Distension Beta Suggestions/Bugfix thread

[gdugwyler]

I'm with you all the way on how most ships after the change will probably drop a lot of upgrades into speed, having not much else to put down. Ideally, what I'd like to do is have enough abilities to upgrade so as to have diversity among individual ships. The first task was to roll out the ship type changes, and afterward move on to filling out the ships.

Here is my THREE PRONGED PLAN (much like a salad fork) for abilities:

1. Extend existing abilities. As you said, Fluffz, basically expanding out a bit present abilities -- making early levels that cost a good bit less but are not as potent, as well as extended levels of the abilities for those that want to sink a lot of points in. In particular I might add an increasing return concept -- so that if the first level of the ability gives you x, the next level gives you x + 1 (so 2x+1 total), the one after x + 2 (3x + 2) ... you get the idea. Each ability level growing more potent at each upgrade, giving a benefit to specializing in a particular ability.
2. Create new abilities. There are several possibilities for abilities that I'd not considered until just recently (excluding those that many of you have mentioned and for which I'm very grateful -- some will definitely be implemented, or those that can and without extreme difficulty at any rate). There are 4 classes:
   1. Abilities that rely on the WatchDamage packet. When you fire on someone and don't kill them, these abilities would be activated (probably a percentage chance). This could include reducing some of their upgrades for that particular rearm, causing engine shutdown, setting energy to 0, firing on them any of the Ops abilities, warping, -RP, reduced loadout at next rearm, and so on.
   2. Abilities that work with LVZ modifications. Recent upgrades to the LVZ protocol allow us to modify locations, display modes, layers and so on of LVZ screen objects (graphics). The only difficulty is that the object numbers remain static/unchangeable/limited. So, for example, for a fake mine effect dropped by a player, it would most likely be restricted to one per team. If one player dropped a fake mine and immediately after another on the same team did the same, the original mine would be moved to the new location. But that's not too big a deal. If there are any abilities that you would like to see done with graphics that do not need to be in a fixed location (doesn't mean actually "moving," but just able to be moved from point A to point B when necessary), I'd be interested. One ability will be for the Weasel, showing the locations of all of the warp points on the map -- and additional levels maybe opening up extra spots. There's also the possibility of opening up a wormhole or tunnel that leads anyone who enters it to a chosen location.
   3. Buff abilities. Simple enough: with the maximum energy and recharge recently done away with, we can now have buff abilities fairly easily. You fire the ability, and for a limited time you have upgrades you would not otherwise.
   4. Permanent alterations. Abilities that would install as permanent alterations to how the ship works. For example, something that provides the package deal of +2 energy, +1 recharge, -3 speed, -3 thrust. (Might be useful for non-Z-Class who need a certain amount of energy for a weapon but have no way of getting it without waiting, or even for Z-Class that just have some ranks to wait before they can buy the next level of energy.)
3. Balance abilities against one another. In order to ensure diversity of ships, the abilities should be balanced both by cost and power. I'd like to see some be significantly cheaper on the whole, and also weaker than some abilities, rather than having ability 1 always cost the same as ability 2, forcing them to compete directly and requiring an exact balance of power between the two in order for players to choose. (I think this was a problem with spider's energy tank vs. super -- super is still highly preferred, is it not?)

Other things: I did hear you about the energy costs of the weapons. Are they generally too high now, even with the high-energy ship type? The idea is supposed to be that the lighter ships should not necessarily be able to use the new gun just because their rank allows it to them -- but the warship should certainly be able to the very rank it becomes available. If it's not then there's an issue.

Also note that for those choosing the Warship, it's not a high-energy, high-recharge shiptype, but a high-energy and fairly low recharge ship type (in comparison to its energy, that is). I'm not on the computer with the numbers at present, but I think its recharge upgrades about as quickly as the Advanced Scout, or even possibly a bit worse. The only way to have both high recharge and energy at ranks below 60 is to choose Z-Class.

