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ON GOD BRO. This game can be so confusing sometimes, I understand not wanting to intimidate casuals/newcomers with 'complex' mechanics such as decimals and all, but come on, what the hell is well-positioned???
"Well positioned" seems to mean "pace chaser" - near the front of the pack but not first. (Edit: I didn't search properly. This is usually pace chaser but there are cases like Tamamo Cross where it's late surger position instead.)
"Positioned towards the front" usually means pace chaser, but there are a few skills where it means "1st or 2nd" because fuck you.
So true. Uma Musume is a heavy numbers game, yet somehow the game hides almost every number with vague and useless descriptions. I like the game, but this aspect is really cringe.
The special effects of support cards are also horrendous, they just say they have effect A without saying how much, I've seen plenty of people who just didn't know the special effects count as part of the cards' stat simply because just saying that it has effect A doesn't help explain to newbie how they're supposed to interpret it
An even bigger thing is that we also don't actually know how the effect work. Special priority? "Oh actually you have to imagine a bunch of weights for each training and the effect adds more weight..." what the fck, how am I supposed to work that out, where in the game did it explain that? Mood effect? Oh big numbers, actually tho it only increase by % of the mood bonus which is also just a small % of the training so all that numbers actually only amounts to +2 extra stat per training
Seriously, how the fck did Cygames expect their players to even play this sht, or were they so confident in their success that they'll naturally have enough players to have people working on database website
That's what mood effect does? I have several hundred hours in this game, and I'm just now finding this out, and I'm assuming that someone saying something on the internet is right instead of being told by the fucking game.
I love the game, but god, this post is more accurate than I'd like.
That's just cygames' bread and butter design, gbf's damage and battle mechanics are just as (if not more) obtuse, with the player base being left with the task of mathing out how anything works.
At this point I think they deliberately do things this way to incentivize the games' community to come together and make sense of their games.
For even more fun, the special effects of the card aren't displayed when you hit the bonuses button before a run, even if they would apply immediately, like the Marvelous Sunday power race bonus.
Lets not even get fucking started on the event choices pre update where you were supposed to trial and error and remember which option was "get an extremely useful skill hint" and which one was "+5 guts"
after enough times of that ive started trying to remember if i need red or purple coins. its just annoying, they show you your stats before buying +stats options, so why not the tokens?
Because the feature to check what options do was only recently added to JP, so old scenario mechanics weren't considered. It got brought to global much earlier and they didn't upgrade the feature to include GL tokens
I quit the game for 2 months because of that, then came back for the big patch that fixed it. Alt+tabbing on a phone to check event outcomes in a browser when the game resets back to the launch screen so easily when out of focus was just unbearable.
Nah, it's not really exclusive to skills too. There's also a huge issue on enemy traits, the fact FGO has no in-game compendium on different enemies and servants and what their trait is just a pain.
It's either you guess their trait is and hope you are right or looking it up on a wiki.
At least FGO only has pure numbers. You can understand everything going on under the hood with pure algebra. Umamusume's got 10,000 lines of conditions.
FGO isnt that terrible. after playing a character for a while you'll get the idea of what it does. like Castoria's skill 1 is 30% team wide at max, skill 2 is 20% ST.
The debuff descriptions are particularly egregious. Not only does Unnerves, Intimidate and Disturb not tell you what it does, but they also do different thing from one another
Can you tell me which one of them is a Speed debuff and which one is a Stamina debuff?
Not from the name, but I can tell from the icons used. If its a cloud its stam, if it has a little uma catching her breath its speed and if it has an angry looking something then it increases chances of rushed? i think
The last one doesn't increase chance of Rushed, but rather increases the duration of the Rushed condition when an opponent triggers it (recent update made it so your teammates can no longer trigger it, which helps considering they can't be affected by it anyway).
The rush ones are pretty bad anyways because they tend end up hitting only the first uma to get rushed, so unless that happens to be your strongest opponent, it's wasted.
“If you haven’t been rushed; when you’re in the 5th or 6th position on the last corner of the track (if its before late-race) or first corner of late race, accelerate .2 for 2.4 seconds.”
I don’t think there’s any less convoluted way to write it lol
You're a paradox gamer. Among other games. A knower.
