Is the goal truly PvX?

Post by Azherae on 2022-11-02 02:14:57

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And I addressed this point. Even when you come to the top, there's gonna be people doing their best to take you down. And if the game's design allows that, you gonna have a tough time being at the top. L2's private servers rarely allow that, which is why I've had cases where some people were completely unbeatable, but Ashes could design their classes in such a way that there are no unbeatable player opponents. RPS design will definitely help with that.

And when you then apply the zerg potential to the equation, you have yourself a never-ending fight for dominance. And in PvE you don't really have that kind of fight. Well, you do, but it's just a "fight" against rng and more about your ability to react/adapt to sudden changes in the encounter rather than a more wholistic skillset of controlling your enemy, knowing their reactions, triggering those reactions at correct times rather than just reacting yourself, and changing your party/raid composition to properly address your enemy's changes in composition (be it an increase in numbers or a changeup in classes).

Btw, were there any EQ2 bosses that changed their mechanics between fights so completely that they required a different set of classes or gear? That is, not while you were trying to figure out how to beat the boss, but after that.

There are many assumptions in this response that don't apply. It would take long to detail them all and derail yet another thread into 'You haven't actually fought hard PvE yet'.

But I can tell you that FFXI has multiple bosses where 'Which party composition you need to take to it depends on the weather, time of day, and which day of the week it is in game'.

Some depend on 'has anyone else killed this other boss recently'.

Very few, but some, are 'what phase of the Moon is it?'

Sometimes these things are entirely emergent, in ways I can barely even begin to describe. But things like:

"Ok it's Darksday so we have to bring a different Tank, but we can bring a different healer and we don't need the Bard for it on Darksday." are a thing.

And those don't always even depend on the BOSS changing. If the boss also changes (which they do), you have to factor it. To the point of 'KILL IT BEFORE SUNRISE, WE DON'T HAVE THE PERSON WE NEED TO BEAT IT IN THE DAYTIME'. And then realizing you can't kill it before sunrise because the weather just changed and your Black Mage's best spells all got 10% damage reduction.

RIP.

Post by Ludullu on 2022-11-02 02:28:39

There are many assumptions in this response that don't apply. It would take long to detail them all and derail yet another thread into 'You haven't actually fought hard PvE yet'.

But I can tell you that FFXI has multiple bosses where 'Which party composition you need to take to it depends on the weather, time of day, and which day of the week it is in game'.
So that just balances out the pvp side of everchanging enemies.

But am I wrong in equating a mass of players with boss rng? Noaani said that he considers mass pvp being the high end pvp content in an mmo (and I agree). With mass pvp you gotta know how to control your enemies on a granular scale, because some parties might not react to your baiting or might overreact and your slight bait would lead to a few deaths on your side which makes you overextend to res them, and so on and so on.

Obviously you can agro the boss and/or its adds, but unless the boss has rng agro stages/abilities/triggers - you'd be able to fully control the boss, which would let you do other things to the boss like maybe triggering new mechanics or just better react to incoming ones.

And I know that you've said that people can be controlled too, but from my experience out of, say, 50 people at the front of a moving crowd of enemies maybe 10-20 might do the same thing, while the other 30 will react in different ways. And then their counterreactions to your reaction would also be different because some of them might not be as well-coordinated with their PL and GL, so their responses are staggered which leads to pickoffs which leads to overextensions.

The flow of the battle can become quite chaotic even when you're attempting to properly control it. To me that sounds like a high end pve encounter. Am I wrong in that assumption?

Post by Azherae on 2022-11-02 02:37:34

There are many assumptions in this response that don't apply. It would take long to detail them all and derail yet another thread into 'You haven't actually fought hard PvE yet'.

But I can tell you that FFXI has multiple bosses where 'Which party composition you need to take to it depends on the weather, time of day, and which day of the week it is in game'.
So that just balances out the pvp side of everchanging enemies.

But am I wrong in equating a mass of players with boss rng? Noaani said that he considers mass pvp being the high end pvp content in an mmo (and I agree). With mass pvp you gotta know how to control your enemies on a granular scale, because some parties might not react to your baiting or might overreact and your slight bait would lead to a few deaths on your side which makes you overextend to res them, and so on and so on.

