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bacon blaster
BIG BAD W0LVES Canis Eliminatus Operatives
181
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Posted - 2014.05.11 17:38:00 -
[1] - Quote
Now, I am sure that at least 5 or 6 different people have said this already. HOWEVER, on the off chance that no one has, or that they missed something, and because I love reading my own text, and have tiny phallus syndrome, I am going to say it myself.
Now, I've watched a few vids from fanfest, including the gameplay footage for Legion. (Which looks damn sexy, btw)
Now, first, I would like to say that Dust was a really awesome idea. Seriously, it is one of the cooler ideas I've seen for a shooter in a very long time. That said, you guys did a lot of things really, really wrong, and butchered this game in a manner worthy of note. Many of these things still bug the crap out of me and make me grind my teeth a tad. If you guys want to give me feed back and explain things, go ahead. Some, I understand, is hard, but others still make no sense to me.
Let's start a list here.
First, 4 days before your game went commercial, you guys released Uprising, and in it, you completely redid EVERYTHING from fixing a few bugs to nerfing the crap out of the radius for nanite injectors. Now, toward the end of chromosome, there were a lot of things that actually worked pretty well, with only some adjustments that needed to be made. What was done was liked by no one, and created a lot of problems that took a long time to fix (what you guys did to the heavy was ******* stupid). Now, the way you can do this better is to not completely change everything right before you end beta. I feel like that should be obvious, but you guys did it once, sooooo.... Yeah.....
Second, the new player experience has been terrible. Since Uprising, new players have not been competitive in any way. I had tried creating new characters a few times to try it out when you guys said you had made a fix to it, and it was never really improved any. I would create a new character, get out of the battle academy, pour a whole mag from an ar into some jerk's back, and then, while I reload, he turns around and does the same, except I am dead in 3 rounds. The disparity between new and old players is extravagant. Now, I know, players need to be able to power up and have advantages over new players. I get this, I support this, it's basically expected in gaming. HOWEVER, if you are going to do this, you need to either make new players competitive, or to separate them in pvp. You guys did neither of these, and new players were able to show up, die repeatedly, and really do more harm than good to their own team. Now, sure, they could stick around and get more effective and unlock better skills and equipment. Problem: last time I heard someone crunch the math, if you hit the weekly sp cap every week, it would take 6 months to get competitive. That's not putting you on the level with the top dogs in terms of gear and such, but you can now be useful. This is an absurd amount of time it will take people to actually be able to play the game. A lot of people looked at this and said, "sure, dust "sounds" like it will be an interesting game, but I could spend 6 months dying all over the place and just have a **** time for 6 months, or, I can cod or battlefield and have fun *NOW.*" That massive wall of sp that kept people getting pub stomped is what kept people from staying with the game. There were never really enough people to separate out players based on their sp or the gear they used and still effectively have people to run games. So, what you needed to do and never really did was bring the disparity between new and old players down to a level that made rookies competitive. If you should express interest in my suggestions, I can add on in another post.
Third, your game balance. There are so many things that you have broken here, and some you did fix, but some you didn't, last I played. I'll try to look at specifics and big things for now, and break it down with it's own set of bullets.
~you completely changed things between chromosome and uprising. This in itself is not a bad thing, but it's the way you changed things. For example: you went from all different types of weapons having their own prices different from each other to everything costing the same within it's tier and trying to balance things around this same price. This was something that I never really thought about until recently, actually and came to hate fairly quickly. The varying pricing allowed a lot of different weapons and gear to really pop out and into their roles, but without making them in danger of being op for their price, like hmg's and assault rifles. The ar was a good, well balanced and easy to use weapon that had a smaller price tag. Anyone could use it, there were really no complicated tricks to working it, but it didn't really overpower other weapons and invalidate them. The heavy machine gun, combined with the heavy suit, was a weapon of raw destruction. In the right hands, it could rampage through ranks of infantry and demolish whole squads in the right range, while reducing player mobility to a crawl, really, and having a reduced range to other weapons. It functioned like a heavy should. The thing that kept it from invalidating all other weapons and fittings was the price tag. A good player you understood how the gear and weapon worked could make a good pile of cash with it and have a lot of fun, but most people could not. Most players could not use more than 1 heavy fit per match without going into the red. After that, it was free fits, or lose money. This is what kept you from seeing a **** pile of heavies all the time. Over all, it worked pretty well. Then, along comes uprising. (I know, I fugging hate uprising.) You guys put everything on the market for the same price, and tried to balance things around this mechanic so that nothing was really more powerful than others and everything worked on the same level. This has just never worked. For the longest time, the assault rifle was king of the game, while other weapons saw buffs ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
bacon blaster
BIG BAD W0LVES Canis Eliminatus Operatives
182
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Posted - 2014.05.11 17:54:00 -
[2] - Quote
Atiim wrote:bacon blaster wrote:[...]
