Spartacus - good effort, I think there are some lessons here. Peer reviews always make someone smarter and can keep devs from going off into the woods. I hope you learned a few things. Bravo the effort, although the result was not to my liking. I think you weathered the piles of crap thrown your way well, and that shows strong character. I know you worked hard at trying to provide a better game, and that will be how you work will be remembered.
Reverting to 2.51? 1: Revert all infantry scripts. 2: Don't revert vehicle MG buff and keep bio ML as it is. 3: ??? 4: Profit! Don't even bother spending your time on scripts. I'll let you know what's OP and what's bad like vehicle MGs. A functional tutorial, better GUI, helpful tips and not retardedly stacked games are what will actually help Empires.
There is no way to say that everything added by Spartacus to empires is bad. Further I refuse to follow any "Spartacus haters". Its about the game and not a single person. And lets be honest, he invested a lot of time getting new weapons and ideas into the game. The problem is, that it is a very difficult job to balance a game. I wouldn't even dare trying to do this alone. And as I see it, the problem is to get a proper feedback from all the players who are actually playing the game for a considerable amount of time and are honestly willing to create a more balanced game in a very objective way. Its not about buffing this or that class/item which you are very used to play with, because you want to be in a better spot in the game. The opposite is true. If you see that a specific item is too strong and makes you too successful, you either need to nerf it, or buff alternative items. There should be no "trash items" which are never used at all. Depending on the very game situation everything in the content of empires needs to have its use, because otherwise it can just be remove from the game without changing it. You can start now and throw some items into empires and see how they work out and try to balance by trial and error. Or you can try to find a clear logical structure which ensures the balance of all items by construction and moreover is easy to understand for any new player. Personally I would like to see efforts based on method two. We had method one in its full beauty for quite a while now without any indication of a convergence after each iteration. However, before one can construct a logical system like requested for method two, one needs to know all possible moves you can do in the tech tree/weapon systems and get an interesting selection together. Therefore we shouldn't forget about all new things introduced by Spartacus but use it as fundus for potential new layouts. That way Spartacus' work can be still useful to empires. In short: You need to know where you want to go, before you do a move. Otherwise you may end up in a location which you potentially highly dislike.
I agree totally with haschte @Security its not a 1 man show, or at least should not be, that's what caused the issues with scripts to begin with, although your opinions might have some merit it should be the consensus of the players that actually play not 1 person's/player's opinion on what's op or not
This is already turning into a joke and one I don't enjoy, I was thinking about ti and in reality I think I can narrow it down enough for even the retards in Empires to understand Spartacus did a hell of a job, he fucked shit up realllll bad, but it made it fun not having a clue what to research anymore, you all complain empires isn't the same, but when you left you complained it had gotten boring? Basically fuck half of the empires community you're ungrateful shitheads, but without you empires wouldn't be empires so please stay around and give me something to yell at. This cycle will continue, and things will not be happy and merry like you hope they will and Research will probably get equally fucked up with candles around, not saying candles is a bad scripter (nor was spartacus) but adding to the game is filled with unforeseen consequences. On the note of actually blaming someone, I say we all hang empty and never let him touch infantry scripts again, because that's quite the blametrain that actually spartacus had to deal with, not Empty. So Candles I hope you make empires enjoyable, but to everyone else give Spartacus the respect her deserves, he's not a shithead troll dev. He tried his best to make empires more fun and it disagreed with what some of we're looking for. That's that Tl;Dr go fuck yourself Spartacus haters.
Not once did I complain the game got boring, I complained more about stacked games before the changes. Then I stopped bitching about players and started bitching about the game, because the players didn't make the game more unbalanced, nor did they remove weapons from the game because they felt they "couldn't fully utilize them". You don't feel tools, you use them. Don't remove them if you dont have the evidence to back up how useless they are. I liked the new armor and engine, and the NF cv model update. And probably the nf rifle 2 actually becoming viable. Even though how it worked was stupid as hell. Even my ancient long gripe with NF walls where the barbwire made it more difficult to see over the wall. The con's out weighed the pros and his method of dealing with feedback was him quoting "are you mad?" or calling people aspies and then empty telling us we are retarded for not liking his changes. Empires is a public accessible game. It's not mine or yours; its every bodies and you cannot fuck everybody over. You can't just change shit without discussing things with people, empty attempted to discuss with us be he couldn't handle criticism. I don't talk about balancing the game because I don't know how to balance it, but when I login and play and something feels horribly wrong. I am going to mention it and its up to you get over the salt. Make your own game if you want total control over everything. I have more trust in candles because he won't shove shit out every single day without actual data gathering. I proposed to him to go back to seasonal updates because that gives him more time to figure shit out and makes it easier on us to adapt to the changes and accurately gauge the game. 3 months of gathering feedback and discussion is much better than a week of feedback and trolling.
