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Post by tim on Dec 7, 2012 16:57:06 GMT -5
2 old issues that bear mentioning: 2) Yellow prisms still only give/display up to 5% bonus each, while every other prism has the bonus at 20%. Just for reference, this is a balance thing, not a bug. |
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sven
Intrepid Tester
Posts: 112
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Post by sven on Dec 7, 2012 23:04:14 GMT -5
Will there be announcement for town's path establishment? A form of indication will be great for good to go action of depositing grid-shards.
Ex. <town name>'s path established!
All hail positive reinforcement.
____________________________________________________________________________________
I did tried registering the same account onto a different browser and tried to log both account simultaneously. (Firefox & Google Chrome)
The results, one of the browser appears to be working fine where the other shares the same message as opening another tab of the same browser. (Error: Already logged in)
As I said previously, works very well. I don't see an exploit here.
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Post by amitp on Dec 8, 2012 12:58:15 GMT -5
tarbomb, your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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Jufda
Gallant Tester
Ninja
Posts: 64
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Post by Jufda on Dec 10, 2012 21:16:23 GMT -5
tarbomb, your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
There is a bug. I saw it a few times today. When stationary enemy (usually processor) is almost dead and I go backwards so far that it's on the edge of screen (not sure if this is necessary), it disappears from sight for good. When I go back I still see bullets it is shooting, but not the enemy. Works otherwise normally, doesn't just show the enemy sprite. |
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Post by tarbomb on Dec 11, 2012 1:11:23 GMT -5
Jufda, you're doing it wrong. It should look like this:  ... well, that, with some obnoxious flashing, and maybe some sounds and pop-ups. You get my point. ;) Also: Panic button works poorly in towns. If you're taking fire from some enemies and you're already in a town, hitting the panic button won't help one bit, since you'll still be taking fire from the same enemies. I can see two possible methods to fix this (if it is indeed a problem): - Panic button, when activated inside a town, will send the tank to the closest other teleportable town (or origin), or... - Increase the radius of the area that has to be cleared around a town so that enemies won't have the range to shoot into towns. The first solution has the advantage of working with armadas and possible future mobile enemies, while the second one is more consistent from a UI point of view (panic does one thing only and doesn't change in functionality depending on context). We could also have panic always send one to Origin (making it equivalent to death without gridshard loss, imposing a strategic penalty rather than a personal one). |
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Post by tarbomb on Dec 11, 2012 13:22:28 GMT -5
Server seems to have crashed. Multiple people's tanks took off from under them and the screen stopped scrolling. Enemies disappeared. Chat was still working though.  |
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Post by rob on Dec 12, 2012 10:29:39 GMT -5
I have an issue with the panic button as it stands. I like panic buttons, but with instant /drive -> /goto, it is essentially just a heal. /goto should only be usable after crafting an item for it. /drive should only function if the town is safe to expand. Tim and I went back and forth on this a few times this week. One one hand, it's cheesy to be able to 'Z', /drive, /goto to essentially insta-heal. On the other hand, adding cooldowns or other restrictions on free travel limits people's ability to inspect the map, quickly find stuff to kill, join up with friends, etc. We eventually decided to let the cheesy heal stand for a bit while we figure out what to do about it. One idea we kicked around was starting with no shields or hitpoints after /drive. Would this suck? Rob |
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Post by rob on Dec 12, 2012 10:32:03 GMT -5
When I first saw scorpion, I didn't knew it was there since it's too blended with majority of the green tanks of the selection. It's somewhat similar to the color scheme of Predator. I missed it's vibrant detail which it makes it standout, uniqueness. I guess it takes time to adjust to it's design. The Scorpion used to be red, and it looked like an enemy. It may be ugly now, but at least it looks like a player.  Rob |
