1/ it takes a lot of time and effort… To have 1 true warhorse in the end I need to lvl at least an average of 4 horses. When you take a thrall, you know it is a tear III berserker, a Dalinsia or a poor TI militiaman. When you take a foal in the contryside it is nearly at random (I know, some are said to be swift, some are said to be robust, but it has nothing to do with reality… ) you must lvl him to see what it could be in the end. It is not a sword with its given stats.
2/ and of course it needs skill… to aim with the Knight lance and even to fight with mace in a melee when in the end you are surrounded by infantry.
Play Assasins Creed Valhalla. At least if i am playing by myself, there is way more to do.
And hence the problem. Forcing players to abandon a server because player base is drying up because more and more have burned out on the hamster wheel gameplay is not a sound business model.
I for one did.
Played PVP since day 1 (PS4 officials). During the last year with every new pathc or major update, i have seen it move from caring about the raiding feature at all. I finally pulled the plug and changed games. I want to play when i want to play, not because 40 hours (in a week) of work is gone because I went to a funeral or birthday party or whatever social activity humans do, and some clan offline raided.
I will occasionally pop in with those clan mates that still play and level up in 5 hours, farm a bit, and maybe engage in a raid or 2. But i now play AC Valhalla for my barbaric fix.
Seriously, how did you write that with a straight face, when you intentionally distorted the comparison of the preparation needed for mounted combat vs. combat on foot?
Yes, that’s the pinnacle of heroic effort in Conan Exiles right there:
“Find the horse”. Go to one of the many locations on the map and press E. Maaaan, that was hard.
“Raise the horse”. Yeah, putting the foal in a stable and giving it 1 fiber is excruciatingly complicated and also very tough on your stockpile of materials. I wish it was as easy and cheap as farming up the mats to craft a weapon, or getting the RNG to bless you with a greater pet, or getting that T4 thrall from that well-defended NPC camp, or getting that legendary to drop from that boss, or delving the schematics for that eldarium weapon (and getting enough eldarium to craft it).
“Feed the horse”. I don’t even know what this is supposed to mean. How exactly did you raise the horse without feeding it?
“Equip the horse”. Oof, that’s gonna be expensive. It’s certainly not as cheap as crafting a full set of armor for yourself and/or your thrall…
“Level the horse”. Indeed, because you can’t just hop on any old horse and have your attacks consume no stamina at all. And let’s not forget those attributes. It doesn’t matter that all horses have the exact same amount of endurance and can soak up damage better than most pets, you gotta get that sweet, sweet trample damage bonus, because everyone knows you can’t fight without that…
“Equip yourself for the horse”. Yeah, man! It’s not like you have to equip yourself for anything else.
“Learn to ride the horse” and “learn to fight on the horse”. You nailed the biggest difference in difficulty, right there! It’s so much harder to learn these things than to learn how to dodge and block, which weapon has which combos and when to use which attack, how to manage your stamina, how to zone your enemies, etc.
Yeah, after much deliberation, I think we can all agree that mastering the art of mounted combat is a much more arduous process than learning to fight on foot. After all, everyone who fights on foot just has to spam right click and they’ll win.
Seriously, though, there’s only one positive thing I can say about your comparison: it’s thematically appropriate, because it’s a load of horse pucky.
Two very different ways to PVP. Two very different spirits
It seems to me that at this stage of such an argue, one of the best thing to do could be to allows the server admin to make that sort of choice: “horses allowed in PVP” vs "Horses not allowed in PVP"
On my mind, sadly, you will not solve the attrition of PVP troops with horse nerfing (as this was THE topic which launched everything). Look at PVP in Age of Conan (there is sadly no mounted combat in this game). In AOC we cry because PVP servers are depleted, some asked to open PVE servers more widely to PVP… for sure, in this servers, there is more noobish and fresh meat…
In my mind, CE was the best game for the compromise inbetween “survival game and building” “adventure, mysteries and combat” WITH a wonderful and very unique mounted combat system (from the foal to the equiped warhorse, movements, jousting etc).
Sadly, maybe this wonderful Funcom mounted combat, messes up our PVP habits.
Haha, yes I played a few days on horse and then I started 2 shotting people. For ground PvP, it took me only 6 months of practice to master it. I have to agree, horse PvP requires more skill.
