A general discussion on the issue of ranged

[Macropus]

That's probably why I dislike throwing's current implementation, since many just throw in your general direction as quickly as possible, and the ones that are consistently accurate are simply an enigma to me.

There are two kinds of throwers: those who throw their stuff at you and those who throw their stuff out in your direction. First try to hit you, second try to make any use of their ammo before dying.
After trying throwing myself I had to admit it does indeed take skill to be accurate with it, because personally I am unable to do that.

[Seleucus]

Throwing takes a ton of skill to hit people, and is balanced by the super slow missle speed, which means if your opponent is aware and dodges at all you end up missing.

Arrows and Xbows with the insanely high missle speed require less skill as there is less travel time for your target to dodge.  And thats why we are having a problem in this game.

[Adamar]

2. Archery and xbow's are far to easy to pick up and be able to learn to use.

Compare the effectiveness between classes.(Score/kills...)

[San]

I hate throwing sometimes, but I can't help but respect those who are very good at it. Such a love/hate relationship.

[Life]

how about we just buff shields instead of nerfing archers.
im not saying add invisible force field again, but archers should not be able to break a difficulty 4 shield.

[Joker86]

I try to stay as short as possible, to present my point of view.


1. I don't want to say that either melee or ranged is easier or more difficult

2. Melee players can support each other with linear growth, which means that every additional melee fighter is worth an additional melee fighter. Perhaps it's even at a degrading rate, since there can only be so much melee players around an enemy without teamhitting everyone and his mother. Archers can support each other exponentially, which means every archers helps the team even more than the guy before him. It's the famous point when you have enough Space Marines to stop an infinite amount of Zerglings, since they can't get into reach. But there can never be a certain amount of Zerglings stopping an infinite amount of Space Marines.

3. This effect starts a vicious circle, since if there are enough archers, they seem OP. If they seem OP, the average cRPG player skills into that class/build, which means there are even ore of them, making everyone of them more OP. It's a self-fullfilling prophecy.

4. Since the effectivity of an archer is determined by the amount of his fellow archers on the server, it is difficult or even impossible to regulate their abundance by tweaking their stats like damage or missile speed. If there are less archers than the calculated average, they are UP, if there are more they remain OP. It would a bad and unfair solution. If anything, a single archer is heavily UP, if you try to be fair and look at his stats compared to an infantry or cavalry player.

5. Playing infantry requires a high amount of teamplay. In difference to the other classes the infantryman require the support of his fellow team members. If infantry players are cooperating with other players, and this group of cooperating players reaches a certain size, it becomes almost unstoppable. On the other hand, if everybody runs around like the average autowalker-Rambo-lemming, no wonder infantry dies like flies and looks almost unplayable and subpar compared to cavalry or archers. If the different classes of infantry players cooperate, they negate their weaknesses and counter all the other classes. On the other hand a single infantryman who has no overview of the general course of the battle is easy prey and already dead. This is the other side of the archer problem: the alternative is unattractive to most players.

The only way to finally get a grip on the ranged problem is to control the amount of ranged on the servers. As I stated above, nerfing or buffing certain classes won't help and is a bad and unfair solution. Instead the incentives to play a certain class on the server should be changed. I made a suggestion some time ago that a certain percentage of your XP is determined by the class you play. The less people on the server play your class, the more XP you get, and the other way round. I wouldn't do this with money, since it should not be made IMPOSSIBLE to play certain classes, just not really rewarding. Another thing which bothers me since I play cRPG is this horrible philosophy to want players to stick to their build. Yes, roleplay wise that's nice, but it's horrible for all the other aspects. If people could respec always or at least more often without those negative drawbacks, and if the marketplace would disappear (it's the worst idea ever and I am honestly shocked someone who can make a game like cRPG can can make such a decision which is as stupid as it gets before crossing the mentally disabled line.) and everyone could reset his loompoints when he wants to, players would be more flexible, the devs would notice unbalances much faster (since the players always notice them first and then you can recognize OP builds by their abundance), and most important of all: it wouldn't be so much of a kick into the face when your precious build gets nerfed or even unplayable at all, which is not your fault and yet you get "punished" that way without any compensation. Yeah, yeah, marketplace, I told you what marketplace is worth a few lines above.

[Thomek]

I try to stay as short as possible, to present my point of view.

