Messages

91

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: We don't need new art, we need a working game.

« on: August 01, 2014, 04:34:05 am »

man cmon it aint that bad sheesh.   theyll fix it in a week,  2 tops

That's what we said about ships disappearing on Scrap NEARLY A YEAR AGO.

This, in the middle of MLG nonsense and the Gold Playoffs for Hephaestus League? Sorry, but no. Not going to put up with nonsense. Whenever I've emailed the devs and been offered freebies in return for my troubles, I always replied "I don't want your freebies. I want this game to work."

That's still yet to happen. I'm always in-game asking other players "why can't you do this?" and being responded to "because my framerates are too slow!" or "because lag!" I'm saying the same thing to captains that I fly under more now than ever before. Consider myself on strike. Sadly, just in time for a fresh wanted season. I was looking forward to winning that. 

92

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: We don't need new art, we need a working game.

« on: August 01, 2014, 04:15:39 am »

Ok. so I exaggerate the point.

The point is not that people need to be fired, although I did word it that way in the initial posting.

The point is that I expect this kind of buggery from free and open-source software, but not in commercial software. When I was running Arch Linux, I continually broke the system because I would update pieces of software which other pieces of software depended upon to work properly before they themselves had actually been updated to use the new-found "shared libraries"

But you know what? Those problems get fixed pretty quickly. I remember installing a fresh Arch installation IMMEDIATELY after an update a bug in GRUB popped up, causing configuration errors. Not only was there a solution ready in 24 hours, but a hard fix was ready before the next version of GRUB.

But that's Arch Linux. It is notoriously hard to use and I was warned before hand that these kinds of things would happen. Guns of Icarus is different. This is commercial software that is expected to work out of the box and it is (as far as I'm aware) illegal for outside sources to view and fix the source code. And not only that, but bugs that have been known and persistent for mooooooonths have gone unfixed while new bugs get created. Perhaps the issue is this is the only Indie game I've taken a liking to and that my expectations are unrealistic. Either way, I think that the MUSE team can do better than this. They HAVE to do better than this. Or else these words will echo from every reach of the internet:

"How the hell is "Adventure Mode" supposed to work if they can't even make the game they've ALREADY PUBLISHED work?"

93

Feedback and Suggestions / We don't need new art, we need a working game.

« on: August 01, 2014, 02:54:13 am »

I'm really saddened that I have to come to the forums with this sort of angry mindset. I love this game. I want it to work. I want it to work, REALLY badly. But here's the deal: every time we get a patch for this game, we get new bugs. We get loads of them. You guys take 2 steps forward, we take 10 steps back. I mean, new themes or figureheads are nice and all, but ...

FIX YOUR FUCKING SHIT.

... Seriously, why are we focusing on adding more features when every time we do, it breaks the game? Ships STILL disappear inexplicably when in a dust cloud. Just when you think we're supposed to have performance improvements with flamethrowers, we start getting reports of 3 frames per second when flamethrowers start firing.

So, I'll put it to you this way:

SUSPEND ARTWORK. NOW.

ONLY PAY ENGINEERS.

If you have artists that are decent programmers, put them to work. We want this game to work in the first place, not break every time a new patch comes in. It was getting good before this last patch, some people reported no lag at ALL. But now it's all ruined. All for not.

Fix it.

94

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Map achievements

« on: July 25, 2014, 04:43:45 pm »

*Insert obligatory "Ermahgerd, only newbs chase achieves. Achieves don't matter and neither do levels, Ermahgerd."*

But in all seriousness, for those of us that do actually get some enjoyment out of chasing achieves, the map achievements are the most annoying. When I was working on Anglean Achieves, I found myself frustrated because I'd sit for days on end in 3v3 lobbies and never once see Anglean come up as an option to even vote for.

I like the idea of making the map achievements unlockable out-of-order. But of course if we did that, we'd finish all 15 in a couple of months. Thus, maybe make the numbers bigger or find more challenging things to do on those achievements. Like, don't just break 30 parts with ramming on Dunes. Make it 150-300 parts. Or switch it to 50 or more 1500 meter kills. Or Both. That way you're likely to actually finish all 15 map achievements in line with the rest of the achievements, you might actually learn something about playing that map and force everyone to crowbar new techniques into their repertoire.

95

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Control the lobbies

« on: July 10, 2014, 06:01:22 pm »

I agree with a lot of what's been said above me. Basically, with a game so team-oriented as this one, you have to start thinking that "the needs of the many is outweigh the needs of the few." (I'm thinking of Bentham and John Stuart Mill here, not Spock) Although I am very much an individualist for the real world and like for people to be able to play it their own way, it's ultimately down to what's need for a given situation. I invite everyone to discuss with me what they want to bring for a given situation if they think something will work better than what I've requested (as of late I've found myself in many long, drawn-out discussions regarding ammos for the lumberjack), but if there outright just isn't any communication, then the game is less fun and lobbies get bogged down.

