Messages

1

Gameplay / Re: 1.3.3 GUNS AND GUNNER SKILL BALANCE

« on: November 05, 2013, 02:39:41 am »

Well, this patch does feel better. I'm not going to lie, The Cohort did not play last week because of the patch. It was bad, and 2-3 hour long sniper matches are no fun for us.

This patch makes brawling fun again, the key word here is fun. Is it balanced? I don't know. I still don't think a good brawling team would be able to beat a good sniper team on most maps. Personally, I would like to see the old gat back, but I will take what I can get right now. This game is still not balanced, but if this is the way forward, lets keep on going and make sure that brawling can be a counter to sniping. Both should be viable, both should have their pros and cons.

P.S. While we're on the topic of "OP" weapons, lets start taking a look at the Lumberjack and Artemis. Lumberjack makes the carronades worthless, and Artemis...well, its makes just about every other gun worthless, at-least in the pug matches.

2

Gameplay / Re: 1.3.3 GUNS AND GUNNER SKILL BALANCE

« on: October 31, 2013, 09:41:15 pm »

Not quite sure if its been stated or not, but why not put in the disable changes/ hitbox changes in before the major changes to the gat/mort? The disable changes alone could have solved some of the "issues" that some people had with those weapons.

As others have stated, disable weapons are now over the top. Try greased rounds or burst out with artemis, it will wreak someone's day. No point even trying to go for a kill right now, just disable and fire away, sooner or later the artemis will finish it off.

3

The Docks / Re: The Legion is Recruiting

« on: October 30, 2013, 02:07:56 am »

YOU MUST BE REALLY PASSIONATE!

Why are you always yelling at me B.T?

4

Gameplay / Re: 1.3.3 GUNS AND GUNNER SKILL BALANCE

« on: October 30, 2013, 12:25:19 am »

How are we supposed to be playing the game?

Gat/mortar was overused because it was the safest way to win at the game, by killing another ship.  'Easy' means there is little to no risk involved.  You're supposed to kill ships but this strategy negates all the other cool things we want to do with the game like disabling components to effect ship movement.  So we've failed you there.  Ultimately, this game is about gaining the positional advantage on your opponent to set up your kill.  Gat/mortar made kills too easy to set up.  Someone with little experience in the game can easily charge in with a gat/mortar Pyramidion and get a kill very quickly.  The weapon decision choice collapsed to these two guns.  It was too safe to use in their previous balance.

People like safe and will go with what they think is safest.  The thinking is important.  The decisions collapsed too quickly because this strategy and combination was easy to pull off.  Therefore, no more thinking needed to occur.  We want more.  We want you to always think about your build and how it will interact with your team and the opposing team.

Furthermore, the way that these two weapons were balanced also collapsed gunner skills so you'd only need one ammo... and therefore no need for gunners.  The nerf to gat/mortar as a multi-pronged attack.

In general, I want the ship that died to say "Damn, that was a good kill.  We messed up and they totally deserved it.  I've got a plan for the next time around."  This is wishful thinking but you can see how things like former gat/mortar and heavy carronade made this almost impossible at times.

Have I been playing the game the wrong way for the last six months?

You are playing correctly.  As I said, the decision space collapsed way too quickly.  Everyone knew that gat/mortar was the pretty much the most effective thing you could do.  It overshadowed ammo choices and gun choices and went in for the kill too quickly.  It cut out a lot of designs and ways to play out of the equation.  You and everyone else played correctly.  I just failed everyone and making this too easy to figure out.

What is the perfect balance we're aiming for?

Kills should be tough to pull off.  Our matches are between 5-12 deaths when normal FPS rack up kills in the 100's per match.  Again, this is about gaining the positional advantage over your opponent.  We've designed in a lot of ways you can do that through disabling.  We want you to disable.  We want you to fly into position.  Deny others' positions.  Get denied.  Retreat.  Reform.  Only until you execute your build effectively or catch an opponent unwary will you be rewarded with the kill.