But yeah, you are right generally. Except it is even more extreme, because ranged always have a meatwall in front to die before it's their turn to die, thus giving them more time to shoot. I don't believe quota system will be implemented though..with the dev attention being focused elsewhere.  Nerf is the tool at hand, and the best "incentive" we have not to play ranged. 

Also, remember that having unique chars is one of the great things with crpg. You recognize your enemy, it is a personal fight with your honor at stake. This is what makes cRPG so intense imo.. If I'm fighting someone I know is a great player, the victory is more sweet, if I die to a scrub the pill is bitter.

[Joker86]

Nerf is the tool at hand, and the best "incentive" we have not to play ranged.

Nerfing ranged once more is as good as an idea as it was to prohibit alcohol in the USA. It's highly counterproductive.

If you want to nerf ranged once more you can take them out of the game as well, making it incredibly plain and boring. The ever-empty melee only server is proof enough.

As a game designer you have to take care of all players equally. Making ranged so uneffective that you can only score points by the help of your 30 archer mates would make playing the class incredibly boring, and the numbers would go down again, making them UP, so you need to buff them again, making the OP... you see where this will end? No? Because I don't either 

After all those years I think the community should have learned finally that buffing and nerfing is NOT the way to go at all. It creates more problems than it solves.

[San]

I understand and agree with most of your points, but there are some situations that I just can't understand.

5. Playing infantry requires a high amount of teamplay. In difference to the other classes the infantryman require the support of his fellow team members. If infantry players are cooperating with other players, and this group of cooperating players reaches a certain size, it becomes almost unstoppable. On the other hand, if everybody runs around like the average autowalker-Rambo-lemming, no wonder infantry dies like flies and looks almost unplayable and subpar compared to cavalry or archers. If the different classes of infantry players cooperate, they negate their weaknesses and counter all the other classes. On the other hand a single infantryman who has no overview of the general course of the battle is easy prey and already dead. This is the other side of the archer problem: the alternative is unattractive to most players.

When I read this, I was wondering in what ways you would suggest being able to defend against a strong ranged opposition. Formations and defensive play are not that great in battle mode, since any piece of health lost on one team and not on the other have immediately tangible effects, where even a slight discrepancy in team force could seal a team's win. The team with less archers would get slowly whittled away until the troops that are left are forced to approach and inevitably lose at some point. That's why I believe that when there are many ranged on the other team, a strong offensive push from the start is the right choice since the team with the stronger ranged aren't obligated to approach.

Even so, with current crpg mechanics, that option is still disadvantageous even with an ample amount of shielders for these reasons:

• Charging shielders can typically only defend themselves
• Movement while holding a shield up is incredibly slow, often times slower than archer run speed with arrows. Shielders are forced to drop their blocks to run and catch ranged. This also makes shielders inadvertently easier to hit from the sides.
• Due to aforementioned poor movement, ranged are more freely able to maneuver around towards enemy sides and blind spots. A good shot only needs to be 30 degrees off of a shielder to land shots consistently
• Shielders are highly vulnerable to other ranged once engaged with a single one. It's difficult to approach even with an equal amount of shielders
• Ranged have the option to run at any moment if they know there is a ranged buddy to back him up. The shielder has to win the up close fight in under 7-10 seconds, usually.

I believe balance-wise, a smaller group of shielders should pose a greater threat to ranged as a whole than they do currently. I think the easiest encampment for a shielder to charge is a group solely comprised of archers. You can get a timing for when they will shoot, you can soak up a good number of arrows, and you may still survive a few shots. Archers are also the slowest and sometimes may be approached even while holding up a block if you have good athletics.

When xbowers and throwers get into the mix with archers, things become incredibly more difficult. Both classes are quicker than archers. Shielders also can't afford to get hit once by a throwing weapon or an xbow(assuming it's an arbalest), since one hit will cripple their health. Blocking a throwing weapon does a good amount of damage to a shield compared to the other ranged types. For lower shield skill, it's an almost immediate danger that the shield would break soon, while high shield skill will feel the effects in the long run if the shielder can't reach the thrower. Indefinite holding with zero cues makes not getting hit more a factor of the xbower and puts it out of the shielder's hands. The xbower missing allows the shielder to chase either player, but the xbower should be able to reload in both cases.

