It took 10 years for blizzard to balance and bugfix starcraft (and yet, there are still bugs). I can guarantee you that empires is not going to be balanced or bugfixed in a year. What if, a day after the steamworks patch, a huge bug is unveiled that could be trivially fixed via scripts? wouldn't you all be kicking yourselves? Distribution is a part of addition. This is no place for semantic games. When is diversity a bad thing? When the thing that it diversifies is bad in the first place. "scripts" are not inherently bad (disease-ridden insects are) and therefore diversity, in this case, is a good thing. Your point about garry's mod is a fundamental difference in our beliefs. if you think the way you think, nothing i'm going to say is going to change it. but as to the last 2 points, having the script manifest at all times is going to make it easier to facilitate these two things. Otherwise, the devs would have to release and distribute a new patch every time they want to balance or test something, and I can guarantee you, even after steamworks there will still be bugs and imbalance issues.
Well it would be a lot more polished and streamlined, there is nothing particularly hard about any aspect of empires on a theoretical level, so the amount of features that would need to be cut would be minimal at best. However these features would be integrated with the UI far more smoothly and effectively than they are at present. So far I have not seen these points, most of your posts have been content free grandstanding. Now that you have put forward some arguments I can actually address, let me begin. With steamworks this will be possible with or without script_manifest With steamworks this will be possible with or without script_manifest Removing the barriers to script alterations is both a good and a bad thing. If you do not take into account the downsides that it will involve then Diversity is both a good and a bad thing, when you end up with 5 servers all with 5 different versions of the assault rifle that all behave slightly differently then diversity is bad. There appears to be plenty of interest at the moment and there is not much point in developing scripts if noone wants to play them. At the moment there are only a few main servers and there are more than enough potential scripts floating around for those servers. Developers will retain the ability to test and use scripts, current testing is supposed to be done using the SVN version of empires and the devs will be able to enable and disable script_manifest for it. The market will not determine the best set of scripts, it will prevent the emergence of unplayable scripts but you will not end up with the best. Having a fragmented mod during the steamworks release when a large number of new players are coming to join the mod would confuse them, especially considering the current lack of visibility of script changes in the ui. Wouldn't the use of steamworks mean that distributing the bugfix would be easy and take as long as it takes valve to update their server? Needless diversity complicates things and adds to the learning curve. Two things that empires does not need any more of. As an aside Pickled, would it be possible for you to behave more civilly. Being impolite is likely to result in you being an ignored and if you get ignored then your opinion is ignored as well.
No, actually, Melanarion, I would love for you in particular to ignore me. Your responses to my threads are always just wasted hot air and I would rather you just preclude yourself from the ability to respond to me altogether.
QFT I only place I'm seeing his opinion is when it's quoted in someone elses and I can't understand what they are saying without reading his quote. Steamworks does indeed enable balance, model, map, script, logic, ANYTHING fixes rapidly. The only difference between script_manifest and steamworks in terms of fixing problems is that steamworks can do everything and all servers would get the same thing. Another thing that hasn't been addressed yet... Who do you blame when a bug fix breaks your server-side scripts? How long will you be down for? At that point do you go to "official" scripts which will be totally alien to you at that point? On the one hand steamworks could enable us to code around your scripts (by you reporting your scripts are broken, devs investiagating then releasing update) however that would mean we would need to support every jackass with notepad and an idea... And I promise you that won't happen. So instead your "awesome" scripts that "everyone" loves will be potentially forever broken, and you'll blame devs for not supporting something you created. These are the kinds of things we need to be thinking about now, the ship is sailing and we need to plot it's course.
It's safe to say that there is indeed a fundemental difference in our beliefs, and lets keep it at tha. I think both sides are valid, but for the situation Empires is in I believe removing the script manifest before Steamworks is the better option. To comment on what you've said I never questioned that Empires would not be bug free, I do question whether the problems will be big enough that the script manifest would be primarily used to "hotfix" them, rather than provide a different experience. And it isn't semantics, when you allow it to be easier to have different gameplay, I said that God should sort them out, as in, let those that really want to add content take the trouble to do so, in most cases those people will have the better idea of what the hell they're doing. What you're saying is that quantity improves quality, and everyone knows those 2 are not interlocked. Diversity doesn't imply good or bad, theres very little to discuss here. I mean, Garry'smod is diverse, Quake3 TDM is diverse. Yet you could argue that Quake3 TDM is not as diverse as Garry's mod, but then again, you don't want Q3TDM to be diverse in that sense.
