Aetolian Combat

Haven

This discussion was created from comments split from: Ankyrean Anguish - Aetolia-based RAGE.

Malok

It absolutely sucks, but I think I'm completely disinterested in any PVP aspect of Aetolia. I used to like PVP on the other IRE games too, but my god, the power creep is just enormous. No thanks. I'll stick to mindlessly grinding Xanhaal and enjoying the social and RP aspects of it. At least those are still there, somewhat.

Ezalor

Eh, you got killed by Illidan. Who is kind of artied to the teeth and not exactly on the low end of the combat scale. Don't get discouraged by one incident.

Illikaal

Malok said:

It absolutely sucks, but I think I'm completely disinterested in any PVP aspect of Aetolia. I used to like PVP on the other IRE games too, but my god, the power creep is just enormous. No thanks. I'll stick to mindlessly grinding Xanhaal and enjoying the social and RP aspects of it. At least those are still there, somewhat.

Man, I really didn't expect for one incident to have that effect on you, but that's just how PK is when you're new to it. I, much like you, used to get facerolled a LOT. But it was only natural, as I was new to PvP many years ago when I first tried it out. 

All you have to do is get your hands on a good system, and go up the combat tiers, much like all of the high end PKers did. Start by fighting lower and mid-tier combatants like Calipso, Angwe, Latharn, Jensen, or even Ezalor, Macavity, and Mastema in the arena. Aetolian combat is all about information, and the more information you have, the more likely you are to win a fight. You just have to practice is all, so start low, and aim high. You're going to lose a lot, like everyone did, including myself. You're going to die a lot, just like everyone else. What separates the good combatants from the bad is never learning from their mistakes, and not repeating them. 

Still, don't let me, or any other Top Tier PKer turn you off of PK because of one very unfortunate incident. Keep practicing, come back, and kick my ass!

Calipso

It seems like the constant same story in Aetolia concerning PK. I dont think I have seen this much issue with PK before, and I have tried each of the IRE. I wonder if it needs looking into perhaps?

*Poke Divine*

Eleanor

Uh, looking into how? I'm not really sure how the admins could do anything about 'I engaged in pk and got facerolled'. If anything, from a business perspective their answer would only be 'buy more arties then'. IRE is here to make bank, after all.

Moirean

Admin do seem to recognize that the war system and lessers have shifted the PK focus heavily into team battles - they created the Sect, as a counter to that. The question is if that is working, and if so/not, why?

Illikaal

Honestly, Aetolia has never been an easy pick-up-and-play game like many other PvP oriented games. That's why I have so many friends who constantly see/hear me talking about/playing Aetolia, and they're like "Oh man, that looks sick. I wanna try it."

All I can do is heave a heavy sigh and respond with, "You got about $1000 to drop? Because that's what it's realistically going to take." Either that, or "Grind nonstop for about 12 hours a day, for MAYBE a year, every single day. Then you -might- be able to compete." 

But then they laugh and go, "Why would I do that when I can play LoL for free?" And then we queue up for a match. And everything is K. 

The problem with the PvP in Aetolia isn't the PvP itself, it's what it takes to even be able to COMPETE in the PvP environment. The only possible way that this could ever even be realistically remedied is to remove every single combat related artifact in the game from the game. But we all know that humanity will have to survive 2 zombie apocalypses before that ever happened. 

The sad reality is that its never going to change, and it sucks. IRE needs to make money, and facilitating a borderline buy to win environment is a huge turnoff to most people looking to pick up a brand new game. There's many other free to play games with great PvP environments that starts everyone off on equal footing, and keeps them there. This is not the case in Aetolia. You have to spend a good chunk of money to omnitrans your skills, or an unrealistic amount of time grinding to get to tip top tier. 

Until that huge problem changes, which again, it never will, I'm just going to recommend to anyone who asks me about Aetolia to go play LoL instead. This game is quite literally the most expensive game I've played to date, and I even get disgusted with myself knowing exactly how much money I had to put down just to be on equal footing with the insane artifact whores (Ison, Sryaen, Darliea, Mazzion) just to avoid getting nearly two-shotted with some skills. 

That's also why 90% of my artifacts are straight up defensive, because I can take them down offensively on my own. I don't believe that anyone should ever buy artifacts to just make themselves hit so hard that they're an instant win button (sorry Tina). 

Ilyon

Eh. The buy-in is definitely there, but it's not so bad. Just gotta play it smart - I mean, I have four classes and a nice pile of artifacts, and the vast majority of that got funded by the $25/mo membership, plus some giftbag/chest purchases. 150cr/month may not look like a lot, but it adds up if you use them well.

