Slowing down combat

Qwyn

Aetolia did an overall slowdown. Everything (in theory) got a % reduction to cooldowns, making combat x percentage slower. One issue they experienced is that certain things, like wake speed and aeon, didn't get the same slowdown treatment, so entire kill routes were ruined. Beyond those outliers, it was fairly seamless and unnoticeable - there was a transition period where players had to internally adjust to the change, but after that, it was fine.

Dochitha

Combat resolves around reflexes and knowledge. Reflexes be it code or muscle memory. You can't account for all situations even with automation, hence knowledge and muscle memory and experience kicks in. That won't change even if combat is slowed down. 

Personally I don't learn combat while fighting. I learn from reading log after the fight and making adjustment. With that I can learn at my own pace, train my reflexes and go in again hoping for improvement, rinse repeat. 

Tecton

Interesting idea - we do have a practice arena mode already, which is intended to show you a lot more information and ease the transition into PvP combat.

Not sure if we'd be able to do a true "slowed down" version of combat, due to how many things are balanced around the base times, but I'll ponder it some when time permits and see if there's some solution we could come up with there.

Qwyn

@tecton - semi-tangential, but one great thing for PK practice Aet has is sparring rooms. This is absolutely amazing for trying out skills and practicing combat. What can we do to get these as org-upgrades in Achaea?

Trevize

Qwyn said:

@tecton - semi-tangential, but one great thing for PK practice Aet has is sparring rooms. This is absolutely amazing for trying out skills and practicing combat. What can we do to get these as org-upgrades in Achaea?

What does those do? We have arenas, and you can challenge someone to practice, which shows what other people are afflicted with/cure/etc.

Qwyn

Basically, they let you try skills out without fear of death, outside of the hassle of arena. There's no formal initiation, so other players are free to drop in and contribute and leave, there's no fee, etc. Basically it's a guild/house/city room where you get to test out skills and if someone dies they instantly rez with no loss.

Amranu

A lot of people in this thread think combat needs to slow down because they don't know what is happening.

Slowing down combat is not going to suddenly increase your knowledge, you're still not going to know what's happening if you don't know what your opponent can do.

Aepas

A lot of people do feel that way yes. I don't originally think that is the problem though. 

As I stated I don't think it's really about understanding what is going on, but instead having some of the finger speed to manual things out. I've noted things like auto-envenom trackers, auto-curse trackers or smart offences that can essentially make your choices for you. Shaman is one of the main classes that seems to need this. While it's not mandatory you're going to benefit a lot more from it. 

I think that a somewhat slowed down pace would assist more in helping keep people from having to rely on this kind of automation. Will automation still happen? sure. But will a few extra milliseconds balanced through combat help a person make a more informed choice and chose the correct attack rather than having a computer do it? I think so.  That's the key really, its just my opinion. Partly because I enjoyed combat much more five or so years ago when balance times were in fact, generally slower on many attacks. 

My general opinion on combat is something along these lines:

If I'm attempting to chase balance for an attack, and rebounding suddenly comes up but I still hit it, I should suffer that consequence because I as the player did not accurately anticipate, and change to a raze attack.
A quick trigger and a good ping though, will negate this.

With most people having a reflexive time of around 170-230ms (based on an article I just looked up but didn't check any sources), if you do something wrong, but your ping is lower than your physical reflexes, your system(not you) has just saved you from botching your attack. 

TL:DR would like to see speeds slow enough that they can more properly appeal to simple alias instead of tables and scripts. 

Tael

Amranu said:

A lot of people in this thread think combat needs to slow down because they don't know what is happening.

Slowing down combat is not going to suddenly increase your knowledge, you're still not going to know what's happening if you don't know what your opponent can do.

A lot of people in this thread also think combat needs to slow down because it's really fast.

I know the messages and effects of probably pretty close to every ability in the game. But combat is just too fast for me to keep up with the messages. When I was practicing a fair amount, it started to get slightly better since you learn to recognize the different messages with less and less reading, but in general many classes spam so fast that I've always had to rely on a lot of highlights and automation to keep up with things. And it's definitely gotten more and more extreme as more classes ended up with more simultaneous actions and independent balances and passive effects and all that. The amount of text generated by most class's offenses has definitely trended up over time.

I know serpent very well - I played it for years and, while I'm not in any sense good at combat, I know how serpent combat works. But when hypnosis afflictions are going off while ridiculously fast dstabs are flying out and the snake is biting, it's a lot of spam, then add in your own offense and your curing and crucial lines are flying into scrollback pretty damn quickly. It becomes pretty easy to miss crucial lines that tell you what kind of strategy they're using and what you need to do to defend yourself. Not only are there things that you have a very limited amount of time to react to, there are things that you ostensibly have a less limited amount of time to react to, but things you end up having a very limited amount of time to see the thing that's supposed to serve as the warning.

