Opening the can of worms

Absorbant beats rails?
Are you mad?
Absorbant is nearly reflective's equal against rails, and paper for everything else.

 

Haven't most people said that Empires has lacked direction since Krenzo stopped leading the team? Spawn sounds like he'll actually listen, so why not save your complaining until he actually becomes a tyrant?

C'mon man, it's not like Empires can get worse atm

@topic: Fast research scripts & a lot of res will always populate servers, is it the way to go? Not really.

 

saw the title and thought someone was going to discuss scouts again.

also, removing the script manifest will only make it more difficult to work on the mod, as doing any sufficient balancing currently requires a brand new update to the mod.

Then there are bugs that you'll never really find unless you test and test and test, and then suddenly it becomes obvious. In this case, reflective armor wasn't always popular, but since it has become more frequent due to the more common use of APC's, people have noticed that the angle modifier isn't working properly, or exactly the opposite of how it should be.

also, From 2.23 to 2.24, there was added support to change armor resistances from a modifier based upon many variable to a defacto damage modifier, and every weapon potentially having it's own value set to it. Unfortunately, the scrip based resists and things like the building scripts haven't had much of a chance to be tested due to the lack of abiliity for everyone to use a single script set without having to try and find it off of random threads and such and making sure they have the most recent version etc.


Lol, Soundspawn, I didn't realize you were a dev now.

You've broken so many rules of devship with this post, starting with using the suggestion forums to gather suggestions....

 

Scout discussion will come soon... I know, is nothing sacred?!?

So, I think I didn't put enough verbage there about what I'm talking about because:
"removing the script manifest will only make it more difficult to work on the mod, as doing any sufficient balancing currently requires a brand new update to the mod. " would be true if I was talking about taking it out now. I want to leave it in for (guessing) about a year so we can achieve a balance. My delima is that I think it will eventually need removed to garner a larger audience. I'm hoping for either community support in that direction, or reasonable alternatives. I'm not sold it has to happen, but at this time it's the only solution I've got. Thousands of confused noobs across 50 servers all with totally different scripts, weapons, vehicles, research, armors, skills, and skill requirements... imagine the chaos, or correct me, either way.

 

Screw scouts, just give the carbine and that NF semi auto rifle ACOG or SUSAT scopes, then let the whinning commence. Oh, and can someone tell me if theres any real difference between the NF and BE assault rifles? Lately it seems the NF rifle is better (but it could just be user skill).

 

I want to specify that there's an option which is not available. "rage hard except for if it's the scripts I like" precludes an option where I would rage whether or not the scripts I like are adopted, as my primary concern is giving the community (e.g. the market) control over balancing rather than a select few individuals.

 

I read that twice and I still didn't understand it.

 

I'm so happy when my opinions aligns with other aggressive posters. Before I join this rage-a-thon, I'd like to point out how pointless this thread is, even though empty already said it once, just as a disclaimer.

This thread is pointless. The feature hasn't been released yet, you(soundspawn_flush) have no idea what you will think a year from now, or what the situation will be. Since no one else knows what the situation will be a year from now in a completely different setting, everyone else's thoughts are also completely hypothetical. You say you want to find-out how much people will rage about a decision you might make a year in the future, and haven't said why you want to find out now, but carry the distinct undertone of using this as a basis for a decision you will make now. Can of worms successfully opened.

This is a hard conversation to have in a forum, because it's long and complicated. When Shandy, Keef and myself were talking about it a month or so ago, we talked for probably 4 straight hours before reaching any real resolution. --And that resolution was still a semi-split decision. Even when talking with people who are in nearly complete agreement, the conversation seems to last a while.

No new special system needs to be implemented for a server to say what kind of mods it is using, all servers have a mod tag field, and it can always be filtered on. If my server is running the BattleTanks_v1.4 script pack, I would simply put that in the tag field and everyone would know it wasn't stock.

SoundSpawn's depiction of mod Armageddon has no basis. I herd no explanation of why a market system would break-down, and I've herd no sighted examples of any other games that failed by doing anything similar.

A true market system of this nature will(should theoretically) always benefit the people. It's a democracy, where my vote is where I play, and I will always play where I will have fun. If servers care about me being on their server, they will do what makes me have fun, unless I am in the extreme minority. When I find a server that I like I'm likely to play on it often. The fact that other servers might be using other scripts that I don't care for as much presents very few problems that I can imagine. In fact, it mostly just makes me want to play empires more, because the game encompasses more variety. That is a straight-up value proposition, "Empires isn't always the same ol' game", if you get bored of playing stock, there might be another populated server playing a variant out there to peak your interest until your boredom has subsided.

