"When Ambush Comes to Shove" -Week 3 Possibly final testing?!

[DrTentacles]

Still don't think the Pyra should be a ramming ship. Hull buff is nice. Mobula nerf is acceptable, but I'd prefer a verticality nerf.

Flak change is acceptable.

The fact that you're proceeding ahead with all the other changes, Muse, is proof that you have literally no idea how to balance the game. You have done a beautiful job with art, molding, and coding, and design, but when it comes to balance, and working with the a community, this is your first big game. You've been at it a while, and it has evolved, but it feels like you're stuck right now. This isn't me being insulting--this is me stating the obvious. Have another round-table discussion. Figure out what you want out of combat in the game. Ask the players what they like, and don't like. Set up a poll. Co-Op will act as a band-aid, because it allows you to shift the focus from ship v ship combat to objective based gameplay, but right now, you need a consistent objective and direction for PvP combat. You plainly do not have that.

I really want a mission statement for what you want to see out of combat in this game--what is your direction for balance? Where do you see tactical depths coming from in combat? Where do you see counterplay emerging? What are the strengths of sniping, and brawling, and how should they be represented in guns and ships? What are each ship's strengths, and what are their weaknesses? What separates a novice of each class from a veteran, and what separates a PuB from a team? What role does ammo serve? Does stamina serve? How will each of those be used by a novice, or a veteran?

You need to have solid, consistent answers for all of these for the game to have *depth*. Right now, most of the depth is in the teamwork, which is awesome, and very little is in the gameplay. This is a turn-off for many people--probably the biggest turn-off after the simple "knowledge cap" to play, because of poorly explained mechanics.   

I do not believe you have answers to these questions--if you do, I would be happy to hear them. I desperately want this game to be played--to last. I do not have your in-office perspective, but I have the perspective of a long-time gamer. It does not appear as though you have a coherent balance direction. Please explain to us where you want this game to be. Kevias, I'll probably email, but I'll take a PM. I am deeply concerned about the apparent lack of direction, and would like to understand, and help, if I can.

[Dementio]

The only change from last week to this week, is the Mobula's bottom guns are turned outward even further. Is that the resulting feedback from 2 weeks?

I hope Muse won't be surprised if I copy-paste my feedback mail from last week at the end of this week.

[BlackenedPies]

The only change from last week to this week, is the Mobula's bottom guns are turned outward even further. Is that the resulting feedback from 2 weeks?

I'd like to hear the feedback that warranted this change

[Daft Loon]

...

Lochnagar Shot reduced clip size reduction to -50% from reduction to 1 shot, reduced rotation speed reduction to -80% from -90%, changed damage to gun model so that is deals proportional damage per shot until gun is destroyed e.g. if gun has 2 shots then each shot deals 50% damage vs a gun that has 4 shots were each shot deals 25% damage—to ensure that Lochnagar has use cases after Heavy Flak changes

...

This is not the same as what is active in the dev app

-60% clip size
+62.5% damage
-70% rotation speed
-70% recoil jitter
100% self damage etc
-60% arming time
-50% AOE

[GurasOguras]

Thank you for making Spire turn as fast as Galleon now.

It's going to be a sad patch for brawlmob, but it's gonna be replaced by brawlsquid so I don't care that much.

[Daft Loon]

Thank you for making Spire turn as fast as Galleon now.

And galleon has guns on both sides.....

[Nietzsche's Mustache]

The only change from last week to this week, is the Mobula's bottom guns are turned outward even further. Is that the resulting feedback from 2 weeks?

I'd like to hear the feedback that warranted this change

Me too. Especially considering at least last Sunday, NO ONE used a mob. It was mostly spires and pyras. And the Spires still won, not because it's OP, but because the pyra's too damn slow still. Being a heavy S.O.B. doesn't mean the pyra can ram better (I'll grant you, the rams that did take place did do more damage to me on the spire, but they also cost the pyra just as badly because it can't connect those rams before loosing so much armor).

