Hi!
This topic is directed to the devs, as I would like to get an aswer from them, but I fear if I write a PM or something like that I could end up ignored, so perhaps, if the community shares some interest in my questions, it could make you give us a proper answer.
The question is quite easy:
How do you want cRPG to be like?
I ask this in terms of general gameplay and more or less even "genre". Like "what is your shooter supposed to be like? Like Counter Strike, almost entirely skill based? Or like Raven Shield, more tactical? Or like Unreal Tournament, arcade like? Or do you want something completely different, like Global Agenda, which is more or less a World of Warcraft shooter."
Do you want to reward players for good skills? Or for good teamplay? Or both? In which relation? How far do you want to incorporate those "indifferent casual" players?
I ask this because I think cRPG has achieved quite a good state in terms of fighting with the different classes, and although there are a few minor issues and imbalances left, the game is pretty much playable. But in my eyes this can be improved further.
Flaming, whining, complaining and trolling belongs to cRPG more than to any other game I know. And in my eyes you maneuvered yourself into a vicious circle of nerfing, where any further step forward would make things worse than better. And I guess I found one source of the problems to balance items properly:
One important aspect of balancing:
You have two aspects to concern: the average player performance (APP) with an item, and the best performance possible (BPP) with a class/item.
BOTH of those aspects need to be balanced, for every class.
If you keep the BPP on the same level like the other classes, but the APP is much lower for some reason, you will have less players playing that class and thus less players reaching the BPP level, making the class looking UP.
If the APP would be on the same level like with the other classes, but the BPP would be lower than the rest, all veteran players would sooner or later changing the class, which would lead to a similar development.
On the other hand you can't balance an APP below average with a superior BPP, following the logic of "it is difficult to master, but once mastered incredibly effective". This system is only balanced for the particular player who spent time mastering the class, but not balanced for the rest of the game. It would be unfair for those who prefer to play the other classes for some reason and also achieved mastership, yet being less effective than the first class because... well... they chose the wrong class? On the other hand it would make all players, who only want to maximize their performance end up playing that one particular class, which can't be good either.
The opposite system of "this class is fairly effective even for noobs, but in return you will never be really effective with it" doesn't work, too. Only noobs would play the class, next to a few idealistic veterans, making the class a noob class, with a lot of bad and only few good players.This is why the APP and the BPP of all classes always need to be on the same level.
And this is where I see the core problem of cRPG. Because the APP is less dependant on skill than most would expect, it's also heavily dependant on knowledge and the right behaviour. And this is why cRPG fails to achieve final balance, and constantly has problems balancing the other classes in relation to infantry. It's because infantry has a lower APP than the other classes, due to simple lack of knowledge. Otherwise you wouldn't have autowalkers being killed by cavalry after spawning every single fucking round. The success of infantry depends more on the performance of its enemy than of any other class. That's why it depends more on "secondary" skills like knowledge to be effective. If the average knowledge of infantry players would increase, the class wouldn't seem so UP in many situations any more. Cavalry made by far the most kills and was dominating the servers before the last patch, although they were not considerably buffed or something like that. It could have lead to the conclusion that cav was OP, but it was not. Infantry was stupid and played like lemmings, making it easy for cav.
Short: moving the APP closer to the BPP does not only make balancing easier, I think the general gameplay benefits from it.
Now how can this problem be solved?
I see three possible solutions, and if they got combined I guess the effect would be even better:
1.: Better access to the mod for new players
2.: Implementing a good commander system
3.: Replacing battle mode with another, similar game mode
1.: Better access to the mod for new players
I think in this matter you can take new players like children. What they learn during their first steps will determine the rest of their life. Currently they don't learn anything. All they see is you get better skills and better equipment, like in single player, so they assume the goal of the game is to reach the single player end game where you slaughter hundreds of bots in plate armour with your superior skills, with the only difference that it's real players and not bots you are killing, making you feel even more awesome. This game is about killing people. I think this is one source of the enormous amount of lemmings on the servers. They approach the game with wrong impressions, and create bad habits.
This can be dealt with easily by implementing a few introduction pages before being able to download the launcher or creating a character. If you would read "Warning! This mod is not only about killing others, it's about making your team win!" before downloading it, you would approach it with a completely different attitude. A few easily accessable (main page, character page) tutorial videos which are presented properly ("You will not have fun in this mod or kill anybody unless you realized the things told in this video") could change a lot. Just make them entertaining, fun and short, and you can teach people a lot of good behaviours, which some veteran players haven't developed until today yet.
2.: Implementing a good commander system
There is not much to say about. Find a system which determines a commander, best would be without needing active participation of the players on the servers (ignorance, still can be fought by a good access to the game like "when joining a server make sure you have a commander. If he is good, you will be more successful, level up faster and gain more gold, and last but not least scoring more kills. If you want to be successful, elect a commander"), and every player needs to be in this command system by default. They can leave it, but it is important that they don't need to join it actively. (Again, i want to get the indifferent players, too). The commander should be able to place different flags like "attack here" "defend" or "stay away!", have an own chat colour, and most important, being able to write big messages over the center of the screen like "Attack!" "Fall back!" or "Cavalry behind!". Another important part is to reward players for following orders by small amounts of gold and/or XP, to create a motivation for players who are indifferent about tactics but like to develop their character faster. Don't make it more than one or two generations more would bring per map.
I know many of you players don't like following the orders of someone else, but like I said, you are always free to leave the command system, not seeing any flags or messages on your screen. It's just that some classes need more teamplay than others, and this should be taken into account to make the game balanced and fair.