Teani

And at the same time, people can actually play the same game and enjoy it without spending heaps of money. All depends on what you're in it for. I've spent money (won't lie about that) but I'm still in it more for the RP than PvP, and the RP in this game way surpasses any other games I've tried. (Sure, could do with a little less drama at times, but still!)

However, if you're in it for PK, you need to be prepared to die over and over while working your way to the top. I've seen Illidan's name on deathsight so many times through the years it's ridiculous, but he's gone through the practice, paid up for artifacts and all that. Just make sure to pick the right opponent so you learn something from each fight.

The thing that annoyed me the most (back when I was more involved) was when two mid-tier combatants fought and the one who lost couldn't take the humilation (or whatever) and ran off to get their top-tier fighter friend. Said friend would be only too happy to oblige, meaning that it was no longer a mid-tier fight, but something very unbalanced and the winner from the original fight would go down because there's no way they can stand against a top-tier and their mid-tier opponent.

Illikaal

Ilyon said:

Eh. The buy-in is definitely there, but it's not so bad. Just gotta play it smart - I mean, I have four classes and a nice pile of artifacts, and the vast majority of that got funded by the $25/mo membership, plus some giftbag/chest purchases. 150cr/month may not look like a lot, but it adds up if you use them well.

Well actually, you're right. I think it was 2 years ago (around the holiday promotion) in which I probably scored the LARGEST jackpot of my promotion purchasing history. I'd gotten over 6k credits worth of artifacts for something around 400 dollars worth of cryptic chests. Still, the nice little stash of Artifacts that I have were acquired over the course of the 6 years that I've been playing now and not all in one chunk. Placing high in some of the Anniversary events netted me about another 2k worth, so I haven't really plunked down as much as I thought, now that I really think about it.

Still, I stand on my previous statement that if they want to 'jump right into it', there's no real way to do it unless they're willing to plunk down a whole bunch of money. Else, they have to spend literal years grinding for what they want. 

And just to touch on what Teani stated: Picking the right opponents on your way up the ladder is incredibly important. You also -have- to watch and study your opponent to see what they do, and come up with ways to get around it. If you don't pay attention, and keep using the same old tactic that obviously isn't going to work, then you'll never -ever- progress. That's why there's a lot of oldbies up and about right now that think they've still got it, when all they're really good for is newbie/mid tier griefing. If they were to fight some of the new youngsters that are showing themselves capable, like Serrice, Valingar, etc. then they will (and have for that matter) get their asses handed to them, because they maintain their argument of "Well back in my day, I was the shit." Rather than trying to improve on themselves, they come up with excuses such as "No, the class they're using is just OP." or "They're only winning because of their artifacts." Attitudes like that will never get you anywhere. 

Haven

Haven said:

The problems I find with Aetolia's combat community are that the tiers aren't evenly spread out populace wise nor are they transparent. There are few combatants in the game in comparison to the other type of players so when a new player joins the combatant ranks they're usually faced with a relatively high entry point of moderate to expert levels of combat where they're facing opponents like say: myself, @Jeromy, @Xavin, @Dato, @Angwe, @Arbre, @Edhain, @Valingar, @Tina, @Belgarion, @Borscin, @Luna, @Serrice, @Dourif, @Mazzion, @Illidan, @Tralendar, @Xarian, @Daskalos, @Tyrak, etc. Which is a pretty staggering entry point in my opinion.

This is why I think more people should take up combat and that there should be more programs introduced to help with the entry point and make the tiers of combat more transparent so as to know whom to look for / challenge without having to guess who the beginner/moderate/expert fighters are. Aside from word of mouth or examining player might, both of which are unreliable sources of information, there isn't really a way to quickly tell/compare where the tiers begin and end.

I still stand by this. More programs should be implemented to ease novice combatants onto the battlefield and eventually spread players around into proper rankings of skill level with meaningful rewards for being in each varying rank. Even if the rewards are primarily cosmetic with things like unique races, honors lines, custom entrance/exit messages, etc.

Truthfully, this is something cities can greatly help out with but alas motivating a decent chunk of people to step away from their respective RP arcs/bashing/whatever at the same time is more often a pain than a reward. Anyway, I agree with a lot of the posts so far in that you gotta choose an opponent appropriate for you, keep practicing, and learn your class.

There are a lot of cool people in the game that'll share information with you and give you tips. You can even come to the forums with your questions and people will answer them for the most part if they know the answer.

Moirean

I have started to sense in the past week or so that there is a widening gulf between RP and combat. This might just be because I am all caught up in lots of things, but I get a bit of a feeling that the interplay between the two aspects of the game is not as pronounced as I remember it to be.

Edhain

The way @Illidan detailed it made me realize how right @Haven is, even though I disagreed at first. It's crazy how much needs to be put into this game, relative to other games, before someone can play combat. Even if as @Ilyon said, you get most of that through subscription, or in my case artisanals, and get other stuff from in-game opportunities, it still takes a disproportionately long amount of time. 

