Feinting - The New Spinning

[Maboobs]

Yes you could, but only if you're opponent was far enough away.


And feinting is not at all unrealistic, people have stated several times that feinting irl is actually FASTER than warband allows you to.

[Hekko]

Pretty sure you could block chambers in MM...

Overheads certainly. Stabs, no. You could be lucky and get away with a block or two here and there but in general your goose was cooked unless you rechambered as Sid would say. There were people who consistantly blocked chambers the trait they had in common that I noticed was a very low ping, under 35-ish or otherwise dodgey connection.

[SirNitram]

I also noticed this flaw within the new melee system.

Because chambers are blockable, they are useless. In MM, if you were fighting a good opponent, and you got into blocking, stabbing, blocking, stabbing, a nicely timed chamber could break that trot.
Or you could chamber somebody in a group fight to get an advantage.
All of this is impossible now, which I find rather sad

[SvenssonHD]

I also noticed this flaw within the new melee system.

Because chambers are blockable, they are useless. In MM, if you were fighting a good opponent, and you got into blocking, stabbing, blocking, stabbing, a nicely timed chamber could break that trot.
Or you could chamber somebody in a group fight to get an advantage.
All of this is impossible now, which I find rather sad

And not to mention how much harder it is to ''time-in'' an overhead stab, as the animation is flawed too.

[Pelgrane]

(click to show/hide)

No, it's inherently not right because it does not at all simulate how much space your opponent physically occupies effort it takes to start and stop attacks over and over again, and thus completely not comparable to feinting spinning. To go around a man defending himself change attackdirection in real life takes a LOT more time than turning on the spot than it does ingame, not to mention effort. The fact that one can prepare and release attacks while not having solid footing posture and weight behind the bayonet (shifiting weight to turnattack directions) is even more ridiculous.

In real life, when both of you are turning feinting around like ingame, there's almost no chance of a bayonet stabbing your opponent's shoulder which is the most common cause of death in NW, because the shoulder block is still too far away. Evan People says this represent human agility realistic feinting, but it really doesn't. If we had something like strafe keys stamina system maybe we could represent human agility stamina, but turning with the mouse feinting wildly while walking forward in comabt represents something people are not actually physically capable of, let alone people's bayonets.

Mind, it's not a NW problem or a bayonet problem, it's a MnB problem. MnB shouldn't allow you o attack successfully when your weight is not supporting your attack. To make the linear/strafe combat more interesting, they would have to make blocks/parries also animations which work much like chambers.

I think the turn-with-mouse canceled attacks system is fundamentally broken and I am not sure if it can be fixed at all. That doesn't mean that spin-stabbing feinting is in any ways justified by any satirical comparisons to anything else (blocking by Evan, feinting spinning by you). Those things are just barely implemented, spinning feinting is physically impossible.

Before you brand me a troll for doing that:

The reason why I did that is to illustrate what you did not seem to grasp from the OP or responses generated by that is that all the arguments regarding feinting and spinning are the same pretty much, which shows how hypocritical people are in their views when they view playstyles. And as such the same logic should apply to them.

I'm not going to label you a troll, but I will certainly now have solid cause to doubt your intelligence and reading comprehension (to my surprised disappointment, might I add), and that's basically giving you benefit of the doubt regarding the trolling. If you plan to patronise people, prepare to be patronised right back.

I agreed with you in that gameplay qua gameplay, spinning isn't the only problem, and that other things might need to be fixed. I agreed that the metagame with the unbeatable block did need counters. What I did not agree on was that these three things (feinting, blocking, spinning) are anything like each other. We CAN constructively talk about the melee system as a whole but your repeated and obnoxious say-so that apples=oranges does not any coherent argument make, and the same logic does NOT apply to both cases.

What real arguments do you have anyway? Evan's very convincing approach was in addressing combat as a whole, and hey, we went along with that for a while. You added nothing to the discussion except to call everyone else a hypocrite and an idiot because they did not like your "play style". Well done.

Two of these situations are crude representations of something that can be said to represent real combat and are in a way intuitive if badly implemented. The third is complete fantasy that does not represent anything at all because it does not involve any cost to the movement which would allow attacks from other directions. Your cute little strikethroughs and replacements, if they are not deliberate trolling as you say, represent a fundamental misunderstanding about how objects move and collide in physical space and how our brains are trained to respond to the observation of said movement.

I also said that because we cannot strafe in-game, we cannot fix this, and so your precious play-style will always be around, just maybe less dramatic.