Summary:
Implement a command system with...
... commanders being elected with a little active play participation needed as possible
... every player having it activated by default
... the commander being able to place flags and write screen messages
... players being rewarded for following orders
... players always being allowed to deactivate the system
3.: Replacing the battle mode with something similar
The worst thing about the battle mode is, that you need to kill the enemy team to win, which means killing is the goal of the game. I think this is a bad thing for the overall gameplay, and the popularity of siege and rageball modes shows, that players do not neccessarily need to have to kill people to have fun. That's why I would prefer something different. I didn't think a lot about this topic yet, but my first idea would be something like a "domination" mode.
On a normal battle map you have a number of flag points placed, I would say three or five is perfectly enough (rather three than five). The points are placed along the "front line" between the teams, in equal distance to both team spawns. Each of these spawn points, once captured, grants a number of respawns for your own team. You can choose at which flag point you want to spawn, or whether you want to spawn at the initial spawn point at the beginning of the round. Respawns come in in waves, for both teams simultaneously, representing reinforcements/rearguards arriving at the battlefield. Once a flag changes the owner the spawn points won't get refilled, which means it's best to conquer a flag soon and keep it for the rest of the map. Your team has won once it owns all flags, the majority of all flags for a certain time (make a "ressource" deplete whenever you have less flags than the enemy, once it reaches 0 you lost) or all enemies are killed and can't respawn. This way coordination and teamplay becomes much more important, and infantry, which is probably the most important class for holding ground, or attacking, gains importance and effectivity.
Another nice side effect is, that you actually don't want to kill too many enemies before attempting to take one of their flags, otherwise you will conquer it with only a few spawn points left.
Now this is what I wanted to say. Improve the COOPERATIVE interaction with other players, instead of only concentrating on HOSTILE interaction, calld fighting. The game has so much more depth, don't reduce it to a simple hack'n'slay reflex game. I would just like to know if this is a direction of development the devs would agree to, or do you have another idea of how cRPG should be?
And no, I don't want to join a clan.
Edit: no whining about certain classes! Unless the purpose of pointing out a weakness of a certain class is just for the sake of discussing about general gameplay mechanics, keep your complaints for yourself! There are enough other topics for it around the forum!
Edit2: Just for the sake of turning a few opinions into my favour: if you are...
... archer
... crossbowman
... thrower
... cavalry
... horse archer
... anything else not being infantry, that has been nerfed recently: the ideas in this topic could lead to your class getting buffed again. :wink:
God damnit Joker, I need a cup of coffee or two to start reading your damn dissertation. :lol:
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I definitely am reminded of your chart (of hard and soft counters or whatever) when reading your introductory paragraph on APP vs. BPP. Couldn't you also argue that, as infantry is probably the most populated class, the APP is lower, in part, due to turnover? I.e.: Player batch "x" comes, certain percentage of player batch "x" stays, the rest leaves; certain percentage of player batch "x" increases in skill, the rest continue to autowalk into lances (like me) and die from being unable to dodge arrows (like me); player batch "y" comes, rinse and repeat process. This is to say, the saturation of lower skill levels is more apparent in infantry because of its higher population? This isn't to say that infantry is a forgiving class (like cavalry), or an unforgiving class (like archery), but certainly population has something to do with it?
1) This solution could be tried, but you can't necessarily shove the philosophy down a new player's throat. At best, a new player will come out enlightened and a new member of the holy order of cRPG. At worst, this new player will feel restricted as to his or her goals, and either quit or just be trollish and assholey. Both reduce the population who don't try to help the team as much as succeed personally (two things which, as far as I can be convinced, are intrinsically linked), but the second one has the unfortunate side effect of breeding resentment against the mod and its community as a whole, which isn't necessary.
2) I started cringing until I read "players being allowed to deactivate the system." Part of the fun, and interesting, part of public battles is that sometimes organization can arise sporadically and spontaneously, with multiple groups of people working collectively toward the same goal (the multiplier.) If, somehow, you can change players' expectations (as in section 1) of the mod through conditioning, then a commander system seems more like it creates points A to B, and following points A to B yields more rewards; however, not following points A to B either yields no rewards, or actively penalizes, which reduces the amount of freedom players have (or think they have) within the game. In my own, personal opinion, a commander system should only have the benefit of possibly (assuming you get a good commander) leading you to easily multipliers. The only real interesting part I see in this system is going beyond the "everyone stick together and reenact The Blob.
3) This is reading like you want to implement a Battlefield-like system into the game, but want to somehow punish players for actively killing the opponent? I got a little lost and confused at "Another nice side effect is, that you actually don't want to kill too many enemies before attempting to take one of their flags, otherwise you will conquer it with only a few spawn points left." This, for me, raises the question: why should the team be penalized for taking the time to eradicate the active resistance to it? I can understand wanting to get rid of the chaotic "kill everyone" aspect of battle, which can sometimes lead to a lot of idiocy, but this idiocy is also displayed in siege. It might also be displayed in rageball, but I don't really play that at all. The idea of a conquest gamemode with reinforcement waves based off held flags and such is interesting, but it seems like it could be a bit complex to implement: why not have (once again, as in Battlefield) a set number of reinforcements (scaled to the player population in the server, if that's possible) which allow for respawns. If I'm correct, Strategus already does this based off how many troops the attacker/defender party has?
I didn't fully understand all of it, either from lack of wakefulness or simply a flaw in my approach to the ideas' presentation: I'm responding to what I garnered from Joker's OP, so feel free to refute anything that I said that was based on a flawed understanding of it.