There are probably a lot of people who don't know what their opponent can do and slowing down combat won't help with that, but there are also absolutely people for whom the problem really is about the speed at which combat happens and the sheer rapidity with which the spam flows across your screen.

Antonius

If only modern clients had the ability to colour lines and output text and delete lines. That might make things easier to spot.

Kiet

Antonius said:

If only modern clients had the ability to colour lines and output text and delete lines. That might make things easier to spot.

Almost no new player is going to walk into achaean combat, be told this, and go 'oh yes this is super fun and better than <any other competitive videogame'. Almost everyone I've tried to introduce to achaea has quit because either credits are too expensive or they don't want to deal with an absurd coding system because combat is too fast to keep up with otherwise.

Aepas

Antonius said:

If only modern clients had the ability to colour lines and output text and delete lines. That might make things easier to spot.

For the days when you don't really want to play achaea but instead play "A unicorn is vomiting rainbows across my screen"

It's fine and grand that you can do all that, but it's still on each person to be able to do that and pretty much points to a bit of a design flaw. 

Kayeil

Antonius said:

If only modern clients had the ability to colour lines and output text and delete lines. That might make things easier to spot.

Even though we can do all that, it's still pretty fast for people. I've cut down hunting spam on the areas I frequent, and it's still a quick pace, though no where near as bad as combat. Everyone processes things differently and at different rates. Everyone picks up on different cues, too. Just like everyone learns differently. Some people can learn very well from reading a log. I struggle from learning from logs. I need to see something in action, and even better if I can try it out myself to see how something works and why it works that way.

Mami

Antonius said:

If only modern clients had the ability to colour lines and output text and delete lines. That might make things easier to spot. Mami response: I know. I didn't realise people expected to read the messages. I have bad vision so I guessed I would just set up simple echoes/colouring/background colours to replace default messages and learn that way.

But I feel @Aepas' issue with it because of my older ping being around his. I am just not sure if it matters significantly enough on fights because I never learned. 

Arador

A half speed mode would be awesome for learning especially in affliction momentum combat. Speed never bothered me in limb prep combat. You hit a limb till the numbers are right, then you execute a combo, usually designed to allow for minimal escape paths. But in affliction combat you need to react all the time. And it is very likely that 0.5 seconds can make a massive difference to how well you stack.

Exelethril

Maybe someone could make an Achaea combat tutorial video on Youtube?

I just checked again and my sparring video has 882 views, dafuq  O.o

Aepas

Arador said:

A half speed mode would be awesome for learning especially in affliction momentum combat. Speed never bothered me in limb prep combat. You hit a limb till the numbers are right, then you execute a combo, usually designed to allow for minimal escape paths. But in affliction combat you need to react all the time. And it is very likely that 0.5 seconds can make a massive difference to how well you stack.

Exelethril said:

Maybe someone could make an Achaea combat tutorial video on Youtube?

I just checked again and my sparring video has 882 views, dafuq  O.o

While I still see that people don't fully understand some concepts of combat it's really not the point behind the idea of slowing down combat.

Elowin

Trevize said:

Qwyn said:

@tecton - semi-tangential, but one great thing for PK practice Aet has is sparring rooms. This is absolutely amazing for trying out skills and practicing combat. What can we do to get these as org-upgrades in Achaea?

What does those do? We have arenas, and you can challenge someone to practice, which shows what other people are afflicted with/cure/etc.

Let's you practice things like rift-locks, which you can't in the arena reliably, since 'eaten' cures don't disappear.

Anaria

Kiet said:

Antonius said:

If only modern clients had the ability to colour lines and output text and delete lines. That might make things easier to spot.

Almost no new player is going to walk into achaean combat, be told this, and go 'oh yes this is super fun and better than <any other competitive videogame'. Almost everyone I've tried to introduce to achaea has quit because either credits are too expensive or they don't want to deal with an absurd coding system because combat is too fast to keep up with otherwise.

I came to Achaea in 2014 with around ten other players. We migrated over from a dying mud with a corrupt admin that doesn't really need to be named. By late summer of 2015, I was the only member of the group still playing. 

Everyone else I know gave up on Achaea either because the price of credits was too high, making advancement an absolute misery, or the coding requirement when they tried to get involved in the fun part of the game was simply too daunting. And while I have always stunk at PK, quite a few of those players I'm mentioning were past masters on multiple other games and quite willing to learn. They just didn't want to deal with having to code or spend years of grinding for entry level artefacts/skills. They also didn't want to drop large sums of real cash on the game before they were really invested in it.

Achaea would be much stronger and probably retain more players if these two aspects received some form of relief and attention. I'm not saying that slowing down combat is necessarily the correct answer, but I do feel something needs to be done.

Cooper

These things have already been addressed, though you might be unaware.

Server side curing alleviated most of the necessity to code to defend yourself.

No Brainer lesson + credit packages mean you have to spend very little to be competitive skill wise.

Iron Realms Elite means you can spend little + slowly build your character without grinding too much.

It hasn't ever been easier to skill and level your character. Probably 5x as easy as it was 5 years ago.