Nice of you to mention a stamina system. I wonder how much stamina a couple of wrist movements (feinting with a sword, for example) would take versus turning your entire body around twice while walking forward, and doing it repeatedly. I would dearly love a realistic stamina system. Maybe dizziness and loss of aim should be included too.

[Hekko]

I agreed with you in that gameplay qua gameplay, spinning isn't the only problem, and that other things might need to be fixed. I agreed that the metagame with the unbeatable block did need counters. What I did not agree on was that these three things (feinting, blocking, spinning) are anything like each other. We CAN constructively talk about the melee system as a whole but your repeated and obnoxious say-so that apples=oranges does not any coherent argument make, and the same logic does NOT apply to both cases.

I am not comparing apples and oranges, if anything I am comparing two different fruit both that have been grown using the same pesticide that is poisonous. You tell me that don't eat that fruit, it's poisonous because of the pesticide used. I then ask you, what about that other fruit, to which you reply: no it's a different fruit.

If anything this thread has shown that exactly the same rethoric can be used on both sides when it comes to feinting and spinning. Yet still people persist that they are apples and oranges. I ask you: How is feinting and different from spinning? Both look silly, both are unrealistic to the degree they are/were implemented. And from a gameplay point of view feinting is less noob-friendly and more dominant at the moment.

What real arguments do you have anyway? Evan's very convincing approach was in addressing combat as a whole, and hey, we went along with that for a while. You added nothing to the discussion except to call everyone else a hypocrite and an idiot because they did not like your "play style". Well done.

I want versatility in combat where a plethora of fighting styles are possible and effective, where there isn't a dominant one and where the skill ceiling is high and where thought has a place in combat not just reflexes and wild buttonmashing.

"Killing off" spinning certainly was a move in the wrong direction, the way it was done even more so (kicking, chambering, swiping(held stabs) are all nerfed as an effect). The wierd animations favouring feinting more so. Chambers being blockable another thing. Melee taking a step in the wrong direction can clearly be seen in alot of the best melee players I know playing less now than in MM or moving over to native because combat here is just lacking or making these posts here on the forum.

Furthermore I never was a spinner. I focused on chambers and the meta-game around that. It even says bolded in the text that I'm not a spinner, albiet not entierly explicitly.

Two of these situations are crude representations of something that can be said to represent real combat and are in a way intuitive if badly implemented. The third is complete fantasy that does not represent anything at all because it does not involve any cost to the movement which would allow attacks from other directions. Your cute little strikethroughs and replacements, if they are not deliberate trolling as you say, represent a fundamental misunderstanding about how objects move and collide in physical space and how our brains are trained to respond to the observation of said movement.

Now, it may be because I'm not trained in bayonet combat, but I am pretty sure that you are not forced to lunge in a straight line forward from where you are standing, so that you could for instance, stab the guy standing to the right or left of the guy dead-centre infront of you in order to catch him off guard. So arguably being able to turn while stabbing is an intuitive mechanic, albeit poorly represented.  So they seem quite equal, all three of them.

I also said that because we cannot strafe in-game, we cannot fix this, and so your precious play-style will always be around, just maybe less dramatic.

Now if I am not completly misstaken you can strafe using the A and D keys. Additionally if that would be the gameplay you would end up with gameplay focused around strafing your bayonet into your enemy.

Nice of you to mention a stamina system. I wonder how much stamina a couple of wrist movements (feinting with a sword, for example) would take versus turning your entire body around twice while walking forward, and doing it repeatedly. I would dearly love a realistic stamina system. Maybe dizziness and loss of aim should be included too.

A bayoneted musket is quite heavy and you need to stop it in addition to setting it into motion so I am guessing your arms would start numbing quite quickly.



My bottomline here is though: Gameplay is what matters and from a gameplay point of view spinning wasn't a negative or even dominant force (in group fights sure, but then in that situation it was used in conjunction with other knowledge of melee like feints, chambers, timing, distance judgement, footwork, understanding the hubris of a group etc., if it was someone spinning like a rotor without any other knowledge of melee he would end up dead quickly (as seen on the groupfighting server).

Feinting together with spamming are at the moment very dominant because other fighting styles got nerfed as a side-effect of the spinning nerf (which was unwarranted in the first place) or just nerfed for no apperant reason, and feinting/spamming got buffed because of the oddities with animations. To an extent feinting but above all spamming are playstyles that should not be too powerful, because they are easy to pick-up, and they lack though and does not require you to pay attention to the doings of your opponent.

It's almost as if there was a native-ification of the game with the DLC, which is something I would state as highly undesirable, because if I would like to play native melee I would play native, not NW. MM melee was unique, enjoyable and something that kept people playing for long stretches of time, I am not saying native melee was bad, just not my cup of tea, and I do not think I am the only one who holds these views.

