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Thats a bad analogy, the rules for football do change for lower levels. E.g. because its harder to maintain a defensive screen (for smaller teams) or because of fewer experienced kickers (younger teams, inc. high school) two point conversions are often reversed.Originally Posted by Im_a_PONYomg
I couldn't tell you mana costs for like any items and nowhere near all spells.
I think you're severely underrating individual skill, though.
Competitive starts at 1800 IMO.The balance opinions of 1650+ players, who have obviously learned how to play, are what should matter. Competative play is where people of 1650+ skills can actually work as a team.
OK zircon, your post maybe is good, but the roll cancelling part is incredibly wrong. america was whupped by japan, and roll cancelling was added to america's game, itwas not removed or banned
I never said Americans didn't learn roll canceling, also I never said it was banned. Can you quote the part of my post where I said that? What I did state is that roll canceling was acknowledged to be an obviously broken "mechanic" by many people and in fact was removed in the Gamecube + Xbox versions (CVSNK2 EO.)
This is relevant to the discussion. Something can't be banned unless it's discrete, enforceable and warranted. Roll canceling is a stupid, broken glitch that removes depth from the game, so banning it would have been warranted. But it's not discrete - it's too hard to detect and prove. So, it can't be banned.
This ties in to people complaining about backdooring. We can argue about whether backdooring is warranted or not, but is it discrete and enforceable? For example, if a player finishes off a tower while their creeps are attacking it, that's obviously fine, but what if the creeps died one second earlier? Five seconds? Ten seconds? In the case of backdooring it makes more sense for S2 to implement protection(s) if at all, rather than to leave it to players to arbitrarily decide at what point attacking a tower becomes backdooring.
(By the way, a lot of these concepts are explained in more depth at Sirlin.net - credit goes to him for the general ideas.)
Is there a link to this idea of 'time-tax' on Sirlin.net, and if so is there a link? It seems an odd concept to me. For example, you state that Chess carries no 'time-tax' because even a novice has the option to make all possible (legal) moves as a Grandmaster, but that they will not always make the optimal move. You then go on to say that memorising heroes is one of the biggest 'time-taxes' of HoN. What, then, constitutes the countless hours of time Grandmasters spend in studying books and famous games in order to recognise certain situations in order to arrive at the optimal move? Every game or sport requires some form of 'time-tax' by your definition, otherwise you are saying that experience plays no role in games at all.
Uh, and then those versions were not used at all in tournaments, and they used the RC version. It was just a skill you needed to learn, like a character's BnB combos and whatnot. It is still a better game than a lot of others, the problem with it was how long it takes to run.
A better example would be like picking master hand in smash or something.
EDIT: @Dune, a time tax is something that you have to learn, before being able to even think about the meta game. Like, learning all the moves pieces can do, leaning how to play magic, how to dragon punch and fireball in street fighter. They are all basics of the game that you ABSOLUTELY have to learn to be able to think about the meta game. Also, they can refer to any grinding, like when you are playing LoL, you need to grind to level 30, and have all the best runes and masteries before being able to play
Last edited by CWheezy; 04-10-2010 at 02:19 PM.
lol
Put it this way: if you listen to pubs, Rampage and Scout are overpowered
I said that, not dune.
Also the hate on lol on this forum is laughable, they do some thing way, way better than hon
What about the strategy inherent in all games then? Strategy cannot be chalked up to the metagame, but is clearly something which transcends simply possessing the skills to play a game in a certain style. If learning to last-hit is considered a 'time-tax' when it fundamentally is just how to time a right-click, then knowing a powerful position (whether it be in HoN or Chess) must be a 'time-tax' as well. To master the former one evidently requires something more than the ability to right-click, for it is about timing as well. However, mastering the latter could involve where one places one hero before timing this attack. I don't see how 'time-tax' forms a suitable basis for an analogy here as it is present in all games or sports.
1900******
The difference is that learning those things is actually interesting and fun, and you learn them every game you play, and there is no limit to how much you can learn. It is always changing and shifting, there is always something new to learn.
Learning how to fireball, or my bnb combo in practice mode is not fun, and I will only learn it like once. What is the exciting part is learning when to throw that fireball so it wont get me killed.
