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I think part of Vox's nerf boner for the RPG is that he believes it constrains the design for new enemy special types because no matter how threatening or interesting they are. He's not wrong in that, having some special that shoots tear gas grenades at your holdout spot (or whatever fixes the problematic player behavior that trivializes his heist on the tomb of horrors), is easily fixed by "shoot a bloody rocket at it". Vox have you considered that it's okay for the players to have the weapon that trivializes specials, and it doesn't really hamper the design of new ones? In other games like card games (specifically hearthstone threads which are terrible don't read them) people theorycraft cards and a typical criticism is "dies to removal" (a card that kills another card) and that criticism isn't treated as valid because every card in your deck dies to removal, but the opponent has limited resources and doesn't always have the card in hand. In PD2, the RPG is a lot less limited than in a card game, but there still are limitations (reload in particular). These can all be mitigated by taking more RPGs into the heist, but that also carries its own opportunity cost. Also, having another special I want to rocket instantly means there are less rockets to shoot at other specials and more time those specials get to live before I shoot them. In practice, this usually isn't a concern with increasing player skill, but most teams aren't comprised of 4x 1000+ hour players who are coordinating in voice chat. I think the opportunity cost of the RPG is much higher nowadays also, there are a few primaries that don't mesh well with RPG (flamethrower grinder) and there are some really good secondaries. I think you can design new enemies or heist features without having to worry about the dies-to-rocket problem, because the rocket solution is a player choice and as many have chimed in, taking that choice away makes people angry. I do think the RPG could be touched lightly, maybe decrease the ammo count to 3/4 fully loaded, but otherwise as people have said before: its a fun weapon and it is satisfying to blow a dozer/shieldwall the gently caress up and that shouldn't be messed with too much. Fellis fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Feb 29, 2016 |
# ? Feb 29, 2016 16:42 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 15:50 |
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Just tie rpg to a tech skill or a perk deck.
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# ? Feb 29, 2016 16:48 |
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swims posted:Just tie rpg to a tech skill or a perk deck. it's DLC that really isn't a solution Also i wanted to add, I haven't used an RPG in months because grinder + fire weapons is great and health regen in this game is way more busted (as lucifer morningstar said before i think). I can't even remember this game before health regen, i think cupcakes were really good then?!?!
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# ? Feb 29, 2016 16:51 |
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I think a better way to increase the cost of things like the RPG and Thanatos would be to have more things in heists you would want to C4 or saw open. Fewer equipment, weapon slots, and skillpoints devoted to the most efficient way to turn cops into ammo drops means taking a weapon with no sustain that only exists to murder your beefiest targets carries more consequences. Not that every heist should be an armored transport mission, but maybe there could be more than four or five heists where shape charges are a good thing to bring. E: that said, an ammo count nerf to the RPG would not be a bad thing, either. Dr Cheeto fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Feb 29, 2016 |
# ? Feb 29, 2016 16:52 |
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John Murdoch posted:It's hard to ignore the sudden power bump given to a whole slew of weapons in the rebalance. And not just in terms of raw damage, but ammo efficiency as well. You know something's weird when you can stay as ammo independent on DW as you can on OVK. It's certainly a far cry from the old days when every ammo bag was a big drat deal. The game as a whole has become a lot more endurance-friendly, yeah. I've been running a KSP/China Lake setup recently and it's so weird to go 30+ minutes without hitting an ammo bag while killing all the cops. The damage is offset, I think, by the hit to accuracy. You can get up to acceptable fairly easily, but that same level of perfect accuracy/stability that used to be obtainable on a ton of weapons is gone. Now it's building guns for that accuracy instead of damage in the hopes you can break 40. quote:Not to say that Muscle wasn't definitely over-buffed, but its regen (any regen, really) is that much more potent when you can wipe entire DW squads with the greatest of ease using nothing more than the M308 or Deagle or whatever and rarely be pressured inbetween health ticks. I dunno, the regen has a big role in the risks you take. Anything that doesn't outright kill you is meaningless since you can recover all of it in under 30 seconds, and that means doing a lot of potentially dumb things because what's the harm? Sure, I'll face-hug that dozer to blast it with an SMG - as long as I still have 1hp left at the end and can get back to cover, the damage done is meaningless.
