Dev Diary Feedback: Combat Changes

[GrumpyMel2]

PS - And the Million dollar question: Why do Devs always FEEL they need to nerf?

The answer to this is because they tend not to plan ahead. They get carried away in wanting to make you drool and and jaw drop over the uber abilities and uber villians they give you at the current (highest) level of the game.... and when it comes time to add an expansion... they suddenly discover that there is nothing left to give the player to make them drool and jaw drop at the NEW uber abilities and villans that they add to the game when they add more levels.... so they have to NERF what you currently have... so they can add new stuff that SEEMS awesome and jaw dropping and makes you want to get to the NEW highest level.

If they had a little more discipline and fore-thought... they wouldn't throw in the kitchen sink in the begining... and wouldn't have to resort to the NERF/One UpManship game quite so quckly.

Examples: If you are already fighting the biggest badest creatures known to exist in the world when you are level 50 ... say for example a Balrog? What can they have you fight when you are 60? The Balrogs bigger older brother Bubba? Or a BLUE Balrog instead of a RED Balrog?

If you already have 95% hit or avoidance chance at level 50.... what do they make you have at level 60...if they want to add new abilities and gear to the game after 50....and make being 60 different then being 50?

Basicaly if you don't hold anything back in the beginning... then you end up having to give things that SEEM really lame when you expand the game.... OR you end up having to hit all current abilities with a big NERF bat.... so your NEW abilities have room to make you "improve".

Not really picking on the Turbine Dev's for this.... this kind of scenerio is endemic in MMO design.

Note that it's bound to happen EVENTUALY for any game that sticks around long enough. It just doesn't happen as quickly if you plan a little bit more for the long term....and are a little more disciplined about holding back uber villians and uber skills early in the games life cycle.

[WhifOfDespair]

My two bits:

The problem is that the original combat system is too complex. Too many vectors to come to the final result.

Of the various RPG combat systems I've encountered over the decades, the one I liked the best was the 'Arms Law' model published by Iron Crown Enterprises (a small company who btw had the Tolkien rpg license a looong time ago). The Arm's Law model was simple and scalable. It was all based on a d100 roll. Combat came down to three components:

1) "To hit" roll. Start with a simple d100 roll. The attacker adds various positive modifiers. The defender subtracts various modifiers. The result is a value from 0 to whatever.

2) Armour Type / result of hit. Take the final number from (1) and do a table lookup against various armour types (which in theory was extensible to new types beyond what they defined). The number would map to anything from a complete miss to doing simple damage to doing a critical hit. Heavy armour types would be easy to hit but very hard to do critical damage against. Light armours would be harder to hit, but easy to do critical damage on as well as doing much more simple damage even without a critical. Damage modifiers are added to the simple damage result.

3) Criticals - assuming (2) resulted in a critical, a separate critical roll would be made to determine the critical damage output. This would be rolled against a table corresponding to the type of weapon / damage type being used. I.E. blunt weapons do different critical damage than edged weapons or fire attacks, etc. A critical might be additional simple damage or a damage over time or a debuff of some sort. Again, like armour types, this system was clearly extensible to different damage types.

The beauty of this system was that it scales up & down easily. The modifiers applied to the 'to hit' roll include the level offsets so no matter what level overall, if the two combatants are equal level they are matched no differently whether lvl 10 or lvl 40. From that point, its all about modifiers from weapons, skills, armour, etc. Even though the system is nominally based on a percentage is no problem with a given modifier being above some threshold such as '100' because the opponent may have a counter that cuts that wayyy back. No single modifier determines the percentage chance. Its the net of all modifiers that determines the percentage chance. So the same system worked for beginner characters battling it out with goblins to demigods at war with demons.

Being total math geeks of course, my friends and I thought this was way elegant and always looked with absolute scorn on the combat system of D&D with its silly d20 and capricious rules and arbitrary scalings ....

Ah ... geeky memories from college ... oops, my age is leaking out ...

[oomo]

In English: Turbine has added or at least enhanced the "gear chase" by making it much more necessary for you to be careful and mindful of your gear. Under the old system, a melee combatant in medium armor could tank very nearly as well as one in heavy armor. If your armor became a little outdated over ten levels, you weren't really suffering from it.

Now you will. Now you'd BETTER go buy (or make, or beg, borrow or steal) that new armor.

Does Turbine realize that seven levels between armor tiers is now TOO MUCH? With armor being as vital as it now is, getting from level 35 to 42 is going to be Hell on roller skates! You guys will have to add new tiers in between the old tiers to help player achieve the next plateau.

So again, in English this means that we have adopted the World of Warcraft vitality in gear chasing. By making good gear necessary, we have increased demand on gold sellers, and increased the presence of gold sellers in our game. There is NOTHING Turbine can do about gold sellers. If they think they can, they have a hard lesson to learn after Moria goes live.

By increasing the demand for gold, we increase the presence of gold seller spam in all of our channels. Private tells will increase, scams will increase, disgruntled players will increase.

Friendly, helpful players will be flooded with stupid questions that should never have to be asked because this new mechanic will bring with it the scum of the MMO-playing earth and all of their ilk. Those who just want to be leet, but can't read the word "the" without special tutoring. And those who aren't interested in the game so much as the pvp and the gear and looking leet.

So the helpful people will get frustrated and close the doors. The community will roll downhill, and before you can do one full turn we will all be saying "wow! this player community sucks as bad as the other one!!"

All that for this one change in the game.

Oh goody.

