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zannon
My view of why I find PK, as a stand alone facet of CF, to be boring, is a bit more flushed out in posts below. Again, the types of games I enjoy aren't the FPS type where it's just a kill or be killed type competition. I enjoy the RP, and PK only as it relates to the RP environment. But say CF existed where you could log in at 51, all skills at 100%, and everyone has a default set of hero gear, and they just ran around playing a king of the hill or capture the flag style game. I'd never play it for very long because it's just not interesting to me. Others may find that exhilarating and that's perfectly fine. But I enjoy the ability to immerse into CF, not just the aspect of can I kill character X with my character Y.

I think people would find this fun, in that people found POS (not quite this but close-ish) fun. And people find FPS's fun. Some even have long term engagement, but if X beats Y every time and you can't vary your tactics, then this becomes boring quickly in exactly the ways you've outline.

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zannon
But here is something to consider, that ties in to some of the video stuff I see above.

Take your orc example. The orc may have a variety of tactics which require you, in playing the orc, to figure out how to optimize them against a given opponent. That's fun for you. However, once you've figured that out for a given opponent, 90% of the time you're using that same pattern, because it is the most effective. Now to some extent circumstances may alter this, but in general, where bash is effective as an orc, you're spamming bash, to the exclusion of maybe the 30 other commands you could enter. So once you know what to use against my char (be it from fighting me or similar chars) reliably all I will see from your char is that script. Will this force me to alter my methods from what I've found to be optimal, to a less optimal strategy? Not at all. I'll still use what I've discerned as the most effective tactic as my disposal.

I believe, in this example, you are still trying to execute your optimal strategy, and I'm trying to execute mine, however the interesting facets come in "counterplay" which is in a video I think I linked to. I want to bash, you want to sing, so you reduce. I can't bash and flee, I reduce, you enlarge twice, now I'm bashing ineffectively. Or maybe you get a chance to sing sleep. Maybe you know I'm going to flee if you hit echos, so you're optimal strategy changes to find a way to make fleeing/running away bad or punishing while also getting echos on me. I fought a lot of bards as Krunk, and they were generally meat, but there were that way exactly because they tried to execute their "optimal" strategy without adjusting it as I adjusted mine. As a counter example, I fought Venara a few times with other characters and generally speaking the kinds of things I usually could do with bards just didn't work at all with Venara. That bard had a fundamentally different strategy vs. most bards. I died to her doing sing sleep. I died to her when she just out melee'd me with pets. I died to her where she wore me down and then sing sleep weird scarab power. I died to her when she nuked the shit out of me with songs and with staves in situations where I wasn't expecting massive damage. I also killed her by way of shieldbash, which everyone "knows" sucks, because that was exactly the kind of thing she wasn't expecting. I believe there is (generally) more depth here than you believe, but then you aren't in it for the PK, so your goals are different.

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zannon
Just because you don't feel your fights are scripted does not mean your opponent does not feel they are. Fire giant sword spec, is there really anything besides bash and flurry? True, some build have diversity, but in the end, they fall into predictable patterns. I'll say Flaayin was clever in maximizing his build, however every single time I fought him was literally the exact same. Knockout, clean out inventory, mind control, set traps and so on. I have never known a single character to attempt to utilize sub optimal tactics because they would make a fight more interesting. They'll go with whatever grants the greatest chance of winning, which almost always follows the same exact script every time you encounter them.

There is more to a good fire giant sword spec than bash bash flurry, yes. The trick is finding the counter that makes that strategy no longer an optimal one for that build. That can be difficult depending on what you are playing, but vs. a competent bard, I would assume that strategy results in fire giant death more often than bard death, because they *can* counter. Stealth in CF feels a little broken to me because there are not really good countering options, or where they exist, it just means you don't fight, or the stealth character doesn't fight.

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zannon
This has held true almost universally across CF for me. Having 30 skills is meaningless when one is optimal above the other 29, and most people in CF by now know what the optimal skill is in a given situation.

Group Pk varies this to a degree, but I see more and more CF being a game of single rather than group combat, which makes the flaws in the PK system way more apparent to me, hence the scripted feel. The chaos of a 4 v. 4 is fun because there are a lot of variables both sides are trying to adjust for, and that requires attention and thought. In 1 v. 1, or 2 v.1, this is simply lacking to a very large degree so as to render the interaction boring to me.

If one skill is always optimal above the other 29, than that is indeed boring, and bad design. That's part of why I rail against the design of paladin. The number of times strike of faith isn't the optimal strategy for two-handed paladin (in a world with 2 round wrath) is vanishingly small, and you have very little to counter if they can counter your strike of faith (via disarm or whatever). But, perhaps paladins are CF's noob tube.

I also agree that CF has been slowly but steadily moving from group play to solo play, which started with a focus on single PK combat and has slowly crept into every facet of the game. I'd love to see that movement arrested and reversed, but I'm not in a position to do so.

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zannon
Now, maybe as the player of the orc this is engaging because you vary based on opponent, but from the POV of the person you fight, you'll use the same thing every time, because you've determined it to be the most effective. Once you play CF long enough, there are very few surprises, and you know what works. So in that sense, for me, every encounter with an orc feels scripted. I would generally say 99% of all orcs I ever fought in CF used three commands. Bash, fallback, spinebreak (and maybe trample to wake up someone). If things go south maybe they flee and chug blood, or quaff. And that's it. Sure they have lots of unique and interesting things they can do. But who cares if they're rarely if ever actually utilized.

I could script I'd say 90% of any 1 v. 1 fight I would have as a bard vs. most any char in the mud.
Yes, playing a non-bard might change my perception for a bit, but it would be temporary and I'd still wager tactics would not vary all that much on a general level.

This is old CF advice, but if you think every orc vs. bard fight is essentially scripted, you should play an orc. Yes, some of those will be straightforward, and you'll laugh at how stupidly easy it is to kill bard, right up until you run into one who is doing something unexpected. Then you not only learn how the fight *can* be more dynamic, but also how to improve your bard play.