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Post by rob on Dec 12, 2012 10:39:10 GMT -5
Chat is difficult to read in towns, particularly now that no buildings break up the blueness. We haven't decided what to do with towns yet. They are weird, empty, strange places right now. Temporary usable items. I'd definitely pop a double damage and/or a shield overdrive for a drill tower raid, for instance. A cool idea. They could be power crystals. A stats page on your current tank- damage of each weapon, strength or each shield, base speed and max health all shown, modified by your current prisms. This will help with the current decision overload when selecting a tank, and could help strategic choices when the VP module upgrades hit the market. Coming in 33 or 34 I hope. No promises! Another minelayer. Maybe with less projectiles compared to Bluto, but higher damage and mine drop rate? Could be faster, a little less durable, and completely devoid of normal guns. The mines are implemented as a kind of a hack right now, with a bunch of missiles (similar to RotMG wizard spell). I'd like to revamp this as a proper AoE blast (more like RotMG necro or medusa), but I haven't gotten around to it. It might also be nice to toss the mines instead of pooping them. Rob |
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Post by rob on Dec 12, 2012 10:54:07 GMT -5
Another perspective on a prism penalty for dying: Most of us here are used to Realm and the concept of a severe penalty for dying - the idea that you should have to "reconstruct" your tank/character. This leads to a "safe" strategy. Instead, why not try the exact opposite of that - no penalty for dying? I know it sounds outlandish, but bear with me a moment. This game is all about position - having your tank in the right place, facing the right direction, at the right time. Dying hurts you more by messing up your position (especially if you're scouting) than by removing your gridshards. So why not take it to its logical conclusion, and make dying a purely position-affecting event? Obviously the concept of movement would have to be modified a bit. /goto would have to go (to... well, never mind...). Teleport and the "frontier" mechanic would have to be reworked in some way (as it is right now, /teleport is just a timesaver, since there always exists a clear path between two teleportable towns by virtue of the clearing requirement). Perhaps "clear to towns" could be replaced with roads (you'd have to construct a road to a town to have it leveled up) and roads would be assailable by mobile enemies (think armadas, but stronger and actually providing a challenge). Teleport would require the construction of an expensive teleport building that could be destroyed by an enemy attack. This naturally leads to town/road defense (imagine tower defense mixed in with the current drive-and-shoot game mechanic), which opens up a whole world of possibilities. In this respect dying would mainly mess you up by costing you your position, and possibly your time. If you have to drive from a teleportable town to the battle, it means you have a strategic disadvantage, and by the time you get back the battle may be lost (the road destroyed, the town assaulted and de-leveled, etc). As I see it, the advantage of having no death penalty is that you can play this game casually - you can just go in, derp around, and go away without really losing anything when you're bored. If you want to play seriously (read: strategically), then you have to take death into account. What do you think? Edit: To clarify, yes, I do mean removing gridshard loss on death. Tarbomb, this is a great post. I love the idea of doing the outlandish opposite of what everyone else is doing. This idea is really seductive. So much so, that in the past I actually experimented with a position-only MMO death penalty. Unfortunately, the experience that came out of it was a feeling of cheap life. In particular, it encouraged suicide runs and a general lack of urgency to stay alive. The penalty was so light, why bother? I didn't couple it with slow travel, but I'm thinking I'd rather recover from death by fighting to get new loot, rather than walking for 10 minutes back to the position I was in. I'm also really hesitant to add any feature that makes it harder to group up with friends, so I want to be very careful about slowing down travel. More ideas like this please! Extra points for breaking "rules"! Rob |
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linkshot
Intrepid Tester
Always go fast.