Add a damage kit to your weapon and apply poison to it
Craft an armor for ground PvP and add armor kits
Level your character to level 60
Put on the armor for ground PvP. Apply buffs and warpaints. Put antidotes and heals and ambrosia on your hotbar. Add a sandstorm mask for gas arrow protection. Put your weapons on the hotbar.
Learn how to move with your character
Learn how to fight on ground: Learn all the weapons. Learn positioning. Learn stamina management. Learn dodge timing. Learn movement. Learn how the enemy fights. Predict your enemy. Improve your weapon aim.
I’ve given up and uninstalled, because I don’t want to play a game where developers seem h**l-bent on increasing grind at every possible point. Combat was fun before the arrival of horses, and the chief complaints were based on exploits, griefing, etc. Horse-mounted combat throws another system into the mix that doesn’t resolve any existing issues. It just adds more to the grind. The same goes for the economy revamps. So much effort to increase grind, no effort to add content. If numbers are shrinking, I’m not at all surprised.
I will try to make it easier by avoiding to write…
Taemien comparison seems to be roughly this one:
on side A on side B
Player -->Player
Armor —>Armor
Weapon —>Weapon
Thrall —> Thrall
then a choice....
more Work to obtain and use a warhorse —> no work to obtain a warhorse
so in the end...
some more Reward —> no r’eward added
I understand he says the effort to obtain a way to counter horses:
-must be another effort more.
-must be an effort of the same importance and encumbrance (spend the same amount of skill points, spend place in your base to build another building etc…) than the one needed for the horse.
I didnt even thought about it: this guy is clever and fair.
I won’t speak overall, but for a game that i have thousands of hours played, Dota. When dota 1 started, no one knew absolutely anything about the game. People would make stupid items and spread rumors that “it does this thing and its good”. It was fun. Every person would choose their items based on their judgement and have fun with it. learning new mechanics, new strategies, exploring the vast amount of heros, skills and items.
After a couple of years most things were already clear to everyone, the foundations of the game were already set. Every character had a default functional build, and nothing else was better than the bread and butter (of course, on higher levels there is the situational side of the game, when you build things to counter something else) but in essence, most strategies were already figured out.
Now, what happens when you try to make something out of the ordinary in a dota 2 match? You get steamrolled. Because everyone else has this “correct build advantage” against you, and assuming that its two equally skilled teams/players, you lose. Thats not fun, at least for most people. If you are different and enjoy losing all the time, cool, but thats not the human nature Imo.
Taking this back into CE, it basically means that everyone not using the “default functional strategy” is at disadvantage with a decent chance of not enjoying it, and thats not good for your playerbase.
Aside from everything that was already said about horses X dismounted players, there is one more thing i would like to add.
Horse fights Dismounted player. In this scenario its +1 for horse.
But the terrain is not good, you can’t ride and fight there. What happens next, dismounted player wins the fight? no, the mounted player dismounts and they fight equally. Thats not a drawback, its just making an even ground for both people. I can’t use that as an argument to say that horses are at “disadvantage”.
what is the +1 for dismounted player, on CE? A dismounted player cannot /spawn horse_01 and fight at least equally. A dismounted player currently does not have anything that puts him at advantage, only equal footing, on very specific scenarios. Why? it was already discussed that horses take no herculean effort to have, so the reason for them to be “balanced” is not there. Where is it?
Because of this, we can either define that horses are a definitive advantage and have no reason to not be used every possible moment (which is awful) or come up with an argument for dismounted being better than horses on a reliable basis…good luck with that.
He was too focused on being clever and ended up not being fair. You can tell by comparing his post to yours. Yours is simple and concise. His includes little gems like this one:
So let’s stop wasting time with his rhetoric and focus on your refreshingly logical argument.
Yes, the horse is an additional element in combat and it has a certain additional cost. It would be reasonable to expect the counter to have some cost, too.
Thing is, I don’t see anyone suggesting a no-cost counter. So the only one giggling at his own ingenuity here is the guy who set up a straw man argument to attack, instead of simply suggesting – like you did – that maybe we should talk about the cost of the counter and how to balance it properly.
