Distension Beta Suggestions/Bugfix thread

[End]

Im going to go ahead and state my opinion, probably of which no one will like, but here it goes. The spider has to be nurfed its far superior to any ship for this type of game. Any baser in this ship of rank 15 upwards runs around the map killing. Once in the FR the spider has to only sit back and spray, two hits kills almost any ship, at level 21 I can hold a constant rate of fire down and im no where near fully upgraded. Granted its one hit kill for yellow upwards but they don't even get a chance to fire at you if you play it well. I could see this ship turning distension into base as its by far the best ship to fly. Nerf it please (and yes it is my favourite ship)

[gdugwyler]

New "ship" idea

Having borrowed some graphics for Distension from a game I was working on a few years back called Commander (attempting to mix in RTS elements to SS -- never finished), I started thinking about what else I could recycle. Distension is entertaining, but there's still a distinct lack of teamwork and coordination ... something that I think if existed would up the quality of play quite a bit. Also, I don't always like playing an action-RPG, so I was trying to think of alternatives to being in a ship, while still being able to rank up and help out your team. What I've come up with is a 9th ship (no, not Nightwasp): Tactical Ops.

The Tactical Ops position is limited to one per team, filling the role of the behind-the-scenes support to the army, and as such they're limited to being in spec on their freq. Consider their ability to watch over any part of the map at any time equivalent to advanced radar/satellite technology ... what have you. Like terrs and sharks, they will receive profit sharing -- though unlike those ships, aside from round end bonuses this will be their ONLY source of RP income. (As you can probably guess, Ops won't have or need all that many levels.) Every 30 seconds they have a chance of receiving an OP point (maybe 2), which allows them to use their various special abilities designed to support the team.

(Note: when "home base" is mentioned it refers to the base in which your army starts a round.) The abilities include:

- Send messages to the team (shown as " messages from DistensionBot) ... much along the lines of sending support to a particular area with automatic recognition/name included of any terr nearby. Further upgrades of this ability will allow singling out players for particular orders, sending to all ships of a particular type, and imitation of enemy Ops to confuse the other team.
- Show a tactical breakdown of the number of enemy and friendly ships in each section of each base, with special notation for terrier locations.
- Priority rearm for everyone on the army for a limited amount of time -- this will force the other army to respawn much more slowly, and as a bonus prizes your rearmed pilots with fullcharge.
- Shields to any friendly pilot in home base.
- Activate doors for a limited time in particular sections of the home base. Upgrades of this ability will allow access to more critical doors, and eventually operation of doors in the enemy base.
- Deploy cover in home base at strategic locations under which ships can hide.

Various assault abilities:
- Deploy a cone of seclusion around a specified player. Upgrades allow a larger cone, and the option to target all enemy pilots in the home base. (Graphics outright stolen from Enigma, then modified. If, uh, we can't run the event, it may as well live on in another fashion.)
- Cover a ship with an exciting ball of solitude, also taken from Enigma. This is essentially the reverse of the previous ability. It makes it difficult to know where exactly one is going.
- Momentarily flash enemy player/players in home base with a (relatively) blank screen. Higher levels will allow longer flashes.
- Display an imaginary minefield that should look almost exactly like the real deal, except that they won't be seen on radar by ships with mine-radar abilities. Choose from a couple of locations. An upgrade creates more mines.
- Targetted EMP ability, similar to that of the Terr. All enemy ships in home base will be sapped of their energy for a short period of time; Sitting Duckfest 2008 ensues.

Less interesting (but still important) abilities:
- Profit sharing upgrade (see Terr)
- Increased chance of receiving OP for using special abilities
- Max OP storage capacity increase


This accounts for all 14 available upgrade slots that other ships possess. Tactical Ops will see upgrading and rank ups done in the same fashion as anyone else. They just won't be directly in the game.

Looking at a lot of work, but it's an interesting addition, I think, and should give me something to do over the break.

[End]

Thought about your idea a little bit Dug and I think theres a slight problem. As only one person can be the commander at one time after a while some are going to be far, far superior at it than others, putting the team at a severe disadvantage unless they command, only widening the ranking gap.

I also thought a few high level ability for the commander could be to warp certain ships to strategic positions or place a bot turret on the map which would spray a line of fire in predestined directions for a limited time.