Not to mention the overwhelmingly obvious issue which is, when the devs make balance decisions people leave the community. We all know how many poor decisions have been made in this mod, and we all probably know a number of people who have ragequit from this game completely because of those changes. --But think about this, assume that the devs never make a "bad" decision. No matter what the decision is, there will always be people standing on both sides of the fence for that decision, and there will be people with varying degrees of discontent and praise for those decisions. Even the best decisions will sub-section the community, and as more and more decisions are made by devs, more and more people will be sliced out of the community. When devs make yes/no decisions for the community, they slowly widdle down the community, which is what has been going on in empires for a very long time. The influx has not matched the out-flux(?) caused by stagnation and sub-sectioning.

Now imagine that the devs don't make yes/no decisions, but work on making optional enhancements in the form of functionality. Servers, then are the ones making hard decisions that will subsection the total community, and while one server might slice me out of it's small community, I'm still a part of the over-all empires community because that one server doesn't speak for the whole, and I can play on a server I like more.

Think about CS for a minute. How many people remember ever being on THE CS 1.6 forums? Exactly, Counter-Strike has been broken-up into server communities, and no one would say that that has bastardized the game. That's part of the power of the server system (and concequently why people were raging at Modern Warfare 2), I don't have to like the server you play on to like the game you play. I don't have to like the "Super Hero" mod, or "Dust 2" to like Counter Strike, which is why I played CS as much as I did.

I can see why devs would think that the script-manifest symbolizes a reduction in thier influence, and why they might have a gut distaste for it, but in the long run I predict that it would resolve to creating a nearly equivalent amount of influence on a more popular game, which if I do the math right means more over-all influence.

Ask yourself this, what is the difference between custom and official maps. In fact, also ask yourself why do devs allow custom maps to be made at all. Fact: Official maps for various games in general get played WAY more than custom maps. --And what is the difference? The difference in a game like TF2 is that the devs pointed their fingers at a few custom maps and say, "I like that, it's now 'Official'." Devs still influenced the resulting game-play experience without hindering the communities ability to prosper on it's own. When TF2 adds custom games to their 'official' pile, they don't then say, "Okay, We've clearly seen all that is possible. No more new maps can be made by anyone."

This is clearly not all I have to say, but I'll come back when I have some more time.

 

what about only let steam stats work for "officially approved" scripts?

 

this, couldn't have put it better.

talking of beta [AMAZING SEGWAY]... empires is technically beta, so this isn't exactly taboo. it's just getting the public to playtest lots of ittirations of the scripts... if that makes sense

 

I reckon jihad jeeps will become an incredibly popular mod.

 

Well, I think I will put forward an opposing opinion, things are more fun that way.

It is better to address these issues early and see where people stand before implementation. Raising awareness of these problems and the search for an acceptable solution will certainly colour the deployment of new scripts to servers.

This is a topic which has been debated in a number of forms and there are a number of good arguments on either side. There is no 'correct' answer, just the one which you feel is best.

But what does BattleTanks_v1.4 change? Does it just add some new main battle tanks to supplement the existing line up, rebalance the existing tanks, both or modify some infantry weapons as well? The lack of visibility about what has changed in game and what those numbers translate into in terms of feel and relative power means that it will be an additional bump in the learning curve if you want to play effectively on more than one script set.

The market system analogy is apt, but you seem to completely ignore the downsides of the market based method. If we were to draw a market analogy involving scripts then the market would not work how you think it would. Scripts are not the only criteria for choosing which server to play on, there are a multitude of other factors such as latency, admin quality, plugins and popularity. This will allow servers with subpar scripts to remain popular despite their poor scripts, so popularity would not be a good metric for deciding the best scripts – just ones which are not horrible. Secondly scripts are not transparent, so there is no easy way to compare the different weapons in game as to their accuracy/damage/ammo values without testing. Thirdly there is a large barrier to learning new scripts as you will have to unlearn all the old weapon choices and roles and learn and familiarise yourself with the new ones effectively create a barrier to you being able to play effectively.

The devs will still need to make yes/no decisions on a multitude of things, such as 9-mining and the problem is that Empires at the moment does not have a large enough community that slicing it up by serve will work any better. We have 3 active servers and if they are all running different scripts then people are not going to be able to switch between them easily. Part of the problem is that empires is only at its best with larger numbers of people, so the 5-10 people who dislike a change enough to leave over it will probably leave. You need more people to make an empires server viable than a CS or TF2 server so unless a change alienated a significant proportion of the community then people are unlikely to make their own scripts.