[gdugwyler]

Wanted to let everyone know that aside from working on abilities, I'm going to address some of the problems associated with the ship types:

• Scout and Advanced Scout will merge into one (too confusing, and an unnecessary distinction). This ship will be the default ship for all players and should work fine for most applications. After rank 10, like the Advanced Scout, this ship will receive 8UP per rank.
• The amount of automatic energy and recharge will be calculated slightly differently -- presently it doesn't show enough of a difference between ship types.
• Artillery will be given a bonus to recharge to make it more viable. It will actually have (I believe) the most overall upgrades per rank due to recharge being somewhat less valuable than energy, which is needed for firing more advanced, high-cost weapons.
• The game will experimentally move to each energy and recharge upgrade being worth either 2/3 or 1/2 of what it is at present; all associated costs (for Z-Class) will be reduced by 2/3 or 1/2, and they will be given automatically 1.5x or 2x as frequently for non-Z-Class ships. The idea is to even out the amount of energy and recharge across a larger number of ranks, so that the difference between having 8 upgrades and having 9 is not as drastic. The hope is that this will make weapon firing costs work a bit more smoothly, so that you're not stuck waiting for 5-10 ranks just to use a weapon that you need only 50 more energy to fire.
• Weapon costs will most likely be reduced for a number of ships. I need to know which ships in particular are experiencing the most problems in order to do this, however. From what I understand, the Lanc is still fine, and I would be willing to bet that the Spider has also not had problems, both of these ships having low firing costs.
• !armory and !status will now show the number of ranks until the next energy and recharge upgrade.

[jngy slate]

The second burst for the terr is still 160 UP isn't it? You should change that.

[Vergilius]

Lil question about !assist. It seems like it only lets me randomly assist. First 2 times i tried today was sth like (max assist rank:72) i was 47 at the time, but it wouldnt allow me. I know nobody from my team changed ships, because 10 seconds later it gave the potential avarice warning, but it still didnt let me. I do get on when the difference is huge. Am i missing something?

[El_Mariachi]

Hi, I played distension today June 10th 2008.

We played a one base game that lasted 22 min and my team lost. I got only 300 RP while the other team got like 20k RP... isn't it a too big difference between the two teams? I thought maybe there was a problem that needed to be fixed : the RP sharing system. As it is now, why would someone even play to get only that little RP at the end... Getting like 3/6 or 4/6 (just a guess) of the other team RP could be interesting.

Also, I don't know if its already like this, but the RP sharing could also depend on the round time. The more long is the round, the more RP the losing team gets (because it means that they fought well). On the other hand, the less long is the round, the less RP the losing team gets (because it means that they didn't really put up a good fight and therefore don't "merit" a big ammount of RP). This would encourage more teamwork and a better ship dispatching maybe, because a team would like to last longer to get more RP.

,------------------------------------------------------------------------.
  |  END OF WAR: GRAND VICTORY for PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF MISANTHROPY (0) !!  \
  .==============================================================================.
  |  Total award: 47747.703 RP     75% for 5 on support   -> average 7161 RP     |
  |              > x2 BONUS! <     25% for 3 on attack    -> average 3979 RP     |
  }======   MVPs   =============================================================={
  |  Holds: Chao <ER> [13]                Breaks: N/A [0]                        |
  |  FR Kills: alinea <ER> [42]           TeKs: Mjollnir [9]                     |
  |  Gen. Kills: Alore [53]               Best Ratio: Mjollnir [3.07:1]          |
  |  Best Streak: Mjollnir [15]           RP: Mjollnir [56899]                   |
  .==============================================================================.
  Round time: 22:14                          END OF WAR STATUS   0 [===|   ] 1   
P Distension> You lost this long battle, but fought courageously.  HQ has given you a bonus of 386RP (100% participation).

Thank you,

El_Mariachi

[Viruk]

The second burst for the terr is still 160 UP isn't it? You should change that.

... to 200 UP. And then dramatically reduce the burst regen frequency. Maybe that would be enough to significantly cut down on all those deaths from unaimed random things bouncing at you from unexpected directions. Although since that still leaves the first burst, plenty of bomb shrap and all sorts of repped ordnance it probably wouldn't. Gah!

Also, I don't know if its already like this, but the RP sharing could also depend on the round time. The more long is the round, the more RP the losing team gets (because it means that they fought well). On the other hand, the less long is the round, the less RP the losing team gets (because it means that they didn't really put up a good fight and therefore don't "merit" a big ammount of RP).

This seems a good idea. I think there is a stalemate calculation based on flag held time. If you used this as a basis for calculating the losing bonus. Maybe multiplying it by (round time)/(stalemate time) and then halving it.

Now that the victory message has neat layout and its easy to find things it might be nice to add the % time the flag was held by the victors to give an idea of how close a game was.

With so many options to test when upgrading your ships; people AFK testing and upgrading their ships are sometimes going to be a significant factor in team balance when there are few players. It is also annoying to be shot at and warped about when you are busy upgrading. Can we not have a !refit mode that will warp you to a safe zone, remove you from the team balance calculations and disable AFK checks, support bonuses, victory bonuses, automatic warps and summons?