I like the idea of toning down offensive artifacts. Seems like that's partly what happened with artifact weapons, though I don't know how effective the rune is. Maybe other offensive artifacts can also be nerfed, or made into defensive ones.

Seir

Lusternia's entry investment is way, WAY higher than Aetolia's (it actually skyrockets into the obscene if you're a knight). Achaea's is also higher because artifacts are quite frankly mandatory at this point.

The only one that Aetolia could be higher than is Imperian, but I'd probably put them at about the same.

I don't know or care about Midkemia, but I imagine it's lower than everyone.

I've not had artifacts for ages now and I've managed to fight with the best of them. As of this moment, the only thing that I've really died to is getting bashed to death by artied vampires (edit: and Illidan) which suggests an artifact scaling issue or maybe that vampire passives are nuts. Hard to say.

Edhain

You've got endgame and a 400 credit system.

Note, I'm not comparing Aetolia to other IRE games, I'm comparing it to games in general - see @Illidan's comparison with LoL.

Seir

Well, in my defense, I've had Citadel for ages. I guess it's a 400-credit system now. >_>

But yeah, read Illidan's post and that seems accurate.

Haven

@Seir: I don't think artifacts are the base problem. It's more that as a noob combatant, you are more likely to come across @Illidan, not only as an opponent but as your initial/starting/first experience on the battlefield as opposed to say... someone of your skill level who'll be manually curing everything and using aliases, etc as you are. What's worse is that for each tier from low-low all the way to about mid-mid tier the population of relatively skilled opponents SHRINK. It isn't until you reach mid-mid, mid-high, low-top, mid-top tier ranks that you find an abundance of people interested/actively fighting before it shrinks again at the elite top-top tier.

I suppose someone could argue that people in the lower tiers should be bashing and working on transing everything first prior to jumping into combat anyway. But I disagree with that stance as a player because when you're training up you want to be able to test out your new toys from time to time. Ideally, you want to see a gradual pay-off happen to keep players interested and invested as to the current system where you muddle around in the dark for a long, long time until BOOM! You suddenly find yourself finally fighting competitively with the larger combat pool of players.

Edit: I would like to note that the complex mob upgrades (i.e. the raiding system you guys are putting in, including the plans for the lower levels) are a great start in remedying this problem.

Seir

Alas, while I definitely agree with you in that the game would largely be better and more engaging if there were more "tiers" as you put it, you also have to take combat balance into consideration. It is difficult enough as is to balance the game due to so much variance and how much systems change, develop, artifacts producing outliers, and so forth. Nearly every game I've played has had one constant maxim when it comes to balance: "we balance around endgame content". Nearly every MMO these days follows that standard.

If you want to get involved in combat, it takes an investment, yes. However, I have bought very few credits since my coming into Aet. The only thing I've bought en masse is lessons for my classes and skills. I honestly think that its skills which are the most vital thing to a fighter though now it would also be endgame. I managed to do fine as a muscular Sentinel for a little while because Quickfoot allowed other statpacks to be viable. Unfortunately, with its removal, this is no longer the case.

However, given the frequency of lesson sales and how easy it is to get endgame now, I think anyone has the ability to become a top tier fighter if they put the time, effort, and a minimal investment into it. I mean, honestly, you can ask some people how bad I was about going for endgame. If I can get it, anyone can.

Macavity

As someone who has played the game for almost 12 years and avoided PK for all of it just because of reasons stated, I have started to get into it more and more now that I have had a paradigm shift in my character because of Nebre'seir, the reasons for this is because of a good system that I have put a lot of work into fixing issues within it when I first got it.  Not only does it take artifacts, engame, and knowledge, but one must also be good at coding or have someone they can get to code or fix issues within.  

That being said, even if a person is Artifacted out to the teeth, they can still be killed just like anyone else.  Yes its harder but still possible.  Just because you have artifacts does not mean you have an "I WIN" button.  

Haven

@Seir: Nah, combat balance is an entirely separate issue. This issue here is largely the player spread or population distribution and general interest in combat.

If we can find a way to interest more people, both newbies and noncombatant oldbies alike, to try out combat and actually -stay- then I think it'll go a long way in alleviating Aetolia of this affliction and generally improving the health of the game in a multitude of ways. It's a pretty big issue in my opinion and it's been there since... hell, since I started almost 10 years ago. I know for a fact that if it were not for the people of IRC like @Missari, @Winger, @Atrapoema, @Hadoryu, @Moirean, @Mygale, etc that encouraged me not to give up, nurtured my coding skills and really took the time to walk me through things that I would have given up on combat a long time ago because while it is a learning experience fighting people leaps and bounds above your ability, it's not fun being beat down all the time.