The time tax is the time you have to put in, before you get to the actual interesting parts of the game.
One cannot make a definition of something rest on 'fun' - a concept so nebulous and subjective as to be completely void of an objectively accepted archetype. What if I find the grinding fun, does that make it no longer part of the time-tax?
Fun is suprisingly not as subjective as you would think, and has actually been defined before.
But if you are going to resort to lame things like that, then you are not really worth having a discourse with! Especially when it is easy to find things that are fun to most people, just look at the keeper thread, and how many posts are like, he is boring and unfun he is.
So I guess discussion is over.
What he's saying is that the knowledge of all the "pieces" in chess takes very little time at all (only a few minutes). It is true that professional chess players probably do a lot of research in order to use those pieces correctly; but in theory, additional research is not required to play a perfect game. In short, once you possess the knowledge of every "piece" in HoN (all the units, items, and heroes [and how they work together]), you have all the information necessary to play the "perfect" game of HoN. This does not necessarily mean that you will, but the "time tax" part of your learning experience is over.
In his original post, he also went into detail about the strategic aspects of the game and how that relates to skill. Once you have all the knowledge necessary to play the game, the strategic part (and how well you do) does not necessarily require TIME to become proficient at, when in theory a keen mind will make all the best decisions using the available information...
Ah yes, the "balance for high level" issue. Let me enforces that with using my fingers to do real air quotes in air.
Balancing for high level is a tricky business in my eyes. There are many holes you need to avoid for it work and for it to be pulled off without danger you need to be skilled developer. I would like to bring out one of the problems that I have a personal interest to complain about.
When you make game for skilled people, you might want to have high execution requirements incorporated into the gameplay to reward the best players as much as possible. That exists heavily in HoN which is its strength and its weakness, as we have seen when Open beta started. Difficulty curve is as unforgiving as it can be and the community is not very friendly either, but that is an issue totally unimportant.
When it comes to gameplay, S2 needs to avoid implementing hero skills or items what I would call "execution barriers". These are things that are taken granted among the best players, but are something new and average players really struggle with. I think the closest that comes in mind about HoN right now is Tempest with his ultimate skill that is countered by the least used item in the game. These barriers can seem ok to most of you because you have no problem with this, but it is a dangerous situation. Tempest right now is a minor problem, he doesn't dominate games that much, he is a slight annoyance and a permaban.
The real danger is in the future, what future brings. S2 needs to avoid ever releasing a hero that is only good for those of high level. Hero that is so hard to use, you need to be a huge Dota pro to pull him off. The worst thing would be that he would be overpowered in high level because of this huge execution requirement, but completely useless in under the threshold it takes to use him. Reward and difficulty.
Reward and difficulty go hand to hand. You do something easy, you get a small reward. You do something hard, you get a big reward. This is the basic principle that we award the good players for being good. It is this that balance has to somehow work with while the pesky diversity keeps poking him to the side and throwing more and more work on his table. And why do I need to tell you this?
DotA/HoN has always had huge problems with this. This problem is why some heroes will never be used competitively and why some heroes will always have place there.
King Leoric, The Skeleton King. Everyone who has played DotA knows him, pretty much a classic DotA hero, but I'll explain him for HoN people. He was a STR hero who only had one active skill. One. It was a single target stun that did damage. Other than that, he got lifesteal aura, crit and resurrection as ulti. Now it should come as no surprise he is not very high tier character in DotA. He stuns someone and then auto-attacked, hoping crits help him out dps the opponent and lifesteal keeps him alive. Resurrection kinda saved him in teamfights, but not mostly. Leoric is a classic case of a hero with very little difficulty, so he has little reward. Now this kind of hero has no place among the high level because for obvious reasons. He is perfectly balanced in how useless he is. If I made a thread about him being underpowered, I would had nothing to argue with. He is MEANT TO BE UNDERPOWERED as whole. If you made any of his skills any better, you would be just rewarding easy gameplay with better rewards, breaking the whole game mindset.
But there is a opposite of him. A hero so difficult to utilize, he has no use in competitive play. You might think: "What? DotA pros are so good, they are able to turn even the shittiest heroes into pure gold! Lies and slander!" But that is not the case. He or should I say, THEY, had a problem of being incredibly rewarding, but at the same time being just too hard to be any use. I am of course talking about the one but not only, Meepo the Geomancer.
