New theme affects some of the Book's guides.

[whoiga]

The new theme, although lovely, has made some of the guides unreadable. For instance, the Current Merchant Issues List thread has primarily yellow text. This provides no contrast. I can copy/paste the text into a program and etc., but it would be nice if you all could report such threads as you go and adjust their font color.

Thanks.

[GalaxiesBook]

Thanks for mentioning this! I have been very busy of late and not had the chance to look at that. In my spare time I will begin to go through everything and fix them.

[kinggtype]

Combat Upgrade Overview
Combat Upgrade Overview
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Our team started out by asking ourselves, how do you go about balancing and upgrading a combat system? More importantly how could we go about doing this for a combat system for a Live game that has already been out for several months? Why would you even want to take the risk of making a change of this magnitude to a Live game? Hopefully this document answers most of those tough questions!

Massively Multiplayer Online games are living breathing entities. Over time they can evolve to become better and better games. This is one of the greatest strengths of an MMO. There are many things that we knew could be improved in the Star Wars Galaxies combat system but more importantly we had an opportunity to take the combat system to the next level and add a shot of adrenaline to make the game even more fun. We had the opportunity to emphasize group play and enhance profession roles, to adjust the professions so that they stack in interesting ways that give players more flexibility with their templates. We could increase the tactical elements of combat and bring the combat excitement levels back up to where they were always intended to be.


It’s easy to look at a game and point out specific things that are right or wrong and try to adjust from there. But will that make the game balanced and fun? Game systems are very complex entities; seemly minor changes to one area can have wide repercussions throughout the game. How do you safely make the needed changes and not make things worse than they were? What kind of chain reactions are going to be created by each change and how many resulting adjustments will you need to make?

This is what we are faced with every day while working on this combat upgrade. What must change, what should change and how far can we go while ensuring we make combat fun and engaging for players of all levels.

While going through the lists of issues that we wanted to address with combat we found that more and more things would need to be changed due to the cascading impact of each change. Where would we draw the line though? If we didn’t do enough then the game won’t be balanced, the problems would just have shifted to new areas. If we tried to do too much then we risk losing what is fun about Star Wars Galaxies and end up in an endless series of tuning passes.

We decided to drop all current assumptions about what is right or wrong about combat and just evaluate what combat should be. We took into consideration all of the original design goals and tenants of Star Wars Galaxies and came up with a list that we believe defines what the Star Wars Galaxies combat experience should be. This list wasn’t intended to define any specific implementation details; rather it would just outline the core philosophies that will define the nature of combat. All future design decisions would be based on and remain true to the list. It would give us the foundation to determine what truly needed to change.
This was the list we came up with:
• Combat will be moderately fast paced and very interactive
o Combat is faster paced than EQ or similar MMOs
o Combat is too slow to truly be considered “Action”
o Combat has bursts of faster paced action
o Combat pacing is slow enough or can be forward queued enough to allow basic chatting and command communication
o Combat actions cannot be queued so far ahead as to break the moderately fast paced feeling
o The average even PvP fight should last 1-3 minutes

• Combat is tactical in nature
o There is no all around “best” action
o Different situations have different ideal actions to respond with
o Actions can have specific counter, combo and recovery actions
o Powerful or unique actions cannot be repeatedly “spammed”
o Actions can only be used a limited amount of times during a specific short period
o Different Professions have different ideal ranges
o Terrain has a meaningful impact on combat
o Movement has a meaningful impact on combat
o Gear choice has impact on speed of motion and actions
o Single shot PvP kills are never possible

• Professions have specific skill sets that define specific combat role abilities
o Profession abilities have minimal overlap to maintain distinct combat roles
o Profession abilities can be combined to create more unique or specialized combat roles
o Profession abilities always stack together in an additive and meaningful manner (either through increased power for each
o Profession ability or through added versatility)
o There is no ideal Profession template combination
o Profession roles and balance are designed to encourage grouping
But what exactly does all this mean and how will these core philosophies impact the game? What actually needs to be changed to get us to this upgraded combat system and what stuff can remain constant?

This is the essence of the combat upgrade and what we are working on to solve. Just fixing the bugs and problems won’t be enough. That needs to happen of course but without some fundamental changes to the combat system we won’t have the necessary foundation to achieve the final results we all want to see. We are not saying that the combat upgrade is going to solve everything or that it will be perfect the day it’s released. But it will get us most of the way there and most importantly it will set the groundwork to allow for faster balance adjustments and future additions to the combat system.