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# ? Feb 29, 2016 17:01 |
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Console status update looks like it's pushed back to tomorrow for anyone that's following that.
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# ? Feb 29, 2016 18:51 |
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How long did it take them to figure out that you could crash your game using a 360 controller to proceed to the next day?
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# ? Feb 29, 2016 19:21 |
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Crabtree posted:How long did it take them to figure out that you could crash your game using a 360 controller to proceed to the next day? Wait, what? Controllers crash moving to the next day?
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# ? Feb 29, 2016 19:48 |
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Fellis posted:Good, thoughtful I agree in general terms, but I think the opportunity cost to benefit ratio isn't in the right place at the upper end of the game. To repeat my original statement, I'm not proposing nerfing the RPG! I want to add explosive damage resistance to Winters and his phalanx, turrets and Bulldozers. (I also talked about giving Winters et al some amount of fire resistance to counteract pyro GL spam). This would also limit the current extreme efficacy of the China Lake against these enemies. I also agree that health regen is a bigger balance problem. It's just a lot harder to adjust that sort of system, and it's outside the original setting of the proposed change, which again was going to be a separate, endgame difficulty! I would keep some of these changes if I were just going to rebalance the whole game, but that would be a much larger task. In such a setting, I'm not sure how to address Muscle, and Gambler actually seems OK. Grinder might work if health regen could no longer proc multiple times simultaneously- but that might be too great a nerf. The overarching issue that I'm seeing in the difficulty balance of the game is that several systems produce bimodal results- either you completely dominate enemies for little cost, or you die. This is the problem of DW black dozers and fbi, but it's also the problem of systems that let you recover health without any permanent cost, or applies a system that can massively increase damage on a diceroll (Low Blow) or make damage outcomes binary (dodge generally). The RPG also falls under that category. The result of a bimodal distribution of outcomes in general events is that skilled players only see the positive end of those outcomes- individual events stop carrying weight, and pretty rapidly the gameplay experience of cyclic tension and pressure goes away. Tempest discusses that in his post. What I've noticed in other, less skilled payday 2 subcommunities is that this is becoming a problem for even less skilled players. Facepunch and the steam fora are trying to get the devs to increase the game's difficulty. Believe me, whatever you think of my ideas, Facepunch has ones that are infinitely worse.
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# ? Feb 29, 2016 20:58 |
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Fellis posted:a pretty good post on balance Lots of people have mentioned good things (LM, you, etc) and I'm glad to see some pretty well thought out positions on balance. Speaking as someone who's actually written a weapon rebalance mod for Payday 2 instead of just posting about it, it's not easy. First, balance is basically a chimera - the definition of balanced means something different to everyone. It's easy to theorycraft a mission statement of like "every weapon is viable and good and nothing is worse than another choice" but when you get into the nuts and bolts that becomes implausible, very, very fast. I wrote a very specific balance mod for a very specific use case and even that wasn't simple. Comprehensive balance? Forget about it. Overkill hasn't done themselves any favors in this realm by adding 40,000 weapons of like 500 archetypes, and for a while they were still trying to make them "meaningfully different" so every assault rifle isn't just a cut and paste of another one. The tiers they set out (light/medium/heavy) are an acknowledgement that they cannot meaningfully balance that way. It's still messy - it's a weird mix of tiers and exceptions-to-the-tiers and I don't understand some of their choices I also sympathize immensely because gently caress. Mind you, we're all talking about guns and indirectly about enemy damage breakpoints with those guns. The big elephant in the room is perk decks - some of which are monstrously overpowered or otherwise let a player completely ignore factors which could otherwise be used for balance. So if you want to rebalance a gun, you need to tweak a perk deck, which means you have to look at a