This is in part a response to the Kabam post
Why is it so hard to navigate input issues? But it is also something I've been thinking about for a very long time, and I have touched upon it from time to time, but never all my thoughts all in one place. I think now's the time.
A few months after the input system issues first emerged, I mentioned a potential problem I started worrying about. Because the game was no longer functioning consistently as it used to, but
relative to the players it was also not functioning consistently at all, what would this mean for players trying to adjust to this new situation? My worry was that because the game suddenly changed behavior in a very opaque way, players would not be able to simply correct for those changes. They would see that sometimes what they had been doing for years would work, and sometimes it wouldn't work. And rather than relearn a whole new game, they would instead lose confidence in what they had already learned without replacing it with the proper muscle and situational memory. And this would happen not just in the conscious mind, but in the deep muscle memory of the player that would not simply be rewritten.
That seems to be the case for me. To put it directly, I'm broken. And Kabam broke me.
Before the Unity engine upgrade, I *used* to know how to Parry. Meaning: I could Parry a champion I had prior experience with better than 95% of the time. I could learn to Parry a new champ within a few days to maybe a few weeks of seeing it. Once I got hit in the face a few times, I would learn the timing for Parrying that champ, and it would get permanently stored in muscle memory. If I didn't fight that champion for a long time for some reason, I could get "rusty" but a few more punches to the face and it would come back to me.
That's no longer true. I'd say my Parry accuracy is now 85-90% for the average champion, unless I fight them regularly. But even champs that were easy enough to Parry that I had a virtually 100% Parry rate against them I no longer have perfect Parry timing. I can go weeks without missing a Parry, but then miss five in one day.
And it is not just Parry. Back dash timing is like that, special chaining is like that, anything timing related is now like that. Whereas there was a time where there were some things I was really good at and other things I sucked at (it took a long time for me to learn intercepting and I'm still learning reparry) I now feel like all my standard timing skills are very brittle. They seem to work on some days, and simply fall apart on others.
I had one fight a few days ago in AQ where I missed a Parry, then tried to correct for that timing and missed the next one, then tried to flush my brain and just do it like I always do it and missed the third Parry. I *never* found the proper timing and eventually died. To a champion I have been fighting every day of AQ for like a year.
Is this me, or is this the game? Kabam says it is probably not the game, but they also say it is possible it might be. But that means there's two problems. First, I have no idea if my problems are problems with the game intermittently throwing me off, or just me having a bad day. Which means I have no way to know if I should just write off the problem or try to fix it. If I try to fix a problem that is not there, I will make it worse. And second, even if Kabam makes the game 100% perfect tomorrow, how will I know that? When will it be safe to tell my brain "if its broken, its you."
It will
never be safe. I will
never know that. Its been this way for years now. It has been this way for long enough that my brain has learned to not trust anything it sees in the game. And that's a problem, at least for me.
To be sure, this is not a problem that affects everyone equally. If you've just started playing the game, you have no prior mental scaffolding for this game. There's nothing that can get confused by the current rework. The current rework is all you will ever know. And top tier players can either relearn the game's new timing or ride out the problems because they are just that good: they see the problems, but they can either solve them themselves or make up for the occasional hiccough. And the super casual players that have been playing for years might not know anything is broken, because they never really spent enough time learning the old game with sufficient precision.
It is the players like me, who have been around for a long time, who have spent time learning how the game works, and have invested a lot of time trying to slowly sharpen their skills through tons and tons of repetition and experience and have struggled over time to turn themselves from average players into above average players due to that experience that might be seeing what I'm seeing. That built up something that can be broken in a way that can't be glued back together.
I'm not asking for compensation. I'm not asking Kabam to "fix" this problem, at least not in their current input system work. I don't think this *is* fixable in the current input system work. This is not me saying "here's a problem, and here's my solution." This is me expressing the idea that the input system calamity is not just about a broken piece of software that can be fixed. The war on input system glitches has casualties, and I think I'm one of them, and I think there are many more like me. While Kabam is trying to navigate the problem of fixing the input system, I think they are not fully acknowledging that the problems don't end for many players when the input system is fixed, if it is ever fully fixed. They'll still be broken. And frankly, if I knew how to fix it, I'd fix myself.
Maybe we're unavoidable and inevitable casualties of the problem. But we are just as much of a symptom of the problem as race conditions in the entity state table. And maybe there are crazy outside the box ideas that might help players like me. Maybe we need a rehab section of the game where Kabam can validate this fight with this champion verses that champion has been confirmed to have the correct timing for all sequences, and do this for a wide range of problematic champions, and then I can go in there like a tutorial and relearn how to play the game well enough to recapture that last 15% gameplay accuracy I lost without any doubt that if its broken, its me. Maybe we need a giant database of interactions known to be correct verses broken. I don't know: none of this seems practical, but who knows. How much resources should a game like this spend to fix a player like me? I don't have the answer to that question either.
It is hard for Kabam to navigate the input system problems, because they are a more complex technical challenge than they appear to be. But not to diminish those technical challenges, but it is ten times harder for me to navigate than it is for them. Given a choice, I would trade problems with them in a heartbeat. They are attempting to perform something akin to brain surgery on the game engine software. I'm attempting something akin to literal brain surgery on an actual brain while blindfolded. And a couple years on, I seem to be more qualified to do the former than the latter, because it seems I suck at the latter.
