Rant Against Theorycrafting

Iriaen

I've noticed that there is a growing prevalence here of certain kind of beta-male, the type who feels a need to delineate everything and when people actually listen to these guys, it results in a game where people spend more time theorycrafting about combat than actually doing combat.  This is because in a completely linear and predictable game, there is no reason to actually play the game when you can just calculate how the fight will go.

If taking out dodging was so great, it should have improved the game, not turned it into a crass damage contest where certain people can sit back, look at their excel spreadsheets, and feel satisfied about their perceived "combat" superiority, without ever sticking their necks out.  Yeah, any form of randomness is "unfair" because you might lose to someone you can beat more often than not a small portion of the time, what f- babies.  Do not listen to these people.  They aren't real men.

If you really get to the meat of what these types are arguing for, they don't feel that anyone should actually need to engage in combat to be combatants.  They are risk adverse.  They want everything on a spreadsheet.  They are perfectly content with a game where theorcrafting about combat and doing combat are not meaningfully different activities for the player.

Iriaen

Case in point, this movement to nerf limb damage.  It seems to me that since people usually don't die to afflictions anymore, they don't want people to die to limb damage anymore either.

I mean, think about it: limb damage is partially random.  You can't know which limb someone will target ahead of time.  No wonder it enrages them.  Lacking complete and total control isn't "fair" so we need to put in a way to heal limb damage because a 1 minute timer for healing is just too long.

If they get their way, fighting a limb damage class can be just like fighting most other classes: a theorycrafting experience where you can calculate the entire course of the fight without actually endangering yourself at any point.

Juran

Iriaen said:

If taking out dodging was so great, it should have improved the game, not turned it into a crass damage contest where certain people can sit back, look at their excel spreadsheets, and feel satisfied about their perceived "combat" superiority, without ever sticking their necks out.  Yeah, any form of randomness is "unfair" because you might lose to someone you can beat more often than not a small portion of the time, what f- babies.  Do not listen to these people.  They aren't real men.

What does the second half of this paragraph have to do with dodging? And what sort of person judges someone's masculinity based on their success in a text based RPG? Here, let me give it a try:

I've noticed that there is a growing prevalence here of certain kind of beta-male, the type who feels a need to aggressively presume to know everything without the desire to test it. They are so insecure in their station and place in the modern game that they lash out violently against anyone with 'facts', because facts interrupt the mirage of competence that they've created to inflate their failing sense of self worth.

See how silly that is?

Cadeyrn

Since you were last here, the reasons for engaging in combat have changed a whole lot more than anything else, most people are casual combatants with a side order of hardcore PKers guiding and keeping them from devolving into a useless mass.

Keeping combat simple, reliable (and by that extension, somewhat predictable) is great news for the majority of the people that take part in combat, we don't have to learn 100 variations of 100 attacks and work on tracking every single little variable if we want to take part. I'm completely down with keeping combat streamlined and accessible where possible, sacrificing complexity bought on by "random" factors.

Iriaen

Juran said:

What does the second half of this paragraph have to do with dodging? And what sort of person judges someone's masculinity based on their success in a text based RPG? Here, let me give it a try:

I've noticed that there is a growing prevalence here of certain kind of beta-male, the type who feels a need to aggressively presume to know everything without the desire to test it. They are so insecure in their station and place in the modern game that they lash out violently against anyone with 'facts', because facts interrupt the mirage of competence that they've created to inflate their failing sense of self worth.

See how silly that is?

No, what's silly is that you think "combat" should be about the management of "facts." This is why you are a scrub.  People used to go into combat in the IRE games and their hands would shake from adrenaline.  That is what made me love these games.  I used to introduce people to combat and they would tell me that they were trembling from the experience.  When I first did it, I was the same way.  No other online game has ever done that.  This is an experience that Imperian probably doesn't offer anymore.  Combat is supposed to be about danger and not about your skill in managing pre-determined "facts."

Juran

Alternate solution: You are simply bad at Imperian.

You are probably a delightful person - very successful with a great job and an amazing relationship, but you have refused to adapt to the complexities of the modern game. There isn't a button you can push anymore that tricks the basic healer into wins you don't deserve, you can't spam the same stupidity/impatience deadeyes macro into hellsight until your opponent stops curing, and you can't take advantage of the fact that the average person doesn't even have all of the attack messages they'll encounter yet, let alone been expected to trigger them.

