A Discussion For Future Changes

[Senor Sauce]

Hello.

I am making this post because as of late, I have noticed many of complaints in the 'balancing' that is being done for a lot of the new changes. I would like to give a few of my suggestions and thoughts on the topic, which also encompasses a lot of sentiment from other players I've spoken to about these systems. Feel free to add any comments should you have anything to add. If you are one of the people behind the scenes, use this as a forum to explain away whatever reasoning there is, or update the players on what is being done to rectify these issues. Keep it civil and do not engage in pointless arguments. This is meant to be a constructive forum for everyone to communicate.



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First, I will bring up fatigue. I know George has another post about it here, so I will just be succinct should you not want to read through that. Fatigue is a system that, though promising, I believe to be unfun at the current moment. Having low fatigue is going to be rewarding, and having a lot of fatigue will be detrimental. It's a system that was paid for, so we are indulging in the sunken cost fallacy to try and make it work.
The arguments I've seen for it are:
- Remove it.
- Leave it to food and water.
- Only have it activate for heavier armors.

While I like the new changes added by M!NT (tyvm), I still believe this system to be slightly unfair for rebel players. After all, CPs when fatigued can just back up and go sit in the Nexus. Rebel players must actively find a place to not only hide where they will be safe, but also a place where they are able to sit/lay down at. So, my suggestions for this are:

- Make caffeinated/stimulant items lower fatigue. If you can afford heavy armors, you can afford some coffee or some similar rebel medical stim. (In theory you can, you can't right now but I won't get into that). You could also make it so some very filling foods give you some stuff back, similar to how Vortessence is recharged by certain foods.
- Have the food and water bar play a role in your fatigue. If you dip below 50% food/water, your fatigue increases faster, and if you're above 80%, you fatigue much slower.
- Keep the fatigue increase forgiving, and the decrease in fatigue by sitting/laying lenient. If I have to sit AFK for 15 minutes because I ran around with armor on for 5 minutes, then it's not a fun system.

**I will counter the 'you're not being smart by running around with your armor on 24/7' argument by saying all I have to do is take it off and put it in my inventory. It literally does nothing but inconvenience rebel players more. Furthermore, making it so rebel players can't be constantly geared is another handicap that Combine players don't have, and frankly that is not a nerf that is necessary.

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• 
  
• Next, I would like to talk about Vortigaunt armor; something that was recently brought up in the Vort channels. Currently, it gives 50 armor (Making Vorts 250 HP total), but HEAVILY reduces your Vortessence drain. Many Vortigaunt players have made a complaint that 50% of your Vortessence bar is completely unfair and unbalanced, which I tend to agree. While wearing the armor, you can only shoot 2 beams before it is completely drained. Here is a post just made about it as well.
• The arguments are:
  
  • - Vorts are not meant to be front-liners, they should be supports, so they shouldn't be able to wear armor and still fight unperturbed.
  • - The armor is unfairly balanced and takes too much Vortessence and therefore that should be reduced to make it more balanced.

While I agree that Vortigaunts are not meant to be frontliners, and armor is honestly not needed at all due to the fact that we have shields, healing, etc., the item at current is completely useless.
My suggestions are:
- Remove it. It sucks, nobody uses it, and it's actually not even necessary for us to have.
- Make the armor give 100 armor, but it completely prevents channeling of energy due to the weight and restrictions. This way, you can take up the support role without also being able to be offensive.
Astro certified idea.


- Make it balanced for melee in some way (perhaps by doing the above or something similar). If it's not going to be balanced for PVP, maybe it is a useful item against Antlions or such.

