Distension Beta Suggestions/Bugfix thread

[Mjollnir]

Hold on, I never said i think the terr is okay now. Imo it is indeed very hard to kill now. But i was under the impression that antiwarp, being a strong weapon, would only become available at a pretty high level. On those high levels you have blue bullets, makes it 1 hit kill. Cloak isnt a problem for them, true, but for the teammates. We can bypass them, and attack the terr, there lies the power of cloaking.

I fully agree on the part that they have tons of ports/pods now, I was only replying to the suggestion of giving the weasel antiwarp. It WOULD overpower it, and i dont want agility/speed/bulletcost/whatever reduced just so i could carry antiwarp, because if we get anti, we WILL get nerfed, you can be sure of that

Okay. I think most of the problems would go away if the Terrs didn't get so many portals. I don't know if giving anti to a weasel is a good idea or not. The blue bullets are made even weaker by the fact that the Terriers portal away every time when we get close. If we shoot one we are totally out of energy and will die almost certainly. With yellow bullets you can at least keep shooting. And yeah.. if there is going to be anti warp it should be at a pretty high level.

[Vergilius]

Glad we agree

On a different note, Warp spots need to work faster, especially the bar/roof ones. takes too long, especially if you have a mid player that comes after you and u have to start dodging. just going to fr by lower and then up to roof is faster that way(i timed it!), making the spots pretty useless

[Viruk]

Now level 20 in all ships and only one officer rank to go before I can get ops.

Umm. Unless my memory is at fault I seem to have lost the officer ranks I gained in the last game. Thanks to a weak opposing team I got them back again this time but what happened? Was there a database restore or something?

Not sure if I also lost ship rank as well as I didn't upgrade anything significant I can remember.

[roxxkatt]

i would also like to see http://www.trenchwars.org/distension expanded.
a help page,
list of upgrades/armory/ui for every ship,
top10, maybe anyship top 10...
maybe an indicator of when dist is on...
best game stats: longest game, highest spree, best rec, etc.
and other cool stuff!

THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES!

[DankNuggets]

i also thought that originally, you couldn't use regeneration to achieve more bursts than you are equipped with at the start. this isn't so. i haven't had more than 2 at once, but that's not to say others haven't gotten more.

warppoints:

i love using these, but they really need to be improved. they are really slow to work, and i'm never really sure if i'm on top of one/how long i have to stay still. too often i'm sitting on one for 4-5 secs, and then as soon as i move, i get warped. is it b/c i was still i didn't warp?
also, in repsonse to someone else's issue, if i get killed as a i warp, it shows me where i would've gone, but i don't actually go there(i go to spawn)

maybe you could put some sort of graphic to show the exact spot or speed it up a bit they would be much more useful. there's no point to use them unless you're just in a really slow ship since they take so long to work.

[roxxkatt]

maybe you could put some sort of graphic

maybe a box of 4 flyover tiles?

[Viruk]

I was able to try out Tac Ops for the first time today

For some reason I got a 'what are you trying to pull' message when I used the !manops command

I managed to find the opshelp and it seemed to explain most of the basics.

I found being Ops very disconcerting as your team appears in blue instead of the enemy but got used to it after a while.

The only ability you can initially use is the ops radar which is of very limited use.

Communication is the biggest problem as you have no access to your team's comm channel. You have no idea what their concerns are and you are only able to use stock messages to guide them (if you have the comms points). I didn't bother as I have always found such messages as more distracting than enlightening and I am not high enough level to spam the enemy team with misleading ones. You also do not see these messages yourself so if you accidentally type the wrong message number you'll probably not notice that you just directed someone to attack the wrong FR.

As very low level Ops about the only things you can do is use the cover (which I haven't tried yet) or priority rearm your team (which at least seems useful and has helped me in the past). This meant I spent a lot of my ops time above the rearmament area looking for clumps of people waiting for re-arm. Probably most of them are like me and launch themselves back into the fray regardless so perhaps this was not such a good idea but I suppose if you have the points to fire off a rearm whenever a victory is due in 30 seconds you probably can't go far wrong. Again you get no feedback when you use the command. The ops radar could have helped here but it is text so I would probably just have spammed myself out of the game. A graphic showing how many people waiting to rearm would be handy for the Tac Ops.