This is different, maps are much more transparent and easy to compare than scripts as the true effect of scripts is much harder to determine than that of maps. Back when 2.25d was launched all the research trees were thought to be relatively balanced, it took quite a while as the only scripts available before the physics tree emerged as the most overpowered tree. On the other hand it is easier to see if a new game mode introduced by a map will be a success or a failure.

 

another good post.

I think the biggest use of public variety of scripts will be to allow testers and devs to get a feel for how the weapons are in "testing" every day, on the public servers. thus you can say that you like the BEcar on the BSID server, and the smg1 on the JPL server, and take the best from them.

 

If you allow different script settings on every server you will no longer be able to make sensible gameplay alterations until you unify it again. (If you[the devs] plan to have absolutely no hand in gameplay in the future ignore this post)

I reckon there will be 2-3 script sets at the end of your period, each equally fitting the server they were used on with the people that played there.

None of them will necessarilly be better than the other because there are a lot of reasons for players to switch a server. Only few will probably understand the underlying scripts and what they mean for their gameplay experience but time will mitigate this I suppose.

How do you then decide on one of the script settings? The only thing you do is you delay the actual gameplay/script decision making for a year-->

"Well we have no idea how gameplay should look like, here server owners do what you want with it while we do other stuff. In a year we will be back to compare the script sets and fuck them together after having no part in them for a year?"

Or do you have a vote? What if the vote is close and you (the developers) hate the scripts of that particular server? What if the scripts only work with die-hard players that know what they do?

I think there are a lot of open questions here.

 

@CobaltBlue - Interesting take on the issue, I'm glad you want to have a discussion about it. Your post is too long for me to address in the detail I would desire, however Melarion did well in capturing most of the points. I really want to emphasize the difference between CS and Empires is that at first CS wasn't so open with hundreds of different sub-communities. Take Empires today and split it into 100 different communities and what do we have... 10 players per community? Doubt that will work.

This is not and will not any time soon become a sandbox game, if you want that, import the models in to Garry's and have at.

As for it all being pointless because it's hypothetical, I disagree. Right now the script_manifest handles particles, weapons, vehicles, and research (engines/armor/weapons/chassis/etc). There's suggestions floating around about opening up skill selection to scripts. The slippery slope leads to a sandbox game and that's not where this ship should sail. So my real question is: knowing you're about to get access to custom server scripts, how upsetting is it going to be the day they are taken away? Alternate question, how can we make the game more available (steamworks) and not have mass confusion without unifying the scripts beforehand?

Oh, and I do know how I'll feel a year from now. For example, I know I still won't like tomatoes, I'll enjoy cheesy zombie movies, I'll love my daughter. I know we'll have different scripts on nearly every server, and I know we'll still want to get on to steamworks. Without this thread and/or discussions like this, I know I'll feel we have to remove script_manifest before releasing a steamworks version. I'll know that the best way to fulfill the communities desires will be to talk to them, and I'll know that the purpose of a dev should be to help the community they belong to grow, even if that means pissing off some vets. I'll know that every decision alienates part of your community and I'll know I can't please you all. These are just some of the things I could list.

@Drag
I came into the script_manifest thing too late to desire stopping it. The community seems to want it as a majority, and opposite of Pickled's opinion, I'm no tyrant. So, script_manifest is coming. My problem is where to go from there. The solution I have in mind is to let the servers have at because, as it's been pointed out, this is beta. The long term goal will be to work on bugs and core features while the community experiments with balancing. At a later time (pre-steamworks) we will begin the process of consolidating the concepts and ideas brought forth from the different scripts into one pack. During the free-for-all, I will be a part of testing scripts and perhaps eventually complete a set or two, so it's not like the devs will just shut their eyes on the whole thing for a year then guess the best fit.

I agree we're delaying the decision, had I joined the team a year ago I'm confident we wouldn't have gone this direction, but we're here now so I'm trying to plot out the path for the future.

I just want everyone to know that taking away this new toy is looking likely before we go to steamworks, or I want someone to help me wrap my head around a way to not have to remove it.

 

The answer, of course, is that we (the majority of the community that approves of the script manifest system) will stop updating empires at the point at which the script manifest system is disabled.

 

That's merely opinion... I have a poll up top that disagrees with your theory. I know it's not a great analog because not everyone has voted, but at least I have some data to refer to.

Assuming you are right, if that's really how this is going to go down, my only play is to disable the script_manifest before 2.25 is released, because you aren't leaving without it but apparently you'll leave if you get it and lose it later. I really really don't want to do that, but you're not offering an alternative, just an ultimatum.

Again, still looking for alternative solutions, how can we have steamworks and custom scripts on every server while growing the community?

 

You don't have that kind of power and you're the one giving us an ultimatum. You have no idea what the script manifest will do to empires once it is released and you split the votes in dissention 3 ways.