Arbre

You know what's funny to me in all of this?  In playing Mecatl, I was muscular, 80something, inept howling, no artifacts, no minis, etc, and I still did decent in combat.  I certainly wasn't where I am now with Arb, but I was keeping up.  I just had to use different tactics because I was so slow.

Haven

Arbre said:

You know what's funny to me in all of this?  In playing Mecatl, I was muscular, 80something, inept howling, no artifacts, no minis, etc, and I still did decent in combat.  I certainly wasn't where I am now with Arb, but I was keeping up.  I just had to use different tactics because I was so slow.

^ Further proof that it isn't so much artifacts/game investment that's the issue as it is the amount of people available when and where in the various "tiers" of combat.

That's the way I see it.

Ezalor

Part of getting into combat is putting your ego aside too. You have to realize that you aren't THE UNICORNS and that there are people who will beat you. There are people who have spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on coding/artifacts. If you want to compete with them, be prepared to make a similar investment.

If you don't want to put in that investment, well, don't whine when you can't beat them. I've found this attitude to be disturbingly high tbh...people jump in, do extremely poorly (because that's what happens when you just start), then start whining or talking about OP. If you're barely Trans anything and don't know how to code a scrap, WHY do you expect to be able to beat someone who's been working on their system for years and has every arti in the book?

Arbre

I love how people have started actually typing out unicorn instead of curse words.  Language filters at their best.  Now to bring it into game and, from there, the real world.

Edhain

I see what Haven is saying about the discouragement factor. Yeah, there are arrogant jumped-up twerps and arrogant complaining has-beens but there's also the sincere newbs who just want to play and are put off by the whole experience of getting constantly beat down. 

It's not entirely fair to say that there are people who put in thousands of hours and thousands of dollars and if you want to compete you have to make a similar investment. It's just a game.

But I guess if you're making the argument that it's a lifestyle, that might work. Aetolia as a business model is a tricky thing I guess because text games in general are a pretty niche market. So maybe you can be that elitist with the already-elitist playerbase you have, I don't know, I'm not an economist.

However, judging by the direction Aetolia has been moving in - subscriptions, firstaid, affliction view, even toning down artifact weapons - it seems like they're trying to make the game more inclusive. So it's probably fair to say that the model is not basing itself off the idea that you have to put in equivalent investment (time, money) as say, Daskalos, in order to compete with him.

Arbre

I'm pretty sure I was way more arti'd out / omnitrans / practiced when I sparred Serrice ages ago and she whoped me.

Edhain

There is a point that skilled unartifactedness can overcome unskilled artifactedness, of course... but the in-game age of a character is not necessarily a measure of the time a player has spent on working -with combat specifically- in IRE games. 

Also, if both the person with the artifacts and the person without the artifacts are at equal skill levels the artifacts tend to play a role in deciding the outcome.

Arbre

I got the impression that Serrice was new to Aet, but I could very will be wrong in that.

Ezalor

Edhain said:

I see what Haven is saying about the discouragement factor. Yeah, there are arrogant jumped-up twerps and arrogant complaining has-beens but there's also the sincere newbs who just want to play and are put off by the whole experience of getting constantly beat down. 

It's not entirely fair to say that there are people who put in thousands of hours and thousands of dollars and if you want to compete you have to make a similar investment. It's just a game.

But I guess if you're making the argument that it's a lifestyle, that might work. Aetolia as a business model is a tricky thing I guess because text games in general are a pretty niche market. So maybe you can be that elitist with the already-elitist playerbase you have, I don't know, I'm not an economist.

However, judging by the direction Aetolia has been moving in - subscriptions, firstaid, affliction view, even toning down artifact weapons - it seems like they're trying to make the game more inclusive. So it's probably fair to say that the model is not basing itself off the idea that you have to put in equivalent investment (time, money) as say, Daskalos, in order to compete with him.

Yeah, that's the thing with the tiers again. It is a fact that you shouldn't expect to beat people who have sunk years of their lives and insane amounts of money into this game without doing the same yourself - but that's only really a concern if you have aims to be the very best, that no one ever was (DUN DUN DUN).

If you want to get to the point where you're pretty much unbeatable you have to put in that amount of time/money. If you just want to have fun and compete in the mid tiers then there's nothing wrong with that, just don't whine when you still get beat by people more insanely into it than you!

Arbre

I'm pretty pleased with where I am in combat.  I think I'm solid middle tier.  I could do better if I put the effort into it, since I have artis and skills and coding power (lol zmud), but I just don't -care- enough.  Sometimes I get the urge to combat and I'll do it like crazy for a few weeks.  Then I go back to only PKing when I'm put in a position that I can't not.