**Now, like Astro, you may be inclined to say this:

And my response would be this:

Once your skills are good enough, apply here. (Obviously I kid)

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Next: Farming. I would like to bring up the current balancing for farming. Whilst the CWU can likely just toss invisible credits at C13 and get a box of seeds, the rebels have to get seeds through basically only admins or events (from what I've seen). This feels heavily restrictive to me, and I don't feel it is balanced properly. 2 fruit = 1 seed feels off to me, especially for crops that really don't give you THAT much food/water. For a passive thing, it doesn't really net much benefit. I could see this not being a big deal if NPC spawns were still a thing that allowed people to gather meats from them, but currently the only way for anti-citizens to get food is to fill up water bottles, beg, or farming. Having farming be the main source of food, IMO, is not really that big of a deal.
My suggestions are:
- Reduce crops to 1 seed per item, with a say ~20% chance to give 2.
- Add seeds to smugglers/BMD sales. Make them somewhere in the range of 15 chips per half bar of hunger than one item gives you, or something.

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This brings me to the final point; more stress tests. I made this post to highlight some CURRENT issues that I believe to exist, but I would also like to attempt to prevent unsatisfactory changes being made in the future. The weapon tests that were done for the weapon base change was a great way to get instant and iterable feedback on an unknown system. I believe this should be done with EVERY major change. For example; Fabricators are meant to be given to rebels at some point, but it is a delicate balance to make sure it's not too OP. If we ran stress tests, it would be much easier to get feedback if you had 20 people trying to abuse the fabricators as rebels and then balancing it.

When adding a system, allowing players to test it first before it is fully implemented will allow for preventative methods, rather than trying to fix a poor system after it is already implemented.

Thank you for definitely reading everything I have written and providing normal and constructive feedback.

 

[AgathaL]

Implementation is the best test. I don't dev gmod servers or anything Source related but my experience on other coding shit tells me that your idea of "stress tests" is bit wishful thinking.

Weapons are viable for small tests because they are situational, you can set up mock battles to test them (and people will still find holes and things to hate in proper implementation).

But then, you have systems like the fatigue system, farming, whatever that vort armour thing is. They are almost impossible to run any meaningful "tests" on. In addition, system in itself can appear perfectly reasonable and in working order, until they start getting a flood of player feedback.

Imo there's no prevention for these issues, Willard isn't developing a game here that requires beta testers for each tweak and new feature, the only reliable way to find bugs and suggestions (such as yours) is through regular implementations and subsequent updates.

Tldr, implement stuff, if the players find it shit, either fix it or can it. There's no "shame" or much complexity in axing already implemented mechanics if they are widely unpopular or sounded good on paper. You never know a system is poor or unbalanced until you let the dozens of players try them in the chaotic server.

 

[CreekMando]

willard is perfect nothing wrong with it and nothing needs to change

 

[Cengiz]

willard is perfect nothing wrong with it and nothing needs to change

 

[Stanford]

willard is perfect nothing wrong with it and nothing needs to change

 

[Orphan]

Shame instead of feedback and actually discussing shit you just get the Neonity special of x reacting and nothing else.

 

[TheGamingPlumber]

Whilst the CWU can likely just toss invisible credits at C13 and get a box of seeds,

We use our faction budget to pay for seeds. we don't toss "invisible credits" at anyone

 

[ramen]

We use our faction budget to pay for seeds. we don't toss "invisible credits" at anyone

Agreeing with Tony here.
I am the ”lead farmer” for the CWU as it stands, and while we having done much farming recently due to ic circumstance, seeds aren‘t gained by throwing “invisible credits” around.

Anything we buy costs money, that’s the way the economy works. We spend our faction budget to obtain seeds/planters/what-not. If our budget is too low, we don’t get seeds. If we have money to spare, we buy seeds. Shrimple as that.

 

[ItsLiam]

willard is awful everything wrong with it and everything needs to change

 

[ItsLiam]

Anything we buy costs money, that’s the way the economy works. We spend our faction budget to obtain seeds/planters/what-not. If our budget is too low, we don’t get seeds. If we have money to spare, we buy seeds. Shrimple as that.

Wait until the CWU finds out you can use the vegetables you get from seeds to gain more seeds, it's called seed-looping.

You got to be loopsmart not booksmart for Willard.

 

[ramen]

Wait until the CWU finds out you can use the vegetables you get from seeds to gain more seeds, it's called seed-looping.

