Kiting stuff, keep it here!

[Slayer]

Cading is love, cading is life.

Who doesn't like standing behind shielders an spamming left click for an hour and a half without moving and then loot a stag bow on your first run? I mean come on guys the game is very fair and encourages more work for more reward along with extremely well thought out tactics for holding down right click, pressing U and going AFK.

In all seriousness this thread isn't going to get you anywhere.

[The Cid]

In all seriousness this thread isn't going to get you anywhere.

Stubbornness is a funny thing eh!  I do hope Devs are taking notice, I love this mod and hate seeing the community leave.

[Marius]

link=topic=24687.msg230154#msg230154 date=1431256110]
recently i was on the server list, I thought to myself, well lets play some Ni. There was no a single server with players on, not even 1 ( it was 10 am GMT), and then i thought well lets kite then, but even tho there was a good map ( first def) i thought why would get try solo it to wave 19 or whatever, i wont get any loot ( besides 1 hm and a bear fur, hah!) and then die. I left the game and played something else instead. What im trying to say here is give us playable maps and xp and drops while playing solo back. Obviously team play is mre rewarding because higher drops come with higher waves, but still turn the xp back to before 0.7.0 and reintroduce kiting maps!
Else i see  that happening to alot other players aswell, keep in mind i play with top gear and lots of experience, that get me pretty far, other dont have that and get pissed off and then  quit.

Lets be honest, that won't happen ever for 2 reasons: Devs wants to make a team-based game and players acting like dicks, then they want to kite alone. Although, I do believe that kiting itself is a fun and necessery thing(all of that was mentioned before, dont want to repeat) and I can't imagine NI lasting long without it. So all in all, what I want to say is that there should be some kiting maps and maybe a bigger loot chance for kiters(not as big as playing with a team ofc).

[DR.]

Acting like dicks, then they want to kite alone.

I'm sorry But what do you do when you have a team of 4 or less.......
For some time zones that all we can do for most of the time so yes this is a problem. 

[McKiller99]

In all seriousness this thread isn't going to get you anywhere.

[[ASSASSINE]]

bump for this, besides kiteable maps, i would like to see brown mats  dropping again. If one solo to wave 16 or even higher, he deserves something for it!
still waiting for official statement

[MatthewO]

I would say that official statement is still the same "cading is love, cading is life"

[Marius]

link=topic=24687.msg231015#msg231015 date=1432210299]
bump for this, besides kiteable maps, i would like to see brown mats  dropping again. If one solo to wave 16 or even higher, he deserves something for it!
still waiting for official statement

New troop: Siege Masters.
Nord Chosen Pikemen have upgraded to a Sarissa.
Chosen Warriors now carry a shield and increase the damage output of nearby Nords.
Nord Heavy Battle Priests have stronger helmets.
Spawn of Loke have gained a bit more of Loke's athletics.

Here is your official statement.

[Kip]

I'll preface this by saying this is not an official statement of the developer team's stance, these are my personal thoughts.

I don't have a strong polar opinion about kiting one way or another.  I do see reasons for it but I also see reasons against it.

The main reason I see for kiting is to get servers started and to be able to do something during quite periods.  To expect a full team of players to all agree to start a Ragnarok at the same time is not very realistic.  A counter to this argument might be that the early waves should be easy enough for a small team to get through without much trouble but to have a point come where you need a proper team of players.

Moving to an extreme, I do not like the idea of one player being able to reach wave 20 of Ragnarok alone.  A team of well equipped players should be a requirement for getting to the end of the hardest mode of the game.  I'm not sure anyone here actually wants one player to be able to kite all the way to 20 but I might as well state my opinion while I'm at it.

One of my main complaints with kiting is that it relies on the fact that ranged players are faster than the bots and that the AI is too stupid to spread out and cut off the players running in endless loops.  It strikes me as glitching and something undesirable.  If our maps were long corridors with a fixed length, I might have a different opinion.  Granted, on some maps the cading strategy also relies on the stupidity of the AI since the bots don't flank around the sides of the barricades but in many positions, that is not a factor.

Another of my complaints about kiting is that only ranged players can participate - for the most part, only archers and pikemen.  I see this as a factor that might encourage players to ignore the slower tankier classes that are necessary for a normal balanced run.

One of the arguments in favor of kiting which I sympathize with is that camping does get boring after a while.  You are always standing behind the shielders and shooting at nords attacking them or slashing between the shields.  I would argue that kiting is very repetitive also and is not a great alternative.  If you are alone or in a well organized team, you are running around in the same pattern always shooting at nords, running away, shooting at nords, running away, until you finish the wave.  It could be argued that you need more skill to get headshots and stay organized but I still see it as monotonous.

Going back the the corridor I mentioned earlier, I'd rather see some sort of run where a full team of ranged and infantry make a series of tactical retreats from one impromptu camp area to the next as the waves are incoming.  There would be no real "base" that everyone stays in; much more of the map would be in use with more variety.  No for reality to set in - this has been a long standing idea shared by other developers and a good way to implement it has not been worked out yet.  It looks great in my mind but it is hard to make happen.

Back to kiting... I'm open to the idea that kiting can get you to a certain point and there might be some reasonable reward for your efforts but unless there is a way to prevent very small teams from obtaining it easily/reliably, I want that reward to be less than that of a team of various classes working together.  I really don't want people to end up scattering to many unpopulated servers and avoiding other players since they think they have a better chance isolated.  The role I currently see for kiting is an alternative that is less rewarding but doable for when there isn't a full team available.

I'll end by trying to gather my thoughts into a simple list of personal opinions:
- Small groups should not be able to reach wave 20 of Ragnarok reliably, our hardest mode, no matter how they play.  It is a battle against the Nord gods after all.
- Kiting can be useful for getting runs started.
- Kiting should give some reasonable reward.
- Kiting should not be more rewarding than a balanced team of various classes.
- Kiting is not an ideal alternative to cading.

Again, I am not speaking for the developer team, these are just some of my thoughts about kiting.  There a few arguments in there that are probably obvious and not in dispute but I've already typed them so I'll not bother removing them now.  I feel like there are still a few ideas bouncing around my brain that I did not include here but they will have to wait for another post.

[Malong]

- Kiting should not be more rewarding than a balanced team of various classes.

Though you gave the disclaimer that your post is not on behalf of the development team, I think many people still have to ask why about the above point. In many players' minds, the reward is based on the task, and the sum of rewards is not based on the number of contributors. In other words, if you perform a task individually or with a group, adding more people does not increase the total reward. If take on a contract to complete a project, your employer does not care how large your project team is, you get rewarded at a rate specified in your agreement.

IBT "well that's life and this is a game," you strive for realism in other aspects of this mod (e.g. "small groups of players should not be able to defeat gods"), and it's not like the action of loading NI makes us logic-less Swadians.

TLDR: "If N players can accomplish the same as M players, the reward should be the same, regardless of if N != M"