Truth is: It doesn't matter. Just do whetever generally works. Game developers do this all the time. Vague shitty paragraphs that mean nothing. If they do give you a flat 10% number, then it applies to some bizarre alternate universe, of which 10% is actually "point (()*#&%@(*$&" Wait, those aren't numbers!
As a programmer, I question why is_finalcorner is an integer and not a boolean. It either is or is not the final corner, there are only two possible states.
It's really handy, but it's more like being given a dictionary than a translation. Even with the guide in front of me I still have to think a bit on which direction "order_rate" goes, for example.
I wonder how hard it would be to make a script that parses the condition and rewrites it as plain English.
See, this is why I actually think full transparency in this game would be a bad idea, or even not practically possible at all. What goes on under the hood in this game is so convoluted that an accurate description of what any skill does would require a small essay, especially if you wanted to answer questions like "how does that 0.2 acceleration compare to just having a higher power stat?" or all the stuff involving mid-race vs. last spurt speed caps and how different tracks have different timings that make some skills better and others worse. Another comment was complaining about support card effects, and how Mood Effect % is misleading because it's only influencing the size of the bonus you get from mood and isn't a flat multiplier on the whole stat gained like Friendship Training % and Training Effectiveness % are, but I'm just thinking how you actually would communicate the real effect of Mood Effect % in a way that's clear and not confusing, and the whole thing just sounds nightmarish.
I think if you wanted Umamusume to be fully transparent, it would have to be a much simpler game - simple enough that the entire game, including how it works under the hood, could be easily explained to the player in the tutorial, and then a given skill's effect on those workings would have to be something that could fit into a single tooltip. You'd basically have to throw out all of Umamusume's existing code and make a new game from scratch. And maybe that game would be a "better" game than what we have, but it would also necessarily have to abstract the sport of horse racing even more than Umamusume already does in order to make it fit into a more Slay The Spire-shaped mold.
I'm reminded of a comment Edmund McMillen made where he said that he wanted the item descriptions in The Binding of Isaac to be vague, because it added to the "mystique" of the game when you didn't know what exactly the items you got did and had to "feel things out" and learn from experience rather than having things explained to you from the beginning. I think that a lot of games that are infamous for being "wiki games" where players feel like they're "forced" to have the wiki open in another window while they're playing - The Binding of Isaac, Rimworld, Stardew Valley - are meant to be games where you don't know what everything does and "play it by ear" while taking it in stride if things go wrong. Some games just aren't meant to be min-maxed.
That's the datamined condition of the skill as it appears in the game's code. Any sane developer wouldn't put that in the game and instead explain it in a human readable way. But we don't have a human readable description that actually explains what the skill does, so we have to fall back to the datamined version.
It's a shame the vague descriptions are not even consistent.
I don't mind that they simplify the description so it's easier to read, but I hate that "well-positionned" can mean vastly different things, or that some abilities say "increase velocity" while others say "increase passing ability" or "increase positionning ability" for some reason (they all increase target speed)
yeah its one of the better backline options for mile accels. you can tell it's an accel by the icon (uma with lines going faster vs uma going super saiyan for velo)
You can tell from the symbol what the main effect is. For instance, No Stopping Me claims to "increase maneuverability" but actually gives more accel than lane movement, as implied by the Uma-vistan icon, to the point where it's basically an accel skill with a little extra maneuverability and a condition that you need to be behind someone to activate it.
On the other hand, Meticulous Measures claims to "prepare for a final sprint" but gives more lane maneuverability and less accel than NSM as implied by the left-right arrow.
As a HOI4 player, the game is 100% transparent. You just need the reading skills of a lawyer and 50 tutorials to tell you where everything is and how to shape your overall strategy.
