Messages

31

Release Notes / Re: 1.4.5 New Balance Changes "When Ambush Comes To Shove"

« on: March 19, 2016, 12:27:33 pm »

And just because I suspect that those 11 changes are going to be offered as a counter argument let me explain why I'm not counting most of them.

-Gravity changes removed
Gravity was completely broken. It should never have been in the Dev App to begin with, at least not for a balance patch. Why are we testing alpha stuff in a balance patch?

-Hwacha autofire removed
This was not a substantial problem either way, and the problems with the hwacha have not been addressed. Maybe you get this one, because a few folks had some strong reactions.

-Mobula's arc changes scaled back
From insane to still crippling for interesting builds while not addressing the core problem with the meta mob. The changes settled on here should have been the wacky outlandish "lets try as big as we can starting point", not where we settled.

-Spires turning changes scaled back (was much higher)
The fact we are discussing nerfing the Spire in the first place is a problem. How many times is it brought to competitive games outside of lab/paritan/canyon?

-AI should not fire the harpoon
This was a bug, this is not responding to feedback this is us being your beta testers (that's fine, part of patch testing, but it isn't really listening to us). I'm being generous here and assuming this was not intended behaviour because if it was then I hope you aren't expecting brownie points for removing really, really bad ideas.

-Pyra mass increased
We are having to fix the pyra again because the last set of big balance patches broke it. Listening to our feedback a year after we give it doesn't seem like it belongs on this list. The changes made in these patches were too large, and the changes made in this patch are too large.

-Squid front gun arc put back in its proper place
The fact we are discussing buffing a competitive meta ship is a problem.

-Squid rear gun moved slightly
Why are we buffing the squid at all. It is a competitive meta ship.

-Lochnagar went from 65% back its normal 125%
Breaking the meta with a baseball bat instead of a club hammer.

-Hwacha got slower and almost lost range because of this, but was changed.
The range reduction was a bug wasn't it? And the hwacha is still a problem.

-Reduced screen shake
This one I'll give you.

So out of the 11 listed most either aren't balance testing but are in fact major mechanics changes, buffs or nerfs which are not needed and do nothing to address the competitive meta, are addressing over balancing from last time, or are actually bug fixes. We have one, minor (if important) UI modification on this list. Maybe two relevant changes if I give you removing the hwacha autofire since the community didn't like the idea. I hope you can see why some of us don't think this is a productive use of our time.

So maybe I'm being a bit harsh. This consultation was only almost a complete waste of our and your time.

32

Release Notes / Re: 1.4.5 New Balance Changes "When Ambush Comes To Shove"

« on: March 19, 2016, 11:45:11 am »

From what I can tell the consultation with players was a complete waste of our time, and probably yours too. It was not taken into account. As for this little gem:

"side note, highest ship winrate in the game before this patch."

this tells me everything I need to know about what was really used to inform how balance decisions were made. Statistics are essential when making decisions like this, but ripped devoid of context they are more likely to be a curse than a blessing.

33

General Discussion / Re: How would YOU nerf the Mobula?

« on: March 16, 2016, 11:56:01 am »

How would I nerf the mobula? Well if I have to nerf rather than buff other underused parts and ships I'd add two big hull strips that wrap around the balloon on the edges so that you can gat / mortar or gat / banshee or hades / flak or hades / art that son of a biscuit more effectively from below.

The problem with the mob is that a smart pilot has way to many ways to kill you while avoiding getting killed themselves. Cant use a heavy carro because double light carro or carro mine counters it due to mob vertical mobility, and mob will usually kill you before you effectively blend it. Cant hwacha or art it because of wide separation of components. Cant meta it because good luck getting on top of a top tier mobula pilot so your gunner has a shot at the hull. Even if you could they have three light guns, you have at best two (or three if you are a junker but good luck being in position first), gg hasta-la-pasta.

So what we need is an interesting way to make a mobula easier to kill. We could decrease its hull. That will work. We could change the layout of the guns or reduce the number of guns. Both of these are options but they take away interesting viable strategies. I like the idea of reducing the viability of the balloon, better vertical mobility but don't scratch that thing or you can kiss that advantage goodbye, but that makes it an odd exception.

The question I ask is, was the mobula ever intended to be borderline invulnerable when it is above you? If not, then give me some way to kill that thing from beneath.

34

Dev App Testing / Re: "When Ambush Comes to Shove" -Week 3 Possibly final testing?!

« on: March 13, 2016, 12:20:44 pm »

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.

35

Dev App Testing / Re: "When Ambush Comes to Shove" -Week 3 Possibly final testing?!

« on: March 13, 2016, 07:28:16 am »

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.

