ComradeAma

Thanks V for this! I want to point out one important moment to ACE combat design team as we are approaching combat balancing in alpha. Spreadsheet clearly states the lack of effective stealth mechanics in mass pvp. There is no even section for stealth/focus group because this playstyle is not valuable. And here is why it is bad for combat system. I have played GW2 for several years, which had (and probably still has) one of the best MMO combat systems. And I saw all metas in mass pvp. When meta is shifted towards frontline, combat becomes chaos. Not valuable backline is not able to stop enemy pushes, whoever gets the most organized push and keeps rolling enemy wins the fight. Playstyle is press W and dont release while facerolling keyboard. It can be fun some time but 2/3 of your classes are not valuable. When meta is shifted towards backline, combat becomes resident sleeper. We called it pirateship. Frontline can’t push because enemy backline would melt it with counter pressure/bombs. Noone is pushing, backline pew pew each other for several minutes, sometimes dozens of minutes until one backline gets advantage over another and opens opportunity for a winning push. Push too early and your frontline is dead. While backline has fun in such meta, frontline falls asleep, it is pretty boring. Stealth classes also get destroyed because you cant open on anything, there is too much ranged pressure everywhere. Third meta, when balance is shifted towards sustain. Nothing dies. Zergs are formed as balls without real flanks, with small tails and roll over single enemy until it dies. There are no mass kills, you focus fire and bleed enemy one by one. It is current Crowfall meta. And the reason is 2k Support Power cap, which is easily reached in epic gear. It is also current GW2 meta and one of the reasons why people stopped playing GW2. It is even more boring than pirateship meta. Please take notes. Stealth classes are not valuable again, they have no sustain by design. Now lets talk about the most fun meta that ever existed. If we split zerg into 5 parts, then roughly 2/5 would be frontline, 2/5 would be backline and 1/5 would be stealth/sudden burst groups. Frontline and backline should be pretty balanced: organized frontline push on disoriented backline can catch a few and kill them, however organized pressure from backline can stop the push and force frontline to regroup and heal in circles. And the most important - stealth classes are valuable too. In meta when frontline pushes and regroups for heals, backliners and some disorganized frontliners get stuck out of position. That moment a good stealther groups open on those people, punish their bad position by quickly killing them and vanish in stealth for the next opportunity. Combat system becomes fun. All roles are valuable, you always have to watch your position and correctly manage your cooldowns. Good decisions are rewarded, mistakes are punished. Combat is overall more versatile and skilled. Gear and numbers matter less. If Crowfall can achieve such kind of meta, it would be a lot of fun to play. P.S. @Yumx It would be great to see a bit more detailed info on class difficulty as some classes can be played effectively by face-rolling keyboard and some shines only with great expertise. For example, Stormcaller and Archer are both rated with two stars for their braindead LMB plays, however Stormcaller is more effective on midrange by dropping sudden burst on offensive/overextending enemy (which is pretty easy) and archer is more effective on a flank shooting enemy backline (which is hard as you need to watch enemy movement and know when you overextend and when not) and both are useless when they randomly shoot enemy frontline.

You can find power range on its tooltip. Most of ranged powers are 15m.

As I remember the max number on epic piece is around 110, so 104 is close to max. Rolls on epic and legendary gear are quite inconsistent, sometimes you get all amazing, sometimes you get many fails. 50 gap is fine, however you can get more with better gear. And bring chaos embers in case you are not lucky. About chances. They are not really chances. When you go to experimentation phase, game creates deck of cards with possible outcomes according to your stats/difficulty, then you drag cards from the deck. So if you draw a failure, you decrease chance to draw another one. However nothing protects you from drawing all failure cards if you are unlucky.

