Number of Team Mines

[»Nude For Satan]

As Gad's post is clearly specifically aimed at me, personally, I thought I'd better respond.

 

1. Yes its a good idea to reduce some of the advantages turrets have now in low pops. Also do same for advantages runners and remote lobbers have, too.

 

2. No leave safe zones there. Make sure they aren't ridiculously easy to enter, because some folk like to exploit them for hit and run sessions, but don't remove them altogether. Definitely was a good move to reintroduce them.

 

3. Toys are too easily gained through greens, bonusing etc, agree. Would rather the bonus system be scaled back than removing greens tho. Means there is still some actual legwork involved in gaining the toys. I think you SHOULD have to work at greening. Hence scale back bonuses and let people green their toys more than gaining them through automatic means.

*actually good point inside the sarcasm here from Gad* - how about, when !fullship becomes available, its time to make !sc tougher. !sc only from safe, too?

 

4. Sorry I don't follow this one.

 

5. Who got rid of !revenge? Whoever it was, GOOD IDEA!

 

6. Agree except for the bit about the puppy ship, if a 50bty bot appeared I'd never get to it in time before you found it. Mind you, you'd have to check quickly to make sure it wasn't another instance of you

 

7. Don't follow this one either. People who don't talk to me are ultra-cool like Skiz.

 

8. Yes waiting sucks, I never wait. I hop in as soon as I can. Then, if a turret slot opens up, I'll jump on it. The only player I've ever seen actively waiting to hunt is sue e side. He asks for people to bonus rabbit hehe. I don't have that patience.

 

9. Turrets should be subject to mine rules like every other frequency. No special consideration!

 

10. Should be able to have as many gunners as the frequency settings allow at the time.

 

11. Or even if they gunned on a turret that stayed in play!

 

12. Nah don't ban him unless he does anything illegal. Probably need to scale back the advantages turrets have in these times' lower populations, though.

 

 

 

 

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

 

 

 

 

Here's my take on the never-ending argument. Remember I'm not a long-time Chaos player and don't really know how it all was back in the day etc etc.

 

Essentially Chaos has seemed to me to be intended to cater for many and varied playing styles. Turretting, hunting, J12 melee agents, bounty- and/or stat-whores. Lamers, surly vets, gangly newbs. There's kind of something for everyone. These days there's flag games etc to cater for even more conceivable goals.

 

Overall, each of the approaches to play should have pros and cons, and not be either impossible to succeed at, nor impossible to defeat. In a perfect world each should have a similar level of difficulty, weighted against the strength of the goal.

 

With turrets, the trade-off for a super-powerful multi-firing, multi-special, robust megaship, is that, as you start to assert authority using these advantages, everybody else starts to take notice, and you find yourself under siege.

 

That is right, isn't it? Turrets are way more powerful BUT they suffer wave after wave of assailants paying a LOT of attention to them! THAT'S why its not a total mismatch.

 

( General view only, ignoring that me driving a turret with Blackers and Great Jedi gunning, facing say, Snafu, or Surrey in a straight-out duel, might not fit the above assumption of power balance! Actually me driving with a turret with Blackers gunning is enough to kill us in an otherwise empty arena!)

 

So, this is representative of a basic concept, which is indeed a basic concept of gaming. As you proceed, survive, win, excel, etc, you "level up", and face more difficult "levels". In the case of Subspace, "levelling up" is really just entering a new level of "noticeability":

 

When you first arrive, on 50 bty, you have people to avoid, fend off, and kill, yeah, sure. But the majority leave you alone. You die, respawn, you die, respawn. Then you win.

 

LEVEL UP! The increased difficulty is, the guy who you killed, just said "wtf?", respawned, and is now looking for you. You're not dealing with what you run into anymore, you've got someone out there for whom your ship name makes him go "grrrr!".

 

You kill him again. Then you kill someone else. Then you die. Then you kill three guys, then a fourth.

 

Then a fifth. LEVEL UP. Your bounty is 200. Some bastard arena spam just told everyone you have a 3-strong streak. Your ship just went bright blue on everybody else's radar. Now, as you pass by other ships, they all turn your direction.

