And lastly, one way to also save screen space and simplify the UI is to reduce skill cycles to just one skill.
Or better, having to make decisions with consequences in a situation, so we don't need 10 pages of math formulas for 101k combinations (aka filler).
That's why I love healing as my game play, because it's not about A skill to apply to B target over and over and over. It's about watching the field to find the best target, and making a HUMAN decision on the spot (which gets better to chose with more experience). It adds the imperfectness of being human in the equation than the mathematical assurance that A macro will work over B keybind (which is why I consider them cheats).
In the process my keyboard and mouse isn't worn bare in a year from 111111111111111111111111 (or CTRL+1 loaded into a macro) spamming, too.
This topic is brilliant IF talking about FFXI because all the other games did not put any depth into their combat system.
Where FFXI failed is to take that depth far enough so that players always had to use the entire system instead of ignoring it and going strict dps and nothing else.
Also what FFXI did right was create and utilize a MACRO system that also kept the screen free of clutter.When you wanted to use a macro you hit ALT or CNTRL and called it up.
Games that clutter the screen with 3/4/5+ rows of hotbars is just nonsense.FFXI had a lot of skills and spells and all were meaningful but as mentioned,you did not need them all in every fight.Some might argue it takes a lot of time to make all those different macros for various situations and it did ,but once you had it all down you were set forever unless changing a gear macro.
Why FFXI also did it right was it allowed you time to think,i love having to think, i hate easy mode.So it's not like you had to look over 5 rows of hotbars and remember where each one was in a split second.FFXI had spells/abilities that were great at level 1 and still great at max level,that is a good design when stuff is not constantly rotated out for a newer higher version,although it did that as well.
That is why searching for a new game to play has been extremely frustrating ,most class and combat designs look like the team spent all of one day designing it.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Good post. It's tactical vs strategic thinking I think. The strategic player wants a lot of skills available so, through knowledge and memorization, they want to win a fight before it even starts by being crazy prepared. The more tactical player wants fewer skills in play to give them more reactive freedom for things like dodging or using terrain to advantage. Although there definitely still is a strategic element to games which force you to pick your deck of skills from a large selection before combat (so maybe those are the best melding of strategy and tactics).
I suspect there is a similar breakdown about hotbar vs action combat in MMOs (really it's stupid to have a tab target system without a lot of skills - you really get the worst of all worlds).
One addition is that I think if you are going to have a lot of skills in the game you should outlaw mods and macros. The challenge of these systems is actually knowing which skill to use at which time in which order. When you have a mod or a macro to do that for you it really does just become dumb button mashing.
I prefer having a lot of buttons but as long as the game has a lot of skills to choose from I think both systems can work
lMAO That is me in a nutshell,i love tactical,i would rather spend a day preparing a strategy than jump right in all hyper like i needed ridilin.
Even when i play FPS's i love maps that offer strategy,that si also why i can't stand mmorpg pvp,i would rather watch paint dry than stand out in the open and spam hotbars back n forth.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Since i think some people missed one of my points, or i just suck at explaining it:
I dislike fighting a keyboard, but i love OPTIONs. I am for deleting every useless skill, just like the majority of you is. I also don't want to have to use more then 5 skills in a priority order for anything like tanking or dps. But i still want to have options that are only needed in certain situations. I also understand that most current gen games go the easy route and just reduce your available hotbuttons and call it "convinient".
Leave the tactical desitions in the game, just leave out useless stuff.
Said game needs just as many keybinds / buttons / macros (however you want to call it) then Rift does. Or any other 40+ skill game. But you only get to choose 5 of those buttons. It is like having dozen auto bound useless skills learned from lvl 1.
So in essence you give up options for nothing and still have to fight your keyboard (which is never good) just as bad.
Also: thanks for pointing out my "a lot" issue. Will remember in the future.
What I think you mean is that you want more interesting options, not just more options in total. The problem is that the more options you give players, the harder it is to make all of them interesting. You can have a ranged attack versus a melee attack, an area attack versus a single-target attack, an instant damage attack versus a damage over time attack, and so forth. So it's easy to have five skills and make them all interesting and useful.
But if you want to give players 30 skills and make them all useful, so that none are readily replaced by others or only rarely useful, that's much harder. You can do it the Uncharted Waters Online way, of making it so that there are an enormous number of wildly different activities, and skills meant for one are obviously useless in another. But that's done by making most of the skills irrelevant to combat, so it's probably not what you're after.
If you want to make 30 different combat skills all useful to a single player in an area without making many of them interchangeable substitutes for each other, that's much harder to do. I don't think I've ever seen any game pull it off. Part of my argument against 50 skills on hotbars at once is that if you try it, players will basically ignore most of those skills most of the time.
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Since you didn't seem to take offense, a quick grammar lesson:
The "a" in "a lot" is the indefinite article, and means the same thing as the "a" in "a forum" or "a post" (which admittedly, is not much). The noun in "a lot" is "lot". It can be plural, as in "lots". In colloquial use, "a lot of buttons" means the same thing as "lots of buttons".