 

[ActuallyRakaesa]

Next: Farming. I would like to bring up the current balancing for farming. Whilst the CWU can likely just toss invisible credits at C13 and get a box of seeds, the rebels have to get seeds through basically only admins or events (from what I've seen). This feels heavily restrictive to me, and I don't feel it is balanced properly. 2 fruit = 1 seed feels off to me, especially for crops that really don't give you THAT much food/water. For a passive thing, it doesn't really net much benefit. I could see this not being a big deal if NPC spawns were still a thing that allowed people to gather meats from them, but currently the only way for anti-citizens to get food is to fill up water bottles, beg, or farming. Having farming be the main source of food, IMO, is not really that big of a deal.
My suggestions are:
- Reduce crops to 1 seed per item, with a say ~20% chance to give 2.
- Add seeds to smugglers/BMD sales. Make them somewhere in the range of 15 chips per half bar of hunger than one item gives you, or something.

• ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

This brings me to the final point; more stress tests. I made this post to highlight some CURRENT issues that I believe to exist, but I would also like to attempt to prevent unsatisfactory changes being made in the future. The weapon tests that were done for the weapon base change was a great way to get instant and iterable feedback on an unknown system. I believe this should be done with EVERY major change. For example; Fabricators are meant to be given to rebels at some point, but it is a delicate balance to make sure it's not too OP. If we ran stress tests, it would be much easier to get feedback if you had 20 people trying to abuse the fabricators as rebels and then balancing it.

When adding a system, allowing players to test it first before it is fully implemented will allow for preventative methods, rather than trying to fix a poor system after it is already implemented.

Thank you for definitely reading everything I have written and providing normal and constructive feedback.

In regards to farming:
IRL seeds get you more than one crop per seed, it would be kind of ridiculous for it to be 1:1, we'd never get any actual farming done.
We're able to get more seeds from crops we harvest through GMs, on a 24 hour cooldown for balance.
Seeds currently give way more than 2 crops if you actually take care of your crops. Depending on the crop, you can get like 4-6 fruits/veggies from it.

In regards to fatigue: Yeah, remove it. For the love of god. It just keeps breaking.
At the very least, yes, add 1-2 safe zones for webuls to recover fatigue in.

 

[Imperator RAD-X]

To start, I appreciate your concerns. Fatigue is the most shared issue-esque that players generally have since it interrupts their flow of entertainment. The effects of fatigue can actually be modified on the server real time, so we're quite careful with it. Despite that, anything Vortigaunt related is DeNuke's territory. If you want to talk about changes with one person, it'd be him. Otherwise, I think you'll gain minimal ground despite your efforts in this thread.

 

[Senor Sauce]

Tldr, implement stuff, if the players find it shit, either fix it or can it. There's no "shame" or much complexity in axing already implemented mechanics if they are widely unpopular or sounded good on paper. You never know a system is poor or unbalanced until you let the dozens of players try them in the chaotic server.

I agree. However, if you look down the line at the post made about fatigue, it is stated the project wouldn't be canned because there was money spent on it. Though I believe it was improved upon already, having volunteers running around in the dev server for an hour with armor on would've immediately given feedback to show that it was poorly tuned to begin.

Not everything needs to be perfect upon release to Main, but to implement things without any prior iterable testing is, to me, just going to put stress onto the devs to come up with solutions faster. Doing a quick hour or two long test where you throw down a bunch of items and let people figure out that vort armor isn't balanced right or seeds don't get enough would allow devs to not have to make quickfixes and spend more time tweaking the systems. Not a knock on them, just an idea.

We use our faction budget to pay for seeds. we don't toss "invisible credits" at anyone

Agreeing with Tony here.

I'm just being facetious on 'invisible credits' here, the main point was rebel players can't buy them at all, and CWU can buy as many as needed so long as they have money, therefore it doesn't need to be balanced for CWU, because it is already easy to get more.

In regards to farming:
IRL seeds get you more than one crop per seed, it would be kind of ridiculous for it to be 1:1, we'd never get any actual farming done.
We're able to get more seeds from crops we harvest through GMs, on a 24 hour cooldown for balance.
Seeds currently give way more than 2 crops if you actually take care of your crops. Depending on the crop, you can get like 4-6 fruits/veggies from it.

