My obligatory "I'm done" thread | Forums

[Archeun]

The game will never be what I want. There are simply too many issues and Ubisoft cares about the Git Gud crowd and not casuals. I played tonight for about 10 minutes. Was having a good time. Was up 6-0 on the board. That is until Shaolin came over. Got trashed by him. JJ showed up next. Trashed me. I finished the game and quit for the night. I'm sick of fighting these characters which are blatantly overpowered on purpose to ensure people purchase them. They are unbalanced and it's a well known issue that has existed since Centurion came. For the most part, I simply won't play until those characters are nerfed and/or chars I play like WL are buffed. I've come to realize I have better things to do with my time than play a game that is the only game that actually infuriates me. I've also taken up working out and I'm taking a MMA class twice a week. I'm far more concerned with being able to protect my family when America erupts into civil war than being able to Git Gud on a video game that has 0 impact on my real life.

[Halvtand]

Update! One week later!

Guess what!
Wrong, it’s still ****.
My KDR has gone from 0.84 in my opening post to 0.62 (over all down from 0.98-0.97)
Win rate has somehow gone up from 51.85% to 52.17% (over all from 54.1-54%)

So quite consistently I can get one kill for about every two deaths I have, and lose every other match. I have started to write down notable names of people I play with or against, just to check if I actually face new people or just the same old crowd. Turns out that over the course of one week I’m still facing the same people regularly (same guys almost every day). Of course there may be new people as well.
While I did enjoy a short reprieve from bottomscoring shortly after my first post, I chalk it down to picking up JJ, and my opponents still not fully understanding what to do about him.

Since then matchmaking has followed a regular pattern. I get a good match about once per day, against people I can sort of handle and with people who are probably more competent than I. This is then followed by a score of matches against people where I either cannot touch them as they parry and evade basically everything I throw at them, or I just about manage to claw out a kill (or takedown) for every third life I lose.

Conclusion:
The matchmaking system used in For Honor is piss poor, but we knew that already. This system does not take actual performance into account when it assigns players to matches. If it does, it does not do this over the period of a week, despite a sharp drop in KDR.
How is the matchmaking done? What is “skill” in terms of matchmaking? These questions have been asked on this forum numerous times and I think we’re approaching the time when we really should demand an answer. If “skill” is not in-game performance, what is it? Why is “skill” a factor in matchmaking instead of in-game performance?

Further testing
This week I picked up a new character (JJ), but with a familiar class. I’ve mained heavies since before this game launched and I know what my job in the game is. Perhaps this is the problem. Since I am able to read, and thus knows that a heavy should stand in a zone as much as possible to earn renown faster, even though my KDR is diving I can generally squeeze out about 300-400 score per game. It’s not great, but it’s something. Next week I’m not going to do that. I’m going to play my heavy as an assassin, avoid the zones and focus on fighting. My score per match should drop dramatically and perhaps that will make the system put me in a different bracket.

Based on personal experience, my win percentages tend to bump up after I drop the tryhard/sweaty approach. This is in literally any competitive PvP game. Human psychology is weird ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .

Human psychology IS weird. But it is not weird enough to alter reality. I could not parry light attacks before I dropped the trying attitude and I cannot do it now. In fact, I can only barely parry some heavies, that is if my opponent doesn’t lag too much. This week alone I’ve faced entire teams with pings jumping between 18 and 300. How they are not kicked out by the servers I cannot even begin to imagine. Yet my enemies seems to have no problem parrying the lights I throw out, or to dodge the bashes. I’m facing people that can defend themselves against what I put out, and I am not able to do the same. I simply lack the skill necessary to do it. Yet the game puts me in with these people over and over again. The only weird thing with psychology here is that I keep playing.

Come to the PvE dark side. Ubi doesn't want us, they give us scraps of **** in the form of arcade mode but we persist and are ever growing.