Froh

Kiet said:

Valkyn said:

Slowed down would be great. Decisions that require .2s reaction speed when your Ping is .2-.3 are just ugh. I can't react that fast, but even if I could my internet would let me down. 

To be honest, let's not go with hyperbole. There are no decisions that require .2s reaction speed in Achaea on a regular basis. The fastest reaction speed you really need is Shaman, and that's still a whole second in general (given average human reaction time is .2-.3 seconds + .3 seconds of lag, that's pretty doable).

Let's look at something really simple, not even PVP.

Say you've got a 2.0 second bashing attach.  Work out the dps difference between 0.0 s and 0.2s packet delay, and then factor in machine reflexes vs human reflexes.

Or how many rooms you can flee in how many seconds if things go bad.  Or when someone hostile to you enters the room, your attack/flee or his attack/flee processes first.

It's not negligible.  Yes, automation can compensate, to a certain extent.

Szanthax

Froh said:

Kiet said:

Valkyn said:

Slowed down would be great. Decisions that require .2s reaction speed when your Ping is .2-.3 are just ugh. I can't react that fast, but even if I could my internet would let me down. 

To be honest, let's not go with hyperbole. There are no decisions that require .2s reaction speed in Achaea on a regular basis. The fastest reaction speed you really need is Shaman, and that's still a whole second in general (given average human reaction time is .2-.3 seconds + .3 seconds of lag, that's pretty doable).

Let's look at something really simple, not even PVP.

Say you've got a 2.0 second bashing attach.  Work out the dps difference between 0.0 s and 0.2s packet delay, and then factor in machine reflexes vs human reflexes.

Or how many rooms you can flee in how many seconds if things go bad.  Or when someone hostile to you enters the room, your attack/flee or his attack/flee processes first.

It's not negligible.  Yes, automation can compensate, to a certain extent.

Curious what the average length of a battle is.. like not a long drawn out battle.. but a normal battle. lasts...

Kiet

Froh said:

Kiet said:

Valkyn said:

Slowed down would be great. Decisions that require .2s reaction speed when your Ping is .2-.3 are just ugh. I can't react that fast, but even if I could my internet would let me down. 

To be honest, let's not go with hyperbole. There are no decisions that require .2s reaction speed in Achaea on a regular basis. The fastest reaction speed you really need is Shaman, and that's still a whole second in general (given average human reaction time is .2-.3 seconds + .3 seconds of lag, that's pretty doable).

Let's look at something really simple, not even PVP.

Say you've got a 2.0 second bashing attach.  Work out the dps difference between 0.0 s and 0.2s packet delay, and then factor in machine reflexes vs human reflexes.

Or how many rooms you can flee in how many seconds if things go bad.  Or when someone hostile to you enters the room, your attack/flee or his attack/flee processes first.

It's not negligible.  Yes, automation can compensate, to a certain extent.

Queue system compensates entirely for that.

Valkyn

No, it doesn't. It helps, but only with things you can predict you're going to need to use before you need to use them. Otherwise you're adding your ping to your reaction time.

Dochitha

Go to the sea. PVP or PVE, the speed is pretty good.

Kiet

Valkyn said:

No, it doesn't. It helps, but only with things you can predict you're going to need to use before you need to use them. Otherwise you're adding your ping to your reaction time.

His example was just for bashing/dps--there's no situation where bashing dps isn't predictable.

Valkyn

Kiet said:

Valkyn said:

No, it doesn't. It helps, but only with things you can predict you're going to need to use before you need to use them. Otherwise you're adding your ping to your reaction time.

His example was just for bashing/dps--there's no situation where bashing dps isn't predictable.

This is a discussion on combat? I figured it was just that... an example. Of course queue makes up for it in bashing, that's great. This discussion isn't on bashing though!

Kiet

I'm just pointing out it's a horrible example! Why bring bashing into a combat discussion, when bashing is largely ping-independent?

Jarrod

One of the main concerns would be running in a slower system.

Hypothetically you hit someone with an attack that has 2s balance and will kill/lock them on the next hit, halfway through that balance they get out of the room and you see them run. 1s later you chase them and get that final hit in.

Now, in hypothetical slow Achaea, you hit with 4s balance attack with the same conditional, now they have 2s to run when they escape halfway through balance (because everything would have to be multiplied by the same amount so proportionally their escape would happen at the same 'time'). Are you going to limit people to X rooms every 2s before hasty instead of 1s? Another situation is that retardation would be nerfed unless the sluggish delay was 2 seconds.

Personally, the problem of movement is enough for me to disagree with this. I hate playing alts without celerity, it would be way worse if they slowed movement down.

Antonius

You'd also have to slow down denizen attacks so they're not out of proportion to curing balances. If you're attacking less frequently everything would take longer to kill and your experience gained per unit of time would drop. Plenty of people don't like PvE much as it is, imagine if it suddenly took twice as long to gain X%.