36

Gameplay / Re: Competitive Ship Tier List 2016 (1.4.5)

« on: March 11, 2016, 09:14:52 am »

Bottom line is that if you enemy brings a Spire and it isn't Lab or Paritan (maybe Canyon, but only if you know your enemy wont spawn camp) then their life will be miserable if you bring a lumberfish or a ship with hades/flak. What makes matters worse is that the Spire is actually very effective against most other ships, meaning that frequently your options are hard counter or match it in the lobby (bring a spire yourself). If you don't have the resources to match it then your best bet may well be to hard counter just to force a different match up (they should deny you the hard counter by switching themselves). Result is that outside of a few niche situations the Spire doesn't see much use because a small number of ships hard counter it brutally.

Depending on the intention of the list I feel the galleon might be a bit maligned here. If it is a summary of how ships are currently used, then I'm on board. If it is looking at potential I've seen galleons sit on the edge of greatness for a while now with many folks trying to drag them into the meta more effectively. I'm not convinced the current mobula meta isn't vulnerable to certain galleon loadouts as Byron has demonstrated in the past.

37

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: I am begging, please add minimum level requirements to pilot...

« on: March 09, 2016, 10:55:29 am »

I think you have identified an important point Kam, such a system needs to inform without patronizing, which I will admit is a difficult task.

Some things would be easy to do without being patronizing though. A screen which pops up when you select an inappropriate tool and tells you "Lochnager ammo breaks guns when it is fired, as such it is largely useless for engineers [Disable this message in future X]" or "The harpoon is currently a weapon in progress, and is not combat effective. We are testing ways to improve it in the Dev App [Disable this message in future X]" shouldn't offend anyone bar the completely insane.

Others are admittedly harder, but even an offensive message which has the player think about their responsibilities to others might be better than what we have now. Certainly I feel there are little things that could be done easily, and bigger things that might be harder to do that might be worthwhile.

38

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: I am begging, please add minimum level requirements to pilot...

« on: March 09, 2016, 09:13:03 am »

So long as it can be turned off or circumvented I'm fine with it. I admire Jamini's goals, but I do think he is living in a Rousseauian fantasy. True, most people aren't intentionally malicious, but a majority are very good at rationalizing their crappy behaviour and many are too stupid to recognize the ways they are stupid. This applies to novices in video games just as much as it does elsewhere.

There is nothing to be done with asshats and trolls, they will ruin your day whatever technical approaches you take (although I do wish Muse was a bit more aggressive with the ban-hammer). The problem is novices have no idea about what being a pilot means. The game doesn't warn them that taking the pilot slot without knowing what you are doing is a dick move. They aren't informed what the normal responsibilities of taking that slot are. It isn't shocking they don't live up to those responsibilities.

In my ideal world we would have various warning that would pop up that you could disable alerting novices when they are about to be an ass. The loadout recommendation screen should tell you that you are expected to accept the loadout. The equipment selection screen should warn you if you try to take anything other than a spy-glass as a crew member. Similarly for gunner and anything other than taking a spanner or wrench. It should warn you if you try to take lochnager as an engineer. It should warn you if you build one of the common questionable builds (all explosive damage or a flak fish). It should warn them that the harpoon is broken. And it should warn you if you click that pilots wheel.

At the moment Muse are de facto asking vet players to do things the game could very easily automated because the game provides novices with close to zero information. Worse the game doesn't create a culture of informed responsibility for novices. You wouldn't captain a football team when you don't understand the offside rule because everyone would call you an arrogant ass. Yet because novices are uninformed and lazy (you know, because they are human) they frequently take on the responsibilities of the captains chair.

I'd emphasize something about Mr.Disasters comments regarding my novice clan efforts. While it was sucking the fun out of the game for me, this wasn't what caused the failure of that project. Ultimately I believe the reason that project failed was because I identified a niche that didn't exist. Good novices were getting gobbled up by the existing clans and nurtured. I built something specifically designed to do what other clans were already effectively doing. And they were offering other things as well like a sense of community and an ethos beyond "don't be an ass". I'm not saying that the way the community interfaces with novices is perfect, but I will say that it is sufficiently the good that polite, responsive novices have many, many options and didn't need another one.

It is the novices that cannot reason out their responsibilities that need help, and since most humans are pretty crappy that is the majority of new players. Most aren't assholes. Most also don't think about if their actions harm others. Of course if they didn't understand their responsibilities they weren't eligible for the clan I created making it useless to them. I don't know what, if anything, the community can do to address this problem without more support from Muse.

That's why I want  this feature and I'd prefer it be possible to disable it. For me this is about ingraining a culture among novices that the pilot slot carries with it certain responsibilities. It isn't about restricting novices choices, it is about getting them to think before they play out their naive sky captain fantasies at everyone else's expense.

39

Dev App Testing / Re: "When Ambush Comes to Shove" - Week 2 is being tested this weekend! (change log)

« on: March 06, 2016, 01:03:28 pm »

Does no one at Muse know how to characterise non-linear systems?

