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1.3.6 Hotfix Flamethrower

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Dementio:

--- Quote from: Sammy B. T. on May 05, 2014, 02:32:38 pm ---It is if that change means you need to run all primary engi and sacrifice trifectas and even simple bifectas because a balanced weapon needed its ability to put stacks down tripled.

--- End quote ---

You don't need to. Aren't you famouse for playing Junker and not letting enemies know your current positions? Isn't that effectively fighting the flamethrower? And what about your ally? Does he have to watch you helplessly die in fires? Come on man, let's be real, this is not the end of the game, it has yet to ruin everybodies fun and certainly it's not the only gun used in the entire game.

Just sit back for a second and watch the community play. You have been complaining about it the second the patch came out and even after the nerf came. I wonder, have you even tried play this game the same as before? Is that really not possible?
I still believe it doesn't matter. The gun got more useful and not more gamechanging. The old flamerthrower had the same problem, but because of chem spray people didn't care too much, why care now? What has changed?

-Mad Maverick-:
agreed with DAN

XtremeNameX:

--- Quote from: Dementio on May 04, 2014, 08:54:28 pm ---Concerning normal matches, and I am saying this again just to make sure, we have to rely on the tutorials teaching new players what to do in case of fire.

--- End quote ---

No offense but this is a really terrible philosophy :P Any game developer can tell you that 90% of users will never read the manual/play the tutorial, let alone pay attention and remember everything it teaches you. Tutorials are just not a very effective method of instruction. Relying on a tutorial to teach new players a relatively complicated strategy isn't going to work, and if failure to understand/deploy this strategy results in the ultimate frustration of your entire ship being on fire, a lot of new players are going to prematurely pass on this incredible game.

To put things in perspective, and since the 'greenhorn' perspective is definitely needed :D Here's a little tangential tale: I'm a relative noob; my crew (all friends who got in on the 4-pack sale) and I have been playing fairly often for the couple months since the sale. We have a pretty good understanding of the mechanics, and can almost always go 5-0 against teams of randos. We, like almost everyone ever, didn't bother with the tutorial; just jumped in, excited to explore this game, and had no issue with that. This game is a great example of "simple to understand, hard to master" and we picked up on all the important mechanics within the first few games. Sure we had some frustration the first time we ran into a blimp popper, but it wasn't game-breaking; there were clearly things we could do to counter it (better communication with teammate-ship, keeping distance, clinging to every meter of altitude like its divine). That kind of introduction allowed us to fall in love with the game, and binge on it for hours whenever we get the chance.

The very first night the 1.3.6 flamer hit, we played 3 games and quit in frustration, and have only bothered assembling to play once since then. We did better in that second time, but only because we equipped every single crewperson to counter the flamethrower, and planned against it every second of every match. The presence of 1 single gun on the enemy ship dictated every aspect of our strategy. Now maybe our relative lack of experience played into this; maybe the elite players don't have to work so hard to deal with it. But I would guess that the majority of players are closer to our skill level than to the elite players' (who seem to be the biggest contributors in this discussion). And again, we are fairly decent-- couple months worth of experience, and a much stronger crew than most of the people we face in the game. How can you honestly expect any real noobs, let alone (and god forbid) first-timers, to figure out enough of how the game / metagame works to deal with the flamethrower? For such a frustrating weapon to be so easy and effective is just going to be a major deterrent to a growing community.

TLDR; The flamethower is just way too easy to use and hard to counter for anyone but the most coordinated and elite players. You can't count on a tutorial to fix that. If my team of relatively experienced friends was frustrated out of the game in 30 minutes, new players are in for a very rough time.


--- Quote from: Dementio on May 04, 2014, 08:54:28 pm ---Does this end the discussion? Please let us be more professional and refrain from moving in circles or does somebody have something to say that hasn't been stated before?

