Topics

1

Scene Editing / Current state of NA maps

« on: January 26, 2011, 11:33:51 pm »

After playing through a nearly full rotation on the NA 100 server i've noticed a growing trend of these huge indoor or closed quarters multi level maps that seem to be built as anti cav.  That's fine that the NA map makers hate cav but don't force people who built a cav class to be absolutely useless.  The map's are not just poorly designed in that aspect but poorly designed as a whole.  People with lower computer spec systems have complained about lag.  The multi tier levels lead to fragmenting and necessarily long rounds.  The indoor tunnels lead to funneling and team attacks.  The maps are poorly laid out and are frankly not fun to play.

A map like that two town river map or whatever its called with the high stoen bridge one one and and the low wood on the other is perfect.  It has an open field for cav fights, ruins for small melee skirmishes, plenty of places for an archer to pick people off and an overall good balance.  These maps currently on the NA server are just awful and we have to look only at the dwindling playing numbers to see that.

ScotTFO's server is great because of the map selection on it but for some reason it is scarcely populated and that's a shame.  The pipe that server runs off of is much better than the others. 

/rage

2

General Discussion / Question about WPF

« on: January 08, 2011, 07:54:10 am »

I noticed that the WPF calculator site is down, or at least not working for me.  And since we have no full patch-notes of all the changes i was curious as to how the calculations on damage and accuracy for bows have changed, mostly in regards to archery.  Since archery has been overnerfed, I was curious as to how the PD penalty now affects actual WPF, and without a new WPF calculator (or patch notes),  I wouldn't want to sink a character into longbows if the new WPF system makes them even harder to use than before.

Also, as I do not know who exactly is affiliated with the past WPF calculator, if you are reading this, are you working on a new one for the current patch or waiting for everything to be ironed out. 

3

General Discussion / Constructive Feedback/Bugs

« on: January 05, 2011, 07:36:14 pm »

I am posting these in general discussion rather than bugs because there's more feedback involved.  Most of the bugs I have found have also already been brought to the attention of the devs.

Starting out, keep this thread constructive, well thought out and flame free, I welcome discussion, debate, and compromises but frown upon straight flaming.  I enjoy the game even after the patch, let that be said first.  The issues with the patch that I've found come from personal opinion and by no means intended to spark the idea that they are game breaking changes. That being said lets begin.

Archery
I do not mind a "nerf" to archers but i feel as if the bows have been taken our of the players hands a bit in the patch.  I feel that the animations are just fine, they don't feel too slow at all (and this comming from a horse archer).  They look cool, they feel realistic in a sense, and I enjoy them just fine.  However, coupled with the damage decrease i feel it is a bit much.  I've played a good 5-7 hours with a critical mind (not just for fun, being quite aware of what I, and the people around me, were doing).  The damage decrease is a bit much for a game, that by looking only at the kills per round, was already dominated by melee and crossbows.  This is now opinion that I believe if you are to slash the damage dealing power, the older animations should be used.  If you keep the animations, increase the damage back up a bit. 

Xbows
The idea that these were nerfed that hard at all is insane.  They still one shot me on a consistent basis and i doubt everyone that does so has the sniper xbow with 150 WPF.  They are just fine, don't need to be rebuffed, and i honestly never felt the reason for a nerf to begin with.  High damage coupled with the shot speed of a snail balances itself.

Team Horse Bumps
A great idea in theory but I have found the application of such has fallen short.  As a cav player myself I have found little difficulty in steering away from bumping my teammates.  I keep myself aware of their locations and weave in an out as necessary (aided by the fact i have a high maneuverability with the sarranid horse).  The same cannot be said for a lot of my teammate cav players with itchy forward movement fingers.  Since cav can spawn in the middle of infantry, many people wind up leaving spawn at around half health.  FF horse bumping isn't a huge issue, nor game breaking, but we need to raise awareness to careless cav players before bans begin to be thrown out excessively. 

Upkeep
Now for what i believe, is a bug.  The upkeep system seems to work out just fine in theory but after doing some testing and really paying attention to numbers, I don't think it is working as intended.  I am lucky enough to have nice round numbers to work with on my expensive items such as the 20k sarranid horse.  The horse costs around 4k to repair which brings upkeep costs at around a 20% value, just fine if you ask me.  With the new xp and gold system I think this will work just fine, my issues now come to how the system is functioning currently.  It seems to me that items break far too frequently.  I don't know if this was intended but paying attention to the upkeep of my items I've noticed that they tend to break on the upwards of 65-80% of the time.  This is a change that will not only hurt the rich folk in plated armor, but the newer player such as myself.  They will wind up stuck in the same dilemmas that the well geared players have even in medium gear.  Again, i don't know how the system was intended but to me it seems like an excessive and possibly not working as intended. 

Another aspect of the system that may be bugged is that: upkeep seems to disallow actual monetary gains on losing rounds making the upkeep seem worse than it needs to be.  From my testing it seems that if something is repaired, any money that is gained does not offset the upkeep value.  I don't know if there is a coding issue that you cannot lose and gain gold at the same time or not, or if the system is just not working properly at the moment but there is definitely something there that isn't quite right.  I think this is something should should be looked into asap, or explained that it is working as intended at least. 

Misc. bugs
If I apply my horse to my spawn inventory on the site, it shows up in game just fine.  If I do not do so, it does not show up in game for use and thus, unavailable.  It is an heirloomed sarranid horse (heavy sarranid, 4 riding req. which i meet).  Not sure if this is related to the issue many are having with the availability of their other heirloomed items.

There is also an issue it seems with the in-game stat allocator (default "c" button).  It seems to always reflect my attribute stat values as well as WPF values from the website correctly.   The problems seem to fall upon skill point values.  I have personally found that sometimes my skill points from the character i retired show up.  I am a HA with points only in riding, HA, and Weapon Mastery, yet my retired values from Power strike, Iron Flesh, and athletics sometimes are shown in the in-game screen along with my true skill points.

Sometimes throwing animations can hang halfway through and get stuck and you need to begin it all over again to release the weapon, as a non-thrower I don't know if this is a new issue or was always an issue.  Just my experience with throwing my free rocks while naked yesterday.

I will add more to this list as I find more bugs or more issues that I feel should be discussed (keyword here).  I think to properly discover bugs or issues with the game we need semi-comprehensive patch notes so that we can pin point things that are or aren't working as intended, otherwise there will just be more for the devs to discover on their own or sift through the QQ posts.

I cannot stress this enough:  I am in no way shape or form whining.  I like the patch, for the most part I like the changes.  Without change things become stale and I like where cRPG is going and will continue to enjoy the game for months to come.  Thank you for reading the entirety of this post and I hope we can begin an intelligent and constructive thread.

And thank you chadz and the rest of the dev team.