Ops points seemed to regenerate very slowly even with the 20% upgrade but that may just be because there is so little else to do. Would be nice to see a proper special icon for them instead of having to check !status all the time to see if you have spare OP/CP.

All in all when you start Tac Ops it feels very isolated and you have no sense of control over your team or your own advancement. You would probably be able to exert more influence on a battle simply by flying around outside the bases in a fast ship and using teamchat. You would get as much reward by going to make a cup of tea.

Presumably the Tac Ops still counts as part of the team as far as assists and avarice is concerned so I would hope the higher level abilities prove to be worth losing a good ship. A few of them certainly look useful.

It would be good to see Tac Ops getting RP as a result of successful use of Ops abilities. RP for each ship priority rearmed/shielded if they survive a certain time. RP if the flag is held for a certain time after closing the doors or covering in the base. RP for enemy ships killed within a certain time of being affected by an adverse op such as EMP or blindness.

Suggestions for other op abilities:

An operation that would prevent enemy escape pods/special regeneration /triggering of random specials from working for a short time within a certain location? The Tac Op would get RP for each item that would have regenerated/triggered. Could have upgrades of varying power and reward.

An operation that could place a 'bounty' on a specific enemy ship or ship type. The bot would msg your team and the target ship(s). If killed within a certain time they would give double RP to the killer and some RP to the Tac Op. If a target survives it could get some RP. Would add fun especially for weasels! Could have upgrades of varying power and reward.

An operation to take a specified number of OP from the enemy Tac Op. If they possess enough points then they lose them and you get RP for each point sabotaged. If the enemy Tac Op has fewer OP; then the operation costs you the specified number of OP in addition to the cost of using the operation. Power would depend on number of OP available to risk but you could upgrade it to sabotage CP too and give more RP reward if successful.

Afterthought:
I think it is important to improve feedback for all of the ops abilities. The team should be notified as to what their Op is doing if it is not visible on screen and the Op should see something equivalent to whatever their team is seeing. An option to allow people to turn off their ops communication/notification in order to avoid spam and save bandwidth would be good.
I would like to see custom messages at higher levels and the ability to read team chat available early if technically possible.
Might also be fun for high level Ops to be able to use their CP to send the enemy fake messages about activated special ops abilities?
Ability to vote out an annoying/useless op by a majority pming the bot within a set time?

[schope]

problem with collors ONLY on distension arena

[Aquatiq]

That's how the colors are supposed to be in dist.

[gdugwyler]

Going to get back and read this thread pretty soon. In the meantime here's a quick changeset:

• If you try to warp at the start of a round, you'll be put back in rearm. Let ali/Lefty know if it works.
• Fixed crash having to do with swapping players out at round end.
• JumpSpace now warps anywhere from 8 to 24 tiles, depending on the upgraded level, and doesn't work off your velocity. To get it to work best, try sitting fairly still and issuing the command. You'll now need to specify a direction (as velocity provided it before). Use >>> NW or the like.
• Ops will be spec'd for AFK after 90 seconds, and no message will be given to prevent ?away idlers. I may change this to send it to the team chat, though. Just note that idling in Ops is no longer possible. You can reset the idle timer by typing in pub chat, or by using any Ops command, including the help.
• Ops shortcut changed to . (period). For example, to issue the cloak of darkness you used to have to type !oda -- now it's just .da. Eliminates the unnecessary !o.