The noun "lot" can in some contexts refer to a very specific quantity. In Guild Wars 1 and 2, for example, crafting materials will stack to 250 in a single inventory slot; if you want more than 250 of something, it takes multiple slots. So players refer to a "stack" of something as meaning 250 of it. Three stacks of green wood planks, for example, is 750 of them. Players could have used "lots" instead of "stacks" and it would have meant the same thing and still been grammatically correct. But this usage is less common than the colloquial usage meaning "many", but not some exact quantity.
There is also a verb "allot", which comes from the same root as "allocate" and means about the same thing. For example, if you get five attribute points when you level up, you could allot 3 of them to attack speed and 2 to magic defense.
There are a lot of things in the English language that could not have been designed by someone seeking to facilitate clear communication, such as "affect" versus "effect" or "lie" versus "lay". But "a lot" isn't so hard; "alot" doesn't actually mean anything, and basically no one ever says "alots".
Strategical is planning ahead of time... placing the right skills on your bar is very strategical
Tactical comes with real time decisions... choosing the right skill at the right time...
Yes, actually hotbar games with a lot of buttons can combine both strategy and tactics if the skills are done well and there isn't just an optimal rotation to handle every encounter.
I still maintain that games with just under 10 unchanging skills are not good strategic games as there are very little planning or thought involved in what skills to use. The difficulty of these games is all from twitch-based skills while the battle is going on and knowing where to move and reacting to what your opponent does.
A game like GW2 has a nice strategic layer because you actually to have a lot of skills to be aware of along with also being pretty good on the tactical side. I kind of dislike the feel of GW2's combat (the fact that there's so much kiting in it mainly) but I'll give them credit for a well designed combat system.
I just recently went back to WoW and was a bit overwhelmed with all the crap on my screen lol. Back when I played WoW, I had almost every skill on my screen so everything was close and readily available should I need it. This time I put almost everything on scrolling or hidden bars except for about 10 buttons I press the most often.
I don't have time for all that button maintenance lol. I'm still not sure however, that I won't get bored with say, 5-9 buttons the newer games seem to be sprouting up with.
I still consider WoW combat system to be the best in genre. And the huge amount of diverse abilities (about 60 per class) is one of major reasons for it. Skilled players can get huge advantage when master them all through alot of practice and PvP.
I played Archeage recently, and very limited amount of skills just bored me. I feel like I learned everything very fast and there is nowhere to grow as a player
I agree with you Op. Many here are confusing option with implementation. Having many skills does not necessarily mean that all of the skills are useless/fluff. That is up to the implementation, which is at the discretion of the developer.
I dont know, I think EQ1 did it best. I had a ton of skills, disciplines, etc. I could create my own hotbars as many as I wanted scaled to how I wanted (horizontal, vertical, square, rectangle, etc). I could create my own macros if I wanted. Hotbar combat but you could move to position yourself correctly.
Unfortunately the game is just dated. If someone would copy THAT with state of the art development tools we have today I honestly believe we would have an awesome RPG, not just a game.
Since i think some people missed one of my points, or i just suck at explaining it:
I dislike fighting a keyboard, but i love OPTIONs. I am for deleting every useless skill, just like the majority of you is. I also don't want to have to use more then 5 skills in a priority order for anything like tanking or dps. But i still want to have options that are only needed in certain situations. I also understand that most current gen games go the easy route and just reduce your available hotbuttons and call it "convinient".
Leave the tactical desitions in the game, just leave out useless stuff.
Said game needs just as many keybinds / buttons / macros (however you want to call it) then Rift does. Or any other 40+ skill game. But you only get to choose 5 of those buttons. It is like having dozen auto bound useless skills learned from lvl 1.
So in essence you give up options for nothing and still have to fight your keyboard (which is never good) just as bad.
Also: thanks for pointing out my "a lot" issue. Will remember in the future.
What I think you mean is that you want more interesting options, not just more options in total. The problem is that the more options you give players, the harder it is to make all of them interesting. You can have a ranged attack versus a melee attack, an area attack versus a single-target attack, an instant damage attack versus a damage over time attack, and so forth. So it's easy to have five skills and make them all interesting and useful.
But if you want to give players 30 skills and make them all useful, so that none are readily replaced by others or only rarely useful, that's much harder. You can do it the Uncharted Waters Online way, of making it so that there are an enormous number of wildly different activities, and skills meant for one are obviously useless in another. But that's done by making most of the skills irrelevant to combat, so it's probably not what you're after.
If you want to make 30 different combat skills all useful to a single player in an area without making many of them interchangeable substitutes for each other, that's much harder to do. I don't think I've ever seen any game pull it off. Part of my argument against 50 skills on hotbars at once is that if you try it, players will basically ignore most of those skills most of the time.
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Since you didn't seem to take offense, a quick grammar lesson:
The "a" in "a lot" is the indefinite article, and means the same thing as the "a" in "a forum" or "a post" (which admittedly, is not much). The noun in "a lot" is "lot". It can be plural, as in "lots". In colloquial use, "a lot of buttons" means the same thing as "lots of buttons".
