Originally posted by Zorndorf

Without crowd control (CC), your game quickly becomes a meaningless zergfest.

As in "bigger group that gets heals wins ...".

Exciting for 2 minutes and then you Yaoiwn. (pun intented).

 

CC that doesn't allow someone to tear me to shreds at the same time is fine, but stuns that allow someone to be utterly destroyed without them being able to control their character are not.

There's no single answer, because of how many factors are involved:

Fight Length: In a game with 2+ min long fights, 10 sec of stun every so often is perfectly fine.  In a game with 3-second fights, 1 second of stun is overpowered :P

Frequency:  A 2-sec stun is not acceptable if it's on a 3-sec cooldown.  Same goes for having a variety of CC moves which can be chained.

AOE: A 2-sec stun on a reasonable cooldown might still be overpowered if it's AOE and then you can stack a bunch of teammates together to perma-stun a large group of people before they can react.

Cast Time:  An ability which instantly stuns someone is much more powerful than the 3-sec cast which may be interrupted.

Very rare abilities (something only one class might have) could even surpass the normal acceptable stun duration.  If the opponent spends 6 seconds casting a spell to stun you 6 seconds, he'll have basically stunned himself for 6 seconds (and during your 6 seconds of stun you might consider actually interrupting that guy next time.)

Magnitude:  A stun completely prevents you from playing and should have the shortest duration, but less potent CCs which lock you out of only certain capabilities can have longer and longer durations (such as being hit by a move which adds many seconds of cooldown to an ability you just used -- so you can't use it for an extra long time but the entire rest of your character works fine.)

WAR's solution to CC was particularly terrible.  They give many classes a ridiculous ability to spit out CC effects, then make players immune to CC for 20 secs after being a victim of CC...resulting in your abilities not doing their full effect most of the time.  It's much better to drastically limit the CC moves available to a class, but have them work every time as advertised.

To put simply: The lengeth of the stun would depend on how fast the combat is. Thus it's not dumb in most games. In fact in pretty much every MMO I've played, and I've played a lot... the stuns have been pretty right on.

Anything that nulls player input [and thus skill] doesn't belong in competitive (read: PVP) games, period.

Ahh, how I miss you AC1.

Originally posted by osc8r

Anything that nulls player input [and thus skill] doesn't belong in competitive (read: PVP) games, period.

Ahh, how I miss you AC1.

Agree, I can't stand the stuns in games unless it is completely pve based.

DAOC did stuns/mezzes right, no games come close since.

Originally posted by osc8r

Anything that nulls player input [and thus skill] doesn't belong in competitive (read: PVP) games, period.

Ahh, how I miss you AC1.

Preparing your character to defend against and respond to CC is an essential skill in pvp. If you don't you die, and your credibility to define skill is in question.

Originally posted by osc8r

Anything that nulls player input [and thus skill] doesn't belong in competitive (read: PVP) games, period.

Ahh, how I miss you AC1.

Nah, you can nullify player input in competitive games without ruining things.  The problem is that too many MMORPGs have extreme amounts of CC flying around (to the point where it makes the game shallow; or simply not fun.)

The Fighting genre is one of the most competitive out there.  Most Fighting games have knockdowns, throws, and combos, all of which prevent the victim from controlling their character (although the better ones involve a combo-breaker-like mechanic, giving you one option while being the victim; ideally this option costs you some super meter.)

I finally quit DAoC after 4 years because of CC. Every battle in open field combta went exactly like this:

One group AOE stuns/mezzes other group. CC'd group purges and then is instantly AOE CC'd with something else on another timer. While cc'd group is busy getting rid of cc effects they're already half dead.Group that got CC off first wins unless they are borderline retarded and have no idea how to play.

I gave as much as I got and it just got to the point that battlefield skill became irrelevant. If your group had to fight another group after the first fight, even after healing up, you were dead because insta purge had a decent reuse timer. Almost every alb gank group I played with in NF, over the last two years I played, had the exact same makeup. Tanks were irrelevant, period. Sorcs, wizzies clerics and minstrels. If you weren't one of those you might as well not bother with trying to find an open field party. Thirteen classes and most people had to play 1 of 4 to have a chance at playing. There were one trick ponies, like a reaver bomb but that was good once every 15 minutes. Considering most group v group fights lasted less than 30 seconds with a good group much faster than that, it was pointless to play something that didn't have the i win buttons of CC. Don't have a sorc available? You're sticking to keep defense or zergs only. 