Imperian is in many ways a faster paced and more in depth game these days. There is something to be said for working out solutions in advance, because even if the best laid plans fall apart in the face of competition, at least you have the groundwork laid to build from. Autocuring will not allow you your version of the game anymore, because it does not exist. The days that you could come back and immediately be relevant again are over. The game has left you behind and you are too stubborn to catch up.

Sarrius

Iriaen said:

I've noticed that there is a growing prevalence here of certain kind of beta-male, the type who feels a need to delineate everything and when people actually listen to these guys, it results in a game where people spend more time theorycrafting about combat than actually doing combat.  This is because in a completely linear and predictable game, there is no reason to actually play the game when you can just calculate how the fight will go.

If taking out dodging was so great, it should have improved the game, not turned it into a crass damage contest where certain people can sit back, look at their excel spreadsheets, and feel satisfied about their perceived "combat" superiority, without ever sticking their necks out.  Yeah, any form of randomness is "unfair" because you might lose to someone you can beat more often than not a small portion of the time, what f- babies.  Do not listen to these people.  They aren't real men.

If you really get to the meat of what these types are arguing for, they don't feel that anyone should actually need to engage in combat to be combatants.  They are risk adverse.  They want everything on a spreadsheet.  They are perfectly content with a game where theorcrafting about combat and doing combat are not meaningfully different activities for the player.

Iriaen said:

Case in point, this movement to nerf limb damage.  It seems to me that since people usually don't die to afflictions anymore, they don't want people to die to limb damage anymore either.

I mean, think about it: limb damage is partially random.  You can't know which limb someone will target ahead of time.  No wonder it enrages them.  Lacking complete and total control isn't "fair" so we need to put in a way to heal limb damage because a 1 minute is just too long.

If they get their way, fighting a limb damage class can be just like fighting most other classes: a theorycrafting experience where you can calculate the entire course of the fight without actually endangering yourself at any point.

The truth of the matter is that people have leaned away from 1v1 combat. People want to remove certain things for the sake of team combat, which is what @Garryn, @Jeremy, et all have decided is best for the game/the direction they want to go. I do not personally agree with it, but the changes have been made for the sake of overall combat balance.

As a person who wishes 1v1 were more prevalent, I cannot possibly stress how much you are so, so wrong. To use your example on dodging - dodging was detrimental to 1v1 because it was subject to ruining entire offenses for No Reason Than Because. It served to dodge an attack's damage, but more importantly, it served to dodge an attack's AFFLICTIONS. The problem with this is only half the game's attacks were ever subject to dodging anyways, which is straight up unfair anyways. Any form of randomness in this field is detrimental to overall combat balance, where skill, forethought, planning, et cetera is what rules the day. The further and further we get away from randomness, the less elements we have that we can blame our losses on, which is a VERY GOOD THING.

To contest your second point, re: limb damage, let's look at two scenarios:

You vs. Generic Affliction Paragon #788

In this scenario, #788 is pressured by your damage/affliction offense/what have you. In an attempt to survive, he shields. What do you do while he shields? You have plenty of options. The most important part is that DEFENDING AGAINST YOU COSTS HIM MOMENTUM. You can cure your afflictions, etc. He must sacrifice a progressed offense in an attempt to survive and continue the fight.

Now, let's look at the other scenario..

You vs. Generic Limb Damage Paragon #27

In this scenario, #27 is pressured by your damage or afflictions. In an attempt to survive, he shields. What do you do while he shields? You have plenty of options, but none of those options include healing your prepped limb damage. You have no way to reverse the damage set by #27. You must press the advantage or leave and wait out the amount of time it takes for the limb damage accrued to fade. #27 spent no momentum or combat advantage by shielding, spamming shield, and surviving. His offense is still present, although invisible. He stopped at the Shieldwhore Rest Stop, cured your offense, and then got back on the road to Victory Town.

If you cannot grasp why this is imbalanced, I invite you to go back to another IRE game.

Iriaen

Yeah, I'm bad at Imperian... no wait.  Apparently you can't answer my question.

Is combat supposed to be about the management of danger or about the management of facts?