[hak]

Tactical Ops

- Send messages to the team (shown as " messages from DistensionBot) ... much along the lines of sending support to a particular area with automatic recognition/name included of any terr nearby. Further upgrades of this ability will allow singling out players for particular orders, sending to all ships of a particular type, and imitation of enemy Ops to confuse the other team.
- Show a tactical breakdown of the number of enemy and friendly ships in each section of each base, with special notation for terrier locations.
- Priority rearm for everyone on the army for a limited amount of time -- this will force the other army to respawn much more slowly, and as a bonus prizes your rearmed pilots with fullcharge.
- Shields to any friendly pilot in home base.
- Activate doors for a limited time in particular sections of the home base. Upgrades of this ability will allow access to more critical doors, and eventually operation of doors in the enemy base.
- Deploy cover in home base at strategic locations under which ships can hide.

Various assault abilities:
- Deploy a cone of seclusion around a specified player. Upgrades allow a larger cone, and the option to target all enemy pilots in the home base. (Graphics outright stolen from Enigma, then modified. If, uh, we can't run the event, it may as well live on in another fashion.)
- Cover a ship with an exciting ball of solitude, also taken from Enigma. This is essentially the reverse of the previous ability. It makes it difficult to know where exactly one is going.
- Momentarily flash enemy player/players in home base with a (relatively) blank screen. Higher levels will allow longer flashes.
- Display an imaginary minefield that should look almost exactly like the real deal, except that they won't be seen on radar by ships with mine-radar abilities. Choose from a couple of locations. An upgrade creates more mines.
- Targetted EMP ability, similar to that of the Terr. All enemy ships in home base will be sapped of their energy for a short period of time; Sitting Duckfest 2008 ensues.

Less interesting (but still important) abilities:
- Profit sharing upgrade (see Terr)
- Increased chance of receiving OP for using special abilities
- Max OP storage capacity increase

Greetings,

These are definetely interesting ideas, along with the Tactical Ops on itself. These ideas might not all be plausible to work in an actual game, but some could be very useful.

One thing that immediately jumps into my mind though, is the spam that could be delivered from such a 'tactical op'. A message limit might come in handy there.
Edit: It seems I did not fully understand the situation. Using the Distension bot to send messages costs points, which regenrate slowly. Problem solved.

I strongly doubt whether tactical breakdowns can be useful in a medium-fast paced game. In combination with mentally slow pilots in Trench Wars, this option could become rather useless. So here's where you guys come in, testing it out.

The rest of the 'assault' options (aren't they 'support' options really?) can be very useful, and give the game something extra. Temporarily cloaking one or several teammates gives you a big advantage, but be wary, the opponents can do it too. Deploying several fake mines or decoys can really mess your enemies up. This really does give the game another touch which makes it so different from the public, or basing as we know it now.

Very interesting ideas, and I'm sure we're all desperate to try them out ingame.

Regards,

Hakkinen B)

[Peace_Maker]

I have said it before and will say it again. Lower jav bomb rate. Most of my suggestions have eventually been implimented and this one should. Riske is now able to spam 3 bombs quickly with the amount of energy he has. Change it.

[Dr. Snyder]

Lets be real, until anyone makes a legitimate case for this arena that would have SS players thinking it had something more to offer them than Hyperspace its not gonna mean much.

Although HS has abusive mods and absurdly dumb rules, it's really addictive and fun. I just hope TW can make something even better because I wanna be able to say fuck and all that good stuff.

Oh and I played this arena and to be quiet realistic it doesn't have that hook. The starting ships blow so badly, making it too difficult for people starting in late. Plus the games not fast pace enough to make leveling up enjoyable it just seems like TW with some people getting really crappy ships and others getting really good ships.

GL with perfecting it guys

[gdugwyler]

I have said it before and will say it again. Lower jav bomb rate. Most of my suggestions have eventually been implimented and this one should. Riske is now able to spam 3 bombs quickly with the amount of energy he has. Change it.

I did see him lob 3 bombs fairly quickly, though it did reduce him down to no energy. Keep in mind that he's rank 35 when he's doing this, though, and likely has just thrown most of the UP into recharge and energy. Anyone else have an opinion on Jav firing rate?

Lets be real, until anyone makes a legitimate case for this arena that would have SS players thinking it had something more to offer them than Hyperspace its not gonna mean much.

I'm regularly in touch with one of the HS devs. Each project is better or worse than the other in various respects, and one such aspect in which he believes Distension excels over HS is seeming to have more of a goal-oriented approach to how the games play out. Some people might value this, and others not as much.

To you Dist might not (at the moment) have the "hook" ... to others it might. I'll admit that right now it's not easy for a new player to get started, what with the majority of the ships being high level -- this is primarily due to it being a beta test, with generally the same people playing, and not much in the way of fresh fish. Only occasionally is it adverted, and even when it is the new guys are often alienated by receiving almost no help for getting started, to say nothing of the large and scary ships floating around. This should be remedied by a proper intro, F1 help, and maybe even a Distension tutorial arena... as well as the arena being public and up regularly. There may even be a chance we can run two bots in separate arenas, one which allows something like ranks 0-20, and the other, 15+: this would cure the apparent problem of the ranking up not having a pace fast enough, as you describe, to keep someone hooked from the beginning.

