Ok so you like NGE...

[Jabe Adaks]

I need to hear from people who like NGE what their niche is.. Cause its certainly is not in the stuff I have been trying out.

Today I picked up a gun, which sadly does more damage than my saber anyway. I went out and tested my WASD goodness against some level 46 npc's. I whooped ass, cause they're level 46, but here is what escapes me... This is supposed to be fun right? FPS style? So why is it when I move out of the way from laser fire the lasers curve and hit me anyway!??!?

I gave up on melee and now I find that ranged is completely broken. As far as I can tell the only professions that shoudl even bother moving is melee in order to stay within attack range. No wonder Jedi are getting creamed. Don't give us armor, give us non heat seaking lasers!!!!!!!!

WTF - seriously guys, tell me what part of this is fun.

Jabe

[sharn musashi]

well for me its oh... i dunno roleplaying. i mean thats why i came to swg in the first place was to roleplay a jedi.

[Oeree]

I find PvP a lot more fun now. Of course, there are some issues with people running in front of your target, making it impossible to shoot the enemy, but it still seems a lot better then before.

[toront]

I find PvP a lot more fun now. Of course, there are some issues with people running in front of your target, making it impossible to shoot the enemy, but it still seems a lot better then before.

PvP now makes me cry. PvP how it is now is what made me leave

[Nyvveck]

I find PvP a lot more fun now. Of course, there are some issues with people running in front of your target, making it impossible to shoot the enemy, but it still seems a lot better then before.

PvP now makes me cry. PvP how it is now is what made me leave

Agreed. I went into the NGE cheefully, because I feel it is important to not make a decision until you have some facts. I PvPed some. I decided that this was stupid, and I left. PvP seems more luck than anything else right now.

[xyryn]

Well, since I'm a ghost when it comes to fighting, I'm concentrating more on RP. I've also found that with the shrinking of the community, more people are actually talking with me.

I have become a person in my own right.

[Isleh]

Can you really expect the NPC's to aim in front of you?

An really, it's the same animation from pre NGE. I remember auto attacking after the CU during the gorax hunts and watching my blaster fire curve into the gorax. When I first played the game I noticed that. Espically when you could gallop on a mount and auto fire back when mounts first became available.

I was timing the time it took to kill Gurks with a saber and with a flechette pistol. Both took the same amount of time. I think the problem is in the targeting ( Yep, I said it ) at this point. The flechette pistol did about half the damage but got twice as many shots. A single miss had less of an effect.

This may change as soon as tomarrow

Snares have been fixed
Melee speed has been increased
Jedi now have armor.

[Nyvveck]

Melee speed has been increased
Jedi now have armor.

And that won't change a thing at how good melee is, because we still can't attack while moving (unless they changed that and they just decided not to tell us).

[Jabe Adaks]

I know a lot of people have their opinions about this. However.. The post is mainly about the fact that this game is supposed to fight like an FPS but a basic dodge isn't working due to "seeker" laser bolts. I don't want top flame it but it begs the question to the few positive spirits left on this forum - how are you enjoying this?

Jabe

[toront]

Can you really expect the NPC's to aim in front of you?

An really, it's the same animation from pre NGE. I remember auto attacking after the CU during the gorax hunts and watching my blaster fire curve into the gorax. When I first played the game I noticed that. Espically when you could gallop on a mount and auto fire back when mounts first became available.

I was timing the time it took to kill Gurks with a saber and with a flechette pistol. Both took the same amount of time. I think the problem is in the targeting ( Yep, I said it ) at this point. The flechette pistol did about half the damage but got twice as many shots. A single miss had less of an effect.

This may change as soon as tomarrow

Snares have been fixed
Melee speed has been increased
Jedi now have armor.

It's different because the game used to have a target lock and hitting a target had to do with line of sight and range, not actually mousing over them. The curving laser bolt at least made sense in the old system because movement was not supposed to have any bearings on hits.

What makes a FPS "skillful" (at least in terms of that genre) is both aiming at your targets and avoiding their shots at you. This system is only one-sided. As soon as you target them and click, they will be hit no matter what. No kneeling, jumping or strafing will affect incoming shots. It bears the question, why be force to target with the mouse in the first place?

[Isleh]

How are you enjoying this?

Because the game is what you make of it.

If complexity is the yardstick you think is the mesure of how fun a game can be, you are mistaken. By that logic, it would be impossible for Ekade to enjoy a game of Go-fish with her children.


