Distension Beta Suggestions/Bugfix thread

[Mjollnir]

Updates:
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Mj ranking up slowly: You're level 30 and pretty much every player is below you in rank! What do you expect? Read back on what I've said a couple of times about front-runners for an explanation about why it's so hard to rank up ... the basic gist: the amount of RP required to rank up was arrived at by the number of players you kill at your rank... so if no-one is flying ships above your rank, or even at your rank, your average will be very far below that, and every single rank will take 2 or 3 times longer than it should under the "calculated" situation. In other words, pack leaders can't bitch!

I understand that concept and I have kept that in mind. I haven't even played my weasel for quite some time now to let people catch up (and because it became boring after the nerfing). My concern was with the fact that now that the weasel can kill people a lot slower than before, it is going to be much slower to level up without some kind of an extra bonus.

Anyway, I am sure you will find a nice balance for the ship if you are going to tweak it after testing the ship yourself.

[Nockm]

Mjollllllllllllllllllll

[gdugwyler]

Terrs resisting L2: Every single ship will be able to resist L2 bullets; it's just a matter of how many energy upgrades they have. At that point, it would be prudent for the WB to upgrade to L3, which should kill any ship (excepting only one) in one shot regardless of number of energy upgrades.

Weasel rankup speed: It's definitely slowed, I'll agree to that. Before it was easily advancing the fastest of any ship, which would understandably make it a lot of fun to play -- same with the Lancs when they were overpowered. I do still intend to increase them both in power very slightly, though, just to stand out a little bit when certain players do unlock them, and so make them coveted ships... might be best to do this just before the public release, so that they're mostly balanced beforehand, and so adding just a little bit won't throw it off.

Schedule: This is still not really feasible, the reason being that my own schedule is erratic, and because development takes quite a bit of time. I only have a few hours a day to work on Distension, and any time there's a bug report, it goes in before the next test run. Sometimes there are major reworkings that delay tests until later on, or cause one of them not to occur, and sometimes I have to be in at work at a certain time for a lab meeting, or have other appointments... if I had no job, maybe I could schedule it reasonably well, but until that glorious day, it stays at two tests, one starting roughly 10A-12P EST, and the other 2P-5P EST.

Reworking testing: Unfortunately, billing server downtime followed by a recycle has coincided with Distension twice in the last couple of days. We need to test the game in a slightly safer environment to determine if it's a bot problem, or if it was just coincidence, since the biller going down never before occurred when Dist was running. There's a very cool way to do this without bothering people too much, and it may actually become the preferred way to test the game. But as a result, we won't be testing today (Friday) unless we get it going faster than I think we will. Monday is what we're shooting for. Sorry for the delays.

[Peace_Maker]

Reworking testing: Unfortunately, billing server downtime followed by a recycle has coincided with Distension twice in the last couple of days. We need to test the game in a slightly safer environment to determine if it's a bot problem, or if it was just coincidence, since the biller going down never before occurred when Dist was running. There's a very cool way to do this without bothering people too much, and it may actually become the preferred way to test the game. But as a result, we won't be testing today (Friday) unless we get it going faster than I think we will. Monday is what we're shooting for. Sorry for the delays.

I vote to test distension in dev zone. You have enough followers to run it there and get the amount of players you need. Also this will allow distension to run longer I believe. Any time you are not working on the bot it could be up running? This will give players what they want, allowing them to play longer. Rank will be gained faster allowing us to test all upgrades faster than its current rate. If you do move the tests to dev count me in on being there when I can.

Peace

[milosh]

We can't freely hand out Dev Zone access.

[gdugwyler]

He's right about dev access... but Mav's given clearance for testing on dev, and we've found a way to do it without giving out the IP and port, which has become possible as of yesterday. I've modified a bot (BouncerBot) to use the new feature, and it's verified to be working. (Any interested coders wondering how it's used can see the code here: http://twcore.org/browser/trunk/twco...ouncerbot.java or check out this thread: http://forums.minegoboom.com/viewtopic.php?t=7843)

Also tried out Distension on the dev server, and it's able to get the DB records we've all worked on for quite a while now. This all means: we'll be able to test Monday on dev.

[HateTheFake]

So now that distension will be hosted in twdev, can u possibly allow us more time to test it? And if so what would the new times be.

[Zeimonster]

multi on levi is completely useless. It doesnt widen the spread at all

[Ephemeral]

I one aspect of Distension that I really like is the usage of points to glean better ships.

I feel this idea should be expanded even more, particularly to the use of public chatting. No one should be able to pub chat until a certain amount of points are gathered. After that, each line of pub chat from a player should 'cost' a small amount of points. If someone wants to brag and taunt and be a general mouthy player, they 'pay' as they go. :fear:

[milosh]

lol ^

[project dragon]

That is actually an interesting concept, and I would like to see if is works!

[gdugwyler]

Couldn't restrict it initially (without some sort of scheme such as *shutup), and in particular this might be detrimental to helping new players understand a fairly complex game. However removing points per blue chat line, maybe when over a certain level, wouldn't be hard to do. It would just be a matter of whether or not people think it's a good idea -- it's certainly an interesting one, and would stop the ever-present and extremely stupid "lol" from popping up constantly...

[Zeimonster]

So, I became a little concerned about the high rp rates I needed to level up at early 30's (36k rp from 29 to 30 and 47k rp from 30 to 31) and was wondering how many rps I'd need to level up one level at the "higher" levels.

Well, I asked dug about the formula and he said it's 1.3x the amount needed to level up in the previous level (makes sense: 36k*1.3=47k). Anyway, I just pulled out the windows calculator and started to calculate.

31-32: 47k*1.3=61.1k
32-33: 61.1k*1.3=79.4k
...
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38-39: 383k rp
39-40: 498k rp
...
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45-46: 2400000 rp <- ok, that's 2,4 million rp already....
46-47: 3.1m rp
47-48: 4.06m rp

at level 48 I get blue bombs
i'll never get blue bombs

To gather 4 million rp, I would have to kill 100k people worth 40rp (without the beta beta bonus that'd probably be about the average of rp per kill I'd get at level 47, maybe a bit more if being optimistic). 1000-2000 kills can be achieved in one day if played a lot. To get 4m rp, I'd have to play distension 50-100 days without getting bored of being at the same level.

Something's wrong.

[MirrorriM]

Dunno if it's been brought up yet, but I've noticed one very annoying and unhelpful thing: players !assisting only to get rp and then quickly switching back to their freq. They will do this over and over within a round, just gleaning rp. Is there a way to punish this behavior?

[HateTheFake]

Is there any way the computer can just randomly choose someone to assist. This is becoming a problem when our terr leaves out of the blue =/. Also can we redo teams, it always ALWAYS seems that the btm team loses, we won 3 small games and lost every other one, its kinda disappointing when u have to get 41k to rank 31 in wb, and ur only getting 30 rp per kill because of lack of flags