Distension Beta Suggestions/Bugfix thread

[inaphyt]

Regarding level 10+ and such taking too long, the problems that the higher-ranked players are seeing are all very intentional. The game is designed to promote even play, and if you wish to fight against that, you'll find that it will be difficult going. The levels were calculated with the idea that you will have to kill X number of people of your own rank in order to level up; X rises slightly per rank but actually not very significantly. However, if you're killing people half your level, the risk of dying is lower, and just like in a more standard RPG it's going to take you ages to level at 50 if you're killing level 25 enemies.

To further underscore this point, the idea of the "humiliation" is present, where a lower-level player killing a higher level player results in the higher level actually losing points. This will be modified so that the lower level actually gets these points as a bonus, encouraging the hunting of players that are significantly higher than the pack.

The theory behind this all is: if you focus on a single ship, in all likelihood you are going to take down the quality of the game, both by being unable or unwilling to provide support in a particular ship when it is needed, and by simply imbalancing sides too heavily in favor of one side or the other. This is not to say that those who do this should be discouraged entirely from playing, but I hope that when there are a slew of rank 5's and a player has a rank 50 ship, they may consider firing up that old rank 8 spider or what have you rather than insisting on playing the 50.


To specific ships again:

Jav starts out pretty well-off, having a level requirement that is reasonably high in the release (tentatively 15). This is to make it a bit more special, and to compensate for the fact that it has a bomb that does 2650 dmg when it connects from level 0. Javving should probably be a bit rape-ish at present as a result. It's meant to have a pretty slow levelling rate, though.

Seems like sharks are really not having that bad a time of it. (Maybe these are the winning sharks.) I'll leave them alone for now.

Terr has a new ability in to prize back warps and bursts. For creative terrs, this can actually give you quite a stockpile even before you've upgraded. For each level you have +10% chance to be prized these things every 30 seconds.

The Weasel's upgrades cost 2 for the first level, but all of their upgrades start +2 ... if you do the math they're actually ahead of the game by 1 upgrade for each of the 5 basic stats, or essentially 5 free upgrade points. They should be fine.


To teamkills, javs and levis lose roughly half of their rank for each TK -- thus the differing numbers. For sharks it's less.


I'm trying hard to get the team evening working properly. I can make the !assist bonus larger and available/adverting more frequently, if you think that will help. If an assist bonus is comparable to the victory reward, I don't see why a player wouldn't switch except out of stubbornness or laziness.

The problem is there are so few people on the same level as you that this theory just doesn't work out, don't you think it should be up to the player which ships they want to level up and not the creater that wants to play god ?

yea i think you did a sweet job with the entire project btw dug everything is working well as far as i can see except the levelling obviously

[gdugwyler]

Regarding level 10+ and such taking too long, the problems that the higher-ranked players are seeing are all very intentional. The game is designed to promote even play, and if you wish to fight against that, you'll find that it will be difficult going. The levels were calculated with the idea that you will have to kill X number of people of your own rank in order to level up; X rises slightly per rank but actually not very significantly. However, if you're killing people half your level, the risk of dying is lower, and just like in a more standard RPG it's going to take you ages to level at 50 if you're killing level 25 enemies.

To further underscore this point, the idea of the "humiliation" is present, where a lower-level player killing a higher level player results in the higher level actually losing points. This will be modified so that the lower level actually gets these points as a bonus, encouraging the hunting of players that are significantly higher than the pack.

The theory behind this all is: if you focus on a single ship, in all likelihood you are going to take down the quality of the game, both by being unable or unwilling to provide support in a particular ship when it is needed, and by simply imbalancing sides too heavily in favor of one side or the other. This is not to say that those who do this should be discouraged entirely from playing, but I hope that when there are a slew of rank 5's and a player has a rank 50 ship, they may consider firing up that old rank 8 spider or what have you rather than insisting on playing the 50.


To specific ships again:

Jav starts out pretty well-off, having a level requirement that is reasonably high in the release (tentatively 15). This is to make it a bit more special, and to compensate for the fact that it has a bomb that does 2650 dmg when it connects from level 0. Javving should probably be a bit rape-ish at present as a result. It's meant to have a pretty slow levelling rate, though.

Seems like sharks are really not having that bad a time of it. (Maybe these are the winning sharks.) I'll leave them alone for now.

Terr has a new ability in to prize back warps and bursts. For creative terrs, this can actually give you quite a stockpile even before you've upgraded. For each level you have +10% chance to be prized these things every 30 seconds.

The Weasel's upgrades cost 2 for the first level, but all of their upgrades start +2 ... if you do the math they're actually ahead of the game by 1 upgrade for each of the 5 basic stats, or essentially 5 free upgrade points. They should be fine.


To teamkills, javs and levis lose roughly half of their rank for each TK -- thus the differing numbers. For sharks it's less.


I'm trying hard to get the team evening working properly. I can make the !assist bonus larger and available/adverting more frequently, if you think that will help. If an assist bonus is comparable to the victory reward, I don't see why a player wouldn't switch except out of stubbornness or laziness.

[Maverick]

Cool. was just wondering about it

[Chao.]

You lose 1 RP

Thought it was 5.

[Kim]

dug, do you also get RP for teamkills?

You lose 1 RP

[Maverick]

dug, do you also get RP for teamkills?

[Kim]

The losing team is definitely biting the bullet in the games that I've played in. Instead of promoting wins, the game should promote the losing team to equalize the battle front to sustain the "grind", then people won't notice how many points it takes to level up, because you'll just be killing stuff all the time.

