Hi, it’s Eric here. Just writing this real quick so everyone knows how we (and by that I mean, yours truly) respond to balance complaints. The most recent is this camping spot on what we call the Giga Ship that’s found on Dunes and Scrap.
The bottom line is that I know what’s being said. I don’t ignore what you say. I hear it all (mostly) so be careful what you say. You’re muttering something under your breath about the Field Gun while you’re sitting on the can? I’m there listening. Omnipresence. And by that I mean, the internet.
The internet is watching you poop.
For the full explanation, hit the jump…
With all that said, I basically collect all the information and let it marinate for a little bit. Let the meat break down some, absorb the flavor, get nice and juicy… the meat changes. The complaints turn into something else. Oftentimes, what the players say (y’all, yes) is just scratching the surface of what is or can be happening. This is not a bad thing, I don’t blame any of you because you haven’t gotten your hands dirty in the guts of this game (I’m seeing how far I can take this meat metaphor going). What I can tell you is that every complaint or comment that is shouted at the collective internets, may be indicating something going very very wrong in the deepest bowels of the beast. A polyp that needs to be removed. A tear in the intestinal lining that needs repair. Constipation (I’m referring to memory exploding because we’re not dumping, I mean clearing, assets properly… fix is coming)? To bring this full circle, complaints are usually pointing at rashes or pimples but not necessarily the root of the problem.
The reasons why I don’t give the various issues a quick sear (hot fix… fix it immediately… bear with me, I’m having way too much fun with this) are as follows:
- Making drastic and reactionary, even knee-jerk, changes may create more imbalance
- Drastic changes removes the notion of a baseline or familiar territory that a player can go back to and recalibrate from
- For the same reasons in #2, constant change does not facilitate a competitive play environment
This is why I didn’t immediately change the damage done by the Field Gun. I merely made it harder to use. While many players are right in that skilled users will still be able to use it effectively, it requires more risk (less turn radius). But also remember, it has lower DPS at the end since it’s reload time is longer and as a lower rate of fire. Each on-target shot, though, is as effective as it was before though which I think is the more important factor here.
So, to address the camping location in the Giga Ship: I fully support emergent gameplay and finding these kinds of cool camping spots. It was never intentionally designed to be a hiding spot. In fact, when I alerted an artist of the issue (and how to fix it, read below) he was surprised that you could even fly down there. This is all okay. I like this. Emergent play, where the player operates within the game designer’s constraints and rules and finds new ways to explore and express him or herself in that system is awesome. It’s our dream. You, the players, are doing cool things that we never expected you’d be able to do. Power to you. The easy solution to this problem though is to block that area off or remove some stuff to make it easier to get to. I generally don’t like that because in my mind it’s also a knee jerk reaction. The notion is to see what’s there and see what we can work with. Make minimal changes, don’t upset the baseline. Keep things familiar.
Still the same tasty steak, maybe even manage to make it juicier. Never to change its doneness, cut, size, or flavor profile. Not going to give you Texas BBQ and then suddenly flip it on you and suddenly serve Carolina style. That’s just not how we roll.
If it looks like you can fly to it, try it out and let me know what happens. With that said, I believe all camping locations (like in all other shooters) will be found out and counter strategies will be developed in time and naturally without intervention from designers—players always seems to make things work, another kind of emergence. But if something looks like you can’t fly through it and you can, well that’s a bug! Report it! And the opposite is sort of true too, if it looks like you can fly to it but you can’t… it might be a bug (reason for sometimes is because on a few ocassions we needed to simplify collision meshes and literally did them by hand by using simple cubes and whatnot… our auto-generation one freaks out if something has a ton of vertices and crashes). So yeah, let me know about those too.
So… where does this lead us? Well, I’ve found a counter to the Giga Ship camping, it’s by going around the to the outside of the Giga Ship. You will see some grates and it looks like you can shoot through them. That’s the solution, shoot through the little slats and someone in there is just a sitting duck. If the camper tries to make evasive maneuvers they’ll likely start crashing. However, you can’t shoot through those slats. This is a bug. This is because it’s a transparent texture laid on top of a quad (rectangle) which our auto collision mesh generator turned the whole thing collideable and therefore un-shoot-throughable.
So an artist is currently working to rectify that so you can actually shoot through it, and that’s about it. Should help a bunch trying to get enemies out of there.
And there you have it! Steak!