Ships should be hard to kill.  Point blank gat/mortar, again, negated gaining the position on someone to a great degree.

Where do I go from here?

We will keep balancing until we've reached our goals.  Nerf, buff, whatever it takes.  Options are important.  Supporting the decision space so it doesn't collapse so easily is important.  Because we're indie, we don't have a QA team.  Everyone who was with us since beta knows how much change the balance has gone through.  It's been a year and finally it's very close to something that offers numerous valid choices.  It will still take a while but we're almost there.  Problems will be nipped in the bud and I personally have to thank everyone for putting up with the issues.

I'm not going to lie, gat/mortar was an great way to beat the game and even I abused it a lot.  However, it was unsustainable.  Lots of weapons, ammo, ships, loadouts, were being forgotten.  Ultimately, this means a lot of hard work was slowly going down the drain.  Whatever changes that may drop in the future will all be an effort to support the decision space to make the game interesting.

Our goal is for you to be able to choose some guns and cater them to your own play style.  Not have the gun or ship dictate entirely how you play.  There's enough room with gunner skills, pilot skill, and engineer builds to do this now—again it's really close to perfect.  Just think if gat+heavy/mortar+greased was the only viable weapon in the game.  The gat/motor was forcing you how to play a certain way—they were telling you to Pyramidion brawl all the time.  People use other things because they're bored of gat/mortar... see too much of it, used it too many times, it's not challenging, etc...



To be honest, this is not easy work.  The hardest thing is not to piss everyone off so that they quit the game.  However, everything is done to improve your experience overall.  Again, I strike at the middle ground.  I want competitive players, the people who spend the most time in the game, to have experience the full depth of the game has to offer.  I want new players to mull over builds and come up with their own creative way to play and explore... hopefully reaching the depths that competitive and veterans are diving and swimming around in.

Not many people get to balance competitive games so I'm humbled to be one of those people.  This is my first time doing it so yeah I made a crap ton of mistakes but thanks to everyone here I've learned a crap ton.  Obviously, it'll be better in the next competitive game I do (NEVER, lulz)  

All I have to say is that I'm really effing glad I don't have to worry too much about balance in Co-op and Adventure.  I'll give you those damn gat/mortars then... you'll just have to grind for it puahahahahah.



Again... sign up for Dev App is you have a very big investment in this game and the balance.  Getting feedback before the patch drops is... ideal.

So, what I get from this post is that this patch is a sign of things to come. Am I reading this correctly? If so, I'm not sure if its worth wasting my time on this game anymore.

5

Gameplay / Re: 1.3.3 GUNS AND GUNNER SKILL BALANCE

« on: October 29, 2013, 03:24:43 pm »

 If the complaint is that too many close range builds use gat/morter, then why hasn't the answer been to give them somthing else that works instead of taking away the few things that do?

Get out of my head already!

 The answer is not to nerf the weapons that work well, the answer is buffing up the useless weapons so they can come into play. You saw this when they first buffed the art a few months back. We in The Cohort had a week worth of fun with the Art, then it was overly nerfed. It was fun, and made us try new builds that worked well, but after the nerf, it was back to the Gat/flak.

You're spot on Garou.

6

Gameplay / Re: 1.3.3 GUNS AND GUNNER SKILL BALANCE

« on: October 29, 2013, 03:04:04 am »

The thing that irritates me about the gat nerf is that it took real skill to nail a gat clip from that far away (750m). I sincerely doubt that enough people were able to do it reliably enough to the point that it was an issue, and more to the point, I -liked- the fact that the gat took skill. In fact, I prided myself on it. Not to sound cocky, but very few people in the game were able to do what i could do with the gat, and it felt good to have that kind of mastery over it. Now you can only hit from so close a range that anyone can do it, and that, to me, just sucks.

I agree with you Garou, the gat was a skill based weapon. I have not seen many people who could hit the shots at long distance. If you were able to, then it was an advantage. In no way was it standard for people to do so.

Now, with this new patch, brawling is not worth it. Just take a long ranged ship, sit back, and snipe. It seems that this patch is taking a step back from opening up the options for combat.