Juran

Iriaen said:

No, what's silly is that you think "combat" should be about the management of "facts." This is why you are a scrub.  People used to go into combat in the IRE games and their hands would shake from adrenaline.  That is what made me love these games.  I used to introduce people to combat and they would tell me that they were trembling from the experience.  When I first did it, I was the same way.  No other online game has ever done that.  This is an experience that Imperian probably doesn't offer anymore.  Combat is supposed to be about danger and not about your skill in managing pre-determined "facts."

This world has never existed at any point in the history of Imperian. The people that took the time to learn the rules and build a proper offense have always beaten the cowboys that shot from the hip. There were certainly very successful 'fighters' that could farm the heck out of non-comms with 2-3 attack aliases, a linear healing system, and bravado the size of texas - but those people did not beat the invested and educated without some combination of numbers or artifacts to bridge the gap.

Juran

Iriaen said:

Is combat supposed to be about the management of danger or about the management of facts?

Both amusingly enough, because in a way they're the exact same thing.

People that design offenses in a sterile workroom often find that they do not perform at all as intended once 'actual people' start throwing additional variables into the mix. Real combat is about knowing what can happen (the math, timings, and design of the skills you're using), and then being able to execute and make changes to your plan in the heat of the moment to make sure it does happen.

You can spend all the time you want designing systems, but you will not get good at fighting without fighting. But the heart of that experience is looking back over your fight and reading through the log to see what you could do differently, to actually improve and take your plan back to the table and tweak it. You must be able to manage the flow of combat and manage the danger by control of facts.

Iriaen

No, that's not true.  Guys that bought things like twisty rings before going into battle because they wanted to fight from their spreadsheets believe that Imperian was always like this.  By the way, how can you go from "you can't handle the new Imperian" to "that Imperian never existed"? But anyway, even good fighters back in the day would die to things like the occasional random affliction or a bad string of rebounding aura hits (rebounding aura being an example of an "unfair" thing that bads got nerfed because some people managed it better than they could).

There are plenty of successful games where combat is about managing danger, which always means managing some form of randomness.  Risk management means that there is a blind spot.  Without a blind spot there can be no risk.  A "fair" game with no randomness can't generate an adrenaline rush.

Eldreth

Juran said:

 There were certainly very successful 'fighters' that could farm the heck out of non-comms with 2-3 attack aliases, a linear healing system, and bravado the size of texas

I see what you did there.

Juran

Iriaen said:

No, that's not true.  Guys that bought things like twisty rings before going into battle because they wanted to fight from their spreadsheets believe that Imperian was always like this.  By the way, how can you go from "you can't handle the new Imperian" to "that Imperian never existed"? But anyway, even good fighters back in the day would die to things like the occasional random affliction or a bad string of rebounding aura hits (rebounding aura being an example of an "unfair" thing that bads got nerfed because some people managed it better than they could).

Rebounding has always been time-able if you were not bad, though we might just have to disagree that 'lucking into kills against better opponents' is good game design.

Take the aforementioned stupidity/impatience spam in hellsight example. In the majority of cases, this was perfectly healable - because the deadeyes spam was slower than herb balance, so you could cure impatience with an herb and then focus. Occasionally however, you'd hit a streak of 20 failed commands due to stupidity being a terrible affliction and die. This meant basically that every scrub malignist had a shot at killing you if you were unlucky that day, no matter how well you prepared. In this scenario you aren't 'managing danger', or even justifying your adrenaline - you're rolling a pair of dice and hoping that you don't get snake eyes.

Ahkan

The ultimate victim here is Microsoft Excel. It's sort of awkward to use, but that little engine that good is a powerhouse. Some of their add ons are just amazing. Excel is pretty awesome for data collecting and analysis if you're not looking to drop 100+ on a beep beep op zeet coding program.

The big thing data collection brings to the table is most easily recognized when Jesse was standardizing newbie attacks to make sure that they were relatively even across the board. It went a long way in showing which classes were stronger, which sort of led to why some professions were more optimized for newbies than other. It's also useful when comparing tankiness, utility, and dps across a combination of statpacks and professions. It lets you see the 'bigger picture' and adjust your classleads accordingly.