--- End quote ---

I haven't seen anyone concretely respond to Sammy B.T.'s mathematical breakdown of why requiring engineers to chemspray + repair is an alarmingly huge efficiency slowdown. Maybe I've missed it; there are a few comments anecdotally suggesting otherwise, but this looks to me like an unexpected side effect of the new flamethrower that makes it even more powerful than intended... I don't think the discussion can be wrapped up until that's actually answered (and Sammy has numbers backing up his argument so any counter-argument should have them too :)

XtremeNameX:

--- Quote from: Dementio on May 05, 2014, 02:38:14 pm ---Just sit back for a second and watch the community play. You have been complaining about it the second the patch came out and even after the nerf came. I wonder, have you even tried play this game the same as before? Is that really not possible?
I still believe it doesn't matter. The gun got more useful and not more gamechanging. The old flamerthrower had the same problem, but because of chem spray people didn't care too much, why care now? What has changed?

--- End quote ---

In the experience of me + 3 friends (in the 1.3.6 and hotfix version) 'sitting back and watching the community play', every ship we face has at least one flamethrower on it. This one flamethrower dictates our ship's ENTIRE strategy to counter it. So in my experience (which I'd daresay is gonna be a lot closer to the 'average' or new player's experience :P) the flamethrower is prevalent, frustrating, and dictatorial.

It is the very definition of gamechanging!!

When ONE weapon demands an entire crew's equipment and strategy to counter it, that is OP. Whether or not this is the case at the highest competitive level should not be as important as the fact that it is VERY true at the low-to-average level of gameplay.

Dementio:
To be honest, I haven't played too often lately so I have no idea how many flamethrowers there are.

And now a warning: I will now try to summerize the majority of arguments and statemants against flamers and try to counter it with my own. If you wanna read this, it might take a while and is full of stuff I already mentioned. I only want to make others see what I see, because that's apparently not the case. At the end is a little summarization and I hope I got it all down, if you really don't wanna read this.

Argument #1: Flamethrower dictates an entire ship in order to counter it.
Counter argument: Every other gun in the game requires my entire crew to bring repair tools. Else there would be more gunner with buff tools. I need a repair tool to counter shatter damage on engines and guns, I need a repair tool to counter flachette damage on balloons and I need a repair tool to counter piercing damage on the armor. There is no difference between this and the flamethrower.
The flamethrower does fire damage, which can't be countered with a repair tool, so you have to bring either fire extinguisher or chem spray, maybe even both. Even a gunner can counter it with heatsink, but heatsink isn't always the best type of ammunition for guns so the gunner has to know when to use it, and god forbid if it's too late.
The flamethrower does a lot of fire, if not perma chem spray/heatsink and if things go problematic you have to let the fire kill whatever is on fire or use a fire extinguisher if one is around.
If countered correctly you can almost nullify the damage output of this gun, no other gun in this game gives you the privilege of countering it to such a great extent.

Argument #1 can be seen as either entirely invalid or valid when it takes every other gun into account too, since you have stuff to counter every gun in the game to some extent.
For carronades there is even a pilot tool (drouge chute) and no engineer in the world can keep up with the gun AND at times requires the entire crew repairing balloon and hull to stay alive. Is that not op? At least I can beat the flamer without having to fear the ground. This effectively counters every flamethrower on the enemy ship, without the pilot actually having to do something and still have somebody shooting without disturbances (e.g.: Gun destruction, balloon destruction leading to the gun to be out of arc).

Example: Enemy pyra has double flamethrower
Once my crew gets going I see an enemy being useless, thus allowing my team to effectively beat up his ally in a 2v1 scenario which leads to a 5:0 victory.

Example: Enemy pyra has flame/carro combo
The carronade will fuck me up before the flamer gets in range. Therefore I will make use of special pilot skillz and teamwork for suprise attacks or to disable the enemy guns before they even get close to me. This is basic piloting with strategy, not necessarily a flamer counter.

Example: Enemy Spire has flamethrower and 3 more guns to back it up.
Same as before. Don't give the enemy the opportunity to even use it.

