Pull" Trick" discussion

[macacoalbino]

I'm not even good at this game and I’m able to kite skirms while pulling with other skirms, never allowing musks to ever reach them.
It’s really easy, just needs a few minutes of practice.
I might post a video of me kiting huss with skirms after I was sieging a rax mid map in arizona. Granted I was playing Sioux, when I saw their huss switch incoming. I just kited my way close to my tc which coincided with my dogsoldier timing wining me the game. Should I win really that game? Well given my strategic choice of pushing while stacking 1500 res and a card, i think not, but with a simple and easy micro trick that took me almost no effort I stole a game from someone who played better than me throuout the game.
That being said, I’ll post the clip once I get home tonight

[lemmings121]

I stole a game from someone who played better than me throuout the game

[gibson]

Yea i made a long post last night about how it isn't actually skillful and anyone can do a basic pull with like 2 minutes of practice,how it's like bhoping in csgo. However the forums went down before it posted it and it was lost forever and I cba to type it out again. The gist was there's a big difference between something that takes actual skill, so not everyone is capable of doing, vs something that takes 5 minutes of practice and anyone can do it,pull trick being the later. Now to do more advanced pulls takes a bit more practice I'm sure, but is still easily achieveable by anyone who can click a mouse. I mean it took me two minutes to learn how to do a basic pull with skirm just off of info from this thread

[Gendarme]

gg ez

[Hazza54321]

just makes hand cav weaker ergo more skirm goon ergo more metabots

[Kaiserklein]

Yea i made a long post last night about how it isn't actually skillful and anyone can do a basic pull with like 2 minutes of practice,how it's like bhoping in csgo. However the forums went down before it posted it and it was lost forever and I cba to type it out again. The gist was there's a big difference between something that takes actual skill, so not everyone is capable of doing, vs something that takes 5 minutes of practice and anyone can do it,pull trick being the later. Now to do more advanced pulls takes a bit more practice I'm sure, but is still easily achieveable by anyone who can click a mouse. I mean it took me two minutes to learn how to do a basic pull with skirm just off of info from this thread

Like 95% of people don't hit and run properly. I wonder how easy it is to hit and run while pulling then.

Btw I don't remember mastering the pull trick in 5 min. The ease I have to pull units nowadays is the result of like 2 years of pulling units around almost every game.

[Gendarme]

The question is rather about whether this mechanism is balanced if Koreans were to play AoE3, I think. Ideally a game is balanced on all levels.

[Kaiserklein]

It would most likely be too strong then. But as long as no actual player shows that it's too op, I don't see a reason to nerf it.

[Sargsyan]

I wish i was korean

[Papist]

I think we should at least be able to agree that the pull trick is not what the devs had in mind when they coded in max speed. It was designed to keep units in tight formations, and make troop movement more fluid as a result.

We've had tons of these kinds of discussions over the years, and the thing I still don't understand are the people who try to differentiate between acceptable and unacceptable bugs/exploits/whatever you want to call them. If the pull trick and making treasure guardians glitch is acceptable play, why is alt d or fast shooting unacceptable? I'm not saying that the second two are balanced, but they are fundamentally the same thing (using a game feature in a way that was not intended), yes?

[Mitoe]

Reviving your explorer with a single button is not a game feature; it's stupid, unskillful, and abusive. And that's the end of the discussion on that one.

[momuuu]

Reviving your explorer with a single button is not a game feature; it's stupid, unskillful, and abusive. And that's the end of the discussion on that one.

What a stupid attitude, sorry but this behaviour is so offensive. You don't even want to consider stepping out of your own bias to hear some other opinion.

[gibson]

Yea i made a long post last night about how it isn't actually skillful and anyone can do a basic pull with like 2 minutes of practice,how it's like bhoping in csgo. However the forums went down before it posted it and it was lost forever and I cba to type it out again. The gist was there's a big difference between something that takes actual skill, so not everyone is capable of doing, vs something that takes 5 minutes of practice and anyone can do it,pull trick being the later. Now to do more advanced pulls takes a bit more practice I'm sure, but is still easily achieveable by anyone who can click a mouse. I mean it took me two minutes to learn how to do a basic pull with skirm just off of info from this thread

Like 95% of people don't hit and run properly. I wonder how easy it is to hit and run while pulling then.

Btw I don't remember mastering the pull trick in 5 min. The ease I have to pull units nowadays is the result of like 2 years of pulling units around almost every game.

i never said you can master it in 5 minutes, I literally said the opposite. You can do a basic pull in five minutes, while more complex takes more practice. I never said anything about hit and running and pulling either lol. It's like bhoping in csgo. It takes a small amount of effort to learn how, it takes a lot to master, but there's no reason for noob to learn it cause for noob it's nothing more than a cool trick, noob doesn't know how to use it in a real game.

[gibson]

Reviving your explorer with a single button is not a game feature; it's stupid, unskillful, and abusive. And that's the end of the discussion on that one.

What a stupid attitude, sorry but this behaviour is so offensive. You don't even want to consider stepping out of your own bias to hear some other opinion.

Nah there's a huge difference between pressing alt d and drag boxing 2 cav and a skirm at distance to make the skirm move faster Kappa

[Mitoe]

Reviving your explorer with a single button is not a game feature; it's stupid, unskillful, and abusive. And that's the end of the discussion on that one.

What a stupid attitude, sorry but this behaviour is so offensive. You don't even want to consider stepping out of your own bias to hear some other opinion.

I've heard the arguments for Alt-D being a "mechanic," and I completely disagree with all of them. I'm completely willing to have an open discussion about other game mechanics and bugs, but I will always consider Alt-D cheating.