Even though I believe the scads of pros out weigh the one flaccid, hypothetical con, I guess I'll still be the one to offer an alternative solution. Assuming a year from now there are still 3 populated empires servers, why not convince the server admins for those three servers that it is in the interest of the greater empires community to go vanilla for the month(or so) of steam-works launch. One of them will probably already be running what you would choose as the vanilla script, and the other two would almost certainly be reasonable people. If you believe it is a legitamate concern at that time, it shouldn't be hard to convince them, and it wouldn't require strong-arming or removing the most powerful functionality added to empires since commander-view. You would also then want to ask the admins to only play stock maps as well of course. Maps in Empires have the ability to vary game play much more than scripts do, and if we are worried defersified game play will make nublets heads explode, to ensure bland docile noobs, custom maps would also have to go. --But I think, again, if it was a legitimate concern you could get the server admins to agree to it for a set term of time.
You must have missed the real point to all this, perhaps that's my fault. I haven't seen any real pros first off that we can't achieve on a developing side anyway, so I don't think the pros outweigh the cons. I agree with the assessment that opening up scripts when the dev team was pretty much dead was a good way to fix the balance issues... but as the mod continues now to develop, I can almost promise you that custom scripts will break over updates causing even more issues for the community, more work for devs, more rage. We'll work through that, however the real issue, the issue I think you missed, is that I'm not worried about the three main servers. I'm worried about the other 20 servers. The three main ones will fill up no problem, hell they'll probably be full while the new players are still downloading. Regardless of that fine detail, what will happen is new players (0-2 game type new) will pull up the server list and not be able to join a "main server", so then they will join an empty one which will snowball into new players filling the server (I'll assume they have seen tutorial videos since they will be part of the main menu). Now god only knows what scripts will be on that server... and those poor bastards won't know what the hell is going on. Until they get on one of the three "main servers" they won't get a normal game, by the time they do play on official scripts, they'll already have an opinion because of some random ass servers setup.
I'm ideologically apposed to the concept of faith, so I doubt steamworks will have a major impact on player base, and that the script manifest will have a negative impact on the community. You're basically barking up the wrong tree when you reply to my posts like that. Facts, logic and donuts are the 3 forms of currency I tend to accept.
A script kiddy could break ICE... Good luck hard coding everything. Just remember, people can and will figure out ways to override whatever they want.
Are you saying that you and the current devs won't give up on the development like the other fair few that have come before you? From the community's point of view, being able to script as much as possible will enable the game to continue development even if the programmers all call it quits suddenly. There have been plenty of cases of this happening and several months without any updates or fixes to MAJOR problems with the mod as it exists. No offense. I'll appologize a year from now when empires is alive and well and you are still fixing bugs and improving the game.
Balancing a game is always complicated. The dev team does not have the resources to do a full testing of all the conditions to identify the unbalances. What has happened in empires is, as mentioned before, a natural selection process where after many many matches players start to identify what works in research and what sucks in research. I don't think there is a systematic way of testing this during development. The successful scripts (i.e. trickster, pickled, others...) are leveraging somehow on the knowledge gained over many months of playing 2.24 that tell us. These new scripts might/might not incorporate new imbalances, but we will not know that until we play with them for a couple of months. The tech tree represents very complex game interactions that cannot be tested in a few test-games. Pickled has reiterated that he will constantly adjust his scripts to fix any unbalances (And i guess trickster will do something similar). However, nobody has raised the issue on how to identify the unbalances of the game. Currently we know that ER and reflective are overpowered in 2.24. How do we know that? because we have probably finished hundreds of games that in general show that BE will win in a ??% of the games when those items are researched. There are also some indications that plasma+bioengine for BE have some value. However, I don't think anybody knows what the exact ??% of games win with ER+reflective is or the plasma+bioengine. Its just a general feeling but there is no hard data that support this. So, I believe that the script creators need also access to the server stats to analyze the data collected over many months to see how the scripts are doing and then make the adjustments accordingly and not on gut feeling. Server data should be made available to the general public also to see what works and what not. I don't know if the server can track what has been researched. It is not necessary to release the individual player information and avoid the point whoring... We could also use kill-maps to balance the existing maps and identify if some are more BE or NF sided. I saw some crude implementation of the kill maps somewhere in the forums but the way is done is not usable for this type of work.
