Mana Games

[gifu]

The Beach House court was a bit too fast, so I couldn’t approach the net that much lol, but compare to the build I used at 880, I was able to put nearly 80 extra points into net stats, which reduced my hesitation at the net and made it easier for me to go to the net
I agree that at 772 it adds more variety

[squeakybum]

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This is someone’s build at 880, like Fergo mentioned earlier I still think at 772 a baseline meta forms. In this example +60 extra points would max muscle tone and stamina which obviously everyone would do (3 points for every skill point above 90) +30 takes you to 100 on the fh and bh power (5 * 3 points + 5 * 3 points), so there’s 18 left to use on volleys or lob/dropshot. Even if you don’t max muscle tone and stamina and all fh, bh stats, some people still had builds at 880 where they had around 15 ish on net stats, so that may not change much, now more people may add some points around <20 to net rather than 0, but the cartoonish baseline meta still forms with possibly more being added to lob or dropshot instead of net. It may seem like more variety initially but I think the baseline would be even more arcade. And when there’s no restrictions on some stats, some people load the extra points onto what gives most cheese, e.g. after their 100 on all forehand, serve physical stats, which would happen, maybe they wouldn’t put 100 counter like in this build, to free up more than 18 more points, but put lots on lobs and drop shots and it would still be unbalanced/cheesy. It can help those who already had the tendency to go to net more though, with volleyer or all court attacker type of builds if they use less points for special skills.

[KINGBARBOZA]

I am a bit biased as I never really played normal 880 XKT and am used to WTSL, but the gameplay seemed fun and pretty balanced to me outside of maybe serves being a tad underpowered. Volleys and net game were viable and myself and Jira had some really interesting rallies you don't really have often online.

However I do agree with what ferit suggested where if this change goes ahead, then perhaps service + rally preview should maybe be removed? I think if players are able to max out physical + baseline as squeaky said, then maybe turning off preview could balance that? As you would need to be able to judge the depth of the ball and react more, so you would get more organic rally finishes rather than robots who can run everything down and return everything full stretch on the run with ease.

[Jira]

People already play with physical and baseline maxed out… it won’t change anything there and even then, there’s a test build with serve baseline physical and counter literally maxed out to 100 and with everyone that tested it, they confirmed that that build didn’t feel strong nor OP because it’s really diminishing returns compared to current meta, it’s like going from 88 in everything mentioned to 90 (and still some people probably have 90 in physical and forehand for example and only serve and bh around 88 in game)

[Dani21]

To me i would also agree with Madferit/Boza about preview removal. This is supposed to be a competitive tour so i personally never understood why an official tour would have previews, it feels like a crutch which artificially increases player level. For example why would i fake a dropshot and then slice when my opponent sees exactly where i will hit my shot, both depth and direction. It also increases rally averages artificially, since there are many situations with central balls where you have an attacking shot from a central position, and while it should be a 50-50 guess for the opponent they get to it cause of the preview. Also, depth perception is a crucial skill which preview negates completely. So yes, if we want to encourage more attacking play and variety, then we should take more steps not just increase the skill average, since to me personally while the increase does lead to more variety i feel like it can also lead to exploits such as perfect dropshot spam because due to preview you are always in position to hit on time. Food for thought.

[manutoo]

Dani21,
I think there are 2 different things here.

First, the preview doesn’t appear before the opponent hits the ball. It appears 1 or 2 frames after the strike, so it doesn’t tell you what the opponent is going to do in advance. It gives information once the ball has already left the racket. At the very best, it gives a 1/20th of a second advantage compared to real life : it's not enough to replace the 50/50 guess.

Second, I don’t really agree that depth perception should be considered a crucial skill in a tennis simulation. In real life, you have 2 eyes with proper 3D vision, body language, ball height, sound, spin reading, and many other cues. On a 2D screen, depth is much harder to judge than on a real court, so the preview compensates for a limitation of the medium more than it adds an artificial skill boost.

So removing the preview completely would not automatically make the game “more realistic”; it would mostly increase the importance of screen-depth reading, which is really not the same as real tennis anticipation.

Maybe the real question is whether the Tour wants to reward more raw screen-reading skill, or whether it wants to keep the current balance closer to what a player would naturally perceive on a real court.

[gifu]

Even at 880, rallies between top players don’t really end, so i feel that’s not a valid reason to remove preview just because it’s 772. If anything, it actually allows max serves and more variety to be used to avoid long rallies

That said, I personally like wtsl gameplay, and I agree with Dani’s opinion that tournaments(only main tour) in particular should be played without preview

The issue is that if we change this, the differences between wtsl and xkt will basically shrink to just whether stats are fixed or not. Also, we’ve been changing rules too frequently over the past few months, and players can’t keep up.

