Rejected Eliminate stance

Would you like this implemented?


  • Total voters
    35
  • Poll closed .

DeletedUser30224

There will be ONE week period available to vote. (May be extended if needed.)

If the idea wins 75% of the vote, it is sent to the developers who will respond with feedback and the idea will be linked in the ideas passed to developers.
If it loses the vote by not attaining more than 74.99%, it will be moved to the archives. The idea will then be placed on the list of items to not post again.

Original thread can be found <HERE>.
Proposal: Eliminate aim/dodge stances in the duel tactics.
Current workaround: None, you must have a stance in the current system.
Details: Imagine the following: Attacker A in round 1 and 5 aims for left arm. Defender B in round 1 and 5 is dodging to the left (since they face eachother what this means is that defender is dodging away from the bullet). Sadly there is a certain percentage (~25% or so based on some research done by players) that attacker will automatically miss no matter how high his/her skills are compared to the defender. Furthermore the attacker most certainly get's a SEVERE aim penalty in this scenario because he/she is aiming at a blank space.

I'd like to see all of this removed. I can accept the random game of numbers, and there is no possible way of generating a duel mechanism that will not use randomness in one way or other, but the current system is not only wrong but also highly abuseable.

As it is now, you set your aiming and dodge stances and they stay the same until you change them again. Not only that but you only control how you dodge and aim for 4 rounds instead of 8 ... (round 1 AND 5, 2 AND 6, 3 AND 7, 4 AND 8). If another dueller duels you, all he/she needs to do is change their aim/dodge stances to match yours from the earlier report and duel you again. The victory is almost guaranteed in most cases. God forbid you are offline and you find yourself KO'd if the attacker is persistent.

That speaks volumes on itself. No matter how high your duelling skills are, another dueller can easily kill you if they find you offline and available for duel (working in defensive clothes for example).

Solution1, remove all of those penalties and just compare skills like it should be. Tactics and appearance still play a role in lowering the opponent's aim, is that not enough? Why do we need the stances? I have plenty of reports as well as other people have, where your aim and dodge is almost double of the opponent's and yet you still lose...and not by a narrow margin at all. How many KO's do you have to accumulate as a defender because you are either working or travelling and another player finds his golden chance to play with the stances and KO you?

Solution2:
If we insist on some sort of control in our duelling, then introduce other means like damage modifiers or aim/dodge penalties/bonuses:
  • aim at torso for no added damage nor aim penalty
  • aim at hands to lower opponent's aim in the next round by 20%. This will lower your damage by 30% and lowers your aim by 15% (harder to hit a smaller target)
  • aim at head for 50% extra damage. A penalty of 50% aim applies for aiming at head (small target, hard to hit).
  • "Attempting to dodge" has no penalty or advantage
  • "Focus" raises your aim by 30% while lowers your dodge by 50% (you are standing like a tree, it's easy to hit a stationary tree).
  • Set your choice for each of the 8 rounds.

Example:
full size image:Click
screenshot-en15%20the-west%20net%202014-10-04%2016-35-45_scaled.png

Round1: AIM:hands (-30% damage, -15% aim), DODGE: "focus" (+30% aim, -50% dodge) TOTAL: -30% damage, +15% aim, -50% dodge (round 2 opponent's aim is reduced by 20% IF you hit)
Round2: AIM:torso, DODGE:"attempt to dodge" TOTAL: -no dodge/aim/damage modifiers apply
Round3: AIM:hands (-30% damage, -15% aim), DODGE:"attempt to dodge" TOTAL: - -30% damage, -15% aim, (round 4 opponent's aim is reduced by 20% IF you hit)
Round4: AIM:head (+50% damage, -50% aim), DODGE: "focus" (+30% aim, -50% dodge) TOTAL: +50% damage, -20% aim, -50% dodge
Round5: AIM:hands (-30% damage, -15% aim), DODGE:"attempt to dodge" TOTAL: - -30% damage, -15% aim, (round 6 opponent's aim is reduced by 20% IF you hit)
Round6: AIM:torso, DODGE:"attempt to dodge" TOTAL: -no dodge/aim/damage modifiers apply
Round7: AIM:torso, DODGE:"attempt to dodge" TOTAL: -no dodge/aim/damage modifiers apply
Round8: AIM:head (+50% damage, -50% aim), DODGE: "focus" (+30% aim, -50% dodge) TOTAL: +50% damage, -20% aim, -50% dodge


