Target / Training Dummies Concept (with pictures!)

willymchilybily

willymchilybily wrote: »

you PC guys always forget console players without addons

Gidorick wrote: »

What do you mean @willymchilybily? This concept would be for everyone. Not just console or PC... no add-ons required.

Oh just that this is a great idea, and would be great for people who like minimum UI and console players who dont have addons. but didnt realise this post was pre console launch so was refering to:

dap_robertb16_ESO wrote: »

What would be the purpose of training dummies?
If it's just a dps test then there are already add ons that provide that information and areas with large HP enemies that provide good test subjects.

Gidorick wrote: »

And the purpose? Maybe someone else could answer that. I wouldn't use them. I just saw that people had asked for them and I had an idea.

Well, I WOULD get the costume for the humor of it.

must be a case of L2F (learn to forum) on my part, apologies.

Ziare0

This is a cool and awesome Idea I am totally on board for this!

LadyNalcarya

I think this post needs more attention
Very nice idea in my opinion, something like this would be really useful.

Gidorick

Thanks @KoshkaMurka. I sincerely hope ZOS devs have seen this. I earnestly believe these additions to ESO would be spectacular.

Especially the dead horse beating and costume. Heheh

I do hope that they don't JUST add them to housing. I really feel like the training out in the world should be interactive.

Spacemonkey

@Gidorick what I have trouble with, is that (and without wanting to take praise from you for you numerous idea threads):

I cannot fathom the creative team working on the game hasn't come up with the same, similar, or their own crazy awesome ideas. Most of this HAS to have been on the board at one point. There are too many great older games out there, too many precedents, and simply too many ideas to be had by anyone with a modicum of ingenuity. It's one of those reasons I don't spend my time posting idea threads with detailed annotations complete with mock-ups. If I thought it would give them the spark needed to add new content I would.

I still believe in the devs and keep telling myself they HAVE to have thought of all of this stuff, they can't just all be code monkeys, landscape artists, writers and voice actors.... can they? Seeing these types of threads make me wonder where the hell the game and level designers are?

Gidorick

I sort of agree @Spacemonkey, It's hard to believe that a creative design team from a professional organization staffed by people who have made these kinds of games before might not be thinking of these sorts of things... I have said many MANY times that we have only a few options as to why we don't have something

1. ZOS didn't think of it
2. ZOS thought of it and decided ESO didn't need it
3. ZOS thought of it and decided it was too hard to add (either because of coding difficulty or time constraints)

I honestly don't know which of these things would be worse. Especially with things like sitable chairs, underwater content, torches, and training dummies being almost generic staples of either TES games or MMO games.

I mean... dude... the second moon doesn't even have a reflection in the water. How does that get missed? I honestly would love to know! Did no one in ZOS ever say "hey... Nirn has two moons but we've only coded one reflection..." No... I'm sure they noticed it, shrugged their shoulders, and went on their merry way.

If ZOS is so apathetic about the design of ESO how can they expect players to be passionate about playing it?

The reasons I make these threads are:

• I'm passionate about the Elder Scrolls and truly believe ESO has the ability to be the definitive TES game.
• I get frustrated when playing ESO because of the lack of... well.. SO many things and this helps me "cope" with the fact that a game that I had really high hopes for just missed SO many things they should have been targeting for.
• ZOS needs to know their absence doesn't go un-noticed and that passion for ESO DOES exist... and hopefully that will inspire them.
• The vain hope that I just might give a dev some idea that sparks that creativity to make ESO what I honestly, truly believe it can be.

Like the costume part of this idea... has that ever been done in an MMO before? I feel like that's pretty creative. And fun!

Dawnblade

Spacemonkey wrote: »

@Gidorick what I have trouble with, is that (and without wanting to take praise from you for you numerous idea threads):

I cannot fathom the creative team working on the game hasn't come up with the same, similar, or their own crazy awesome ideas. Most of this HAS to have been on the board at one point. There are too many great older games out there, too many precedents, and simply too many ideas to be had by anyone with a modicum of ingenuity. It's one of those reasons I don't spend my time posting idea threads with detailed annotations complete with mock-ups. If I thought it would give them the spark needed to add new content I would.