I didn't know this was in place, thank you for sharing that. Perhaps we could then add a command that is something similar to /removeseeds, and that's on a 24hr cooldown, and it gives you a random number of seeds.

To start, I appreciate your concerns. Fatigue is the most shared issue-esque that players generally have since it interrupts their flow of entertainment. The effects of fatigue can actually be modified on the server real time, so we're quite careful with it. Despite that, anything Vortigaunt related is DeNuke's territory. If you want to talk about changes with one person, it'd be him. Otherwise, I think you'll gain minimal ground despite your efforts in this thread.

At the very least we got this out of it; the overall point I was trying to make, to sum this up, is about pre-emptive tests that we should implement, and an open message for any of the staff to tell me either, a. good idea, or b. we can't, and also open a forum for people to speak about any other problems they may have found in terms of balance. These issues will get fixed in due time, but it would be nice if we could do something to help as a community to lower the chances of things being poorly balanced in the future.

 

[M!NT]

While I like the new changes added by M!NT (tyvm), I still believe this system to be slightly unfair for rebel players. After all, CPs when fatigued can just back up and go sit in the Nexus. Rebel players must actively find a place to not only hide where they will be safe, but also a place where they are able to sit/lay down at. So, my suggestions for this are:

- Make caffeinated/stimulant items lower fatigue. If you can afford heavy armors, you can afford some coffee or some similar rebel medical stim. (In theory you can, you can't right now but I won't get into that). You could also make it so some very filling foods give you some stuff back, similar to how Vortessence is recharged by certain foods.
- Have the food and water bar play a role in your fatigue. If you dip below 50% food/water, your fatigue increases faster, and if you're above 80%, you fatigue much slower.
- Keep the fatigue increase forgiving, and the decrease in fatigue by sitting/laying lenient. If I have to sit AFK for 15 minutes because I ran around with armor on for 5 minutes, then it's not a fun system.

**I will counter the 'you're not being smart by running around with your armor on 24/7' argument by saying all I have to do is take it off and put it in my inventory. It literally does nothing but inconvenience rebel players more. Furthermore, making it so rebel players can't be constantly geared is another handicap that Combine players don't have, and frankly that is not a nerf that is necessary.

Well, the point of the system is to get people to return to their base. For CPs, they can hang in the nexus with other cops and have some RP outside of getting shot in PCS-3. For rebs, it incentivizes people to hang out in bases or RP hubs. The system as of now only helps you, but has no debuffs as I've reversed all the logic in the code.

As for your other suggestions- some of these things can be done right now in the server config live.
As for adding new things like tracking it based on food/water, or caffeinated items, or anything else- I don't think that its a worthwhile endeavor at this moment in time. Considering that the localized damage system will more or less replace fatigue, and the existing medical system, and overhaul food/thirst mechanics as well, it'd just be a wasted effort. At the same time, the fatigue code is poorly written (and the original dev refuses to fix it) and will be totally redone with the aforementioned changes.

For those reasons, I'm not prioritizing what little time I have to work on the schema to fumbling around with fatigue any more than I already have been forced to. All I can say is that it'll be replaced by a much better thought out system in the (hopefully near) future.

• Next, I would like to talk about Vortigaunt armor; something that was recently brought up in the Vort channels. Currently, it gives 50 armor (Making Vorts 250 HP total), but HEAVILY reduces your Vortessence drain. Many Vortigaunt players have made a complaint that 50% of your Vortessence bar is completely unfair and unbalanced, which I tend to agree. While wearing the armor, you can only shoot 2 beams before it is completely drained. Here is a post just made about it as well.
• The arguments are:
  
  • - Vorts are not meant to be front-liners, they should be supports, so they shouldn't be able to wear armor and still fight unperturbed.
  • - The armor is unfairly balanced and takes too much Vortessence and therefore that should be reduced to make it more balanced.