Sigh, Meepo. Meepo Meepo Meepo, even his name suggest disaster. Meepo is another Dota hero, but not as common as Leoric. Meepo has been a total balancing trainwreck in Dota along the years. He has been steamrolling, been useless, never something in between. He is THE biggest pubstomper in the whole game. He is one of the most unique heroes in Dota and also one of the hardest to use. Ok, time to break him down for you. Meepo has 3 skills and the iconic ultimate. He has a AoE disable, teleport/AoE nuke and DoT slow. But what really made him interesting was his ulti.
He replicated himself. Every ulti level, 6 11 16, you would get one more Meepo. These Meepo clones were not illusion, they were real heroes that worked exactly like the original but could not buy individual items. Instead all stats original Meepo bought, the clones got too. You got not only two, or three, but FOUR heroes for one pick. Because Meepo's DoT passive stacked, having four Meepos hit you meant fast death. Oh also permadisable with AoE nets because you could rotate the skills between different Meepos and that teleport nuke that pretty much did like 600+ damage in 400 aoe around Meepo. Yeeaaah. Oh did I forget to say that each Meepo clone shared XP with each other, so having one Meepo in each lane meant getting lvl 16 when everyone else was at like 8?
Yeah, Meepo sounds like a powerhouse doesn't he. But here is his biggest weakness, weakness so huge it totally ruins the hero. If one of the Meepos died, all died. Death of any of them meant they all die. He was very prone to nuking and ganking. You have one Meepo getting xp on lane, ganking with three, three whacks away from kill and BAM, laning Meepo bites the dust from a Nerubian Assassin combo and there we go. Not only this, but trying to keep your weakest Meepo alive during any teamfight was like having to juggle with a two babies and a chainsaw. He was just too hard to use. If someone in this day would go and master Meepo so greatly that he would never get killed, he could not be stopped. Fight against team with lvl 16 Meepo in it is not 5v5, it is 8v5.
But on the easier arenas, like games of average skill, Meepo is so much easier to keep alive and oh god if you let him farm too much, you have a lvl 25 Meepos on your doorstep with items that you can only dream about at lvl 13. You just can't balance this hero. He is not like Leoric, who is trapped to low tier because how simple he is, Meepo is one of those heroes who has no cap, no ceiling. If a hero has unlimited difficulty, does he have unlimited reward? Yes he should have, but that is not good design! You just can't make heroes like these, heroes that have no place in the game you want to make because they are either designed to be too easy or too hard.
This is why Ophelia is in such state. I have seen the pubs talk about her, they want to buff her, when she might just be one of the best heroes in the bloody game. Nobody walks out of triple minotaur stunfest when you have angry bees debuff swarming on you and a angry woman in bikini beating you to death.
But the trouble here is diversity. We need Ophelia in the game the game just to keep the game diverse and FUN. In fact, diversity is directly related to how much fun a game is. Connect-2 doesn't have the same appeal as Connect-4. Diversity is what creates better gameplay and more interesting lineups. But diversity is the opposite force of balance because trying to brainstorm how difficult this skill actually is to give it a proper reward, you run into disasters like Engineer on release. S2 most likely thought "Hmmm, this guy must be quite hard to use, let's make him powerful" and then the game was like it was. Look at Techies for crying out loud, he is THE most unique hero in all of DotA, but even harder than Meepo to balance! And I honest to god would love to see Techies in the game because he has mind games written all over him. Well, Mind games and TNT.
Phew. If you read this far and saw any typos or bad mistakes in the text, I blame my dyslexia.
Well, hold on a minute. Yes, there is a decision involved in last-hitting (and decision-making has nothing to do with time taxes.) The decision is when to last-hit, and which creep to last-hit. The process of actually last-hitting a creep involves no decisions. The timing of last-hitting involves memorization of projectile speed / attack animation, and learning how to gauge your attack damage / attack range as it compares to the life of creeps. Once you have decided to last-hit something, the decision making ends. You either last-hit the creep, or you don't. Whether you do or don't achieve this is based on how much time you've put into practicing last-hitting, not any sort of strategy.
