MM or NW

[Evanovic]

Lots of if's in that quote. I'd say it agrees with me and with my personal experience. Hell, you agree too, since you say it's merely "against the norm".

A successful chamber was not a guaranteed kill, even if you weren't counterchambered. Footwork was a very important factor.

That personal jab and thinly-veiled "noob" insult is completely gratuitous.

Put it this way: chambering is much less useful now and you see chambers blocked a hell of a lot more often in NW, to the extent that you may as well say MM chambers were 'unblockable' in comparison to the current. The point is that chambering is now a useless thing to risk doing due to the slow turning mechanic that causes you to stub and more specifically in the case of the overhead: odd animations that make it impossible to achieve.

[Hekko]

Lots of if's in that quote. I'd say it agrees with me and with my personal experience. Hell, you agree too, since you say it's merely "against the norm".

I am confuzzeled are you agreeing with me or not? Your general tone suggest disagreement, while you say the quote agrees with you when it infact is my quote supporting my side of the argument.

A successful chamber was not a guaranteed kill, even if you weren't counterchambered. Footwork was a very important factor.

A successful chamber was not a guaranteed kill, however, it almost always was a guaranteed hit(/poke/thud/stub/whiff). People who got away with blocking chambers either had a dodgy connection, a very low ping or were incredibly lucky. And anyone/everyone of those who were reckognized as good players in MM would, rightly so, call bullshit if someone blocked two chambers in a row.

That personal jab and thinly-veiled "noob" insult is completely gratuitous.

Well, I genuinely don't know if you played MM that much, quickly looking through your post history most of your 15 pages of posts seem to be about Vikingr and NW with 9 in total being about MM. Furthermore, I made the comment in order to tie in MM into the quote since the quotes post was made in regards to warband. And to illustrate the statement:

"2:10 - (WoC|2|Hekko: Would you say that downchambers were blockable in MM?
2:11 - KWAC_Sid: Mhm
2:11 - KWAC_Sid: No"

"2:24 - (WoC|2|Hekko: Heya, would you say that chambers were blockable in MM?
2:24 - (WoC|2|Hekko: Assuming a ping of around 40
2:24 - Vikestad: Generally no, but if you sidestep like a boss"

(By the way, this sidestepping thing has become infinatly easier with the lower turnspeed, which is why I am saying that even downchambers are rather blockable these days, because it takes so long to turn to the target)

"1:51 - (WoC|2|Hekko: Would you say that a down chamber in MM was unblockable in general?
1:51 - Evanovic: most of the time
1:52 - (WoC|2|Hekko: Assuming a normal ping (people between 35 and 55)
1:53 - Evanovic: yeah"



The bottomline is, it's painfully obvious that chambers are borderline useless these days due to many reasons, one of which is that they are rather blockable these days, and that is a huge loss for both competitive and entertaining gameplay. I ask you to run the following test just stand still at medium range, stab, get chamberblocked and try to block on time, you know what's coming so reactions don't really come into play, and if both of you have ping of around 40 your goose is cooked.


Edit: As the scientifically minded people me and Evan are we actually went to the duel server and tested it out in a plethora of scenarios with different skins to utilize the different polearm skills. And what we found is that downchambers are not blockable as long as: you are in range to actually hit the person with a normal stab*, you don't hold it in for any amount of time, you don't do fancy manouvering on the up-down axis with the chamber. My ping was just above 40 and evans was around 55. All range tests were run double sided so that both tried to do it at the same range. The tests did not involve any form of movement of the characters since the tests would be too hard to replicate time and time again with the same conditions.

*Your block extends a bit infront of your char, and as such you can block attacks that wouldn't otherwise reach you, we found that chambers were blockable in this scenario, but blocking or not didn't matter since the stab was out of range either way.

[Evanovic]

Edit: As the scientifically minded people me and Evan are we actually went to the duel server and tested it out in a plethora of scenarios with different skins to utilize the different polearm skills. And what we found is that downchambers are not blockable as long as: you are in range to actually hit the person with a normal stab*, you don't hold it in for any amount of time, you don't do fancy manouvering on the up-down axis with the chamber. My ping was just above 40 and evans was around 55. All range tests were run double sided so that both tried to do it at the same range. The tests did not involve any form of movement of the characters since the tests would be too hard to replicate time and time again with the same conditions.