 

You kill them too. Then you kill some more. Your bounty is now 450. That mongrel bot just told everyone you have six straight decent-bounty kills. On different occasions various players have said "u so dead". Some have added umlauts.

 

Then you kill another ship. It was also 450 bounty. The bot screams to everyone, basically "somebody kill this &*&%^^&er!!!". LEVEL UP. The first sign of the new level is a single chat sentence by another ship : "where's [your ship name]".

 

More killing, more surviving, you are on 700 bty and the bot is frothing at the mouth. "He's great He's fab! He MUST be killed!" Then four hunters converge in javs. The put you on the wall with repping tape. You burst. Port. They die. Bot rages : "MEGAEXPOSED TO THE ENTIRE CHAT-READING AUDIENCE"

 

LEVEL UP! Suddenly, extra weasels start peeling off the mothership (the mothership known as the "USS Spec"). There are as many ships hitting you now as there are bullets, and the ships are actually hitting you faster than the bullets are! Rabies is rife arenawide. "You run!" "You lame!" "Backarrow more!" "Forwardarrow more!" "Sidearrow more!" "Use-combo-of-various-arrows more!" "Haha you repped so I won even though you're 10:0 on me."

 

Then you die. You were apparently very easy, too. You think, well, that was fun, if intense. Could do with a smoke (or a soda for the kids) now. "A-ha and straight to spec!"

 

So you're back to Level .... 2. People are going to notice you right from the start now. But they aren't going to batter you to pieces until you get a bit of bounty again ... or if they feel you really, really, did all that very lamely.

 

Now, this is the concept of how the game is supposed to become more difficult as you become better. Its our version of levelling. So long as the environment supports this, it really can work quite perfectly.

 

With Turrets, and also with Runners, and Remote Lobbers, part of the environments that keeps the balance, is population. All three need to rely upon not spending too much time constricted to melee-work. On the fringes, or anywhere out of the centre, there's more flee-space.

 

Nowadays, population is considerably down. Why this is, and what we can do about it, is for another thread. Fact is, it is.

 

What this has done, is it has altered the balance. The remote areas of the map used to be comparatively safer than the middle. There was less action out there, and, more importantly, it was action that hadn't seen what had just been happening in the middle. Now its basically empty, and almost entirely safe. The only action is the action that chased the turret/runner FROM the centre. The fringes are a haven now, with probably only about 20% the dangers that such areas used to pose. No-one's going to be hanging around safe, sitting in a sole gap to another sector, or spraying bullets all over the place in some outlying duel.

 

There are other elements too, a random warp is a LOT safer now. The ability to get into a safe zone is easier, due to there being less enemies hanging around there at the time you arrive.

 

So, overall, the balance of power has been skewed by population change.

 

Now I'm no hunter. I've had a fun discussion with Gad about how proud I was when I killed him once, yes ... ONLY ONCE , in the 9 or so months I've been back in Subspace and playing Chaos. (Actually its twice, now, and I only added this sentence so I could brag about it) But I LOVE to chase a big bty or a turret. Why? CHALLENGE! I can hardly beat a first-time newb, but if a turret flits by, I'm off after it. Its FUN! Sometimes I'll try to be self-preservative in the act, sometimes I'll throw caution to the wind. Who friggin' cares. I guess if I was any good, it might matter a bit more that I'm fairly suicidal.

 

Hence I think that some things DO need to be adjusted to bring the balance of power back to a more even level. Exactly what? Well, we've seen some slight tweaks and its generated a lot of discussion and anger. Larger tweaks are billed for upcoming resets and these are going to be supported by some and decried by others.

 

I can SEE why a hunter feels that its lame for Gad to run round the map like he's in a centrifuge, or head for safe whenever he loses a gunner, to allow a secure reattachment rather than attempt to do so out in the open arena. When I'm on a turret, the driver has always attempted to enable my attachment from within play, rather than within safe. EG fongz, umm that other player, can't remember name, a word like dix but not dix, probably another 3-letter name, can't remember, loves lancs. They don't last as long as a Gad turret, but then again, they don't spend much time in safe, or rocketting along the boundary of the map, either. They tend to stay in play much more often. Caveat: not ALWAYS, as EVERY turret, like EVERY player, is plain stupid to not duck away from the action when they cop some hits and have low energy, or run out of reps. I'm an exception. Or stupid. Probably the latter.