Umamusume, on the other hand, is a fairly simple game that just straight up hides information and lies to you
"Collaborative graded races" is particularly WTF, I would have never guessed that it was referring to NAR (NAU in-game) exchange races (held in Oi + the new dirt racecourses) without looking it up. Is there even any in-game mention of the NAU/URA distinction other than the background banners, let alone the concept of exchange races?
uma slander i can get behind, theorycrafting for this game requires a special degree of number crunching
it leads to a lot of build and stat variation but good luck ever trying to figure out things on your own w/o an external breakdown from game decompiles and testing
vibes based descriptions but cant ever 'vibes' a decent vet on your own
With the new update there’s so many new mid-race velocity skills I have a hard time tracking which ones are like .15/.25 or straight up LIES AND GARBAGE
"guts are low" the actual uma stat and race: guts not needed yet lol. like 99% of the time you lost the race due to pure RNG, nothing wrong with your Uma stat unless you forget to train stamina properly
Don't forget that "the last spurt" and "last spurt mode" are two different things, but are both referred to using "the last spurt" in skills (see: NSM, homestretch haste, etc)
This is 100% accurate and I can only be grateful we have Gametora and an extensive amount of knowledge from the JP and other servers.
I can only imagine the absolute shitshow of "Just trust me, bro" misinformation that would have existed during the first few years if this had been released fresh in English, too.
Vibes-based descriptions are wonky, but my favorite is KC's history-based descriptions. Wow, this new quest says "Sortie the 2nd generation Destroyer Division 27." What, you don't know who that is? Better go read a history book, nerd. Gee, the new event says it's about an obscure cancelled attack on Ulithi anchorage. Better hope you know who was supposed to be there at the time, because they get a 1.15x damage boost that's literally never communicated.
The best part is the Type 3 shells, a special AA equipment. For about a decade, they were the only piece of gear in the game with its own special animation... which was actually just bait, they had a hidden fucking 0x AA modifier. If you hadn't read historical accounts of how goddamn useless they were, or checked the wiki, you just got shafted. Absolute peak game design.
i mean atleast telling you to straight up read on historical events is miles better than having to decompile the actual game just to see the actual activation. one of them is accessible even to the most tech illiterate while the other requires you to be a junior backend developer at the least
KC does that too, don't get me wrong. Each map has hidden routing that can't be datamined. It's like if each CM needed a certain secret combination of running styles or ran out of stamina mid-race. Sorry, Gemini needs 1 front runner and 2 late surgers, you brought a pace chaser instead. That's just experimental testing by the hardcore players that goes on the wiki. And there's all kind of hidden shit; the "best" battleship guns in the game are nearly useless on half the battleships because of a giant hidden debuff.
Still, I'm a huge fan of how one of the best resources for event prep is unironically reading history books.
Well, not entirely a joke. It's still one of the most useful weapons in the game for dealing with softer land installations like supply dumps and airfields. Which is perfectly accurate; Type 3s did actually mess up the parked aircraft on Henderson Field a couple times.
Man I've been wanting to complain about this for such a long time, so many skills in this game have such vague and inconsistent descriptions
Unyielding Spirit and Updrafters all say "increase passing ability" even though they have different effects
Recovery skills "recover endurance" or "decrease fatigue", bro just fucking pick one and stick with it
Green skills always say "increase performance" but never tell you in what way and by how much. And why only the gold versions (i.e. Firm Course Menace, Yodo Invicta) specifically say what stats are increased but not the white versions? Can they not like go back and change the white ones? Are they dumb?
And for some reason evolved skills have more detailed descriptions than the regular version? Can they not go back and change the original ones? Are they dumb?
P much any strategy as long as you’re jockeying for position just means you’re blocked from the side which can be when someone is attempting to overtake, you’re attempting to overtake, or just that someone is on the adjacent lane lol
This reminded me when I tried to build an XOguri Cap the first few times when I was early in the game to complete the career as a Pace Chaser.
Festive Miracle / Control breathing and kick forward hard toward victory in the second half of the race after recovering endurance with skills at least 3 times.
Okay, well it said to have skills that “recover endurance”.
Hydrate / Slightly recover endurance mid-race.
Preferred Position / Slight decrease fatigue mid race.
One said that it “recovers endurance”. The other said it is to “decrease fatigue”.
So, Preferred Position does nothing for me because it said it “decreases fatigue”, was what I thought before even learning that any stamina recovery skill can contribute to the precondition for the activation.
One example I bring up a lot is Hydrate vs Preferred Position. Both skills say “Slightly recovery stamina mid race (pace)”, so you might think they are both the same skill just with a different name.