So even if we are going to change preview, I think it would be better to wait a bit longer, or at least wait until it actually becomes a problem

[Jira]

I think if we were to change the official tour to no preview first a lot of people would actually stop playing it, and secondly it would slowly kill either the official tour or the wtsl tour since they would really get more and more similar.

And also yes I agree with manu, playing with no preview is an extra skill that you can actually learn but it doesn’t make the game more or less realistic nor similar to reality since as he stated, you can’t actually perceive depth like in real life

There are a lot of people who don’t enjoy playing without preview, many already complained about the removal of dangerzone and going full out no preview would really be badly received except from the mainly wtsl players, and they only show up to play big events from time to time, they are not the core of the tour so if we really were to make that big of a change I think we should poll it like when we asked for feedback on elite controls (which imo would be a better change than no preview but that’s just me)

[Dani21]

Dear Manu,
I understand your point about 2D courts. However, I play both with preview and without. With preview, you get so many more 50/50s back in play because of that split second. The impact may seem small but it is very noticeable and impactful. We can do a comparison between preview and non-preview rally length. The impact is especially noticeable in higher ping situations. The idea is that with preview you basically only have to look in your half of the screen without considering ball travel at all in your movement. This also leads to some situations where players are able to accelerate returns on both first and second serve, because you are not reacting quicker to the direction of the serve, since you can see the preview. It also helps positioning a lot, not just depth. And while okay you may not agree about depth perception i think we can all agree that positioning on shots should be a crucial aspect in a tennis simulation. That is why i mentioned the 50-50s. Because even if you guess right without previews you won’t know exactly where to stop your run to hit a perfect shot.
I do agree that there’s too many changes at the moment and even the 772 seems a bit quick itself considering full preview was just eliminated, however i have noticed that the rhythm of change has accelerated considerably with maybe the community not able to keep up and judge those changes.
Anyway I truly appreciate the opportunity for the exhibition tournament , i think this big a chance needed to be tested before being implemented .
By the way when is the change implemented? I imagine for grass swing? Since we’re in the middle of a clay season and changing builds mid swing would be complicated?
Thank you for your time and dedication to the game, Dani.

[Jira]

Regarding your last concern Dani we have the recommended 00 builds that come with the xkt mod updated for 772, ready to go whenever Manu makes the change so at least the baseline builds to start tweaking are gonna be ready from the moment the change goes through

[squeakybum]

Hi Manu, as Dani said, at online tour level these split seconds feel more like 2 seconds, it makes a difference, we can process things at that speed. Depth perception, reacting to a ball and not being aided by the ball mark is a skill, that can be learned in game just as in real life. Choosing what shots to hit to avoid an error, where to hit the ball, these are also skills involving looking at a screen and processing information. If the online tour stipulated that you play without assists, as in other competitive gaming scenes, people would learn this skill and certain plays as Dani mentioned would be viable. It’s true that the preview appears after the opponent has hit the ball but in that time, at our processing speed from so many reps of playing the game, previews are the difference between reacting to the ball and being told where the ball is landing, particularly for a deep ball, or a fake shot, or a serve. It creates artificially extended rallies. You can perceive depth in the game just as irl, by just playing without previews for an extended period. And as Dani mentioned it’s not just depth perception, it helps with, but also positioning and it removes certain skill gaps in these areas. You rarely have to anticipate or pre-meditate an action, when there’s previews because you have a in-built corrector for any wrong decision or movement you’re making and the element of surprise is reduced. All game sense for each aspect of the game just comes with reps and especially playing online. I am definitely not against having previews for those who want to use them either to learn or if they are not good enough to play without, or if they just decide for their community they want to use them, but if you’re playing competitively, to be the “best” officially, in canon tournaments, you should play without aids.

Also for a long time in the tennis elbow scene there’s been people wanting to remove previews in online tournaments, since TE13, I don’t think players would not play the official tour if the official tour stipulated no previews when it already removed danger zone. They would just learn how to play, it’s more so about whether the top players are willing to play without previews, bc others would follow if they want to compete. You would still have players of all levels, just without assists but a steeper learning curve for beginners. I agree with Dani that official TE4 tour would be more legit without assists which are meant to help you when learning the game. Just as we don’t need to know whether we are the green zone to hit a strike well, we also don’t need to see a marker to know the ball bounced there, we just see with our eyes, after we train. I also doubt it impacts wtsl as the main barrier is the fact more people are used to playing with previews. It is enough different in other ways and there could be more tour cross play.