Some ideas: 1. No global cooldown on tray switch and let powers of new tray be used immediately. It will make melee/range combos smooth, right now you have to press dodge between two skills while tray swapping or just wait (which feels bad). 2. Show new tray as soon as tray key is pressed, there is a significant delay now . Sometimes delay causes confusion if tray swapped or not, you start spamming tray button and may end in harvesting tray with dizzy down. 3. Allow combat > stealth swap, but instead of being instant, make it a channeled power with noticable animation (e.g character model transitions to invisible). Being hit 3 times during animation causes exposed, knockdown and small cd on tray swap. 4. Reconsider Dizzy Down mechanics. It should serve as punisher to people trying to leave fight, but it hurts people ambushed by stealthers.

I think the optimal solution would be implementing checks on both server and client, but disabling them on server. Then give everyone in-game option to report player for hacks. Once player is reported, server turns on server checks for that specific player for some time. If server gets enough case of client reporting things which should not happen while not having desync issues, than server permabans user with all their accounts for hacking. This way server maintains its optimal performance and lets players play Russian roulette with their hacks. I doubt there will be many volunteers in buy-to-play game.

A simple client-side check for LOS/raycast during every tick of channeled power would help a lot with all the targeting issues without degrading server performance. It won’t stop hackers though.

Catch-up mechanic should be a blocker on list of features for 5.110. As it starts alpha stage we are calling people from other games to actively play CF. They won’t come at day 1. They will come in waves. And one of the first questions will be “why can you farm/craft blues and i cant?, how do i catch up?”. If we have to answer “you can’t, wait for release”, i guess people will follow the advice. Noone wants to be half efficient, because they knew about game/joined community in a wrong moment.

I have two monitors. If I switch from Crowfall client in Fullscreen mode to Discord, the client sometimes will freeze for about 10 seconds. If I click into freezed client, it crashes. Client log prints ERROR in the last line: 2019-08-28T19:44:26.875Z ERROR TIMELINETASK - StopFxPool.AttachCombatResult: null attach object!

If you watched ACE streams, Debbie was always against giving out details of incoming features. JTodd normally does not listen to her, but I guess giving away too many details and not meeting expactations hurt more than not announcing anything and then hitting with sudden news bomb. To be honest people are not playing, because there is no reason to, besides learning the game. Rewards do not matter (they are bad), winning does not matter (noone tryhards, expect people who get fun from any win), grinding does not matter (wipe is coming). Engamenents are rare and rarely fun (especially on EU, maps are too big, population is too low, gear difference is usually massive). There is nothing wrong with it. You can't expect game to be fun until release. If you don't enjoy it, just take a break.

Another example of how many people want good competitive MMO instead of another casual cash out flashy spamfest. I just can't believe Activision (rip Blizzard) won't thanks this forum for nice amazing words autocorrect it up again.

@Wilbur @Phr00t https://bitbucket.org/amaranth2517/crowfall-parser-pub If you are interested in contibuting to project, ping me in Discord.

@Felagunda It is a problem of current pre-alpha testing state. Most of people played since the last wipe and have full skill training, that allows them to farm even in winter with proper gear, but new players can be effective only in spring. There is no way for new people to catch up on training right now, but there will be such option before release (search experience tomes on these forums to get an idea how it may work (it is still work in progress)). So it may be a good idea to wait... until new campaign or go to Gods Reach (it has eternal spring) or until next wipe, or join a guild that already have trained harvesters who can support you with mats.

@boogiee The problem is that price for Russians is about 3 times lower than for EU/NA (for obvious economical reasons and service level). And people who payed different money can't play together. So it is not ACE problem, it is problem of Russian economy... So as a part of the deal with early backers, ACE allowed Russians, who bought NA/EU client, to play on both EU/NA and RU. That offer has expired now and you can't get it anymore. But may be they can change their mind to allow all Russians who buy NA/EU client (3 times more expensive) to play RU server any time. I advice you to send them a letter to support@crowfall.com with such proposal . P.S. I am Russian early backer.

No, guild stuff is handled by web site and Innova has do it themselves. The last time I asked @Pann about it on stream about 2 monthes, she said that RU was handled by Innova, and I think they have no idea about their progress on the issue.

Thanks for report, I added note to download section.