Thread: 2.0 Movement inertia: Removed

Originally Posted by Soukyuu

I don't see how realistic inertia animations oppose PvP. If anything, it adds a new dimension of skill, namely playing predicting the delays your body needs to get into position.

I understand why you'd think this, but it does not work that way. Adding in movement inertia does not increase the skill-cap in PvP (it actually decreases it in a sense), and I will try to explain why.

What adding movement inertia does is it adds in a game-enforced lag-time before a player can react properly to new information (in this case, usually substantially longer than a player's reaction time). That means that any player who finds themselves on the defensive side of an encounter (for example, a player is attacked by another while enroute to somewhere else) is at an extreme disadvantage because the time it would take them to react properly to the attack is significantly larger than their personal reaction time.

What this means, in the most basic sense, is that - all other things being equal (skill, gear, class balance) - the defender will lose, always. Forced reaction-lag-time mechanics, like movement inertia, remove the defender from the equation and create binary PvP encounters where everything relies on the successful execution of one player (the attacker), rather than of both players. To elaborate with a brutally simple model:

Consider a world where all players had two HP and one attack, which always dealt one HP damage. In this world we have two players who do not see eachother and are moving at random vectors. Then assume they both see eachother at the same time. Who wins?

The player who had the more advantageous initial movement vector (most likely towards the other player) will always beat the one who had the less advantageous (most likely away from the other player; requiring them to reorient themselves before they can attack) if there is movement inertia involved. They will always get their attack off first, bringing their opponent to 1 HP before they can respond with their own attack.

In a perfect world, the win-rate should be split evenly between the two players 50-50 in a way that ignores their initial movement vector given enough trials. In perfect "Skill Based" PvP, the outcome of a fight should ignore random factors determined before either player was aware of the other, and instead focus on each player's ability to successfully respond to eachother's actions. If random factors are not ignored, then the PvP becomes luck-based, rather than skill-based.

TLDR: Mechanics which cause game-enforced lag-times on player actions induce Binary PvP dynamics that either remove or lessen the impact of indiviual player skill on individual fights. Who lives and dies - all other things being equal (gear, skill, and class balance) - becomes lopsidedly dependant on the proper attack excecution of only one player (or luck), rather than both players.

If you're familiar with competitive Starcraft 2, spells like Fungal Growth and Forcefield have a simliar effect on competitive play (at least in certain matchups): they effectively remove one player's ability to respond properly in fights, leaving the success or failure of individual attacks dependant on the attacker's skill only, rather than both the attacker and the defender. (MouzCCMorrow on this issue: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/7180048170)