Obviously you can agro the boss and/or its adds, but unless the boss has rng agro stages/abilities/triggers - you'd be able to fully control the boss, which would let you do other things to the boss like maybe triggering new mechanics or just better react to incoming ones.

And I know that you've said that people can be controlled too, but from my experience out of, say, 50 people at the front of a moving crowd of enemies maybe 10-20 might do the same thing, while the other 30 will react in different ways. And then their counterreactions to your reaction would also be different because some of them might not be as well-coordinated with their PL and GL, so their responses are staggered which leads to pickoffs which leads to overextensions.

The flow of the battle can become quite chaotic even when you're attempting to properly control it. To me that sounds like a high end pve encounter. Am I wrong in that assumption?

You are.

For a reason that most will consider insulting or arrogant.

What you've described only happens if your opponents suck.

High end PvP is very mechanical.

An opponent 'doing something poorly' or 'reacting strangely' is nearly NEVER a reason to change your strategy. That's why you get those 'unbeatable people' in some games. They have learned 'the strategy that basically does not lose', but they're not even THINKING about you when they execute it.

Some people can do this in 16v16 combat. Some can go higher than that.

You see chaos, I don't. I see 'headless chickens' and switch to 'rounding up the chickens' mode, which doesn't require as much thought either.

Once again, top end gamers are INSANE and they are generally NOT doing or even thinking in the way that most people believe they are. So, complex PvE is added to push them more. Top end League players for example think so differently that they can't always even remember/understand why certain things are possible in the lower tiers of play.

It is possible for a thing that seems like a useful tool for a very long time while in the mid-levels to be 100% always a bad idea against a skilled enough opponent who has frame-perfect timing. And games WITHOUT frame-perfect timings literally make it so that those people don't even have to stress while doing it.

Post by Ludullu on 2022-11-02 02:53:11

An opponent 'doing something poorly' or 'reacting strangely' is nearly NEVER a reason to change your strategy. That's why you get those 'unbeatable people' in some games. They have learned 'the strategy that basically does not lose', but they're not even THINKING about you when they execute it.

Some people can do this in 16v16 combat. Some can go higher than that.

You see chaos, I don't. I see 'headless chickens' and switch to 'rounding up the chickens' mode, which doesn't require as much thought either.

Once again, top end gamers are INSANE and they are generally NOT doing or even thinking in the way that most people believe they are. So, complex PvE is added to push them more. Top end League players for example think so differently that they can't always even remember/understand why certain things are possible in the lower tiers of play.
So this is where we come back to Noaani's argument of "someone can always bring more people". How many "you"s are there in the mmo genre? And how many people can they realistically kill in 1v5-7 per each one of "you" fights.

I don't doubt that there're insanely skilled players out there and I'm sure they'd be able to beat a ton of people (like I said, I've seen that happen, though usually through overgearing on top of their skill, rather than pure skill). But what would be the limit?

PvE limits the amount of insane people you could bring to the encounter, while owpvp doesn't. And when we talk about subjective winning sides, the entirety of the zerg would've been attempting the hardest pvp content all up until they'd turn into a zerg big enough to overpower those "insane ones". At which point the insane ones would have to come up with ways to beat the zerg, which would now be a challenge to them and the difficulty of the challenge would depend on the quality and size of the zerg.

And another example I know from L2's history is of a highly skilled and geared party that broke off of the strongest guild on the official servers (pretty much pinnacle of L2's power scaling), made their own guild with a few other strong parties and started standing up to their original guild. And they were managing to win fights.

So again, even when you're at the top - someone will come for you in some shape or form. This is why I think that PvP can still be as difficult as PvE. It's just a different kind of difficult. Leading and tearing apart a zerg until they all die is somewhat different from trying to control a boss agro and managing his mechanics and abilities.

Though maybe I'm missing a yet another FF11 or EQ2 boss, where you had to pretty much fight a "zerg boss" with 40 mechanics and a 100 attacks of different kinds :D

Post by Azherae on 2022-11-02 03:08:54

An opponent 'doing something poorly' or 'reacting strangely' is nearly NEVER a reason to change your strategy. That's why you get those 'unbeatable people' in some games. They have learned 'the strategy that basically does not lose', but they're not even THINKING about you when they execute it.