skill tree, which means revisiting Mastermind, which affects Fugitive, which changes Enforcer, which only works on Deathwish, and what about on a particular heist where you can do a specific thing, and maybe you need a saw, and this weapon attachment alters the stats just so, and that weapon pickup rate alters the ammo sustainability, and, and, and, and ... well. You see why Overkill just decided to shrug and say "we're going to add fun things that are fun and leave it at that." Given the complex interactions between difficulty, player skill, mission design, perk decks, skill trees, infamy discounts, heist design, keeping the feel and flow of Payday 2 instead of making it a different game entirely, making sure not to invalidate accumulated player knowledge and skill and all the rest? They're making the best call they can here in 2016. Is it perfect, no, is it the right call for Overkill to make in the real world that we live in, absolutely yes. Do I hope they plot out a balance and upgrade path a little more carefully for Payday 3? Yes, but I don't pretend it's realistic to apply many of the "lessons learned" in Payday 2. Not this deep into the lifecycle, at any rate. Some of them, sure. Most of them, not a chance. Psion fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Feb 29, 2016 |
# ? Feb 29, 2016 21:14 |
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The short version of that long wall of text none of you should read is this: Balance is hard, comprehensive balance is realistically impossible, get over it, this is the worst part of the thread spiral. Let's post mask roulettes instead. i have so many more of these Psion fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Feb 29, 2016 |
# ? Feb 29, 2016 21:24 |
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cheezit posted:Wait, what? Controllers crash moving to the next day? That's what the latest hotfix said it fixed apparently. I'm just wondering how the hell they figured that out.
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# ? Feb 29, 2016 21:25 |
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Crabtree posted:That's what the latest hotfix said it fixed apparently. I'm just wondering how the hell they figured that out. Maybe one of 'em had a controller and it crashed going to day two. haha.
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# ? Feb 29, 2016 21:33 |
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cheezit posted:Maybe one of 'em had a controller and it crashed going to day two. haha. Well I mean like were the specifics of the bug going from keyboard and then to controller for day 2? Like is there some challenge to see if you play HLM day 2 better or worse with the 360 controller than the keyboard or what?
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# ? Feb 29, 2016 21:38 |
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no one has used a controller to play this game so it took a while to figure out
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# ? Feb 29, 2016 21:39 |
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New Heister idea; Trucker Joe-Bob. Talks constantly in confusing trucker lingo in and out of pager responses, has a nickname for every heister including Dallas and Houstin as Big and Little Texas respectively and is voiced by Ellis as it will be released in tangent with the No Mercy remake.
Crabtree fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Feb 29, 2016 |
# ? Feb 29, 2016 23:13 |
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I just want the No Mercy remake because it means I can kick No Mercy in the balls repeatedly on Deathwish to make up for the PAIN AND SUFFERING which was Payday 1 no mercy mind you it was still an awesome heist, just, wow
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# ? Feb 29, 2016 23:16 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Oqckq1BRc
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# ? Feb 29, 2016 23:24 |
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re:RPG balance The problem is expecting enemy longevity to be tied to threat. The reason Cloakers are dangerous is because they don't need to be on the screen very long to do their thing, and they can drop out of vents, so they don't need to spawn at the edge of the map and slowly lumber toward you. Expecting any enemy to function as a 'boss' is poor design choice. You're not trying to counter-play, you're just trying to play better to get around the enemy. In this way dozers are actually terrible. They're no different than normal cops really except they do more damage and have a smaller glowing weakpoint. Having more specials on the screen at any given time could help. Having specials who don't need to stick around very long to do their thing would also help. Gas turrets or some hypothetical gas cop just needs one good shot. They counter-play is to move and not sit in the gas.
