Darkfall "Released"

[Venkman]

WUAs unwashed masses do not want that level of accountability, though I do think it's a good idea if additive (ala AC1 XP chains).

[IainC]

Get rid of dedicated tanks and healers completely. Throw away diku combat entirely and replace it with combat from virtually any other multiplayer action game. It's not like "small number of players vs AI" combat is the exclusive domain of MMO gaming. The genre is just polluted with developers who can't think outside of their own little MUD/MMO rut.

Bingo.

I'd also like to see advancement curtailed somewhat; a move away from individual advancement and towards group advancement. The player avatar reaches maximum potential relatively quickly - further advancement is primarily cosmetic. The player can put his or her efforts towards a cause (guild, realm, clan, whatever) that has a greater advancement scheme (that doesn't serve as a gate for content as much as a gauge for power / territory / etc).

Why do you think combat in MMOs isn't like other action games? Is it because designers are somehow blind to other systems or is it because MMOs have to be built on different design assumptions to those action games? (Hint; it's the second one). People are making wish lists of stuff they would like to see in future MMO combat, but no-one is thinking about the assumptions that underlie those design points, no-one is following their pixies-and-unicorns suggestions through from 'this is what we want' to 'this is the effect it will have'.

The player advancement stuff is largely irrelevant to the main discussion, go and create another thread if you want to talk about that.

[Venkman]

So player advancement has nothing to do with a series of guaranteed successes in a system designed to dispense character optimization choices by providing consistent contrived combat events?

I will disagree here

We are thinking this through, to the logical next step that requires departure from the tried and true (and done) diku. WoW is not about 3000 people per server experimenting with different ways of interacting with each other. It's about players on their own advancement trajectories in a system like most other dikus intended to limit them in some ways and enable in another. But it's just one type of game over and over. It's not technology that holds back smart AI here. Rather, it's the expectations set by the experience. Having smart AI would break the game.

Yes, an MMO requires at least 10x the content of a non-MMO. But even that assumption is based on the one type of model being popular, in a genre with many different experience models. WoW is an MMO. But in the land of esoteric discussions about "what could be", where ideas are bit get constrained by business realities, MMOs are not WoW.

[DLRiley]

I have to disagree with you Darniaq, I haven't played an mmo side from Guild Wars that truly has more content than a single player game. I've played mmo's longer than I have most single player games, but the relationship between activities I actually want to do again vs activities I have to do again for the sake of advancement is wonked in the favor of advancement. Which in generally doesn't equal content to me.

Instanced world allows difficulty to be staged easy, non instance and your going to have to radically increase the numbers of opponents to match the numbers of players eager to kill mobs. Which is done now in many mmo's, just without the AI the truly make the encounters frantic. It's really down to an mmo saying "we expect you to fight as a team" vs "we expect you to play solo with potential of co-op". The answer to that question should pretty much drive the way the game approaches pve encounters and class balance in general.

Ianc to the last game that insisted that tanks are useful in pvp was a mess as far as combat was concerned. in all honesty if you create a healer class and don't think that players will automatically target that healer and you purposely design the game on the assumption that in your parallel diku universe the tank is a priority target? I can't help but 

TR city seige system wasn't a bad idea, in fact it was probably the only saving grace that game had....

[Lantyssa]

Instanced world allows difficulty to be staged easy, non instance and your going to have to radically increase the numbers of opponents to match the numbers of players eager to kill mobs. Which is done now in many mmo's, just without the AI the truly make the encounters frantic. It's really down to an mmo saying "we expect you to fight as a team" vs "we expect you to play solo with potential of co-op". The answer to that question should pretty much drive the way the game approaches pve encounters and class balance in general.

If monster stats are static, perhaps.  Which most games use, so that's what we're familiar with.

Look at CoX's giant monsters though.  Many of their abilities scale with player level.  It's possible to make a completely dynamic encounter by using scalar values instead of fixed integers.

We're just need to think well outside the conventions we're used to.  For all areas.  Not just encounters.

[IainC]

Ok, a few things. To Darniaq: We were discussing monster AI and player behaviour around encounters, not specifically reward systems or player advancement. We'll take it as read that there is some reason for players to want to engage the encounter without worrying at this point what that reason is. It doesn't matter and doesn't advance the discussion.

