The reason hard CC is disliked – at least from my point of view – is the sheer blandness of it. It’s not about losing to it. Beating a completely helpless, disabled enemy is hardly as satisfying as beating one that can put up a fight. It’s not fun, in other words – which is just one opinion on it, so no need for anyone to get their knickers in a twist about a different view. If it’s any consolation, I used to think hard CC was great, then I guess I grew as a person and realised, nah, the others who are saying it’s crap are actually right.

It’s not a case of avoiding its use either, since many spells and abilities, perfectly fine as they are, cause hard CC as collateral damage. As with many things in this game, self-balancing is critical to a challenging experience. You can choose to assign the farcically OP teleport skill (shouldn’t the teleport radius be based on aero point investment?) to just one character, for example, or simply not use it. Or you can very easily choose to turn your party into gods by abusing the overly liberal skill distribution system. But you can’t choose to not hard CC an opponent, as it’s tied in to too many spells/skills that are useful for other purposes as well.

It’s clearly a controversial topic. So it’s obviously something better handled by a mod. I’m hoping the API – or what I’d call an API anyway – for this game is a little more fleshed out than the comments on it suggest. I’ve never worked with a perfect codebase. My dev philosophy over the years has become: code needs more UX than any website or app. Nobody knows it’s just beans and toast as opposed to code caviar because it’s actually working. Then you crack open the hood…

As a cheat/hack myself at times of pressure, I know no developer is perfect, and it’s near-impossible anyway to make the perfect API/framework. But I’d like to think if I get involved in modding, I can actually apply useful, custom logic, and also build my own interfaces as you might with JS (and that game interfaces are not the result of some software program that auto-codes the UI via impenetrable, inefficient code-spaghetti).

In other words, it would be great to be able to make the game you imagine, as opposed to having to settle for the ‘safe bet’ that’ll keep the majority happy, and therefore willing to pay.

And the finances are more important: I can dig that.

The hang up about randomness in games is bollocks, though. You have to call a spade a spade. You don’t look at 90% probability in math, and write it off as 100% because it ‘might as well be’. It could be 99.9999% probability, and it’s still bloody well random, because only an absolute wackadoodle would say otherwise.

A random number generator generates random numbers: random. To look at it any other way is basically batshit insane. In fact if that’s your reasoning, you might as well just change your avatar to a bat and let the whole world know *coughs*.

To summarise the most critical points (as I see it) from this thread:

  • 1) There are great ideas here for an alternative to hard CC. If it’s too risky, I'd ask that the devs provide the functions etc that modders need to make this a reality
  • 2) Attacks to physical armour and magical armour should ALWAYS damage a percentage of real health, as it’s too simplistic as is. Again, if it’s too risky, I'd ask that the devs provide the fucntions etc that modders need to make this a reality, please & thanks