One of the things I have to emphasize about the system I mention above is the notion of giving specific charges to go along with the kick. These are things that have to be established WITH the vote kick and you'll have to have something pop-up on the concerned player's screen as soon as the vote is called letting them know that he's currently being voted-on. Because this game is internationalized, those messages will show up in different languages so no matter what language he or she speaks, he or she will understand that there are 14 people who don't want to play with him because he's not responding. Add a 45 second timer that starts with that second captain's approval for vote-kicking or with the first vote following an impeachment call as well as the ability for anyone to change their vote at any time. This way, a player who's just chillin out with no sound and not paying too much attention to chat can go "wait, hold on guys! I'm here! Tell me what to do!" and then we're back on track again.

I like the idea of an auto-translating captains-orders feature, but I'm afraid the user-interface is already way too cluttered. I've already un-bound the V commands because I hit V instead of C accidentally and it screws up my flying.

96

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Control the lobbies

« on: July 06, 2014, 03:40:16 am »

First thing to note: I am obviously not a common forum poster. However, I am sick and tired of having games ruined by that one guy that doesn't respond. It's one thing if someone is chasing an achievement or doesn't agree with a captain on how to run a certain build. I get that, I don't want to punish that kind of independent thinking. However, the kind of situations we're dealing with are not those in which people disagree, and in my experience the people who use chat abusively are also not the single biggest issue, especially when I can simply mute the people that annoy me. It's those situations in which they simply don't respond at all. How will a CA fix that? How will a mod fix that?

For starters, I'd love to have access to CA's more quickly. I want to be able to type in global "is a CA handy?" and get immediate response. However, at 12:00am Pacific time, that's not the case. And even then, what can a CA do when someone does not respond to any communication AT ALL.

In all seriousness, this is the single most common problem I've seen: people don't respond, and it's the single most prominent reason why matches don't start faster. Matching people by skill level won't make it faster because, as we're all aware, this community is celebrated for the way it embraces new players mixing with old players and having everyone co-learn. It's when people are not communicating or they are fighting at each others throats while refusing to just go somewhere else that things go awry (more commonly, the former).

This is why I make these two suggestions, each of which to be necessary to the other and something derived from democracy, which even pirate ships organized under:

1: A vote kick

It's simple, it's called on by a captain, but no one votes until another captain (maybe two, or all) approve. Then, crew members on the aforementioned boat (or perhaps the whole team's crewmembers) will vote for the kick. Before all of that can happen though, a specific charge must be associated with the kick. "unresponsiveness" "trolling" "abusive language" "uncooperative" for example. But these charges have to be set in stone and described similarly to the report system as it exists now.

2: Impeachment

Just like a vote-kick, but for the captains. A crewman calls a vote, 2/3 or 3/4 of crew members approve (maybe just 1 half, even), then 1 or 2 captain approves (depends upon lobby size, I imagine. I can see 1 captain approval going awry in a 3v3 or 4v4). This is meant for that one guy that joins and grabs a captain seat, insists everyone ready up but has not addressed his crew and has brought a bunk loadout. It might occasionally apply to the guy chasing the harpoon achievement, but I'll admit that when I was chasing "Destroy 100 parts on a harpooned ship", I and my crews were frustrated and I'm not convinced I blame anyone who would have wanted to impeach me in lobby for it. I was lucky though, because there were a lot of people who were on board to knock that sucker out with me and I was grateful for it. 

I believe it was the economist Milton Friedman who argued against systems that depend upon "the right man being in charge". This is the problem with the CA/Mod system. At the same time, I think that opinions voice against vote kick functions are well founded. I think the solution is to develop a system in which a kick will take actual effort and conviction to achieve, but only requires those members of a lobby to make happen. I see no reason to believe that CA's and Mod's are solely capable of handling the problems of the community, but I do want to include them, even if only in some figure-head type of capacity.

97

The Docks / Re: Hey there GoI! Do you like Cake?

« on: January 19, 2014, 12:49:51 pm »

Hi guys. I thought I'd express some intrest in flying with the cakes in an official capacity. I've been flying with you guys casually for a while and it's a lot of fun. I'm interested in getting into the competative scene too, especially if we can manage some wacky wavy builds (lot's of times that means fire, not always).

Only complication might be my work schedule, which often keeps my occupied in the late evenings on weekends, but if a match comes up that I'm free for, I definitely want in, in any capacity.