DIRTY BOMB UPDATE: Version 21216

[pulley]

Main reason was to bring his kill rate up a bit, it was very ‘meh’. I think we’re agreed the role/ability needs to be better for both Recon characters if we’re going to up their played time.

His kill/rate was fine. Its always the man (and map) behind him… on chapel i always end up top 3 k/d…

[pulley]

[QUOTE=spookify;453503]Never Nerf a Medic in a Medic based Game.

Same game play/style as ET and RTCW. The only class I will ever play is Medic unless it is so usless I wont but then whats the point of stop watch if all your medics are dead and you can sustain a push.

Medics will always have a statistical advantage of game play!
Think about it! ET and RTCW (6v6 Comp)
Did you see 4 engys 1 fo and a solder??? NO
4 Medics, Engy and Fo
or 3 Medics, engy, fo and soilder

Your stats should be based on 50% to 67% of people playing medics… At least for SW.

Like that one guys signature said ET did it right…[/QUOTE]

totally agree!!!

[Kl3ppy]

I have 2 big questions regarding this “update”:

1. Am I able to reduce the size of the objective squares? I know, I can make them invisible but I just want them smaller.

2. How can I improve my performance? I lost between 30 and 50% of my frames. I believe that this makes me feel my merc is running in sirup instead of in air. Also the aim is bad for me and I suspect the performance drop to be the cause. On previous patch I didnt had this issues, the system didnt change (hardware and software are the same)

I’ve set ingame everything to low, but performance is still very bad.

The 2 points above are the main issues for me, the 2nd destroys the fun for me and this is why I consider not playing this patch.

What I like:

[ul]
[li]the new grenades
[/li][li]gibbing ppl is much easier now
[/li][li]Friend vs enemy recognition is much better now
[/li][/ul]

Cant say if good or bad:

[ul]
[li]map changes
[/li][li]increased ammo in clips
[/li][/ul]
Very bad:

[ul]
[li]the hud is now too full again
[/li][li]medic healing is too slow, should be faster if I get a medpack from another medic instead of using my own packs
[/li][li]notification in the middle of the screen when carrying something is a pain in the ass
[/li][li]performance
[/li][/ul]

I will try different HUD settings, maybe I find something that I like more.

Regarding the new medic selfuse of medpack prevention. The idea itself isnt that bad, but why do you punish all medics? I think there should be a difference between using own medpacks and using medpacks from another medic.
Own Medpack: Slower healing, but faster than now. The auto healing is almost as fast as the medic healing now, at least it feels this way.
Other Medpack: Normal healing speed

[pulley]

[QUOTE=Kendle;453506]It’s not a Medic based game, and don’t lump RTCW in with ET. ET made it a Medic based game by virtue of having an OP Medic. RTCW wasn’t Medic based.
[/QUOTE]

woooot XD Sure it was. I never saw 3 LT 1 Medic 2 Sniper XD It was the other way…

[pulley]

[QUOTE=Shifty.;453621]I have 2 big questions regarding this “update”:
2) How can I improve my performance? I lost between 30 and 50% of my frames. I believe that this makes me feel my merc is running in sirup instead of in air. Also the aim is bad for me and I suspect the performance drop to be the cause. On previous patch I didnt had this issues, the system didnt change (hardware and software are the same)
[/QUOTE]
try deleting all config files…

[INF3RN0]

His kill/rate was fine. Its always the man (and map) behind him… on chapel i always end up top 3 k/d…

I think he’s referring to KPM and not K/D. Either way sniper could use some body shot damage reduction now more than previously.

[Volcano]

yeah would be nice to tone the body shotting down for the sniper

[N.E.R.D]

I would like to see comments on the changes from the devs for every build to see what the thinking behind them was. If it’s purely on echodate or something like that maybe all the comp heroes should play soldier now so that they would have to nerf them into the ground

[MrEd]

It’s quite simple, we will just keep pestering you until all our hax become in-game menu options.

Such as OwNLY’s Lucian Freud mode? :rolleyes:

[Mustang]

Such as OwNLY’s Lucian Freud mode? :rolleyes:

No sir.

What I’d love to see is in-game drag and drop positioning of HUD elements (i.e. [ShooterGame.SGUIHUDPlayer]) with some snap to grid sort of feature.

Option to disable chat text fading, increase max number of chat and obituary messages, sensitivity inputable as text field as well as existing slider for more fine tuning (or at least double digit accuracy on slider), m_yaw slider (and text field), mini-map zoom slider, fov slider, ironsight sensitivity slider, bindable backspace key, toggle on/off text-to-speech of chat messages, custom hitsounds, set clan tag, show ally names always on, toggle on/off showing of crosshair whilst ironsighted, audio sliders for footsteps, hitsounds, music, ambient, guns, voip, tts, etc.

