Prediction Thread: Melee abilities will be the second most successful patch Mortal has ever had.

[fartbox]

Okay, well, does it use shortcuts? I get the impression that it doesn't and that the mouse is only used to click on items, and I can see the idea of the concept, the items change to fall on the aspect of the most effective attack in relation to the existing enemy's clothing, with the idea of maximizing/optimizing damage, so you're constantly switching from one outfit to another.

And here you're making a PVP MMO comparison, except that PVP has never been very successful in MMOs, the majority of big MMOs are almost full PVE, and the social dimension takes up an enormous amount of space, GTA5 and all its streamers and multi-servers being a case in point, when “GTA6 ONLINE” was released 1 year later, it would have been one of the most played titles in the world I imagine (this is an extrapolation, but I don't think I'm wrong, before this kind of “communities” were found on Arma3 and modded servers).

And you still haven't answered my question, create a proof of concept of your skill ideas, that's what we want to see, critical concepts to improve.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

"And you still haven't answered my question, create a proof of concept of your skill ideas, that's what we want to see, critical concepts to improve."

Cleaves
A skill capped disengage of some sort; Bunnyhoping/Grapple hook are some of the better designs out there right now.
Quick single target burst damage
Debuffs/buffs
Sustain options
Movement options either gapclosers or raw speed
Mitigation options


And mages need to be able to cast with weapon out. We need ways for races other then elves to pressure a mage and that mage should have to play defensively for a window. There should be windows of opportunity for both mage and footy to pressure eachother regardless of race.

If we add a bunch of gap closers we may also have to reduce cast speed of alot mage spells to make them relevant. But thats fine. The game is painfully slow. The tempo. Which is why the game fails to garner any interest from the spectators (no one cares to watch even the best PVP videos). The tempo of both melee and mage need to be uped dramatically. Coming from other games Mortal feels like its stuck in slow motion for everything, it feels like playing a game covered in molasses, it's unpleasant and it feels artificially inhibitory.

 

[Emdash]

eventho the graphics may not represent the situation, I think the actual first step to fixing melee is to make it so that you can't parry behind you haha.

I don't support there being a 'back attack' bonus, but if the game would tell you when you were hitting someone's back / when your back was getting hit, the graphics wouldn't have to keep up. Obviously, there would be unfair outcomes / laggy mishaps, and ping would still offer an advantage, but it would at least start the ball rolling.

I don't think melee special abilities are bad. I would like special arrow abilities, too, tho, but the issue that I have is that they aim to fix a broken system by making attacks that circumvent the system. That's like SV's playbook. Can't fix it? Just go around haha.

Henrik, bro, I almost wanna PM you on discord. I promise you that if you or someone who is in charge of things like combat direction (no pun) SPEAKS WITH ME and tells me their theory and ideas, I can point out the reasons it will fail, within minutes.

People in MO wanna be slashing people with their sword. They wanna move around and change directions. That's a different sort of skill cap. It's not APM, but if you count each adjustment of the mouse, etc, it turns out to be a lot. However, the problem is people are practicing 'moves' and multifeints (and I still think people are nuts who don't think you can macro them) and you don't have to worry about your lateral movement or any vulnerability while you do a move because it takes so long to charge a swing and do damage. Gotta be able to slash people up, gotta be able to kite, to move so that standing still is a death sentence regardless of your parry-ability.

 

[Turbizzler]

I don't have high hopes, based on how things have been going with MO2 the past few years, with SV repeating the same mistakes they did with MO1 - I fully expect half functioning abilities like spear stance, or something silly like triple strike that could nearly insta-gib people.

 

[fartbox]

I don't have high hopes, based on how things have been going with MO2 the past few years, with SV repeating the same mistakes they did with MO1 - I fully expect half functioning abilities like spear stance, or something silly like triple strike that could nearly insta-gib people.

Melee kind of needs an instagib. TTK on melee vs melee is abysmal right now. People are still breaking weapons on eachother. Which is why zerging feels so strong and why soloing on a footy feels so awful right now but on a mage it feels "Ok". Because the mage can actually apply damage and secure a kill before the zerg mobolizes.

In other games you don't get to make as many mistakes as you do in mortal. It also doesn't take as long to get regeared and back to the same spot in other games but thats besides the point.


The goal of combat abilities should be to diminish the advantage of numbers. Numbers being so strong is removing alot of agency in the world and removing alot of fun out of the game, also to reduce the emphasis on spinning while fighting in melee combat and finally to increase the tempo of Mortals combat overall. This should also diminish the games sensitivity to ping, Ping sensitive games typically work best with many servers, something Mortal doesn't have the luxury of right now.

They can do this in a number of ways: Allowing the player to "Clap" clumping. This is utilizing AOE damage abilities that often scale based on how many people are hit. OR you can introduce low single target TTK and then the game revolves around finding the one guy on the enemy team that is out of position and .5ing him before his friends can react, this is how League plays late game. OR you can introduce disengage and "pick your fight" abilities/mechanics. Usually theres alot of mix and match overlap between the other games in the genre. This is something that Albion and EVE lean on heavily.