 

I can ALSO see why Gad and those who ride him feel as though the changes are some sort of personal attack on them. They are trying to use one of the various playing styles in Chaos. Their ships are more powerful, they have more focus on them, its supposed to even out. Why change anything else? Why the hate? Is he being punished for being good?

 

To an extent, such tweaks ARE based on reducing the advantage turrets (also runners and lobbers) have these days - due to the lower population. Because there are less players around, more safe open spaces, fringes, unmarked safeties, unguarded slip-points, the "levelling up" simply doesn't result in a higher level of difficulty, or not enough so. The balance has become skewed. A turret should have to run a gauntlet of one strength or another almost everywhere they are in the arena, perhaps a little less so in the remote areas. Now there is just no gauntlet at all out wide, not near the safes, either. That just makes the situation a bit of a joke.

 

Also, exploits of the game through simply, realising "hey if I do this, then ..." are always going to be discovered. They also must always be taken into account by staff, does this new concept ruin things, skew balance? If so, do we a) outlaw it, or b ) adjust other things, to bring it back to a balance. In my opinion rules/settings should ALWAYS be examined for the need to change. When the environment itself changes, ie population and its ramifications, then this is just all the more imperative.

 

So I support tweaks to bring back some balance. I dunno if I agree with everything suggested. We suggested changes to the bonus system and the overwhelming response was to get rid of the bonuses altogether! Wasn't expecting THAT! So there is going to be a reset with no Bonus use at all ... a combination of a) a fun change and b ) seeing what feedback such a scenario gets. After that, new bonus settings are set to be introduced. Again, the reception this receives is all important.

 

I don't care that Gad (and Gad-turret) mine-reps. I don't really care that he runs when under attack. I enjoy chasing a Gad turret regardless of my chances. What I don't like is that the arena is arranged, settings-wise, such that a Gad-turret can exploit safety zones for regular get-out-of-jail-free. What I don't like is that he wrongly (edited from falsely, I don't think it's "falsely") claims that Chaos keeps changing to accommodate hunters, when in reality NATURAL change (population attrition) has caused Chaos to change to accommodate runners, and staff are merely working out ways to restore some balance. Clearly, if Gad's playing style was so impossible to utilise in Chaos, he wouldn't be the current record-holder for longest ever streak.

 

Finally, I don't like that Gad has publicly expressed that he hates the (or some selected) staff of Chaos enough that he was encouraged to try to kill the zone. I don't believe he is trying to kill the zone, though he may feel somewhat that way, on and off. Regardless, that's a pretty pisspoor thing to say, and doesn't endear him to the rest of the population too much. I don't mind Gad, but I'm not gonna say I liked seeing him say that.

Edited April 5, 2011 by Nude For Satan

[Jazz]

The mine times (2 min down to 1 min) and number of team mines (12 down to 8 ) were changed when the Flag with upgrades/downgrades was put in -- this was an experiment to try and re-balance the overpowered mine stacks possible with the flag bomb upgrade.

 

How long for _anyone_ to notice such a change?

Answer: 29 days. When I put in the change, I thought they would be noticed in no more than two days time, and probably within hours (that was the guess of others I asked also). The mine time change was noticed within two days (not the first day). I was very surprised when the team mine limit change was not noticed -- my prediction was very short -- yet it was quite long before anyone noticed.

 

About changes: when doing user testing, one needs to collect objective data. When the user is informed of changes, the data is no longer objective, but biased. If a change is made, but the observed behavior does not change, then that shows the change has little/no effect. No one noticing this change, or changing their behavior for 29 days shows that the change was a minor one. That's interesting information.

