Christ. Can you guys read the forums before reposting about the same thing 20 million times. Or at the very least have a good read through this: www.raegquit.com/log.php
It's not upsetting that it takes a while for the scout to be fixed. It's upsetting that it takes a while for some basic parameters to get tweaked. You've heard my stance a million times. Any available balance testing manpower should be playing on the production version and balance updates should be released independently of larger feature updates. The rifleman is getting the scout rifle and the scout is getting a shotgun.
You know, is shotgun really a good idea? shotty pistol can already easily one shot people so a dedicated primary weapon shotgun could easily be such a noobcannon. But new content is always good I guess.
I don't really know how a shotgun is going to work out if I'm entirely honest, but the models are done and the animations just need a bit of tidying up. Add in some sounds and they're ready. Beerdude is handling the GUI overhaul. He's made incredible progress so it might actually happen. Once it's at the point where it can start taking over different aspects of the game at a very basic level, Candles will be able to pitch in and start to contribute to building that up. Right now, Beerdude is just getting all the foundations in place, and has been for quite a few months. Candles is currently doing a lot of short term content/bugfix work. You've heard my stance a thousand times as well. For me, every release is a PR opportunity and the larger the changelog, the better that is. That was the philosophy with the 2.4 update, and had it not been for a really disappointing launch error that prevented fuck knows how many people from actually starting the game, I feel like that release would have really rejuvenated the game. I'm still really disappointed about how that played out, especially given the exposure we received from that. I'm quite open in stating that once the GUI overhaul is ready and we fix up the Commander interface and interaction with players, it'll be time to hit Greenlight. I just hope that Greenlight doesn't disappear before then, given that it hasn't exactly played out how Valve intended. You really need to understand that, had this been 2-3 years ago, I'd have been preaching the exact same thing about balance updates. In fact, there are probably old posts dotted all over the forum with me saying just that. Balance updates can be entirely independent of content releases. But times have changed. Balance updates were originally an idea to essentially maintain the playerbase between releases, but it just doesn't feel like we have a playerbase to maintain right now. We're either getting new blood in or it's gg for Empires. I'm of the opinion that changing up the meta is a bit pointless when there's no-one there to really use it. I usually get 90% of the balance information I need for the next patch within the first week of the game being updated. The remaining 10% comes once strategies have been established over time. Testing has proved to be fairly limited in terms of how much information it gets across. It only really finds any extreme imbalances, given we never have enough testers for a proper game. TL;DR balance patches are pointless now because there's no-one to take advantage of it. I can admit openly that I never expected us to be this long between releases, given our last one was March. I intended the followup patch to be around Julyish, August at the latest. Sadly, we just had no manpower at all during that time so nothing happened. Now we have Candles, so we can hopefully get back on schedule. Re-balancing the game 3-4 times a year is more than adequate. I'll be trying my best to make sure we don't go this long without an update again, so the lack of balance updates should be a non-issue.
It's one part "Shotguns r kewl" and one part "shotguns force you to move closer to the enemy & your teammates" I'm usually all for transparency, but I don't want to know anything about this. Don't get my hopes up. Oh Trickster, we should date.
Maybe instead of worrying about making new players join with bugfixes and balance updates you focus on content updates drawing players in? Shotguns might draw people in regardless of whether the changelog is padded with "fixed spectator existing" or not. Bugfixes aren't going to draw in new players regardless of whether they're attached to something bigger, but they could possibly prevent people from getting sick of said bug/broken balance and leaving.
http://forums.empiresmod.com/showpost.php?p=280991&postcount=158 http://forums.empiresmod.com/showthread.php?t=10823 I wonder what happened to that... looks pretty close to being finished imo.
Absolutely impossibe. We couldn't even get it into Dies Irae, and getting models in there was about 100x easier than getting something into source. The screenshot you see is essentially the only way in which it looks acceptable. Half of the shit isn't grouped together, it has no low poly, the textures can't be used, and fuck, there's a shit tonne of other stuff as well. That tank was never getting ingame. Not to mention the fact that I don't think we even have the files, I'm fairly sure Megel never game source files out.
We could maybe ask for those files if he still has them, but somebody would still have to fix that thing and create the low poly stuff etc.
Can we officially dub 4.0 "the aircraft update"? We can't just let the legend die, even if 4.0 will be just a new NF heavy model. EDIT: oops double post, sorry
For what its worth I pretty much totally agree with this. Balance updates are as much about stopping people from quiotting/ getting old players who still have the game installed back into the game as they are about making it better for new players. But tricksters well aware of my opinions on release schedules I've also been pretty open about the need to remove all the aircraft stuff from the menus/game aswell since its 99.99999999% likely it will never come to anything