I just want to point out that people can go on about how great things were before Spartacus all they like, but the fact is most of you weren't playing and had nothing talk about because I was lucky to update them once every few months. Spartacus relentlessly developed the scripts and provided really regular updates. They might not have been to everyone's taste, but I genuinely do believe that experimentation, however misguided, is better than stagnation, which was what was occurring as a result of me. In hindsight (on Spartacus' side) he could look back and maybe think about different people that might have been worth listening to. I know I used to have a group of a few people on my friends list who I'd regularly go to to bounce ideas off. It's difficult these days because there's no real way of testing the scripts. Back when I first started, I was able to get up to 20 players testing things. By the time I finished, if I scheduled a test even close to a release when there were also code related issues to deal with, the attendance almost never even reached double figures. Barring a few dedicated guys (w00kie comes to mind), no-one was interested, and at least 50% of those who turned up just dicked about. That put us in a position where the live release was the only real way to test things at all. It's worth saying that I also had some fairly radical ideas for where to take things, at least when it came to infantry. I actually quite liked Empty's infantry weapons. Though I can't say I agreed with changing up the classes, the actual weapon behaviour and handling I thought was a really nice change. I imagine if I had done what I had intended, there would have been a lot of resistance to it. On a closing point, I think I want to put a really basic "psychology" lesson out there. If you want to get your point across to whoever is doing the scripts, don't be an asshole about it. The fact is, if you're an asshole, it doesn't matter how good your point is, it will be ignored. No-one is going to cave in to people being an asshole because it just sets a terrible precedent. I know I ignored ideas I probably thought might have worked out, just because the person spewing them was being a cunt. I know previous scripters ignored me back when I used to be (more of) an asshole. The fact is, when it comes down to it, 1 person does need to have the overall decision at the end of it as to what goes in, what doesn't go in, and the general direction things will take. I don't know anyone who's ever held the position who wouldn't tell you they'd love a lot of community support in doing things so they could reach something that the majority are happy with, but that comes from consistently constructive feedback, not from thread spamming abuse. This extends into ingame as well as the forums. If you make it unpleasant for a developer to play the game, then he won't play, and inevitably he will end up losing touch with what needs to be done.
So you start of by telling people they've not played, but holy shit are you the one to say that. Anyhow, this quoted part is bollocks through and through. With an exception of JGF who always voices his discontent with a disproportionate choice of words, the earlier complains were nowhere near the later ones. In fact, people gave spartacus feedback in-game after every release nearly instantly since the updates came out mostly fridays or so. Its the fact they were usually ignored completely that they got way more hostile as time went on. If being nice or logical didnt work, people tried the other way, simple as that. If you choose to disregard what most of the people say, you shouldnt be suprised they are going to be angry about it. Also, as opposed to what you said, its also not a one, but a two sided interaction, so if you consistently act like you know better than dozens of people, dont expect to get constructive feedback.
Basically, Spartacus : 8/10 No hard feelings. Unless Spike will be taking over, I wouldn't say it's a good thing that Spartacus is leaving. I've been testing shit for quite a few times with him and I'd say he kinda knows what he's doing. He's actually willing to communicate and don't call people shit. Like I said, comming is like scripting, Spartacus is definitely not the best commander on the team *shots fired*, but he's willing to comm when no one would.
agree with sec. Spart at least tried some new things out. Some good, some fucking OP(plasma cannon,tripML), and a lot of crap. You gota make a lot of crap though to pick through and find the tomato seeds for the next crop though.
i cant be bothered to read all the pages... can we keep the part where turrets are only turrets? much love to sparty
Turrets are Hobbes Killing major attack force type stationary units. They are a key recipe to increase your increased death ratio. One Turret to rule them all, One APC to find them, One Engineer to bring them all and in the walls bind them. You Hobbett PS: That non boom game on Slaughtered - you were a force to be feared. I knew what you would do, we stopped early attempts - but your persistence was amazingly effective.