Ugh.

[Omniraptor]

The pyra needs galleon levels of armor and health if they keep it at this speed. Make it so the pyra can't really maneuver, but it can charge into someone's gun arcs and survive for a bit there. Maybe that will help.

[ZnC]

I enjoy the gun-ammo mechanics and logic behind it. If they go, I go. Period. Might as well remove the gunner class and just have engineer and pilot only.

Here's my problem with changes:
Balance changes = Small tweaks to numbers
Gameplay changes = Significant changes in how things work

So far I've seen a lot of gameplay changes. Reducing Hwacha jitter by 33% just to compensate for Heavy Clip. Single click fires whole volley. Stamina. Squid gun arc change. Nerfing H.Carro arcs and reload speed at the same time. Flamer loses penetration completely. Nerfing pyra acceleration and hull at the same time. Buffing spire accel and hull at the same time. Fanning out Mobula guns. H.Flak rework. Loch rework for H.Flak. And more.

In the end, I find there's not much to talk about. Play and enjoy the game however you want, or don't.

[DrTentacles]

As a note, increasing the Pyra's hull does not help it ram. I ram often in a squid. Rams are not about damage. Rams are about controlling the enemy ship. If the hull is buffed, and the turning and acceleration remains slow, ramming is still bad.

[Omniraptor]

Could we please get some clarification on the goals of these changes, and what specific gameplay problems they are intended to address. Especially the spire changes. Does muse think spires are too powerful?

I really really don't understand why they touched lochnagar. Like, why, guys? Just why. Why does harpoon have right click now? Why is light carronade still useless?

[Mysterious Medic]

Okay, so instead of delineating why I disagree with many of the changes I'm going to give a proposal.

Revert hwacha to previous state before buff. Revert caronade to previous state before nerf.

Keep the shatter damage for the caro the way it is now. (Also keep the direct damage the same obviously) Keep the downwards arcs for the caronade as it is now. Don't nerf heavy clip. Don't nerf caronades upwards arcs.
Done, hwacha's fine.

For pyra: put health at 600. Revert back to old acceleration. Also, don't change its mass. It does something weird to ramming that has somehow made it easy to knock off your target even with moonshine.

For Mobula: don't mess with gun arcs- it's a weapons platform. Nerf its maneuverability, or punish it for taking damage more. Either reduce it's hull armor to 500, or reduce its vertical acceleration to 6.5 m/s².

Heavy flak change is okay.

Harpoon change is okay.

Squid change is fine, although somewhat unnecessary.

Spire needs a massive change. The idea of "glass cannon" does not really work in this game. All guns are accessible by all ships, and it's not like Spire has a passive buff on damage or something. Give Spire a niche maneuverability to use, like mobula has. Maybe exceptionally high acceleration and speed? If not give its weapons some protection, or give it a slimmer profile. Something needs to be done, and giving it better armor, hull, or otherwise just won't work due to the shape of the thing, and also its less than optimal engineering routes.

Don't touch lochnagar. Add more niche ammos.

These changes are simple, and fix the problem in an isolated way that does not affect the whole system (a problem Muse has had with balancing for a long while).

[nanoduckling]

The problem with the various ammo types is they don't really offer interesting choices. There is usually 1 ammo type you should use per gun (a fact which even with stamina largely leaves gunners pointless closing down another interesting set of choices). Where we are selecting different ammos we are mostly doing it for range leaving us with three to four real ammo types, long (lesmok), medium (charged/burst/normal), close (greased/incend/heatsink) and point blank (loch). You could have those 4 ammo types with suitable damage to range trade offs and the game would play mostly the same.

I don't want to see different ammo types go. I want them made interesting. The loch changes look to me to be taking an interesting ammo type (loch was almost always taken as a gunner and was one of the ammo types lending itself to more varied play styles) and replacing it with another potentially interesting ammo type. It is like fixing your handbrake when the steering wheel is broken. We might end up with a better handbrake, we might end up with a worse one. Most likely we will end up with a handbrake some people like while others miss the old one. The steering wheel is still going to be broken. How it will actually interact with the current meta I cant say, making it kind of a pointless risk to take in my book.

