A blocking system rant of sorts. (With crap drawings and half-assed ideas) *WARNING* May be long

[Durante DLH]

The reason I am making this is because I feel like the current block system for dueling it a little shit. It seems to be all or nothing PB's from what I can tell, and have learned from others. My suggestion is (Excuse the crappy drawings) This:
MB2 Picture Thingy

Now you may be saying "Wtf is this shi*t?". Well let me explain. You see, my suggestion is a new blocking system which uses three different block types.
There would the semi-block, which only happens if you hit the yellow area. This will reduce BP drain, but you will still lose the other stats you had built up from combos.
The blue areas would be regular blocks. You would lose no BP, and lose half of what you gained from combos.
The green areas remain perfect block, but now it comes with the bonus of being the only block which can keep all your stats up while adding bonuses for PBing
Maybe also something between green and blue which kept your stats safe, but no bonuses.

Here is also a (May I add amazingly drawn) slideshow:
“Oh no he is too great a pber”

As show, poor Stick Man #1 cannot attack because Stick guy #2 is too great at PBing, but he also cannot find the right PB zone in time to block Stick #2's attack, meaning his PB bonuses are letting him win.

Now hopefully this is showing what I am getting at here with three block zones. Bonuses shouldn't be thrown around for PBing when it's almost the only form of block used. But if PBing were to be even harder, and regular blocking were added, then it could function like a real duel. While a good fighter can block an attack, a great fighter can turn it around. And I feel like this should also apply to normal dueling instead of the regular "You can't Pblock you are doomed" kind of thing I see a lot.

Of course this could use work, but I would find it much better if the blocking system used a line instead of a circle, as hitting the edge of a sword would hardly count as blocking, hitting it would block it, and a perfect hit against the sword could give room for a disarm, or a simple stagger time for a small combo attack.

This is, sadly as it may seem for you all, the end of what I have to say.

But don't worry I am gonna do a few more of these looking at other aspects of the game when I feel like I've grasped their concept enough.

 

[Spaghetti]

The only thing I can say is.... people arguing over a crappy video I made 8 years ago amuses me greatly. Carry on.

 

[Tempest]

I thought it was RC1 but it also didn't look quite as bad as I remembered (good refresher from those unofficial trips down memory lane).

 

[Stassin]

Ah, finally someone who really knows what he's talking about and who i can converse with without bumping into misunderstandings at every word.

The only change that needed to be made to Perfect Blocking was tweaking it so looking straight down wasn't the best way to Perfect Block and halfswinging wasn't as impactful.

Yeah... and more precisely make it so aiming in the direction of the incoming swing helps too, right ? I mean that was always how ppl intuitively felt the best way to make PBs happen was, no ? Even if it was false and what you actually needed to do was use blue/duals, look down and walk back. In any case, how do you propose to do that while keeping saber/saber collision as the base for detecting PBs ? Like, i dunno how you'd do that. Maybe in other games it works but with what we've got from JKA i just doubt it's possible. There's this kind of work out there that attempts it but in practice it's very idealistic to believe it can work without being bypassed/ignored, even just because you can spin the camera around at unlimited speed in JKA/mb2.

I'm glad you brought nudge back in 1.4 and added perfect block counters but you put a band-aid on a tumor.

Huh, so, could it be that perfect blocking is the only major thing which is wrong in the current system in your opinion ? And maybe parries being so clean without the ability to hit each other at the same time too.

There's so many different opinions anyways. Some ppl hate nudge too, even amongst those who played all the way back in v0 (though not many). Well i hated being PBed by someone with 0 BP knocked down, rolling, just because due to having 0 BP, the large hitboxes used for bodyhits would be passed through (cause couldn't stop the swing with BP), allowing the saber to go ahead and continue towards touching the actual body, BUT their saber somehow was in the middle (even though it wasn't in the middle for the large bodyhit hitbox to be hit). Even PBing from behind happened. Yeah, when the large bodyhit hitboxes were ignored instead of causing a block due to 0 BP (or inability to block, such as when the swing came from behind), touching the saber and thus PBing was alot more likely.

Reliably PBing, i.e. causing a saber/saber collision, even when there were large invisible hitboxes used to detect saber bodyhits which would be reached by the incoming swing before you knew it even if it looked like you had aimed your saber to be in the middle, was wishful thinking. Yes, with blue/duals it worked due to their stances with the sabers protrudring so far forward, going further than the large hitboxes could reach. And so i took that away and made every style similar in their playstyle, that is true, even if i tried faking the opposite by adding useless perks.