To the OP, if a 2 sec stun peeves you, try playing against one toon that gets an instant cast AOE stun  that lasts 10 seconds and insta AOE mez that lasts 30 seconds. Open rvr was always a toss up so I ran in a gank group that specialized in rushing up to a keep, wipeing 8-30 people standing outside and rushing off before the enemy ever knew what hit them. The ONLY defense to our strat was purge and hope you were close enough to the gate to get inside the keep before you died. 

Originally posted by osc8r

Anything that nulls player input [and thus skill] doesn't belong in competitive (read: PVP) games, period.

Ahh, how I miss you AC1.

Ahh, Asheron's Call...those were the days.

Originally posted by Kyleran

DAOC did stuns/mezzes right, no games come close since.

Thank you for your most profound and informing  post to this thread. I did not play DAOC and still have no idea what you mean.

Developers masturbate furiously every time they think up a new way to put stun in a game.

i miss the days of old eq when enchanter could charm  people and make them run into lava, so a 2 sec stun is nothing,

people that cry over crowd control just take away from how devs can make the game more fun for "enchanter" type of classes

now every one has to be able to run and jump around all they want cause losing control of there character for 5 seconds is

the most unreal insult for players...if the class has charm skills stun skills that make them fun in pve taking that away for pvp is

stupid, and kills the fun of playing that class so i say keep the crowd control classes in games and keep them fun.

Originally posted by osc8r

Anything that nulls player input [and thus skill] doesn't belong in competitive (read: PVP) games, period.

I agree 100%.

If the only way that a class can win a PVP encounter is by preventing their opponent from actually playing their characters; it's just a seriously badly designed class imo.

I'm cool with some crowd-control mechanics; I don't mind snares/roots, as I can still fight back while snared/rooted. I don't mind forced positional changes (like being knocked away or pulled towards the opponent) providing that I can still fight back while in the air. I'm cool with being debuffed or having access to certain skills temporarily removed like single-school silences since I can still use my other skills to survive/fight while I wait for my others to unlock.

But there is absolutely no reason for stuns to be in a PVP game, and by that I mean ALL stuns; including knockdowns, mezzes, fears, banishes, global silences, etc. If a game has CC like that, then I will immediately discount its PvP as anything but an occasional diversion. In a PvP focused game, it's automatic failure in my eyes.

Originally posted by dave6660

I've always enjoyed playing the CC classes.  Crippling your enemy in a variety of ways adds more dimensions to combat.

The duration of the stuns should be relative to the speed of the game's comat system so it's hard to pick a number.  Stuns / fears should not be chainable where you can lock down an enemy for the entire duration of a fight giving them no chance to fight back.

I haven't played WoW since before the first expansion so I don't know how bad this problem has become.

What he said

The duration of stuns is meaningless unless you define the speed that combat in the game happens... it's like saying no one should be able to do over 1000 damage in a single hit ever.... sure that works for a game that limits you to 999hp but what about the games where you get 10k+ or 100k+ that arguement doesn't really work anymore. And if you want to pick at the numbers it's an EXAMPLE to show a point nothing more.

Originally posted by Thrage

 Fear is a million times more annoying/retarded than stun.

Fear, stun, mezz and root are about the dumbest things that could have been added to most MMOs only because they were implemented poorly.

1) Any scenario where the player has zero control over his character is a frustrating and "un-fun" scenario

2) For every negative action a player can take on a character there should be some form of available and optional counter, preferably one that comes at the expense of some other benefit.

Some MMOs have done a decent job of balancing the stun/mezz/root thing. In UO, higher resist skill on the victim means a reduction in the time that one can be paralyzed. Since there is a finite amount of points a player can allocate to skills, the higher resist is raised, the lower the remaining pool of points for other skills. In EVE, players can fit modules to their ships to counter modules that others use in order to "lock them down" and disrupt their warping, speed and targeting. The trade-off is that is one less module slot for fitting other gear.

A >2sec stun is dumb the way it is implemented in most MMOs. Now, if there were potions or skills that you could use that would reduce or negate the stun, it would be a lot more palatable.

Stun's happen in real fighting, makes sense they should be in game. Having skills that stun 100% of the time for a set amount of time probably aren't as realistic. Also, armor(especially helmets) should do a better job of mitigating stuns.

the rogues ability to stun for too long in warcraft was one of the things that eventually led me to give up the game .

Reminds me of playing DAoC, where the Healer class had an instant mezz and stun shout.  Nothing like be mezzed and stunned at that same time.  Mythic has always been king of crowd control.  The sad thing was they gave you few tools to counter it.  Why I avoid Mythic titles like a plague.

 if you had good gear you could easily survive the stun, or being a gnome use your racial, or just get those honor signets whatever.