DLRiley: Instancing is not a universal panacea. It gives you as the designer some powerful tools in controlling how players experience content but it does have some downsides. You will still need to develop fun content that isn't instanced regardless.

Ianc to the last game that insisted that tanks are useful in pvp was a mess as far as combat was concerned. in all honesty if you create a healer class and don't think that players will automatically target that healer and you purposely design the game on the assumption that in your parallel diku universe the tank is a priority target? I can't help but  :rolleyes:

You have failed to understand the argument. No-one is going to assume that just because a defensive tank exists, that players will automagically become retards and ignore the healer to go and wail on the guy with the heavy plate. I said that you can give the defensive tank tools to ensure that ignoring him brings consequences and therefore makes combat a series of tactical choices rather than 'bag the healer, mop up the rest'. Whether it's been done right in previous games isn't the issue and isn't related to what I said.

You're falling into a predictable pattern, it's easy to pour scorn on existing design if you studiously avoid looking at the reasons for those design decisions in the first place. No-one woke up one morning and thought ' I have a fantastic system to make MMO combat boring and predictable, I must go and code it while it's fresh in my mind!' the systems that we have are in general the least worst solutions to complex problems of player behaviour, game focus and scale. Before you start tearing down what has gone before, you need to understand the reason it was built in the first place. It can certainly be improved but if you don't understand why we have what we have then your new design is going to run into some rocky territory as soon as it comes into contact with reality.

[WindupAtheist]

Shit looks like it does because EQ got it from MUDs, and everything else is just shinier EQ. With only rare exception nobody has even tried to invent jack shit. There's a reason I went batshit and started trying to sign up through some incomprehensible Japanese website when I heard about the prospect of a River City Ransom MMO. Not just because I'm overly nostalgic (though I suppose I am) but because I was intrigued at the idea of an MMO based on a fun console game about fighting, and not some fucking text MUD and its descendants.

Give me twitchy combat and let me bust up the environment and hit people with garbage cans and stuff. Let me kick a guy over and pick up the sword he was about to hit me with and chop him with it. Give me some shit that resembles a fucking game.

[Arthur_Parker]

You're falling into a predictable pattern, it's easy to pour scorn on existing design if you studiously avoid looking at the reasons for those design decisions in the first place. No-one woke up one morning and thought ' I have a fantastic system to make MMO combat boring and predictable, I must go and code it while it's fresh in my mind!' the systems that we have are in general the least worst solutions to complex problems of player behaviour, game focus and scale. Before you start tearing down what has gone before, you need to understand the reason it was built in the first place. It can certainly be improved but if you don't understand why we have what we have then your new design is going to run into some rocky territory as soon as it comes into contact with reality.

Talking about predictable patterns, you're obsessed with balance, the holy trinity is totally played out, it's gone beyond boring and predictable.  UO and AC1 worked despite having only two or three valid combat templates, even with those limitations they still offered more real choices and more interesting combat than what we get nowadays.  They did that with overpowered skills and totally pointless skills.  Your non diku experiences are what, Eve & SWG?  Stop lecturing people, you can't see the problem because you don't even realise there is one.

[Venkman]

To Darniaq: We were discussing monster AI and player behaviour around encounters, not specifically reward systems or player advancement. We'll take it as read that there is some reason for players to want to engage the encounter without worrying at this point what that reason is. It doesn't matter and doesn't advance the discussion.

This is not a balance discussion. We have plenty of game oboards for that This is about looking at the more basic level.

The player behavior in an encounter is intrinsically tied to what motivated them to go there with what character customization they brought with them. We're well beyond the need to discuss specific mob behavior in a diku because for the most part that question has been answered (D&D>MUD>dikuMUD->EQ1->bunchaimprovements->WoW). And we don't need to discuss player behavior because that too is well known (you're trained to want to customize, shown the path to do so, choose to figure it out or cheat your way through, win).

So, focusing on the specifics of a boss AI targeting a healer before a tank is, well, that's what those oboards are for. We don't need to design a better WoW because nobody could afford to build it.