Yes, technically all games or sports do have some sort of time investment required to learn the basic mechanics. I shouldn't have said that Chess literally doesn't have one, it just doesn't have much of one. It's negligible compared to, say, learning how to accurately shoot in basketball (a skill which even advanced players constantly drill.)
Memorizing heroes in HoN is VERY different than studying strategies in Chess. Memorizing heroes is the equivalent of learning how a piece moves. Obviously you need to know that bishops move diagonally to play Chess properly. Likewise, obviously you need to know that Blood Hunter's ult causes you to take massive damage when you move your character around. This is different than studying WHEN to use Blood Hunter's ult, where, on whom, etc, or when to move a bishop (and where.)
I agree with your post overall, as it pretty much restates what I said at the bottom of my OP. Heroes that have high execution barriers should not (necessarily) be nerfed, but rather they should be made more accessible.
However, the paragraph I've quoted here is something I sincerely disagree with. Difficulty and reward do not go hand-in-hand. RISK and reward go hand-in-hand. For example, take Ken's fierce dragon punch in the Street Fighter games. If you hit with it, it does a lot of damage (high reward!) But if you miss, you are basically left wide open for several seconds (high risk!) Conversely, if you throw out a jab punch, you will do very little damage if you hit something (low reward) while if you whiff, you have virtually no recovery time (low risk.) Difficulty has absolutely nothing to do with this, nor should it.
Leoric being easy to play does not mean he should also have low rewards... that makes no sense. Where's the logical connection? The exception is if the difficulty itself in some way adds to the risk (ie. it's harder, therefore it takes longer to do, or restricts your usage of the thing to certain situations, making it riskier overall), but this isn't relevant in HoN. There are so many problems with associating difficulty with 'power'.
For example, we could in theory design a hero that requires you to memorize a sequence of 50 key inputs. You might say "well now he needs to be very powerful, much more so than any other hero." But the thing about difficulty is... player skill conquers it. Competitive players will learn whatever they have to, and practice it to hell, in order to win. And now look at what has happened - we end up with a hero ridiculously overpowered in competitive games, where everyone knows how to use him properly. Poor design at it's best.
Last edited by zircon; 04-10-2010 at 05:19 PM.
Sadly Aych, I believe S2 is already in the process of adding a mistake.
Someone found a hero skill model that is basically a Puck clone from DotA. What's the problem with this? Puck broke the meta-game of DotA. He negated more than half of the roster simply by being present, and as far as I know, the "witty" Icefrog did nothing to balance him out (someone correct me if I'm wrong, I have not played dota in about a year). But I played DotA competitively for a good two years, and that hero was what made so many matches suck.
And just btw, this is MY opinion on Puck based on experience.
The problem with risk is that, player skill influences the risk moves have. As you get better and better, you are able to decrease the amount of risk of of the ability. In your example, very skilled players will find opportunities where the Shoryuken will most likely hit rather than Flowchart Ken if you know what I mean. But why I want to think difficulty as tied to power is because, in the case of Leoric, there is nothing that can be powerful and still be just a single target spell that stuns and does damage. If we make like a objective, hero needs to gank someone, you can try to approach Leoric from many flanks, you could try to try complex tactics, hide in plain sight by manipulating trees and fog of war, going from unexpected places, master him as a whole, you still find yourself with tools limited to 3 passives and that one stun. I mean, look at Deadwood. He has to hit with roots, burst from trees, willowmaker and finishing touches. But unlike Leoric who comes, presses T and then clicks the enemy hero, Deadwood would have to get the right position with tree cover, time the root and have enough mana for all of this. If we buffed Leoric's ganking ability to the same level, make his Hellfire Blast stun as long as both roots and Willowmaker and make it do as much damage, you would break that hero completely.
This is how I see it anyway. Maybe difficulty is the wrong work, "more work" or "more execution" would be closer to truth? Well I dunno.
Also that last thing you mentioned, bad design example? It already exists, it is called Invoker. Banned in all games in DotA.
Wait, are you saying Invoker is perma-banned in competitive matches now, or is he just always banned in captain's mode? Sry again, haven't played DotA in forever...
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