[Mjollnir]

Going to get back and read this thread pretty soon. In the meantime here's a quick changeset:

• If you try to warp at the start of a round, you'll be put back in rearm. Let ali/Lefty know if it works.
• Fixed crash having to do with swapping players out at round end.
• JumpSpace now warps anywhere from 8 to 24 tiles, depending on the upgraded level, and doesn't work off your velocity. To get it to work best, try sitting fairly still and issuing the command. You'll now need to specify a direction (as velocity provided it before). Use >>> NW or the like.
• Ops will be spec'd for AFK after 90 seconds, and no message will be given to prevent ?away idlers. I may change this to send it to the team chat, though. Just note that idling in Ops is no longer possible. You can reset the idle timer by typing in pub chat, or by using any Ops command, including the help.
• Ops shortcut changed to . (period). For example, to issue the cloak of darkness you used to have to type !oda -- now it's just .da. Eliminates the unnecessary !o.

Great to see the JumpSpace being fixed. Wouldn't it have been easier for the players, if the direction of the JumpSpace was taken from the direction the ship is moving? I posted an idea about it before in the thread and it has to do with creating a unit vector from the current speed vectors. The current system has it's advantages though since you don't have to move to be able to warp. How about having this system and adding a random warp direction by ">>> R" (for escape purposes?) and if you use ">>>" only you get warped to the direction you are going.

Since I don't wanna bother making two posts: Viruk's post about Ops seems to indicate that he wasn't on the team freq when he was playing it. Normally you are on your team's freq and if you weren't, it wasn't working correctly.

[2kill]

I found being Ops very disconcerting as your team appears in blue instead of the enemy but got used to it after a while.

about the team in blue... you are in spec so with your page up and down ticker and press ctrl on a teammates name should fix the problem

the ops can't use team chat? lol was wondering why you would bother with special messages, but just wondering has anyone tried messaging the team? you know with "<message>? could be a bug don't know as I'm waiting to get into ops :/

It would be good to see Tac Ops getting RP as a result of successful use of Ops abilities. RP for each ship priority rearmed/shielded if they survive a certain time. RP if the flag is held for a certain time after closing the doors or covering in the base. RP for enemy ships killed within a certain time of being affected by an adverse op such as EMP or blindness.

Suggestions for other op abilities:

An operation that would prevent enemy escape pods/special regeneration /triggering of random specials from working for a short time within a certain location? The Tac Op would get RP for each item that would have regenerated/triggered. Could have upgrades of varying power and reward.

In ops you really don't have any other of ranking yourself do you besides profit sharing so ya I think it needs a little something it can do by its self.

The /triggering would have to be high rank but would be really helpful to the team

[gdugwyler]

Felt hot to trot and made a couple other changes:

• L2 bomb radius increased
• L1 bullet damage decreased slightly; spider starting and max recharge decreased slightly
• Levi back on support, but like the Weasel, has minimal profitsharing
• Ops setting to freq should hopefully work properly now.
• Ops radar now includes sharks.
• Ops nav ability (thanks Cheese). ,# to snap view to a space, where # is the location. Ops help includes more info. 8 total views.
• Ops AFK made a bit better.
• Endround bonus increased for losers, and time required for loser bonus to kick in halved (15 min or more).
• Warp point checking increased from every 10 seconds to every 5 seconds. Let me know if it goes nuts or anything. Shouldn't. This means that only every 5 seconds will the warp points "activate" -- saves on processing time.
• Lagout system adjusted. Hopefully works correctly. You'll never be able to !lagout after DCing, but I would like to work with the lag settings. Need more info from people who get DC'd by lag: what does the message say?
• You can now change to shark or terr when your freq has both flags, so long as you've held for less than 20 seconds.
• Escape pod will now only fire once per death.
• Spawning radius widened for round start.

[roxxkatt]

ops can be afk, but afk is a LONG TIME.

the check needs to be NO LESS THEN 5 mins.
in fact, i wouldnt mind if it were 10.
ops was rendered useless today, i had to quit.
strips you of your OPs every time.

also, when it specs you, it offers lagout, and puts you in wb after.


also, i remembered that i hate . commands, and like !, i didnt mind doing !ore... im not THAT lazy =P

the warptos werent working for some reason, i have no idea why.

[Mjollnir]

Manually requesting to change back to your original team when assisting and being succesful takes away all participation. That is extremely annoying. Is there a good reason for it?