MF's review of latest patch

[mf1]

Review on latest patch. This is a cross-post from my post on reddit

r/Dirtybomb - MF's review of latest patch

Config Restrictions

Clamped a number of video settings to address exploits, such as completely disabling particle effects

Poorly thought out change.

I understand and agree with the reasoning and thought behind clamping down on commands that should be restricted, but disagree entirely with how it’s been implemented. It really feels like a rushed job due to not addressing the caveats of restricting the particle command. You should of held off introducing this until the caveats were addressed via in-game sliders that allow us to turn off blood splatter and muzzle flash.

Additionally, you have severely reduced FPS for everyone.

Accuracy Nerfs

K-121 Machine Gun - Reduced spread and recoil by ~5%
PDP-70 Automatic Sniper Rifle - This will no longer insta-gib players if it kills with a headshot
KEK-10 SMG - Bullet spread now increases ~7% faster than before while firing
Crotzni SMG - Bullet spread now increases ~10% faster than before while firing

Kudo’s for retuning fraggers K-121 a bit, it is very overshadowed by the M4.

Nerfing accuracy is not the way to do it SD.

You can change RoF, bullet damage, damage falloff and headshot modifier but touching accuracy will ALWAYS be met with massive criticism. If you want to encourage SMG use to close-quarters, introduce more severe damage falloff.

Stop tuning with accuracy, use the other values.

Aimpunch

Reduced the amount of kick when receiving damage, to compensate for the recent update to view-kick functionality

Perfect. Thank you for listening to the competitive community.

Next step is removing it all together, but it’s much better than what we had. I do think that if you are looking for visual indicators to inform players they are being shot, knocking aim is not the way to do it.

Melee Weapon – Turn Speed Limit

Added a turn-speed-limit for melee attacks to prevent exploits and to reward initial aim

This was a very poorly thought out change.

Introducing a change of sensitivity reduces control a player has over the game which is ALWAYS bad. When coming out of the turn speed limit, it almost feels like you have thrown your mouse across your mousepad cause of the sudden return of your DPI/sensitivity.

There is much better ways to do this and I recommend checking out how Natural Selection handles melee in its games. There is no turn-speed limit, however the active frames for damage are extremely short. This results in the player having to actually AIM where they are initiating melee, but cause of the extremely short active frames, macro’botting it to spin around does nothing.

Deployables

Deployables are now easier to place in tighter spaces

Perfect. Placing any deployable is often a painful struggle. Anything that makes this easier is great in my books. Will be interesting to see what bugs / broken turret spots emerge from it

Sparks

REVIVR now deals the correct amount of damage to objectives
REVIVR battery now begins draining immediately, rather than when minimum charge is reached
Increased the rate at which the REVIVR battery is depleted while charging shots by 10%
Enemy REVIVR shots are now seen as orange in-game

Perfect. It will be good to see how sparks plays in competitive matches now that the objective damage has been tuned. It would be great if actual stats can be provided for these changes however?

Match Making – Skill algorithm

Updated the Competitive Matchmaking algorithm so it spends more time searching for players of closer skill-ratings

Can only be a good thing. I personally don’t MM, but I’m sure others will appreciate it! Thank you!

Melee Weapon - Movespeed

Cricket Bat - Reduced run speed when equipped by 2.5%
Katana - Reduced run speed when equipped by 2.5%

Don’t understand why you would even touch this. It’s not enough to really affect anything but its annoying to know that you are very slightly slower.

Bug Fixes

Lock-On Augment now correctly reduces Turret lock-on times
Fixed bug where pressing ‘4’ could cause a Frag Grenade to be thrown
Steady Augment now correctly adds health to all deployables
Flying Pig Augment now correctly negates all fall damage

Always appreciated. Thank you.

Mission Objectives

Added new missions for Competitive Matches, the Execution Game Mode and Secondary Objectives

Stop trying to force me to play execution.

I play your games because I loved ET, ETQW and Brink, which means stopwatch/objective for me. The people that are attracted to this game want to get away from the CSGO/COD of the worlds. Please focus on your target audience, not the CSGO/COD crowd. Your player base consists of Quake, TF, ET, Tribes, Natural Selection, insert any other fast paced fps.

[Amerika]

The melee change was most likely implemented to stop people from being able to macro 360 spins in a very short window of time. Even if you reduce the active frames down to a small window, using a macro setup to spin you as fast as possible, you still have the same issue. I get what you’re saying but CSGO, IIRC, had to do a similar fix for the exact same reasons.

I don’t quite get why the Revivr was slightly nerfed. I get the reduction in damage to generators and the EV but not the other nerfs.

It would be nice to have options for the muzzle flash and blood. But I’d rather see those options clamped now because, despite what many could claim, seeing through explosions was a pretty big advantage in a lot of scenarios (even if it came with tradeoffs). Many were not using it to get slightly more FPS in those situations. They were using it because you could see through it.

[Gi.Am]

The accuracy of the SMGs wasn’t nerfed. only the how fast the spread increases. If your aim is true, the first shots will still be pinpoint. You just can’t spray as long as you could before. IMO its the right way to do it in this case. It makes the Hochfir/SMG-9/Blishlok more attractive the other option would have been to buff those 3 SMGs. But considering that the KEK-10 and Crotzni were a bit too effective in ranges where other weapons ought to dominate. Taking the strong SMGs down a bit was the better option.

Sparks Rezgun. From a single test it seems that the actual damage number against it at full charge is 0 (atleast it’s so low that the health bar doesn’t move even after 3 shots). Imo it could have been higher .

Melee movement speed. That is mostly a buff or a rebalance for the shortrange weapons. They were fine before but the katana exploit fix affects them too. So they need something to compensate, now you are moving a bit faster with them compared to the longrange melee weapon. Also makes phantom loadouts without the katana justifyable.

Disagree on the new missions. The whole point of the system always was to encourage people into playing parts of the game they don’t like or simply don’t think about playing so its logical to have missions for all avaible gamemodes (you can still skip those missions tho).

Rest is spot on tho.