Last Example and very often mentioned: Triple-quadritruple Flamer Squid Trifecta of Fire.
Squid with their high manouverbility can counter almost any ship in close range. If it gets close to me I will be forced to tank the fire if I can't kill it from the very beginning. While tanking I hope my ally gets my message and goes for the squid. The squid with its low armor health will naturally escape, this is where it loses flamer arcs and I can effectively concentrate on shooting it down.
Double flamer squid? Go long range and camp in a corner is the easiest counter strategy. You don't even need anti-fire tools for it.
If you think that is just stupid: Charging headfirst into a flak spire while at least 1km away is stupid. Long range is a tactic and squids are known for not being good at long range. This will lead to victory.


Argument #2: With the new power of the flamer a 3rd engineer with either chem spray or fire extinguisher is obligatory, at least on certain ships that to some are hard to repair in general.
Since it never actually became harder to counter the flamethrower Argument #2 lacks arguments. The real problem here is that more people have started using it and you are just not used to the amount of flamethrower, does not used to keep up with perma chem spray.
Let me tell you that before the buff Flamer was still devastating once a chem spray has been forgotten or missed. Again, only more people use it, thus you will meet the flamer in situations where you once thought you wouldn't meet a flamer. Get used to it.

This is like the artemis hype all over again. Too many people used the artemis thus everybodies guns and engines were down, even from a longer distance. It eventually led to death. The artemis then got a nerf in which it didn't really get weaker, but harder to use.
The flamer is a close range gun and close range gun are usually easy to use, the best counter to it is long range. This applies for all close range guns like the famous gat/mortar combo.


Argument #3: Less experienced don't know how to deal with flamethrower.
Again this was a problem before, but now that this gun actually gets used, it deserves to be mentioned.
I stated that we have to rely on tutorials on this one. Of course not everybody takes a look at them. But from personal experience I can say that I am glad to have a decent tutorial showing all the basics I need to know to play this game correctly. When I started playing this game, the tutorials lacked content. I had no idea what my pilot tools did, because I had yet to earn the ability to read the description. And some point I got it down, read the forums for guides, asked other player what to do and learned. Now people say I am a good pilot. You start every game low and you have to learn stuff to become better.

Biography aside, it is up to the new players wether they want to learn how to play this game correctly or just have fun by doing what they want to do.
The latter is often not widely supported, but I feel MUSE does its best to enable this feature. If somebody decides quit playing this game because of one gun that they have yet to learn how to counter, it does require some tuning, without a doubt. Maybe this gun just requires such a high amount of teamwork to counter that it should be locked for less experienced players, but is certainly doesn't deserve another nerve regarding % of stack, damage in general and range.

Concerning Argument #3 I have to be honest: I have no idea what do to in this situation. All I can say is that the gun is fine as it is and changing it's ease of use is no ease task, since it is close range and in close range everything is easy to use (e.g.: Hit the balloon with a carronade, hit the hull with gat/mortar. Not the hardest things in the world).



To summerize a bit of what I wanted to say and maybe a bit more stuff, I dunno:
- Every gun needs to be countered, the flamer only has it's own tools for it.
  - And Fire extinguisher usually isn't the way to go against a Flamethrower, so there is only 1 tool being used that has been used for forever.
  - Fire Extinguisher might need a buff
- If counter is successful: Flamer is useless and can render an entire ship useless (Double Flame Pyra)
- Strategy is always a counter to flamer (long range), which does not negate the usefulness of the gunner
  - The gunner himself can use heatsink to not worry about his main gun or other guns getting set on fire.
     This does replace an engineer circle of chem spray for guns only. But it also depends on the gunner to know when best to use heatsink, if the pilot is busy.
- A flamer squid catching you of guard is like a mine or burst Hwacha hitting you while you are off guard. Stuff is destroyed and without help from your ally eventually kills you. "How to teamwork"
- Flamer was always devastating. Because of the the lack of use nobody ever paid it any heed.
- Subconcious/Psychological bullshit going on where excessive use of flamethrower gives it special powers, which it doesn not possess

- More nerf might push the flamer back to the corner of never used guns
- New players have to learn the game in order to defend their fun, somewhat. If you happen to not know how to shoot a gun in (example) counter strike, you will not have fun.


Please consider that it was rather late when I wrote this and thus might lack some clarifications here and there.

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