Cutthroat - 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th Impressions, Feedback, and Possible Solutions
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So, I've played a couple cutthroat races, maybe 3 or so last league and 2 here, including one of the 6-hours. And, while it was fun, there were a few problems with it. I've split this up into spoilers as it takes a huge amount of space on the page and most people will only actually be reading a couple points.
Introduction
Firstly, Cutthroat is and always has been very enjoyable; there are plenty of good players to compete with and some nice ones as well. It's a lot of fun and really thrilling when you're in a life or death, lose all situation- though that last point may benefit from some tweaking. Building your character for PKing whilst being able to progress and level adds a fun dynamic and makes the league really interesting, thought the number of builds people seem to employ is rather limited with some outliers. Unfortunately, I feel the changes haven't really added to its appeal.
Level Difference and Progression
Secondly- Hilbert stated this in game and it's a good point. The player level/progression difference for instance invasion needs to be tweaked. At level 29 I could kill players five levels below me who hadn't even gotten to Sarn yet. Stunlocking, freezelocking and bear trap-locking get even more extreme at this point and you can kill people with barely a chance to react or do damage to you. I posted this in another thread, but here's a possible solution to this. Though I'm not sure on progression AND level locking making the level difference for invasion lower is definitely a good idea.
" The main detractor of this is having no one to kill, though in a permanent/long duration league that may not be as much of a problem. Getting to the base of the point, Cutthroat currently rewards racing much more than killing players as getting ahead then going back is currently the best way to play despite lacking the spirit of the game.
Freeze, Bear Trap, and Stun Locking
Moving onto the *locking I referenced earlier: capping its duration on players is the most obvious and easiest solution. Freeze is the biggest offender here as being freezed for >1 seconds from a spell like Freezing Pulse with a cast time of 0.65s or getting Glacial Hammered every 0.75 seconds for huge duration is not fun and drastically limits build diversity. Reducing the PvP damage of Glacial Hammer did nothing to stop this. Its damage should be returned to normal while a cap on freeze duration in PvP is implemented. Bear Trap operates similarly here on melee characters due to desync; getting bear trap stacked is the main problem here as the stun+move lock following a huge burst of damage is certain death. The movelock means that often your attacks simply won't work properly. Stun is probably the least egregious of these mechanics and could probably continue without changes as you have to build for it to truly be effective.
Dropping Items on Death
To elaborate on my prior statement that drop on death could use some tweaking (mainly for the benefit of people new to cutthroat), I have to raise the point of how daunting it can be before you've set up a secondary gear set. Leaving players with a weapon and/or a randomly chosen item and/or a level 1 Wool Shoes with 1 of each colour socket(kudos to Metronomy for this suggestion) could improve the state of the game. Leaving players with the weapon is the point I'm most leery on, this suggestion was mainly to balance out the difference between leaving a caster with an item compared to leaving a attacker with an item, but it also ensures that playing an attack-based character is safer. The randomly chosen item could not be of highest rarity unless uniques were considered rares for this purpose- which is still a little unfair to those who must rely on magic items- as this would make powerful uniques like Wanderlust even more advantageous. Leaving the player with some free shoes is probably the best solution as they will be able to socket at least their main skill and progress isn't stopped absolutely by death.
Checkpoints and Spawn Invulnerability
Regarding progress and the checkpoint system, perhaps checkpoint spawning should have a brief timer on its use, similar to portal spawning. In one situation I had someone corpse rush me several times whilst sorting through his items and felt awful killing the helpless sod until I told him to stop and wait; in another situation I was killed, spawned at the waypoint and ended up with some gear pieces of another dead player that were actually upgrades- which I in no way deserved. This is of course due to most CT fights occuring near zone entrances, but this could be tweaked a little as well: allowing the player spawn immunity to extend a short distance around the waypoint would lower the effectiveness of trap stacking it and allow the player to attack the camper through multiple avenues.
Trading and Partying
Finally, the inability to party or trade is a bit of a limiter and doesn't prevent people simply drop-trading their items for a well known player's benefit. Perhaps a max party size of 2-3 with/without FFA would reduce the effect or roaming gank squads. Similarly, allowing trading would make the aforementioned quasi-nepotism easier, but would benefit regular players who need that transmute orb or whetstone for their recipe much more. Perhaps a time limit on trading would be a good middle ground.
Conclusion
In its current incarnation, Cutthroat is an rough, unbalanced, and completely chaotic mess- though its messiness might be part of its appeal. It's extremely fun, but suffers from a lack of viable build diversity, a horrible imbalance of PvPing versus PvEing, and a very small dedicated playerbase. I really wish more people played CT, but in its current state it won't attract many. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage, in a league based around PvPing, more people is better, however changing the mechanics of CT might offend the hardcore niche it's meant to appeal to. I realize the format is still being tested and that the GGG team is very spread out, so I'm trying to offer as much feedback as I can in a constructive manner. I really appreciate the work that's been put into CT as it's definitely my favourite race format and I am more than happy to help test it out. The shift to standard in general is a good one as no one wants to play with 6 players
TL;DR
Change instance invasion level difference cap, cap freeze duration, limit Bear Trap's PvP damage, reconsider checkpointing/spawn invulnerability, enable some light trading/partying for testing, and- most importantly- keep working on it!
