Distension Beta Suggestions/Bugfix thread

[AcidBomber]

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.

[DankNuggets]

So im playing distension, and the game has been at a standstill for about half an hour now.

Why?

Freq 1 has 13 players in

2 lanc
1 wb
2 spid
3 shark
5 terrier

come on now, should there not be a limit to the number of terriers? Its impossible to remove them all from the flag room without another coming in before we can kill the rest. With all the sharks, my jav is having a really hard time killing these things, as they attach to the terrier, spam their 3-6 reps, and suicide someone. Now I know we need to have basing ships, but the 5 terriers in right now spawn with a total of 11 bursts per death. When they all attack at the same time, thats 33 bouncing balls of death flying around the fr.

Id say i hit about 90% of bombs that arent repped, and am currently 21-49, with zero tks.

This is silly :P

I think u might be overexaggerating a little bit. 11 burst per death? how do you figure? i'm a rank 30+ and i start with 1 burst... i get maybe 2 from regeneration per death... Also, at least 2 of the 5 terrs were < lvl10 so you can't fault them for wanting to rank up their ships.

A limit isn't needed, maybe the terr was just made a little too powerful to compensate for ppl not playing it. The idea was to make it more than just a warp point into fr, allowing ppl to actually fight with it (ie, more than just 2 terrs anyway).

Sharks are always annoying if you are trying to base in a jav. I thought there was a limit on them? but i know my team had at least 3 in one fr at a time

2 lanc --> 2 lanc
1 wb --> 1 wb
2 spid --> 5
3 shark --> 3 shark
5 terrier --> 2 terr

is this what u want? i'd suggest ?go base b/c there's never 5 terrs, an assload of spiders, and the same damn thing over and over again.

virtually every match i play is at a standstill for 30mins or more it's not b/c of 5 terrs or even sharks, it's b/c the game is set up to keep a balance btwn teams, and if that's done properly, no one should have an ez win.

[Mjollnir]

I was trying to think about the jumpspace ability and how it could work better. Unfortunately I don't know much about the mechanics of Continuum. I heard there has been problems with the same kind of things before. Sika was trying to make a bot that counts the laps in racing but it didn't work because the system is so inaccurate that the players didn't register in the right spots or something. In our scenario there is only one player that needs attention so maybe there is more hope here.

I am assuming you are trying to calculate the warp spot by adding the x and y speed vectors together for the new coordinates. You can probably get something like speed x-axis / frame and speed y-axis / frame (or whatever) from a command of some kind. And the speed is probably in pixels. An awful lot of assumptions though

Anyway, another way of doing the warp could be making the length of jump a constant number (maybe even so that the player can adjust it), that we will call C. This won't always help with the bot getting old coord info but it would help in a way because you could now move very slowly and still make a decent warp so the coords are more likely to be close enough to the real situation. If it was like that it could also be used as a tool to escape a tough spot even when you are not moving much at all. This could also be a setting that the player can toggle (using constant or speed dependant warp or even a random warp to a random direction).

We have vectors x=(a,0) and y=(0,b). Lets say x + y = z = (a,b) and lets make ||z|| = 1 which means the length of vector z is 1. The new unit vector Z can be calculated Z = z / ||z|| where ||z|| = sqrt(a^2 + b^2) and z = (a,b). Now if we multiply the unit vector Z with the constant C we get the vector that can be used to get the new coordinates. We get oldCoords + C*Z = newCoords. The numbers will have to be rounded after the calculation. If we don't want to use a constant we can just forget about making the unit vector and use the formula oldcoords + z = newCoords (which is probably used atm). The constant has to be a number that makes jumping over a wall possible from every angle.

[AcidBomber]

Yeh, the escape pod seems to do a lot of damage especially when you spawn with everything again (bursts/portals?).
Or maybe is because we had 5 terrs on 1 team, so they kept getting escape pods and stuff that's why people noticed they're quite powerful. (Perhaps they should be?)


