Quote: ChaosX on 03/24/2012, 05:27 AM - view
I don't think you were wrong to complain about this. I am less than thrilled about the current setup of racial abilities as well. While the bonuses are minor, I think it's understandable that every player wants their character to at least have the same number of bonuses as the next fellow.

If you (for example) are playing a race that receives a number of PvP-only racial abilities, and you are not even remotely interested in PvP, then you may naturally feel like you have fewer racial abilities than everyone else.

Here is my beef with the way racial abilities are currently designed: they appear to be influencing a player's choice in choosing certain races over others.

Now, I thought this concern was a huge part of the reasoning behind making the hit-boxes of the different races as similar as possible - so players wouldn't feel like they had to choose a race based on combat advantages and disadvantages. And yet, here the developers are, risking the same mistake all over again with racial abilities (which, unless I'm mistaken, is an EME addition to the game?).

How did that happen? Hit-box differences are too threatening to a player's ability to choose a race based on aesthetic preference alone, but tacking on extremely useful or extremely useless racial abilities to these same choices is just fine? That makes no sense. It's like there's two different visions at work here with completely differing ideas on what should be the driving factor behind a character concept.

To quote Bluehole Studios, the developers of Tera Online, on hitboxes:

"If there are major differences in hitboxes so that those of a physically smaller race have a smaller hitbox and therefore are harder to hit, this would be an advantage. Conversely, because these races have shorter limbs compared to larger races, it is more difficult to attack enemies, and this would be a disadvantage. These elements would have a big impact on game balance, and certain races would then be preferred or avoided, and those who wanted to play the disadvantageous races would become frustrated with TERA."

In this case they clearly have a problem with players preferring or avoiding certain races due to a mechanic's impact on game balance. And I just don't see why this very same philosophy wouldn't apply to racial abilities.

Will it matter to every player to the point where everyone is feeling pressured to choose or avoid certain races? Of course not. By the same token, did the hitbox difference matter to every player to the point where everyone was feeling pressured to choose or avoid certain races? No. And yet, it was still changed regardless.

A little consistency on this philosophy is not too much to expect.

Regardless of whether or not a player makes their final decision based on the racial abilities, the game system is still giving the player a poor choice: choose aesthetics or choose technical performance. Generally speaking, the game system should force choices between two different aesthetics, or choices between two different vectors of technical performance (defense vs. offense for example).

A player should not generally have to choose so discretely between aesthetics and technicals when there's no point.

If your aesthetic choice happens to coincide with good technical performance, then good for you ... but it's an idiotic choice to force on the player when the alternatives are so clearly better: make racial abilities selectable, remove them, nerf them / make them cosmetic.

Edit:

To be clear, many of the racials are pretty tangential. However, the issue is the long cooldown ones. These can basically autowin a fight every X hours. On the flip side, the other racials have nearly zero impact on all fights.

Pretty sure a 100% full heal is going to be way the hell better than any other racial in the game, and only a few other racials are really competitive at all.

It should be exactly the opposite of what you are suggesting. When the dev's made hitboxes bigger to 'equal' out the playing field, they should have kept them the same size as the character you've chosen. This is Tera. This isn't WoW, EQ, EQ2, SWTOR, Rift etc. The entire reason that I'm playing this game is because it requires more active gameplay, skill and evolving strategy than other games in the market currently.

I want small hitboxes for small characters. I want longer reach for characters with greater reach. I love the fact that you don't get to just click a target and go afk while you dps it down. I also expect that races in a game come with (are born with) different innate abilities. Remember, these aren't things that the character learns later on in the game where it could be taught to someone else, it's just something that they can do naturally, thus why it is called a 'racial ability'.

Those of you who played EQ back in the day like myself know about making hard choices. You want to get a character with high hp regen? Well you're going to level slower than everyone else and you'll be hated just about everywhere you go. You want to be a strong warrior with great reputation in most cities? You're only going to be able to adventure during half the day because you can't see [filtered] at night and you aren't going to have the innate armor stats that other evil races will receive. Come end game? It all balances out anyway with gear.