Let's start a list here.
First, 4 days before your game went commercial, you guys released Uprising, and in it, you completely redid EVERYTHING from fixing a few bugs to nerfing the crap out of the radius for nanite injectors. Now, toward the end of chromosome, there were a lot of things that actually worked pretty well, with only some adjustments that needed to be made. What was done was liked by no one, and created a lot of problems that took a long time to fix (what you guys did to the heavy was ******* stupid). Now, the way you can do this better is to not completely change everything right before you end beta. I feel like that should be obvious, but you guys did it once, sooooo.... Yeah..
Second, the new player experience has been terrible. Since Uprising, new players have not been competitive in any way. I had tried creating new characters a few times to try it out when you guys said you had made a fix to it, and it was never really improved any. I would create a new character, get out of the battle academy, pour a whole mag from an ar into some jerk's back, and then, while I reload, he turns around and does the same, except I am dead in 3 rounds. The disparity between new and old players is extravagant. Now, I know, players need to be able to power up and have advantages over new players. I get this, I support this, it's basically expected in gaming.
HOWEVER, if you are going to do this, you need to either make new players competitive, or to separate them in pvp. You guys did neither of these, and new players were able to show up, die repeatedly, and really do more harm than good to their own team. Now, sure, they could stick around and get more effective and unlock better skills and equipment.
Problem: last time I heard someone crunch the math, if you hit the weekly sp cap every week, it would take 6 months to get competitive. That's not putting you on the level with the top dogs in terms of gear and such, but you can now be useful. This is an absurd amount of time it will take people to actually be able to play the game. A lot of people looked at this and said, "sure, dust "sounds" like it will be an interesting game, but I could spend 6 months dying all over the place and just have a **** time for 6 months, or, I can cod or battlefield and have fun *NOW.*"
That massive wall of sp that kept people getting pub stomped is what kept people from staying with the game. There were never really enough people to separate out players based on their sp or the gear they used and still effectively have people to run games. So, what you needed to do and never really did was bring the disparity between new and old players down to a level that made rookies competitive. If you should express interest in my suggestions, I can add on in another post.
Third, your game balance. There are so many things that you have broken here, and some you did fix, but some you didn't, last I played. I'll try to look at specifics and big things for now, and break it down with it's own set of bullets.
You completely changed things between chromosome and uprising. This in itself is not a bad thing, but it's the way you changed things. For example: you went from all different types of weapons having their own prices different from each other to everything costing the same within it's tier and trying to balance things around this same price. This was something that I never really thought about until recently, actually and came to hate fairly quickly. The varying pricing allowed a lot of different weapons and gear to really pop out and into their roles, but without making them in danger of being op for their price, like hmg's and assault rifles.
The ar was a good, well balanced and easy to use weapon that had a smaller price tag. Anyone could use it, there were really no complicated tricks to working it, but it didn't really overpower other weapons and invalidate them. The heavy machine gun, combined with the heavy suit, was a weapon of raw destruction. In the right hands, it could rampage through ranks of infantry and demolish whole squads in the right range, while reducing player mobility to a crawl, really, and having a reduced range to other weapons. It functioned like a heavy should. The thing that kept it from invalidating all other weapons and fittings was the price tag.
A good player you understood how the gear and weapon worked could make a good pile of cash with it and have a lot of fun, but most people could not. Most players could not use more than 1 heavy fit per match without going into the red. After that, it was free fits, or lose money. This is what kept you from seeing a **** pile of heavies all the time. Over all, it worked pretty well. Then, along comes uprising. (I know, I fugging hate uprising.) You guys put everything on the market for the same price, and tried to balance things around this mechanic so that nothing was really more powerful than others and everything worked on the same level. This has just never worked. For the longest time, the assault rifle was king of the game, while other weapons saw buffs This should be easier to read.
I know, wall of text, but I don't know how else to do it. |
bacon blaster
BIG BAD W0LVES Canis Eliminatus Operatives
183
|
Posted - 2014.05.11 18:17:00 -
[3] - Quote
Selinate deux wrote:This game is huge. I don't know why people can't grasp this concept. To do what they want to do, they have to figure out how to design an entire game and still have it work within the universe of an entirely different game while not breaking either of them. The game mechanics themselves will be extremely hard to come up with on their own, not to mention the technical aspect of incorporating it into the Eve universe in a truly integrated and meaningful way. The challenges that face this team have never been solved before and probably won't even be attempted again for a long time by any other developers.