As well, as for anti-warp, is hard for me to toggle between anti/non-anti with the drain lol... and what's the radius now?
Is already pretty small, and i can only antiwarp enemy terr if i get close to them, but now with the drain i cant tank L2s while running towards the terr with sharks and such repelling me. o.o"

Oh well lol


PS: Spiders are really dull at low levels with their L1s, nothing else is any good =\
Any way to make it more interesting to play? And is not to mention, really hard to play cuz you have to aim and such, compared to a terr sitting there with their bursts or a jav lobbing bombs at fr entrance.

[Mjollnir]

Limiting the number of terriers is cause for trouble. It is also unnecessary. One team having 5 terrs is not a common problem.

Also, I feel you should be able to switch to shark / terr without losing participation even if your team has a sector hold. It may be that you need a 2nd shark to hold both flags, or something of the sort. I am not sure if this was the case before the new "sector hold" check for participation loss was put into place.

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.

I agree that you should be able to switch to a support ship at any time without losing participation. The new rule that allows changing ships when you have only one flag is probably overriding the old rule of allowing support ships to do it.

[meddi]

Limiting the number of terriers is cause for trouble. It is also unnecessary. One team having 5 terrs is not a common problem.

Also, I feel you should be able to switch to shark / terr without losing participation even if your team has a sector hold. It may be that you need a 2nd shark to hold both flags, or something of the sort. I am not sure if this was the case before the new "sector hold" check for participation loss was put into place.

[Viruk]

Played levi again today: Bullets may be cheap but still cannot fire very fast and they are slower than the bomb (which is still fun but only good at earning RPs if you can find weak ships to aim it at). I foolishly keep upgrading my armor as that is about the only thing I have the UPs for in a single level. Unfortunately vs a bunch of terriers bursting all over the place all this armor is completely useless and as a levi I can forget about dodging terr bursts.
Requesting terrier limits.
Would like to see more power or a small support bonus back.
Any chance of a levi ability that gives chance of full charge after warp or attach? I will never get enough recharge to get all that energy in a hurry and attach-kills are so annoying when you are a tank!

P.S. If the EMP on my bombs was at all effective I couldn't tell from my end. Anyone from the opposition want to comment?

[Mjollnir]

and that freq got its well deserved loss in the end and gave the other one an average of 13k rp. there is no need for a limit because the system works and the retarded 5 terr team team lost 13k rp to the less retarded 2 terr team.

If people are being retarded we have to let them ruin the fun for the others? I don't think so and I think a limit is a good idea.

[Mjollnir]

So im playing distension, and the game has been at a standstill for about half an hour now.

Why?

Freq 1 has 13 players in

2 lanc
1 wb
2 spid
3 shark
5 terrier

come on now, should there not be a limit to the number of terriers? Its impossible to remove them all from the flag room without another coming in before we can kill the rest. With all the sharks, my jav is having a really hard time killing these things, as they attach to the terrier, spam their 3-6 reps, and suicide someone. Now I know we need to have basing ships, but the 5 terriers in right now spawn with a total of 11 bursts per death. When they all attack at the same time, thats 33 bouncing balls of death flying around the fr.

Id say i hit about 90% of bombs that arent repped, and am currently 21-49, with zero tks.

This is silly :P

There needs to be a max amount for Terriers. Maybe 2 for smaller games and 3(-4) for bigger ones. It would be nice if they were more balanced for the teams as well. Today it was 1 terrier versus 3 or 4 for a long time.

Other notes about today's test:

- I didn't like the smaller radius change. The damage increase didn't do anything noticable so it basically just made Javelins weaker. Also, the amount of kills I was able to get was reduced a lot.

- The jumpspace didn't really seem to work very well. It seems it worked pretty rarely and most of the time it made a random warp to a wrong direction or just warped you to the same spot.

- Terriers were bursting way too much for the basing to be skillful. It was just a suicide fest for the Terrs. I think the Terriers should not get bursts prized after getting an escape pod. That just makes Terriers want to kamikaze so they can burst again. They also seem to get the escape pod A LOT.

- Spiders are dominating. An example: Zei's level 30 spider got 3 levels + 80% of a level today. He also got way more RP than my Javelin when we compared the RP amounts after an hour of play. My Javelin is level 46.