7

Gameplay / Re: 1.3.3 GUNS AND GUNNER SKILL BALANCE

« on: October 28, 2013, 11:15:57 pm »

I I'm not convinced that this patch has been 'tested' by the right pilots enough to warrant an up-cry yet.

And who would these "right pilots" be?

8

Gameplay / Re: 1.3.3 GUNS AND GUNNER SKILL BALANCE

« on: October 28, 2013, 06:40:30 pm »

I don't see a point to brawling anymore, especially against a sniper team. Don't know about you boys, but I don't like being forced to snipe to have a chance at winning a match.

9

The Lounge / Re: The most glorious Quotes ever

« on: October 27, 2013, 01:56:54 am »

OH MY GAWD! GET THE BALLOON! OH LAWDY LAWDY LAWDY.

- Nowuffo using "crazy voice"

By the way, the best way to picture "crazy voice" is to think of a female mickey mouse cooking waffles.

10

The Lounge / Re: PAX East 2014

« on: October 23, 2013, 02:33:55 pm »

We can ask about boarding!

Ohh, I can't wait till I see Zil at PAX East.

11

General Discussion / Re: Hey guys! (Buff Bug craziness)

« on: October 19, 2013, 01:40:50 am »

It's Charon, over at the Ducks.

So yesterday, I took a look at a video of Wolfrider playing in the sunday rumble and something looked really off. There was a series of repairs that took place in rapid succession (or at least it appeared this way) and I made this common knowledge to my brother Ducks. I should've headed from there STRAIGHT to the sandbox, but instead, I gave the go-ahead to chat up the forums about it.

Pretty immediately, you guys came together to discuss this thing and a lot of what was said got us thinking. We hit the sandbox this morning and tried our best to beat this thing to death and found that the pipewrench repair and hull buff expiration armor jump look incredibly similar, which would entirely explain the repair which was in question in the video. We even measured out pixels.

Anyway, after checking it out for a good long while, we decided that there was likely no way that the buff hull bug was what we were seeing, and I want to make this clear now.

I brought the video up, I thought it looked shady, it had a lot of us swayed, and in the end I was wrong. Sorry guys.

In the end, this isn't about whatever relationship all of you have with Squash. It's not about how he's looked in the past, and he wasn't looking for this when it came down to it. I gave him the video, the info, and he posted what I gave him. I was wrong here. I don't accept when my own team screws up on this level, and I won't sweep it under the rug when I do it. My bad, y'all.

All my best to you Wolfpackers, good luck in the Anvalan Conflict.

Its good you did this. At the same time, its unacceptable for you to allow you members to harass other clans on these forums. It was unacceptable for Squash to do what he did, especially without speaking with Mav first or "checking it out for a good long while."

I think an apology is in order from Squash himself. I don't know how you keep your ducklings in order over there, but I know that I would handle this with a swift kick if one of my members did the same.

12

General Discussion / Re: This Goddamned Community.....

« on: October 10, 2013, 11:20:07 pm »

I may have to go to the next East. I just don't want it to devolve into a giant game of duck, duck, goose with smollett and sammy.

We could totally go together and be room mates. It would be SOOOOOOO much fun.

13

The Docks / Re: The Cohort - Recruiting casual-competitive gamers - US based

« on: October 10, 2013, 07:28:38 pm »

Dragonmere and Nowuffo are now officially officers in The Cohort. If you have any questions about the group or interest in joining please feel free to contact either one of them.

See you in the skies.

And remember,

14

General Discussion / Re: Rape Jokes

« on: October 09, 2013, 02:17:23 am »

Rap jokes are still okay, right?

Squash, I think you should stop making fun of this thread and actually take it seriously. Everything said so far has been spot on.

15

The Docks / Re: Sky Badgers Inc. Guild Recruitment

« on: May 24, 2013, 12:59:21 am »

Wish you boys the best of luck! Hit me up sometime if you wanna set up some matchs with The Cohort.