What I think we should discuss is the more fundamental game design itself. We can't possibly have a discussion about changing AI until we first decide to depart from the formula already mastered. And we can't really write off player wants as some esoterica, because for one, there's plenty of examples out there of motivating them differently, and for another, any game that hopes to capture even an equivalent number of players is going to need to go after everyone not playing WoW.

Otherwise, you're just tweaking WoW, and therefore serving as an eventual boomerang for it.

Or, as you said:

...it's easy to pour scorn on existing design if you studiously avoid looking at the reasons for those design decisions in the first place. No-one woke up one morning and thought '

We're not pouring scorn on what's been done. We're saying it's been done So we need something new.*

* Of course, it can't just be new. It's got to be, like, well crafted too.

[IainC]

Talking about predictable patterns, you're obsessed with balance, the holy trinity is totally played out, it's gone beyond boring and predictable.  UO and AC1 worked despite having only two or three valid combat templates, even with those limitations they still offered more real choices and more interesting combat than what we get nowadays.  They did that with overpowered skills and totally pointless skills.  Your non diku experiences are what, Eve & SWG?  Stop lecturing people, you can't see the problem because you don't even realise there is one.

I don't care about the holy trinity. Really I don't, let people be a nuking healer in plate with a greatsword if that's what they want to play. I was defending the inclusion of archetypes like the glass cannon mage earlier because it's a popular archetype that people enjoy playing. I am generally against systems where everyone is a hybrid because it tends to make everyone average to the same thing. You say that UO and AC1 prove that false but I'm not sure you'd get the same result if those games were releasing today to a modern MMO generation of players. Whether you like to hear it or not balance is a bigger issue these days than it was back then. It's a waste of dev time and a major stick for your players to hit you with if you get it wrong.

I can see the problems, I'm just pointing out that the answer isn't as easy as some people seem to think it is. There are reasons underlying the current crop of designs that go beyond 'EQ/WoW/DIkUMUD did it this way' and in my view people aren't exploring those properly. It's easy to say 'I want mobs that act like players' but if you don't look at the reasons for why mobs don't act like players in most games and then look at what the likely result of that change in your game would be, you aren't ever going to advance. it's easy to design an MMO via bullet points, every MMO forum is full of posts doing that. Also my experience with system design is in no way limited to playing a handful of MMOs.


Darniaq, I agree but to be honest this conversation is veering all over the place so fast I'm not sure that we're all having the same discussion. We started off talking about the why games include glass cannon archetypes and then we ended up going through mob AI, class roles and now apparently it's all about balance.

[ezrast]

I always assumed that monsters behaved the way they do because the game servers would melt if mobs had any situational awareness more processing-intensive than "who's hit me the hardest?"

Edit: And the effects of changing that would be... nothing, necessarily, except for making combat more interesting. As has been said, you can still have a tank and a healer and a dps that gain experience and earn loot even without traditional aggro mechanics.

[K9]

It's always all about balance!

[DLRiley]

Ok, a few things. To Darniaq: We were discussing monster AI and player behaviour around encounters, not specifically reward systems or player advancement. We'll take it as read that there is some reason for players to want to engage the encounter without worrying at this point what that reason is. It doesn't matter and doesn't advance the discussion.

DLRiley: Instancing is not a universal panacea. It gives you as the designer some powerful tools in controlling how players experience content but it does have some downsides. You will still need to develop fun content that isn't instanced regardless.

Ianc to the last game that insisted that tanks are useful in pvp was a mess as far as combat was concerned. in all honesty if you create a healer class and don't think that players will automatically target that healer and you purposely design the game on the assumption that in your parallel diku universe the tank is a priority target? I can't help but  :rolleyes:

You have failed to understand the argument. No-one is going to assume that just because a defensive tank exists, that players will automagically become retards and ignore the healer to go and wail on the guy with the heavy plate. I said that you can give the defensive tank tools to ensure that ignoring him brings consequences and therefore makes combat a series of tactical choices rather than 'bag the healer, mop up the rest'. Whether it's been done right in previous games isn't the issue and isn't related to what I said.

