Alright so the post has been up for some time and generated some interesting responses I'll comment a bit on it.
Alot of the responses has seen the thread for what it is worth and commented in a serious manner on the serious bits and hopefully smiled a bit about the bits that were satire. And for these responses I thank you.
Some responses have been quite nice in nature, but missed the point a bit, and very nicely illustrated the hypocricy that exists in the community regarding game-mechanics in MM/NW. Many of the things said are the same things people like me and Evan have brought up about spinning (
disclaimer I am defending spinning because of the way it was removed, not because I support the feature, I don't mind the feature however, which is why I am not ready to pay a large price to other melee for it's removal).
People have said: "It's unrealistic, and looks silly, but it's needed for the diversity of melee, as well as to get though peoples blocks. Furthermore while it may not exist in the form that it is ingame it still represents something that a human could do in combat"
This pretty much mirrors some of the defence made for spinning, yet when defending spinning stating these things are unacceptable where as no one protests here. Spinning also had and easy defence, downblocking. Feinting requires you to know how to play the game very well, to actually follow all the feints until you are "immune" to it. This all just goes to show that it's acceptable in the community to hate on spinning for whatever reason, but other features are beyond the same criticism.
What I am somewhat saddened by is that no one picked up on the fact that almost all my suggested changes are way overtop and that they would kill or hamper other aspects of gameplay ontop of feinting, which is my major beef with spinning. Or maybe this was too obvious to even warrant a comment?
Then we have bunch of comments by native people who say things are fine telling us that we don't know how to play etc. Futhermore they say that playing melee competitvely in NW is us being stupid because being competitive has no place in NW. Saying that MM/NW players need to l2p and that the game is boring without feinting and there's no other way to kill people. They don't even mention chambering which was what the high-end metagame in 1v1s revolved around in MM.
It's fine to think that Native/Vikingr/cRPG/1866/Secsession contains a good combat system and balance. I disagree, but I won't begrude other people their opinion. What annoys me is when the native people pass of their opinion as gospel. What MM did was to remove some options from combat, and by doing so putting more focus on others forcing a deeper understanding and thought through way of fighting within the limitations, and as a result it created the best melee experience
I have yet to have in a Warband mod/dlc/expandalone.
Then we have a few people who may have taken my post a bit too seriously. I don't think feinting should be nerfed severly. I think as long as implied chambers (when you try to chamber their first feint and end up hitting them since they stopped their attack and changed attackdirection) work as a counter as well as the animations are smooth and less confusing feinting is fine. Slowing it down a bit may or may not be warranted as well, because as MaHuD said, sometimes it feels as if changing block directions is slower than changing attack directions.
The Sword is underpowered crowd: while I don't disagree, the sword could do with some minor retweaking I still think it's important that the bayonet retweaking is done first, because those changes may affect the sword-bayonet power-parity. And furthermore most people on any given server will be using a bayonet anyway.
I joined a MM game 1 month before release for the first time since 6 months, I found a complete broken melee system, people spinning like mad, holding down-block constantly and generally being elitist pigs that take out new people within 0.1 second.
Something had to be done, spinning removed to stop the people from being some weird ninja, up-stab added to stop the bloody constant down-block & be safe approach.
New things bring new problems, though the situation is far far far better then what it was.
Your suggestions have been noted and all denied.
I find this post somewhat internally incoherent. At one point it's too easy to kill new people, and in the very same sentence it's too easy to stay alive. If anything new people are easier to farm at the moment, block once --> Upstab to the face --> Watch score increase. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of the upstab it adds new life to the melee system that was getting gradually stagnant, but the way it is at the moment it feels imprecise, random and the best practices when it comes to fighting seems to consist of buttonmashing. I feel that the melee has gone from an "easy to learn (on the warband scale), hard to master" to a "hard to learn, easy to master". I don't think it makes for good gameplay when all advanced techniques like chambering and such have to give way for feintspamming or just plain old spamming.
In my opinion the ideal is if it's relatively easier to stay alive and harder to kill someone, that way new people don't feel useless and people have something to strive to, i.e. tons of kills.
