Regarding Global Cooldowns

[magictaquito]

Thank you for further explanation on this Max. Eager to see solutions for the current AP regen problems. The patch notes were appended saying AP would be fixed later. Would you be able to confirm that there is indeed a fix being developed, Max?

[nat3s]

No real concerns re GCD, it does feel slower, but if it helps in the long run, I'm all for it.

What does concern me is the AP starvation, it's a massive buff to dps AM/Shamans that were already the best solo roamers in the game, the AP drain allows them to have a bit more AP whilst keeping their victims on 0 AP almost permanently.

I play both an AM and a Shaman (and regen WH/WE of course) because of how powerful they are... But it's getting boring, solo meta hasn't changed in years and this AP nerf only helps to solidify it more.

[Spellbound]

It did broke allot of abbilitys and AP management tho.
Game feels actually alpha stage atm.
Can we get some info on this aspect too?
It would be great if BO aoe punt works without having a close range target again + it doesnt even punt the target it self...
And it would be great aswell to not have to change builds around just so we arent AP starved 5seconds in the fight.

There will be changes and adjustments to the short term issues going on right now that the team is aware of. I know it's frustrating as I'm playing daily and notice what you guys are talking about.

[Akalukz]

Ranked have been getting massive focus over the last two years, and its as dead as ever afloat despite several attempts of live-support. Where are the limmited development hours getting used, if you dont mind us asking from the community? Because we care, and we actually want this server to live long and improve. But right now all we get is some dirty Secrets laundry and mudwars while hearing the one coder is giving ultimatums to the rest of the team, something we had hoped this privateserver was long past.

oh and as for the GCD, i dont personally care. Im much more interested in a roadmap and future direction.

For the record, I've made no such ultimatums, that part was just completely made up.

Ranked got a lot of attention and development time around April-May 2021, and Season 2 was fairly active after that, Season 3 was even more active. But that game mode has barely had any changes in a year now. Can we just stop blaming Ranked for every other thing that hasn't gotten attention?

Ranked will continue to get dumped on because it seemed to be the beginning of the end of Nerfed Buttons. A lot of people play this game for the ORvR, and they grow bored or frustrated with the lack of attention/development of such. It's amazing how quick some things get done but frustrating how slow others are getting done, i am sure it is a fine line walk.

[sharpblader]

Thank you for the explanation and your approach to cater to the global audience.

As someone who neither plays from EU or NA and mostly with a high ping, I experienced no difference with the GCD change.

As a part of this community I would like to state that you don't owe any explanation to us especially when you work with such limited resources.

[Lokiusus]

While getting any explanation for the changes is great, the "we're doing this all for the future benefit, shut up and wait" excuse is worthless when it's clear that you: 1) didn't have all those promised future beneficial changes ready to go, 2) don't have the staff necessary to make those huge changes to the game in a short timeline while trying to unfuck all the current problems.

The game is DYING. Barely anybody will be around in 12 months when the "benefits" are implimented. Population is the lowest I can remember since probably 2016.

While I get wanting to make the game a more correctly implemented representation of AOR, you should've recognized that this game DOESNT NEED TO BE AN EXACT REPLICA.

And you should've thought to give people the chance to give their viewpoint on whether to implement such drastic and unfinished changes based on promises alone.

It's obviously your project to do with as you will, but without the community the server itself is worthless, regardless if its authentic to AOR or not.

[Dabbart]

Yea, this turned out pretty much how I thought.

Thanks for your time Team.

[warlover]

Recently, there has been some discontent regarding the way we communicated our recent changes and we’d like to thank you for all your comments and highlights on how much this means to you. We believe that the trust between the development team and the community should be always at its peak.

The recent changes that we pushed are part of a bigger effort on the ability system that would overall help the development of the project and the player experience in the long run. Thus, we initially refrained from sharing the bigger plan as it’s still in its earliest stage and at this very moment there are no observable benefits from it, but in the future, it opens several doors.

However, before we dig deeper into the global cooldown change, we would like to talk about the reasoning behind the bigger effort on the ability system and how that helps with future development and faster release of content in the future.

• Faster turn around time on ability changes
• Less knowledge required to do ability changes
• More consistent and accurate real world values from game data
• Easier way to recreate dungeon boss abilities, creature abilities and item related abilities
• Accurate ability and character window tooltips (damage and timers)
• Fixing some smaller nuances on how abilities worked

Lastly, we’d like to reassure you that we constantly strive to make the game better, create content, ease future development and bug fixing, however the tools that we have in hand are very limited and even created by our team over the years. Which is why some changes are introduced after many years of preparations. Moving forward, we will make sure to communicate game-changing implementations properly and firmly through our Community Management team.