You're falling into a predictable pattern, it's easy to pour scorn on existing design if you studiously avoid looking at the reasons for those design decisions in the first place. No-one woke up one morning and thought ' I have a fantastic system to make MMO combat boring and predictable, I must go and code it while it's fresh in my mind!' the systems that we have are in general the least worst solutions to complex problems of player behaviour, game focus and scale. Before you start tearing down what has gone before, you need to understand the reason it was built in the first place. It can certainly be improved but if you don't understand why we have what we have then your new design is going to run into some rocky territory as soon as it comes into contact with reality.

You know that's exactly what WAR did, which turned PVP encounters into glorified PVE encounters. If you was a melee your job was to baby sit the other teams melee until RDPS finished doing all the work. Just because their are ways to make tank operate like they do in pve in pvp doesn't mean it should be designed. Shoeing in a crappy concept is still shoeing in a crappy concept, didn't the mechs vs tanks discussion teach people anything?

I'm not pouring scorn on the whole system, just parts I don't like and hasn't changed for 10 years. The balance issues your talking about is concerning PvE. PVE hasn't changed since .... well it hasn't which is the point. There is no real reason 50% of the classes that are pushed through development should exist other than the cool factor. One of these classes is the tank, that fills a role highly dependant on the stupidity of the opposition instead of the intelligence. If you want to change pve you raise the intelligence and expect classes, skills, arch types, whatever, to be able to handle it.

Iainc the only reason current AI isn't smatter is for 2 reasons;

A. Developers would actually have to make AI
B. It would make encounters hard, Mmo's are not designed to provide a challenge like single player games are, mmo's are designed to keep people playing.

Inherently developers feel that easy mode is easier to keep the kids playing than hard mode. People spend 90% of their time advancing through the ranks for the sole purpose of making PVE easier not harder. That is the exact opposite of what any non-mmo game provides. But no developer wants players to quit their game because "its too hard".

[Arthur_Parker]

Whether you like to hear it or not balance is a bigger issue these days than it was back then. It's a waste of dev time and a major stick for your players to hit you with if you get it wrong.

It's a skill based game, say it, skill based game.  You brought the balance subject up again, in a DArkfall thread of all places, do you honestly believe balance is even going to register as a problem during the release of this game?  Poor coding, server stability, never even making release, death penalties being too harsh etc, yes, but balance?

PVE balance, considering the market this game is aimed at, who really gives a shit?  PVP balance, if players discover the most effective PVP template is a left handed half elf under 5'6" with a heavy x-bow, which do you think is a more likely, a mass movement to quit the game or one of your starter zones crashing due to Tanis overload? 

[DLRiley]

I just realized we were having a balance/what will change the genre discussion in a darkfall thread.

[Venkman]

Darniaq, I agree but to be honest this conversation is veering all over the place so fast I'm not sure that we're all having the same discussion. We started off talking about the why games include glass cannon archetypes and then we ended up going through mob AI, class roles and now apparently it's all about balance.

Good point

[IainC]

It's a skill based game, say it, skill based game.  You brought the balance subject up again, in a DArkfall thread of all places, do you honestly believe balance is even going to register as a problem during the release of this game?  Poor coding, server stability, never even making release, death penalties being too harsh etc, yes, but balance?

PVE balance, considering the market this game is aimed at, who really gives a shit?  PVP balance, if players discover the most effective PVP template is a left handed half elf under 5'6" with a heavy x-bow, which do you think is a more likely, a mass movement to quit the game or one of your starter zones crashing due to Tanis overload? 

We'd kind of moved on from discussing Darkfall directly though and were talking about game design in the abstract.

For your second question, PvE balance is still important otherwise you'll find that a lot of your design assumptions regarding player metrics go out of the window. Players won't find it important (apart from climbing over themselves to roll the best powerlevelling option) but that doesn't mean it's not important to the game. As for PvP balance, if everyone's rolling the same thing I'd say that's a problem.

[WindupAtheist]

You say that UO and AC1 prove that false but I'm not sure you'd get the same result if those games were releasing today to a modern MMO generation of players. Whether you like to hear it or not balance is a bigger issue these days than it was back then. It's a waste of dev time and a major stick for your players to hit you with if you get it wrong.