*Your block extends a bit infront of your char, and as such you can block attacks that wouldn't otherwise reach you, we found that chambers were blockable in this scenario, but blocking or not didn't matter since the stab was out of range either way.

Yes, I can confirm said findings. We also tested Overhead Chambers. Now, it was found that these were universally blockable. We tried from many distances and we were able to block them every time. If you couple this with the sheer difficulty of chambering an overhead (due to dodgy animations), remembering that a failed chamber usually results in death, you can safely say that chambering with the Overhead in any circumstances is not worth the risk.
 
To explain why the Underarm Stabs are more blockable in NW melee combat: the findings suggest that if the chambering stab does not penetrate fast it can be blocked. In NW the slow turning mechanic prevents a lot of chambers from penetrating fast, as often chambers are done when the opponents are not directly facing eachother, and thus the chambering player needs to turn to move his chambering stab into the other player. The only time when the turning mechanic does not affect the chambering is when it is done at stand still and directly (the stringent test conditions that we imposed on the experiment). You can see then that successful Underarm Chambering is limited to when you're pretty much mirroring the opponent, quite an unlikely situation in most melee combat, and therefore not common enough.
 
So with the Overhead Stab being completely useless for chambering and the Underarm Stab losing a lot of it's use in dynamic melee fights we can safely say that Chambering has lost its punch and sadly detracted from the variety of melee. And one could argue that chambering was the main thing that made breaking an opponent's rhythm possible.

[hrotha]

Well I wasn't expecting you to actually go and test it! 

Dunno, it's my impression. I think the oddities of chambering and blocking in NW might have more to do with wonky animations than with slow turning speed, as I don't see why that would be a factor in making chambering less of a viable technique. Víkingr for example has much slower movement speed, and while you can block chambers if you're fast enough they're still pretty effective.

By the way, I was saying you could block them in some circumstances, not that it was the norm. That's why I said your quote supported my position, because it qualifies that statement with several conditions under which you could block.

[Klyvare]

Might I remember you guys, that we had a vote for overhead stabs and you all voted for it ?

I am quite confused to see that you dislike whatever we changed on the melee system, if you voted for it or not... It just does not make any sense.

So next time we just won't change it at all, becouse votes do not catch the majoritys will? That would be stupid.. Sorry about that, but I really really do not understand you.
We changed it to your liking and now you are complaining. As vince already said, I think the problem is, that you simply dislike whatever we changed...

... I find it quite obvious that the vote for overhead stabs was to implement overhead stabs in a balanced and good way, which is a part of creating a game. And not a vote for "Give me unbalanced and broken overhead stabs". Everyone probably took for granted that the overhead stabs would be as balanced as the old ones were.

And tbh it feels like it is quite clearly a bad gameplay mechanic when you have two attacks, and two attacks only, which both are identical just different directions. It is like playing WoW or HoN etc where all youre spells to the exact same thing. It creates a gameplay which is lifeless and dull. Luckily for NW there are other things to combat to counter for this like feinting etc which can bring SOME flavour to the combat, but what you did was remove a lot of it for hardly any gain then to dumb things down.

And also, what a great attitude you have as a game developer!

[DarkOmega]

feinting etc which can bring SOME flavour to the combat,

Feint into an overhead stab you are dead

I know what you mean about feinting make the melee slightly better but compare this to the old MM melee you had feinting, spinning, side steps and to an extent chambering. Making the melee challenging and enjoyable now it is just the same old overhead stab.   

[Klyvare]

That is what I meant. That not all flavour is gone, but a lot has been removed for no great gain.

[Shamble]

At present moment for me MM better, not to much, but still
NW too bright and variegated - all these flowers, mushrooms and others, MM seemed more dark and monotonous
And maps... most of new have too much flora, it is annoying and also because of this I have very low FPS and can't  play NW normally

[Oposum]

I lost against a guy with a butterknife today, he didn't really know how to play, he lucked out and tanked the first stab and then he ran in circles around me, and I couldn't turn quickly enough to stab him, even after I had blocked to get attackpriority.