Some people can do this in 16v16 combat. Some can go higher than that.

You see chaos, I don't. I see 'headless chickens' and switch to 'rounding up the chickens' mode, which doesn't require as much thought either.

Once again, top end gamers are INSANE and they are generally NOT doing or even thinking in the way that most people believe they are. So, complex PvE is added to push them more. Top end League players for example think so differently that they can't always even remember/understand why certain things are possible in the lower tiers of play.
So this is where we come back to Noaani's argument of "someone can always bring more people". How many "you"s are there in the mmo genre? And how many people can they realistically kill in 1v5-7 per each one of "you" fights.

I don't doubt that there're insanely skilled players out there and I'm sure they'd be able to beat a ton of people (like I said, I've seen that happen, though usually through overgearing on top of their skill, rather than pure skill). But what would be the limit?

PvE limits the amount of insane people you could bring to the encounter, while owpvp doesn't. And when we talk about subjective winning sides, the entirety of the zerg would've been attempting the hardest pvp content all up until they'd turn into a zerg big enough to overpower those "insane ones". At which point the insane ones would have to come up with ways to beat the zerg, which would now be a challenge to them and the difficulty of the challenge would depend on the quality and size of the zerg.

And another example I know from L2's history is of a highly skilled and geared party that broke off of the strongest guild on the official servers (pretty much pinnacle of L2's power scaling), made their own guild with a few other strong parties and started standing up to their original guild. And they were managing to win fights.

So again, even when you're at the top - someone will come for you in some shape or form. This is why I think that PvP can still be as difficult as PvE. It's just a different kind of difficult. Leading and tearing apart a zerg until they all die is somewhat different from trying to control a boss agro and managing his mechanics and abilities.

Though maybe I'm missing a yet another FF11 or EQ2 boss, where you had to pretty much fight a "zerg boss" with 40 mechanics and a 100 attacks of different kinds :D

You are.

I don't really have a point to further make here.

I just don't agree that 'being outnumbered' is difficulty, because I'm a programmer.

I know there comes a point where you CANNOT do it. The code offers no way to do it.

I'm telling you that the top end gamers hit the 'code's limit' relatively easily. Zergs just bring that limit DOWN more in online games because latency is a thing.

The greatest enemy of a top Online fighting game/FPS player is the speed of light itself . Second is 'the amount of time their monitor takes to render the information received from VRAM'.

Anything less, they usually overcome about 3-6 months in. Some can do it in days. Xiaohai can do it in TWENTY MINUTES.

PvE can go beyond aspects of this because PvE only has the code limit on one side, and it's easier to get around it on that side (this is speaking from the Machine Code level of programming). Human input requires an input device.

If you want balance in PvP, you're not getting a higher challenge than PvE. If you don't mind throwing out balance entirely and allowing Kara cancels and Option Selects, you can get close, but then those would work in PvE too.

All PvE is dumbed down to be possible to non-superhumans. Adding more numbers to the PvP also dumbs it down unless you don't care about balance.

Post by Azherae on 2022-11-02 03:21:32

Actually I think I know how to explain this, it MIGHT be the answer to your confusion.

There are things in hard PvE that the average player, if not TOLD or SHOWN that it is done, will conclude that they are PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE.

You don't get a lot of success in gaming these days by making things that the majority of people conclude 'this is physically impossible to do'. You give them something, you make it weaker, you give them gear to help, you give them power to overcome it faster so that they can win by luck.

The level at which most players conclude 'this is impossible to do' is the level where I start to pay attention.

Two levels higher is where I start to have fun.

Four levels more is where I start to think 'this is physically impossible for me to do if I don't practice for four months'. Which is also the point where a friend of mine starts to have fun.

I'm not saying that PvP is not all the things you said. I'm saying that PvE often goes way beyond that, but how would one even convince the average person 'this is where I start to enjoy it' after they've concluded that there 'must be another way' because the game cannot possibly expect a human being to do it?