While I agree that Vortigaunts are not meant to be frontliners, and armor is honestly not needed at all due to the fact that we have shields, healing, etc., the item at current is completely useless.
My suggestions are:
- Remove it. It sucks, nobody uses it, and it's actually not even necessary for us to have.
- Make the armor give 100 armor, but it completely prevents channeling of energy due to the weight and restrictions. This way, you can take up the support role without also being able to be offensive.
Astro certified idea.

View attachment 32530
- Make it balanced for melee in some way (perhaps by doing the above or something similar). If it's not going to be balanced for PVP, maybe it is a useful item against Antlions or such.

**Now, like Astro, you may be inclined to say this:
View attachment 32531
And my response would be this:
View attachment 32532

Right. So Vortigaunt changes are all being worked out by the vort leads, who have sole authority over how that faction works. I don't feel like ripping my hair out, so I don't touch it. I do know that Astro, DeNuke, Melon, and others are all working with @Mango and @Asimo1234 on yet another swath of vort changes.

Next: Farming. I would like to bring up the current balancing for farming. Whilst the CWU can likely just toss invisible credits at C13 and get a box of seeds, the rebels have to get seeds through basically only admins or events (from what I've seen). This feels heavily restrictive to me, and I don't feel it is balanced properly. 2 fruit = 1 seed feels off to me, especially for crops that really don't give you THAT much food/water. For a passive thing, it doesn't really net much benefit. I could see this not being a big deal if NPC spawns were still a thing that allowed people to gather meats from them, but currently the only way for anti-citizens to get food is to fill up water bottles, beg, or farming. Having farming be the main source of food, IMO, is not really that big of a deal.
My suggestions are:
- Reduce crops to 1 seed per item, with a say ~20% chance to give 2.
- Add seeds to smugglers/BMD sales. Make them somewhere in the range of 15 chips per half bar of hunger than one item gives you, or something.

The CWU lead has already talked about the deal with how they interact with this system so I won't get into that part of this.

However, I agree that its a silly balance decision to give the seeds a 50% drop rate. They should have a >100% drop rate, because that's how farming works. I hear all these arguments about "loops" which I think are just short sighted. This is a system, like anything else, and farming should be a loop, because it's a self contained game mechanic.

I would also like to see @gb_ add more recipes to cook so that the system has more depth to it.

Anyways, I plan on making some kind of thread in the discord (with a pingable role to go with it) that announces all the changes before they come out. This'll include fixes, buffs/debuffs, new systems, etcetera. I think that we poorly communicate these things at the moment to players as, outside of making a whole ass Dev Blog, we have no other mechanisms to use to announce these changes.

 

[Senor Sauce]

For those reasons, I'm not prioritizing what little time I have to work on the schema to fumbling around with fatigue any more than I already have been forced to. All I can say is that it'll be replaced by a much better thought out system in the (hopefully near) future.

I appreciate all your comments and all the work that you have been doing. I picked this specific part because you said 'forced to' work on the fatigue system; you could easily not have to be pressured as much to hotfix these systems, if players were given a few hours to mess around with this system in the days before it was added. Since you are one of the main devs who have been given the headache, perhaps it can be left to your decision, or the decision of whichever dev is working on a particular thing, idk. I feel as if you shouldn't have to have a headache at all for implementation of a system you didn't even make.


(Just to reiterate I have no issues with CWU, was just a comment on the need for rebel farming to be fixed, which you said it's going to be buffed even moreso than what I suggested, so that is good.)

The CWU lead has already talked about the deal with how they interact with this system so I won't get into that part of this.
---
Anyways, I plan on making some kind of thread in the discord (with a pingable role to go with it) that announces all the changes before they come out. This'll include fixes, buffs/debuffs, new systems, etcetera. I think that we poorly communicate these things at the moment to players as, outside of making a whole ass Dev Blog, we have no other mechanisms to use to announce these changes.

I like this idea, perhaps if we can't do more tests this is a good middle ground. Thank you again for your responses.

 

[Marco]

Wait until the CWU finds out you can use the vegetables you get from seeds to gain more seeds, it's called seed-looping.

You got to be loopsmart not booksmart for Willard.

UNIRONICALLY, you can loop so many items with the fabricator