The noun "lot" can in some contexts refer to a very specific quantity. In Guild Wars 1 and 2, for example, crafting materials will stack to 250 in a single inventory slot; if you want more than 250 of something, it takes multiple slots. So players refer to a "stack" of something as meaning 250 of it. Three stacks of green wood planks, for example, is 750 of them. Players could have used "lots" instead of "stacks" and it would have meant the same thing and still been grammatically correct. But this usage is less common than the colloquial usage meaning "many", but not some exact quantity.
There is also a verb "allot", which comes from the same root as "allocate" and means about the same thing. For example, if you get five attribute points when you level up, you could allot 3 of them to attack speed and 2 to magic defense.
There are a lot of things in the English language that could not have been designed by someone seeking to facilitate clear communication, such as "affect" versus "effect" or "lie" versus "lay". But "a lot" isn't so hard; "alot" doesn't actually mean anything, and basically no one ever says "alots".
I agree with most of your post. To me if you had 50 (unique) skills, its not to use all of them for all combat. Naturally out of 50 you get to select what set of skills you feel comfortable with and move forward with that. MMOs as it core mechanic is grinding in one form or another. If I had 50 skills I would be able to switch the ones I use frequently making the gameplay feel fresh and giving me options.
What happens today is two-fold. I get a game with a limited hotbar and I get bored with those skills around the 30th level. Or I get a ton of skills on a hotbar (becoming extinct) and giving you these long strains of rotations.
Give me a large number of skills. Let me pick how many I want to use and when.
I still consider WoW combat system to be the best in genre. And the huge amount of diverse abilities (about 60 per class) is one of major reasons for it. Skilled players can get huge advantage when master them all through alot of practice and PvP.
I played Archeage recently, and very limited amount of skills just bored me. I feel like I learned everything very fast and there is nowhere to grow as a player
Too bad WoW took away player choice as its combat was good. I'd prefer to have skill points and have my hunter need ammo and be able to melee to add flexibility. To me WoW is more of an RPG arcade where you fighting to collect something (which can be fun) as opposed to playing a character (i.e. losing its RPG element and pushing the MMO one).
If I had 50 skills I would be able to switch the ones I use frequently making the gameplay feel fresh and giving me options.
What happens today is two-fold. I get a game with a limited hotbar and I get bored with those skills around the 30th level. Or I get a ton of skills on a hotbar (becoming extinct) and giving you these long strains of rotations.
Give me a large number of skills. Let me pick how many I want to use and when.
That may be an argument for having 50 skills, but it's not an argument for having 50 skills all available simultaneously. Think of Guild Wars 1 where you might have 100 skills for your class, of which only eight are on your bar available for a zone. But if you weren't using PVE-only skills to make everything trivial, you'd often have to change which eight skills you were using to be more effective against the mobs in that particular zone.
I still consider WoW combat system to be the best in genre. And the huge amount of diverse abilities (about 60 per class) is one of major reasons for it. Skilled players can get huge advantage when master them all through alot of practice and PvP.
I played Archeage recently, and very limited amount of skills just bored me. I feel like I learned everything very fast and there is nowhere to grow as a player
Too bad WoW took away player choice as its combat was good. I'd prefer to have skill points and have my hunter need ammo and be able to melee to add flexibility. To me WoW is more of an RPG arcade where you fighting to collect something (which can be fun) as opposed to playing a character (i.e. losing its RPG element and pushing the MMO one).
Hunters had melee attacks and limited arrows in the past. For most players including me it was more annoying and useless then fun. So they removed it. Hunter in WoW is now my favourite class across any MMORPG
Lets get an example of skills done right into this discussion.
Everquest 1, Necromancer.
I don't know how many different kind of dots this class has. At least 10 id guess ;-) But is that boring? Hell no!
efficient dots that tick for like 3 min, do good damage, cost low mana
dots that tick for 30sec, do the same damage, cost way more mana
dots that tick for 3min, do way more damage, cost way more mana
dots that tick for 30 sec, do way more damage, cost WAY WAY more mana
dots that tick for 2min, start out low damage and every tick gets bigger and bigger
dots that heal your group while damageing the enemy, with bad damage / mana ratios
Just to name a few. So you could argue they are all dots and it should simply be one big dot. And id argue that would be boring as hell. Having to adjust to your current fight takes more "skill" then mindlessly klicking that one button. Take the above in a boss fight. Shit hits the fan, healer running OOM and the boss needs to die, now. You would switch to your less efficient dots and try to burst him down. Or maybe take some pressure of the healers by healing your group with inefficient dots, so the healer can focus on the tank and not having to AoE heal.
Adds coming in that die fast? No need for those long ticking dots.
The same applies to group content. In Everquest you CAN use a standard rotation, that is about 70-80% efficient for any given group situation. But you could also just do a different rotation for every trash pack to max out that dps / mana ratio. More OPTION to not get bored.
Just to come up with a real example on why having a lot of good and diverse options opens up chances to adjust midfight and shine as a good player. And we are only talking about some dots here. I am sure you can come up with more pretty examples that include other skills not related to damage.
Then again, unless it is an action game (i still dislike my RPGs becoming action games,...), you could just as well click your situational skills with the mouse *gasp* and only have your standard rotation on 1-5. Oh and what bores you more? Klicking the same 5 skills over and over, or having to use your brain and adjust midfight?