I still believe in the devs and keep telling myself they HAVE to have thought of all of this stuff, they can't just all be code monkeys, landscape artists, writers and voice actors.... can they? Seeing these types of threads make me wonder where the hell the game and level designers are?

Someone earlier linked a comment and an old stream where the devs basically said it was on a list somewhere, it just continually gets pushed to a lower priority.

As far as the idea - it is very interesting though the part with light / hard attacks being auto / toggled doesn't make sense to me (though I might have misunderstood).

IMO - any and all combat against a dummy whether open world or personal instance should be fully player controlled using the exact same skills and keys / buttons as fighting an actual mob.

It might also be helpful to have either different dummies or ways to adjust dummy stats for different levels / HP / and other stats such as armor and resists.

Gidorick

@Dawnblade , the auto attack concept was pretty much the way I got around the idea that players would need to leave the training dummy UI to alter their skill bar. Since attacks don't really matter for accuracy, you hit or you don't, I didn't think it was necessary that players be the one to initiate the attacks on the target dummy. This leaves player interaction open to allow them to switch the skills on their skill bar while they're attacking.

It was an attempt to make the training dummy an efficient way to test multiple builds quickly.

NewBlacksmurf

I think the simple solution is coming. Floating combat text and then there's no need for target dummies other than for ppl who just want to sit in town trying out different things like we've seen in some other MMO's.

I just think the target dummies are a dumb idea for non-PC cause we don't have anything like damage meter add-ons to go back and see what they've done.

Gidorick

Perhaps @NewBlacksmurf ... I still think it would be a positive addition to ESO. All of it.

Spacemonkey

@Gidorick

Don't get me wrong, I love these idea threads you put together.
This mostly came from these same threads reminding me all the potential this game has.
It gets to me.

I guess I just have that inability to accept points 1-3, and believe in a 4th one, which is that , they're getting to it..... soon

Gidorick

Spacemonkey wrote: »

@Gidorick

Don't get me wrong, I love these idea threads you put together.
This mostly came from these same threads reminding me all the potential this game has.
It gets to me.

I guess I just have that inability to accept points 1-3, and believe in a 4th one, which is that , they're getting to it..... soon

And believe you me, @Spacemonkey, if ZOS ever makes ESO half the game it can be you'll never see me on here again. I'll be content in Tamriel. Like a guar in poop.

Jaeysa

Gidorick wrote: »

Like a guar in poop.

XD I needed that visual, thanks :-p

Finally at my computer rather than on my phone - I like the costume!

NoMoreChillies

good idea
standard DPS measurement is needed.
Healing and Tanking should get something similar

Gidorick

NoMoreChillies wrote: »

good idea
standard DPS measurement is needed.
Healing and Tanking should get something similar

Hmm... it seems that we need... THE MACHINE!

Dubhliam

This is a really wonderful and well-thought idea.

My only suggestion would be not making it player instanced(?) but to restrict dummies to Houses when the Housing system finally comes.

Gidorick

Dubhliam wrote: »

This is a really wonderful and well-thought idea.

My only suggestion would be not making it player instanced(?) but to restrict dummies to Houses when the Housing system finally comes.

This is essentially what it looks like they're going to do @Dubhliam , personally I would prefer that dummies, Tamriel wide, be interactive. Selling a personal house dummy for crowns, sure, but having them publicly available would keep players in towns more as well as advertise the dummies for the homes.

Generally, I don't think it's good to add features liked these that are ONLY in homes. Our encourages isolationism.

That thought is what lead to my concept on personal home crafting stations: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/208786/player-home-personal-crafting-stations-concepts/p1

Spacemonkey

Gidorick wrote: »

Generally, I don't think it's good to add features liked these that are ONLY in homes. Or encourages isolationism.

