Balancing, maps, teamplay and player numbers

[bruce]

First I'll say what that I'm sure balancing crpg is hell. Everyone , me included, whines virtually all the time and whatever you do people will complain about it.

That said, I'll also say that what players ask for often results in things they don't want happening. People asked at a time for a melee server, and it failed, because everyone went to EU1 instead.

The most players we had and the most teamplay (yes, with "pubs") we had was on old EU4. It was both fast (it could run with 220 players smoothly), and it's map rotation were all random open maps.

When you say that, most people imagine "cavalry paradise". Well, it was and it wasn't. It was in the sense you could play all maps as cavalry and potentially do well, since there was no impassable terrain for you. It wasn't, because archers were noticeably more effective firing at range back then, there were more of them and they were typically protected - outright attacking was just suicide, and even riding closeby was suicide - you had to stick behind your team, assist vs enemy cav, and then you could try attacking distracted people. On the other hand, due to player count in one part and the fact maps are open and flat (so once infantry is toast you WILL be caught) archers couldn't kite endlessly, camp hills or do such shenniganns - once there's no infantry to protect you you will get shot by other archers / mown down by horses.

Teamplay was enforced not by game mechanics (such as old gold/xp proximity system) but by how the game plays - you stuck together or died, sticking together was easy since the maps were open and largely flat and you saw where your team is, and if you didn't you would predictably die. There were no "town maps"; every map you had to act the same (assemble into some sort of formation, either advance together or camp) and then people learn how to stick together by rote, by repetition. it was the only time I regularly saw teamplay in CRPG.

The various classes all had their fun. The infantry clash was generally speaking decisive, but even a peasant with a scythe had a role and fun (eg; protecting archers from horses, helping infantry by stabbing people etc). Archers had their fun, shooting horses, other archers, and 2h heroes once the shieldwall broke. Cavalry had a map they could play on in every match. Ofc, it wasn't -perfect- (the horse charge at the time was overdone, for instance, and things like destriers too survivable, much like now), but overall I think it was a lot more fun for everyone.

[Joker86]

You are definitely right about it, but I also regularly see players do really retarded and brainless stuff. And not only a few of them.

It was this very day where I watched my brother playing conquest siege, he was on the attacking team. He spawned a few meters away from the siege tower leading up the wall to the first flag. On the way to the tower, outside the walls, an enemy cavalryman on a large warhorse rode towards him. He somehow managed to dodge it, and went on towards the tower. When he climbed it, he looked back and said to me: "Look at those retards! They will chase him for like five minutes instead of trying to capture the flag and win the map." and he turned the camera and was perfectly right. There were about seven or eight infantry players (a few of them ranged), trying to kill that horse and the rider, circling around dancing pirouettes or running after a horse like a dog runs after a car. If they climbed up that siege tower the horse would not have been able to follow them, it would not have posed a threat, and they would have had an easier game capturing the flag. But they chose the braindead way. And it was seven or eight of them. For the attacking team it's like that cavalryman would have killed them and they needed to respawn.

I think a good part of the cRPG community is really braindead on the servers. I don't say they are really stupid, have lower intelligence or something like that. cRPG doesn't attract particularly dumb people more than other games. It's just the problem that teamplay in the beginning never was used that much, and people didn't get used to it. It didn't become a custom, like some other games tend to have. And every new player learned by the average gameplay on the server that you just go for the kills, and once they grew to veteran players they tought the new noobs to play that way. The one and only golden rule for winning a round in cRPG was never followed on the servers:

Don't go where the enemy is - go where your teammates are!

I would like to see something being done about that problem. We have essentially clever players being stuck in some kind of "braindead" mode, because neither the community itself, nor the developers in form of game features encourage teamplay. You need to have the idea that teamplay could be something benefitial yourself, and even if you have it, you are pretty much alone with it, unless you join a clan. And even then I usually see those clan groups seperating from the main force of their team.