BUT in reality Preferred Position requires you be in the front half as well. In CMs with front runner spam the skill might never go off at all (definitely not speaking from experience here…)
Stamina To Spare/Calm And Collected does that same bullshit. The description only says "Decrease fatigue upon approaching mid-race. (Pace Chaser)" but actually you also have to be in the front half.
normally its for the specific servant although in most cases its HP restore, Def up, ATK increase. not a great skill, and they're mostly changed since then, so yeah
Kind of like betting on horses! You may have past records, but whether this horse is good at this thing on this track is also very vague, and you are risking your money on this vagueness.
The "straights" and "curves" are the main loop of the track. The parts that are neither correspond to the parts that are offshoots of the main loop used for the starts of certain race lengths.
Edit: Actually, the Nakayama Outer course also has a section that's not considered either a straight or a corner even as part of the main loop. https://japanracing.jp/en/racing/go_racing/jra_racecourses/course_details/nakayama.html The upper part where the 1200m course starts. On the 1600m course it goes Neither -> Corner 2 -> Neither -> Corner 3 -> Corner 4 -> Straight.
I think it was meant for it to be a way to less “gamefy” the training, like they do it to give an impression that youre training the girls for real and excessive explanation is takinv the magic away and would confuse tha players. If they want a more detailed explanation they can look it up
The worst is the fact that speed and velocity are used interchangeably for both target speed and current speed skills, which is particularly egregious because target speed has cases where you don't want it but current speed is always good.
If you activate a target speed skill during the start of late race then it's effectively wasted because you're already accelerating to the new late race speed cap and you won't hit the additional speed provided from your skill before it wears off. This is what is meant by a skill getting eaten.
Current speed meanwhile instantly increases your speed alongside the new cap so it works even while accelerating.
Give me a button, that, when pressed, allows you to click keywords and then a textbox pops up that explains what that word means exactly.
And even then you have lack of information on what's to come, which is really weird. Champion's Meet is such an important event for free carats and currently you get like 3 days notice ingame when it's starting.
Just occupy the space that says "no race events right now" and put a little "these are the conditions for the next cm" in there.
It is funny this image because people usually forgot that umamusume is a gacha too
And most of the gacha players dont read nothing, I can even say most of the players here skip the storys, every story in general
Realizing that my 2LB Nishino Flower wit SSR's "Wit Bonus (Friendship 100+)" is actually THREE WIT BONUS is the point when I realized this damn game needs to be waaaaay more specific about what things are doing.
In SMT/Persona you have skills that do light/medium or heavy damage.
And you have like 3 skills of each that says the absolutely same while being totally different!
Except those games don't practically change the wording at all and just tack on the numbers. There's no concise version, only wordy versions with or without numbers.
Persona/SMT has a very clear and consistent language and scale though even without checking a Wiki you can tell which skills will be better under most conditions.
Light -> Medium -> Heavy -> Severe.
Named consistently too, as Base -> ga/la -> dyne -> Unique. Eg. Zio -> Zionga -> Ziodyne -> Narukami.
If it has Ma in front then it's AoE.
It takes a little adjustment, but the logic is clear and consistent. When you get the naming conventions you'll never be confused.
My guess why Japanese games tend to do this is that Western RPG mechanics are massively inspired by D&D and other tabletop games where everything is strictly formalized with clear rules and numbers
Meanwhile JRPGs kinda developed in their own bubble so you have these vibe-based descriptions and opaque game mechanics
Monster Hunter has A LOT of numbers, it just never explains what those numbers do. Also in games made by the A team the attack value is bloated by an arbitrary number, so some numbers are just straight up lying to you.
You can prolly guess what basic stats like Atk/Def are but calling Crit chance "affinity" confused so many new players (especially people that got into the series with World), like they even have Critical eye/Critical boost as skill names, and Crit boost specifically mentions that it increases the damage of critical hits, but the crit chance stat has to be called "affinity".
Well imagine if they really added necessery details for every skill and mechanic during race. It would be overhelming, you spend more time to read and try to remember it than actyally playing. Guess it is main issue
I totally understand the frustration as a beginner, even as a veteran I'm discovering new mechanics and clarifying misunderstood data every week. If anyone actually wants to talk about the hard mechanics because you enjoy the difficulty and math please reach out to me.
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