Combat Conundrum

[tboxx]

It seems like MMO combat as a whole is moving in a faster combat direct here is how I see it

2000ish 2005 combat in MMO was mostly done by hitting hot key abilities with cooldowns ( EQ 2, , WoW) > shift > real time combat with hot keys and combat animation movement lock, (Tera, Neverwinter Nights,) > shift > twitch combat > Indie MMO's (Darkfall and Planetside 2).


I was just reading a review of Neverwinter beta which the reviewer from MMORPG.com said the combat being real time was good but it felt clunky and slow due to player movement lock while animating combat abilities. The Devs stated it was done on purpose so that mobs could have slow animations as to have a longer time to provide "tells" for when they will do big attack etc, otherwise, if they don't speed mob combat animation players would run around it in circles swing at its back.

I played some EQ 1 a year ago for a while and combat was so slow I actually felt the game was more enjoyable 2 boxing (playing 2 characters at once via 2 game clients open and running). It appears a majority of people 2 box in EQ 1 now.

I almost always see people complaining of combat speed in MMO betas within the last 2 or so years, it almost always the same two adjectives "sluggish and clunky" .

My conundrum is when twitch combat is implemented in games people are always moving constantly often erratically to avoid hits when abilities are not tab targeted. Those games proudly claim it allow for player skill to matter more. What I find to be a conundrum is group/raid/team skill and strategy focused on positioning, support abilities etc and realism suffer.

The result is combat feels like a team of Rambos vs. another team of Rambos and looks like an angry swarm of bees.

[Jackolantern]

Honestly the reason for the slower, auto-attack in MMORPGs has more to do with bandwidth than any in-game reason or design choice. EQ1 had no choice at all, since dial-up regularly had players playing with 200ms or higher latency. A fifth of a second is huge in twitch-based gaming which typically requires reaction-times in the ~75ms range at the worst. Beyond the player side, this also overwhelms servers. The EQ1 style of play (that is still fairly common today) would allow messages to be sent back and forth periodically between the server and client. For example, when you attacked a mob, the client sent a message to the server that the player wants to attack. Server sends back a message that entering combat was successful. Then it is all server to client (provided the player does not move or use spells), as it sends how much damage was done per hit. The actual attacking animations are all client-side. If you compare that to a twitch system, where the client and server are sending craploads of data back and forth as fast as they can manage to keep synced and up-to-date with each step the player is taking, the moment they make an attack, and everything the mob is doing. Then you have to consider if there are 30 players all standing around watching the fight. Now every one of them have to be updated on every single move the player and the mob makes as fast as the server can manage, and they also have to get every single thing the players around them are doing.

Data transmission already increases nearly exponentially as players congregate, and so server devs have created and use many tricks to reduce bandwidth to send as little as possible (such as the auto-attack combat). When you have twitch-based combat, that essentially throws out all of the tricks since everyone in the area must receive a steady stream of updates to keep in sync and know what is going on. If you really take a look at various MMORPGs, pretty much every MMO that has true twitch-based gameplay limits the number of players that can congregate during combat. Guild Wars did not allow combat in towns, which were the only non-instanced, shared areas in the game. Dungeons and Dragons Online also restricted all combat to one-party instances. There are a few games that have come out in the last year or two that are trying to inject twitch-based combat into open-world MMOs, but even these, at their core, have tricks and methods for making this work. These include designs that greatly diminish benefits of congregation, phasing (instancing that you don't know about), or quiet simplification of combat for spectators.

Without these optimization methods, tricks, slight-of-hand, and design decisions, twitch-based combat in MMORPGs is not physically possible on any kind of decent scale.

[Callan S.]

I always throught mmorpg character moved more like ants - perfectly still, then moving at absolute full speed instantly.

I think another game, maybe city of heroes, had inertia on characters, so it takes awhile to get to move in any direction.

I'm not sure how support and positioning suffer. If the idea of support and position require players to be static, then you can't have fast movement. It's a matter of chosing one or the other.

Though I don't know how fast play would spoil 'Don't stand in the glowing red circle, a fireballs about to land there' positioning stuff?