*sigh*

Jabe, when we were dueling in front of Eisley, what was I doing and why was I doing it and did it make it harder to hit me?

I have to wonder at this question because on one hand I hear from you and Toront that there is no skill in dodging and on the other I hear it's to hard to hit an opponet in PvP & PvE because they keep moving. Which one IS IT?

As to why you click, you hit now. I guess it helps to have been a dancer. When Dwilah made her video, the dancers had to go by her instructions on where to place ourselves. We could not go by what was on our screen because where we were to her was not where we appeared on our screen.

Translating this to combat, I guess I could move partially behind something and think I can still fire back at Dwilah while making it hard for her to aim at me. Dwilah could see me standing out in the open and be firing away. Meanwhile, The server has both of us completly out of line of sight. So we both stand there firing at one another thinking we are both hitting. Yet, to the server, we don't have line of sight and neither one of us is taking damage.

Then there is the infamous force slide where I guess it's the server going "Oh, BTW, this person is here."

So for now, until SOE improves collision, I'm glad it works the way it does and not have to deal with that nightmare.

[Jabe Adaks]

THe rules for PvE and PvP differ. I shoot and you are not targeted and I miss you. NPC shoots at Jabe and the lasers curve around and nail me. My problem is the rules make absolutely no sense right now. I like combat systems to be concise and have a universal rule set, no exceptions.

I dunno. I had fun with the gang hunting krayts tonight so there is still hope.

Jabe

[Sai'nu]

"Never give up; Never Surrender!"-- The Other Kirk.

Why do I like a broken game right now? It's hard to answer that acknowledging that, yes, many parts are still broken. Melee being one of the biggest parts (for me).

For me, it was trying to learn some melee/ranged mixes that were largely inspired from reading one of Nyvveck's early posts about TC'ing it. I've barely touched ranged, save for when Batty finally went BH in CU, and I'm still very much in the melee mentality. Basically, it was understanding that without tanking ability I was going to have to learn a lot about the 'FPS' part of SWG now. Mixing my strategy on the ground (without armor) was going to involve using ranged tactics, for the most part, against the 'smart' npc AI which will run from melee now. The Krayts won't run though... we learned that tonight...

Doing Corvette runs have helped me to try and see where they plan on taking a few of the professions as well. Jedi, I truly believe is being made into a sort of Tank after trying saber block up on the Vette. Our Non-Cons can play vital roles in missions since they don't draw aggro for the most part. Spies share a tanking role as well with their 'poof' ability. I still believe that Commando and BH are very capable of being the DDs... and a good medic can even solo a Krayt right now. I'm enjoying it because I can map out where they appear to be taking the professions. I have a sense of what my roll will be in a group after the get some fixes in over... and here's the biggy... the following months.

I have fun because I can still see the potential and am having a blast with what they've given us. You can now be a mysterious Jedi if you want to play it that way by 'not' using your saber. Stat drop clothes do offer some tweaks here and there as well.

At avoiding anymore ranting... it's what I'm making it out to be for myself. Hopeful.

And... I'll even agree that PvP has degraded since the options available since CU... but it's also faster and there can be some strategy involved. Just not as much. It's a quicker beast now. Meesa thinkin' that's why some of yousa not liken' it very much.

[Oporim]

There is a difference in when you are fighting an NPC or a PC.
The whole difference arises out of NPC's ability to have a 100% lock-on on you.

In every pure-FPS shots are also 'curved'. Difference is, you don't see it. In FPSs where you fire a ballistic projectile, its animation moves at the correct speed, that is 600-900 m/s. Taking into account that non-sniper ranges are much smaller and you have an acceptable ping (say 100ms), your shot covers say 80m in this time, while most of the fighting is done in close quarters in cities with ranges 50m and less. Even if you are fighting out in the open, travel time is not bigger than 2 frames (or two updates) unless you play a sniper.
There will allways be a difference between the position of target player on his machine and last-reported position of target player in shooter's machine. Even if target player dispatches his position AND movement vector, the shooter can allways see predicted (extrapolated) target position and not the actual position. So when shooter shoots, he is shooting at a ghost. If he would send back projectile path instead of hit-event, while target machine receives projectile path (supposedly aimed for target-player head) target player could have stopped moving or in some other way interrupted his predicted movement thus making it very hard for shooter to actually hit him. Put here timer differences and problem is even bigger.
This being true, your shots have an instantly calculated result (with a possible delay of result coming into effect). Even if projectile-path info dispatch is 'the proper' way (the realistic one), the shooter-side hit calculation is the way to implement it for high-ping environment.