[gdugwyler]

New ability idea: when the ship with the ability is killed, the killer is knocked to 0 energy (though begins recharging immediately). Not sure which ship to give it to, though. The following are all potentials: WB, Jav, Levi, Weasel, Lanc. I'd most like to see it on one of the last 3, as they're more unusual in nature. Though WB might be a possibility considering it doesn't have all that much.

Spider nerf: Did a small one. Overall energy reduced by 60, and recharge upgrades now don't add as much. Opinions on how they work now?

Weasel rank up rate/overall ability: Any thoughts? Is this ship still too weak, rank too slowly, etc? Had complaints about it being rather hard to kill people, but other reports that that's not so much the case.

Capping/winning the war: Securing sector holds now takes 10 seconds, as does sector breaking. Also, "winning the war" will consist of winning 3 more battles than your opponent. The will show up like this:

Score:  0 [ ==|   ] 1

This means army 0 is 2 battles ahead of army 1, and needs just 1 to win. However, if army 1 wins the next one, it will look like this:

Score:  0 [  =|   ] 1

Meaning now army 0 needs 2 to win, and army 1 needs 4. No blocks either direction of course means it's tied.

Progress on Ops: Going well enough. I'd say it's 50% there. All the groundwork has been laid -- just need to implement most of the abilities in the bot. Have about 3 done (easily the most difficult ones). Re: a high-level Ops unbalancing the game, this could be the case. However Ops will still add to overall army strength even though they aren't in the game. Might modify it slightly so that their ranks count for a bit more in the strength figure if it becomes a problem. Also, re: turret (or thor air strikes, what have you), it would mean putting a bot in the game and having another login dedicated to Distension, a step at this point I don't care to take. I did consider the warping idea, but thought that it might lead to some abuse... hmm. Were it done in the right way ... safely ... it would be a damn interesting twist. OK, seems like a good idea -- in that case I'm dropping the radar ability as an upgrade: it will come as the single default Tactical Ops ability, as it's not all that great anyhow...!

[Soja]

i like the capping that u made instead of a 2-3 win it has to be broken woo nice dug

[alinea]

New ability idea
The Terr seems like a good idea, but since it doesn't have an open slot, I would vote Lanc. I have seen many Levis and Weasels that have been terrors, but never a Lanc, so maybe it needs a boost around its middle levels where it seems a bit boring to play compared to other ships.

Spider nerf
Bwahaha I love my spid, and yeah, it probably need a slight nerf.

Weasel rank up rate/overall ability
Not a weasel myself, but it seems okay for the time being.

Capping/winning the war:
Hard to say on this one, sounds like it may make the game more exciting with less people unnecessarily suiciding the flag. Looking forward to trying it out with these new settings!

-ali

[Vergilius]

i like that new ability idea, actually. altho i dont think u should give it to the levi. With the huge bomb radius they have, good,fast bullets and very maneuverable i think they are strong enough now (you didnt mention from which lvl this would be available?)

So yea, weasel and/or lanc, the 2 ships that are in smallest numbers.

weasel: well yea, i am able to get 1:1 ratio, but it is mostly cuz there are smaller lvls to kill. vs a ship with about the same lvl it is hard, I can only hope it has shitty aim. 1vs1 weasel-spider? if i dont cloak, i kill him 1 time out of 5. Very hard contestant.

Levi; i see tons of 'em lately, just like we saw tons of weasels bout a month ago. Not stating you should nerf them, but keep a close eye on em.

Or you could make it easier for yourself and just make the weasel a bit more powerful . Anyways, need more testing. Put it up more plz

[Mjollnir]

...
Anyone else have an opinion on Jav firing rate?

The jav firing rate feels fine to me. The jav is finally starting to be more fun to play and I don't think it should be nerfed atm. Not many ppl play a jav as it is.

New ability idea: when the ship with the ability is killed, the killer is knocked to 0 energy (though begins recharging immediately). Not sure which ship to give it to, though. The following are all potentials: WB, Jav, Levi, Weasel, Lanc. I'd most like to see it on one of the last 3, as they're more unusual in nature. Though WB might be a possibility considering it doesn't have all that much.

Hmm... This one could be quite an annoying ability. I think it fits most to the annoying nature of a weasel but I would rather have some other way of making the ship stronger.

Weasel rank up rate/overall ability: Any thoughts? Is this ship still too weak, rank too slowly, etc? Had complaints about it being rather hard to kill people, but other reports that that's not so much the case.

