New rules for class debate

[Adamar]

So in other words the solution would be hugging a wall while facing archers who are standing (!) a few meters away and shoot you constantly,
And saying you are meant to be weak against a class is pretty easy, when you are not weak against any class yourself? Or tell me a class which can kill an archer pretty easily without the archer ebing able to do much about it. Shielders can't be killed that easily, yes, but they are no real threat, either. So what's left? Cavalry? Shoot the horses. Everything else? Just shoot it. Throwers with shield, perhaps. Not a very popular class, I dare to say. At least not popular enough to counter the amount of archers on the servers.

The fact stands than archers do get killed prety easely in the servers(with all the nerfing they took), either because of bad armor, bad evasion from low athlectics and shit melee capability. The theory that archers are unbeatable doesn't stick when in practice capable meleers do kill them constantly. As for cavalry, yes, archers can shoot the horses, but only if the target is available. Any cav with a brain wont attack archers with good couver, but will rather stay away and draw the archers to the open. It's a shame that some horsemen put their horses in situations where they'll obviously lose, only to complain about it after. Inteligence should be a factor in any war game.

[CrazyCracka420]

Okay, then tell me how you want to kill an archer who has higher ATH than you but less item weight, when you can only engage in melee, and no one else is left on the map? And THEN tell me, how you want to cover yourself against two archers. 

As an archer you will instinctively displace when you have no line of sight to your target or your target is covered by its shield. If the target is moving towards you, you will just try to keep distance and kite it. During that time you will know your archer buddy will follow the same instincts and move in the same way to get into the back of the shieldman. What I want to say with this paragraph is: already mediocre or even bad archers will still use the technique of crossfire, because it is a much more instinctive tactic than many others, which require some knowledge or thinking or go even against natural instincts (waiting BEHIND a hilltop, BEHIND a bottleneck etc., for example).

Okay, 2 vs. 10 is a little bit too much, but 2 vs. 5 is well doable.

That's what archers do, they hit people from a distance, while melee has to close the gap to be able to hit someone.  So what do you propose, that we remove archers from the game?  or that arrows fly sideways when they shoot? 

If there's 2 archers left and your team can't take them without getting shot and killed from them being at different angles, then you should probably stay hidden.  It makes sense that someone with higher athletics and lower gear weight is faster than you. 

Everything you are saying is common sense, and how it should be in the rock/paper/scissors scenario.

[Micah]

Balancing and fairness

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Balancing does not necessarily mean making a game fair. This is particularly true of action games: Jaime Griesemer, design lead at Bungie, said in a lecture to other designers that "every fight in Halo is unfair".[2] This potential for unfairness creates uncertainty, leading to the tension and excitement that action games seek to deliver.[3][4][1]

In these cases balancing is instead the management of unfair scenarios, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that all of the strategies which the game intends to support are viable.[2] The extent to which those strategies are equal to one another defines the character of the game in question.

Simulation games can be balanced unfairly in order to be true to life. A wargame may cast the player into the role of a general who was defeated by an overwhelming force, and it is common for the abilities of teams in sports games to mirror those of the real-world teams they represent regardless of the implications for players who pick them.

[Havoco]

Support me for forum moderator and I will Delete move all balance/whine threads to spam!

[Joker86]

Everything you are saying is common sense, and how it should be in the rock/paper/scissors scenario.

RPS-system only works if the chances are equal. If rock has 100% chance to beat scissors, scissors have 100% chance to beat paper and paper has 100% chance to beat rock. Or 50% each. Or whatever. But if the chances are like 50%/60%/30%, the RPS-system doesn't work any more. Or at least not 100%.

So saying "Ah, better chance here, worse chance there, everything's allright" doesn't work.

Again I'd like to point out that I am not supporting any nerf for either archers nor cavalry. I think on the paper both classes are heavily underpowered, compared to infantry. Still the point is, that in battle the infantry is more of a "reacting" class, which reacts to whoever attacks it, while it slowly moves to the center of the enemy formation to eventually meet a good target, while archers and cavalry are not only free to pick their target, they are also much more capable of getting out of unadvantageous situations than infantry. This mobility and the flexibility it brings are the reason why infantry always complains about the other classes. It is difficult to solve this problem, but I am dead sure nerfs are not the way to go. It's more an abstract problem concerning the metagame, than a simple balancing issue which can be solved by tweaking values. That's why it needs creative solutions. (Other than removing archers.)