That’s a much more interesting discussion, precisely because balance is not the same as symmetry. Sure, you can make the counter have the same cost as what it counters, like you keep suggesting:
And there are many ways to make it cost as much as a horse, not just mirroring the exact same requirements
But you don’t really have to make it cost as much as the horse. That would only be necessary if the “reward” for having the counter was the same as “reward” for having the horse. In other words, if the counter is just as powerful as the horse. Yet it doesn’t have to be exactly as powerful.
Then again, I guess it’s harder to sit down and toss a few suggestions along those lines, than it is to simply belittle those asking for a counter. One of those two actually requires imagination and reasoning.
This is a fair assessment. I’m not quoting the whole thing, but over all I can’t disagree with the post as a whole.
This. And this is why I responded a bit facetiously to SirDaveWolf. Everything a non-mounted player works for, a mounted player has worked for too. But they also did the work for the mount.
So while I agree that there is an issue with mounts being the end-all be all of open ground combat. I cannot rightfully say they need a heavy nerf, or a counter needs to be easily available.
A counter needs to be available, and it should require the same amount of skill and effort as a horse does. ON TOP of learning ground combat, and equipping your character.
At no point should it be equip this on your hotbar and giggle as you hard counter the mounted player and think you’re clever for it.
That’s why I said we need to be serious about this. Unfortunately many are not. Its quite telling when I’ve even said a few times that I don’t like the current system and would like to see a fix, but because I don’t agree with them 100% that there should be an easy hard counter that makes mounted combat useless, that they go pretty damn close to personal attacks. Instead of engaging in an actual discussion that could produce results.
I’m not surprised though. I had this same issue 2 years ago when archery was messed up. They want to let their emotions run the discussion instead of getting real results. And judging by the ‘imma just quit the game’ posts. Its another ‘Funcom Bad’ set of responses anyway.
Though in nearly every case, the person making the suggestion admits that it is either a bad suggestion or not ideal. So I don’t hold it against them. And this is only within this thread. Not the many others on the subject.
Here’s what you need to do. You need to stop getting wrapped up around the tone of the arguments or the use of simple hyporbole. You keep trying to prove me wrong on principle, even when you agree with me, simply because you feel insulted or someone else could get insulted. If you keep doing that, you’re never going to get anywhere with me in these discussions. So make a decision, either deal with it. Ignore me. Or keep getting your feelings hurt.
We could agree to disagree on the matter of tone and have a discussion. Or you can be upset. That’s your choice. I’ve already made mine.
Please, do tell me what to do, I can’t wait to hear it
Right, so my two options are to ignore you or “get my feelings hurt”?
I think I’ll go with a third one: when you write some ridiculously distorted argument to point out how clever you are and how dumb everyone else is, I’ll point it out, people might have a laugh, and then some of us move on to discussing the matter at hand.
Stop. Just stop. If you would read carefully, you would see that my post has nothing to do with what you wrote.
You are stating that getting a horse ready for PvP is an additional and tedious task. The only grindy aspect of this task is leveling it. But this can be combined with tasks that you have to do nonetheless. So it’s not an “extra exclusive” thing to do.
If you would put a special counter in the game, for example increasing the stamina damage of the Ancient Lemurian Spear towards horses, then I would have to grind for the scales, which I never needed before, because I can make star metal weapons. In fact, I could then combine the horse grind with the grind for this counter horse weapon.
Guess we’ll lock another thread then. You made that choice, so here we go again. I have no issue being the bad guy, but are you willing to participate in another? We’ll see.
Not a solution (and not a PVP player, so take it as coming from a point of ignorance) - but how much difference would it make if the saddles were more thoroughly differentiated?
I’m suggesting something like, the scout saddles give speed and maneuverability, but offer little or no protection (to horse or rider), should be easier to knock a rider out of the saddle and offer less (or even no) damage bonus (because they lack the bracing of a heavier saddle).
Cavalry saddle can then be focused for speed - some armour/protection value - damage bonus in the charge, but less the rest of the time - and reduced maneuverability (so that it becomes more about having to set up for the charge and less effective if you get yourself into the middle of a melee).
And then the war saddles can give the armour and damage bonuses, but have the worst maneuverability.
I’m sure on its own it wouldn’t be enough to solve anything - but maybe with a slight reduction in the damage bonus, and making mounted attacks a little more precise (so they don’t just hit everything in the area without much aiming), and most especially making mounted attacks cost the user stamina (because you still get tired swinging a weapon even when you sit on something…), could that bring things more into line?