Am I a doomsayer? Nope. This will NOT spell the doom of this game. In fact, it will bring player populations up so that servers look like they are actually used. We might even begin to achieve populations more like those in World of Warcraft.

I hope your servers can handle that.

But it means that the casual players, who currently are the bread and butter of this game, will slowly fade away and find other things to do.

Not doom. Just a change in face. We get to look a lot more like that other game.

Honestly, I'm disappointed in Turbine.

But the business side of me urges them onward. Business is business after all, and the hierarchy is "money first, players second." Turbine would love to deny that, but you can't be in business and be profitable and have it otherwise.

Those of you who are into the gear chase, into pvp, into the big raids will be overjoyed, and will do everything you can to tell me how wrong I am.

Your words won't change anything. You can flame and harangue all you want, but that doesn't change what is going to happen in this game. I can live with it, so you can too. And when it finally gets to the point I can't live with it anymore, well hey, I am only ONE player. No big loss.

Best post in this thread. Hear hear!

We already cancel both our accounts for months on end and then just play for a month before cancelling again because it doesn't cater to casuals anywhere near as much as it claims. The game is going to turn into the "good gear" grind all other MMOs are and the story and beauty of being in Tolkien's world won't mean anything to the l33ters chasing the loot.

My biggest hatred so far is how the special Book instances don't cater down for 3 group and 2 group sizes like I once wrote in this suggestion (quoted below) I'm here for the story, not to "compete" with anybody else, I'm quite happy with my "size" thank you, I don't need it extended electronically:

First of all thank you for the best, most beautiful and most immersive MMO there is to date.

To accommodate a larger subscriber base and ensure that your game tailors to all playstyles, I have a suggestion:

Make all instances that relate to the main epic storyline book quests have an option at the door for [Solo], [Small Fellowship 2 to 3] and full Group [4 to 6] and have the instance difficulty scale to the choice. Solo gives Normal difficulty. Small group makes them all Signature difficulty and full group is the way it is now.

Even as a level 49 Rogue and Level 49 Minstrel, our duo CANNOT complete the elite instance where you have to fight with Legolas and it's grey con to us, because it's designed for a large six group in mind. People who only want to play as couples or one or two real life friends are far more the majority than pick up groupers I believe and if you make this happen I guarantee your subscriber base will double when people learn of this.

You can make the xp and rewards less by not letting any loot drop at all and take an XP hit, we don't care, we're here for the immersion and storyline, so to those of us who just want to enjoy the story we do not mind losing out on the dropped rewards. We pay the same 15 dollars a month as people who play in full groups do and think it is only right that we are accomodated as well.

[Kickapoo]

Some good comments and feedback above...


Well, I'm happy the dev team is looking critically at the game combat system and taking the future into account; I'd rather have adjustments be made now rather than needing to take a hatchet to the system in the future... a system that we would have been entirely too familir with by then to accept major changes.

[Beloth]

If this isa required for the future of the game, both for complexity and hard cap avoidance, thin isn't it time to stop the jinglejanglemixedbag approach to item stats?

How the hell are us stupid people ever going to figure out what the heck we need to keep and equip/ need to keep and save for specific instance/ need to keep and save for raid, and the go ahead and sell, when the frikkin' stats are in GD .0000% increments, and NO TWO of the same piece of equipments have the same 'base stat' contenuity?

A lvl 10 Shoulder Pads may have A, B and C stats, but the lvl 14 Shoulder Pads have G, K, O and Z stats!

How the hell are we supposed to figure this out?

This is getting rediculous.

[Knapsack]

If this isa required for the future of the game, both for complexity and hard cap avoidance, thin isn't it time to stop the jinglejanglemixedbag approach to item stats?

It does sorta run counter to formulaic approaches to game play and min maxing I suppose.

How the hell are us stupid people ever going to figure out what the heck we need to keep and equip/ need to keep and save for specific instance/ need to keep and save for raid, and the go ahead and sell, when the frikkin' stats are in GD .0000% increments, and NO TWO of the same piece of equipments have the same 'base stat' contenuity?

Keep what both looks best to you and plays well?

A lvl 10 Shoulder Pads may have A, B and C stats, but the lvl 14 Shoulder Pads have G, K, O and Z stats!

How the hell are we supposed to figure this out?

Maybe it isn't supposed to be figured out?

This is getting rediculous.

I know! This thread had been sleeping peacefully for five months but you found and awakened it somehow.


Perhaps we should take cover?

[Beloth]

...

I know! This thread had been sleeping peacefully for five months but you found and awakened it somehow.
...

No matter what anyone says there is always some 'snootysack' ready to pounce and sneer.

This is the official thread pointed to regarding the current changes from Book 7...
I see now it was mistakenly linked to the new article.
Thanks for your condesention, and snotty attitude.

So much for the forum 'housekeeping' they did a couple of weeks back, eh?

[Knapsack]

No matter what anyone says there is always some 'snootysack' ready to pounce and sneer.

So for some reason you felt a need to construe your image of me into a derogatory caricature. Does it make you feel more comfortable to imagine me your inferior? If so, have you ever wondered why would that be?

This is the official thread pointed to regarding the current changes from Book 7...
I see now it was mistakenly linked to the new article.
Thanks for your condesention, and snotty attitude.

You have pretty well earned it, bud.

[Beloth]

So for some reason you felt a need to construe your image of me into a derogatory caricature. Does it make you feel more comfortable to imagine me your inferior? If so, have you ever wondered why would that be?...

I didn't say you were inferior, just that you have a snotty attitude.
Guilty conscience?