I spent years watching UO balance a skill-based system as more and more skills were piled onto an aging heap of spaghetti code by expansion after expansion. There were always phases of this or that esoteric vampire/ninja/cowboy/gangster template being the top of the heap, followed by a round of tweaks and nerfs that had the forums in an uproar. Then I started playing WoW and realized it was absolutely no different. If anything the balance screaming from the plebs is worse with WoW due to the nature of the game.

There was always lots of template diversity in UO. Since the game was still more of a virtual world than a "YOUR DPS MUST BE 8% HIGHER TO RAID BLTQ!!1!" game there was also room to have fun with templates that weren't neccessarily optimal. I once ran into a paladin/tamer in UO who would ride into battle, hop off his pet's back, then fight beside it. I'd never seen anyone do that before and if it wasn't the most uber template possible it was still plenty good enough to be viable.

There are reasons underlying the current crop of designs that go beyond 'EQ/WoW/DIkUMUD did it this way' and in my view people aren't exploring those properly.

The current crop of designers should all piss off and go get jobs washing dishes. All they've done is copy diku a hundred times, and now that WoW has done a better diku than any of them will ever be able to do, they've done nothing but splutter and fail. I've heard them talk about how they learned from WoW, or how they plan to compete with WoW if they're cocky. I've seen them come up with every killer IP from Lord of the Rings to Warhammer to Dungeons & Dragons. And I've seen a string of fucking flop dikus ground to dust under Blizzard's boots without even managing to outperform peak EQ1.

[UnSub]

Look at CoX's giant monsters though.  Many of their abilities scale with player level.  It's possible to make a completely dynamic encounter by using scalar values instead of fixed integers.

CoH/V possesses a number of systems I really wish other devs would steal and refine further. Travel powers, sidekicking, scaling attack / defence for certain mobs / events etc.

On a related note, ChampO and DCUO have 'open' power selections, so you theoretically can build whatever you like. Of course I think this will lead to players building the Holy Trinity and falling back on those archetypes because that is what they are comfortable with, but there is a step towards a less class-based MMO game coming.

Also, both titles are heavily beat 'em up influenced where you can brain people with cars, so some of WUA's requests will be answered.

[Lantyssa]

There was always lots of template diversity in UO. Since the game was still more of a virtual world than a "YOUR DPS MUST BE 8% HIGHER TO RAID BLTQ!!1!" game there was also room to have fun with templates that weren't neccessarily optimal. I once ran into a paladin/tamer in UO who would ride into battle, hop off his pet's back, then fight beside it. I'd never seen anyone do that before and if it wasn't the most uber template possible it was still plenty good enough to be viable.

You're giving them too much credit.  I've seen heated discussions over 1% increases.  It baffles me.  Is 101 really that much more powerful than 100?  Is it worth excluding people for that?

Also I did the fight beside your mount thing in SWG. 

[Sophismata]

IainC has a point - it's not just about changing the system, you have to look at why the trinity is there in the first place. It's not completely arbitrary (obviously), though I feel that, for the most part, it's a result of people not wanting or bothering to try anything new - killing the trinity involves killing DIKU, and people keep making DIKU games.


Remember that the holy trinity is the epitome of efficiency; it is based around specialisation, in that each member of the group does one task and does it best. It sort of breaks down the basics of DIKU / RPG combat: you have to kill the <foo>, and you have to survive the <foo>'s attacks. At its simplest, you specialise one player to survive the enemy, and one player to kill it. Unfortunately, we have already put some assumptions into place, even at this stage. We're only facing a few combatants - in the realm of text-based MUD's, this is easy to understand; in a 3D space? Not so much.

(Killing my previous wall-of-text here, I'll summarise). People will veer towards specialisations because specialising is more efficient than generalising. In the case of DIKU, specialisation is encouraged and made possible by the AI (and the tools given to manipulate that AI). In a textual space, aggro control makes a certain kind of sense, because it is an abstract idea involving participants you cannot see, only imagine. In a 3D space, we can do better. WoW is not 3D, it doesn't really utilise the fact that players exist in a virtual world, you could replicate WoW's combat in a MUD. You could not replicate, eg, God of War, CoD, Super Mario World, etc, in a MUD.