That thought is what lead to my concept on personal home crafting stations: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/208786/player-home-personal-crafting-stations-concepts/p1

100% on this. ESO is too, 'politically-correct-gamer-wise', in that it tries to apologize being an mmo to all the players that don't really like mmos. MMOs are all about interaction (for me). Well as it is 75% of the game has you being isolated. Caldwell Gold/Silver should never have been designed the way they were, etc... - not going to go further into that or I'll get lost ranting for a few pages.


I get that people want housing (hell I want housing), but if you give housing all the utilities you go to town for... why would you go into towns? So this is a very delicate feature to implement. There are a couple of things that could make housing useful/desireable (more than just for the sake of decorating and playing sims until you get bored of it) , housing could allow a kind of global store, where through a mail network you can put one item for sale, and you can browse what the rest of the players have put for sale - trophy room to store your item trophies that currently take up bank space - personal wayshrine working as 'recall' only - any other utility that doesnt replace something already in the world basically.


Training dummies (to get back to the subject), should as Gidorick mentionned, make use of the already present training equipment all over the world.

I dont even see the need to make it instanced. If someone's already on it, you can't use it. Find another. This WILL make those in towns fairly busy, but you know what? They should. And I want to walk past them and SEE other trying out stuff on it, it might inspire me to do the same or try new combinations etc... there are tons of these all over the maps. So there might suddenly be a reason to go back to all the zones (especially cities) to get access to one dummy that isnt being used. New ones could also be added to fighter's Guild locations and Undaunted. (not really hard to just pop a new dummy in game)

And @Gidorick's idea of selling a portable one in Guild Store is pretty neat monetization which has no impact on other's gameplay.

petraeus1

Gidorick wrote: »

I sort of agree @Spacemonkey, It's hard to believe that a creative design team from a professional organization staffed by people who have made these kinds of games before might not be thinking of these sorts of things... I have said many MANY times that we have only a few options as to why we don't have something

1. ZOS didn't think of it
2. ZOS thought of it and decided ESO didn't need it
3. ZOS thought of it and decided it was too hard to add (either because of coding difficulty or time constraints)

I honestly don't know which of these things would be worse. Especially with things like sitable chairs, underwater content, torches, and training dummies being almost generic staples of either TES games or MMO games.

I mean... dude... the second moon doesn't even have a reflection in the water. How does that get missed? I honestly would love to know! Did no one in ZOS ever say "hey... Nirn has two moons but we've only coded one reflection..." No... I'm sure they noticed it, shrugged their shoulders, and went on their merry way.

If ZOS is so apathetic about the design of ESO how can they expect players to be passionate about playing it?

The reasons I make these threads are:

• I'm passionate about the Elder Scrolls and truly believe ESO has the ability to be the definitive TES game.
• I get frustrated when playing ESO because of the lack of... well.. SO many things and this helps me "cope" with the fact that a game that I had really high hopes for just missed SO many things they should have been targeting for.
• ZOS needs to know their absence doesn't go un-noticed and that passion for ESO DOES exist... and hopefully that will inspire them.
• The vain hope that I just might give a dev some idea that sparks that creativity to make ESO what I honestly, truly believe it can be.

Like the costume part of this idea... has that ever been done in an MMO before? I feel like that's pretty creative. And fun!

This leaves out the arguably most important reason why some features weren't implemented: ZOS thought of it, but decided to give priority to other features/content. About a year ago on ESO Live, there was a section called Armchair Developer (we need more of those), where they explained the difficulties of designing underwater exploration and combat (from animations to a new movement system and AI for 3D movement of NPCs etc.), how much work it actually was and how much iteration it would involve to feel right (feel 'natural' doesn't mean feel good in for a player). From my experience playing GW2, underwater combat is very hard to get right and doesn't necessarily add gameplay value. I would love it if ZOS opened up Tamriel in ways like this, but I've got a hundred things I'd love to see, so do you and so does every gamer that plays ESO or designs it. ZOS only has a limited amount of people who can actually code these things, and they're also the people who have to work on bugs/performance/things that don't work as hoped or planned.