So since we are supposed to be using this thread to give feedback, I'll ask a question of Muse whose answer will tell me how I can best be useful looking at the patch proposals. What is it you are trying to achieve with the changes to loch? What is the intent with the other changes? What are the numbers backing up the changes to balance the game?

Folks have said there is a problem with the people at Muse heading up these patches. I'm pretty frustrated too. Allow me to offer up the possibility that there is a problem with the process though. Seems to me there are three basic categories of things you might want to do with a patch.

(1) Balance
(2) Fix an existing mechanic
(3) Introduce a new mechanic

In order of biggest problems to smallest problems with the current patch process.

(1) Continuous and slow instead of the current meta breaking mess would let us shift the meta to interesting places for you. Let your players shift the meta naturally and give it a regular and gentle push if it gets stuck. Once a month look at the current meta for the top 10% of games by geometric mean of MMR and looking for signs the ships, weapons, tools and ammo aren't balanced. Make very, very small adjustments to ship and weapon stats to adjust for any element that is over or under used. 2% here, 3% there.

Do this in a way that enhances the character of the ships (so if the squid is under powered give it better turning or acceleration, don't just dump a load of points into its hull stat). Be transparent about what trends in your data provoked these changes (I'd just publish the statistics used in depth complete with models of the data and the like).

They need to be small because an interesting meta should shift on its own anyway if elements are reasonably balanced as rock becomes popular and people start considering if paper should be a thing again. If they aren't then cumulative changes will eventually even things out if they are made regularly enough.

(2) Find out what mechanics folks don't like. And by folks I mean your existing, experienced player base. You can and probably should consult the odd novice (they would have told you that the mino was either going to be pointless or leave them with insane levels of rage for instance), but by and large it will be those of us who have played the game the most who know where the game needs the most love if it is going to be deep. If you ask novices then they are going to ask for noobtubes everywhere.

Even with what seems to be a novice player fetish you folks still try to balance for them in ways that will amplify the effect of skill differences (squid changes in the most recent set of proposals for instance) instead of dampen them.

This will be more qualitative than (3), so it will require interaction with players, case studies, that sort of thing. I can give you a head start though. The harpoon is broken. The rangefinder is pointless. The ability of crew to bring pilot tools outside of the spyglass is largely pointless.

(3) This you are going to have to do the same way you currently are. On the plus side if you aren't making massive ship breaking changes with every large patch we can give you better feedback on your new mechanics. Blind testing 'there is a new gun' or 'there is a new map' or 'there is a new ammo type' makes sense. Blind testing stat changes when the first thing your community does when given a new patch is fire up ducksoficarus and calculates is completely pointless.

I appreciate the idea of being consulted on these patches, but the lack of communication here is really killing the process. If your inbox is wildly different from the forum please, tell us. Again, numbers would be nice - "80% of the emails we got with feedback loved the loch changes" would at least tell us why you are persisting with ideas which have had a lukewarm reception at best. Why are the balance changes so large? Why are they so infrequent? Why are we 'fixing' mechanics people like and leaving broken others? What is the vision here? Even if we aren't on board with the objectives at least we could then understand the motivation behind these changes which to an outsider simply seem bizarre.

[Atruejedi]

Ssssssssoooooooo... it's noon... Sunday... 12 PM EST... and... and literally the only person in the dev app for the testing session...

[nanoduckling]

Honestly jedi, since the last major patch, I don't see the point. I read the notes from the past two weeks and have given my feedback, but the changes didn't reflect folks feedback then and they don't reflect them now. And it isn't just vet complaining there were common threads last time and this time which are being ignored. I cant help Muse achieve what they want to achieve if I don't know what it is. I suspect I'm not alone in this.