The root of all misery in cRPG

[Dezilagel]

Very much like Joker indeed. Long, badly structured posts based of off false premises.

I'll give an 'in-depth' analysis in the afternoon.

[Kafein]

Joker raised a lot of good points.

[XyNox]

I appreciate the construcitve input joker, though, also I am afraid I can not fully agree on every of your points. Let me explain:

Nicely written essay, and the stuff about the first four facts is perfectly right. But the rest, concerning your conclusion, is not. At least not in my eyes, of course, as I am in no way the measure of all things. 

And in general I'd like to point out that your thread is in no way discussing the root of all misery in cRPG. It's only discussion the old conflict between archer and infantry players.

It is indeed not but if I had chosen any title that appears to have the term "archery" or anything related in it, trolls would have trolled right away. With the current, nondescript title trolls had to find out what they gonna be trolling about by reading at least some lines first. 

If an archer was constantly aware of his surroundings, and didn't allow himself to concentrate on a target until it is dead, it was close to impossible to reach him. Clever positioning, awareness and self discipline lowered the chances of infantry to reach archers drastically. And those traits are something I'd call a good part of what we call skill.

I can only agree on that part. It indeed was easy to avoid most threats with superior mobility. This mobility has been taken away though with nothing in return so far. No matter how bad you are in this game, if you have enough money to buy a shield you WILL catch the best archer in the game without ANY risk just by holding down rmb.

Another thing I'd like to point out is that you always do like the battle starts with an infantry player spawning close to an archer and immediately heading towards him. But that's not the case.
I. The archer had his chance to be effective all the time UNTIL the point when the need to kite came up. Archers SHOULD get creamed in melee, that's the way the class balance should work. Though I have to admit that I think that archers are underpowered on the paper, concerning the values they are fighting which, like damage, missile speed, etc.. But the reason for this UP'ness is a completely different one. II. It has to do with the game mode an the developers trying to balance mechanics by tweaking effectivity. It has also to do with side effects which are not really part of the game itself, which in this case would be the popularity of the archer class and its special ability to exponentially gain effectivity with linearly growing numbers.

I. If this is the case, I still dont understand how nerfing their ability to run away while not giving them a fair chance in melee justifies the current situation. This is not balance, this is punishment. And I dont see why I should be punished for the actions of people I dont even wanna know. It cant be that hard to come up with a patch that does actually nerf kiting without nerfing every other aspect of archery in the same turn, can it ?

II. I agreed on that point more than once in other threads. Still, we dont have those other gamemodes and I dont think this will change for quite some time. What we have is battle and siege and the nerfs still apply for those gamemode. Knowing that it all would all work out if there would be another gamemode is not much of a compensation.

I. I think you are asking a rather biased question at the beginning of that quote. Aren't those question the same that could be asked by a pikeman who is attacked by a hose archer? II. And why do you formulate your sentences in a way which tries to create the impression that archers do NOT have bows which allow them to attack any enemy they can see shortly after the battle has begun? Yes, you are screwed when melee starts, but you always try to ignore the entire ranged spam which took place BEFORE melee started.

I. It is indeed a biased question as I am talking about archery. The fact that I dont mention the "mounted ranged problem" doesnt mean that I think a 1 v 1 between HA/HX vs. any non ranged melee build is fair. Nobody likes to be autokilled by default by a virtually undefeatable enemy. Although its not THAT bad as of now, devs are slowly moving in the same direction with archers vs shielders/heavy inf although such a change is unnecessary.

II. I am well aware that archers carry bows and can shoot . Sadly this does not impress a shielder at all. Also the fact that heavy inf takes 6+ hits from bows that are light enough to carry a decent melee weapon, the fact that archery hitboxes are plain messed and finally the nerfed missile speeds means that carrying a bow is in no way a guarantee for dropping any melee before he is able to reach you. Once an arrow is in the air you cant correct for it, even an aimbot could not help you there. Unless you can see into the future and you will know which side / in what spastic pattern your enemy will "dodge" even the best archer in the world can be just as good as his enemies dodging skills allow for it.

I dont want to say that bows are wothless now, of course they are not. You can still stand back and spam arrows into the blobs and headshot those who tend to walk in straight lines for a second or more. But you can just do this as long as some of your newborn autokill-counters come by and chose to kill you, even if you could probably kill them with a wooden stick with an equal build.