In a perfect world the players should have that insight by themselves, but as this world is not perfect, I say you need to push them into the right direction. My constant solution to everything for the past few months is conquest mode, and so it is in this case as well. But a (reasonable, in reality working) commander feature would be nice as well. And perhaps an overhaul of the entire presentation of the mod.

The community had time enough to develop some decent teamplay behaviour. It failed. So we need to change the system, as in the current state it apparently is not working. That's why I say, that we do need the game to encourage the proper behaviour. As sad as this might be.

Just two last statements at the end:
a) Teamplay does NOT mean there will be less challenging fights, or that you can't fight against several opponents for your life. If anything, it can cause you to live longer and have more fights per round. The more of a Rambo-Lemming-Autowalker you were, the bigger the performance difference will be when you concentrate on teamplay.
b) You don't need a clan for teamplay. I know several other games where people join with different classes or roles, and immediately know what their task is, or where they ask in chat what the current agenda is. You don't need teamspeak for coordination, you only need some community habits.

tl;dr version:

Waiting for the players to start applying teamplay has failed. So the game needs to be changed to encourage it more. And there is not a single good reason why cRPG should not go that way.

[bruce]

The problem is this: you can either enforce teamplay by mechanics (the first one was, if you remember, proximity based gold/xp system), or you can make a game design which requires teamplay to have any success.

The first is generally irskome to players (such as, commander feature) or doesn't end up working (if it's not strict enough), the second is not guaranteed to work by itself. If the game allows you to be both a lone ranger and a teamplayer and be successful, then you won't have teamplay. On the other hand, if lone ranger gameplay predictably and every time leads to your death - playing a lone ranger just isn't fun, because it's not successful. This was the case when everyone was playing on EU4 for a while where we had large fights on open plains - it was the one time crpg fights looked like an actual battlefield.

[Grumbs]

OP weren't you complaining about ranged nerfs in the server before? I think there is a pretty obvious "buff ranged" agenda here

Don't confuse standing in masses behind shield walls for half the round as "team play" btw. That is not fun for anyone except people pewpewing all round

To kill either ranged, grouping melee players or cav you need team play regardless. The threat of being randomly shot from some wannabe legolas just encourages camping and boring passive gameplay. Getting people grouped up can encourage teamplay, but teamplay should be encouraged for the right reasons and create fun gameplay not snorefests behind shieldwalls

[bruce]

Idk, I find it more fun to stick in a shieldwall and attack together then random charge chasing people through a town / ruins / whatnot which looks more like a benny hill chase and invariably turns into chaos. And yes, teamplay is in large part staying and going to fight in formation.

Although, open maps with new crpg archery would be bad because they're just not that effective vs cav anymore. Well, I guess crossbowmen could take up the slack, or balance would be adjusted otherwise.

[Prpavi]

well i myself always stuck (or tried to) to the main melee group... it has only brought me grief.

unless youre a big clan member and play with them you are more likely to end up with a braindead team, get shitloads of THs, shielders will constantly block your swings as a non shield melee and at the end ot the day you will just get shot by a randomer due to the fact you are already low on healt.

you must take into consideration that game mechanics were waaaay different from when you and I both were in trollbears and nowdays i just prefere to go solo and flan and pick my fights. i noticed like most people i tend to run from battles more than i used to, thats just the direction the mod went in. don't think its anybody fault and there are 100 factors why that is literally, but no i do not wish to sitck to the main group anymore and no i wouldnt like to have open plains since a HX will harras me untill they kill me no matter how much dizzy i get from strafing.

my 2 cents...

