ANARYU'S PROFILE

So much on this topic could be said...

Well, I can attest to the fact that just releasing games themselves is not nearly so popular a thing as releasing a demo or a lot of promising screenshots.

I think one fact that's been missed though; the audience that this was intended for, and the majority of those who post on it, are not the people who play your games.

The people who play your games are quiet, rarely comment, you wouldn't recognize their usernames, and are outside the little golden-age vs. new-age split that is thought to be so important and ground-shaking.

(Most of us active in IRC or the community forums are way too lazy and/or superior to care about other peoples games.)

comment=30553
I think everyone could benefit from an extension. Even if it's just 24h. Right now it doesn't seem unfair to anyone, because those who already finished did it way before deadline, and those who didn't are all desperate and considering dropping.

A 24-hour extension would mean sleep tonight.

l think you're right; we have the same ultimate goals but the middle-ground process is different for each of us.

For example, each of your mentioned methods is something I'd consider part of a prediction-based model:

1. Temporary taunt (how is this different from hate? I don't know any 'permanent' hate systems, most MMOs use a temporary taunt system as well, FFXI, WoW.)
2. Silence effect - These are nothing but methods to help you lead an enemies actions - a mage that is silenced doesn't likely have a high-level Holy Sword skill and high melee enhance stat. (And if they did, why bother with the status effect?)
3. Speed debuff - Again, you're working to assign the enemy to a slot location more advantageous that you KNOW so you know you'll get characters off first; if the speed debuff was random between 5% and 80%, would you use it? If you don't know if your character will go first, why bother debuffing speed?

I haven't played a lot of the tabletop RPGs out there, but D&D does reward and focus heavily on predicting/controlling the actions of your opponents; status effects to stop them from acting, forcing them to move to various areas or zones, or heavily penalizing them for walking through areas or taking actions, and many ways to force enemies to fight a certain "tank" or to ignore certain classes.

I don't think the 'risk' of the unknown needs to be so pronounced in RPGs; it's lead to a number of serious downfalls in the basic combat model:
1. Status effects usually being useless since they don't always hit and the most useful places (bosses) are usually immune
2. "Safe" tactics - Attack + Heal = Win - most secondary skills and effects are ignored, and if you require people use them to win, they have to guess how you wanted them to play (Hitman series anyone?) once they have guessed the ideal strategy... it's just memorization.

I think trying to get that feeling from Mega Man to an RPG Combat system would be a great ideal to reach for; you spend your time knowing 'what' you need to do, but doing it correctly depends on your focus and ability, not on random luck.

I get frustrated when I screw something up myself repeatedly, but I get angry when I didn't do anything really wrong yet I lose.


Also, curious about what I meant by "safe" strategy, the best example:

The damned table floor-boss in Persona 3 - up to this point the game rewarded me for being smart, I took the right people with strong elements into fights, and I was able to proceed with no grinding and really under leveled.

Suddenly floor-bosses got a new ability: Megi-spells.

These spells hit your whole team, can not be blocked or reflected, and damage can only be reduced by reducing their attack/accuracy stats, no one has defense against the spells. The ONLY viable tactic was to use a broken skill that nerfed their accuracy really hard-core (Ness mentioned she used this method to for most of the early game to make it all really easy) or to be able to out-heal their damage. Otherwise it was only a matter of time until the boss did the attack enough times in a row to completely wipe your team. (I got REALLY close once, but he used the spell 6 turns running!)

I could extend my life by bringing team members strong or immune to his other damage type, fire, but he would always eventually use it 3+ turns in a row and that was that.

I finally beat this using the old tried and true RPG method: grinding until I got the second level group-healing spell, the boss fight became a lovely slug fest of me healing my team with that skill every turn until it died through the rest of my team chicken-pecking it to death.

Ah, sorry, more to come; maybe have the first article briefly over all items and then each after expands on those with more detail and examples?

Otherwise reading just the first is confusing since I don't know what points and if I wanted to use this I'd be going in the wrong direction before the rest are released.

post=136956
Perhaps games can only have previews (as opposed to reviews) before they are completed/cancelled. These previews do not have formal ratings. Only once a game is completed/cancelled can it receive reviews that have formal ratings.

This.