The Magic Man wrote:

Stephen001 wrote:

Actually, I guess movement then play the tutorials.

To be fair, the game is not the sort of game that would facilitate a tutorial.

The controls are simply, and consist of a mouse button, and... 6 keyboard keys.

The objective is also very simple. If it is deathmatch mode, kill the enemy. If it is proection mode, kill the enemies king.

As I said, I can add help to make this stuff more obvious.
But that is all I can do. I can make it easier for them to learn how to play, but I cannot make them good players.

I can tell someone that riflemen shoot small guns, tanks shoot big guns, and planes drop bombs. That doesn't magically turn them into a military genius like Sun Tzu, capable of winning any war.

It just means they know what they are working with. Not how best to and when best to use it.

Which is the same case here. While in practise mode, I can tell them, use the mouse to move, click enemies to target them and so on.
But I cannot make them good at playing the game.

Knowing how to play in the basic sense not surprisingly makes the difference between being able to play well and play badly.

Alathon wrote:

* Mouse clicks operate both to move and to target. This results in frequent misclicks. Bad bad bad.

You can drag the mouse around after clicking to move.
Also the space bar can be used to target an enemy as well (only the closest to you however).

* Target indicator is small and blends in with some characters / some environment.

I can easily make it more apparent and easy to see.

* Abilities that can target yourself don't get used on yourself if you have no target. They also don't let you click the ability then a target.

I can make it so abilities with a friendly target get used on yourself if you have no other friendly target set.

* Abilities you can't use aren't greyed out, which often makes it difficult to figure out if you can use an ability or not. You both have to look if you have enough MP, and then if its not on cooldown - Thats two looks away from the map in an action-based game.

That I'm not sure I could do effectively.
Ability cooldowns are purposely not on a timer, but when you attempt to use them they make a check against world.time. I could possibly make them use spawn() and change their icon when they are on a cooldown time, but I did not make use of spawn for efficiency reasons. It is better to be safe than sorry.
I will look into it, if it does not effect the game in anyway there is no reason I cannot do it.

Same for spells and lack of MP, I can probably have spell icons greyed out when you lack MP.

* The help files aren't presented to you unless you decide to visit the 'Help' menu up top. This is bad. Why is there no help file upon simply joining the game?

As I said, I will fix this.

* Why is there no 'Getting started' helpfile? I had to do a combo of going back and forth between the two working helpfiles, to figure out how to play the game properly.

Getting started how?
But as I said, while in practise mode, I will add messages when you are playing, so you know how to do stuff when the time is appropriate.

* Why is there no overlay on top of the ability icons, that shows what number an ability is?

Can probably do this.

* Why are you even shown abilities you can't use because you haven't skilled them up?

Can make them greyed out.

* Why don't the normal keyboard 1-0 double as the same as the numpad 1-0 for using abilities?

Either you have some strange keyboard, or two right hands. How could you possibly use a mouse and a number pad at the same time :[?

* Why can't I rebind what keys abilities trigger off? If you notice, DoTA, which you're imitating, uses Q,W,E,R,T,Y because that area is a natural area to have your left hand placed.

You can. They are just macros, and control_freak is not enabled. I can change the default keys if people want it though.

* Why is there no map of how the whole place looks? Its pretty hard to figure out even a general direction of where you want to go, when you have no clue how the map works. Don't need a minimap, just a total map that shows the environmental layout.

I could make a minimap, not exactly sure where I could put it however.

Zaole wrote:

in addition, the controls are really unintuitive-- it doesn't matter if you have a 1,000 page helpfile when the controls are so weird and strange that a 1,000 page helpfile is seriously necessary to figure out how the game works. nobody wants to read a book to play a game.

Ok then. Suggest a better control scheme.

But I have to be able to...

1. Freely and easily move around with minimal chance for mistakes. In fast, action based combat I do not want to be continually making wrong moves, and if I do, I want to be quickly able to correct myself.

2. I only want to use 2 hands, not 5, nor do I want to have to move my hands around the keyboard a lot.
I need to be able to move, use upto 5 abilities easily and target and click on specific things on the screen instantly (even if there is for example 20 things on screen, I want to be able to quickly and effortlessly select one of those 20 things).
Without moving my hands around the keyboard much.

The Magic Man wrote:

Zaole wrote:

in addition, the controls are really unintuitive-- it doesn't matter if you have a 1,000 page helpfile when the controls are so weird and strange that a 1,000 page helpfile is seriously necessary to figure out how the game works. nobody wants to read a book to play a game.

Ok then. Suggest a better control scheme.

But I have to be able to...

1. Freely and easily move around with minimal chance for mistakes. In fast, action based combat I do not want to be continually making wrong moves, and if I do, I want to be quickly able to correct myself.

2. I only want to use 2 hands, not 5, nor do I want to have to move my hands around the keyboard a lot.
I need to be able to move, use upto 5 abilities easily and target and click on specific things on the screen instantly (even if there is for example 20 things on screen, I want to be able to quickly and effortlessly select one of those 20 things).
Without moving my hands around the keyboard much.

I don't know about you but, when the controls of a game use such keys as WASD, my fingers on my left hand typically rest there the entire time. I do not see what the problem is, why can't the movement use the keys I suggested while the mouse does everything else?

SuperAntx wrote:

The Magic Man wrote:

I could make a minimap, not exactly sure where I could put it however.

You could use one of those big empty black boxes.

They're not always big empty black boxes.
I currently use opacity for a reason, the map has a lot of secret tunnels. They are secret for a reason. If I turned opacity off for trees they would be in full view, not very secretive anymore. And I do not know of many methods of making secret tunnels secret while you can see everything.

Also, when they are not big empty black boxes, they are actually part of the screen.
Depending on where the map is put it could obscure player vision of certain things.
This would give some teams unfair advantages depending on the situation.

<--- HSP and home-schooled = abnormality.

Sounds like you're using the shortcomings of your own movement system as a deterrent for WSAD controls.

If you think targeting with the mouse, moving with WSAD, and using 1-6 for abilities is impossible then you have obviously never pvp'd on World of Warcraft.

If you are planning on changing the control scheme I suggest offering a choice of the two. I find it easier to move with the mouse and use my left hand to use abilities, but that's because I used to play Guild Wars a lot and I got used to a particular control scheme.

SuperAntx wrote:

Sounds like you're using the shortcomings of your own movement system as a deterrent for WSAD controls.

If you think targeting with the mouse, moving with WSAD, and using 1-6 for abilities is impossible then you have obviously never pvp'd on World of Warcraft.

WoW uses pixel based movement, and runs at more than 10 FPS.
If I make a mistake with movement in WoW I am not twice my bodies length away from the enemy, I am a step at most. And I can quickly and easily correct myself.

Correction: Sounds like you're using the shortcomings of your own finger dexterity as a deterrent for WSAD controls.

Just because you can't control your character doesn't mean you should gimp everyone else with a horrible movement system.