[IR_Kuoin]

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[Tomas]

If we want more team play then we have to start changing certain melee weapons so that they are not so good in all situations

1) Make more weapons unbalanced but buff their damage in return
2) Nerf 2H stab vs horses (not sure how)
3) Increase weapon stun due to blocking against a heavier weapon
4) Remove the point blank stab on polearms (not sure how)
5) Nerf cut damage vs heavy armour
6) Buff cut damage vs light armour
7) Buff blunt/pierce damage vs heavy armour
8) Nerf blunt/peirce damage vs light armour
9) Buff all shield HP
10) Buff axe/poleaxe damage to counter the shield HP increase
11) Nerf axe/poleaxe speed slightly
12) Speed up archer rate of fire slightly
13) Activate weapons when chambered so that you can't move them through other people or objects prior to swinging (not sure how)

All of the above will make weapons more situational so that players can't kill absolutely everything really easily with the same weapon.  Instead players have to carry multiple weapons (expensive) or team up with other people using different weapons.

I don't actually want to see all these changes btw, they are just the one way i can think of to encourage more natural team play

[Kafein]

You are definitely right about it, but I also regularly see players do really retarded and brainless stuff. And not only a few of them.

It was this very day where I watched my brother playing conquest siege, he was on the attacking team. He spawned a few meters away from the siege tower leading up the wall to the first flag. On the way to the tower, outside the walls, an enemy cavalryman on a large warhorse rode towards him. He somehow managed to dodge it, and went on towards the tower. When he climbed it, he looked back and said to me: "Look at those retards! They will chase him for like five minutes instead of trying to capture the flag and win the map." and he turned the camera and was perfectly right. There were about seven or eight infantry players (a few of them ranged), trying to kill that horse and the rider, circling around dancing pirouettes or running after a horse like a dog runs after a car. If they climbed up that siege tower the horse would not have been able to follow them, it would not have posed a threat, and they would have had an easier game capturing the flag. But they chose the braindead way. And it was seven or eight of them. For the attacking team it's like that cavalryman would have killed them and they needed to respawn.

I think a good part of the cRPG community is really braindead on the servers. I don't say they are really stupid, have lower intelligence or something like that. cRPG doesn't attract particularly dumb people more than other games. It's just the problem that teamplay in the beginning never was used that much, and people didn't get used to it. It didn't become a custom, like some other games tend to have. And every new player learned by the average gameplay on the server that you just go for the kills, and once they grew to veteran players they tought the new noobs to play that way. The one and only golden rule for winning a round in cRPG was never followed on the servers:

Don't go where the enemy is - go where your teammates are!

I would like to see something being done about that problem. We have essentially clever players being stuck in some kind of "braindead" mode, because neither the community itself, nor the developers in form of game features encourage teamplay. You need to have the idea that teamplay could be something benefitial yourself, and even if you have it, you are pretty much alone with it, unless you join a clan. And even then I usually see those clan groups seperating from the main force of their team.

In a perfect world the players should have that insight by themselves, but as this world is not perfect, I say you need to push them into the right direction. My constant solution to everything for the past few months is conquest mode, and so it is in this case as well. But a (reasonable, in reality working) commander feature would be nice as well. And perhaps an overhaul of the entire presentation of the mod.

The community had time enough to develop some decent teamplay behaviour. It failed. So we need to change the system, as in the current state it apparently is not working. That's why I say, that we do need the game to encourage the proper behaviour. As sad as this might be.

Just two last statements at the end:
a) Teamplay does NOT mean there will be less challenging fights, or that you can't fight against several opponents for your life. If anything, it can cause you to live longer and have more fights per round. The more of a Rambo-Lemming-Autowalker you were, the bigger the performance difference will be when you concentrate on teamplay.
b) You don't need a clan for teamplay. I know several other games where people join with different classes or roles, and immediately know what their task is, or where they ask in chat what the current agenda is. You don't need teamspeak for coordination, you only need some community habits.

tl;dr version:

Waiting for the players to start applying teamplay has failed. So the game needs to be changed to encourage it more. And there is not a single good reason why cRPG should not go that way.

Or, they don't care about winning and simply do whatever they think is amusing.

[Templar_Steevee]

8) Nerf blunt/peirce damage vs light armour
9) Buff all shield HP
12) Speed up archer rate of fire slightly

I can't agree with those points.