I'm not bothered by any of the changes in particular here, and some changes I get are being made the make qualitative changes in how the game is played (the loch change for instance). Those are going to be big and need constant balancing and there is nothing else for it. But once again we have nerfs and buffs which elevate some ships by absurd degrees and pound others into the dirt. If you want to characterise a non-linear system you need to make small changes. This is especially true when testing the system. You need to do this even if you think a component of the system is seriously out of whack because small changes in non-linear systems can have a big impact.

The pyra buff is a 150/550~=30% change in hull health before we ignore the effect of the other adjustment. It is also a de facto admission that the pyra was massively over-nerfed in the last meta-shifting patch, which is what every single tester said at the time. 30% is not small. 30% plus other changes is really not small. I have no idea how to interpret any of the feedback on this because it will take me 4-6 weeks of theorycraft and testing to work out what impact such a radical metashift will have. As an aside if this was pushed in its current form I'd be pretty darn annoyed that once again I'm having to learn the top tier play all over again for what should be small balance fixes.

Learning how to use stamina I'm fine with. Learning what might be an interesting new loch mechanic I'm fine with. Relearning the whole meta without substantial qualitatively new problems to solve just wont be interesting.

As a final note, a squid buff? And a double squid buff at that. The squid is a popular and effective competitive ship with several top tier pilots considering it their signature ship. Buffing it because novices don't spend enough time in the blastyard with it before taking it out is going to make competitive play less interesting. I'm not especially happy about that.
 

40

Release Notes / Re: Version 1.4.5 Release Notes

« on: March 04, 2016, 06:40:20 am »

Out of curiosity do we know who does the statistics for Muse? Because my understanding is Spires have high win percentages, but I've never seen a proper analysis of the game data for how the ships are balanced taking into account win rates or MMR or some similar measure of skill. Spires could win frequently for a number of reasons, but it certainly isn't because they are easy ships to pilot and crew.

I worry that the Spire is being treated as a novice ship because it is successful, which is a poor proxy for the skill needed to operate it. Is there any way that future patch notes could come with an explanation for why the changes are being made the way they are? Even better would be the hard numbers the decisions are being based on.

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General Discussion / Re: picking ship before match start

« on: February 15, 2016, 07:43:26 am »

Problem is that GoI has an odd counter structure. Just a random example, spires require a certain amount of discipline to use but can be utterly devastating. They are effectively hard countered on most maps by arcing weapons (lumberjack, hades, etc). I often have a good gunner and one or two novice engineers. So, sometimes I switch to a hard counter not to hard counter but as a build denial approach. It is my way of saying "No I'm not letting you bring that kill spire on this map, I cant match you with two novice engineers gunning so bring something else or eat lumberfish". Hard countering is also perfectly acceptable if the teams are horribly unbalanced. That said switching last second is poor form. If your opposition starts playing the counter merry-go-round though I think you are perfectly justified in doing it. The lobby game is essentially a negotiation between the pilots as to what is acceptable for a balanced match. Usual rules for not being an ass while negotiating apply.

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Community Events / Re: Cronus League Week 4 and 5!

« on: January 24, 2016, 04:07:17 pm »

The Bards are partnered with Ergo Victorium, and we are playing Week 4 while they play Week 5. I think there is something I have misunderstood.

43

Guides / Re: How to better utilize Gats - A Case for Heatsinks

« on: January 21, 2016, 01:33:10 pm »

Meh I wouldn't worry. I totally ballsed up lumberjack damage mechanics the other day on here. It happens. There is a related tactic to the one you are suggesting which uses burst rounds to maximize damage per clip and double break hull without the need for a reload. Not a fan of it but I haven't given it a try with some of the odder situations I'd like to try it in (double gat mobula for instance).

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Community Events / Re: Idea: Defence

« on: January 20, 2016, 04:29:07 am »

Nice idea Mann, similar to the Aerodrome (I think it was the Aerodrome?) in some ways although sans cargo mechanic. One problem I can see with your reasoning although not with the format is:
"Obviously there is a kill limit so teams will be advised not to team up with other teams in game. Your kills, your score."
Basic game theory, GoI massively rewards teamwork, especially in 4v4, unless you know your enemies are going to split up you are well advised to form a spontaneous 4 ship team since getting half the kills in a 12-10 is going to get you way more point than in a 12-3 game. Since forming a 4 ship team always increases your likely kill rate it is a stable equilibrium, you wont get teams splitting. Only exception is if one team was so good they thought they could carry on their own, then they should try to get all 12 kills.

45

Guides / Re: How to Lumberjack -levi

« on: January 19, 2016, 01:56:05 pm »

So it does, mea culpa. I tested that out in the blast yard and everything, must have been direct hits breaking components. In that case burst is pretty much useless to decent gunners.