Xendran
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TL;DR: EpicDuel has lost control over its speed, and immensely asymmetrical skill balance. This means the developers have been unable to focus on a specific experience and craft it into the best version it can possibly be, because there is such a potential variance of what is happening in fights, and the game tending toward being faster and faster.
This combined with an insanely high level cap and massive power gaps between players means you never know what to expect from EpicDuel, and not in a good way.
This directly affects how players feel in a battle and as such has a huge impact on the community feeling of the game.
Back in beta, the game had a much more consistent feel, and balance more often naturally shifted based on the builds that were being played, rather than developer intervention.
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Back in beta, the game had a much more consistent feel, and balance more often naturally shifted based on the builds that were being played, rather than developer intervention.
One of the most overlooked things about a game like this is that variety comes in the form of meaningful skill decisions, and minmaxing straight up numbers should play less of a factor.
The tiered diminishing returns system is actually very useful in theory, however EpicDuel fails to abide by an effectuve set of rules and guidelines regarding skills, and what kind of skill composition makes up a class.
The more you can predict or encourage players to build in specific ways, the greater control you have over the experience they have in a battle.
This means you can focus on crafting a great experience around this, since you have a fairly good idea of the length of most matches.
One of the biggest things that has contributed to EpicDuel's decline is the game speed. This comes in two forms, both number of turns and actions per turn.
At its core, EpicDuel can be thought of as a hero based card game, with Skills being your "Cards".
Card games are some of the most in depth and enjoyable turn based games that focus on two players, right alongside large strategy games (Risk, Civilization, etc.).
Because a card game is much more related to EpicDuel, card game design philosophy is the best place to get inspiration from with the design.
Each stat in EpicDuel is like a color in Magic the Gathering.
The availability and power of skills related to your stat is determined by how much of your character is invested into that stat.
This follows the same concept as picking a colour, and colour splashing in MtG.
One thing i'd like to say, is that "stat spam" builds are not a bad thing. They are actually exactly what you want players to be doing.
However: You need to have a fair amount of control over the range in which players are doing this. It shouldn't be something like 70 to 150, most players should fall within a fairly similar range. Something like 80 - 100.
Players playing within this range should have a strictly balanced Damage to Survivability ratio.
When you have a strong core of "I'm going to be a dexterity build" and "I'm going to be a support build", it allows you to craft a much more refined and thematic experience around each of them.
Now, in terms of this relating to game speed, having massive variance in the potential speed of battles like EpicDuel means you can't craft a consistent experience for the player.
Also remember, out of any number of equally powerful builds, the fastest one is objectively the best and hence human nature will drive a large number of players toward that playstyle.
Think the Face and Zoo decks of hearthstone.
Because of this, you want to make fast builds strictly controlled and watched, easy to predict so you don't take an unrecoverable amount of damage before realizing how you need to counter them, and finally they should be slowed down when fighting the same build.
This means that fast builds offer a similar number of wins in the same time period as other builds. This gives players access to a fast playstyle but without making them strictly better way of playing the game.
Having the build get slowed down by itself also greatly regulates the percentage of the community that will be using that build at any given time.
If a fast build becomes excessively prevalent, then it will start to encourage players to switch builds. Not only will it be slowed down to a normal speed by battling others using the same build, but other players will develop counter strategies. This causes a natural cyclical meta, rather than forced meta shifts via developer intervention.
The game has tended towards ridiculously fast matches, lasting only 2-4 turns generally. In addition to this, only one action is taken per turn.
This is why ramping resources systems are used in card games. Not only does this inherently add a warmup to more powerful skills (instead of arbitrary warmups on various skills like we currently have), it also means you have much more control over your RNG elements.
Right now if you get stunned it just straight up takes a turn. In a game this fast, that is an instant loss unless your build is a straight counter to theirs or you also get some RNG.
When you have another resource system, you can have many more effects that take less than an entire turn of value, while also having them be more frequent.
This means RNG both feels better for the person using it since it works more often, and doesn't feel as bad when it happens to you because it doesn't mean a guaranteed loss.
There is an unprecedented amount of power and build speed variance at the level cap of this game, and the way levels are segmented doesn't work well with the power of stat scaling in this game.
First of all, everything before the level cap is a tutorial.
The purpose of a progression system in a dueling game like this is to teach you how to play the game by giving you access to it a piece at a time and asking you to redo the puzzle of making your build now that you have this new piece.
Once you hit the level cap, all pieces should be available to all players. All play at the level cap comes down to the player using skill and predicting their opponent in order to imbalance the flow of the match in their favor.
Secondly, a straight up bracketed level system is way easier to control.
You can make stats less directly powerful between each level (there are a number of ways to do this), but incorporate strong new mechanics at each bracket.
An example of how games implement this is by adding things like passives, new pieces of armor, etc. available at each bracket.
Skills increase in complexity and the amount of synergy they can have with each other as you unlock more through leveling.
Each bracket has a similar power level between them, and a distinct jump in power when moving brackets. The difference between the lowest and highest level in any given bracket should not be particularly high, and the increased reward for defeating them should be directly proportional to the winrate data collected from players match histories.
All of these things come together to create a fast and volatile experience. You never know what ridiculousness you can expect in battle, but you know it'll have something to do with the fight ending before anybody had a chance to think about what just happened.
This creates a fast and volatile mindset which makes players not get along with each other as much as they could be.
When we were in beta, these elements were much less pronounced, especially the RNG. Battles were substantially longer than they are now, so a stun lost you a lower percentage of your total turns that battle.
The natural cycling, and 3 playstyles per class setup that we had (Offensive, defensive, utility) worked really well. There were only a few extreme balance issues affecting the majority of the player base, most being edge cases like heal looping.
< Message edited by Xendran -- 9/5/2016 2:26:30 >
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