These sorts of things.

Whilst I’m here anti-aliasing options please!

Some would also ask for toggle on/off setting for floating HUD icons, size and colour changes, but I think if we get some nice defaults for these then everyone should use the same.

[tokamak]

Main reason was to bring his kill rate up a bit, it was very ‘meh’. I think we’re agreed the role/ability needs to be better for both Recon characters if we’re going to up their played time.

I’m with Inferno here in that the kill-rate is the last characteristic that needs to be touched when improving the recon class. Nerfing the HB-sensing but buffing the kill-rate is flattening out the class and making it less distinctive.

Having a weak offensive class but with incredibly damaging HB-sensing isn’t imbalanced, it’s awesome. It’s the most powerful way team-play can be utilised. It means that a team can use information as a weapon to such an extend that it’s worth dropping offensive power over it.

It also means that class-saturation is reached very fast. One recon makes a huge difference, a second recon is already getting pretty useless and from there on every recon you add to the team is gimping the team potential. When you find that you have such a pattern going on then you know you’re on to a truly interesting class.

[Anti]

I would like to see comments on the changes from the devs for every build to see what the thinking behind them was. If it’s purely on echodate or something like that maybe all the comp heroes should play soldier now so that they would have to nerf them into the ground

It’s not just Echo data that we use to balance the game, we have a number of ways of evaluating the game and its balance before making changes, these are:

[ul]
[li]Anecdotal player feedback (i.e. forums and IRC)
[/li][li]Structured player feedback (i.e. surveys, Q&As)
[/li][li]Observation of people playing
[/li][li]Playing the game ourselves
[/li][li]Echo stats
[/li][li]Heat Maps
[/li][/ul]

We consider all of these when we make changes.

In the case of the Medic it’s not just play time that has driven our changes, it’s just the most obvious example. As some of you have stated we’d expect to see more Medic action than other classes, but not to the extent shown above.

As we stated much earlier in the alpha DB’s Medics are supposed to fill a support role, not be the best soldier on the battlefield. Not only was the Medic being played more than we expected it to be but we’ve seen he’s clearly the best combat class right now, and players tend to focus on fighting with him rather than supporting their team.

Some examples prior to the patch:

These Kill per Minute rates for the main weapons of recent weeks put the Medics SMG as the second most effective weapon in the game, by quite a margin. Obviously MG1 and the Sniper Rifles need looking at too, but in fairness to Dazzler he can’t heal himself

That higher kill rate could just be down to the Medic staying in the game longer due to his self-abuse of med packs However accuracy and head shot % also show the Medic SMG as probably the best gun in the game.

Now average accuracy values like that could be heavily dependent on who is using which gun, especially in a small player pool like this, so they’re not super valuable. We do have more detailed charts though to investigate this further, that look at the distribution of accuracy for each player with a specific gun.

Distribution of Accuracy
Series 1 = SMG 1, Series 2 = AR 1

Distribution of Head shot %
Series 1 = SMG 1, Series 2 = AR 1

Here you can see that the average accuracy across all players is higher with the SMG than AR, as is the head shot percentage, albeit not by a lot. this means regardless of player skill or who the player is the SMG appears to be more accurate, before you even figure in its higher than average RoF.

In this case the combination of our own play, player feedback, observation and data suggested the combination of very good gun and Medics mostly self healing is why they’re so heavily played. The class isn’t doing what we wanted it to do and ultimately isn’t balanced well enough.

This is why we made the changes we did. As with all changes these are just a test at first, based on what we’d seen previously. We’ll now observe these changes, get more feedback and gather more data and in the end we’ll see what effect they have and if it’s right for DB.

[Anti]

[QUOTE=tokamak;453647]I’m with Inferno here in that the kill-rate is the last characteristic that needs to be touched when improving the recon class. Nerfing the HB-sensing but buffing the kill-rate is flattening out the class and making it less distinctive.

Having a weak offensive class but with incredibly damaging HB-sensing isn’t imbalanced, it’s awesome. It’s the most powerful way team-play can be utilised. It means that a team can use information as a weapon to such an extend that it’s worth dropping offensive power over it.