[gdugwyler]

The idea of a refitting mode is an interesting one. It would keep the teams balanced while there were AFKs and take the pressure off. I'm trying to think of a way for it to work with the current architecture of the bot ... hmm, there may be a way in which it would work. It would just require a player to issue a command to enter the mode (as you suggest) but probably also a command to exit it, in order to save the data properly.

The losing award is bolstered by the round time played, yes. In fact a losing award isn't given unless at least 15 minutes were played. There does seem to be something off in the calculation (still not where it should be), but note that it's not as severe as you state it. I think a lot of players on the losing side will confuse the total award (often something like 20K) while not realizing that indeed that amount is split between every member of the winning team. The total award given to the losing team, however, is not shown, making it difficult to see the difference. In the particular pasted case, it was also an end-war event, giving the winning team x2 RP -- and that multiplier doesn't carry over to the losers. Still, 300-400RP is pretty much just a slap in the face to the losing team ... at the very least it should be worth at least twice as much as your average kill. Speaking of, how are the round win awards at present? Are they still not being scaled up enough? 3K RP doesn't sound that great when each kill gives you about 250-300. (Though, the amount shown on the display is not boosted by the RP bonus ... maybe the issue of the loser's bonus is that it's not displaying the adjustment? I'll check it out.)

And I'll see about adding the % time the flag(s) were/was held for each freq.

Also, figured out the reason there are no breaks: we've been playing a lot of single flag, and single flag doesn't have sector breaks, only holds.

How do the modified ship types feel? If this job is anything like the one I get paid for, no news is usually reasonably good news. I had a chance to try them out myself, didn't see any glaring problems on an initial pass. Note that rearming had to be slowed down a bit (we had a recycle...) because there are significantly more energy and recharge upgrades. I guess the message cap is still not low enough to prevent it. Eh.

[DankNuggets]

all seems to be moving along well. I've still only played a couple of shiptypes, but in talking to others and the fact that you've combined the scouts, it's getting easier to get a handle on how your ship will turn out in relation to the other choices.

the biggest problem i see now is the one that viruk mentioned: there are too many times when there's one shark/terr and they need to upgrade their ship. Unless they warn the team, and the team responds, the entire team ends up attaching to a semi-afk terr and spaming him with "GO TO BASE NUB!!" or similarly with a shark when it's needed to constantly rep away mines. If these people could remove themselves from the fight long enough to upgrade and still keep their participation, it would help. Not that it'll make ppl change ships to compensate, but it will probably take the heat off of them since people will know that they're upgrading and it'll help the team in the long run.

One check would be that you couldn't stay in the !refit for more than say 2 mins w/o pm'ing the bot so that people couldn't sit in afk for 99% of a round and still get 100% participation.

another question: i know you're getting sick of constantly explaining the relative "which shiptype is better" questions, but what makes the scout undesirable? It seems like there should be a middle of the road choice, and that all choices should be relatively the same, just with different distributions of high, med, low. There's already High Energy/Low Recharge, Low UP; vice versa; Low on both, high UP; Var, high UP; and then scout with Med all-around. I kept hearing stuff about one ship being potentially "better" than the others. I would say that they should be on par with each other, and that the "better" should be at the descetion of the player. Maybe you meant it was better at a certain rank, but in the end, there really shouldn't be a "better" choice, or you'll end up like before with everyone following one path.

[Imperian]

i suggest we scrap the ship specialization thing and go back to the times when there was no such thing. it kinda ruined the fun for me because everything was so unbalanced and confusing

i just like having stuff for each ship that is different. i propose everything to be manually upgradeble again.

I want rank to actually mean something. A rank 40 pilot should have a lot more abilities and power than a rank 1 pilot.

Restart everyone so they're at the beginning... so its more fair.

[Mjollnir]

i suggest we scrap the ship specialization thing and go back to the times when there was no such thing. it kinda ruined the fun for me because everything was so unbalanced and confusing

i just like having stuff for each ship that is different. i propose everything to be manually upgradeble again.

I want rank to actually mean something. A rank 40 pilot should have a lot more abilities and power than a rank 1 pilot.

Restart everyone so they're at the beginning... so its more fair.