I've long ago thrown in the pvp towel and my stress level has dropped significantly. Arcade mode was just the dev team trolling pve players into playing more pvp. "Want a challenging ai experience? Instead of improving our AI we'll just make them incredibly powerful and broken. Now maybe you'll try pvp :3."

I did try to mainly play PvE, I think I did that for about a month or something. At least enough PvE to do all my orders and then a few matches PvP. The problem is that fighting bots in this game is dull. It’s just boring. Boring is the carnal sin of any action game. Level 1 bots could just as well not be there. Level 2 are too predictable and even level 3, due to their predictability, is not that hard unless they gank you. I mean, even fighting a player that is waaaay below you in skill is more fun that playing bots, because you can at least tell that the guy is trying.

It's just different than what game used to be year ago. It was close enough to real fighting that as someone who used to train HEMA, I started to enjoy it very much. Fights felt like well played chess matches, pace was slower but grittier, more believable. I would lose but there was always easy visible why and I was never mad or angry.

Thank you for writing this part. I think you’ve really put your finger on the problem. As I read this I got a flashback to just after FH had launched. I was playing and telling a visiting friend about what was going on. I specifically remember saying “You get all the info you need right on the screen, so if you die you know why”.
Now we have more reliance on bashes than ever, faster attacks. Feats that lets someone literally teleport in behind you and hit you, more soft feints (some even unreactable) than ever and just more stuff that makes that statement untrue. Heck, half of the time the “killer information” doesn’t show, so if you didn’t see what you died from, tough luck.
I mean, I get it, defensive meta was not fun. But after two years of “fixing” the game has become a huge mess.

[FrothingTeemo]

Game is flat out unbearable against other players. The queues are insanely long only to put me in against organized groups of maxed perk and gear people only playing the most broken characters who do nothing but run around in 3 man groups triangle ganking. The netcode is garbage and has 1 second plus input lag the majority of the time which isn't helped by all of the animation locking they built into the game which makes ganking way too effective and encouraged. If you get hit by a single light attack you can't ever recover in a fight with the way players behave in this game and how flawed the devs made combat.

Most of the game modes are dead as well the one time I managed to get into brawl before the queue crashed it took 16 minutes though the matchmaking being awful is likely to blame for this because I have been stuck in games with bots on my team for an eternity where it definitely just wasn't filling the roster with people waiting to be put in games.

[Jazz117Volkov]

The Wu Lin neatly embody everything wrong with the direction the game has taken.

The last few times I tried PvP the matchmaking took forever, and when I finally did find a game it immediately resumed because "the lobby was empty". I haven't been bothered since. Despite the best efforts of many on this forum, the game has slowly but surly migrated towards faster and cheaper moves. The style and aesthetic that was originally so appealing is almost completely absent. Barely holds my interest anymore.

For Honor has become little more than a meme farm.

edit And the one thing that could have given the game new life for players like me was Arcade mode, but that turned out to be nothing but a morbidly frustrating slap in the face. How such a poorly conceived sh!tshow of a mode got green-lit is beyond me. So many fantastic PvE examples on the market that would fit perfectly into For Honor's 4 player coop architecture, but no...we got the laziest, most unsatisfying, anit-player bullsh!t this side of a Steam Greenlight asset flip.

[Corentin10111]

Look at the number of players... The devs are digging for honor's grave deeper and deeper, the direction they take is always a bad one..
They are struggling to balance first season's heros: 690 days and it is still such a mess.. They are unable to balance the roster and will bring 3 new characters even if it will make the situation worse..
We would really like to hear their point of view on the subject on a warrior s den but instead of that we will have: "Hey it is Pope! Happy new year!! What about your hollydays Damien?" and then one hour of for honor memes..
THIS IS GREAT !! GOOD WORK GUYS !!

[Jazz117Volkov]

I understand your point, but the guys on the den are just doing whatever they can, and in my opinion they do a fine enough job. I enjoy the show. I think the problems with the game go a lot further back and are a lot more fundamental. In terms of aesthetic and atmospheric direction, it's been all over the place since before launch. The game they advertised and the game they sold were completely different. It's just gotten worse from there.