That being said, who cares if they screw it up on the first try? Honestly, that's why we're here. To be frank, given that the tech demo looked playable, I'd be OK with them releasing that as a beta and then improving it from there if we had all of our assets and skills (just so we could have something to work with and comment on).
In other words, don't expect a masterpiece on the first try. Something like this is difficult.
I don't expect a masterpiece on the first try. I expect it around 10-50 tries later. That said, there were some mistakes they made with dust that I feel should have just been obvious and some other mistakes that I feel need to be highlighted. Dust was an ambitious goal, in many ways, and and there were bound to be errors and problems. I just want to see Legion do better. |
bacon blaster
BIG BAD W0LVES Canis Eliminatus Operatives
183
|
Posted - 2014.05.11 18:21:00 -
[4] - Quote
While other weapons saw buffs and nerfs to try to make things work again, while working with the new price mechanics. The HMG builds have just never worked as well since. At the start of Uprising, in fact, the hmg was like a leaf blower loaded with gravel, something I saw someone get right on the forums. Now, sure the heavies have improved quite a bit since then, but they still don't feel that great to me (to be fair, I never got past minmatar standard frame and standard hmg, so, the level of gear is not really functional)
~At least one of your bug "fixes" made new problems. The way it was explained to me was that the missiles from swarm launchers would not res for other people if launched from outside of a certain view range. This was terrible for our vehicles, there was no warning for them, they just suddenly started taking damage. Now, to fix this, you simply cut down the range on the swarms to inside of this range. The problem this created was, combined with the nerfs on the forge gun, we had no real way to engage vehicles at long range. This gave a distinct advantage to rail tanks, which can now engage infantry from far outside their ability to fight back, and dropships which would now just move *a little bit* and be outside swarm range. Sure, forge guns still had some range to knock around drop ships, but those things were hard to hit with no aim mechanic, just a large cross hair and clumsy controls. I know that these kind of rendering bugs can be hard to figure out and fix, but this was a bad idea for a fix.
~Anti vehicle options were honestly not that good. A lot of games will give you some manner of anti-armor option, like an rpg, and a primary weapon, because they know that you don't get to skip out on fighting infantry just because you have rockets. Dust didn't really do this. You always had a choice between av and a side arm and not really being able to engage infantry worth a damn, or running in terror from vehicles. Now, sure there were a few non primary options for av: AV grenades and bombs. Av grenades got a serious nerf to their damage, and then to their carry capacity so that they are basically kind of useless unless everyone in your squad is able to use them on a hostile vehicle and leave you severely handicapped against dropships. Bombs came in two flavors: Proxi mines and remotes. Proxi mins were just garbage. Last I tried using them, I watched tanks roll right over them without detonating them. For a vehicle to actually set them off and take damage from them, they basically had to come to a complete stop on top of them for the bombs to have enough time to detonate. That kind of makes them useless most of the time. Remotes, on the other hand, you have to detonate yourself. This creates some additional options for strategy, and has plenty of ways to be effective at ruining someone's parade. In anti vehicle warfare, however, it's a bit more work than it should be. Either you have to guess where a vehicle is going to come through, lay some bombs across that, and watch them like a hawk in the hope that something comes by. The other option was to try to run in front of the vehicle, lay some bombs in it's path, run the **** out of the way, and hope he runs over them and you can detonate them before he passes them or he kills you. It works, I've seen it work, but it's not terribly practical. Something you guys could have done was look at making an av weapon for a side arm slot, something that had some severe limitations, like ammo capacity and range, but could still work.
I'll add to this as I come up with more things that I do not remember at the moment, brain is all fuzzy and I am watching fanfest vids and such. that's all for now though. |
bacon blaster
BIG BAD W0LVES Canis Eliminatus Operatives
184
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Posted - 2014.05.12 03:45:00 -
[5] - Quote
Another thing you guys screwed the pooch on was going full release without full sets of gear and items. There was 1 heavy variant, and 2 vehicle variants along the lines of race. It's been over a year, and we only just got a full set of suits and weapons, and will still do not have much in the way of vehicles.
Also, your Eve link, the big thing that was supposed to make Dust interesting and different from other shooters, only barely exists. 1 year after launch, we still only have mutual corps, semi mutual comms (cannot do voice chat between eve and dust in the corp chat, you have to make a separate channel for this), integrated mailing systems, and that's it really. Saying that the currency is integrated feels wrong to me, as there is a huge tax for transactions between the games. There is no real mechanic for eve to provide any support for dust outside of orbital bombardments, and I can't really see any benefit for eve players to connect to dust. As someone who plays eve and lives in null, I will tell you, no one seems to give a **** about Dust. They regard it as a novel thing and no one is surprised by the rebooting of it in legion. |
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