In Age of Reckoning there was a 1.5 second global cooldown, which was pretty standard in MMORPGS and existed in games such as World of Warcraft. There was also the functionality to queue up their next ability so it would fire right as the global cooldown ended. This had the benefit of allowing people to queue the ability and have them fire at the same time with nice wiggle room for latency.

Why was the global cooldown changed to 1.1 seconds on Return of Reckoning?

When the ability system was implemented there was no support for the ability queueing system. The ability system worked by the client sending to the server the next ability to be queued before it was due to be sent, this could occur any time during the global cooldown. Then, because we didn’t support the ability queue system, the ability would be cancelled. So if people wanted to fire abilities exactly 1.5 seconds after the previous they would require impeccable timing and low ping. Therefore a period of 0.4 seconds was introduced, to allow the ability to be fired correctly when queued. This number was chosen because the client would usually send the queued ability around 75% of the way through the global cooldown. However, the drawback of this implementation was that people who had higher latency would fire the ability after someone with low ping and that the global cooldown animation in the client wasn’t the real global cooldown.

Why was the global cooldown changed back to 1.5 seconds?

When the Return of Reckoning ability system was implemented a lot of the design and implementation was based on assumptions. Systems didn’t work exactly how they were supposed to and workarounds had to be made in certain cases. When we originally started we were not able to do client side changes and any ability changes, either due to balancing or workarounds for limitations in our implementation caused the data which is in the client to be different from what we had on our server. Over time we gained the ability to do balance changes and did research on how the ability system on the client worked. However, now we have the burden of having people to understand how to implement ability changes twice and in two systems which work in different ways. This has caused a lot of problems, and the data has only become more and more out of sync over time.

We decided we needed to simplify this and decided to have one system which was used in both the client and server. However, because we do not have the ability to change the client code we have no choice but to implement a new system in the server to match the client. Another benefit of this is that a lot of unworking or bugged abilities would work correctly. One big example is that abilities for use for creatures in, for example dungeons, would be working with very little effort. A lot of work has been done to match the data so that changes we made over the years in the server were represented on the client. Part of this change is that a lot of the values in the client were designed around the 1.5 second global cooldown. Therefore we added support for the ability queues and removed the 0.4 second period in order for all the data to line up correctly. With a 1.5 second global cooldown the scaling on stats and weapon DPS matches, regardless if abilities are instant cast, have a cast time or are channeled abilities. This gives a more solid ground for balance decisions than making them on top of calculations that don’t really add up. Additionally, this would have the added benefit of being able to play nicer with players with higher ping, as we have a global playerbase.

Is it possible to change the GCD/what would be necessary in order to do so properly?

It is a giant can of worms to do it properly when you start thinking about it. We can scale the stat & weapon multipliers to match a different global cooldown duration. But if you scale stat multiplier down, should you also scale base damage down to match/be same portion of the damage? What about cooldowns, if cooldown was equal to 10 global cooldowns before, should it also be scaled down? What about dot/hot tick rates, usually they are 2 global cooldown durations, should they tick faster? What about buff durations, if a buff lasted 10 global cooldowns, should that also scale down? If dot tick rates are scaled to match the global cooldown, you have to adjust buff durations as many are coupled with dots. Then what about cost, should that also scale down? Doing less for the same cost doesn't really make sense.

All of these things really need to be thought about and a proper decision taken before doing that.
We would maybe have chosen a different GCD duration if we designed the game from scratch, but it would be a massive rework of abilities to change it currently.

We hope this gives everyone some insight into our process. We apologise for the delay in this post but be assured we wanted to consider all the factors.

All sounds good to me ty, now lets go play some War

[Sulorie]

While getting any explanation for the changes is great, the "we're doing this all for the future benefit, shut up and wait" excuse is worthless when it's clear that you: 1) didn't have all those promised future beneficial changes ready to go, 2) don't have the staff necessary to make those huge changes to the game in a short timeline while trying to unfuck all the current problems.

The game is DYING. Barely anybody will be around in 12 months when the "benefits" are implimented. Population is the lowest I can remember since probably 2016.

While I get wanting to make the game a more correctly implemented representation of AOR, you should've recognized that this game DOESNT NEED TO BE AN EXACT REPLICA.

And you should've thought to give people the chance to give their viewpoint on whether to implement such drastic and unfinished changes based on promises alone.

It's obviously your project to do with as you will, but without the community the server itself is worthless, regardless if its authentic to AOR or not.

The patch isn't about making RoR like AoR, it was explained a dozen times now by staff and other players, why GCD was changed.

[Akalukz]

I think if the GCD would have been the only thing, no one would have complained more than a day or so. But put with the AP change and well here ya go.