Big zerg = big wait times = big communism = no loot for you = no individual skill expression = boring game = play another game

When you design "big zerg" content into your game the best approach is timered objectives, it's something people do a few times a week on average and the rest of their gametime is spent in smaller groups or alone.. Designing your entire game around zerg content results in failure 100% of the time.


Name a MMO that built around "Big zergs" and a "Made it". You won't be able to, but you'll be able to name many offline MMO's that took this direction.

 

[Teknique]

Something I have been saying for a long time is that the first game played like a mix of counterstrike and wow, and that the 2nd game feels like world of tanks. This game suffers both from being horrendously slow and boring, yet at the same time not being accessible for the average player. You’re wrong about their not being any quick reactions in mortal that’s not quite true. You do have to balance tracking your opponent, tracking their attack directions, and also hiding your own attack directions. It’s wrong to say that it’s just completely brainless, however they basically just made it so your character feels like they have neurological and motor issues. The game is just trashy clunky basically and isn’t scaled for anything other than brain damaged players in alpha who didn’t want to be sad about their duels. It does not work properly as an mmo only as a duel sim. Blinks and high alpha strikes and a faster pace, yeah I can absolutely see it.

 

[Emdash]

Something I have been saying for a long time is that the first game played like a mix of counterstrike and wow, and that the 2nd game feels like world of tanks. This game suffers both from being horrendously slow and boring, yet at the same time not being accessible for the average player. You’re wrong about their not being any quick reactions in mortal that’s not quite true. You do have to balance tracking your opponent, tracking their attack directions, and also hiding your own attack directions. It’s wrong to say that it’s just completely brainless, however they basically just made it so your character feels like they have neurological and motor issues. The game is just trashy clunky basically and isn’t scaled for anything other than brain damaged players in alpha who didn’t want to be sad about their duels. It does not work properly as an mmo only as a duel sim. Blinks and high alpha strikes and a faster pace, yeah I can absolutely see it.

The shit that doesn't make sense to me is that this is Mortal haha. It wasn't like that before.

@fartbox I totally agree that zerging is wack, but you just can't decrease the advantage of numbers 'like that.' You have to understand the heavy parry is a result of people refusing to take a zerg death because they think "I am skilled; I should be able to outskill the zerg." But anything given to one player is given to every player, and thus can be exploited by a zerg.

I think there needs to be more strategy. There definitely needs to be more kiting. It can't be a dash like disengage, but the slow MO1 disengage... like Kite you from Bakti to Kranesh disengage is legit. Veela speed boost is kinda crazy as it is, again, because zergs get it, too.

It needs to require more precision to hit people in zergs, people need to drop faster just in general so that you can kite and whittle, but a well organized zerg should crush everything. When you die in MO you have to priest and regear so each player who goes down is at least weakening the zerg for a few ( unless they are ressing.) A good player should be able to survive, but you will still get outnumbered say... 50-75% of the time. However, over the course of the game, that 25% will really matter.

Then they need to look at content that isn't just a point on the map that everyone can zerg. Zerging is incredibly inefficient. It should be exposed as such. With how few people the are playing the game, it should be to the point where if you are getting zerged in x area, you should be able to log into y area and profit. Once that is balanced right, people will zerg LESS. Still, they will zerg when it really matters ( again, why I think ninja siege is good, because it makes it not about zerging.)

Zerglings are weak minded; being able to punish them and get them when they are alone is important to the game health. Also allowing the smaller groups to inflict TC damage on zerg groups. There just need to be more ways to strike back and more places that have value. It can't just be about how to beat the zerg because that seemed to be the theory of MO2 combat in general, and IMO MO1 combat was WAY less zergy. Sure, you would get zerged, but there has been outplay of small numbers because you could focus people, drop them, kite to safety, and repeat until they were whittled.

 

[fartbox]

The shit that doesn't make sense to me is that this is Mortal haha. It wasn't like that before.

@fartbox I totally agree that zerging is wack, but you just can't decrease the advantage of numbers 'like that.' You have to understand the heavy parry is a result of people refusing to take a zerg death because they think "I am skilled; I should be able to outskill the zerg." But anything given to one player is given to every player, and thus can be exploited by a zerg.

I think there needs to be more strategy. There definitely needs to be more kiting. It can't be a dash like disengage, but the slow MO1 disengage... like Kite you from Bakti to Kranesh disengage is legit. Veela speed boost is kinda crazy as it is, again, because zergs get it, too.

It needs to require more precision to hit people in zergs, people need to drop faster just in general so that you can kite and whittle, but a well organized zerg should crush everything. When you die in MO you have to priest and regear so each player who goes down is at least weakening the zerg for a few ( unless they are ressing.) A good player should be able to survive, but you will still get outnumbered say... 50-75% of the time. However, over the course of the game, that 25% will really matter.

Then they need to look at content that isn't just a point on the map that everyone can zerg. Zerging is incredibly inefficient. It should be exposed as such. With how few people the are playing the game, it should be to the point where if you are getting zerged in x area, you should be able to log into y area and profit. Once that is balanced right, people will zerg LESS. Still, they will zerg when it really matters ( again, why I think ninja siege is good, because it makes it not about zerging.)

