Distension Beta Suggestions/Bugfix thread

[2kill]

finaly id like to say that games last to long for my understanding. i wouldnt change the timer tho, maybe remove some blocks to make defending a little bit easier?

you mean harder? I find that I enjoy the longer rounds the only time I didn't was when I really needed to be doing something else but couldn't bring myself to leave. (so I guess I was enjoying it then too just more stress ful) also when its released who's going to care? you will most likely have time when you play and if you don't you can always play later.

[Fluffz]

imho with few people playing the comparison of ship powers is unfair towards a high level team. i dont think someone can win a 9vs14 game.

also i was hoping you could play a ship while being ops.

finaly id like to say that games last to long for my understanding. i wouldnt change the timer tho, maybe remove some blocks to make defending a little bit easier?

[Epic li]

So, I found out that if you don't upgrade bullets in the jav, and upgrades shrap, they come in level 3, nice eh? isn't there a way to change that? i mean, i was lvl 15 getting 1hitko with my shraps a lot

[roxxkatt]

also,

at the beginning of the round, -immediately- before all players are warped out, they need to be warped back into a safety. this is to prevent players with mines to mine the small bot spawn point. (cough aqua cough)

additionally, the bot spawn points need to be 175% more spread out, and about 10 tiles down/up


additionally,
today my comp was being an asshole, and had hangs of about 2s.
the dist arena has no spike protection, and all participation was lost, because lagout cant handle d/cs.

increase the no data spike limit to 2500ms, to kick the player into spec, not kill.

[roxxkatt]

i could throw together a F1 rather rapidly...

want me to? :O

[gdugwyler]

Vaguely important announcement

As some of you may have heard, I've been pretty busy lately, and have had to cut back pretty severely the development on Distension. However, after a week or so a couple of fine people have stepped up to continue running the beta. alinea <ER> and Left_Eye are now beta coordinators. Please report any bugs you find during betas to them, and they'll be passed on to me.

Fortunately this comes at a time when Distension is getting close to being out the door. I'll still continue to develop the game, though in a limited capacity, and may participate in tests here and there, at which point you can still report bugs directly to me. For the next few weeks I'll focus on things like creating an introduction (!intro commands), F1 help, and so on. If I get frisky, I might even include some kind of tutorial, though that's doubtful. (milo, maybe this is up your alley, considering you were working on that pub tutorial? It would probably be far more simple for Dist, as people would already know how to play.)

I'm unsure how ali and Left_Eye will schedule the tests, so you'll have to check with them, and/or they may post here when they plan to do it. For those that have normally been unable to play due to the odd times, you might find you can now give Dist a whirl.

--

A couple of questions: anyone have Ops, and if so, how is it? I'm not sure if it's fast-paced enough to be worthwhile to include. I did put in a lot of work on it, but if it doesn't work with the game it can be dropped, or at the very least made a super-secret option.

I've also considered making a large selection of ships available at the start, rather than unlocking at ranks. Any opinions on this? Would probably still keep what I've planned as the "special" unlocks to unlock in a particular way (Weasel, Lanc), while allowing the other 6 to start straight off. This might be a better way of figuring out whether or not the ships are balanced, as well.

--

Continued thanks to all the testers. Discussion is still very welcome here. Shooting for getting the game out sometime in mid-April with your help and continued input.

[Fluffz]

I sui'd in a group of nme's. It is possible i got tkd, but rather unlikely.

i also think it is messed up. had the same thing quite often already.

[project dragon]

- Limiting the amount of specials used in an area / timeframe and stopping them from working isn't possible.

But delaying the time between when a terr can use a burst is!
I think the problem people have to terr burst is that you can spam them quickly. Nevermind the limiting stuff (which I consider a negative thing, more details to follow), but for a terr to have 4 bursts and to throw them all out in a fraction of a second is what makes the bursts annoying for most people. The terr is quite capable of defending itself or at least it is able to evade enemies better now with how Dug has tweaked it (multiple portal upgrades, lvl2 bullets, emp, etc...). I think to help prevent burst spamming, there should be a longer delay between bursts (eg: if you burst, you can fire your next burst in, for example, 3 seconds). That way, terr's will have bursts to use, but will prevent them from spamming them.

For ship limitations, it's hard to justify them for me. It's sort of like the reaction people had when they tried to limit javs pubs. It sounds like it can work, but I think it does more harm then good. For one thing, ship limitations will prevent newcommers to the game from being able to pilot those ships in order to decide which ship they would like to specialize in, if you generally have 2-3 terrs that will always terr. It restricts them to less choices, which I don't think is fair. Secondly, if you have bad pilots in the limited ships, it will hurt your team even more! You can yell at them all you want, but you know there will be people that will stay in that ship because they can. Thirdly, you will occasionally see the overpowered team, hording certain ships, but moreso that I see, is that the team that pretty much plays one ship, is eventually the team that will lose. They don't have any balance on their team, and although they look overpowered, they WILL have weak points. The point of you, as the enemy, is to adjust to exploit their weak points. For example; switching your ships around to combat their strategy. You may lose your participation, but what does that matter if you don't change and lose anyways? You gain experience in other ships, which will make you a well rounded player.

I hope that made sense. : (

[Mjollnir]

I think we should get rid of everything cool to ensure proper balance!

You shouldn't have to compromise player freedoms to make the game balanced. People are not going to like being told what ships they can and cannot play by the bot: "Wanna shark? Nope sorry, your team has two...Terr? yea....thats taken as well, try spider!". May as well just make it a capped game .... <_<

Players should be allowed to pick ships and balance the teams themselves. Too many javs are useless against good sharks. Too many terrs means you have less fighting ships.