[HUMMAN]

but bhop is a cool thing, it was just nerfed. Pull trick is cool and that falc move was exciting, it was a positive experience in terms of gameplay. (I am sure tabben knows about it too, just did not expect it).It may change the meta as people said(favors skirm, cannon more-cannon is quite unpopular anyway-) in this perspective u can nerf it somehow but i dont get dicky attitude towards the mechanic.

[momuuu]

Reviving your explorer with a single button is not a game feature; it's stupid, unskillful, and abusive. And that's the end of the discussion on that one.

What a stupid attitude, sorry but this behaviour is so offensive. You don't even want to consider stepping out of your own bias to hear some other opinion.

I've heard the arguments for Alt-D being a "mechanic," and I completely disagree with all of them. I'm completely willing to have an open discussion about other game mechanics and bugs, but I will always consider Alt-D cheating.

So you're ignorant and arrogant.

[Gendarme]

That's somewhat surprising, actually. Mitoe is usually very reasonable.

[Mitoe]

@gibson if it's not easy to use in a real game, doesn't that mean that it doesn't favour the weaker player? At least that's the argument I've been hearing from most people who don't like it. That and the argument that its primary use is to correct "mistakes."

I personally don't agree with this. There is potential to correct mistakes like mis-positioning and run vills away from raids, sure, but there are many other opportunities to make use of it proactively as well. For example, I more often fight for treasures knowing that I can use the pull trick to escape a snare; is that correcting a mistake or is it just being confident in my abilities as a player? I also sometimes send 1 unit ahead of my army to scout for me while I move across the map, and then I can pull it back towards me when I spot the enemy army--and this, while good, is only useful if my opponent is going for a unit composition with lower range than my own, or if the unit I'm using has significantly more LOS than their max range unit, otherwise I lose the unit and the pull trick is irrelevant.

You can also break off smaller groups of units to poke at lower-range compositions; for example, if I have skirm/goon vs musketeers, I can break off a group of 5-10 skirms and 6-11+ cavalry and use those units to harass the enemy army repeatedly, since he has no unit of equivalent range to match me. This, however, requires a lot of attention and using many additional control groups sometimes; it's definitely not an easy thing to do.

Of course this all sounds good, and players should definitely do this more, but the number of times it's really relevant are small in number. If you want to make proper use of it in the mid-late game you need to be very good mechanically and have high APM to do it at the same time that you stay on top of your macro and stuff. Most of the time you're not going to have enough cavalry/faster-moving-units to adequately pull something like skirmishers, you're going to have more units than the selection limit (50), your opponent will have units of equal or greater range than your longest range units, etc. Everyone here is saying that surely it could be abused far more than it is, and this is true to an extent, but you can clearly see the limitations of the mechanic, and no matter how good someone is getting around the selection limit in a way that abuses the pull trick to its fullest extent without sacrificing something else worthwhile in micro is near-impossible, if not entirely impossible.

I don't see how it's overpowered. There are certain situations where it can be quite strong, of course, but I don't think these few situations warrant a large-scale change to the trick in general and provide stronger players with a way to differentiate themselves from weaker players. It provides a use for drag-boxing that isn't there otherwise: remove the pull trick and it will always be best to keep all of your units separate and never ever group them together, except maybe when you want to path pikemen through your army to the front to block cav or something (which, by the way, will be slower and less reliable, because max-velocity also affects the speed at which they move through units.



P.S. You guys are seriously be accusing me of arrogance/ignorance based on my belief that Alt-D is cheating?

[momuuu]

P.S. You guys are seriously be accusing me of arrogance/ignorance based on my belief that Alt-D is cheating?

No. It's based on your absolutely ridiculous attitude.

[Gendarme]

Based on your refusal to ever consider changing your belief, rather. It might have been an exaggeration on your part, but taken at face value it is obstinate.

[HUMMAN]

not all people should always agree to discuss something, for myself i would not discuss Alt-D too. It's just bad design and taste, if u like it no point to discuss for me.

[Kaiserklein]

So you're ignorant and arrogant.

Dude, Mitoe is one of the least arrogant persons I know, and he's certainly not ignorant regarding aoe.

Now about alt d, it's just an obvious bug that appeared when they added hotkeys for changing stances on TAD. The explo is not supposed to even be able to change stance while dead, let alone get revived from changing his stance (???). There's a reason why you're supposed to wait until your explo has 100 hp or pay 100g to get it back. I don't understand what's still not clear about that.

Pull trick is different. It's a mechanic necessary for the game to work properly, in terms of pathing and grouping, and not a bug. Using it to make units run is a side effect. Now, we might need to nerf it by reducing its max speed and/or range, but that's another topic.

[Mitoe]

Fine, I can understand the attitude thing. The whole "end of discussion" thing was a bit off-putting. Sorry for that.

However, Alt-D as a topic of discussion does not have a lot of depth to it and I think I've seen pretty much every possible argument for it to be a legit game-mechanic and disagree with all of them. It's a lot more black-and-white than other topics, and I can't see how anyone could possibly change my mind: on that, at least, I was not exaggerating.

[Cometk]

Show hidden quotes

Reviving your explorer with a single button is not a game feature; it's stupid, unskillful, and abusive. And that's the end of the discussion on that one.

What a stupid attitude, sorry but this behaviour is so offensive. You don't even want to consider stepping out of your own bias to hear some other opinion.

I've heard the arguments for Alt-D being a "mechanic," and I completely disagree with all of them. I'm completely willing to have an open discussion about other game mechanics and bugs, but I will always consider Alt-D cheating.

So you're ignorant and arrogant.

how can you blame mitoe for having a definitive opinion on something that has had hundreds of pages of discussion over the past 5 years? talking about alt-d has been done to death already. relax