Changes:
I believe shielders should be able to follow and disrupt most ranged repositioning strategies better than they do currently once the ranged and melee on the other team let them get too close. I believe that movement speed should increase while holding block and moving forward after a few seconds. That would isolate the balance for shielders against ranged and it would make them a better supporting force for charging specified locations. Reducing shield weight is another option that may help some in certain ways, but it would also increase their acceleration in melee fighting by a noticeable degree. That change would help them against melee more than ranged IMO.

The above applies to team balance, but I believe gameplay interaction between ranged and melee can be more of a two-way street if there were more cues for ranged shooting. I mentioned this in another thread, but I like how archery has a timing window, and I feel like it can be applied to the other ranged characters and tweaked for archery so it can remain skill-based. Because one can predict the timing of a shot and see exactly where the opponent is aiming, prediction and mindgames are more effective tools. Indefinite holding takes control out of the person approaching. With that in effect, stat tweaks can mostly be a purely internal affair and ranged weapons can keep good stats.


When I read this part:

The only way to finally get a grip on the ranged problem is to control the amount of ranged on the servers.

I can only disagree, since I believe there should be options available to both teams for any general team composition. There are few hard counters in this game, but soft counters (noticeable advantage) should exist against every class based on equipment usage and simple strategy should be available.

[Corsair831]

imo best solution to ranged (and thus people crying about ranged, which i find so much more annoying than the ranged itself), is to give some good coverage shields for 0 shield skill, with better ranged forcefields, that take 10 or so arrows to break.

admittedly, that would require a pretty Major rebalancing, so it won't happen.

tbh, all these threads are pointless at this point, nothing major is going to be done to cRPG at this juncture, devs are busy working on their new game )

[jtobiasm]

In short it is too easy to be good at ranged.

zzzzzzzzzzzz bore off mate.

Remove Crosshairs for ranged

Ye m8 i'll stick blue tack on my screen, np.

[Joker86]

[...]

Actually your quote of me was not meant as a point like "There are options to deal with this", it's more meant like "most people play infantry the wrong way, and thus have bad experiences with it => more inclined to become archer".

The thing is that in cRPG usually when one class apart from infantry is way overrepresented, for some reason the effectivity of that team increases, instead of going down. I don't know why it's that way, I guess it's simply the inability of pubs to adapt their gameplay to that special enemy team (or even to notice there is something different and to recognize the requirement of adapting to it), but whenever I saw that one team had most cavalry or archers, that team usually won.

I guess you can also describe it the other way round, that due to the fact that archers and cavalry need little cooperation to be effective (cavalry need each other only to distract the enemy, archers only need to stand loosely next to each other to support and protect each other), whereas infantry needs higher levels of coordination (ideally most infantry classes should stay within a protecting line of shielders and pikemen), which means most infantry players remain under their possibilities. So it's no wonder that those teams win, which have a lower percentage of these "bad" players.

Concerning my statement of controlling the amount of classes: I would never go that far to say "you can't play this class right now", a hard limit or something like that is something I wouldn't want myself, such things are a big letdown. But I think players should be motivated to try playing other classes, and to fill shortages. That would be my approach.

I know it is difficult, because another point for playing archers is the low interaction level with your enemy, since the fighting most of the times goes exclusively from one direction into the other. You aim at the enemy, and it's mostly your skill which determines if you hit or miss, the enemy can influence this by dodging, hiding or blocking with his shield, but most of the time you can simply pick another, unaware and easy target, so that there is really little interaction with the enemy. In melee on the other hand your enemy has actually to make a mistake in order to enable you of scoring a hit. This is something intimidating and frustrating, especially considering the average skill level of the cRPG community.

[Xeen]

Great posts, Joker and San.  I particularly agree with Joker on the fact that nerfing ranged really doesn't change the true problem.  There are plenty of times when ranged is perfectly fine.  The problem tends to be when there is a critical mass(great starcraft analogy btw) of ranged or when people in general realize how ridiculously powerful non-interaction is and just start kiting anytime they have any amount of ranged advantage.

I think an important thing to point out here is that most people's problems with ranged stem directly from the battle game mode.  Changing stats isn't really going to matter when the problem is less about the amount of damage they are doing and more to do with the fact that you just don't get to fight people at all sometimes.  I've long said that they should just have a modified, consistent motf that spawns long enough into the match that positioning and ranged harass would matter significantly.  If they did this, they could at the very least unnerf arrow weight if not buff archers altogether.  Archers are completely fine, I'd even say great if applied correctly and in appropriate numbers in siege, but a buff for them would probably be just fine.