It all comes down to lazy design of current gen games in my book, really. I agree that having more skills in current gen seems like a plague. Yet i am having a blast playing good old everquest every now and again if i can't stand the boredom that is current gen MMOs.
MMOs finally replaced social interaction, forced grouping and standing in a line while talking to eachother.
Now we have forced soloing, forced questing and everyone is the hero, without ever having to talk to anyone else. The evolution of multiplayer is here! We won,... right?
Originally posted by rounner I went back to check out Vanguard the other day but I couldn't play any of my high level chars because I forgot how to play them. It would take me days of situational playing to remember all of the different rotations and reactions for a char. When I remember and am in the zone its great and what I like, but I understand why others would want a simpler system.
And so it should be lol, i'm with you on this.
As for the OP, i agree 100% and i've been in the beta of the game you are talking about for a while. It's the same with GW2 and will be the same with EQN. EQ only allowed you 8(think it was that number, haven't played for years) but it felt right somehow.
On the other hand you don't want pointless skills,
Vanguard is a great example though, loved the game even with it's flaws.
That sounds exactly like you have played a game where it was done wrong.
Mind telling me where you got that from, so i can check it out? I personally have yet to play a MMO where a priority order had more then 8 skills. And those 8 got reduced one patch later to 5. I have never seen anything above those numbers myself, maybe that is why i don't have issues with many available skills.
WoW, EQ2, Rift, Vanguard... most themeparks I have played. Even classic EQ let you macro up to 5 skills together.
My macro on EQ2 for instance had 30 skills (the maximum possible in a macro) all put into priority order, yet people tout EQ2 as having complicated gameplay because it has so many buttons. Top DPS with one button, another button for AEs... so complicated! Healing / tanking / utility weren't harder to macro either.
Granted WoW has less skills these days for each spec, but my macros still have something like 8-10 skills.
My personal opinion is that if I can put it in a supermacro, its just clutter that could be handled through varying the animation for the one skill (like how GW2 does 3 different attacks in a row with the same button). GW1 on the other hand had real tactical choices for skills by limiting the hotbar to 8 skills.
Today i wanted to bring up a point about the controversy concerning "Too many skills".
Its more the controversy of making MMO games for non-MMO players. But this is what happens when major corporations take control of a genre, we end up seeing games only get funding if they target more player types. If an MMO was only targeting MMORPG players we would see games that utilize an entire KEYBOARD, not a controller or portable touch screen.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
I wonder if all these supporters of multi-hotbar MMOs realise that people can play their games and probably beat them by simply pressing 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 or 2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2 depending on the situation.
Originally posted by evilastro I wonder if all these supporters of multi-hotbar MMOs realise that people can play their games and probably beat them by simply pressing 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 or 2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2 depending on the situation.
Unfortunately, I've played MMOs where you just stand in front of your enemy and then hit the first couple of number keys at random as fast as you can. That's not fun, sorry.
World of Warcraft is an excellent game for its time. It's a very good way to do things if your players are using keyboards and you are playing a tab target MMO.
Its not a great way for action MMO - and I have no doubt in my mind that action MMOs are vastly superior in terms of combat.
#1. Lots of skills on the screen take away from immersion and clutter up your UI. You want players to feel like they are a part of the world not staring at bars of buttons.
#2. Tab Target MMOs suffer from a complexity problem. Mutiple skills and buttons are how they combat this. The problem is that combat isn't as interactive as it should be. Its largely standing in once place and trying to quickly get into your rotation - and then moving if you have to and repeating this process. By adding more keys - they can make a more complex rotation - and by adding more 'emergency' abilities they can make combat more difficult. It works to some extent - and makes something relatively simple more complex.
Action MMOs though can use action on the screen to up the complexity. Because they rely on movement they can tie the skill of the player not into the skill selection but the careful positioning of the player. You want to make combat that relies on ducking behind cover after a fireball has been thrown at him - you can do that with action combat. It doesn't precalculate whether the fireball hits or not and just show the animation. You want to make a gun that does max damage at long range but less damage at close - or vice versa - you can do that. You want to make a fire field that you can jump up out and have your character escape danger - you can do that.
So the action MMO designer CAN tie complexity to action on the screen in a way the tab target MMO designer cannot. So they don't need the 'crutch' of a gazillion buttons to make the combat interesting or hard.
#3. No doubt serious WoW players think I am blowing smoke up their butt and don't really believe me. But this is because they don't have enough experience with the new combat systems. At first they feel just like WoW. And you can play them a lot like WoW. But there is more depth there - albeit hidden for a WoW player. The problem for games like GW2 is that they haven't really done a great job of exposing their depth to the playing base. The PvE stuff is so easy that you can advance levels just aimlessly hitting buttons. It doesn't pressure you to play well at any point - there are not even roles. But the depth is there with a huge skill gap between good players who can avoid alot damage while dealing out incredible amounts and bad players who have to follow along in zergs.
From what I am hearing out of the beta tests in Wildstar the next generation will be fixing this. I think the combat system in ESO is also advanced as well.