Thanks to Hilbert, Metronomy, and a few people whose names I can't remember for some ideas I stole/adapted for my post. Last edited by nikheizen on Apr 9, 2014, 6:54:38 AM
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Thanks for the feedback.
With the instance invasion rules, we are looking at how old instances work. Basically, once you have been in an instance you have the rights to enter that instance, even after you level up. By itself this isn't too bad, except that instances in cut-throat tend to be used for much longer than in the normal game. We are looking at how we want to handle this, we are likely to (1) expire access to instances after a certain amount of absence, and (2) lock access to instances after a certain amount of time, to force the "battle-zone" instances to be cycled a bit (this also deals with the fact instances fill up with objects over time). We are looking at freeze caps, or non-linear scaling that is harsh on the top end to the freeze time calculations. We are unlikely to have these changes in before the 48 hour cut-throat event. | |
" And thank you for the quick response. " So, if I'm to understand correctly, the level difference seems to be greater than it is because you may re-enter instances once you've levelled up, regardless of the level of players in that area? " Isn't 1 the feature that is already in place? Are you planning on altering the amount of time you can be absent for? I can see this hurting progression due to the backtracking in A3. " Well, it's good to know that it's being worked on. As you didn't respond to my points regarding checkpointing, spawning, dropping items, and trading and partying, I figure that either a couple of these are already in the works for further CT races or are much lower down on the priority list. Am I correct in this assumption? | |
" Or you could finally drop freeze. Since the first real CT event every player said that it's broken. Stop trying to keep this mechanic. As long it exists you can do whatever you like you only waste time. Did you ever PVP or is it another Kiwi Pride issue? Create an account and play a CT event and you will see how it works. Early on you will be frozen for 3-6 seconds. Later on the Templar becomes ineffective and the strong GH classes are Scion, Duelist and Mara because you must understand how DPS works in PoE. You are very unlikely to receive significant upgrades on weapons aka 100+ ED, so you will most likely use Sash receipes. And even if you are lucky Damage nodes become less efficient that's why you will go for speed. On level 54+ you can even remove the Mara as dangerous class because DPS is tied to attackspeed and Spells become more dangerous. This means the skills freezing you will be Highspeed GH with 2+ attacks per second and Coldspells with 2+ Casts per second. Even you got high coldresists Crit and Implicit Freeze chances will Freeze you for 1 second and because you will be hit by 2+ attacks/spells per second you will be permafrozen. The problem is the implicit freeze chance and it's simple to change it to an implicit chill chance in PVP or chance crit freeze hits to chill. Chill is more than powerful enough in PVP. Even if you do something like the unique Chaingloves and add a cooldown you will have to deal with Vulnerability and Temp Chains and with the help of certain nodes players will be able to extend the freeze duration to bypass the cooldown. I remember that Prozon could permafreeze me back in CB PVP because of the Penetration gem alone, till I used DF. Freeze is broken just as Buri+Clegclaws/Kelphiesnare switch+GA+Multispierce with Poisoncharms in D2. And Blizzard couldn't find a proper way to fix it so they destroyed Bow users for good. CT suffers 2 major problems: 1. Freeze(explained several times why this mechanics must be dropped in PVP) 2. A too high invasion level difference not relying on quest states. There is no way a level 4 has a chance against a level 10 for example aside from perfect eq. That's why you must include quest states. Also low players should be able to invade high players but they need to see an invasion screen like: Player B(level 10) ..... instead of Player B ..... Even better in Partyevents they should see who is in one party because 2 vs 2 vs 2 vs 2is more interesting than 6 vs 2. Just look how bandit PKing or PKing in general works. Most PKs in normal are level 22+ or even 25-26 and that's obvious and players won't trust them. Effective PK comes with level 18.  You join a random group play with them a bit and then strike them down. I got also cruel examples where I pked players while being underleveled and I got pms that players really didn't expect to be pked by me. Even with queststates as additional limiter there are enough good campspots and players will think strategely. For example somebody rushes docks and levels up and didn't do a single quest. Another player is afraid of getting killed by overleveled players so he does Sewers first and progresses. The progression protection allows him to catch up. Here are questsstates which would create good protections: Lower Passage, Brutus, Merv for act 1 Sins, Weaver, Vaal Ruins, Vaal and Golden Hand(strategic quest state) Clarissa, Sewers, Solaris, Undying Wall Piety, Fairgravesquest2(strategic) There is more than enough room to PK players. 3 levels is the optimal difference till at last level 35-40. | |
" No, currently instances expire after being empty for some amount of time. Qarl is suggesting that player's rights to access an instance expire, even though the instance itself is still there (with other players in it). Last edited by Amaroid on Apr 12, 2014, 10:30:28 AM
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