Build 78

[tim]

Hello everyone! Today we pushed Build 78. Here are the changes:

* Fixed a visual bug when receiving coins as loot
* Improved missile collision algorithm and visual effects
* Changed how other players burst/shotgun triggers are shown to be more accurate
* Increased healing of Isolator Class Barrier Unit
* Added Missiles to Isolator Class Barrier Unit
* Increased lifetime of missiles fired by Juggernaut, Punisher, and Despoiler Outpost
* Prevent players from teleporting back to a location they recently teleported away from

This build has some small changes that should improve general visual accuracy, but the biggest change is the new teleportation rules. Here's how they work: when you teleport, for 20 seconds, you cannot teleport back to any player within 5 squares of where you teleported from. These rules attempt to prevent the cheesy strategy of teleporting out of a fight, healing, and teleporting back in (sometimes repeatedly). We never want you to be unable to teleport out from a fight to safety, so teleporting to a town can never be prevented by these rules. Right now, there is no visual indicator of these rules, but we're considering ideas like placing a large circle on the map showing where you teleported from (and thus can't teleport to), and/or recoloring the player icons that are in the prevented area. We're definitely looking for feedback on these rules, both in terms of how it changes encounters by doing what it's intended to, and in terms of cases where it prevents you from playing with your friends when you want to.

Thanks for helping us to test the game. Please post feedback and bug reports in this thread.

Rob & Tim
Jetbolt Games

[tarbomb]

I disagree with the premise that "teleporting out of a fight, healing, and teleporting back in" is "cheesy". Such an strategy not only encourages teamwork (one player stays in the battle while the other recovers) but also is conducive to a cooperative environment, since the faster you can get back into the battle, the more useful you are to your teammates. This in effect punishes people for escaping, which I don't think should be the case. Free movement is a core theme in Grid12 - the entire game rests on moving from location to location - and should be maintained.

Furthermore, this fails to address the two really cheesy strategies:

- Vindicator bombing, where a user repeatedly switches into a vindicator to drain shields at the edge of a town (normally when clearing a town to level it up) and uses its blast. Since the vindicator is always at the edge of a town anyway, the change doesn't affect it; in fact, by encouraging people to battle closer to towns (since they can be teleported to at will), it increases the incentive to use this tactic.

- Corsair kamikaze runs, a.k.a. godbombing, which involves repeatedly teleporting a corsair to a player in the battlefield, shearing, dying, and repeating; the teleport cooldown seems to be reset on death so godbombing is still a viable tactic. Furthermore, by penalizing players for escaping by making it very likely that they'll miss out on valuable loot, the restriction encourages this strategy to do damage safely while one's main (and looter) remains at a safe distance, swooping in for the kill.

As a result, I dislike the new teleport restrictions. Here are a few situations that really annoy me about it:

- Bad TPs. TP to a friend who's in the thick of battle. Oh, no, it turns out that he's cloaked/invulnerable and sitting right on top of it! Lose a lot of HP and barely escape intact. Let's get back... oh, wait, there's a 20 second cooldown. By the time I'm back the enemy (normally a convoy) has moved quite a bit.

- Catching up to players. Sometimes when running down a convoy or trying to reach a zeta/omicron as soon as possible I'll use a trailblazer so I can speedboost my way there. Players who are about a square or two behind will often use teleport to keep up; the restrictions make it impossible. Similarly, the restriction makes convoying without speed prisms impossible; whereas before one could use teleport to keep a tank without speed prisms at a good position for a convoy attack, it's no longer possible now. This increases the gap between prism-equipped midlevel and high level players and newbies, and definitely qualifies as an instance of "preventing me from playing with friends when I want to".

- Switching tanks. If I want to switch tanks (e.g. farming walls with a guardian, and a patrol's coming) normally I will escape to origin to switch to a tank with a cloak and come back quickly. That's no longer possible. Either I can switch to a trailblazer in the field (then the very long cloak cooldown comes into play) or I have to wait 20 seconds to come back. This change makes doing patrols nearly impossible.

- Looting bosses. You always escape when you loot a zeta or omicron. Period. It's near-impossible to loot one without escaping or dying - none of the invulnerability abilities last long enough to do it safely, and in a bomb-heavy environment, cloaks don't cut it. TP restriction prevents a player who just looted from getting back into the fight.

As I see it, teleporting is essential to way the game works right now. Adding a cooldown to it is really a nuisance that doesn't help with the real cheese tactics much.

If you feel that abuse of teleporting is a real problem, I propose another solution: adopt a mana or energy system for teleports that remains after death or disconnect. That allows several quick teleports in succession (fixing the catch-up, looting, and bad-tp issues, since in those situations you only need to teleport a few times in quick succession before cooldowns or enemy fire force you to regen anyway), while preventing constant abuse of teleport (e.g. godbombing, which normally involves teleporting into the battlefield tens of times in quick succession). Attaching the energy system to tank switching might also help with the vindicator bombing exploit.

Also: I am immensely pleased with the new missiles on the walls. Right now they're not much of a threat, but the concept of slow-moving missiles that can actually be dodged (and they're great fun to dodge with a mouse!) can lead to some very interesting enemy designs that force elaborate and careful tank handling. I'd love to see more enemies (and bosses, in particular) use them.

[Crunch]

I'd like to echo Tarbomb's sentiments, especially about the tp changes. It's currently too harsh a penalty for staying alive. Looting has become especially tedious against bosses. Overall, it encourages conservative play instead of high risk/reward play, which is slow and boring, at least to me.

I love the missiles. Having something to dodge is a nice shift and I can envision some interesting bullet hell traps and enemies in the future.