In SWG problem is bigger, since bolt velocities are abnormally slow (you can almost outrun it). This makes animations long. When you fire a shot, you see an animation of the bold flying towards the target. Problem is in low bolt velocity. When you fire it, you have allready sent info to the server 'I fired bolts towards NPC #NNN' and I must have hit it, since all parameters were OK. But at the same time, your machine has the position of that NPC and its movement data by which your machine can interpolate NPC's position for all frames between the actual two endpoints when you receive data for NPC position from server. Since you are obviously hitting NPC but your machine is interpolating his position, you are seeing curved bolts. So, the problem is not in curved bolts, but that bolt animations have a velocity of some 100 m/s (or maybe even less).

Go on a high lag planet and fight some creatures. What you will see is
T=0: fire 5 bolts
T=1: bolts hit target
T=4: your action drops
T=7: creature receives damage (actually your machine displays creature health drop)

Or even worst case:
T=0: fire 5 bolts
T=1: bolts apparently hit target
T=4: you get a package of 5 messages saying "Cannot see target"

Analysing all this you can conclude NGE has just SLIGHTLY different UI than CU game. The firrerence is in CU your toon was establishing a 100% proof target lock for you and you were just shooting. Now target lock is established when you hoover your mouse pointer over target. NPCs still have a 100% proof target lock, since they are automated and their server data does not consist of
- point gun at Azimuth/Elevation (of the target player, or even execute lead aiming taking into account target movement)
but of
- target player #NNN is locked

So you see, server and client have different aiming 'interfaces'. SWG server cannot have a point-and-shoot aiming engine, while client can have it.

About dodge:
player dodge actually has an effect. It does not have an effect when a bolt has allready been fired, and this is actually the proper way if you assume bolts have a considerably higher speed than player movement (if you are not throwing rocks).
Dodge has an effect on opposite-player aiming. If you move erraticly you will break his lock-on (but not NPC's lock). And I think this is the way to go.

But, not to despair, you can have a movement-effect even on NPCs. When you move and NPCs have 100% lockon, their hit chance will be reduced.

===============
Why do I love NGE?
Because I have to aim. Aiming at an NPC among 10 pikets is fun. Strafing allover a bunch of NPC is fun (and this is possible now). Having to aim at a running player is more fun for me than having a 100% proof lockon. Chasing around small vorritors in the grass is MUCH more fun than it was before. Before you established a lockon (even if vorritor was 50m away and you couldn't see it) and you shot it to death. Now vorritor runs and you actually have to put some thought into following where it is going and tracking it with your eyeball and keeping lock-on.

So, because I find more connection to the real-life aiming now than I did before, I find this NGE aiming OK.

Regarding specials:
I don't care if there are less as long as they make RL sense. I in fact never used my full potential of specials under CU, only a few of them. And this does not make SWG a FPS. In FPS you have to make specials by yourself.

Regarding action:
Now you can execute one special attack and then no more for some time. Opposite to before when you could use nothing but specials. So I find this OK too.

Regarding damage:
Damage has been increased. Fights on average can last a few tens of seconds, but they can last longer. I find it OK too. It still does not make it a FPS where one-shot-kills are available to player.

Regarding third-player blocking LoS: on one hand it is more realistic on the other hand it can be annoying.

Regarding linear-path advancement: it is a bad decision for variety. OTOH in CU many were using just a few possible templates. Don't care that much.

Fewer professions available: don't care at all. 9 is still a reasonable number.

Meele issues: that I do care. You guys need to be worked on. Some meele attacks should be executable on-the-move. Player speed should be lowered to walking when firing/fighting - that way meele could catch up, it is more realistic. Etc.


(edit: also because I don't like the "you shoot with 1200 damage, I have 6000 armor and 2000 PSG, I have Duelist, you inflicted me with Blind Stun and Dizzy, I use damage mitigation food, you use accuracy food, I have CAs and AAs, you have CAs and AAs, I'm lying on ground from KD, you managed to pull a Critical on this ... " this is like dicing back and forth, no wonder it degenerated into two extremes: being debalanced to hell or in some cases being so balanced the outcome was decided by other factors than combat - OTOH some of these features are still in game making it obviously non-FPS)

[Orph@N]

Wow umm Oporim your answers scare me sometimes lol. So much detail goes into em.