If you use something like this (would be nice to have a say in the appearance and tactic skills as well in your duel tactics, some sort of modifiers that you can apply to each round just like with aim, dodge and damage) then it is unlikely that it can be used in an abusive fashion. After you duel someone, you do not know if the player was bad at aiming or not, they might have aimed at heads, they might have just very high dodge and crap aim, you are unlikely to find out with another duel. The beauty of it is that the randomness of how the hit/miss is calculated is just that, random. A random number between aim and dodge +(appearance/tactic modifier) is chosen and whichever is higher that is the result. Any modifiers apply before the random numbers are drawn of course.

Abuse Prevention: None that I can see. My modifiers are given as an example, I have not tried to optimize them, so a combination of them might be more favourable than other, but as I said, it is just an example, nothing more. I'm trying to prevent abuse of the current system, not introduce another form of abuse.

Summary: Remove the stances in duel tactics. They allow us to abuse the current duel system. Also it is well known that aiming badly has a terrible penalty on you and aiming good has a great bonus to aim therefore open for abuse. Solution: remove it altogether. Add damage/aim/dodge modifiers instead that are not easily readable from the duel report. Let the skills speak for themselves.
 

DeletedUser

There are 2 solutions in the given proposal here. I am in favour of one and not of another. How do I proceed to vote for that?
 

DeletedUser

Will vote yes, though I prefer solution 2 and don't really like solution 1.
 

DeletedUser22685

Stances exist with the purpose of preventing non-duellers from being completely obliterated every time they're attacked. I don't think many non-duellers would take kindly to having their safeguard removed.

Stances worked just fine for the first half of the game's lifespan thus far. They allowed non-duellers to get in their customary few lucky dodges or hits, but they didn't completely dictate the results of a duel between two specialised duellists as they do now. The problem with stances stems from the fact that they were tinkered with unnecessarily during the appearance/tactics formula overhaul that took place a couple of years ago. Simply reverting these changes would be the obvious solution, but a substantial resistance to applying the obvious solution has been displayed over the years, especially where the duel system is concerned.
 

DeletedUser

Will vote yes, though I prefer solution 2 and don't really like solution 1.

Stances exist with the purpose of preventing non-duellers from being completely obliterated every time they're attacked. I don't think many non-duellers would take kindly to having their safeguard removed.

Stances worked just fine for the first half of the game's lifespan thus far. They allowed non-duellers to get in their customary few lucky dodges or hits, but they didn't completely dictate the results of a duel between two specialised duellists as they do now. The problem with stances stems from the fact that they were tinkered with unnecessarily during the appearance/tactics formula overhaul that took place a couple of years ago. Simply reverting these changes would be the obvious solution, but a substantial resistance to applying the obvious solution has been displayed over the years, especially where the duel system is concerned.

Agree with both.
 

Diggo11

Well-Known Member
Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As Futu said, stances have worked perfectly fine in the game previously, and there is no reason they cannot again. Besides serving to provide some protection for non-duellers, they have a far more important purpose: teamwork. One dueller can only do so much in this game; a town sharing duel reports and mapping out the stances of opponents report by report can do so much more. Removing this last aspect of duelling, to the point its literally a random number generator favouring whoever has the most skill points to use as input, would be absolutely devastating to those who have fond memories of duelling towns like I do. I am glad at least one other person besides myself sees the inevitable: that right now this would be another well intended but utter screw up in the downfall of duelling.
 

DeletedUser30224

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As Futu said, stances have worked perfectly fine in the game previously, and there is no reason they cannot again. Besides serving to provide some protection for non-duellers, they have a far more important purpose: teamwork. One dueller can only do so much in this game; a town sharing duel reports and mapping out the stances of opponents report by report can do so much more. Removing this last aspect of duelling, to the point its literally a random number generator favouring whoever has the most skill points to use as input, would be absolutely devastating to those who have fond memories of duelling towns like I do. I am glad at least one other person besides myself sees the inevitable: that right now this would be another well intended but utter screw up in the downfall of dueling.