8) Just imagine that you are getting hit with a blunt or pierce weapon when you are wearing a mail or something like heavy aketon. What will happen? Your ribs will be crushed with a blunt weapon really easily, and puncturing that kind of armour is pretty easy.

9) This is just a dumb idea IMO. If you want to keep your shield for longer time jut inwest more points in shield skill. With my STF hoplite char i got 8 shield skill and my shield hardly ever got destroyed. There are a lot of differend shields in this game, so you should fing good one for your playstyle.

12) Archery is good as it is. There is no reason to change speed, dmg or accuracy. IMO archery is ballanced atm. Ballance between dmg, accuracy and fire rate is ok and after nerfing kiting it's not so hard to catch an archer (there are some exceptions , but they are hi lvl guys)

[Vibe]

If we want more team play then we have to start changing certain melee weapons so that they are not so good in all situations

1) Make more weapons unbalanced but buff their damage in return
2) Nerf 2H stab vs horses (not sure how)
3) Increase weapon stun due to blocking against a heavier weapon
4) Remove the point blank stab on polearms (not sure how)
5) Nerf cut damage vs heavy armour
6) Buff cut damage vs light armour
7) Buff blunt/pierce damage vs heavy armour
8) Nerf blunt/peirce damage vs light armour
9) Buff all shield HP
10) Buff axe/poleaxe damage to counter the shield HP increase
11) Nerf axe/poleaxe speed slightly
12) Speed up archer rate of fire slightly
13) Activate weapons when chambered so that you can't move them through other people or objects prior to swinging (not sure how)

All of the above will make weapons more situational so that players can't kill absolutely everything really easily with the same weapon.  Instead players have to carry multiple weapons (expensive) or team up with other people using different weapons.

I don't actually want to see all these changes btw, they are just the one way i can think of to encourage more natural team play

This would just make the game into a group composition fight and group composition in pub is extremely random. We have enough of that when entire teams are filled with either ranged or cav (or even both).

[Joker86]

If we want more team play then we have to start changing certain melee weapons so that they are not so good in all situations

(click to show/hide)

1) Make more weapons unbalanced but buff their damage in return
2) Nerf 2H stab vs horses (not sure how)
3) Increase weapon stun due to blocking against a heavier weapon
4) Remove the point blank stab on polearms (not sure how)
5) Nerf cut damage vs heavy armour
6) Buff cut damage vs light armour
7) Buff blunt/pierce damage vs heavy armour
8) Nerf blunt/peirce damage vs light armour
9) Buff all shield HP
10) Buff axe/poleaxe damage to counter the shield HP increase
11) Nerf axe/poleaxe speed slightly
12) Speed up archer rate of fire slightly
13) Activate weapons when chambered so that you can't move them through other people or objects prior to swinging (not sure how)

All of the above will make weapons more situational so that players can't kill absolutely everything really easily with the same weapon.  Instead players have to carry multiple weapons (expensive) or team up with other people using different weapons.

I don't actually want to see all these changes btw, they are just the one way i can think of to encourage more natural team play

Your basic idea is right - less flexibility for every player increases the need for teamplay. But the solution went into a totally undesirable direction. If anything, I would go into the other direction and make certain classes even more deadly in their "speciality". That way, if you have a counter, it is even more dangerous to you, and while you were able to more or less evade your counter or even defend yourself against it, you would now be almost helplessly at their mercy without a teammate helping you.

But the problem with the whole class dependancy tweaking is, that it's class balance tweaking. It is what has been done for years now in cRPG, and what caused all that lobbying, "class racism" and all the other stuff which is so present in the cRPG community. Reworking the classes from scratch again would render all that work of those years useless. There must be other ways. And indeed, there are other ways.

Or, they don't care about winning and simply do whatever they think is amusing.