What I would like to see for now is just the empathy and the understanding, that other persons might have a different gaming experience, and thus it can very well be that they enjoy the game much less than others. That's why I think that giving half-hearted advice ("use a shield" "get better"), conclusions from oneself about others ("I do fine when I play inf?") and ignorance in general ("QQ moar") should be put back and first checked if it could really be that others enjoy the game less, and if the reason for that is something that ought to be changed. A few people doing well doesn't mean things are well in general.

[Vodner]

Everything you are saying is common sense, and how it should be in the rock/paper/scissors scenario.

There should never be an RPS scenario, ever. At no point should you lose because your class is just flat-out countered by some other class.

You should lose because you made a mistake or two, and the other guy(s) didn't.

[CrazyCracka420]

I do well as infantry and I am cav/infantry hybrid.  I feel if I was only an infantry class I would do even better on the ground.  And in this context, better doesn't mean the ability to rack up kills or even be useful on offense.  It means the ability to not get overrun by cavalry or shot to shit by archers. 

It really comes down to infantry being able to work with teammates, get behind their shielders when necessary, protect their own ranged when necessary, stay near pikemen when necessary.  It doesn't even require you to change you 2h hero/rambo skills/attributes, but it does require changing your mentality some. 

Saul no class is ever outcountered automatically by another class.  As a cavalry lancer I have the advantage over a 1h/shield user.  That doesn't mean they can't survive a confrontation with me (or even kill me).  It depends on the location of the map, how much time they have to prepare before I hit them, if they are able to move out of the way and juke me, and if they are able to connect their hit.

I just use RPS as a general analogy.  No class automatically kills another class 100% of the time.  So I think you're being quite facetious with your statements. 

The game isn't rock kills scissors, scissors kills paper, paper kills rock.  That is just a saying to help explain a thought process.  In reality (and as you know, and I've been saying) every class has strengths and weaknesses.  If you put your weakness up against another classes' strength, you are going to lose more often than not.  That's not to say it's impossible to overcome, or that the outcome is predetermined in any way, because it's not.

When there's 50 people on each team, it's not (and should never be) lancer vs pikemen, or archer versus shielder.  You should be working with your team and running around in groups if you are are on the ground. 

[Kafein]

I sure do love how this thread has proved my point.

Very few people in this community are capable of discussing balance without saying the things in the OP, when all of those comments have literally nothing to do with balance and are playstyle changes. That's not balancing in any sense of the word. That is altering playstyle to compensate for a perceived lack of balance.

Want an example of balancing? Spinstabbing. All you had to do was block down (a playstyle change since apparently some people didn't get this) but what happened was the nerf to stab and overhead speed (balancing move) which rendered it a lot less useful.

By all means, turn this thread into the other 740 that are discussing the same damn shit.

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This just proved that a discussion purely about "balance" has very little value at this stage.

I think we have a balanced mod currently, more balanced than it ever was in fact. But it could be as balanced yet so much better without kiting archers and with something to do for cav that isn't backstabbing.

The fact stands than archers do get killed prety easely in the servers(with all the nerfing they took), either because of bad armor, bad evasion from low athlectics and shit melee capability. The theory that archers are unbeatable doesn't stick when in practice capable meleers do kill them constantly. As for cavalry, yes, archers can shoot the horses, but only if the target is available. Any cav with a brain wont attack archers with good couver, but will rather stay away and draw the archers to the open. It's a shame that some horsemen put their horses in situations where they'll obviously lose, only to complain about it after. Inteligence should be a factor in any war game.

I think I never read a paragraph that is so full of bullcrap.

Let me comment :

The fact stands than archers do get killed prety easely in the servers

At the end of most rounds on a battle server, all the archers in the winning team except the very unlucky are alive. Actually if you open your eyes you will see that the majority of players in a winning team have some sort of ranged weapon, and that is normal since they can play their role away from the dangerous areas.

bad evasion from low athlectics

? Archers have the best athletics of all classes, with the only exception of light crossbowmen. Furthermore, the near absence of armor lets them enjoy full mobility.

The theory that archers are unbeatable doesn't stick when in practice capable meleers do kill them constantly

That is under the assumption these "capable meleers" actually survive until they reach an archer at melee range. Also, being good at melee won't help them to do that. Actually, nothing will, except more agi, more ath and less armor. A shield slows them down considerably.

As for cavalry, yes, archers can shoot the horses, but only if the target is available. Any cav with a brain wont attack archers with good couver, but will rather stay away and draw the archers to the open.