You also complain that archers can't be good at melee if they want to be good at archery. But couldn't melee complain bout the same thing? You wrote that you need to invest quite some points into melee to be at least fairly effective. If you want to be really effective, there is no room left for any ranged capabilities, except of crossbows, perhaps, but in my eyes this is a problem which is related to te crossbow itself and with the upkeep system. Infantry HAS to have better chances of killing archers in melee than archers should have to kill infantry over range. If range has a 50% chance of killing infantry over range, infantry needs a full 100% chance to kill archers in melee to keep things fair!

Appart from that sentence I can more or less agree with the whole paragraph, nothing wrong with that. The problem is, there are just too many situations now where the archer has a 0 % chance at range and the melee has a 90 % chance at melee, namely shielders. Cav can as well bump archers now with about 80% probability ( depending on the horse of course ), where a single bump can take 30 % or up to 60 % of your health, while there is no way to shoot often enough to kill it before it collides with you when it come around a corner/from behind cover. Not even to mention what happens when cav decides to actively attack instead of just running you over.

Actually you can divide a fight into two phases: the ranged phase and the melee phase. We could argue a lot about the actual average chance values of archers killing infantry over range or infantry killing archers in melee, but there is one value we don't need to argue about: the infantry's chance of killing archers over range. For pure infantry (which is the vast majority of infantry and the kind of infantry we are talking about) this chance is 0%. They simply can't. Now if we keep the basic mechanics of balance in mind, if you change something on one side, you need to change the same thing on the other side.

If you claim that archers should become better at melee, the logic balancing reaction should be to make infantry better at ranged combat. But as this does not make any sense, the only option left would be to make archers worse in ranged combat. If we would go that far to increase the motivation to stay and fight infantry instead of running away to a reasonable value, archers should be at least almost as effective as infantry in melee. And as we already stated that we can't make infantry almost as effective at ranged combat as archers, the only option left would be to make archers almost as bad in ranged combat as infantry. As infantry has literaly zero effectivity in ranged combat, archer would be nerfed down to the effectivity of stone throwing peasants. I can't believe you would support actually removing an entire class form the game and replacing it by some kind of half-assed wannabe-hybrid. 

I think this is much too theorethical to apply it on actual gameplay. I dont see what would be the problem about giving archers a fair chance to defend themselves instead of nerfing their ranged-, melee- and mobility rating all together patch by patch.

"But we don't need to go that extreme, some slighter changes could do the job", one could answer. Yes, the changes could be slighter. (Archer becoming only slightly better at melee and slightly worse at archery), but I doubt it would help then. I even doubt that making archers almost as effective in melee as infantry would help a lot. Because I doubt that good melee character statistics would encourage most archers to enter melee. In my opinion many archers, if not even most, decided to become an archer to NOT have to fight in melee. They are intimidated by the skill requirement of manual blocking, they are suffering bad pings or are simply afraid of the average melee capabilities of most seasoned infantry players. And the final possibility will always be that players simply prefer archery over melee because they enjoy it more.

My final conclusion is, that the game mode needs to change from battle (round based team deatchmatch) to conquest. That way the need of kiting would suddenly disappear, because the need to hunt archers would disappear as well. With that change, there would be no need any more to "balance" the kiting capabilities of archers with high item weight and bad fighting stats. Seriously, you need to fix a mechanics problem by changing the mechanics, not by tweaking the effectivity. Both changing the movement speed of archers or changing their melee capabilities is tweaking the effectivity and will be equally useless in fixing the mechanics problem we have. The only other problem I see would be the popularity problem which I mentioned above. But there are also ways to fix this without the plain and rather sad solution of lowering the popularity by lowering the effectivity.

Amen. With appropriate gamemodes there probably wouldnt be the need for threads like this but as I said earlier, what we have now is battle and siege, sadly.
Edit: don't make jokes about the length of my former posts, or I will fall back into old patterns, as you see here ,|,,  ,,|,

I think you deserve a response for the effort taken to explain your point of view.
Now, I also see a lot more reasonable opions stated in here and I am sorry I wont answer every singe one of you, thanks to those people.

Unsurprisingly, there are just too many invalid points from people who dont have the necessary insight to participate in this thread in a useful way and I am not willing to spend more time for now explaining it over and over again because, as we all know, there are people here who are not interested in balance when their favorite build is on the top of the foodchain.

I think I made my point clear and quite some people were able to share it.

Summary of this thread:

The thing is, there will be no more new Archers in future, people whine hard about the archers who play the game for 2-3 years. A new player will try out how much fun it is to play a archer in crpg, but then he will notive that he will get hardly some kills with his bow and arrows and he cant defend himself properly and he cant run away. And i dont need to talk about the score. So his solution is: I press the respecc button and become a melee fighter because its easier to get kills and points. So you have alredy won the war haters.