Iniar

It's not theorycrafting if you're trying to afflict JPK-Brishi. On the flip side, I do believe there should be unartifacted classes than -can- take on artifacted damage hammers. Limb damage is good for this. Unfortunately, you simply cannot beat them now. I'll be honest with you, I've parried people like Brishi 6-7 times in a row and guess what - that made 0 difference to my outcome: he waltzed away, cured my afflictions and came back in. I have to parry some more? F that shit. I should be able to soak up more hits given -he- walked away. Guess what, I can't. The solution needs to be better than what Khizan proposed, but at this point, nothing has been done so I'll take what I can.

Iriaen

Back in the game, I was able to get a lot of the people in this thread to agree with me that controlled randomness can be good.  I think, though, that they are still not getting my underlying point.  If the randomness can't make someone win where they might otherwise lose, then what is the point in having it? How is it a significant part of the system if it can't possibly change the outcome?

Gurn

Ahkan said:

The ultimate victim here is Microsoft Excel. It's sort of awkward to use, but that little engine that good is a powerhouse. Some of their add ons are just amazing. Excel is pretty awesome for data collecting and analysis if you're not looking to drop 100+ on a beep beep op zeet coding program.

Dunno about excel, I use notepad.

But seriously. I feel like I jumped in a time portal. As annoying as @Ahkan and @Sarrius can be sometimes, I'm now reminded how tame and nice they are compared to 2007.


@Iriaen-- I can't stop disagreeing with everything you say. Let's break it down.

A) You can't calculate how a fight will go. This is why we say that in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, it isn't. I don't know where you get this idea that you can do something like this, but if you can 100% calculate these things, please, do it for us and show us. 

Summed up, you're saying that sheer dumb stupid luck is the X factor in combat that gives you that adrenaline rush. What?

C) Nowadays, it isn't about how skilled you are at computer sciences or if you can find a dumb little exploit in someone's system. It's about how well people know Imperian combat. It's about knowing the game instead of knowing how to exploit code. 

D) What the hell are with your insults and retorts? It's really cringeworthy reading things that insinuate that you're somehow "the alpha of the pack" or something. "Yeah, I'm bad at Imperian... no wait.  Apparently you can't answer my question." What are we, in middle school?

E) "Is combat supposed to be about the management of danger or about the management of facts?" They're the exact same thing, buddy. As any gamer/fighter/soldier can tell you, the better you know and control the field, the greater your chance of success. There's a reason why in economics, information is considered one of the most costly commodities.

I just... I don't know. There's just something terribly wrong with what you believe the game is and what the game actually is.

Sarrius

• The expert in battle seeks his victory from strategic advantage and does not demand it from his men.

Strategic advantage comes from information.

Khizan

When Gurn writes a post against you that Ahkan, Sarrius and I all vote up, you might want to consider the possibility that it is literally impossible for you to be any more wrong.

Gurn

Iriaen said:

 If the randomness can't make someone win where they might otherwise lose, then what is the point in having it?

Yes.

Mathiaus

If you manage your limb priorities right, use restore appropriately, and use rubble/tumble/cubes/etc effectively along with smarter parrying, it isn't as bad. As well, learn to code tree use in for healing leg breaks, cause g-bot won't.

Septus

Smart randomisation does exist. Its built in to the cure order.

This is good because it allows both people to adapt. Dodging sucks because it doesn't.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with playing the game in the way you're criticising. You might not like it, but I doubt people are forcing you to play in the same way. Saying their way is inferior/less valid to yours just makes you look ignorant. If that's how they derive enjoyment from Imperian, its frankly noone's business but their own.

Iriaen

Khizan said:

When Gurn writes a post against you that Ahkan, Sarrius and I all vote up, you might want to consider the possibility that it is literally impossible for you to be any more wrong.

I'm not trying to convince you guys.  That's what, four people who have always felt that way? When Imperian was in its prime, the mods used to ignore this movement to remove all timing and random chance.  And more people were playing the game back then and using the forums back then.

Imperian and IRE has always had guys who say things like "a 6-second second passive is bad because it's a passive, but a move with a 6-second cooldown that does almost exactly the same thing as the passive and doesn't use up balance or equilibrium, that you're going to want to fire off every 6 seconds to maximize its usefulness, is good, because it's not a passive... also, making a class stronger just because it can't move its whole offense is unfair... oh, no one's playing Diabolist anymore, maybe it's because limb damage is too good, let's defang that next.  Soon, no one will be able to stand against my artifacts and straight damage spam."