Yeah, i also didn't like how due to PB relying on saber collision, literally only 2-3 swing directions were ever worth it with yellow style. Left, right, and maybe the bottom-right to upper-left swing too. All others were slower and would thus be useless since you could achieve any result you wanted with even just the right to left swing, by aiming down or up depending on the opponent's stance and his aim. I also didn't like how PBs could occur whenever during engagements, not only when standing and blocking with your stance; honestly, with JKA's animations and their speed, can you say that PBing was really possible during those animations, when your saber is literally moving so fast that it looks like it's teleporting, with wide swings that travel all around your body in split seconds ? I know i could just remove all those occurrences and only allow saber/saber collision to count as PBs when standing and blocking, and yet, many ppl liked that PBs could occur in those situations. Because it felt like a close, 3D control over your saber.

I mean sure, saber/saber collision is the best thing to use for PBing, but with JKA's and even more so mb2's mechanics it just seems impossible to make it work reasonably. Like i said in a post above, at the very least everything needs to be slower and animations need to be more realistic/less spread.

Or maybe i'm stupid and Tempest will find a way to make it work. Or maybe, having it like before was fine because ppl don't really care if PBing only works 50% of the time and also occurs 50% of the time when they don't expect it to, and it actually adds mysteries which ppl love to take a "long time to master" because clearly there is alot to master. I'm sure if i added mechanics that were actually literally random, and wrote in the changelog a half-assed description not stating that they are random, ppl would find a way to "master" it after long, hard years (i literally witnessed this with yellow's now gone 5th random swing); well, more like finding the best way to play that suffers the least from the random events, through long periods of experiencing different playstyles without actually fully knowing what's going on. I'm not saying that's the case for saber/saber collision PBs, but i believe it stirs the same kind of feelings in ppl's minds, of mystery, of not actually knowing clearly what you need to do and thus you don't really need to blame yourself for poor skill or whatever, of feeling that always something new happens that you didn't expect (because it's not actually clear). And of course in the case of saber/saber collision PBs, of not actually needing to try and aim to PB, just letting the game PB for you pretty much. You can see from the way Chaos for example talks that this is likely how he feels; "it's a pain to have to aim and aim etc., this is an arcade game" yeah, before, you just somewhat aimed, or not, or just looked down, and it PBed, or it didn't, too bad - no need to strain your brain to make diverse things happen, the game does it for you, so it's relaxing. Surely there were some ppl who actually tried hard to make PB work reliably and it did help, but for most it'd be like that (but of course the feeling of true control over your saber also played a big part, i'm just focusing on one particular thing here). Well that's how i see it anyways. The same kind of thing happens with random gun spraying when running.

Yeah so really not easy to do anyhow. Best approach is probably to do like Boothand's creator and trigger blocking animations in the right direction so as to help sabers collide, but JKA's blocking animations are simplistic and not really ideal for that either.

 

[Stassin]

The thing is, even BP as mb2 introduced it doesn't make sense if you really want to see your *saber* blocking swings. BP makes you block precisely when the swing didn't hit your saber. Large hitboxes are used for that instead of the usual body hitboxes that are used for gunning for example, because when we use the usual hitboxes, it looks pretty bad due to you blocking even though the saber goes through your body (worse with higher latency) and it is poorly responsive compared to the current setup with large hitboxes (the hits occur very late due to not hitting the large hitboxes and having to continue until they hit the body hitboxes).

We *could* try having something similar to mount & blade but again, with all the styles in JKA, it just won't work well at all. Maybe if we were to keep just red style and maybe yellow style and severely slowdown swings and combos, it would begin to make some sense. But when you look at it that way, with a blocking system relying on saber/saber collision that is actually clean, the end result of gameplay experience for the user becomes "aim towards the incoming saber swing to perfect block", which is what the current system does. Sure, the aim of the one who is attacking doesn't matter in the current system, but to make it matter we also need to prevent camera spinning and other possible sorts of abuse.

 

[Chaos the Chaotic]

You can see from the way Chaos for example talks that this is likely how he feels; "it's a pain to have to aim and aim etc., this is an arcade game"

I see you missed the point. You make me sound lazy I'm really just a serial procrastinator. I'll finish Kotor one of these days. I rescued Bastilla from the swoop gang earlier this year.

The point was aiming to block where it makes sense. Fluidity, aesthetics, spatial reasoning - all in one juicy package.
And again with this pb obsession of it being 100% actionable.

U srsly going to claim it was random? A bad angle is not random. Nothing about this was or is random. That's just bullshit.
Lack of technique, ability, bionic limbs, but randomness? *sniffs*
I think not. That's just an illusion and an excuse.

It's all just numbers crunching against numbers. How those numbers played out depended on location, timing and ping.
Sure it was easier doing things a certain way, but thats true with everything. There will always be better tactics to abuse depending on changes made.

Here's what your overhaul did:

Removed layers you deemed personally undesirable and or random(hah).
Put training wheels on everything and made it boring.

And the sad part is, you agree with me. You said it yourself. Boring.
Not because you know how everything works. But because its simplified redundancy.
It's worse now than when everyone just spammed yellow...