- Level 1 bullet damage is very high and I bet it's starting to get close to yellow bullet damage. Notable mostly in spiders and sometimes the Terrs.

[Fluffz]

and that freq got its well deserved loss in the end and gave the other one an average of 13k rp. there is no need for a limit because the system works and the retarded 5 terr team team lost 13k rp to the less retarded 2 terr team.

[dako]

So im playing distension, and the game has been at a standstill for about half an hour now.

Why?

Freq 1 has 13 players in

2 lanc
1 wb
2 spid
3 shark
5 terrier

come on now, should there not be a limit to the number of terriers? Its impossible to remove them all from the flag room without another coming in before we can kill the rest. With all the sharks, my jav is having a really hard time killing these things, as they attach to the terrier, spam their 3-6 reps, and suicide someone. Now I know we need to have basing ships, but the 5 terriers in right now spawn with a total of 11 bursts per death. When they all attack at the same time, thats 33 bouncing balls of death flying around the fr.

Id say i hit about 90% of bombs that arent repped, and am currently 21-49, with zero tks.

This is silly :P

[gdugwyler]

(Bolding changes for easy tl;dr skimmers)

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

Cheese: Trying out lowered bomb radius today. To compensate, bomb firing costs for Jav are reduced slightly, and bomb damage is increased, so that a very close-striking bomb (nondirect) will actually hurt more than before the change, though not by much. Levi bomb damage has been upped slightly, to around 1150 for a direct hit, and the EMP time was reduced very slightly. Also, L2 bullet damage dropped yet another 50 energy, for what I hope will be the final adjustment to bullet damage. To compensate for the series of L2 damage reductions that I believe have worked to make the Spider somewhat dominant lately, firing costs are reduced for ships that start with L2. About stopping Dist early, can't say as I know what you're talking about, unless it crashed.

[roxxkatt]

Maybe solution is to make the blast radius of the lev bigger and the jav smaller.

The bomb radius HAS to be the same size for all ships.
A lv2 bomb is the same for every ship.

Which is why I have been, and still am suggesting to raise the emp bomb from 35% real damage to 45%...



also: stop ending dist early =(

[Vergilius]

Weird thing happened today: I made about 4 kills in a row, died, then killed someone and it gave me a streak bonus? Never had that before. Anyways, not a bug that i dislike :turned:

[gdugwyler]

Lot of great balance suggestions. Here's what I've done today:

• Levi regular bullet fire energy reduced slightly. They probably need something a little better after they were taken off the profit sharing dole. This is geared toward keeping it mostly a gunning ship.
• Lanc regular and multifire energy reduced, as were fire delays for both. I think Lanc is one of the hardest hit by reduction in L2 energy damage, as it has lowish recharge, is slow, and its bullets don't exactly move like lightning. This may fix it up a bit.
• Spider is no doubt presently doing well especially at low levels due to the reduction in L2 bullet damage. In proportion it became stronger. I may reduce L2 bullet damage again just slightly, but afterward also reduce bullet energy fire costs for all ships starting with L2 to compensate.
• Spider AntiWarp energy cost greatly increased and range slightly reduced. It now does a slight drain at 10 levels of recharge. Before, for some reason I was basing the cost on having much less recharge. This should patch it up. Let me know if it needs more tweaking.
• Weasel. Ah, Weasel, the lucky bastard. Vengeful Bastard now gives assist bonuses if it leads to the person's death within 5 seconds (1/2 RP earned by winrar). May adjust that time, depending. VB now also has more interesting options, such as firing Ops abilities. Generally speaking the normal engine shutdown will only happen half the time, with the other more interesting things coming up much more often now. Also, Weasel streaks are worth slightly more than for other ships, and Weasels making a BTeK get DOUBLE RP rather than +50%. They also now earn +20% for regular TeKs.
• Ops should now be given on the round you win the battle if you go up a rank.
• Jav JumpSpace ability should be mostly working. Automatically given at rank 15. There are negative penalties to using it, though; they go away the more you upgrade, and you can jump further with higher levels as well (how far you go being based on that and how fast you're presently moving).