The game is not that unbalanced anymore but there is naturally a few things that need to be balanced again. Now that the original scout class was removed, it shouldn't be all that confusing anymore. That is because the default ship class is just fine, and you don't even have to think about the specialization if you don't want to.

Every ship is going to have more variety than before with different shiptypes and the new abilities that will be put in place. If you want to be able to manually upgrade everything use the Z-class.

The ranks were all set to level 40 for beta testing purposes and that isn't how it's going to be when Distension is released. I don't understand your argument about rank 1 and rank 40 not having a difference in power, since they clearly do. Remember that there are no rank 1 ships playing at the moment, since everyone is set to a higher rank when they sign up.

[Mjollnir]

Ships that seem to be a tad overpowered at the moment are the Lancaster and the Shark.

Lancaster:
First off, I know Dug wants Lanc to be "a bit overpowered". Probably not this much though. Most complaints when playing seem to be about the Lancaster. I have to agree that it is extremely strong now and should probably be nerfed a little. On top of it racking a huge amount of kills, it can actually tank a blue bullet at the moment. I would like other people to comment on the ship in here because Dug doesn't usually make changes without more feedback. Anyway, I think the vast majority of the player agree with the Lanc issue.

Shark:
This is a different kind of situation. A few people posted about the Shark being overpowered before but nothing was probably done. I know Dug feels it lacks abilities and he probably doesn't want to nerf a ship that is so important to have in a team (to keep people playing it). That being said, I still think it's a little too much of a factor in a game. It's either the amount of reps or the power of the reps, that makes the Shark able to walk in the base and sit on the flag for too long. The fact that the team that has more sharks always wins, tells a lot about their current power.

I hope there are some nice abilities in stock for the Shark, so we can make the ship more enjoyable to play while nerfing the reps. It would be nice to hear some ideas about possible abilities for the ship in here as well.

[Fluffz]

i quit playing lanc because of the bomb and firebloom (a natural counter to reps btw) nerf. the spider has a far higher damage output so i fail to see ur point. they are weaker than be4 specialisations.

the ship that bugs me is the Levi, it levels ultra slow and doesnt get so many kills.

the problem with sharks aint their reps, its the fact that sometimes a team with 0 sharks has to play against a team with 3 sharks. I still think that fixed frequencies are a bad idea.

[Epic li]

i quit playing lanc because of the bomb and firebloom (a natural counter to reps btw) nerf. the spider has a far higher damage output so i fail to see ur point. they are weaker than be4 specialisations.

the ship that bugs me is the Levi, it levels ultra slow and doesnt get so many kills.

the problem with sharks aint their reps, its the fact that sometimes a team with 0 sharks has to play against a team with 3 sharks. I still think that fixed frequencies are a bad idea.

So you think a ship that has a chance of getting a full charge when killing, tanking a l3 bullet, having a counter to reps, having a escape mecanism(bombs), shoting l3, getting 15+ killing sprees whitout too much trouble isn't overpower? ok.
And you fail at lev, it's an awesome ship(when i played it), and it's one of the most annoying ships atm for me
The sharks, i dunno what's the problem, but they can simply get in the base and sit on the flag fast enought with enought reps, that they are able to get the sector hold-.-

[Mjollnir]

i quit playing lanc because of the bomb and firebloom (a natural counter to reps btw) nerf. the spider has a far higher damage output so i fail to see ur point. they are weaker than be4 specialisations.

the ship that bugs me is the Levi, it levels ultra slow and doesnt get so many kills.

the problem with sharks aint their reps, its the fact that sometimes a team with 0 sharks has to play against a team with 3 sharks. I still think that fixed frequencies are a bad idea.

I don't know what you have been smoking but we sure haven't been playing the same kind of Distension. The only point I somewhat agree with is the difference in the number of sharks / team. I did point that out in my post though. Anyone know if the rule, that a team can only have one extra Shark, compared to the other team, is in place? I still think that repels are the source of the problems, especially if the forementioned rule is in place.

[Fluffz]

So you think a ship that has a chance of getting a full charge when killing, tanking a l3 bullet, having a counter to reps, having a escape mecanism(bombs), shoting l3, getting 15+ killing sprees whitout too much trouble isn't overpower?

you never played lanc. to tank l3 you need a warship which cant afford all that other stuff u mention. additionally its supposed to be a special ship you need to unlock first. you need lvl52 for usefull firebloom and i have jet to see someone use the bomb to dodge. the bullet speed in open is slow enough for everyone to avoid being hit. the ship itself also isnt the fastest, gl with that 15 kill spree.