As a sidenote WoW wants to strip a lot of buttons out of the game for the next expansion. But likely this is not because they implementing a new engine but just because they want bad players to have an easier time of it..
Originally posted by evilastro I wonder if all these supporters of multi-hotbar MMOs realise that people can play their games and probably beat them by simply pressing 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 or 2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2 depending on the situation.
I wonder if all these supporters of 1 set of 6 skill MMOs realize that people can player their games and probably beat them by simply pressing 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 or 2-2-2-2-2-2-2 depending on the situation and never really have much of an option to do anything else because all that remains are 3-4-5 and 6. Everyone else however still has 7-8-9-0-q-w-e-r-t-y-u-i-o-p-[-]-a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l-;-'-z-x-c-v-b-n-m-,-.-/-
and that's not including the F keys, shit+, alt+
that's a lot of choices to spam with.
Ahh, variety!
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
In gw2 To be good Dagger dagger elem I need 30 + bottons all always to use them. Some times I can fight even vs 2 characters and win Attut fire bam aoe cond might att air shock aura skill 1 a bit them 5 them attut to water heal and dmg reduction Cond chill switch no earth cond knock protection buf back to fire and again burst and so on and interval from each is 13 sec
Still Thief can almost 1 shot me 3 skills
Buff Buff a few skills that increase DPS and in stealth 1 hit and I have less than 25 % hp quite sad
warriors same but they not so OP spam 5 skills and 4 additional utilities
So no there is simple balance issues Some classes have to use 10 kills and wipe you and some one else 30 + and need to use them extremely fast in order to win.
I think skill is when you have lot of botons and mastering them so that you use them effectively and fast in the end you gain your SKILL
SO SKILL Is a variation of both effective and fast use of skills gaved to you
Originally posted by evilastro I wonder if all these supporters of multi-hotbar MMOs realise that people can play their games and probably beat them by simply pressing 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 or 2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2 depending on the situation.
I wonder if all these supporters of 1 set of 6 skill MMOs realize that people can player their games and probably beat them by simply pressing 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 or 2-2-2-2-2-2-2 depending on the situation and never really have much of an option to do anything else because all that remains are 3-4-5 and 6. Everyone else however still has 7-8-9-0-q-w-e-r-t-y-u-i-o-p-[-]-a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l-;-'-z-x-c-v-b-n-m-,-.-/-
and that's not including the F keys, shit+, alt+
that's a lot of choices to spam with.
Ahh, variety!
Keyboard spam isn't fun whether you're talking about 6 keys or 30 keys. I'd much rather have skills that actually require skill and thinking to use successfully.
Originally posted by syntax42 I simply don't have enough buttons within reach on my keyboard to press everything needed to play the game. I dislike using my mouse to activate skills because it feels slower to react.
Good.Why? Being dependent on macros and addons to play cheapens your experience in appreciating different games that can have 51 combat arts/spells/buffs, and not forcing players to get game controllers and fancy 10 button mice to play so folks can have a "challenge" and brag about their eliteness.
In agreement here.
"Games are too easy!" says the player with a "gaming mouse" and add-ons galore.
As for the buttons, keep my mouse out of combat and I am golden. I use the "weird" set-up where my hotkeys are my numpad, giving me 12 (0-9 with + and - keys) easily reached buttons. Add in the <ctrl>, <alt>, and <shift> keys and I now have 48 easily reachable keys. Tab targeting for the win! LOL
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
[quote]Why? Being dependent on macros and addons to play cheapens your experience in appreciating different games that can have 51 combat arts/spells/buffs, and not forcing players to get game controllers and fancy 10 button mice to play so folks can have a "challenge" and brag about their eliteness.[/quote]
Eh. I always use macros in the tab target games. It will free the player to be more situationally aware. Take the Pugilist in FFXIV for instance. Its a pretty dumb design you are supposed to hit ability one -then ability 2 - then ability 3 then you get a puff. Problem is the 'form' descriptions on the screen are pretty small (you are gating from hitting ability 3 before 2 and 2 before 1). So if you don't use macros you find the player glancing down at the keys instead of the game actions.
Instead use macros and bring a most measure of immersion back into the game. You want to be watching what your character does on the screen and where he does it - not monitoring some UI.
Comments
Or better, having to make decisions with consequences in a situation, so we don't need 10 pages of math formulas for 101k combinations (aka filler).
That's why I love healing as my game play, because it's not about A skill to apply to B target over and over and over. It's about watching the field to find the best target, and making a HUMAN decision on the spot (which gets better to chose with more experience). It adds the imperfectness of being human in the equation than the mathematical assurance that A macro will work over B keybind (which is why I consider them cheats).
In the process my keyboard and mouse isn't worn bare in a year from 111111111111111111111111 (or CTRL+1 loaded into a macro) spamming, too.
.:| Kevyne@Shandris - Armory |:. - When WoW was #1 - .:| I AM A HOLY PALADIN - Guild Theme |:.
This topic is brilliant IF talking about FFXI because all the other games did not put any depth into their combat system.