Following your team is not less amusing. People only imagine it that way. But rushing headlong into the enemy crowd and being hacked down after a few swings, spending the rest of the round in spectator mode does not contain more action than spending some time waiting with the team, engaging melee later but then surviving for a longer time. And it doesn't mean you can't charge five enemies on your own, anyway. It just happens later in the round, but on the other hand the round ends sooner after your fights.

[Teeth]

Glorious 2010 cRPG, sure it was stupid and ridiculous and mean to new players and what not. But it did do one thing better than the current cRPG. The xp and gold rewards system. Now for those newmy old friends who weren't there. You got xp and gold when an enemy was killed within a certain radius of you. The amount of xp and gold you got was based on the level of the player that died. The guy who got the kill got exactly the same as the guy standing 20 m to the side. If I would have to guess I'd say the radius was about 20 m, don't clearly remember though. The radius also might have been larger for cav. The xp and gold you got this way was displayed on the top right and I think you got 100% of that if you won and like 40% if you lost.

The maps back then had a lot of random plains as well. Back then there were no slots and hybridizing was easy. Which means almost everyone had a shield and a lot of people had ranged, there were hardly any pure ranged or pure anything really.

Here is a video to get an impression, it also features the xp barn, although a classic, it was basically shit gameplay, but further in the video there are some more open maps. Quite an early video so a lot of peasants.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P32SuOJExR8

I am going for a bulletpoint system now, because otherwise this post is going to reach Joker level.

How did battles look like back then?
- Loose sticking together
- Shieldwalls, with a skirmishing phase and then a big melee
- Ranged stuck near the infantry, so did cav.
- Cav was not OP in open maps, due to people sticking together.
- When you closed in on an archer, they mostly switched to melee, because they had armor and weapons and everything (except if this archer was K-something_Khan, he would run away with 12 athlethics and clutch rounds like this on his own against 10 enemies :p)

What did you not see?
- Spawnrushing cav
- Half the team circling one way, half the other way
- Everyone spreading out like a retard
- Chasing kills, got you a lot less xp than turning around and facing the mob
- People in braindead grinding mode effectively suiciding

In short, they were epic and team focused battles, where everyone was forced to stick close to the fight and ranged and cav actually supported infantry.

Now I am not arguing that the old system was perfect, but it sure beats the multiplier and the mentality it creates. I think area based xp has some great benefits that greatly increase the amount of teamplay and greatly reduces the amount of retardedness that people who value teamplay have to put up with. Really the problem which the OP describes is caused by the reward system which simply needs an overhaul. Take the good elements from the 2010 system and the current system and improve the game by a fuckton.

Also on the note of more open maps, I agree, but not randomly generated maps. Just generate some good flat plain maps and put those in as fixed maps instead of the randomly generated ones. Otherwise a random plains map ends up as a 'I camp my hill you camp yours' 8/10 times. Or is simply barely traversable. It's just a simple matter of generating until you have a good one and saving the terrain code, I could make a dozen if the map lord approves.

[CrazyCracka420]

Just put more random plains and steppes in the rotation and you'll force more teamplay. It happens every time the maps change to an open map.

I don't know why we're still playing city/enclosed maps still, almost every infantryman is playing it like it's counter-strike, not a medieval battlefield.

Force people to use terrain and teammates, not buildings and 3rd person view around a corner.

Village and city maps are "siege" maps in Strategus, but apparently are "battle" maps in public servers...go figure...

I'm more of a fan of promoting teamwork/teamplay without changing the gameplay or adding wonky mechanics to force it.

[Rumblood]

One item on teamplay:

If you want to encourage teamplay, the game mechanics can not make it more likely that you will be wounded by a teammate than the enemy. Even odds of 25% team/75% enemy damage is too great. I believe we need a combination of less chance to team hit and in-game less penalty when you do.
Take it away completely? No. It is an important mechanic in itself. But it should be encouraging smart teamplay rather than discouraging it altogether.

(Side effect is griefers will find it harder to grief as it will take more hits to kill a teammate and thus easier to reach the 5/5 auto-kick for douchebaggery)