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# ? Feb 29, 2016 23:55 |
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Psion posted:I just want the No Mercy remake because it means I can kick No Mercy in the balls repeatedly on Deathwish to make up for the PAIN AND SUFFERING which was Payday 1 no mercy You knew what you were getting in, it says No Mercy right in the name.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 00:13 |
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Crabtree posted:You knew what you were getting in, it says No Mercy right in the name. I did. I played Payday 1 before I played No Mercy in L4D and it was really weird going through the same level in L4D later. When I recognized it, which took a second, I was expecting fifty Chargers and Tanks and poo poo to drop out of vents and kill me so hard it'd delete my game. But then we just walked through and saw zero enemies in there, which just made me hyper-paranoid for the rest of the level. Payday does things to your brain.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 00:29 |
Psion posted:Payday does things to your brain. *walks into bank* *glances around nervously*
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 00:32 |
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"There are no guards in this bank? Where's the camera room then? I bet I could totally stealth this *staff presses alarm button under the desk*"
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 00:35 |
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LuciferMorningstar posted:*walks into bank* this but seeing police in washington D.C. where do i get this mod pack also i never knew that the hit and damage indicators in mspaint hud were replaced too lol
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 00:37 |
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Crabtree posted:New Heister idea; Trucker Joe-Bob. Talks constantly in confusing trucker lingo in and out of pager responses, has a nickname for every heister including Dallas and Houstin as Big and Little Texas respectively and is voiced by Ellis as it will be released in tangent with the No Mercy remake. So I came up with this in the middle of a game because marv said "he's loaded for bear" which sounded like CB speak to me. Imagine some of the voice lines for a guy like this. Like masking up... "Kick the tires and light the fires, Big Daddy." "Bain, you got your ears on? We're going hunting for bear." "Better back them hogs off another ten." He'd have interesting things to say on pager responses... "Breaker 1-9, breaker 1-9, can I get a radio check, come back?" "Dispatch I'm at gate 3, requesting permission to dock, over." "Negatory on that, rail yard, just pickin' a geetar." "Let them truckers roll, 10-4!" And fun CB handles for the crew! "Space Cadet, you got a copy on me?" "Come on over Crime Momma!" "Rocking chair, Black Dog, rocking chair!" "Climb on up here, Slim!" "Birmingham, help me out good buddy!" As well as nicknames for the special units... "Them Shooters ain't lookin' for deer!" "Here comes the Pork Chop Express!" "Suicide jockey, dead ahead!" "drat right Smokey, we ain't gonna pay no toll!" "Jumper Cables, on our six!" And of course, finishing the heist he'd have something to say. "Hold on tight to your saddlehorn, son! Yee-haw!" "Ain't nothin' gonna get in our way!" "10-4 Good buddy!" "Maximum overdrive!" "Puttin' the hammer down!"
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 00:42 |
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I should have known Maria was a dude and not an extremely obese alligator lady in tight spandex, but I wanted to believe.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 01:17 |
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Skunkrocker posted:
you're getting weirder than i do
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 01:32 |
Literal Nazi Furry posted:you're getting weirder than i do You were never weirder than Skunk.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 01:50 |
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Mendrian posted:re:RPG balance Not gas - rubber bullets. No penetration, but massive stopping power. The Rioter (or Riot Officer, the cloaker captain) - armored enemy with a rubber bullet shotgun, which sends you to the ground in one hit. And not like it's a down - you get up in like 2-3 seconds. But that's 2-3 seconds of enemies getting free reign to shoot at you. I think that we need more enemies who can punish you for being in the wrong place, especially if you have to be in the wrong place to defeat them. Like Shields. Shields are the most dangerous enemy in the game because they have the ability to actively force you out of hiding and make you circle them, potentially exposing yourself to gunfire. Unless you decide to shoot them with something explosive, shields will gently caress you up. Not on their own, but when you leave them be for too long they will find a way to combine with other enemy units. Which in my book is good design, since this game is about drowning you in waves and waves of enemies.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 01:56 |
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Literal Nazi Furry posted:you're getting weirder than i do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIBw10VUcNQ watho posted:You were never weirder than Skunk. