Hekko
Master Knight
The time has come to revert back to MM melee. Alot of people didn't change to Windows Vista when that was released because XP was clearly better, well at the moment melee in NW is like Vista was for OSes. This is problematic because we're de facto forced to use vista, and efforts to alleviate the situation are basically passed off as borderline cheating (Wolfy's mod to change the upstab into an overhead swing). I now propose that instead of forcing everyone into using the Vista of melee we revert back to MM melee until the Windows 7 of melee comes along.
I will now list a few reasons for why melee is not working out at the moment:
[list type=decimal]
[*]The overhead stab is, has been and if based of the current incarnation will always be atrociously bad. The stab is based of the WFaS overhead pike stab and the issues surrounding it seem to be neverending. The code is now alledgedly the same as for downstabs, but this is clearly not true in regard to chambers as well as applying stuns, the hitbox is off by a large margin, my guess is that it's unfixable unless it's redone from scratch, properly.
[*]As mentioned above the overhead stab has a bad hitbox, unfortunately it seems contagious because at the moment the downstabs hitbox seems worse than it was in MM or with Awlpikes in native, on several occasions has Evan been spectating me from a birds-eye-perspective or I him and both of us could swear that the bayonet is solidly in the enemy without it actually doing anything at all.
[*]Something that also plagues melee is the low and random-esque damage of bayonets. Anyone who has spent some time on the groupfighting server against competent oponents will know that the norm is that it takes two stabs to kill someone due to the fact that it's hard to get a clean onehit stab on people in the heat of battle while staying alive. This of course makes fighting when outnumbered alot less valid, because it takes very long to get rid of threats if you end up hitting three guys once/twice without killing them. Swords were compensated for their loss of speedbonus with higher damage, bayonets were not.
[*]The reason for the low damage is the loss of athletics skill. The loss of athletics skill and slower turning speed is causing sluggish melee which quite obviously is undesiarable, and the general sluggishness is probably the cause for alot of problems mentioned above.
[/list]
I believe that no one really knows the ins and outs of melee, and as such tinkering on the current incarnation of things is bound to fail because while progress is made from time to time it still probably never will be satisfactory (upstab changes for instance). Thus accordingly the obvious solution is to just revert to MM melee, and if the interest to go on and try to find a truly enjoyable improvement on melee (the windows 7 of melee so to speak) one can start working on that from scratch rather than with the negative bagage the WFaS upstab carries.
It's quite observable that the current melee incarnation isn't cutting it: there is no populated duel server that I know of, where as in MM I know some people who spent almost all their time on the duel server. This shows that melee has fundamentally lost it's appeal and for it to be truly interesting to play in melee one has to introduce more people to add a different dynamic (why the groupfighting server is populated). Not to mention that people who were considered melee gurus of MM have just quit because the thing that they played MM for just disappeared, and those who go on do so for other reasons (such as the community they are playing with).
One can of course make some arguments for why NW melee should be kept. Some people might say it's more democaratic or whatever, but that's just a bad excuse for not wanting to put in the effort to understand and learn the different techniques needed for MM melee. As far as I am informed most of the who's who of melee want MM melee back. Ward, Varangian, Akame, Vorlen, Sid, Evanovic, Crackman, Glopaxi, PoKo, Robby, George MacKintosh, Hives, Littleguy, Daniel, PhonieX, and the list goes on. Infact I reckon most people of this steamgroup agree with me to quite a large extent. Those that I spoke to were very much for MM melee, to the point where Glopaxi&PhonieX&Ward were even playing on a MM server asking me to come there. So it goes to show that the argument does not stem from people doing badly, it's from people wanting melee to be more interesting, competative and fun. Also when speaking to people from the US community I have heard that the prominent regiment Marins Garde pretty much quite outright because of the melee.
Accordingly the only argument I see left for people to make in regard to keeping melee is that it's more historical, realistic and aeasthetically pleasing. It's probably more historical, on the other hand I sincerely doubt that everyone on the battlefield was doing soley upstabs in the clips above you can see the vast majority of feints&attacks being upstabs. A musket is quite heavy after all! It's not really more realistic either as shown in this clip as well as the weight argument made before. And it certainly looks less aesthetically pleasing when everyone walks around with the upstab/upblock as seen in this clip from the most recent groupfighting tournament.
Here are a list of clips illustrating the predominance of the upstab, as well as the displeasing aesthetic of it as well as a comparison with a few MM clips showing that while MM certainly has issues it's a lot more refined than NW:
NWEC Final
These are some of the best meleer in the community, and notice how almost every single kill, attack and feint in the clip is an up one.
Random Linebattle
Same predominance, everyone is using the upstab, looks silly, feels silly, acts silly!
A clip from the 5th groupfighting tournament
Downstabs are the primary mode of attack, also illustrates that thoughtless overhead spamming gets you killed not to mention the higher precision and fluidity of MM combat.
Part 2 of the same clip
Reaffirms the above observations, also shows the need for teamwork&co-ordination in order to take down a opponents fast in the famous overhead-downstab combo!
Part 3 of the same clip
The third bit from the same clip shows how spinning isn't as much an eyesore as people make it out to be, unless people deliberately go out of their way to make it silly, in which case spinning isn't the only thing that looks silly. All these clips illustrate a second point, in the sense that it's absent: spinning is hardly as efficient or predominant as people make it out to be. The clip is of Graham and his Minions winning the groupfighting tournament, yet still, none of them spin like like a fan.
So considering everything written above there's no reason to keep the NW way of melee, while there is every reason to change away from NW melee, and since the only available change at the moment is reverting to MM that is what should be done!
Thanks to Evan for supplying most of the clips with comments, header and valuable discussion, thanks to Lyra for making the demostration clip of the unrealistc overhead!