The difference between all those other games and Tera is that skill is going to make the crappy players stand out like a sore thumb. If I'm running a guild that is heading for end game content, I want several things.

1. I want you to have a personality that meshes with everyone else in the guild. If you're an [filtered] and everyone else is joking around and having a good time I don't give a [filtered] if you're the best tank in the game, you can find another [filtered] guild to play with.

2. Skill. If you're dps'ing for me and you can't dodge attacks to minimize the damage you're taking then I don't want you even if you have the supposed 'best' race for that class. I'd rather have any other race who can mitigate their damage effectively than someone who requires constant attention and babysitting.

If you are getting your [filtered] handed to you so often that you have to drop your full heal racial every time it's off cooldown then you need to find another game. Again, this isn't WoW. The mobs don't auto target you and get to hit you no matter what you do. You're ability to avoid/mitigate damage is more important in this game than your ability to deal it out. If you can at least avoid taking damage you can eventually kill your enemy. If you constantly get sausage whipped in the face then no one is going to enjoy playing with you and you'll learn to love playing solo classes a TON.

If it seems like I'm being overly harsh here it's because I've seen too many games fall to the 'we're too f'ing stupid to play this game dumb it down for us majority'. Every game I seem to find the majority of players want every class and/or race to be a) godly, and b) easy to master. Otherwise it isn't fair to those people who aren't actually good at the game, but feel it's their right to have all the same gear and do all the same things that a truly skilled player gets. Just because you pay $14/mo. to play a game doesn't mean you're entitled to something other than the ability to play the game based on the specifications set forth by the developers when they created it. It doesn't say in the EULA that you're going to end up with elite gear and be at the top of the PvP charts. It says you pay your money each month and if you don't like/can't handle the game then you have the option to cancel your subscription and go play another game.

The problem with MMOs is that the actual 'skilled' community of players in any game is about 10 to 15%. There is a large percentage of average players who have played a bunch of different MMOs and know the basic ropes of how to play, say they're 50 to 60% and then there is the 25 to 40% of a community that are just garbage players. They can hide in most MMOs by quietly gearing up and playing a cookie-cutter dps class that doesn't get noticed. One of my best friends still plays WoW and he is one of these garbage players. I introduced him to the game about 4 years ago and he sucked balls at the game. He still does. But he's in the top guild on his server running a dps arcane/fire spec mage and no one can tell him apart from any of the average players. During the starting years of his career he constantly came to me complaining about how hard the game is and each time Blizzard patched the game and made it easier he was happy again for another 3 or 4 months before the average/skilled players gained an advantage on him again and he was back to whining on the forums about how broken this class or that class was.

This group of garbage players are a) the most vocal about how a game needs to change to suit their needs and b) the first ones to quit a game when the developers don't comply with their wishes because they've done it a dozen times before with every other game they've played. When a developer sees a 20% decrease in their monthly subscriptions because a chunk of their community has left, all rational thought goes out the window and they start doing the 'too little too late patching the game to make everyone who quit happy'. What they don't seem to take into consideration is that these garbage gamers are FoTM gamers anyway. They'll jump ship for the next game that comes out in a month or two anyway (and you wonder why the suck at games they only play for a couple months). Along with that the developers assume that the people who are still playing the game will continue to play no matter what patch changes they make and that they can salvage the players they lost by succumbing to their wishes. This is where we hit the death-spiral. The actual skilled players start to leave because the average players are getting gear/perks easily when it potentially took them months to earn the items that they have. Once the skilled player base start to leave then the average players begin to find it harder and harder to clear end-game content without solid leadership and the garbage players that are still left begin to stick out in the crowd. The average player doesn't find the game fun anymore because they're constantly having to work too hard for their loot and sharing with players they don't think deserve it (huh . . . kinda sounds like what the skilled players felt like before they quit . . . ). Once the average players start to leave the game is finished as the garbage players are already starting to kill another MMO anyway.