All nice and good, but you are talking about the past and I about the present. I agree with you to a point. Yes, stances are a nice tool to group-hurt players, Yes, stances are a nice thing to spam-duel an offline player, Yes, stances are the biggest wild card there is when it comes to dueling: get them right and you can win.

Which brings me to the conclusion, that stances are a major element in whether you win or lose a duel. This also means that your skills, however high they are, are not the main driving force, they do not represent your total worth as a dueler. Stances also marginally help unskilled players to win the odd duel, but that is buried by the frustration of duelers, who want to compare their skills or at least hope to have a fair chance at it.

You do not expect a race car to lose on a track race to a tractor, even if the track itself offers unpredictable changes in it's topology. That is fair, and an overwhelming amount of times, a dueler will not lose the duel with a non-dueler. However with the same analogy, a 2014 race car on the same track racing a 1970 race car will still lose a fair amount of times, far higher than the spectators would like.

When I am talking about comparing skills alone to decide the winner, I never mentioned that the winner will be the player with the higher skill-set, if any of you read that between the lines, there is no space between the lines. A random number is extracted from the min and max value for each player and compared, whichever is higher, that guy shoots the other in one round. The process is repeated 8 times. These skills I am talking are influenced by other skills in your build, tactics, appearance, aim, dodge all play a role in whether you dodge or not. Resistance is calculated separately for each shot of course.

All of this means that skills are compared with other skills, your raw dueling potential dictates your chance of wining or losing. It sure sounds like something not many people would agree, but that is how it was in past, at least some version of what I have described. Our so called glory days in dueling were based on raw skills. They were influenced to a degree by stances, sure, but that has changed since, we all agree on that.

So why my solution is an "utter screw up in the downfall of dueling"? Dueling is broken and this would at least resemble something we had in the past. My mistake was to leave both solutions in the idea which confuses the hell out of people, I am still trying to persuade myself of submitting it even if it passes. I was perhaps naive to believe people would see the solution as either or, but they do seem to exclude each other to a degree..live and learn I guess.
 

DeletedUser22685

So why my solution is an "utter screw up in the downfall of dueling"? Dueling is broken and this would at least resemble something we had in the past. My mistake was to leave both solutions in the idea which confuses the hell out of people, I am still trying to persuade myself of submitting it even if it passes. I was perhaps naive to believe people would see the solution as either or, but they do seem to exclude each other to a degree..live and learn I guess.

I did realise that there were two separate ideas, but I was only referring to Solution 1 in my previous post. I agree with you that something needs to be done, but I believe it should be something halfway rather than a full removal of stances as was proposed in that solution. Between the current system and your first solution, I chose the latter as the lesser of two evils and voted accordingly.

Solution 2 is actually quite interesting, but it's tough to predict what results it would actually yield. The idea of a hit to the hands having a negative effect on the opponent's aim is something I hadn't considered before.
 

Diggo11

Well-Known Member
All nice and good, but you are talking about the past and I about the present. I agree with you to a point. Yes, stances are a nice tool to group-hurt players, Yes, stances are a nice thing to spam-duel an offline player, Yes, stances are the biggest wild card there is when it comes to dueling: get them right and you can win.

Which brings me to the conclusion, that stances are a major element in whether you win or lose a duel. This also means that your skills, however high they are, are not the main driving force, they do not represent your total worth as a dueler. Stances also marginally help unskilled players to win the odd duel, but that is buried by the frustration of duelers, who want to compare their skills or at least hope to have a fair chance at it.

You do not expect a race car to lose on a track race to a tractor, even if the track itself offers unpredictable changes in it's topology. That is fair, and an overwhelming amount of times, a dueler will not lose the duel with a non-dueler. However with the same analogy, a 2014 race car on the same track racing a 1970 race car will still lose a fair amount of times, far higher than the spectators would like.