L2P issue here. What actually happens is that cav that know their weaknesses will attack archers only if there is enough cover to hide behind until it's too late for the horseman's target. An archer in the middle of a plain is pretty much unbeatable for one cav, because there is no angle of attack where the horse remains unseen. Also, I don't see how someone can possibly "draw" an archer somewhere. When I play as archer I don't ever need to follow an enemy, there are plenty of targets everywhere. It's actually the archers that force enemies to move.

[CrazyCracka420]

Before a few weeks ago, at least on NA1, one of my biggest pet peeves was it's getting down to the end of the round and we have 5-10 people left, no cavalry, and no ranged.  The other team has no ranged, but 2 or 3 cavalry and we'd be fucked because we had no ranged and idiots wouldn't stand together, they would try to chase down horsemen.  Which is funny that people are still doing that, but to a lesser extent because the archer is on the ground.  He's still faster than you, and chasing around one guy with 3 or 4 of your teammates is the WRONG move in every circumstance unless he's one of the last couple people alive, and you have 10-20 or more on your team.  The right play in both circumstances is to stand still, preferably near teammates, and preferably with some sort of cover.

I don't think ranged being alive at the end of the round is a problem, nor do I think it signifies they were kiting the whole round.  I think all it means is that we were severely lacking archers for months on end, and people got comfortable without having to worry about archers shooting them.  Now they have to go back to adapting to archers on the battlefield, and people are resisting.

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I still don't see what the problem is, or what people's solution to it would be.  Remove archers?  People are complaining because a class is using what advantages it has, as often as possible?

[Gravoth_iii]

But melee people can still tell other melee people to get a shield?

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Seriously, get a shield.

[Hunter_the_Honourable]

Iv made a hoplite character because everyone saying "HUUR DUUR GET A SHIELD AND SPEAR  "

Let me tell you Hoplite build is so annoying to play, If I'm caught alone Im fucked if I'm being shot at by more then one archer I'm fucked (even the one archer can destroy my shield) and even if I get to the archer all he has to do is run into me and my spear stab just bounces. And no I'm not one of the fools who only has a spear but even with a sword the archers out run me and I spend all my time chasing them but never catching them.

Point being all you dipshits saying go hoplite and get a shield.....seriously go hoplite and watch all your team just leave you to fend for your self you soon become as useless as everyother shielder on the field.

I agree with tears suggestion seems the most balanced way to fix things.

*side note*

no access to nigh-tier weapons, so they often glance even on leather.

You don't need "high-tier" weapons and glance on leather? Do you even play native!?!? I play native nearly everyday and the archers do a fair amount of damage and glance no more then the normal inf do.

[CrazyCracka420]

I never said to get a shield and spear.  Maybe you should try getting a 1h weapon as an alternate.  You could have stayed as your current class and tried to stick with teammates (shielders to protect from ranged, or your own spearmen to protect from cavalry).  Or stick with your own archers who can protect you against both, while you protect them from melee or sneaky cavalry.

There's lots of classes and variety of ways to play each class.  There's lots of different equipment, and play styles, all of which needs to be taken into account.

I didn't hear many people say "go hoplite" as the universal solution to be better equipped at handling cavalry and archers.  For the most part in your thread (and other archer QQ threads) there's been two groups of people, one saying archers are too OP and they have no way to counter them.  And the rest of us (who posses common sense and reasoning abilities) were telling you that you were going to have to adjust the way you play your class if you don't have a shield, a spear or ranged weaopn.

 In general you shouldn't be cavalry or archer hunting if you're an infantry melee class.  Why are you trying to chase down archers before the end of the round?  And if it's the end of the round and your team loses because people were trying to chase archers, then you clearly did something wrong.

The largest problem with archers is that people were not used to having them on the battlefield, in numbers that they used to have, up until a couple weeks ago.  So now people are having to get re-accustomed to tactics with archers on the battlefield. 

You can't force all public players to work as a team, but there's enough regulars on that most times infantry are fighting in groups, even if it's just relatively loose fighting formations. 

[Dexxtaa]

Excellent debates going on. So far no one is making any "fuck you qqmoar" comments, which I'm sure it will eventually devolve into. But until then, this is a great read.

[CrazyCracka420]

Sorry Dexxtaa Hunter brought out the flame in me...he's just a whiny bitch.  But I didn't get too flamey until now (hunter_the_horrible would a better name, since you're horrible at using your brain).

[Hunter_the_Honourable]

I never said to get a shield and spear.  Maybe you should try getting a 1h weapon as an alternate.

And no I'm not one of the fools who only has a spear but even with a sword

Also I wasn't directing my post directly to you, but to everyone saying "get a shield"

In what part did I say I was referring to you??? O.o