I feel the ship is currently too weak. I get owned in my lvl 35(?) weasel all the time now and that makes playing the ship quite boring. Now that a huge source of weasel RP is gone (the breaks and holds) it is going to be tough.

Capping/winning the war: Securing sector holds now takes 10 seconds, as does sector breaking. Also, "winning the war" will consist of winning 3 more battles than your opponent...

This should be good in theory as it forces people to play more as a team. We will see if it works though since people aren't generally very smart. Before it was possible to save the team alone with a sneaky solo attack (if they didn't have proper defenses) and I kind of liked that. It made it possible to keep a horrible team in the game, as it is very frustrating to keep losing round after round.

[2kill]

Weasels

I don't play them much, but recently I've been upgrading all my ships to higher levels and once I hit 9, (and I heard another person saying the same thing) the leveling seems to be moving very slowly, and I think that L2 bullets at rank 9 would get the Weasels rolling..... It maybe a bad idea now (or not) but I think it could go into the final release since weasels are a special unlock and well be facing even higher levels


Tactical Ops

Sounds like a good Idea not much to say about it yet but,
I'm concerned about higher Ops creaming the other team, to fix this maybe a time limit of how long you can be an Ops would work... or a limit of a certain amount of battles in a conflict

thats all for now see you guys in distension

[gdugwyler]

Updates and such

A few things: the first is to apologize for the recent lack of beta testing. For those that haven't heard some severe lag issues with the server (I'm fairly certain) are keeping the bot from being able to stay up too long, and when it is up it's often lagging like all hell. There are a few things being worked on to alleviate the strain on the connection between bots and the server, and apparently the actual source of the problem is being narrowed down after HopOne turning up nothing, only a red herring.

To the second, I want to present a possible change to how Distension energy and recharge are handled. With no motivation to work on Distension (when you can't run the damn thing it's a bit difficult to remain convinced that progress is worthwhile), I've been playing some Hyperspace. Comparing notes, if you will. HS has some flaws in places, but it's also much better than Distension in being more friendly to new players. One way in which this is true: the gap between someone just starting out and someone who's been plugging away at it forever is not all that great. The odds aren't great that you'll be able to destroy someone who's been playing quite a while, but with a bit of luck and some skill you can pull it off somewhat frequently. On the other hand, starting off in Distension at a time when other players are quite far up in the ranks is an exercise in extreme patience... your best bet is to hope for an unrewarding vulch here and there. I don't think this does much to help low ranks enjoy the game... just making up for it by saying that a high-rank kill will give you several ranks at once doesn't help. It's hard to feel you earn it, and it's hard to get much pleasure advancing when there's little feeling of accomplishment except for having overcome the odds of an initially somewhat cruel system.

The largest contributor to the disparity is -- pretty clearly -- energy and recharge. What I propose to do is for each ship increase starting energy and recharge by a factor, decrease maximum energy and recharge by the same factor, and decrease (probably halve) the amount of energy and recharge bestowed by each upgrade. This will bring everyone quite a bit closer to one another in terms of tanking and firing ability, while still allowing gun upgrades and other special bits to serve a good purpose. Along with this change would come a more severe cap on the highest rank above that continues to give full RP.

This may also extend the life of yellow bullets somewhat, though of course reduces the value of red in the short term (increasing it in the longterm). Might consider dropping L2 bullet damage a bit.


Last, I wanted to open up the idea of two career paths: assault and support. This would basically decide the order in which ships would unlock (though eventually you would be able to unlock all). Assault would begin with a WB, and support with a shark. The assault unlock scheme would be something like: WB, Spider, Jav, with the Lanc being a special unlock. The support scheme'd go: Shark, Terr, Levi, with Weasel as special unlock (mostly just because it's unusual, and not so much that it supports). Once you finish off the standard 3 ships of your chosen path, the others begin to unlock, and once you've gotten the special of your path and all ships of the other path, you can unlock the special of the other. Also under this plan, Levis and Weasels would receive a small amount of profit-sharing. As an additional incentive, Tactical Ops would also unlock a bit earlier for support than for assault.


Comments appreciated, and so on.

[2kill]

Ok let’s start with the career paths,

I like it. It should add an interesting side of play like mages vs. fighters in other RPGs… now the downside, I’m worrying about the fact that the people who choose the assault won’t be able to play the terrier if their isn’t any good support people. Maybe another career path could work being called a mixed path that goes WB, Terrier, Spider, Weasel (cause it’s a useful ship all around) Also I think ether you should be able to unlock the special ship at any time or at least be told if you get to the goals to unlock, so you don’t have to redo things you tried in a lower rank

As to recharge and energy I think it may work but I will know more once we try it out

That’s all cya guys