Posts: 102
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Post by linkshot on Dec 12, 2012 11:41:31 GMT -5
One idea we kicked around was starting with no shields or hitpoints after /drive. Would this suck? Mechanically, such a concept boggles my mind. I think No Hitpoints is the best way to go here. While shields are definitely more important in the grand scheme, 0 health encourages teammates to run healer tanks to get you back in the action faster. I would totally support Hercules tossing bombs!..or what about blowing up enemies it kills at close range, instead? More max HP = bigger explosion. Not necessarily more powerful (actually yes more powerful, but just accelerating slower), but larger AoE. What I would like to see are traditional city-game buildings. We could have a "farm" building that caused enemies to spawn outside the borders (without disabling /tele). There could be a "network" building that would be the new resonators, but would only be halfway potent when many towns (and many networks) are connected to each other in the grid. Make them act as sort of a Prism for the map, even, giving the respective bonus based on how many are connected to each other. If you have one in one town but then one in an isolate one, you'd get only a level 1 boost, but get a clear path connecting them, and you get the Level 2. If you're worried about that making things too powerful, you can make it so we have to directly connect each Network to the other, making a web instead of a circuit. I'd also like some regeneration buildings. One for shields and one for health. Clearing out the town with each level would become a little safer. Finally, I'm thinking of a Lighthouse/Beacon. Adding this to a town will reveal the nearest neighbouring one for every 5 levels you put into it. For the mechanic, make it so that there is only one building in a town, and where/when it spawns is random, so you don't know how much you have to buff a town to get the building, but the Resource level gives it a slight boost (so 3% to 10%). For each building, this is: - Farms: Bonus to prize (Resource 10 is 10% more gridshards per drop) - Networks: Flat addition to the boost (20% becomes 30% on 10) NOTE: It takes the top 20 towns in the network and then averages them for its "total level" - Regenerators: Flat addition per heal (10 adds on 10% of your shield/tank health per heal) - Beacon: Range increase. (10 increases seek range by 10%) Of course, we need to add a little risk:reward here. The higher the resource level, the more enemies will try to flock to it. Make it so an Armada can de-level towns so it keeps its fear, but basic enemies will try to demolish the building you put up. Amount of enemies drawn to it will be 3*Resource, so 9 to 30. On top of this, towns with higher resource are going to have their building appear on a higher level, so more work has to be put into them. The question then becomes: "Do I put lots of time into this Resource 10 for a better building, or go for the resource 3 quickie?" |
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zuboki
Very Brave Tester
Posts: 16
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Post by zuboki on Dec 13, 2012 15:33:28 GMT -5
2 old issues that bear mentioning: 2) Yellow prisms still only give/display up to 5% bonus each, while every other prism has the bonus at 20%. Just for reference, this is a balance thing, not a bug. If you don't mind me asking, how is increasing shot rate unbalancing compared to increasing damage? Let me explain with a basic scenario. Consider a tank that does 10 damage, and fires once every second. Over 10 seconds, it does 100 damage. {10s*1shot/s*10damage/shot} If that tank achieved the maximum damage prism bonus (+40%) with no yellow prisms, it would instead deal 140 damage over that 10 seconds. {10s*1shot/s*14damage/shot} Back in the days of Ash sneezing everything to death, the cooldown/rate-of-fire formula was altered to make it so that every 100% increase in yellow would linearly add 1shot/s, correct? If this remains true, with the current max at 10% instead of 40%, the damage for a max-yellow-no-green example tank is much lower, at 110 over 10 seconds. {10s*1.1shots/s*10damage/shot} Pushing it up to 40% would make it equal to damage's effect on dps, and also make the maximum possible dps from a full prism set 21% higher in total (for our example tank, it would become 196 compared to 154, which isn't too unbalancing, considering the previous state of the game). If you deem this increase too much, you could even reduce the base tank damages for the more powerful tanks to rebalance around the increase. As it is right now, though, I feel that yellow gives no notable benefit compared to green. It was truly broken in the days before, but it's been fixed and could get along much nicer with its friend green nowadays. |
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Post by rob on Dec 13, 2012 16:39:29 GMT -5
Hey Zuboki,
Yellow is more accurately a "rate of fire" buff nowadays. If you shoot 2.5 shots/s with no bonus, then somehow get a yellow bonus of 100%, you'll shoot 5 shots/s. If your bonus was 200%, you'd shoot 7.5 shots/s. Yellow is not overpowered in relation to green anymore.
However, simply upping the yellow pulch bonus to 20% is a big buff for pulch owners, which means all the enemies (or playertanks) have to get rebalanced, and the gap between fresh newbs and pros gets even wider. So we're just going to leave it as is for now. Which means that yellow pulchs aren't that good. Sorry. We'll come back and do that larger cleanup another time.
Rob
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