch and mash strain of doing so).

I don't think that people being skilled at writing and using REASONABLE macros is a bad thing at all. It wasn't hard for me to learn the systems in question. On the other hand, I have seen badly made macro systems, where one macro can be commanded to cycle through your entire spell and ability list, starting from the best ranged attack and ending with your 'Oh $#!T' buttons. That wasn't really the fault of macros in general, though, any more than Saddam Hussein was the fault of politics. They were bad ideas.

It's also important to remember, I believe, that third party software will always be attempted in the modern online gaming age, and that the vagaries of cheats and hacks are not the fault of the game rules, they are unprevented violations of them. This means that if someone ran past you using a hack that constantly spam shuffled his inventory to keep him from being overweight, or you found your every cast hit by stupidly well timed interrupts from someone who wasn't even targeting or paying attention to you, THOSE WERE HACKS. Cheaters, not people benefiting from a bad design on the part of the devs.

 

I don't specifically hate macros. I just think they're a patch for poor game design. Aion and gw2 are examples of games which built the macros into a skill chain. So you didn't need a separate macro.

As I've said before, if they scrapped the skill tree and random UI associated with the cards, they could be used as a smart, visual macro system. So my <attack> key gets bound to a stack of cards and it used "best available" based on how I set the cards. That leaves me to focus on important things like choosing whether to attack or how to defend, rather than playing cooldown whac-a-mole.

 

i love MTG


I cant wait 4 testing this new cambat system. Good ideal. DEV.