Where FFXI failed is to take that depth far enough so that players always had to use the entire system instead of ignoring it and going strict dps and nothing else.
Also what FFXI did right was create and utilize a MACRO system that also kept the screen free of clutter.When you wanted to use a macro you hit ALT or CNTRL and called it up.
Games that clutter the screen with 3/4/5+ rows of hotbars is just nonsense.FFXI had a lot of skills and spells and all were meaningful but as mentioned,you did not need them all in every fight.Some might argue it takes a lot of time to make all those different macros for various situations and it did ,but once you had it all down you were set forever unless changing a gear macro.
Why FFXI also did it right was it allowed you time to think,i love having to think, i hate easy mode.So it's not like you had to look over 5 rows of hotbars and remember where each one was in a split second.FFXI had spells/abilities that were great at level 1 and still great at max level,that is a good design when stuff is not constantly rotated out for a newer higher version,although it did that as well.
That is why searching for a new game to play has been extremely frustrating ,most class and combat designs look like the team spent all of one day designing it.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
lMAO That is me in a nutshell,i love tactical,i would rather spend a day preparing a strategy than jump right in all hyper like i needed ridilin.
Even when i play FPS's i love maps that offer strategy,that si also why i can't stand mmorpg pvp,i would rather watch paint dry than stand out in the open and spam hotbars back n forth.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Yet hiding them behind macros and keybinds is sense? o.O
.:| Kevyne@Shandris - Armory |:. - When WoW was #1 - .:| I AM A HOLY PALADIN - Guild Theme |:.
What I think you mean is that you want more interesting options, not just more options in total. The problem is that the more options you give players, the harder it is to make all of them interesting. You can have a ranged attack versus a melee attack, an area attack versus a single-target attack, an instant damage attack versus a damage over time attack, and so forth. So it's easy to have five skills and make them all interesting and useful.
But if you want to give players 30 skills and make them all useful, so that none are readily replaced by others or only rarely useful, that's much harder. You can do it the Uncharted Waters Online way, of making it so that there are an enormous number of wildly different activities, and skills meant for one are obviously useless in another. But that's done by making most of the skills irrelevant to combat, so it's probably not what you're after.
If you want to make 30 different combat skills all useful to a single player in an area without making many of them interchangeable substitutes for each other, that's much harder to do. I don't think I've ever seen any game pull it off. Part of my argument against 50 skills on hotbars at once is that if you try it, players will basically ignore most of those skills most of the time.
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Since you didn't seem to take offense, a quick grammar lesson:
The "a" in "a lot" is the indefinite article, and means the same thing as the "a" in "a forum" or "a post" (which admittedly, is not much). The noun in "a lot" is "lot". It can be plural, as in "lots". In colloquial use, "a lot of buttons" means the same thing as "lots of buttons".
The noun "lot" can in some contexts refer to a very specific quantity. In Guild Wars 1 and 2, for example, crafting materials will stack to 250 in a single inventory slot; if you want more than 250 of something, it takes multiple slots. So players refer to a "stack" of something as meaning 250 of it. Three stacks of green wood planks, for example, is 750 of them. Players could have used "lots" instead of "stacks" and it would have meant the same thing and still been grammatically correct. But this usage is less common than the colloquial usage meaning "many", but not some exact quantity.
There is also a verb "allot", which comes from the same root as "allocate" and means about the same thing. For example, if you get five attribute points when you level up, you could allot 3 of them to attack speed and 2 to magic defense.
There are a lot of things in the English language that could not have been designed by someone seeking to facilitate clear communication, such as "affect" versus "effect" or "lie" versus "lay". But "a lot" isn't so hard; "alot" doesn't actually mean anything, and basically no one ever says "alots".
Yes, actually hotbar games with a lot of buttons can combine both strategy and tactics if the skills are done well and there isn't just an optimal rotation to handle every encounter.
I still maintain that games with just under 10 unchanging skills are not good strategic games as there are very little planning or thought involved in what skills to use. The difficulty of these games is all from twitch-based skills while the battle is going on and knowing where to move and reacting to what your opponent does.
A game like GW2 has a nice strategic layer because you actually to have a lot of skills to be aware of along with also being pretty good on the tactical side. I kind of dislike the feel of GW2's combat (the fact that there's so much kiting in it mainly) but I'll give them credit for a well designed combat system.
I just recently went back to WoW and was a bit overwhelmed with all the crap on my screen lol. Back when I played WoW, I had almost every skill on my screen so everything was close and readily available should I need it. This time I put almost everything on scrolling or hidden bars except for about 10 buttons I press the most often.
I don't have time for all that button maintenance lol. I'm still not sure however, that I won't get bored with say, 5-9 buttons the newer games seem to be sprouting up with.
No bitchers.
I still consider WoW combat system to be the best in genre. And the huge amount of diverse abilities (about 60 per class) is one of major reasons for it. Skilled players can get huge advantage when master them all through alot of practice and PvP.
I played Archeage recently, and very limited amount of skills just bored me. I feel like I learned everything very fast and there is nowhere to grow as a player
I agree with you Op. Many here are confusing option with implementation. Having many skills does not necessarily mean that all of the skills are useless/fluff. That is up to the implementation, which is at the discretion of the developer.