It's been fun playing again, I really enjoy the new content!

[Justin]

Sorry for this not being specific to this build, but I haven't been playing at all recently.

I got a new laptop almost two weeks ago and it's a PC. Before I had a Mac.

I used Safari to run this game because Google Chrome had some issues (which I've completely forgot now since I only attempted to use it for a day. In my mind I pretty much related Grid12 directly with Safari). Although, on Safari, my mouse wheel wouldn't scroll the map. I prefer Q and E to do that anyway so it isn't a bother for me, but in case that isn't already known that's what's up.

I don't want to download Safari now just to play this game.

Every time I try to sign in on Google Chrome, it says I'm already signed in. I tried on IE and it takes me to the blank black screen. If the servers are actually down right now I guess it's not an issue and you can ignore this.

What browser is best for this game?

[tribow]

firefox might be good for this, I use chrome and it isn't half bad for me.
Also that black screen ALWAYS happens to me when I use IE.
Safari, I have no idea.
That's all I know.
Does anyone use firefox?

[tarbomb]

How did this town even get discovered?

[tribow]

Just a guess, but you know how when you see someone else lag and they just move forward? Maybe someone lagged really hard and to everyone else, he/she went forward until a town was found causing that region to be found too?

Or did that just pop up with no warning? If that's the case, NO IDEA. I GOT NO GUESSES!

[Crunch]

Tar, I can't remember who, but somebody was talking about the "russian players" who were exploiting some kind of lag while scouting with phantoms. Evidently, they could cloak indefinitely and were responsible for the map looking like it does. I told him to post on this thread but it appears that he didn't do it. Otherwise, your guess is as good as mine.

Edit:

Player Finland singlehandedly destroyed a zeta today with a rather impressive use of phantom bomb spam. Perhaps he could shed some light on how he's exploiting the game mechanics. 

- - -

Unrelated: Rob/Tim, I fought the ORB-13 today and just wanted to say that the Orbiter art looks really great now.

- - - 

Also, the region overlapping subcommander box still hasn't been fixed. Here is an image of a subcom which could not be spawned because it overlapped into a maze region. The region it belongs to is otherwise 100% cleared. 

[fire]

Dec 6, 2013 16:09:50 GMT -5 Justin said:

What browser is best for this game?

personally I would advise against using a browser at all. adobe flash projector is definitely the best thing you can use imo


also rob/tim,

--->1 in 10 regions are "green" -- if you haven't installed/used the "green ticket" item, your weapons do 1/10th damage and you take 10x damage

green ticket is per-account and takes as long to gather/meld/craft as a level 20 tank

inside the green region drop the components for building the "red ticket"; in the red regions you can collect the "blue ticket" components, etc; each colored region also drops its own unique loot for a 5th trigger or giant form or somesuch

the idea here is to allow vets to access certain regions that newbs can't go to, while not giving vets a big advantage in newb regions

of course rich newbs can just buy the ticket in the market as normal

and it's not really a ticket; it's a "harmonic adsorption field" or something

also, it's not a single use item like a ticket, it's more of a "pass" <---

that is definitely my favorite idea in the list on trello

[tarbomb]

Justin: You should really experiment, since performance with different versions of flash varies dramatically between machines. Some people find that flash projector gives better performance; on my machine, it's always been fairly slow (the disparity was there back in the 20-30 builds, and seems to be still around), and it renders images and text with a significant loss in sharpness. Others find that pepper chrome, non-pepper chrome, firefox, etc. give better performance.

Crunch: I witnessed a guy named ZeroCool today doing a similar ability regen hack like you described with a silver blast, although he stopped when I warned him that it was against the rules. He was on at the same time as Finland and had similar mannerisms so I suspect he might be an alt.

On my end I've been getting a lot of freezing, especially when escaping - the screen freezes for around half a minute. The freezes occur both in projector and chrome, and seem to have started appearing in build 77.

Edit: just noticed this:

[cyberbaka]

Dec 8, 2013 0:57:12 GMT -5 fire said:

Dec 6, 2013 16:09:50 GMT -5 Justin said:

the idea here is to allow vets to access certain regions that newbs can't go to, while not giving vets a big advantage in newb regions

Aug 23, 2012 13:11:44 GMT -5 rob said:

* No level-appropriate zones -- there are no zones, just a single world which players fight to expand. Newbies and veterans must fight shoulder-to-shoulder.

Aug 23, 2012 13:11:44 GMT -5 rob said:

Newbies and veterans must fight shoulder-to-shoulder.

[fire]

@ cyberbaka

your post was a tad bit confusing, anyways, the idea i posted was not my own, but that of rob himself. He may have stated both of those things at an earlier time, but as this game is in alpha, he is also open to change if the current path of the game will not succeed. Unfortunately, I really do not see a game which gives no feeling of progression succeeding. But only time will tell, and I really do hope that he can make it succeed for him.

[cyberbaka]

Sorry, i messed up with bb-code and cant edit it.

Suggestion:
It would be nice to see solid numbers of damage, hp and shield in tank choosing menu. Would be nice it will show basic damage, hp etc and with augs/prisms.

[Justin]

Dec 8, 2013 22:08:24 GMT -5 cyberbaka said:

Sorry, i messed up with bb-code and cant edit it.

Suggestion:
It would be nice to see solid numbers of damage, hp and shield in tank choosing menu. Would be nice it will show basic damage, hp etc and with augs/prisms.

That ^

And to be able to hover over your own tank and see stats (HP), like you can with other peoples tanks.

[cyberbaka]

^
I think would be enough to see it in tank menu.

Also: there is no numbers for skills (damage, time for invis etc.)