Mechanically, however, it's all inside out. The developers were not prepared for what the players would do with the game. In hindsight, it's obvious, but at the time...not so much. See, the faults in the design sit on the level of player intention. The game behaves correctly and plays well when both players are most invested in having fun. However, once the game got into the hands of the public and the "competitive players" it soon became apparent that the only thing players cared about was winning. This extreme motivation and the resulting gameplay tactics was not an environment the Art Of Battle was built to contend with. It completely fell apart overnight. The only thing competitive players will use is the safest option, so if we're not talking exploits, it's unlock-tech, and if it isn't those, it's zone attacks at max range with full stamina. Safest options. Always. This mindset forced the devs to rebuild the car while it was driving and everything interesting and unique about the Art Of Battle was put on hold: parries were weakened and the punch button was over-tuned to all fcuk. Because that was the safest option. Sort of a pattern, isn't it?

Early on the devs said they didn't want to restrict the players in how they play the game. This is code for they don't know how the game should be played. And it's not like I have all the answers, but I think for the game's sake, they need to be honest about who the game is for and how much fun people can have with it. The Wu Lin, for example, are fcuking awful opponents. Their kits probably have the highest viability at high level, and for this reason they're incompatible with the other heroes on a behavioural level. It's a sh!tshow, in my opinion. Yet, the only real thing the devs achieve is pumping more wild ideas into an already unstable mess. That, and nebulous stuff. All the battle outfits...oh my Jesus. In one month we'll have a new hero with a full list of shiny new problems.

[Lord_Vipes]

And this **** is why I prefer Vs Bot matches. Thankfully Ubisoft removed the fact you get lower loot/payouts if you do vs Bot, as well as the stupid contract restriction.

[Vakris_One]

I understand your point, but the guys on the den are just doing whatever they can, and in my opinion they do a fine enough job. I enjoy the show. I think the problems with the game go a lot further back and are a lot more fundamental. In terms of aesthetic and atmospheric direction, it's been all over the place since before launch. The game they advertised and the game they sold were completely different. It's just gotten worse from there.

Mechanically, however, it's all inside out. The developers were not prepared for what the players would do with the game. In hindsight, it's obvious, but at the time...not so much. See, the faults in the design sit on the level of player intention. The game behaves correctly and plays well when both players are most invested in having fun. However, once the game got into the hands of the public and the "competitive players" it soon became apparent that the only thing players cared about was winning. This extreme motivation and the resulting gameplay tactics was not an environment the Art Of Battle was built to contend with. It completely fell apart overnight. The only thing competitive players will use is the safest option, so if we're not talking exploits, it's unlock-tech, and if it isn't those, it's zone attacks at max range with full stamina. Safest options. Always. This mindset forced the devs to rebuild the car while it was driving and everything interesting and unique about the Art Of Battle was put on hold: parries were weakened and the punch button was over-tuned to all fcuk. Because that was the safest option. Sort of a pattern, isn't it?

Early on the devs said they didn't want to restrict the players in how they play the game. This is code for they don't know how the game should be played. And it's not like I have all the answers, but I think for the game's sake, they need to be honest about who the game is for and how much fun people can have with it. The Wu Lin, for example, are fcuking awful opponents. Their kits probably have the highest viability at high level, and for this reason they're incompatible with the other heroes on a behavioural level. It's a sh!tshow, in my opinion. Yet, the only real thing the devs achieve is pumping more wild ideas into an already unstable mess. That, and nebulous stuff. All the battle outfits...oh my Jesus. In one month we'll have a new hero with a full list of shiny new problems.

Levelling the blame for everything wrong with this game's balance squarely, and rather nebulously, at the "competitive players" is shooting far off the mark in my opinion.