The idea of this thread is pretty neat, I'll give you that. But if there's one thing I've learned from playing MMOs and engaging with devs on forums, nothing is as easy to develop as it seems to gamers.

Gidorick

I would think

ZOS thought of it and decided it was too hard to add (...because of... time constraints)

Would cover that @Spacemonkey ...

But I agree and understand that making games is difficult. But the devs coming on and saying "but, water would be hard! " falls flat to me because there are SOOO many games that have done this in the past. Most of the things I post would not be breaking new technological ground.

And I personally think many forumers give ZOS way too much leeway when it comes to these sorts of things. We asked for a very long time for first person Mount riding. In one ES alive at some point some Dave mentioned they would like to add it, but it would require something along the lines of remodeling the horses... yeah this was before the b2p transition.

Well months went by, and a player figured out how to add first person mount riding to ESO. The amount of code it took him could be printed out on one sheet of paper.... I use this addon and it works wonderfully. The amount of code that it took wouldn't have taken a professional coder more than a couple of hours to write, if even one hour.

So why didn't ZOS add it before? I mean I'm sure they have their reasons... but it didn't require remodeling of the mounts. They look absolutely great in first person.

I think it just wasn't a priority for them. It was asked for enough that they felt they needed to address it and give an excuse as to why it wasn't added... but that excuse just falls flat.

So whenever ZOS gives a reason as to why they don't do something, I always take it with a grain of salt and I remember the 35 lines or so of code that has allowed me to remain first person while riding my mount.

Dubhliam

Spacemonkey wrote: »

...

I dont even see the need to make it instanced. If someone's already on it, you can't use it. Find another. ...

This is actually a very good idea, and could be implemented in a way duels will (should) be implemented.

The whole reason instanced dummy system is bugging me is that it would not "feel" natural. I want to be able to dodge roll, jump, run around the target if I wish.

Lenikus

Screw all of this, i want ONLY that costume over there.
And i'm happy with the game's state as long as i have that

Gidorick

Spacemonkey wrote: »

I dont even see the need to make it instanced. If someone's already on it, you can't use it. Find another. This WILL make those in towns fairly busy, but you know what? They should. And I want to walk past them and SEE other trying out stuff on it, it might inspire me to do the same or try new combinations etc... there are tons of these all over the maps. So there might suddenly be a reason to go back to all the zones (especially cities) to get access to one dummy that isnt being used. New ones could also be added to fighter's Guild locations and Undaunted. (not really hard to just pop a new dummy in game)

You know I considered this when I was first writing the concept almost a year ago now. The reason I went with instanced training dummies is because I figured we would get players moaning and complaining that they could never find the training dummy to use.

You have a really good point about seeing players use the dummies and being inspired. Because even lead to conversations about builds and whatnot... I could see perhaps shirt and training dummies not being instanced like those at guild halls. But we couldn't have it to where all training dummies where one person use. Imagine if you couldn't use a crafting station if someone else was using it. That seems like undue frustration for the player to me.

Gidorick

Lenikus wrote: »

Screw all of this, i want ONLY that costume over there.
And i'm happy with the game's state as long as i have that

Someone else that really loves the idea of that costume. Awesome!

petraeus1

Gidorick wrote: »

But I agree and understand that making games is difficult. But the devs coming on and saying "but, water would be hard! " falls flat to me because there are SOOO many games that have done this in the past. Most of the things I post would not be breaking new technological ground.

That code is not public nor universally appliable. Sure they can do underwater content, but making ~50 new animations just for humanoid characters (which they can't copypaste), redesigning all spell effects (which they can't copy paste) etc. (with all due Q&A and iteration), is that worth it? I'm pretty sure Matt Firor and Rich Lambert have a pile of ideas for ESO and could be adding stuff to the game for 10 years before taking any forum suggestions. The first-person mount thing I agree on, that can't be much work, but I've seen your Concept Repository @Gidorick There's a lot of cool stuff in there, but also a lot of terribly ambitious stuff, and even if they decide to implement concepts such as this concept about target dummies, it would come alongside their DLC schedule (aka their revenue stream), whenever they can spare a dev. It may be disappointing, but imo understandable. I don't feel like I'm giving them too much leeway. I have no insight in their development schedule, the amount of projects they're working on and the amount of moving parts those projects involve.

