Revolutionary concepts in MMO Gaming: AION

Well it's not like AION really needs an introduction per se but there were some interesting things worth mentioning in a recent little review-of-sorts I read. In the article/blog/review, it mentioned about how you can pair movement during combat to give yourself bonuses. What kind of bonuses? Well, moving forward will give you a slight damage bonus, backwards will give you a defence bonus and strafing will give you an evasion bonus! Amazing! Except that it's not and just goes to illustrate how... pathetic -- for lack of a better word to come to mind, our current and "oooh next generation" [MMO] games are.

Disclaimer: I've not actually played AION in any capacity. And from the videos illustrating my complaints, I dont ever intend to.

So why is it pathetic? Many (some 11-million plus strong) would argue that this addition of motion-related combat boosts would be a pretty neat thing indeed. I however, would like to bring to light, three 'problems'.

Problem 1: Additional damage/defence
Sure, if you're hefting a sword or axe and you 'lean into' your attack, the extra shift in weight will undoubtably give you more forward/downward force giving your more damage. But thats not with the W/Up-cursor button does -- it moves you forward. As in your whole body. As in point mass. As in, there's no additional force/momentum being applied to/along the weapon. As in, there shouldn't be any additional damage.

• Bonus Question 1: If you're using a longbow, if you jerk forward when you release your arrow, should it do more damage because, in this case, validly, your arrow will have a greater launch velocity?
• Bonus Question 2: What if you're attacking a target above you? After all, AION does allow for personal-flight. So what if you're on foot and you're fighting an airborne opponent directly above you? I'd love to hear the explaination of weight-shifting here.
  

Now what about backing up? Initially this makes sense and we think we've seen things like this in well-established games such as Oblivion or whatnot. But not quite. You see it makes sense before combat -- if you think the monster is too powerful, you back off and try to avoid it or whatnot. However to get a damage bonus by moving backwards during combat is a bit silly -- especially if you're expected to do this as you make an attack. It makes sense if you are, say, blocking with a shield and backing up, bracing for a hit that you should get a slight defense boost.

It becomes more laudable the more we look at it: suppose we have a sword that has an attack range of 2 units and that each combatant has movement speed of ½ unit/sec and that the opponents start off outside each other's reach (say, 3 units). Let's play through this:

• 0:01. Opponents are 2m apart.
• 0:02. Combatant A attacks while simultaneously going backwards. Combatant B doesn't move and attacks. This now has two scenarios
• If combatant B attacked first than combatant A receives damage and does no damage in return (out of range).
• Otherwise, both combatants miss each other as they are both out of range (2.5m)

Now let's humor the mechanics of this for a moment - let's assume that by backing up, instead of receiving a 100% hit from your opponent, you only receive an 80% hit. Sure. This can be represented by a 20% defense bonus. And correspondingly, a 97% hit translates to a 3% armor bonus and 92.17% hit becomes a 7.83% armour bonus etc.

So now we have two options

1. You cannot have a damage bonus by moving forward as there is no physics-valid or plausibly-physics-valid scenario where that can happen (arrows, spears, lances and direct-forward-thrusting weapons aside, as those should have a bonus).
2. Yet while backing up, we can get a defense bonus if we take the 'glancing blow' interpretation.

But apprently, in AION, we can have our cake and eat it too. But don't get too excited -- I have a sneaking feeling that:

1. The damage bonuses are not restricted to arrows and forward impalement weapons like spears and pikes and such but rather, you can get a damage bonus for moving forward while swinging a slashing weapon like a classical longsword.
2. The combat timing does not take into acount when players press backwards -- and so, even if a player should miss a target because they have moved out of weapon range, they won't (more on this later).
3. The amount of defense bonus does not accurately (or remotely) represent  the difference between the "full hit" that the player would have receieved standing still versus the "lesser" hit by moving back i.e. it's a static buff.

And because of this, it is epic fail.


Problem 2: Evasion Bonus.
If an opponent performs a line attack on you (spear, arrow, forward thrust with short sword etc), strafing should give you a chance to evade the attack. But what if the user performed a slashing attack with a halbard or axe? It's very easy to see the multitude of scenarios where the evasion bonus fails. In fact, this whole concept of "evasion bonus" is, itself, fail. What exactly is this [combat] bonus supposed to do? If you dodge something, you dodge it. If you failed to dodge it (due to ineptitude, lack of experience, surprise attacks etc) then that's your own fault and you get hit.

I can see passive scenarios where the evasion statistic may apply i.e., character is walking in a field and narrowly evades a bear-trap -- something the player would not have an opportunity to dodge themselves. But combat? Please. Evasion is so passé. If you can't dodge something, there's a few characters for you: L2P.

Don't get me wrong, I can handle the dice-roll gameplay dynamics -- but the majority of MMOs -- AION included don't quite live up with the Dungeons and Dragon level of dice-roll mechanics. It is worth noting that with Dungeon and Dragons Online none of this ever really rears it's head as a problem as evasion and hit-chances are well built into the framework of both the game and the universe.

Problem 2.5. A thought experiment
Clearly we know that the combat mechanics of AION/MMORPGs does not properly take into account order of execution and such. Now what would happen if someone decided to make a macro for up-down-strafe + attack in such a way that all the commands would be delivered concurrently? ;)

Problem 3. Sticky Targeting
A classic problem of most (save the now-officially-defunct Hellgate London) MMORPGs suffer from magical sticky targeting that does silly damage. The idea here is, if trigger an attack from a monster, then no matter what, you will take damage -- even if the attack was melee and you teleported 10meters out of melee range or if the attack was ranged and you hid behind a rock.

There is no grasp of the concept of cover, proper evasion or tactics. Instead, you tank your characters up as much as possible and invest in this magical "evasion" stat and just tank your way through everything. This is why you often see melee-only MMO trailer videos -- because it's a bit ridiculous to see players take damage when projectiles clearly missed them.

Of all the problems with MMOs (be it grinding, boring repetitive quests, having to go through normal difficulty before being allowed to play hard etc), this is probably the most critical. Of course, now that we have a generation of millions of players utterly incapable of aiming, dodging or otherwise handling hand-eye-virtualspace-coordination, it might be a bit too late to redeem the MMORPG segment.

Apparently this is all justified. Wait for it. The premise for the justification is that without this magical hit system, you could just kite larger monsters all day and get better loot/experience than you would "properly deserve". There are two problems with this:

1. They could have just solved that by limiting the amount of experience and quality of loot you get from killing mobs of a higher level past a threshold (say 3 level tolerance before dropoff).
2. In the spirit of keeping things "even" -- why does the game then send monsters that are stronger
3. than you at you?

What does this mean?

Remember back a few years ago when those highschool shootings started? Everyone got their panties in a knot over video game violence? (Doom, Counterstrike etc). They were all ranting about how impressionable the gamers were and how these videogames were shaping us (in this case, to be desensitized violent shooters)? I guess with millions upon millions of MMOers now, we have a new problem -- people that have no spatial awareness -- because they're used to not having to aim. So not only do we have to worry that these people cannot drive in straight lines -- we also have to worry that they expect their cars to 'evade' for them.

 
Not all is lost
But MMORPGs aren't the be-all-end-all. Games like Hellgate, Dust 514,  Killing Floor, Borderlands and Huxley -- MMOFPSes essentially with varying levels of 'role-playing' elements (mostly limited to 'classes'). Sure it's not as engaging as the storyline of a proper RPG, but it certainly gets away from the dull "macro driven" combat. That's enough ranting from me, time for some Risen.