[Pelgrane]

I am not comparing apples and oranges, if anything I am comparing two different fruit both that have been grown using the same pesticide that is poisonous. You tell me that don't eat that fruit, it's poisonous because of the pesticide used. I then ask you, what about that other fruit, to which you reply: no it's a different fruit.

No, it's like...there's fruit full of pesticides, and then there's this insect, which say, pretends to be a fruit. I'm telling you not to eat the insect that pretends to be a fruit, though doubtless the pesticide is the problem. It's an entirely separate question as to whether we need the masquerading insect.

If anything this thread has shown that exactly the same rethoric can be used on both sides when it comes to feinting and spinning. Yet still people persist that they are apples and oranges. I ask you: How is feinting and different from spinning? Both look silly, both are unrealistic to the degree they are/were implemented. And from a gameplay point of view feinting is less noob-friendly and more dominant at the moment.

It has shown nothing of the sort. What it has shown is that satire is no substitute for argument.

Walking AWAY, then spinning on the SPOT, while being able to aim and strike, and being too fast to be caught by a strike, is not something anyone should expect to face, or need to win. Whatever problems MnB melee may have, spinning should not be a solution, because at that point we might as well introduce magic, combat pets, teleporting, kamehamehameha qi strikes and other fantasy elements.

Feinting is 100% part of what is expected, and it's only the representation that suffers. Blocking is also expected, though the amazing downblock is what caused the entire problem to start with. It's a matter of bad implementation, but you don't need to spin to deal with that.

Now, it may be because I'm not trained in bayonet combat, but I am pretty sure that you are not forced to lunge in a straight line forward from where you are standing, so that you could for instance, stab the guy standing to the right or left of the guy dead-centre infront of you in order to catch him off guard. So arguably being able to turn while stabbing is an intuitive mechanic, albeit poorly represented.  So they seem quite equal, all three of them.

You're misunderstanding, perhaps. MnB already allows to aim stabs with, say, a horse lance. Doing the same with a bayonet would be as you say, a representation of aiming at the guy next to the guy.

It's another thing to pivot on the spot and hit the guy in the shoulder past his block, and entirely something else to magically avoid the bayonet point that is placing itself where you are because you're spinning and then of course there's the fact that half the time you're dragging your bayonet through your opponent and then manage to stab your opponent anyway. Or when you're spinning inside his animation, and stab him.

Do me a favour, go and get a 5 or 6 foot broomstick and try spinning at a stationary target at the kind of distances that spinning happens in MM. See what happens.

Now if I am not completly misstaken you can strafe using the A and D keys. Additionally if that would be the gameplay you would end up with gameplay focused around strafing your bayonet into your enemy.

You're actually turning to face, not strafing. That's why all combats become circular and why spinning is good. If you're going to turn might as well turn really fast.

Part of it is because as Evan mentioned all attacks are launched from the extreme right side and turning is necessary to hit anyway since you can't really aim the direction like you can with a lance without turning.

If you could strafe and aim, that would probably make combat more enjoyable for bayonet specialists like you. More chances to fail, more openings to exploit. If they could make blocks timed and not held it would be even better. It would probably also be a completely different game, and I have doubts it can/will be done. Still doesn't say one single positive thing about spinning.

My bottomline here is though: Gameplay is what matters and from a gameplay point of view spinning wasn't a negative or even dominant force (in group fights sure, but then in that situation it was used in conjunction with other knowledge of melee like feints, chambers, timing, distance judgement, footwork, understanding the hubris of a group etc., if it was someone spinning like a rotor without any other knowledge of melee he would end up dead quickly (as seen on the groupfighting server).

Most people are not on the groupfighting server, and would readily agree with me that it was dominant and it was negative. Hence the change, by the by.

To an extent feinting but above all spamming are playstyles that should not be too powerful, because they are easy to pick-up, and they lack though and does not require you to pay attention to the doings of your opponent.

Spamming is entirely what the bayonet is about. You're supposed to run at the enemy line, stab, then carry through, and carry on. You're certainly not going to convince me that battles became little dancing circles and came to complete fullstops every time two men with bayonets met.

I don't understand why you think the bayonet should be a weapon made for fine fencing. Do you complain that fighting with a rifle as a club inelegant, or sabre briquets are ineffective? What's the purpose of this mod, in your mind?

[Coconut]

Pretty sure you could block chambers in MM...