(As an aside here, I said that a group of specialists is more efficient that a group of generalists. In life, this is a fact, primarily because specialist tasks can rarely be cooperated on. In a video game, it's not absolutely true. Theoretically, you could have three players, each of which could deal 1/3 the damage of the dps class, and absorb 1/3 the damage of the damage absorption class. Now, by rotating the player that is attacked, we achieve the same result as the specialised roles, with two exceptions. One, this requires more coordination, and is much harder, and two, everyone is the same.)

[ashrik]

Guys, Darkfall will fix all these issues!
Tasos has looked at the problems facing MMOs in the past, present, AND future and went like FUCK DAT IM NOT LIEK U  
I say this because the revolution is so close and yet none of you seem to have made peace with a higher power yet.
Also- inquiring minds what to know: What happened to IainC's sweet employee tag?
Edit:^_^

[Signe]

Someone should take the last couple of pages of this thread and stick it in a better place.  It's much too interesting to be in a Darkfall forum.  Except for the post above which is just weird. 

And our ginger Scot seems to have left his old job and got a new one and misplaced his ginger name, even though his new job sounds just as red to me.

[Jack9]

WoW is not 3D, it doesn't really utilise the fact that players exist in a virtual world, you could replicate WoW's combat in a MUD. You could not replicate, eg, God of War, CoD, Super Mario World, etc, in a MUD.

If you can recreate WoW in a MUD, I can recreate GoW in a MUD. One boring MUD btw. WoW doesn't use 3D in encounters, but is does use 2D (DONT STAND IN THE FIRE). This speaks to the audience, not just the game.

[Sophismata]

If you can recreate WoW in a MUD, I can recreate GoW in a MUD.

First, I said "recreate WoW's combat", and second, do you really believe that?

[Arthur_Parker]

For your second question, PvE balance is still important otherwise you'll find that a lot of your design assumptions regarding player metrics go out of the window. Players won't find it important (apart from climbing over themselves to roll the best powerlevelling option) but that doesn't mean it's not important to the game. As for PvP balance, if everyone's rolling the same thing I'd say that's a problem.

If players don't find something important, then it's just not important.  One viable pvp template is an extreme case, ideally you should shoot for at least two, but the chances are the devs won't have a clue how many they have (see AC1 suggested templates).  As with all games, the players are going to determine what templates are viable and the devs will, as always, end up reacting to the players.

[Count Nerfedalot]

I can elaborate on any of the following points, but not without turning this into a wall of text, so I'll just toss these ideas out as is and see where folks get confused or miss the point before cluttering the place up with long arguments over every word. 

No-one is going to assume that just because a defensive tank exists, that players will automagically become retards and ignore the healer to go and wail on the guy with the heavy plate. I said that you can give the defensive tank tools to ensure that ignoring him brings consequences and therefore makes combat a series of tactical choices rather than 'bag the healer, mop up the rest'. Whether it's been done right in previous games isn't the issue and isn't related to what I said.

(emphasis mine)

This tangentially touches on one of the core issues that plague multi-player combat systems in general.  That issue is allowing a combatant, any combatant, to be safely ignored for a period of time.  This one little inaccuracy in the simulation is the ultimate cause of much of the suckage in current game combat systems. 

A confounding issue is that there is no limit to how many attackers can effectively target a single defender.

Combine those two and what should be either a tactical engagement of formations or a roiling melee instead devolves into the tired old game of mass-fire on the most dangerous/vulnerable target till it dies, then pick the next target and repeat.

Game designers adjust to this inaccurate (in all but naval combat) mechanic in PvE by making most or all of their MOBs tanks, be they dps tanks, ranged dps tanks, healer tanks, or whatnot.  The "solution" in PvP is much more elusive, and thus stems most of the problems.

Solve the two core issues, and a lot of the crap that characterizes current combat systems goes away.  Possibly to be replaced by other crap, but hey!  That's progress! 

Unfortunately, solving them within the constraints of near-real-time combat and current user interfaces and player feedback mechanisms has so far been impossible, and thus we get stuck with crap.