Zerglings are weak minded; being able to punish them and get them when they are alone is important to the game health. Also allowing the smaller groups to inflict TC damage on zerg groups. There just need to be more ways to strike back and more places that have value. It can't just be about how to beat the zerg because that seemed to be the theory of MO2 combat in general, and IMO MO1 combat was WAY less zergy. Sure, you would get zerged, but there has been outplay of small numbers because you could focus people, drop them, kite to safety, and repeat until they were whittled.

You say its not possible to give tools to the player without giving to the zerg which is correct but the tools just need to be designed in a way that they are only beneficial for the player and not for the zerg.

We do this with scaling. This video happened several months ago and is an example of scaling tools.

I want zergs to be strong but I dont want them to be autowins. even against 1 player. They are currently autowins. Autowin conditions kills competitive games.

 

[ElPerro]

Insane argument full of misinformation. You insulted the skillcap of OSRS, when it in fact has the highest skill cap in the MMO world. We define skillcap by APM. The higher the APM, the harder it is to be in the top 0.1% of the game. OSRS has the hardest 0.1% threshold in the market because it has the highest APM(its not close). It even has a large esport community both third party and studio organized with cash prizes offered by Jagex themselves.

Mortal is essentially a game of bowling, where the players spin before throwing the ball. Just because it increased the difficulty of throwing the ball, doesn't mean its pragmatic to do so. It also doesn't make it more popular or impressive then regular bowling.

Mortal is the least competitive PvP MMO on the market. The fights almost always come down to Numbers>Build>Ping>Gear and not individual skill.

Have you ever asked why that is? Because the combat facilitates it, the ruleset facilitates it. There is no room for skillcap to grow in this game because its squashed by numbers, ping, gear and builds.

People play these types of games to be competitive and the combat and the rulest in mortal actively prevents people from being competitive. That's why people aren't playing mortal, thats why people are playing mortals competitors. Because they can be competitive in those games. The last remaining 1000 players in mortal aren't interested in skill cap, they aren't interested in competition. They just want to kill other players by any means necessary and you coming in here and trying to pretend like we play some super competitive game is very cringe and disengenous. You must either not play the game or you must be so heavily invested in zerg gameplay that it threatens your interests to allow a competitive environment to flourish.

Which I understand. The last 1000 players or so that we have left are almost all in a zerg guild/alliance. So trying to convince them to undermine their interests is insane on my part but the thing i can tell you is that without changing Mortals combat, it will eventually run out of funding and be shut down. You'll end up being forced into those other games that you despise anyway. No studio can survive on 2k subs a month. The overhead for this MMO has to be near a million a year. Even with a small support team and only 5devs. They need a minimum of 7k subs to meet that breakeven point.

Do you think mortal has 7k subs right now?

We need to convince players that are playing in mortals competitors to play our game, we don't need to convince people heavily invested in the current status quo to be happy about it.

I never said mortal in its current state was competitive but you want to remove the only thing left that does take skill, instead of nerfing/changing the things that limit the skill based combat. For what so casual players can get lucky with a melee chikaboom and get their participation trophy? You forget zergs will also have access to melee chikaboom and they will be more effective at using it, so thats gonna be even more aids.

If theres a miracle and it brings massive amounts of casual players, the servers can barely handle 2k players max. Its never gonna be the next Albion or Eve, better to just focus on their hardcore niche.

 

[fartbox]

I never said mortal in its current state was competitive but you want to remove the only thing left that does take skill, instead of nerfing/changing the things that limit the skill based combat. For what so casual players can get lucky with a melee chikaboom and get their participation trophy? You forget zergs will also have access to melee chikaboom and they will be more effective at using it, so thats gonna be even more aids.

If theres a miracle and it brings massive amounts of casual players, the servers can barely handle 2k players max. Its never gonna be the next Albion or Eve, better to just focus on their hardcore niche.

Im saying making the skill cap revolve around ping and revolve around spinning was a terrible terrible decision for a global MMO server. We should of never been here in the first place.I want a different high skill cap environment. One that is more fair to all players from all countries and one that has a skill cap that is more familiar with the genre so that it will have a higher adoption rate among new players trying the game.

These things are important because MMO's aren't free and the quality and quantity of a MMOs updates are typically very strongly correlated with user count:

More users->More Money->More devs->More updates

On the contrary the only MMO i've seen maintained by the original publisher with a lower user count then Mortal currently has is WURM online, which doesn't receive updates. Every single MMO i've personally observed with a user count lower then Mortals current count has gone offline(offical publisher version). Some of those survive as private servers with small communities.

I'm thinking long term here and the long term is that unless Mortal combat changes fundamentally that it will not appeal to enough players to generate enough revenue to survive. So you will eventually end up in those games that you don't like regardless. Seems foolish. Seems stubborn. All because you want to be a spinny boi and aren't willing to compromise for the greater good.

You can spin in EVE. They have an entire subcommunity devoted to ship spinning. Might be worth checking out for you.