When I am talking about comparing skills alone to decide the winner, I never mentioned that the winner will be the player with the higher skill-set, if any of you read that between the lines, there is no space between the lines. A random number is extracted from the min and max value for each player and compared, whichever is higher, that guy shoots the other in one round. The process is repeated 8 times. These skills I am talking are influenced by other skills in your build, tactics, appearance, aim, dodge all play a role in whether you dodge or not. Resistance is calculated separately for each shot of course.

All of this means that skills are compared with other skills, your raw dueling potential dictates your chance of wining or losing. It sure sounds like something not many people would agree, but that is how it was in past, at least some version of what I have described. Our so called glory days in dueling were based on raw skills. They were influenced to a degree by stances, sure, but that has changed since, we all agree on that.

So why my solution is an "utter screw up in the downfall of dueling"? Dueling is broken and this would at least resemble something we had in the past. My mistake was to leave both solutions in the idea which confuses the hell out of people, I am still trying to persuade myself of submitting it even if it passes. I was perhaps naive to believe people would see the solution as either or, but they do seem to exclude each other to a degree..live and learn I guess.
Given this idea is titled "Eliminate aim/dodge stances" and summarised as "Remove the stances in duel tactics... Let the skills speak for themselves," I am working on the basis that your idea intends to remove stances from duelling. In any event, replacing stances with effectively hidden stances has the same consequence of eliminating any team work from duelling.

Continuing on: I am very much talking about the present, the problem is with your conclusions. Yes, stance currently is a major factor in the outcome of duels. No, that does not mean skills are not the main primary factor. Yes, this means stances should be weakened back to the point of "just enough to make a difference", as Futu said. No, it does not mean they need to be removed or replaced.

Your duelling build always has been, is and always will be the number one determinant in the outcome of a duel, but it's false to equate this to "raw duelling potential". From 2008 through to today, your raw duelling potential has been the sum of your build, personal analysis and teamwork. Decent duellers have solid builds, often handed to them by a friend. The truly good duellers track the pressure points of opponents' builds and wear clothes to exploit them; they work with their town mates to identify stances and use them to their advantage. Yes, the changes to the aiming and dodging formulas greatly disrupted the fine balance, but don't mythicise the so called 'glory days': it was never as simple cut as you've romanticised it to be.

Which brings me to my next point, what makes duelling interesting. Once upon a time, duelling had a number of variables, brought about by the usefulness of all six skills in play for both duellers. It also had player-selected stances and the entropy of the hit calculations. So far, so good. The 1.33 update changed that, removing the usefulness of appearance and tactics (excluding clothes) as well as reflex and toughness (given the newfound superiority of ranged duellers). It also made it illogical to have noticeably uneven amounts of aiming and dodging, meaning the two remaining variables are what percentage of skills to put in aiming & dodging vs either damage skill and player-selected stances. That's significantly fewer variables in play, a combination of seven compared to a total of merely two, but what about the entropy? Entropy increased, due to the changed randomised bonus of selecting the correct dodging stance. The logical resolution to this situation is to reduce entropy and greatly increase the number of variables in play...

The problem is, removing stances does not do this. Straight off the bat, the number of variables involved does not increase, quite the opposite it halves. The only human decision left to duelling becomes the split between aiming & dodging vs damage skills, which is hardly an engaging problem worth spending six years on. Yes, entropy is reduced, but at a cost far too high. I know your intention is not to make duelling a contest of who has the most skills, but when you simplify the whole process to effectively picking a number between 0 and 100 and then crossing your fingers for good luck, that's what it becomes.

So I've done a full circle, back to my initial statement: you're proposing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. To put it into context, 'stances' are far more than the bonus for picking the correct dodging position, which is the actual sole problem with them. For a start, you're ignoring half the equation, the bonus for picking a more critical aiming position: this is currently exactly the same as 1.32 and earlier, and there was definitely no problem with that. Beyond that, your proposal inadvertently reduces both the complexity of the duelling system and the amount of teamwork involved, which are undoubtedly the two core ingredients of fun that has kept people coming back day after day. Kudos for writing it, but it needs to be resigned to prototype status. If there's any hope in this idea, it's your replacement for stances, which sound interesting but needs a bit more love for mine.
 
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