[Redgiant]

Some things to make RvR more fair/realistic/fun/somewhat self-balancing:

1. No form of magic assist commands or buttons. There is just no corollary in the real world of automatically shooting at precisely the same exact person all at once, or knowing who is shooting at who without just seeing it happening. If you want to approximate this in the fog of war, do what real soldiers would have todo; verbally issue commands and try to coordinate that way (which of course is not easy at all compared to facerolling your keyboard).

This hampers the almighty (and easy) assist trains and focus fire. Or at least makes them just as difficult to manage as a real battle would have it.

2. Don't have auto-target, make everyone aim and fire whatever they have in real-time at something which might move. The probelem here is you better have a very responsive and accurate interface or certain people and abilities will just scream, both in terms of reactiveness to your desire to turn, shoot, run, whatever and also how immediate the game reacts to what you are telling your character to do. It also brings up the thorny issue of whether you even allow splash or chained secondary damage since now it becomes even more powerful (since if you somehow hit a moving target, the secondary damage is still more or less "automatic" and poeple desire to have that component even more than normal).

This also hinders assist trains, and also makes fighting generally more chaotic hence tactics and leaders who can convey them to teammates shine more.

3. Allow or approximate legitimate moves a real person could perform, but not ones they couldn't. You must allow a person to swivel their head to look to the side or even behind them. If you are moving and turn to look to the side, no penalty to movement. However, if you rotate your head more than, say, 60 degrees to either side, yourmovement slows to 40% or so of normal speed sicne you obviously cannot run full speed and turn your head to look behind you that far. SO, it should be possible, but you will slow down to do it just like a real person would.

Personally I think Darkfall isn't going to happen, but let's say for grins that they are really on the way. if so, they should rethink their stance on having no way to look behind you unless you fully just stop and turn around. That isn't how real people do it, unless they have a neck brace on.

4. Have at least 3 sides to the conflict, never just 2. Learn from why DAoC had a good idea here. Or Diplomacy.  Or any game wise enough to make it an N-sided affair. This is probalby the best overall self-balancing strategy you can have, if you have enough communications and alliance means in-game to let different sides or factions gang-up on others when they get too strong.

The goal is a very basic one: people play a game to HAVE FUN, not be someone else's target practice all the time. Any system that doesn't give carrots to absolutely everyone at some minimum frequency is going to have those on the losing end just stop playing. it is one thing to strive to get better when beaten down, but another thing entirely to have it always happen with no seeming chance to turn the tables no matter what you or your team does.


Now, someone at Mythic needs to scrap the current WAR, and turn it into DAoC II so I can get bakc to the kind of RvR I love playing. I can dream...

[currently playing LoTR Mines of Moria, 57 Minstrel. You really should SEE what they did for that gigantic subterranean lair, even the most jaded of you guys on f13 would have to be duly impressed by what Turbine has done there.]

[Sophismata]

Here's some general guidelines:

1. Making focus fire ineffective has to be done by making focus fire ineffective. Throwing the UI in the way is not a solution, merely a kludge that will frustrate players. You do not want focus fire to be "difficult to manage", you want it to be inefficient or impractical. Players must not want to focus fire.

2. I'm not touching this one in a Darkfall thread.

3. ... whoa, let's not try to be realistic. Be fun. Make sure the game is grounded in its own reality and its own rules - it has to be internally consistent. But don't do stupid things that will annoy people, just because it's "real". You must abstract things, because it is a computer game. Peripheral vision, situational awareness and instinct are not things that can be easily represented, and most attempts to force realism are not, in fact, realistic at all.

4. Having 3 sides to a conflict is no different than two - it can be better, it can be worse. In most cases, it is much more risky, as 1v1v1 tends to turn into 2v1.

Now, someone at Mythic needs to scrap the current WAR, and turn it into DAoC II so I can get back to the kind of RvR I love playing. I can dream...

No, DAoC was a lucky coincidence that Mythic tried, time and time again, to screw up. The stars won't be aligning a second time.