When I used to argue that IRE should move towards automated healing, I just assumed that they would do something to preserve the random factors in the game, instead they started catering more and more to people they once had the wisdom to ignore when this game was in its prime.

Yes Gurn, I like randomness.  I like dying to randomness sometimes.  That's why almost every other PvP game has some randomness in it that can get you killed.  People always complain about the random factors, the timing factors that they aren't good at, and the designers of popular games always ignore them.  Imperian stopped ignoring them and that's a bad thing.  As if Khizan and Ahkan were ever going to quit.  Guys like that would get their spreadsheets torn up regularly for years and they would always come back for more, there was never a need to cater to them, the Dregaurs quit, the Rascas quit, the Iriaens did other things for years, now I've come back and see the "An" people being catered to and where is everyone else? They're playing games where they have a chance to take a headshot and die, or if they want no randomness, they're playing chess.  They aren't playing Imperian because this will never be good as a linear game due to the pay-to-win aspects.

Gurn

...Wat. Are you serious? Because I just explained everything a moment ago.

Despite the wall of text, let me sum up your post:

"RANDOM = BEST GAEM AND DID YOU KNOW DREGAUR AND STUFF QUIT BECAUSE THE GAME WASN'T RANDOM ENOUGH"

I'm... It's just... I... 

You're not serious, are you? Please tell me you're being an elaborate troll, and we all fell for your trolly troll ways.


I just... I can't even begin to start with how this logic doesn't work. I mean, come on.

Sarrius

Rasca was awful.

Ashel

"I don't understand anything about math or game design and I am mad" - Iriaen, 2014

Ashel

Also hahahaha "the Dregaurs quit [because the game was gradually rebalanced]" I WONDER WHY

Iriaen

A linear game which follows the chess format, who wants to play pay-to-win chess? Imagine that the other guy can buy more pieces than you can.  Without any significant random factors to manage, that's what Imperian is approaching being turned into.

So we got rid of aeon, retardation, rebounding, stupidity, dodging, we have no crits, we are going to nerf limb damage and the forum crew wants to get rid of hidden afflictions too.

You guys are those people from MMOs who are like "we shouldn't have crits because they make me lose sometimes" and yet for some reason, pretty much every MMO keeps crits.  That's because you guys aren't as smart as you think you are.  You make balance suggestions based upon what you think will make it easier for you and refuse to accept the possibility that maybe people like Dregaur were just better at managing risk.

Ahkan

2006

Be alpha

Kill people with cheese

nightmare, asthma, stupid.

Much random, wow.

Rock it all over the bads.

Eight years later

Log into imperian

Betas taken over. 

Not random. Linear.

Can't compete.

Wait a week.

Assume alpha.

Inform betas they're bitches.

Much details on how they're not alpha.

Suggest return to glory days.

MFW I realize I'm still the best.

Wysrias

You are making a LOT of sweeping generalizations, and I think that's largely why everyone is dismissing your perspective (other than outright disagreeing with it). You don't personally know why people are playing other games, you don't know why all of the current players are playing, you don't know why healing has migrated towards a standardized format. You are constructing a strawman and attacking it in the absence of any real proof for why these design decisions have been made.

The reality is, the current group of players is playing because they enjoy playing this incarnation of the game. That's the only real conclusion you can actually draw here. You're not accepting anyone else's assessment of the game's current state, and you're instead attacking individual perspectives because they don't match up with what you're envisioning for the game.

Do you really not see why people would be offended that you return to the game and immediately conclude that all of the decisions that players have helped shape have been bad ones? Do you really think it's a fair assessment to claim that nobody understands the game they're playing, and you - who has not played for years - understand it better than them?

I think that if you want any sort of real discussion about the current state of the game and how it works, that you have to first accept that maybe your perspective isn't being dismissed because it's unpopular or that nobody likes it, and maybe that it may just outright be wrong. You have a lot of people explaining why, but nobody is going to engage you in a serious discussion until you cut out the generalizations and maybe play the actual game for awhile.

Khizan

Iriaen said:

You guys are those people from MMOs who are like "we shouldn't have crits because they make me lose sometimes" and yet for some reason, pretty much every MMO keeps crits.  

 What is resilience, Alex?

In this post: Khizan fails at Jeopardy references.