 

Now that the experiment is complete and we have the data, number team mines will be changed back to 12 and mine times will be back to 2 minutes at the next reset. Based on observation, I think these minor changes would probably do little to help with the 'new player leaving' issue (see below).

 

12 mines per team was the standard SVS setting with 7 man freqs. That works out to less than 2 mines per person -- so that was the game design decision back then based on that much larger population. I remember leaving freqs where the other people would use all the mines (doing mine stacks and such) - I wanted to have at least one available for mining chasers. I would favor having the number of mines change with the freqsize, but will not implement that at this time.

 

It also appears that some people erroneously believe that many settings changes have been made during the past year. This is simply not the case. Here are the facts -- changes made in the last year:

1) shark -- this was a fairly major change

2) bty increase for kill -- raised from 6 to 12, and now to 20.

3) bouncing bomb damage percentage -- I found that somewhere in the last several years, someone nerfed the bouncing bomb damage to 80% of normal (which is interesting in light of lanc usage being in the tank). I've set it back to SVS normal of 100%.

 

Mines are the NUMBER 1 way that new people to the zone can even get a kill.

That might be true for intermediate players, but it is not true for *actual* new players, who have no idea what a mine is. We lose the vast majority of people in the first 5-10 minutes of play (that's what 'new player' means) -- getting mine repped and dying instantly is a significant way that we lose these new players. No one likes dying suddenly and without understanding why. It's not fun, seems unfair, and so they leave.

 

Please be assured that mine repping is part of Chaos and will not be removed. But it is most decidedly not newb friendly. It is the only "one shot kill" we have in Chaos, and is the most risk-free way to get kills (which is why many pilots do not respect that style of play) -- these reasons are why mine stacks and mine repping are not a part of more 'skill based' SVS play such as League.

 

--hallu

 

What was the general view from most ppl about mines being 2mins versus 1min ?

 

Seemed to me like the only ppl complaining about 1min mines WAS the mine reppers (who now had replace those mines more frequently and risked death), and the ppl who like leaving mine stacks in main areas and leaving them there while they run off to less active areas.

[samgunn]

I have noticed game play has changes since the mine time has changes, no more people mine reping. I hate being min repped but i hate the game being changed even more, put it back the way it was.

 

There should be safes easily available as people need to park there ship quickly some time, e.g playing at work and the phone rings, playing at home and the family needs something. Who care if some people will run to safe every time they get in trouble better then them escqing.

 

quite frankly i have noticed that population drops off whenever people start dicking around with the setting, Have you ever though people just like to play the same game they have played for 10-15 years. change the map every now and then, change the flag game every now and then, change the bonuses every now and then, but leave the ship and zone settings alone. i know whenever some idiot comes along and messes them up i just stop playing till some one else comes along and puts them all back.

 

Samgunn

[Gadianton]

quite frankly i have noticed that population drops off whenever people start dicking around with the setting, Have you ever though people just like to play the same game they have played for 10-15 years. change the map every now and then, change the flag game every now and then, change the bonuses every now and then, but leave the ship and zone settings alone. i know whenever some idiot comes along and messes them up i just stop playing till some one else comes along and puts them all back.

Samgunn

I totally agree.

Edited April 7, 2011 by Gadianton

[hallucination]

...play the same game they have played for 10-15 years...

[Ed: emphasis mine]

 

Well then don't miss the SVS settings this weekend.

 

--hallu

[»Nude For Satan]

quite frankly i have noticed that population drops off whenever people start dicking around with the setting, Have you ever though people just like to play the same game they have played for 10-15 years. change the map every now and then, change the flag game every now and then, change the bonuses every now and then, but leave the ship and zone settings alone. i know whenever some idiot comes along and messes them up i just stop playing till some one else comes along and puts them all back.

 

Samgunn

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRdfX7ut8gw

[Gadianton]

lol funny video. Tradition.

[Caerbannog]

quite frankly i have noticed that population drops off whenever people start dicking around with the setting, Have you ever though people just like to play the same game they have played for 10-15 years. change the map every now and then, change the flag game every now and then, change the bonuses every now and then, but leave the ship and zone settings alone. i know whenever some idiot comes along and messes them up i just stop playing till some one else comes along and puts them all back.