First and foremost it was the developers themselves who pushed this game as an E-sport very heavily at the start of its life before they even knew what they had in their hands. You're going to blame the players, who had no control over the production and development of the Art of Battle system; instead of blaming the people directly responsible for pushing the E-sport agenda before they even knew what they were doing and had no clue what a balanced fighting system looked like. That's like saying, "screw competitive people for playing the game at a higher level than casual players! It's their fault I'm not enjoying the atrociously bad matchmaking system!"

You say that player intention ruined the design of this game but you're making the mistake of thinking the devs had no intentions of their own. And ultimately it's the devs that are 100% in charge of how the game is run, not the players. The devs always intended to foster a competitive playerbase because that's how you keep a PvP game like this alive for longer than a year. It's just that they were completely unprepared for the amount of work involved in balancing the mechanics of the game nor even what was required for the technical infrastructure. For Honor is frankly one big shot in the dark. The devs have always been throwing a bunch of stuff out there and seeing what sticks because nothing like this game has been attempted before. At this point in time I strongly believe that Ubi has decided that For Honor will just be one big beta test to gather as much data as possible for the production of For Honor 2.

As for the playerbase; there will always be people that play at a more competitive and dedicated level than the average casual player. That's been a fact for every PvP game ever made. It's the developers job to design ranked modes for these players to play - So far the FH devs have failed miserably at this basic task which most PvP game devs have no problem doing adequately within the first 3-4 months of trying. By now we should have had ranked Brawl and ranked Dominion frankly.

Furthermore it's the devs job to design good matchmaking that keeps high level players in competitive pools and doesn't let casuals be mixed in with them until the casual's MMR shows that they've made the leap to a higher level of play - another thing the FH devs have failed at. To design in-game tournaments, a spectator mode and generally facilitate the means for casuals and competitives to be clearly seperated so they can both enjoy the game at their level - another fail by the devs.

At the end of the day "competitive players" are just players like you and me. Most of them decided to dedicate the time and effort to know more about the fight system in this game than even the developers themselves. I too used to feel like player intentions and the win-at-all costs attitude was largely to blame but eventually I realised that it wasn't. There is no such thing as these "other players" that aren't us that can be pegged as the catch-all scapegoat for all the failings of the Art of Battle fight system. Truth is the fight system itself is responsible here. Player intentions are just a sympton of the ailment.

I hate to be the one to break it to you but the Art of Battle fight system isn't this perfect system that was just too pure for this cruel world of ours. It wasn't so much tainted by the intentions of players as it was gradually exposed for the flawed system that it has always been underneath. The Art of Battle system as it existed in its original form at launch is just a simple reaction test. Once you learn how to react to everything that's it. Job done. Game mastered. There was no depth to that kind of gameplay and that's why it had to evolve. That kind of evolution was inevitable otherwise the game would simply have died out after Season 2 because the lack of depth in the Art of Battle system itself would have killed it. Not because players had actually discovered that lack of depth.

You can't stop evolution but what you can do is provide feedback on what path the next evolution/refinement should take and hope the devs learn from their mistakes instead of repeating old ones and making more new ones than they know how to fix.

[Corentin10111]

At the end of the day "competitive players" are just players like you and me. Most of them decided to dedicate the time and effort to know more about the fight system in this game than even the developers themselves. I too used to feel like player intentions and the win-at-all costs attitude was largely to blame but eventually I realised that it wasn't. There is no such thing as these "other players" that aren't us that can be pegged as the catch-all scapegoat for all the failings of the Art of Battle fight system. Truth is the fight system itself is responsible here. Player intentions are just a sympton of the ailment.

You can't stop evolution but what you can do is provide feedback on what path the next evolution/refinement should take and hope the devs learn from their mistakes instead of repeating old ones and making more new ones than they know how to fix.

+999999

[Tundra 793]

You can't stop evolution but what you can do is provide feedback on what path the next evolution/refinement should take and hope the devs learn from their mistakes instead of repeating old ones and making more new ones than they know how to fix.

You're not wrong, but they clearly have only listened to themselves, Reddit and the competitive players thus far.

They didn't learn from their mistakes last year, can't imagine they'll start now.