Distension Beta Suggestions/Bugfix thread

[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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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)

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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]

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.

[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. : (

[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.