It also means that class-saturation is reached very fast. One recon makes a huge difference, a second recon is already getting pretty useless and from there on every recon you add to the team is gimping the team potential. When you find that you have such a pattern going on then you know you’re on to a truly interesting class.[/QUOTE]

Interesting is good, and we need to support various play styles, but we have to try and measure fun and interest too.

As I said in replying to Inferno, the Sniper Rifle changes were to address the Recon’s combat deficiencies rather than played time, we need to look at other elements to fix that.

[tokamak]

Awesome, thanks for the stats.

And okay! Fair enough. At the risk of sounding patronising, or simply stating something you guys obviously already know (going by past games) I just want to stress that not every class needs to be equal in regards of kill-rate and survival rate and those sort of things. It would be expected that an offensive engineer is living much shorter than a defensive sniper. More telling would be revival rates. If the offensive engineer is not the most revived class in the game then there’s something going wrong.

[MrFunkyFunk]

Lucian Freud

I don’t know that player, what team did he play for? Or was a modder?

More seriously, I appreciate the work done on this patch (like any other patch in fact, altho we don’t need to over comment the good stuff ).

• The new layouts on some maps are welcome altho I still hope to see some more verticality to spice things a bit for both sides.
  
• Since we know the IFF is a work in progress I won’t comment much except: shrink everything (and by default allies nameplates & hp bars are a must-have. Enable them through walls & at distance too, it’s an invaluable asset on the battlefield to know who needs support or exactly where did someone fall).
  
• I don’t have anything particular against the medic self-heal nerf. The problem I have with the class is: still making it worthwhile to revive people. I do it a lot but sometimes I feel like I’m not doing a favour reviving someone for him to get killed half a second later with me dying in the process (and we’re back to revive shields; spawn timers and global health regen. Which in my opinion is still a really disappointing feature that removes the sense of risk and achievement and teamplay out of a lot of fights. Can we please test for sometime its complete removal of the game? I know some modern games have it but a lot of them also don’t have it and people don’t whine just because they’re left with 20hp until they find a heal)
  
  [li]Again I don’t know if it’s perfs related or if you reduced the size of the head hitboxes (it’s surely a factor in it, since it’s probably back to what it was months ago. That’s the problem when increasing “forgiveness” like this, you get used to it and when devs make a step back we need to get our old marks back. I noticed a whole lot less headshots from everyone yesterday lol), but for some reason my aiming feels off. Like it’s somehow “lagging” behind my crosshair. It’s hard to explain but in this patch I really feel like the best way to kill someone is to just stand still and go for bodyshots (it’s faster than footsteps dancing).[/li]Which bring me to an old topic of mine: I’d really love a little less spread again.
  

Overall messy writing going in all directions but I hope some points are valid.
Ty

Edit: Seeing all those Echo graphs, Anti, any chance that you guys publish some data for fun in the future (ie: when we open the alpha to the other packs)?
Like long time personal players stats; who did the most mines kill; who did the most revives; etc, those kind of things.

[Kl3ppy]

[QUOTE=MrFunkyFunk;453654]

• [li]Again I don’t know if it’s perfs related or if you reduced the size of the head hitboxes (it’s surely a factor in it, since it’s probably back to what it was months ago. That’s the problem when increasing “forgiveness” like this, you get used to it and when devs make a step back we need to get our old marks back. I noticed a whole lot less headshots from everyone yesterday lol), but for some reason my aiming feels off. Like it’s somehow “lagging” behind my crosshair. It’s hard to explain but in this patch I really feel like the best way to kill someone is to just stand still and go for bodyshots (it’s faster than footsteps dancing).
  [/li][li]Which bring me to an old topic of mine: I’d really love a little less spread again.
  [/li]

Overall messy writing going in all directions but I hope some points are valid.
Ty[/QUOTE]

Thank god, I’m not the only one feeling this.

[pulley]

However accuracy and head shot % also show the Medic SMG as probably the best gun in the game.

I don’t think thats true. But the more skilled player play medic and the more casule player play the objective bases classes like Engi and Soldier. So u cant really say its the best weapon.

[RasteRayzeR]

yeah, the headshots with Vassily were really hard to get … even on the EV mg which is an easy kill usually

[Volcano]

I don’t think thats true. But the more skilled player play medic and the more casule player play the objective bases classes like Engi and Soldier. So u cant really say its the best weapon.

i don’t think that’s right, because we play the objective class since noone else will, i haven’t seen a skilled player swap from medic to another class to benefit the team

[Kl3ppy]

I don’t think thats true. But the more skilled player play medic and the more casule player play the objective bases classes like Engi and Soldier. So u cant really say its the best weapon.

Thats not 100% right because I play medic too