I think I still need a little fleshing out. Are you suggesting that people could earn contention points to qualify for a port battle without entering or engaging in PvP (until the port battle)?

I'm basing my comment on drifting MMO players on various numbers I've seen from other companies about what happened to their numbers when WoW came out.

Yes. WoW's budget was 65m, and much larger now with the extra years of development. What I fear is that the budgets are getting so high that making a return is difficult. I can't go much into the business side of things beyond that, because it requires talking about specific companies, but companies that may look like a solid success are struggling to earn back their original investment. This is especially true when they have marketing budgets more akin to console games (10+m marketing budgets).

I'm not sure I follow. What are you thinking when you say "alternative ways"?

I thought I would give you guys some behind the scenes on where we are coming from stylistically with the Avatar Combat. (at least from the animation side of things).

The closest thing that I have worked on to what we are doing now, is EQ and EQ2. EQ2 may be closer, but I spent more time on EQ (starting with PoP).

Before we got started animating, we were working with a local sword fighting troupe. They take their work seriously.
http://www.academiadellaspada.com/
Cecil is a nut who could probably kill you with a paper clip. They were really gracious in allowing us to observe their classes and video tape whatever we wanted. There is a deadly german school of fighting that I really wanted to get in game.

One of the things I took away from the classes is that real sword fighting is over in seconds. It's nothing like movies as you all have mentioned. So what do we take from movies and yet keep it somewhat historical? It's a real challenge. Throw in game engine constraints and it becomes a conundrum. People want to jump on tables, swing from chandeliers and get launched from cannons. So we really had to find a middle ground that will work in a game environment.

There's another engine problem going on; we had to turn off animation blending during combat, so visually transitions for one anim to another iare a bit jarring.

Right now we are working on a few different things that should present the combat in a better way. We don't have a time table to finish yet, but Rusty is always lurking behind us to get it polished and in game.

Btw,I just found out today that you can control click your prep attack so that it will automatically use that. If you haven't tried that, check it out.

I guess you're allowed at least one snarky post after so much great feedback ;-)

You totally just made my day. Thanks for reporting back!

I've already responded. Devlogs are an overview, not a comprehensive change list. They typically don't contain details on stat reductions because we want to make sure those are going in. There are decreases to Cutthroat DPS skills in 1.4, which I believe are in the second testbed release (which contains quite a few important changes). Some of the numbers in the devlog changed before it went live, just like the devlog warned would happen. If I engage in theorycrafting, it doesn't help you and it consumes my time. The most valuable feedback comes when all the changes are in testbed and people can try them firsthand.

Consumables worked that way a long time ago in beta. It created the opposite problem - if the heal was good enough to matter on a small ship, then it made big ships extremely difficult to sink.

Round every step. Each calculation is contained and must result in an integer, then add those integers for the final result.

Damage is floored at 1.