San also made a great point about xbows holding their shots to deal with shielders.  Right now, I see that as the greatest detriment to shielders actually being effective ranged counters.  It seems to me like there are far more people nowadays that realize how great a strategy this is, and purposely prioritize shielders when they are backing up friendlies.

Throwing needs a slight change, I think Tydeus is already on this.  I think the best option is a reduction in damage coupled with an increase in ammunition.  The main problem I see with throwing is the ridiculous amount of burst damage you get from a single hit.  Too many throwers, as San points out, basically just roll dice and hope they get some really gay instakills.  They also just give more ammunition to people who don't suck at throwing and both teams have a shitty time.  Bringing back 2 slot throwing stacks would give the balancers an easier way to balance damage vs ammo.  For instance, heavy throwing axes being 5 ammo for 2 slots would be a great compromise in the current system.

And last........  CAN WE FUCKING TRY CAPTURE THE FLAG???  It is a fully functional game mode that any admin could just change to anytime they wanted to.  Ruins is a good example of a map with sufficient cover, flat ground, and distance.   

[Gnjus]

I try to stay as short as possible

1. I don't want to say that either melee or ranged is easier or more difficult

2. Melee players can support each other with linear growth, which means that every additional melee fighter is worth an additional melee fighter. Perhaps it's even at a degrading rate, since there can only be so much melee players around an enemy without teamhitting everyone and his mother. Archers can support each other exponentially, which means every archers helps the team even more than the guy before him. It's the famous point when you have enough Space Marines to stop an infinite amount of Zerglings, since they can't get into reach. But there can never be a certain amount of Zerglings stopping an infinite amount of Space Marines.

3. This effect starts a vicious circle, since if there are enough archers, they seem OP. If they seem OP, the average cRPG player skills into that class/build, which means there are even ore of them, making everyone of them more OP. It's a self-fullfilling prophecy.

4. Since the effectivity of an archer is determined by the amount of his fellow archers on the server, it is difficult or even impossible to regulate their abundance by tweaking their stats like damage or missile speed. If there are less archers than the calculated average, they are UP, if there are more they remain OP. It would a bad and unfair solution. If anything, a single archer is heavily UP, if you try to be fair and look at his stats compared to an infantry or cavalry player.

5. Playing infantry requires a high amount of teamplay. In difference to the other classes the infantryman require the support of his fellow team members. If infantry players are cooperating with other players, and this group of cooperating players reaches a certain size, it becomes almost unstoppable. On the other hand, if everybody runs around like the average autowalker-Rambo-lemming, no wonder infantry dies like flies and looks almost unplayable and subpar compared to cavalry or archers. If the different classes of infantry players cooperate, they negate their weaknesses and counter all the other classes. On the other hand a single infantryman who has no overview of the general course of the battle is easy prey and already dead. This is the other side of the archer problem: the alternative is unattractive to most players.

The only way to finally get a grip on the ranged problem is to control the amount of ranged on the servers. As I stated above, nerfing or buffing certain classes won't help and is a bad and unfair solution. Instead the incentives to play a certain class on the server should be changed. I made a suggestion some time ago that a certain percentage of your XP is determined by the class you play. The less people on the server play your class, the more XP you get, and the other way round. I wouldn't do this with money, since it should not be made IMPOSSIBLE to play certain classes, just not really rewarding. Another thing which bothers me since I play cRPG is this horrible philosophy to want players to stick to their build. Yes, roleplay wise that's nice, but it's horrible for all the other aspects. If people could respec always or at least more often without those negative drawbacks, and if the marketplace would disappear (it's the worst idea ever and I am honestly shocked someone who can make a game like cRPG can can make such a decision which is as stupid as it gets before crossing the mentally disabled line.) and everyone could reset his loompoints when he wants to, players would be more flexible, the devs would notice unbalances much faster (since the players always notice them first and then you can recognize OP builds by their abundance), and most important of all: it wouldn't be so much of a kick into the face when your precious build gets nerfed or even unplayable at all, which is not your fault and yet you get "punished" that way without any compensation. Yeah, yeah, marketplace, I told you what marketplace is worth a few lines above.

I try to stay as short as possible

I try to stay as short as possible

I try to stay as short as possible

[Corsair831]

walls of text, walls of text everywhere

seriously guys, 150 words or less lol.

or at the very least do tiny summarys then put ur main point in spoilers