26-04-2015, 05:39 PM
As I posted in the community outreach thread, we are working on some plans for the next major patch.
Cavalry was always primarily Senni's project. Right now, our focus is on improving the game we have and putting more effort into smoothing the start of the game for new players. Cavalry will get some attention in time but it is on the back-burner since it has little affect on the rest of the game.
I would love to have a public facing issue tracker but it is difficult to find a good one that fits our hosting requirements and does not add to our costs. We are currently using Axosoft internally and might be able to create a public interface to it using their api but that would draw time away from working on the game itself. We are also using GIT internally but keep in mind that this is not an open source mod.
As has been discussed countless times before, a random loot system is the fairest system available at the moment. No, it does not directly reward players for putting in more effort but effort is still required to keep the team alive to reach later waves. There is no way to gauge the effort put forth by shielders and medics.
While technically there is no "true" randomness for computers, what is available is good enough for our purposes. Also remember that to properly gauge the spread of the results, you must look at a very large sample of data - not just a few runs. With regards to the lottery analogy, instead of buying more tickets, you need to spend more time playing.
I would argue that retaining players and gaining new players are both difficult, especially for a game as old as Warband. There is only so much that can be done to keep the game fresh and we will continue to do our best to achieve this.
While the Auction Hall does not force people to buy more than they need, it does allow people to buy what they can. Not everyone can afford to purchase the whole bundle.
I do sometimes wonder whether barrels should have a place in this mod. I dislike the way they are used to bypass "useless" or "junk" waves and can be used to weaken other stronger waves without worrying about loss of loot. Because barrels are so powerful, Nords have been made more powerful to compensate leading to a dependence on barrels. All that said, I do not see them getting removed from the game.
The movement of Nords is indeed the main weekness to the game. They will always try to take the shortest route to the player making them easy to kite and causing them to get hung up in tight areas. In a recent patch, we removed the invisible waypoints from the map to see what affect it would have on game play. In some cases, it has made things more interesting since ranged bots do not just run up to the shielders and get slottered and instead have to be dealt with care. In other cases, it has needlessly slowed down game play due to bots getting stuck. In coming patches, we plan to start adding back waypoints where they are needed and leave them out where they are not.
Much has been said about kiting and I do not want this thread to morph into yet another wall of text about it. I will only say that I do see both sides of the argument. While it does allow for a server to start up with fewer people, it also includes a history of people trying to keep others out of their runs because they are not good enough or are not a kiting class. I am not saying all kiting is like that but it is one of the concerns. Again, I will not fully address kiting here because we have more than enough threads on the subject and I would like to this thread free of it.
One thing I have heard anecdotally is that many people are particularly busy studying for final exams. I do not think this can all be attributed to finals but it likely is a part of it.
(12-04-2015, 11:12 PM)Kip link Wrote: In brighter news, we have some great ideas in the pipeline for the next patch and are looking forward to how they will affect game progression from lower to upper levels. I don’t want to say anything specific quite yet but these changes will make the game more inviting for new members and introduce some fun ideas for existing members too!
Cavalry was always primarily Senni's project. Right now, our focus is on improving the game we have and putting more effort into smoothing the start of the game for new players. Cavalry will get some attention in time but it is on the back-burner since it has little affect on the rest of the game.
I would love to have a public facing issue tracker but it is difficult to find a good one that fits our hosting requirements and does not add to our costs. We are currently using Axosoft internally and might be able to create a public interface to it using their api but that would draw time away from working on the game itself. We are also using GIT internally but keep in mind that this is not an open source mod.
As has been discussed countless times before, a random loot system is the fairest system available at the moment. No, it does not directly reward players for putting in more effort but effort is still required to keep the team alive to reach later waves. There is no way to gauge the effort put forth by shielders and medics.
While technically there is no "true" randomness for computers, what is available is good enough for our purposes. Also remember that to properly gauge the spread of the results, you must look at a very large sample of data - not just a few runs. With regards to the lottery analogy, instead of buying more tickets, you need to spend more time playing.
I would argue that retaining players and gaining new players are both difficult, especially for a game as old as Warband. There is only so much that can be done to keep the game fresh and we will continue to do our best to achieve this.
While the Auction Hall does not force people to buy more than they need, it does allow people to buy what they can. Not everyone can afford to purchase the whole bundle.
I do sometimes wonder whether barrels should have a place in this mod. I dislike the way they are used to bypass "useless" or "junk" waves and can be used to weaken other stronger waves without worrying about loss of loot. Because barrels are so powerful, Nords have been made more powerful to compensate leading to a dependence on barrels. All that said, I do not see them getting removed from the game.
The movement of Nords is indeed the main weekness to the game. They will always try to take the shortest route to the player making them easy to kite and causing them to get hung up in tight areas. In a recent patch, we removed the invisible waypoints from the map to see what affect it would have on game play. In some cases, it has made things more interesting since ranged bots do not just run up to the shielders and get slottered and instead have to be dealt with care. In other cases, it has needlessly slowed down game play due to bots getting stuck. In coming patches, we plan to start adding back waypoints where they are needed and leave them out where they are not.
Much has been said about kiting and I do not want this thread to morph into yet another wall of text about it. I will only say that I do see both sides of the argument. While it does allow for a server to start up with fewer people, it also includes a history of people trying to keep others out of their runs because they are not good enough or are not a kiting class. I am not saying all kiting is like that but it is one of the concerns. Again, I will not fully address kiting here because we have more than enough threads on the subject and I would like to this thread free of it.
One thing I have heard anecdotally is that many people are particularly busy studying for final exams. I do not think this can all be attributed to finals but it likely is a part of it.
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