Gidorick

Sounds to me like you really drank the koolaid of that armchair developer @petraeus1 . I love it when they say things like "We'd have to make like 50 new animations for that" I just think... "don't you have a team on your staff who are dedicated to making animations? Isn't that their JOB at ZOS?"

ANYWAY... we've diverged from this thread topic enough. If you want to continue this discussion we can go over to some thread that's dedicated to the discussion of ZOS' performance. Let's re-rail this thread toward target dummies.

Gidorick

Dubhliam wrote: »

show previous quotes

Spacemonkey wrote: »

...

I dont even see the need to make it instanced. If someone's already on it, you can't use it. Find another. ...

This is actually a very good idea, and could be implemented in a way duels will (should) be implemented.

The whole reason instanced dummy system is bugging me is that it would not "feel" natural. I want to be able to dodge roll, jump, run around the target if I wish.

@Dubhliam Dodging and rolling is important when attacking a target that can't and wont attack you? Just for the fun of it? It wouldn't frustrate you if every time you went to a target dummy, someone was on it?

deleted220701-004865

A tip for ZoS: In order to motivate the largest amount of players to want to beat up target dummies--make sure they look like Argonians. That would be sure to incite rage in the mass populace.

Argonians: Nature's Punching Bags.

Gidorick

LOL @Tondodino ... I like that idea. I think that would be a PERFECT thing for personal homes. Have these "regular" dummies for public use but then let players buy "Men" dummies (the regular ones) "Mer" dummies with wood ears, "Orc" dummies with wood teeth, "Khajiit" dummies with wood ears and tails, and "Argonian" dummies with horns and tails.

hehe.. I like this idea.

Spacemonkey

Gidorick wrote: »

You know I considered this when I was first writing the concept almost a year ago now. The reason I went with instanced training dummies is because I figured we would get players moaning and complaining that they could never find the training dummy to use.

You have a really good point about seeing players use the dummies and being inspired. Because even lead to conversations about builds and whatnot... I could see perhaps shirt and training dummies not being instanced like those at guild halls. But we couldn't have it to where all training dummies where one person use. Imagine if you couldn't use a crafting station if someone else was using it. That seems like undue frustration for the player to me.

Well there's 2 things.
1) Like I already said there are a LOT of dummies already in the world, so it just adds incentive to find your own less-traffic heavy training spot in a more remote area of a non popular zone. Breathing a bit of life back into those 4th/5th Alliance Zones.
2) I personally wouldn't get frustrated to have to go out of my way or wait my turn for dummies. This isnt like crafting. There's is no hurry and if you really need the dummy for respeccing needs than it should be much of a hassle to travel to a less popular zone to find an unused one. But I do understand the whole showing off part AND the lazy attraction of simply going to (i.e.) Elden Root's training area and unleashing crazy combos to wow those looking and being close to the respec altar. To this, I don't think that many would really be frustrated (already if it's in the game it would be quite nice!) - but also opens the door to the implication heavy question: Why should only one person be able to target a dummy at a time. (in real time)

To this question I add:
- If you are not grouped, sure the animations won't be as special because others are mixing their own so visually you no longer look as awesome or neat (or quite the contrary) - but that's it. You still see proper numbers, and had the usage proper out of the dummy.
- If you are grouped and others of your group attack same dummy, you now see the GROUP DPS etc... letting you test stuff out for tough trial, vet dungeons etc... bosses.
- Although now with this new development I do agree ; with where this is going, 'training grounds' areas (large undergrounds in fighters guilds) could be interesting, and perhaps instanced, adding multiple mechanics like dummies with different resistances - regens, multiple dummies etc... but that's the idea running away with me a bit, imo