Overheads certainly. Stabs, no. You could be lucky and get away with a block or two here and there but in general your goose was cooked unless you rechambered as Sid would say. There were people who consistantly blocked chambers the trait they had in common that I noticed was a very low ping, under 35-ish or otherwise dodgey connection.

i could chamber block stabs at 135 ping in mm easily

[Vorlen]

Bassicly, what sit comes down to, is that melee in NW has been chewed up and spat out onto the pavement. Most of the players who were good at Melee think NW's is weak and broken, and alot of mediocre players seem to think it's incredible now. What a strange correlation. And don't pretend that "U just need to learn2play in NW", i can block 4 directions pretty damn well in native, it's not too hard to block two in NW. which is.... effectively all the game is. Blocl up, Block down, spam a little.

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.

Any player worth his salt in MM could break a players block, there were a variety of techniques that worked AND were relatively balanced. I guarantee you that if someone wanted to do something as stupid as merely down downblock in a duel against me i would get through it. I wasn't a spinner either, but if anythingspinning was only mildly OP. And only if you got cocky or lazy against a spinner. The old overhead was perfectly viable, and whilst i recognise that (even being dodgy) the new animation is a much better representation, if doesn't work properly from a gameplay persepctive. if someone didn't bother blocking against the old overhead then you would get a stun which allowed you to hit them quickly afterwards with a 1 shot kill. Not really much different from how the new one works, except now you have new dodgy animations, the glitches and ghost range, and poor chambering with it.

Honestly not too bothered anymore though, haven't logged onto NW in a week. I'll probably still play now and then with the 15e, but this ludicrousy that "NW melee is fixed, so much bettaz than MMz" is an absolute joke.

[Evanovic]

Walking AWAY, then spinning on the SPOT, while being able to aim and strike, and being too fast to be caught by a strike, is not something anyone should expect to face, or need to win. Whatever problems MnB melee may have, spinning should not be a solution, because at that point we might as well introduce magic, combat pets, teleporting, kamehamehameha qi strikes and other fantasy elements.

Feinting is 100% part of what is expected, and it's only the representation that suffers. Blocking is also expected, though the amazing downblock is what caused the entire problem to start with. It's a matter of bad implementation, but you don't need to spin to deal with that.

I would say feinting and spinning are equally expected/not expected in MB because both are exploitative of mechanics of clear intention. Being able to change from an attack to a block was implemented for defensive reasons and not really for aggressive, deceiving means. If it had been intended as a way to attack the enemy then you wouldn't have a block animation making up half of the feint animation, they'd have developed a separate feature or animation for such a move. It just so happens that the block animation fits smoothly and seemlessly into the feint animation and therefore it feels like an intended feature. (Note: the overhead feint in NW is an exception to having a 'smooth animation' and thus example to prove that feinting is not an intended feature of the devs).

In the same way spinning was not an intended feature. Both are born of the potency of the block feature and used in deception-tactics. Both exploits are built on base mechanics of necessity; being able to turn fast enough to face the enemy and being able change from attack to block in mid-attack. Therefore I'd put them in the same class of move/feature/exploit.
 
However, I don't think that either Hekko or I, or any other defender of a fast turning mechanic seek for a return to the 360 spins of MM, just for a noticeable increase in turning speed from what it is currently, in order to bring back the usefullness of other methods of fighting (sweeping, chambering, kicking etc). I think I'll stop using the term 'spinning' in my arguments actually, because it really does make out that I want super-fast 360 spins. I don't.
 

It's another thing to pivot on the spot and hit the guy in the shoulder past his block, and entirely something else to magically avoid the bayonet point that is placing itself where you are because you're spinning and then of course there's the fact that half the time you're dragging your bayonet through your opponent and then manage to stab your opponent anyway. Or when you're spinning inside his animation, and stab him.

Pivoting is forced due to the limited to 1 direction and originating from the right stab. Some of the latter points in the above paragraph are exploit side-effects of a crucial fast pivot-turning that is necessary to give remotely representative agility of a person in real life. And I'm not talking about the agility of a person to animate themselves as MB does, but rather the agility of being able to dodge a stab and then return a direct stab with speed. MB makes the ability to stab fast to one's sides look unrealistic (the foot-work in particular), but in reality if there was a person about 45 degrees to your side you'd be able to put your foot out and lunge the bayonet into him with speed, and no doubt if someone was 90 degrees to the side of you'd be able to turn, dodge/parry a stab and then thrust into with relatively high speed. Despite some exploits and a poor animation, having a relatively fast turning mechanic is the only way you can represent that level of realistic agility within the melee. The bonus being a return of variety (effective chambering, kicking, sweeping etc). In my opinion there's a much larger case for increasing the turning speed, having its merits in both gameplay and realism. (Reminder: I'm not asking for extreme 360 spins though)
 

Part of it is because as Evan mentioned all attacks are launched from the extreme right side and turning is necessary to hit anyway since you can't really aim the direction like you can with a lance without turning.