[Templar_Ratigan]

Until they fix archery in a way that makes sense.

Hey it's the best way to get things done.

[Joker86]

I can only agree on that part. It indeed was easy to avoid most threats with superior mobility. This mobility has been taken away though with nothing in return so far. No matter how bad you are in this game, if you have enough money to buy a shield you WILL catch the best archer in the game without ANY risk just by holding down rmb.

This is right, nd this is why I formulated that sentence this way. But in my eyes it is totally okay, because shielder are actually meant to counter archers (instead of only being fairly protected against them). The "fairly" also indicates the second part of my point: shielder can still be hit into the legs or the head, and a shielder can never look towards all archers. The closer he gets to the enemy frontline, the wider the angle will be in which the arrows are coming in. So running towards an archer with your shield up is still far away from a sure thing.

I. If this is the case, I still dont understand how nerfing their ability to run away while not giving them a fair chance in melee justifies the current situation. This is not balance, this is punishment. And I dont see why I should be punished for the actions of people I dont even wanna know. It cant be that hard to come up with a patch that does actually nerf kiting without nerfing every other aspect of archery in the same turn, can it ?

In this case an unbalance existed, and that's why a nerf/punishment was applied. I would have preferred another solution, because I don't support nerfs in general, but meh. All I want to say is that the class balance is reying on the principle of "You can attack me while I approach, but if you fail to kill me I will kill you", which should be a fair deal, at least in theory.

Short:

Before:

I shoot you, you eventually die. You reach me, I kite, you eventually die. I run out of arrows and enter melee, you eventually die. If not, I die. (Each "eventually" represents an increasingly smaller chance, though)

Now:

I shoot you, you eventually die. You reach me, you eventually die in melee. But most likely you will not, and I will die. But I had my chance.

 

II. I agreed on that point more than once in other threads. Still, we dont have those other gamemodes and I dont think this will change for quite some time. What we have is battle and siege and the nerfs still apply for those gamemode. Knowing that it all would all work out if there would be another gamemode is not much of a compensation.

I wouldn't argument that way until the developers state that conquest can't be done, which I frankly don't believe. I see no point in looking for any other solution than the optimal one. The community just needs to put some more pressure on the devs to get them actually work on it.

II. I am well aware that archers carry bows and can shoot . Sadly this does not impress a shielder at all. Also the fact that heavy inf takes 6+ hits from bows that are light enough to carry a decent melee weapon, the fact that archery hitboxes are plain messed and finally the nerfed missile speeds means that carrying a bow is in no way a guarantee for dropping any melee before he is able to reach you. Once an arrow is in the air you cant correct for it, even an aimbot could not help you there. Unless you can see into the future and you will know which side / in what spastic pattern your enemy will "dodge" even the best archer in the world can be just as good as his enemies dodging skills allow for it.

I dont want to say that bows are wothless now, of course they are not. You can still stand back and spam arrows into the blobs and headshot those who tend to walk in straight lines for a second or more. But you can just do this as long as some of your newborn autokill-counters come by and chose to kill you, even if you could probably kill them with a wooden stick with an equal build.

I already stated that I think archers are a bit UP on the paper regarding the values they are fighting with. The problem has its origin in the amount of archers, which - when high enough - can invalidate all points you mentioned above. Even the low deadlyness of archers can't change a lot there. With enough shit flying through the air even heavily armoured shielders will go down before they reach the enemies.

And there is another, but much less important argument: archers can protect each other by standing fairly close to each other, peppering every enemy who approaches with arrows. That way archers are forced a bit to do teamwork, as infantry - ideally - should be, too. In an ideal world shielders, two handers and pikemen would support each other, because infantry is the class in cRPG which requires teamwork the most. Cavalry requires it the least.

Appart from that sentence I can more or less agree with the whole paragraph, nothing wrong with that. The problem is, there are just too many situations now where the archer has a 0 % chance at range and the melee has a 90 % chance at melee, namely shielders. Cav can as well bump archers now with about 80% probability ( depending on the horse of course ), where a single bump can take 30 % or up to 60 % of your health, while there is no way to shoot often enough to kill it before it collides with you when it come around a corner/from behind cover. Not even to mention what happens when cav decides to actively attack instead of just running you over.

You are right about that, but I think it's okay, because almost every class has such an enemy. The system is no perfect, though. The horse archer works as "horror enemy" very well for pikemen, two handers and cavalry, but he doesn't have such a counter himself. Shielders though are countered by cavalry, because they either try to attack and recieve a lance stab due to their short reach, or they block and get trampled with full bump damage. Hoplites suffer from two hand and so on. It's the classic rock-paper-scissors-system.