Post by Calibix on 2022-11-02 03:22:32

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Post by Noaani on 2022-11-02 07:52:57

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Post by Beyolf on 2022-11-02 08:03:11

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Post by Noaani on 2022-11-02 08:23:19

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Post by Voxtrium on 2022-11-02 16:48:58

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Post by Azherae on 2022-11-02 17:02:20

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It is because of exactly this type of response and the usual attitude underneath it, that there is a problematic disconnect within competitive gaming.

One does not have to be the top to UNDERSTAND how the top works. Both 'denying them' and 'trying to bring them down' fails because there is no way to do that from this stance. A lot of the time, people who think they are average could be MUCH closer to top than they are if they actually understood what the top was doing instead of having this reaction type.

I'm not saying I'm elite, I'm not even saying that I would be better than you at any given game, particularly not Ashes.

But the number of people like me is not THAT small, they just don't normally play MMOs because MMOs are generally unrewarding. So you're right on that front. If the genre keeps churning out content that is meant to be cleared by people who don't like any of the things I like, then obviously I won't play those games.

Whether or not that's a good thing is entirely subjective towards what a given person enjoys.

I do recognize that you are being hyperbolic, but what good is it? I'm not sure if this post makes you feel better through venting, or is just random 'fun' because you didn't feel like engaging, or if I touched a nerve somehow.

Post by Voxtrium on 2022-11-02 17:08:53

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Post by Azherae on 2022-11-02 17:11:40

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Most of this doesn't match my experience.

"If you already did the encounter at least once you already know everything about the encounter" - not in the games I play.

"In PvP there is much more stuff that needs to be learned." - Also not true. I would elaborate here but I usually get the 'Fighting Games aren't MMOs' response, which is correct because MMOs are almost always less complicated.

"Execution of the mechanics is more challenging" - nope.

"Raids in the modern age" - Assume that if I am talking, and I BET that when Noaani is talking, this isn't what is being talked about.

"Another thing is that in PvP you can design different objectives which lead to "winning" in a lot of different ways, while in PvE the objective is 1 kill the boss and you dont have different ways of killing the boss than executing the mechanics correctly." - I once again feel sorrow at the state of the genre if this is the experience of most players. I will continue to hope that Ashes can live up to the standards of the MMOs of Yore so that people can have an experience beyond this.

Bonus for NiKr so this post isn't just counterpoints.

Post by Mag7spy on 2022-11-02 17:50:07

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Post by Noaani on 2022-11-02 18:55:23

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Post by Noaani on 2022-11-02 18:59:10

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Post by Calibix on 2022-11-02 19:40:44

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Post by Azherae on 2022-11-02 19:43:31

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You should define it, probably. No point in having people bring a bunch of examples that you then say don't count.

And it has definitely been a long time since MMOs made proper dynamic content. The last time we tried to have this discussion with someone it was just:

"Those games are too old, no one plays them."

Can we count on you to not do that and actually address the specifics of the encounter?

EDIT: since these discussions always end up back here ...

Post by Arya_Yeshe on 2022-11-02 19:44:39

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Post by Azherae on 2022-11-02 19:57:27

https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Vulkodlac

Well, I have a LITTLE time so here's a minor something. This isn't a 40 man raid, for that you'd have to go back to

https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Jormungand

All mobs in this game have a meter for their larger special attacks (but not spells).

Boss mobs often have this meter passively rise, but it also rises by 10% of a required 1000 to do an attack every time anyone hits it, including with damaging magic. Normally this doesn't mean it just does the moves constantly even with a lot of people hitting it, but the move may be more powerful if the meter is higher depending on what it is.

The move done is chosen mostly-randomly, with OCCASIONAL bosses that have either a nonstandard preference (as mentioned there) or 'use specific very powerful nearly-unstoppable ones if they get high meter'.

You can stun these attacks but if you do, 90% of the time the METER REMAINS, so you can 'stun the megadeath move' and then it just randomly choose that one again and now it will be even stronger and probably someone's stun is on cooldown.

It takes forever to explain the sort of encounter being discussed here because the nature of a Dynamic encounter is that it cannot be discussed in that way because it is not scripted .

So, there's two.

I have about 400 more if you like.

Post by Calibix on 2022-11-02 19:58:24

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