I dont know, I think EQ1 did it best. I had a ton of skills, disciplines, etc. I could create my own hotbars as many as I wanted scaled to how I wanted (horizontal, vertical, square, rectangle, etc). I could create my own macros if I wanted. Hotbar combat but you could move to position yourself correctly.
Unfortunately the game is just dated. If someone would copy THAT with state of the art development tools we have today I honestly believe we would have an awesome RPG, not just a game.
I agree with most of your post. To me if you had 50 (unique) skills, its not to use all of them for all combat. Naturally out of 50 you get to select what set of skills you feel comfortable with and move forward with that. MMOs as it core mechanic is grinding in one form or another. If I had 50 skills I would be able to switch the ones I use frequently making the gameplay feel fresh and giving me options.
What happens today is two-fold. I get a game with a limited hotbar and I get bored with those skills around the 30th level. Or I get a ton of skills on a hotbar (becoming extinct) and giving you these long strains of rotations.
Give me a large number of skills. Let me pick how many I want to use and when.
Too bad WoW took away player choice as its combat was good. I'd prefer to have skill points and have my hunter need ammo and be able to melee to add flexibility. To me WoW is more of an RPG arcade where you fighting to collect something (which can be fun) as opposed to playing a character (i.e. losing its RPG element and pushing the MMO one).
That may be an argument for having 50 skills, but it's not an argument for having 50 skills all available simultaneously. Think of Guild Wars 1 where you might have 100 skills for your class, of which only eight are on your bar available for a zone. But if you weren't using PVE-only skills to make everything trivial, you'd often have to change which eight skills you were using to be more effective against the mobs in that particular zone.
Hunters had melee attacks and limited arrows in the past. For most players including me it was more annoying and useless then fun. So they removed it. Hunter in WoW is now my favourite class across any MMORPG
Lets get an example of skills done right into this discussion.
Everquest 1, Necromancer.
I don't know how many different kind of dots this class has. At least 10 id guess ;-) But is that boring? Hell no!
Just to name a few. So you could argue they are all dots and it should simply be one big dot. And id argue that would be boring as hell. Having to adjust to your current fight takes more "skill" then mindlessly klicking that one button. Take the above in a boss fight. Shit hits the fan, healer running OOM and the boss needs to die, now. You would switch to your less efficient dots and try to burst him down. Or maybe take some pressure of the healers by healing your group with inefficient dots, so the healer can focus on the tank and not having to AoE heal.
Adds coming in that die fast? No need for those long ticking dots.
The same applies to group content. In Everquest you CAN use a standard rotation, that is about 70-80% efficient for any given group situation. But you could also just do a different rotation for every trash pack to max out that dps / mana ratio. More OPTION to not get bored.
Just to come up with a real example on why having a lot of good and diverse options opens up chances to adjust midfight and shine as a good player. And we are only talking about some dots here. I am sure you can come up with more pretty examples that include other skills not related to damage.
Then again, unless it is an action game (i still dislike my RPGs becoming action games,...), you could just as well click your situational skills with the mouse *gasp* and only have your standard rotation on 1-5. Oh and what bores you more? Klicking the same 5 skills over and over, or having to use your brain and adjust midfight?
It all comes down to lazy design of current gen games in my book, really. I agree that having more skills in current gen seems like a plague. Yet i am having a blast playing good old everquest every now and again if i can't stand the boredom that is current gen MMOs.
MMOs finally replaced social interaction, forced grouping and standing in a line while talking to eachother.
Now we have forced soloing, forced questing and everyone is the hero, without ever having to talk to anyone else. The evolution of multiplayer is here! We won,... right?
And so it should be lol, i'm with you on this.
As for the OP, i agree 100% and i've been in the beta of the game you are talking about for a while. It's the same with GW2 and will be the same with EQN. EQ only allowed you 8(think it was that number, haven't played for years) but it felt right somehow.
On the other hand you don't want pointless skills,
Vanguard is a great example though, loved the game even with it's flaws.
Come on Brad, make us happy.
WoW, EQ2, Rift, Vanguard... most themeparks I have played. Even classic EQ let you macro up to 5 skills together.
My macro on EQ2 for instance had 30 skills (the maximum possible in a macro) all put into priority order, yet people tout EQ2 as having complicated gameplay because it has so many buttons. Top DPS with one button, another button for AEs... so complicated! Healing / tanking / utility weren't harder to macro either.
Granted WoW has less skills these days for each spec, but my macros still have something like 8-10 skills.
My personal opinion is that if I can put it in a supermacro, its just clutter that could be handled through varying the animation for the one skill (like how GW2 does 3 different attacks in a row with the same button). GW1 on the other hand had real tactical choices for skills by limiting the hotbar to 8 skills.
Its more the controversy of making MMO games for non-MMO players. But this is what happens when major corporations take control of a genre, we end up seeing games only get funding if they target more player types. If an MMO was only targeting MMORPG players we would see games that utilize an entire KEYBOARD, not a controller or portable touch screen.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
Unfortunately, I've played MMOs where you just stand in front of your enemy and then hit the first couple of number keys at random as fast as you can. That's not fun, sorry.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
World of Warcraft is an excellent game for its time. It's a very good way to do things if your players are using keyboards and you are playing a tab target MMO.