TL;DR > Racial abilities should stay. Hitboxes should be resized to fit the character size. Reach should be reset to the actual reach of the race. This isn't WoW. Time to put on your big boy pants and learn that the world isn't always fair. If you want to be a tiny character with short arms and are deadset on being a warrior then you better be ready to also learn that larger characters are going to have an advantage on you. It's up to you to figure out how to navigate past your shortcomings on a character, not the game dev's.

TL;DR2 > If the dev's succumb to the wishes of the majority and veer away from the vision they had for their game in the first place, they will create something that, in the end, no one enjoys and everything will come crashing down in a fiery ball of death within the first year of release.

Quote:

Your argument is pretty incoherent on several accounts:

1. You use an example of tradeoffs where the tradeoffs both have value. The current racials in TERA do not have equivalent value. Some are excellent and autowin fights every period of time, and some are /zzzzz and are irrelevant. This is the crux of the problem.

2. You attempt to borrow the results of a more coherent argument (hitboxes, where there are realistic tradeoffs, even though it still causes imbalances and is thus a bad idea to have different hitboxes, unless the devs make a gigantic effort to balance them, which could happen but is unlikely / unreasonable) in order to justify a poor argument.

3. You use an argument justified in an RP-PvE context where character flavor trumps performance.

4. Related to #3, your argument relies on the paradigm of the EQ-esque era where character balance was a low priority on gamers' minds. It's nice that you're on a nostalgia trip, but BHS/EME have to deal with today's demographic, not yester-year's.

5. Ironically, your entire rant on how you are in favor of the "skill" in the game contradicts your argument where you support imbalanced racials.

Commentary:

Players want balanced races, so they can choose the race they wish without impacting raw performance. Players also want race uniqueness, which tends to conflict in many cases with the balance. It's the developer's challenge to meet both needs as best they are able.

The most common/effective solution to date are cosmetic / pve fluff (threat range) / minor racial abilities.

This direction is indicative of the obvious: players want balance over uniqueness of racial abilities, because the race aesthetics are unique enough that they wish to choose the race without impacting performance.

For somone who seems to be trying to take a PVP sides perspective in this discussion, you sure are insulting them by thinking that they cant adapt to having different sized hitboxes.

The whole point of PVP is to masure ones skill against another. If you think that having different sized hitboxes is wrong becouse its 'unbalanced', then you might aswel lsay thatin all FPS games everyone should only be able to choose 1 type of gun, and in RTS games people can only choose one race, and in racing games only 1 car.

Balance only matters when it comes to balancing out things between majorly different things.
Races in TEra are not majorly different. They (atleats in the orignal) had different sized hitboxes, with different sized 'reach', and different racials. These do NOT dictate the outcome of a fight, not like say class A Vs B would if A was underpowered.

Big hitbox(negative) + big reach(positive) + racial that 'could' help (i.e 1 time heal, passive dmg recution) (positive)

Small hitbox(positive) + small reach(negative) + racial that could not help (crit from behind, faster out of combat running)(negative)

THAT is all the balance that is neccesery for a difference between race. There is NOTHING to get all bent out of shape for, for somthing so small. Specialy when changing it causes issues outside of ballance... which it has.

To be honest i think the people syaing that hitboxes should all be the same, when it goes against the orginal game, the athtestics, and common sense... just want them the same so they dont feel the need to choose a race they dont like the look of becouse they 'feel' that race gives them the best advantage in pvp. i.e the Elin and Popori.
hell... 'real' pvp'ers would WANT to choose the race that 'could' give them a disadvantage in pvp, for the challenge.. thats what pvp is about .. the challenge.

Quote: Lains on 03/27/2012, 11:45 AM - view

There are SO many Elin lancers on K-Tera, it's ridiculous. And these are very serious players. So I don't think racials matter as much as all that.

Think about it: If you have good heals you don't need the majority of racials which supposedly affect combat. And the 1% damage increase from backstabbing? Ooh! Jump back! Too much!

Don't forget that abilities are scaled and balanced for max level play and it's at that point that racials matter the least.