[project dragon]

I wouldn't mind seeing some help for a team that is losing horribly (going 0-3, or 0-5, etc...). I know the assist command is there, but people have to volunteer to do it and most people don't like leaving the winning team unless people are starting to complain a lot. perhaps something like warping the losing teams terr into a base to give them a head start, or something along those lines to give the team help without having to depend on the winning team for help. I also wouldn't mind it if the tile-set was a little bit brighter to help see everything a little more clearly.

Other than that, I find the zone very enjoyable to play in. Keep up the good work, gdugwyler!



ps. if you guys like this kind of RPG styled game, you might want to check out SSCE Hyperspace, cause it's an RPG zone that's roughly about the same as this. I'd be good to see what works for them, or to learn from their mistakes.

[inaphyt]

:-) dugwyler ftw

The streaks don't resolve the problem i mean... people will just camp and run furthermore probably wont even care about the flag.

In a warbird getting 1600 even with streaks and round wins and 1.5 bets bonus takes ages just think the average ship gets you 6 (if you happen to have flags)
thats 266 kills for one level... this is like only level 10 seriously..

[milosh]

You can go for streaks, and also you fail to forget that you gotta dedicate a lot of your subspacing time online to this to get anywhere, at an efficient rate. Therefore I'd say the steep leveling mechanism shouldn't be reduced. When the game is released, it'll be on 24/7 pretty much, and if its recent tests indicate of its "fun-ness", it'll be like another Pub, with a steady flow of people playing in it.

:-) dugwyler ftw

[Chao.]

24/7 pretty much

I think there was a little doubt about that, if it's gonna run (generally) without restriction then the slow progress is more bearable.

[Kim]

You can go for streaks, and also you fail to forget that you gotta dedicate a lot of your subspacing time online to this to get anywhere, at an efficient rate. Therefore I'd say the steep leveling mechanism shouldn't be reduced. When the game is released, it'll be on 24/7 pretty much, and if its recent tests indicate of its "fun-ness", it'll be like another Pub, with a steady flow of people playing in it.

[Chao.]

The javelin seems to be a major RP collector, and you can fly through the early levels if there's a big population there. I don't know if it would be different when the game is actually released, but right now when you get to level 11~ or close it gets a lot harder to level. I've spent the last couple of testing sessions trying to get halfway through it. I'm not sure how much is required to level it in comparison to the rest of the ships, and it should probably be more than most of the others, but when it doubles each time it becomes a daunting task in general to level a ship up very high, because 1.) Many people I see are very low ranked, and even 5-fering them is only going to give you minimal rewards. Would it be a bad idea to try and give the the jav a bigger bonus when they manage to kill multiple enemies at once. There's a streak bonus right now but I believe it should be higher and easier to get with a javelin.

In regards to the shark i've seen ph jump up to level 10 (the same as me) in the game, and even disregarding the ship difference he's done it very fast. If you mine up the bases you're going to get some kills, you might look into giving it more to start off with (perhaps the ability to mine once when you first get the ship). I don't know if that's possible, but starting them off with one rep and one mine would be a nice balance. If it becomes a problem because the other team is no longer dying due to mines, you might want to jack up their support bonus even more, because even now people can see how essential they are to making sure your base isn't taken while you're gone.

The weasel also might become incredibly difficult to get upgrades for later on, considering most of it's things cost 2 points. I haven't messed around in it much though.

[gdugwyler]

Ranking up should be looked at in two ways: from a per-ship perspective, and in terms of early leveling where players first are addicted -- say, <10 -- to after that. Some ships seem to level almost too quickly, while others take a lot longer than patience allows. Which do you see problems with, vs those levelling too fast? (Make sure to consider that ships shouldn't get levelled to max without about 6 months of solid playing time, though.)

Today I played a spider for the first time in a while, and was pretty shocked at going up a good 3 ranks in the period of about 10 minutes. I would fire in the general vicinity of an enemy, and the kills would pop up as if by magic.

In contrast, I played a Levi that was at rank 9 or so and was lucky to get a kill every minute or so. Largely I found I was getting killed much more often than killed. This may be in part due to the recent change of levi bombs to being less damaging and causing more EMP shutdown, however. I found myself using the bombs quite a bit less as the guns were just about the only thing that made kills.

A further contrast was the shark. Despite having the second smallest RP requirement, I couldn't rank up this thing if my life depended on it. Granted, I didn't ever win a round with it and earn the bonus. But its kills came morbidly slow. Perhaps shark & terr should get double RP for kills, and also have their level RP requirements lowered?

One addition coming soon for the terr is a chance to have burst and port prized back every 30 seconds. Each level upgraded gives you +10% chance of this occurring, maybe compensating for the loss of shared greens for the terr. This doesn't make life any easier for the shark, though ... may need to give them guns much earlier on, + another rep, as some kind of self-defense.

Re: scheduled times, unfortunately my schedule is such that I can't actually schedule anything. The only thing I can say is that at the moment I'm testing usually somewhere around 10AM-1PM EST or 4PM-6PM EST. (That's 3PM-6PM GMT and 9PM-11PM GMT, EST being GMT -5.) Hard to say which time is more likely, but I'm trying to vary it up to allow people from different times to test it out.

If you can provide input on how fast each ship seems to level, particularly if you've played many of them, I'd appreciate it.

[Jeenyuss]

I would say levelling is way too slow... i mean even with the 1.5 beta bonus it will takes ages at around level 10.... as in like half a day.

I think you should make it harder to level up at higher levels so people don't lose interest earlier on.

i somewhat agree with this. the last thing i want to happen is get bored of it but yeah, maybe leveling up should not be quite AS difficult for the earlier levels. if it takes 1000 rp for a level 10 terr, or whatever, i can only imagine how hard it would be for a level 20, or 30, when all the interesting upgrades come about as well.