Samgunn

I totally agree.

 

Really?

Then why are you crying about not being able to use bonuses, a 2000+ feature for two weeks?

 

P.S. I, too, prefer Lancasters with one bounce. Two bounces make it a silly superzoneship. Oh, and terriers with slow fire rate. Pew pew. The added extra aim should be enough, when you're done being a newbie, move on. Oh, and weasels with Self-EMP. I kind of wish PriitK hadn't forgotten that.

[Gadianton]

"weasels with Self-EMP" whats that?

[Caerbannog]

"weasels with Self-EMP" whats that?

Close bomb EMPs freezing your own energy.

Oh, and you could kill yourself in SubSpace via closebombs. (still works in the tutorial v 1.34 IIRC)

 

Did you make up your mind on where you stand on bonuses yet? "Hunters" being able to !bonus speed was a horrible thing for you a few threads ago. Now not having bonuses hurts turrets? What?

[Ethylene!]

"weasels with Self-EMP" whats that?

Close bomb EMPs freezing your own energy.

Oh, and you could kill yourself in SubSpace via closebombs. (still works in the tutorial v 1.34 IIRC)

 

Did you make up your mind on where you stand on bonuses yet? "Hunters" being able to !bonus speed was a horrible thing for you a few threads ago. Now not having bonuses hurts turrets? What?

 

Gad wants whatever favors him. He wants to be lame but heaven forbid anyone else can be. This is why no bonuses is a good thing, hunters don't have them and niether do turrets, I don't see any inequality here. Bonuses are a terrible idea. One of the main objectives of the zone is to use your weapons wisely, if you don't you will most likely die. Being able to acquire weapons (!bonus booster) at will is not even close to what the game is supposed to be like. If you want things like they were in the old days then you shouldn't want bonuses.

[Jazz]

"weasels with Self-EMP" whats that?

Close bomb EMPs freezing your own energy.

Oh, and you could kill yourself in SubSpace via closebombs. (still works in the tutorial v 1.34 IIRC)

 

Did you make up your mind on where you stand on bonuses yet? "Hunters" being able to !bonus speed was a horrible thing for you a few threads ago. Now not having bonuses hurts turrets? What?

 

Gad wants whatever favors him. He wants to be lame but heaven forbid anyone else can be. This is why no bonuses is a good thing, hunters don't have them and niether do turrets, I don't see any inequality here. Bonuses are a terrible idea. One of the main objectives of the zone is to use your weapons wisely, if you don't you will most likely die. Being able to acquire weapons (!bonus booster) at will is not even close to what the game is supposed to be like. If you want things like they were in the old days then you shouldn't want bonuses.

 

Amen Ethy I prefer no bunuses at all.

And the proposed costs for the following reset (?) are still cheap, so they'll still be overused.

 

And the self-emp .... i was just noticing that last night I was messing around and shooting emps point-blank, and all it did was reduced my energy, but it didnt freeze ..... just immediately started recharging.

I never noticed that before When im fighting other ships, i sometimes try and get close so they cant bomb me for fear of prox damage. And weasels are pretty dangerous when used properly as it is, and i figured if i got in close, their prox would negate some of their advantage by making the pilot worry about freezing himself after shooting me

[samgunn]

...play the same game they have played for 10-15 years...

[Ed: emphasis mine]

 

Well then don't miss the SVS settings this weekend.

 

--hallu

 

Im bloody well looking forward to it.

 

Samgunn

[»Nude For Satan]

... One of the main objectives of the zone is to use your weapons wisely, if you don't you will most likely die. ...

 

Imo this is an extremely good point and very relevant to the debate. When a new player enters and we give them some early hints, one of the first is "your energy and your health are the same thing. DON'T waste firing with just spraying indiscriminately". Then they die to someone who's bonused a booster so they can send three thors down from the top of the map without having a clue what demographics of players will be in its path.

 

Its a specific point where part of the playing philosophy is corrupted by the advent of bonuses. "Use your weapons wisely" is almost the reciprocal of the bonus system.