I think this is much too theorethical to apply it on actual gameplay. I dont see what would be the problem about giving archers a fair chance to defend themselves instead of nerfing their ranged-, melee- and mobility rating all together patch by patch.

Because archers are still "good" at ranged combat. No great or amazing, but still good, despite the nerfs. If you'd give them acceptable melee capabilities they would become pure archers and hybrid melee. Which would be OP. Their chance to defend themselves is when the enemy is approaching, not when he is already there.

[Havoco]

-1 to all of xynoxs posts for reverting joker to textwall speak.

[Mechanix]

Fuck this, I'm calling it in.



Mod's dead.

[Smoothrich]

didnt read post, is this guy saying that the mod isn't fun because ranged classes are too weak?   -1'd regardless, lol

[Artyem]

words

Good book, but I thought it could use less words.

[Joker86]

Good book, but I thought it could use less words.

Yeah, sorry, could very well be, but since we are in an essay topic I thought it would be okay. It's less than it looks, anyway, doesn't take more than two or three minutes to read. I guess that's okay for a topic that complicated like this one. 

[Rumblood]

Great post from the OP laying out the facts, followed by pages of shit posting opinions and "examples" of dirty archers doing shit that happened once over the last 2 years and the traumatized tin can just never got over it.

What goes unmentioned is that because of the high upkeep costs of archery equipment, archers who tried to go HA got nailed by the HORSE upkeep as well and can't afford to both ride a horse and use archery equipment! Melee? They've been making gold for generations upon generations and their shit doesn't cost as much, nor break as often as archery equipment. They can ride all night.

Seriously archers, just go melee with a xbow sidearm AND a horse AND make fistfuls of gold while you do it 

[Joker86]

Great post from the OP laying out the facts, followed by pages of shit posting opinions and "examples" of dirty archers doing shit that happened once over the last 2 years and the traumatized tin can just never got over it.

There are less facts than you would expect, everybody's got a different perception.

What goes unmentioned is that because of the high upkeep costs of archery equipment, archers who tried to go HA got nailed by the HORSE upkeep as well and can't afford to both ride a horse and use archery equipment! Melee? They've been making gold for generations upon generations and their shit doesn't cost as much, nor break as often as archery equipment. They can ride all night.

Seriously archers, just go melee with a xbow sidearm AND a horse AND make fistfuls of gold while you do it 

This is less an issue of class balance than of the upkeep system, which was always broken in my eyes, but became literally useless with the introduction of the marketplace. This could have been figured out by the simple thought that for example heavy cavalry needs more equipment than for example heavy infantry. Devs tried to balance by upkeep, but since upkeep is broken the balancing attempt failed. (Next to the fact that it was no real balancing at all, you can't balance multiplayer items by the difficulty to obtain them.)

[Rumblood]

There are less facts than you would expect, everybody's got a different perception.

Exactly, like currently the anti-archer camp pretends that cavalry doesn't exist at all as a built-in counter to kiting. I've never seen even the fleetest footed archer outrun the slowest mounted player.   

I know, they will complain that archers could dance around the cavalry without being touched. That's because they aren't real cavalry. Real[/b] cavalry had no problem getting the dancing archer. They did it every round. Now even the W key wonders can get horse bumps on the immobile archer unit.

This "kiting" issue was nothing more than an excuse for another nerf on archery. There was no kiting issue, there were only people who couldn't deal with the limitations of their class along with its benefits.
Horses, shields, other ranged, and agility builds all adequately dealt with mobile archers.

QUIT BALANCING THE GAME BASED OFF OF THE DUEL SERVER!

[Smoothrich]

QUIT BALANCING THE GAME BASED OFF OF THE DUEL SERVER!

kiting is an issue on battle, nothing to do with duels.  it promotes negative gameplay that no one enjoys except kiters i guess, who almost always admit its trolling and "heh im makin this guy so mad right now" because its so blatantly stupid.  people still kite just as well now anyways it seems, doesn't really matter its still a frustrating class to deal with on battle.  cav get 2 shot by archers anyways, only other ranged counter ranged.

almost every time i play cRPG now 9/10 players have crossbows, throwing, or bows.  rest are usually pikes/long spears.  its horrible gameplay for battle servers all around.  all xbows need stats heavily reduced, archers can lose a ton of accuracy, throwers should just be removed.. but there'd still probably be 9/10 players as ranged, ruining the servers

[Dexxtaa]

QUIT BALANCING THE GAME BASED OFF OF THE DUEL SERVER!

If the devs did that, how would the two-handers kill anything in a fight, then.

Selfish, selfish man.