@trickster You're forgetting that after the ob port we had to start all over with the balance, on top of that a completely new weight system was introduced that required a new balance mixture. The problem with rails goes much deeper than it just being unbalanced. The new weight system requires a lot of weapons and customization possibilities to be effective, as long as there's the amount of weapons we have right now, you'll always have the problem of the weapons either being overpowered or nearly useless. That's because the extremes are too far away from each other with the current mixture of balancing possibilities. 2.23 was a public test, none of that was play tested and as I've said a dozen times already, the idea was only worked out in theory and had to be put to the test one way or another. Whether or not you agree with that doesn't mean it was meant as an improvement to balance, it was a different way of balancing things. 2.24, reflective is bugged. It's not balance, it's a bug. I don't see where this hate is coming from, for someone with your status you could show a little respect to others for their effort, instead of just saying how much better you are at odd comparisons that are based on half facts.
It's not so much that the values are hard to balance, it's that you guys overbalance everything. Rails were overpowered BOOM they got nerfed to pathetic heat making DU. Same thing to plasma. The way you guys balance is all wrong, instead of moving things around gently, you push them in huge stat changes, ISTD is a great case example, you tried to buff it and make it slightly better, you made a god cannon. You upgraded every stat by about 5%, but overall that made the thing about 80% better. Just move things around slowly, and make sure you buff and nerf equally, if rails get nerfed, buff plasma a tiny bit so the overall 'power level' of all the weapons together is equal.
Agreed. I see this working in two steps. Step 1: Finding which weapons/vehicles/research need buffed This could be mostly done with existing stat tracking plugins (like the one G4TC and Viper has used before). Basically, you let the stat tracking run for several weeks and see which items get used the least. This should indicate which ones are useless. These items would then get buffed until people started using them with regular frequency. Step 2: Finding which weapons/vehicles/research need nerfed This one is where we use player intuition. Basically we setup a poll that asks players to organize items into tiers like Tier 1: Totally OP Tier 2: OP Tier 3: Just right Tier 4: Underpowered Tier 5: Totally useless We compare the Totally OP and OP items with the stat tracking and nerf them until their are either OP or Just right. This is part of the reason I liked the script_manifest idea because this could be done between official releases. Put a script on a server for a week, collect stats, let players rank items, then adjust and do it again the next week. Not only would it vastly increase balance testing, but it would get newbs invested in the process if their feedback was actively solicited.
Railgun saw a massive buff because of it's nature, it was basically the end game weapon that rarely found any use. Look around and you'll see plenty of people saying it's useless since it's a 3slot weapon that only works on the BE heavy. The slight tweaking never changed that. Same for the stuff in physics, it took a bugged reflective for people to find out (after 2 years) how OP the physics branch is. If you look at the changelog you'll notice that physics has consistently been tweaked ever so slightly for every patch. The gentle pushing was done during 1.08 rcs (there were what, 32 rcs?) I think Simon suggested the istd, I only copy pasted it into the scripts. And plasma was changed completely, it wasn't just buffed or nerfed, it's made into a different weapon. Before it was a 1v1 weapon, the suggestion came from Warfle, I only copy pasted that. I realize that a lot of the mistakes have been the big noticable changes, which were made consciously to try and change the weapons or their role. Some of the changes were actually made to try and figure out how the revised balance would work out with new different weaponry, back then I was pretty positive about getting those in after 2.12 or so. Lessons were learned, best way now is to try and tweak the balance to make 2.25 more playable, and from there on we'll have to completely revise it as I've always intended to do.
No, I'm making sure the next version has better balance. I havent played enough to know whats going on, but I know that you and others have. All the butthurt from all parties aside (including me), we play the game, so lets work this out just for the sake of our own playtime.