This was originally Hekko's observation, so any credit for that should go to him. And to be honest, we've talked about this so much that I think we're pretty unanimous about the whole 'spinning'/turning mechanic issue.

Spamming is entirely what the bayonet is about. You're supposed to run at the enemy line, stab, then carry through, and carry on. You're certainly not going to convince me that battles became little dancing circles and came to complete fullstops every time two men with bayonets met.

I don't understand why you think the bayonet should be a weapon made for fine fencing. Do you complain that fighting with a rifle as a club inelegant, or sabre briquets are ineffective? What's the purpose of this mod, in your mind?

One of the main reasons MM was so successful was the melee. It was the thing that resulted in players spending 100s of hours on it and was what pretty much gave all meaning to the public servers. Competitive gameplay was what made this so successful and enabled it to eventually become a publish DLC. I'm not saying that the DLC has completely lost it's competitive gameplay, but the skill-ceiling feels considerably reduced since MM and it would be nice if there was a return to a more skill-based environment, and for it to not merely be a Napoleonic Wars simulator.

[Oposum]

New combat system is step forward from mm, it just needs some tweaking. Mainly, the overhead stab, animation isn't smooth enough and there's some weird point in which it looks like it's going to stab before switching to overhead stab which makes it quite hard to see where's the attack going if you have less than 40 fps, which is common with huge player numbers. Also, from what I've seen and tested, damage calculation of overhead stab is the same as in regular overhead swing which is probably causing the extreme randomness in damage (seems that you can 1 hit people while moving backwards from 2 range, while overhead stabbing while you're walking towards people at 0 range makes a bounce, which is how regular overhead swing behaves, eg you don't get speed bonuses as in regular stab).
Also, feinting is NOT an intended feature, during warband beta it went through some changes to stop it being insta-win button (back then you could cancel your attack at any point, which led to some rather ridiculous stuff happening) but feinting really is needed or fights would degenerate into who will get bored first.
Just fixing overhead animation, damage calculation and overhead "ghosting" would stop bayonet melee from being rather random.

[Maboobs]

I would say feinting and spinning are equally expected/not expected in MB because both are exploitative of mechanics of clear intention. Being able to change from an attack to a block was implemented for defensive reasons and not really for aggressive, deceiving means. If it had been intended as a way to attack the enemy then you wouldn't have a block animation making up half of the feint animation, they'd have developed a separate feature or animation for such a move. It just so happens that the block animation fits smoothly and seemlessly into the feint animation and therefore it feels like an intended feature. (Note: the overhead feint in NW is an exception to having a 'smooth animation' and thus example to prove that feinting is not an intended feature of the devs).

In the same way spinning was not an intended feature. Both are born of the potency of the block feature and used in deception-tactics. Both exploits are built on base mechanics of necessity; being able to turn fast enough to face the enemy and being able change from attack to block in mid-attack. Therefore I'd put them in the same class of move/feature/exploit.

Bots in M&B feint, they don't spin. That tells you that feinting IS an intended feature, and spinning is not.

Yes feinting looks dodgy, but it doesn't give any advantages compared to spinning/sweeping. Spinning/sweeping gives your weapon a huge area in which it will kill, almost definately in 1 hit because of the huge speed bonus you get from it. Compare this to the straight forward stab and it's a wonder if there were people who didn't spinstab in MM.

EDIT: Why do you people insist feinting is not intended?

[Oposum]

EDIT: Why do you people insist feinting is not intended?

If you saw how the feinting looked and worked at the start it would be pretty clear to you that it wasn't intended mechanic

[Maboobs]

EDIT: Why do you people insist feinting is not intended?

If you saw how the feinting looked and worked at the start it would be pretty clear to you that it wasn't intended mechanic

Actually, I fondly remember playing the beta and watching a clanmate "Fred" using feinting. I'd never seen it before, and he kept catching me out until I learned to block his second attack. Then he started doing it triple, and I blocked his third. Then he mixed them in, and it got tricky, but eventually I became pretty good at blocking, and I could even learn to predict when he was going for the triple so I could get a cheeky stab in etc. etc.

[Scully]

Pretty sure swordsmen in real life pretended to attack one way, only to change and attack in a different way to fool their opponents. Think of M&Bs feinting as being that, without actually having proper animations for it.