[manutoo]

Dani21,
if the preview lets you consistently reach the ball of a 50/50 situation, then it's not a true 50/50 and it'd prove my point : not having the preview brings an artificial difficulty to a game that tries to be a simulation, not an arcade game.

you said : " without previews you won’t know exactly where to stop your run to hit a perfect shot" ; and that puzzles me... On a real court, do you think the players don't know where to stop to hit a perfect shot ?
Again, that would make my point stronger : without preview, you're handicapped compared to real life.

Squeakybum,
having to learn a non-tennis skill (ie: depth perception on a 2d screen) to play a tennis simulation is not something I'm looking for in a tennis simulation.

Adding an artificial difficulty to create artificial situations to shorten the rally length (which indeed can get unrealistically too high, especially on clay) doesn't seem to me a good solution.

[squeakybum]

Well shortened rally length may be a natural consequence for someone transitioning from having previews to none, but should not be the reason for this. It’s just another skill people can pick up, since you don’t have the lowest previews set at service + rally, or at service, you have it set at none. So anyone can learn this skill. There are people like myself who played TE4 without any visual aids from the first day, and others I’ve taught from day 1 without it, so it’s just something you can learn, not just for depth but also for positioning, it’s not like when we have no previews we don’t know where the ball is going, and we can’t adjust to a deep ball, we have this skill because we learned it, just as you learn how to hit the ball without the danger zone. But I understand you don’t want players to need to learn that skill that to play on the official tour.

And I think Dani’s point was without previews you need to make adjustments that you don’t necessarily need to with a ball mark. I don’t think in real life you have a marker telling you were the ball will land, but I will say some cameras may be better for depth perception, e.g. 3rd person. The times I tried 3rd person it was almost never caught out by a deep ball as I followed its whole path. But other than deep balls, it shouldn’t be that hard to learn to read the ball’s trajectory it’s whether you want to or are forced to, and the tour has not in 20 years, and probably will not require people to learn that skill.

[Dani21]

Manu,
Yes, if you’re guessing in real life you don’t know when to stop. Example is bertens vs halep madrid poimt where halep got hit while running/guessing by the smash. With preview she’d never get hit 😂. Point is we’re not talking neutral rallies, where you can position yourself properly even without preview, we are talking on the run shots. And yes, irl when you’re hitting on the run, or while being moved around, many times you hit closer to the body than you would like, or a bit further away. And the handicap to real life is not logical, it’s way easier to move in the game than irl. In real life a contre pied shot is many times a winner. In game you can just get back in time 9 times out of 10. Let alone how much of a disability serve is in game compared to irl. The amount of 1-2 punches hit in game is considerably smaller than irl. That’s why the irl argument does not stand imho, because if you wanted to make the game have the same play as real life, then returning would become much more difficult and rallies much shorter. On updated clay for example dally averages can still go up to 10. IRL stats are below 5 even for clay iirc(4.2 according to google AI) . So yes, those 50/50s would be point ends in real life considering the rally length is half.

[Madferit]

Manu:
My biggest issue is I feel like preview allows you to hit CLEANLY basically at will. And hitting cleanly is a big part of tennis. It's very hard to do. Precise movement, foot work, adjustments, micro adjustments, distance to the ball, centering on the racquet. No preview allows this aspect of tennis to be better simulated.
And I can only speak for msyelf on this, but that's why in wtsl with no previews allowed, I think it's harder to keep form and there's more dips as far as how your game is feeling week to week or even day to day. If you're not sharp, you not gonna hit the ball as clean, you gonna miss-hit a lot. It demands more precision. Where as with previews on, I never feel like that's a factor. It's just about aim, not about shot preparation and movement. I can hop on xkt after not playing for two weeks or a month, and my level is more or less the same. I just gotta get my aim together and that's about it. Where as in wtsl I'm way more inconsistent, and some weeks I'm feeling the ball super good, and other weeks I struggle way more to find my best level.
I actually agree with your point that depth perception is far from ideal on this 2d setting, so I don't mind the preview helping in that particular regard. My issue is the preview makes hitting a perfect shot every time way too easy, which is not realistic at all. The realism that it provides for depth perception in a few deep shots, isn't worth it for the unrealistic assist that it provides for every single shot to be hit perfectly.