Attack priority is different in slash vs stab then in stab vs stab, by moving in one direction while facehugging and swinging in the other one you can get in 2 hits in a row without the stab weapon dude having a chance to hit you

Anyway, overhead stab is broken, damage calculation and chamber timings are same as with overhead slash which results in pretty ridiculous sweetspots, damage and weird chambering. Not to mention ghosting when overhead attack anim finishes but there is still 1 second time window during which if you walk into it you're going to get 1 hit killed. Also, overhead stab has weird "middle-feint" in it which makes feintspamming a viable tactic because with low fps it's impossible to see which attack is coming ("middle-feint" looks like its starting a stab then suddenly switches to overhead). Spinning with overhead around is quite acceptable tactic cause of ghosting in group fights you will most likely get a hit (spinning and feintspamming done together causes blindness). Overhead stab hits seem to cause horse rearing every time they hit horses chest, even while bouncing off it, which makes it pure cav killer.

This new melee system is far better than MM, it just needs some tweaking, mostly overhead stab.
All in all, NW is far better than MM.

[matmannen]

(click to show/hide)

Napoleonic Wars has been/is being sold almost exclusivley on word of mouth; the marketing budget costs are probably equivalent to the change in your back pocket.

The vast majority of original players of MM also translated to be the vast majority who knew about NW, therefor, how can NW has balooned into thousands of players (estimated 30k sales) from a maximum of 1k players if those original players didnt enjoy it enough to spread the word. Yet, if MM was so popular and good and amazing etc; why did it maintain (a still healthy) a much lower player base?

I know saying it's better because it's more popular is an obvious fallacy, but it's there.

Now, lets look at improvments;

- Over 220 units, rebuilt from the ground up, including expanded artillerey avalable for use like rockets, and then the sappers and engineers who can plant bombs, or build cover, which combined with the destructable cover mechanic adds a whole new layer of depth. Moreover the units included are perfected; literally, not a single detail is off to even the most astute pitch fork weilding gaming historian eager to shout at online companies 'raping' history. Not only this but the strenghts and weaknesses of the classes have been expanded on i.e; rifleman super vunerable to cavalry, grenadiers have better melle, curassiers are slower but more heavily protected and so forth.

- Improved graphics, better textures, re done player models and new animations.

- Dozens of new maps + random maps and an astonashing ammount of custom maps being developed by players already. Plenty f varietey, and with destructable enviroments mean alot of maps often play out differently (especially seige which is transformed now you can breach walls entirley and climb rubble in a forlorn hope)

- More servers, and increased stability

- Musicians, standard bearers and officers give morale and skill buffs.

- New game modes like Commander Battle which will ensure the game can still be played if even like 4 people played daily as you can command 50, or more bots.

- Increased character customization

- New proffesional voice acting

- A boat load of classical backround tracks and tunes your musicians can play

- Replacing zoom with a telescope for commanders to ensure only the leaders have that tactical edge, and including the much desired march function, and the brace function

- A completley revamped custom battle mode with up to 500 bots (IIRC) now possible to be divided up into custom squadrons up to 50 men and who can fight on a number of maps

- Fantastic art work

- Increased popularity leading to increased ammount of line battles.





NOW;

Some people are saying they prefer the now (badly aged) MM because they think a single attack animation, only useable by baeonet equipped infantry, is over powered? And the thrust only Baeonet. WTF is wrong with you people?

How can people prefer a stupid animation with a guy waking his musket over someones face over a more real stabbing attack it doesn't make sense. I remember seeing the mm vrseion of the overhead attack for the first time; I remember face palming thinking that would be one of the first things i would have changed.

[Hekko]

How can people prefer a stupid animation with a guy waking his musket over someones face over a more real stabbing attack it doesn't make sense. I remember seeing the mm vrseion of the overhead attack for the first time; I remember face palming thinking that would be one of the first things i would have changed.

Gameplay > looks. While I agree, it looked absolutely silly it, and it's mechanics made for better gameplay than the current incarnation of the upstab.