Its not a great way for action MMO - and I have no doubt in my mind that action MMOs are vastly superior in terms of combat.
#1. Lots of skills on the screen take away from immersion and clutter up your UI. You want players to feel like they are a part of the world not staring at bars of buttons.
#2. Tab Target MMOs suffer from a complexity problem. Mutiple skills and buttons are how they combat this. The problem is that combat isn't as interactive as it should be. Its largely standing in once place and trying to quickly get into your rotation - and then moving if you have to and repeating this process. By adding more keys - they can make a more complex rotation - and by adding more 'emergency' abilities they can make combat more difficult. It works to some extent - and makes something relatively simple more complex.
Action MMOs though can use action on the screen to up the complexity. Because they rely on movement they can tie the skill of the player not into the skill selection but the careful positioning of the player. You want to make combat that relies on ducking behind cover after a fireball has been thrown at him - you can do that with action combat. It doesn't precalculate whether the fireball hits or not and just show the animation. You want to make a gun that does max damage at long range but less damage at close - or vice versa - you can do that. You want to make a fire field that you can jump up out and have your character escape danger - you can do that.
So the action MMO designer CAN tie complexity to action on the screen in a way the tab target MMO designer cannot. So they don't need the 'crutch' of a gazillion buttons to make the combat interesting or hard.
#3. No doubt serious WoW players think I am blowing smoke up their butt and don't really believe me. But this is because they don't have enough experience with the new combat systems. At first they feel just like WoW. And you can play them a lot like WoW. But there is more depth there - albeit hidden for a WoW player. The problem for games like GW2 is that they haven't really done a great job of exposing their depth to the playing base. The PvE stuff is so easy that you can advance levels just aimlessly hitting buttons. It doesn't pressure you to play well at any point - there are not even roles. But the depth is there with a huge skill gap between good players who can avoid alot damage while dealing out incredible amounts and bad players who have to follow along in zergs.
From what I am hearing out of the beta tests in Wildstar the next generation will be fixing this. I think the combat system in ESO is also advanced as well.
As a sidenote WoW wants to strip a lot of buttons out of the game for the next expansion. But likely this is not because they implementing a new engine but just because they want bad players to have an easier time of it..
I wonder if all these supporters of 1 set of 6 skill MMOs realize that people can player their games and probably beat them by simply pressing 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 or 2-2-2-2-2-2-2 depending on the situation and never really have much of an option to do anything else because all that remains are 3-4-5 and 6. Everyone else however still has 7-8-9-0-q-w-e-r-t-y-u-i-o-p-[-]-a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l-;-'-z-x-c-v-b-n-m-,-.-/-
and that's not including the F keys, shit+, alt+
that's a lot of choices to spam with.
Ahh, variety!
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
Not always.
In gw2 To be good Dagger dagger elem I need 30 + bottons all always to use them. Some times I can fight even vs 2 characters and win Attut fire bam aoe cond might att air shock aura skill 1 a bit them 5 them attut to water heal and dmg reduction Cond chill switch no earth cond knock protection buf back to fire and again burst and so on and interval from each is 13 sec
Still Thief can almost 1 shot me 3 skills
Buff Buff a few skills that increase DPS and in stealth 1 hit and I have less than 25 % hp quite sad
warriors same but they not so OP spam 5 skills and 4 additional utilities
So no there is simple balance issues Some classes have to use 10 kills and wipe you and some one else 30 + and need to use them extremely fast in order to win.
I think skill is when you have lot of botons and mastering them so that you use them effectively and fast in the end you gain your SKILL
Keyboard spam isn't fun whether you're talking about 6 keys or 30 keys. I'd much rather have skills that actually require skill and thinking to use successfully.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
"Games are too easy!" says the player with a "gaming mouse" and add-ons galore.
As for the buttons, keep my mouse out of combat and I am golden. I use the "weird" set-up where my hotkeys are my numpad, giving me 12 (0-9 with + and - keys) easily reached buttons. Add in the <ctrl>, <alt>, and <shift> keys and I now have 48 easily reachable keys. Tab targeting for the win! LOL
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
[quote]Why? Being dependent on macros and addons to play cheapens your experience in appreciating different games that can have 51 combat arts/spells/buffs, and not forcing players to get game controllers and fancy 10 button mice to play so folks can have a "challenge" and brag about their eliteness.[/quote]
Eh. I always use macros in the tab target games. It will free the player to be more situationally aware. Take the Pugilist in FFXIV for instance. Its a pretty dumb design you are supposed to hit ability one -then ability 2 - then ability 3 then you get a puff. Problem is the 'form' descriptions on the screen are pretty small (you are gating from hitting ability 3 before 2 and 2 before 1). So if you don't use macros you find the player glancing down at the keys instead of the game actions.
Instead use macros and bring a most measure of immersion back into the game. You want to be watching what your character does on the screen and where he does it - not monitoring some UI.