"Rock is overpowered. Paper is fine." - Scissors.

But the retard-factor (and the fact that some ships are too powerful when there are many of them) has to be taken into consideration. Some ships are way more important than others and restricting them can help with this. Ideally, the restrictions wouldn't even get noticed most of the time but would still level the playing field. We aren't talking about "taking away everything cool" and the game can actually be more fun if it's balanced properly.

This is still beta and we are not at a fine level of balance like a game of rock-paper-scissors yet. The more balanced the game is made the more fun it should become. We just have to keep in mind not to restrict things too much, so that the original intention of making it more fun isn't forgotten.

[meddi]

I think we should get rid of everything cool to ensure proper balance!

You shouldn't have to compromise player freedoms to make the game balanced. People are not going to like being told what ships they can and cannot play by the bot: "Wanna shark? Nope sorry, your team has two...Terr? yea....thats taken as well, try spider!". May as well just make it a capped game .... <_<

Players should be allowed to pick ships and balance the teams themselves. Too many javs are useless against good sharks. Too many terrs means you have less fighting ships.

"Rock is overpowered. Paper is fine." - Scissors.

[Mjollnir]

Yes a limit is bound to be frustrating for some but I suspect that if this ever goes live then some people will be deterred from playing by FR battles degenerating into a burstfests.

A rank 0 terr is still a lot more useful than no terr at all and a single mid-rank terr is often good enough to win a FR battle. Since terrs can get significant RP from support bonus AND burst kills AND victory bonus without even firing a shot they are not likely to remain low rank for long.

It might be better if the really powerful specials such as bursts and reps could be limited in some way without limiting the ships themselves. Are any of the following possible:
Limiting the number of times a special can be used in an area and/or timeframe by stopping it from firing?
Limiting the number of specials available on a frequency by dynamically capping specials per ship?
Dynamically reducing the duration of specials based on the number available to a frequency?
Developing new 'Anti' specials that counter or nullify existing specials?

I agree that the limit may bring problems when people want to rank their low level Terriers. There could be a system that allows a certain amount of lower than x level terriers to play. Another way is something like you suggested but those things are mostly impossible or complicated to implement. This is how I think they would work / not work:

- Limiting the amount of specials used in an area / timeframe and stopping them from working isn't possible.
- Capping the amount of specials / ship is in work already in how the ships
- Limiting specials to some amount / team is possible but would probably bring too many problems such as ships getting a really unbalanced amounts of specials so some people are left with none. That could also be fixed by limits / ship but it gets more and more complicated. I guess this would be possible though.
- Reducing the duration of specials on the fly is impossible I think.
- Anti-special systems that nullify specials are possible. They would work by typing something to the bot and it would take away the enemy specials. Similarly to the Terr EMP, it would take some time to charge and you could use it again and again.

[Viruk]

Maybe I don't play enough, but I've never played a game with too many terriers. With ship limits on, when this thing goes public, the most useless and retarded players are inevitably going to end up playing the most important ships. It will also make it frustrating with people trying to rank up a lower lvl terr. A rank 0 terr is no where near as useful as a rank 50.

Yes a limit is bound to be frustrating for some but I suspect that if this ever goes live then some people will be deterred from playing by FR battles degenerating into a burstfests.

A rank 0 terr is still a lot more useful than no terr at all and a single mid-rank terr is often good enough to win a FR battle. Since terrs can get significant RP from support bonus AND burst kills AND victory bonus without even firing a shot they are not likely to remain low rank for long.

It might be better if the really powerful specials such as bursts and reps could be limited in some way without limiting the ships themselves. Are any of the following possible:
Limiting the number of times a special can be used in an area and/or timeframe by stopping it from firing?
Limiting the number of specials available on a frequency by dynamically capping specials per ship?
Dynamically reducing the duration of specials based on the number available to a frequency?
Developing new 'Anti' specials that counter or nullify existing specials?

[meddi]

How is it a cause for trouble? If we would limit them, there wouldn't be so many unnecessary Terriers. It would also reduce the amount of bursts flying around which make the game too random to be true basing.

Maybe I don't play enough, but I've never played a game with too many terriers. With ship limits on, when this thing goes public, the most useless and retarded players are inevitably going to end up playing the most important ships. It will also make it frustrating with people trying to rank up a lower lvl terr. A rank 0 terr is no where near as useful as a rank 50.

[DankNuggets]

Yeh, long games = big rewards at the end.
I still think the losing team should get a bigger chunk of the reward for losing & participating. (IE: Yesterday's match, i got 13k for the win, what did the people on the other team get?)
Think they should at least get 25% of my 13k, or even 1/3.

i was on that losing team, i don't know that i got anything. i remember hearing about the losing team gettting a %, but when i looked throught the chat, i couldn't see where i'd been rewarded any rp.

brings up a good point-- it seems that most people (support ships at least) are getting most of their rp through end of game bonuses. They are keeping up with the fighters right now, but what happens when there are dozens of games to win in a day instead 3-5? Will these ppl who rely end of round bonuses excell much more than someone who relys on kills for rp?

does the Beta multiplier extend to the end of round bonuses right now?

a chunk for the losers seems like a good way to keep everyone on a somewhat level playing field, and encourages ppl to assist (i was pretty shocked to see that even though i assisted for 99% of the round i got (almost?) no points when i was switched back to my army right b4 winning)

[Vergilius]

Verg: could you have been TKd? Other than that I don't see any reason why the streak wouldn't have been reset.

I sui'd in a group of nme's. It is possible i got tkd, but rather unlikely.