[IainC]

For your second question, PvE balance is still important otherwise you'll find that a lot of your design assumptions regarding player metrics go out of the window. Players won't find it important (apart from climbing over themselves to roll the best powerlevelling option) but that doesn't mean it's not important to the game. As for PvP balance, if everyone's rolling the same thing I'd say that's a problem.

If players don't find something important, then it's just not important.  One viable pvp template is an extreme case, ideally you should shoot for at least two, but the chances are the devs won't have a clue how many they have (see AC1 suggested templates).  As with all games, the players are going to determine what templates are viable and the devs will, as always, end up reacting to the players.

It is important though. if there's any depth to your game at all, you'll have a bunch of design assumptions about the rate that players earn gold, the rate they advance in (either through levels or whatever other advancement mechanic you have), the rate they consume content, the level of co-operation needed for various tasks and so forth. If your bell curve is seriously skewed by a couple of out of whack options then those assumptions stop being valid and parts of your design start becoming broken. Players don't care about that until the point that they notice the ingame economy has stopped working or there's no-one grouping up anymore because all new characters are born attached to their PL bot.

I agree with your point on viable PvP templates, players will always come up with new and unforeseen combinations that don't look as if they'd work until you try them. That doesn't mean you shouldn't work on smoothing out bumps where you can proactively though.

[Arthur_Parker]

It seems to me that you just want to impose a set of rules for limiting game play that allows you to predict player behaviour and match it to an excel advancement curve.  It's just a lot easier to do that for set character classes, you might justify "defending the inclusion of archetypes like the glass cannon mage earlier because it's a popular archetype that people enjoy playing", but ultimately if you asked WoW Mages if they want to be able to tank and heal, the overall reaction would be "fuck, yeah".

Again, DArkfall thread, skill based system, god forbid players manage to squeeze some fun out of a skill based system by doing something unexpected and upset "player metrics".  As others have already said, nobody is going to build a better WoW any time soon.

[IainC]

It seems to me that you just want to impose a set of rules for limiting game play that allows you to predict player behaviour and match it to an excel advancement curve.  It's just a lot easier to do that for set character classes, you might justify "defending the inclusion of archetypes like the glass cannon mage earlier because it's a popular archetype that people enjoy playing", but ultimately if you asked WoW Mages if they want to be able to tank and heal, the overall reaction would be "fuck, yeah".

Again, DArkfall thread, skill based system, god forbid players manage to squeeze some fun out of a skill based system by doing something unexpected and upset "player metrics".  As others have already said, nobody is going to build a better WoW any time soon.

You're 100% wrong. It's not about 'limiting' anything. Frankly you're the only one that doesn't seem to get it so I'm going to stop repeating myself as you're clearly going to take away whatever you feel like regardless.

Again. Not about Darkfall anymore, have you been reading the last few pages?

[Arthur_Parker]

You're 100% wrong. It's not about 'limiting' anything. Frankly you're the only one that doesn't seem to get it so I'm going to stop repeating myself as you're clearly going to take away whatever you feel like regardless.

Again. Not about Darkfall anymore, have you been reading the last few pages?

Here, I'll quote you.

Spells can be casted while wearing armor, but with a variety of penalties

This looks foolproof.  Casters wearing armor... what could possibly go wrong?

That's rather ignorant. Hell, the only reason this whole "casters can't wear armour" conception even exists is because of Gygax's crazy notions of magic.

*Bzzzzt* Nope it's because the easiest way to balance the huge DPS and/or high utility of casters is via massively lowered survivability. Glass cannons and all that.

I can't believe no-one has picked up on Tasos' statement that the game will be automatically balanced because anyone can have any skill yet.

How come you don't want to talk about DArkfall anymore?  OMG, what about balance?

[IainC]

Here, I'll quote you.

Some stuff from 4 days and 3 pages ago

How come you don't want to talk about DArkfall anymore?  OMG, what about balance?

Now you're just being a dick for the sake of it.

[Draegan]

Here, I'll quote you.

Some stuff from 4 days and 3 pages ago

How come you don't want to talk about DArkfall anymore?  OMG, what about balance?

Now you're just being a dick for the sake of it.

Maybe he's the guy that runs NASA.  I learned today he's a dick too.