Core Combat Changes

Once we had the list of fundamental design philosophies that will get us the combat system we all desire we were able to take the next step.
Before delving into the implementation details we wanted to figure out if there were any core problems with the combat system that would prevent us from reaching our set goals. It’s easy to come up with design fundamentals when working in a vacuum, but we have the unique problem of working on an active running combat system and we needed to make sure that we protected the initial design of the system and the “feel” of the game. So with these limitations in mind we got to work.

It didn’t take too long to identify the core problems we wanted to solve, but finding the ideal solutions was the true tricky part. Eventually we settled on a limited set of core system changes that would be required in order to get the combat system to a more balanced and fun state. We needed to keep the changes as simple as possible to avoid unnecessarily upsetting the system while still making sure that they got us the results we needed.

The following list is what we finally decided on:
• Separate special ability costs from damage
o HAM bars now have a separate ability and damage portion.
o Ability points are limited by current damage levels
o Ability points regenerate much faster (30-60 seconds for a full unbuffed pool)

• Must deplete all Health, Action & Mind to incapacitate
o Non-targeted attacks have an equal chance to hit Health, Action & Mind
o Health, Action & Mind pools can drop below zero, to some reasonable max negative value (-50 to -100) to more easily allow all three pools to be below zero at once.
o There are no additional penalties for having a pool with a negative value.
o Certain professions still have abilities to target specific pools

• Deathblow is no longer instantaneous
o Deathblow will have a setup time in which it can be interrupted and the player is vulnerable
o Deathblow will only be able to be done while in melee range. All professions will have the innate ability to perform a deathblow (some may be better at it than others) but none will be able to deathblow from a distance
o Most profession abilities are no longer weapon specific. (Though some abilities are still limited to specific weapons or weapon groups.)
o Armor is currently both overpowered and not diverse enough. The armor system is getting a complete rewrite. Many new types of armor are being created and these types will better leverage the numerous existing appearances of armor to make armor choices an important part of combat and provide visual diversity.
Keep in mind that these were the largest of the core system changes. Many other things beyond these changes will be addressed such as changes to weapons, healing and buffs. We need to be rock solid on fundamentals first and foremost because any deviations from the foundation would have huge potential ramifications on all combat related systems.
Balance Diagram

With the core combat changes finalized we only had one last critical issue to resolve. Since we had decided on emphasizing the specific role abilities of each profession we needed to narrow down what those roles were.
We needed a way to think about professions and their roles that would allow us to give each core combat profession a specific role strength with as little overlap as possible.
The biggest problem that we saw with the current profession design was that nearly every profession tried to do nearly every thing which lead to a lack of any true strength or role definition. We needed to avoid the same pitfall. One of the core philosophical issues that lead to this problem was that professions are not the same as classes. A class-based system must have each class complete and self-supportive in its own right. Because Star Wars Galaxies uses has a skill-based system we are able to concentrate more on the specific strengths that a profession skill set gives without worrying if it was complete. Characters are able to learn multiple complete professions or lots of abilities from multiple professions to create their ideal complete template.
This philosophy shift allowed us to concentrate on what exactly the true strength of a profession should be and make all of its abilities support that strength. We also looked at how each profession is currently played so that where possible, we could stay as true as possible to what the heart of that profession was.
We decided to visualize the role definitions in a diagram to more easily figure out where everyone should fit. Most professions fell into place quickly and easily while a few were not so simple. Eventually we had to make some hard decisions about what the future of certain professions would end up being. Because we needed each profession to have a unique strength with as little overlap as possible we ended up having to give some professions new role abilities that never existed before and others we needed to shift their role quite a bit from what they’ve done historically.
While we know that not everyone will agree with the final decisions we felt that they were ultimately needed for a stronger and more cohesive game. Below you will see the final balance diagram. In it you can see the relative balance of each profession and what their roles are intended to be. This obviously doesn’t define any of the specific abilities or how those roles are going to be carried out but you can see how they relate to each other. All future decisions about each combat profession will be guided by this balance diagram.



Continuing Forward
Now you should have a good idea of what some of the initial design processes and conclusions for the Combat Upgrade were. As this process progresses we will be revealing more info about specific changes with insight into those changes and our reasoning for the decisions as well.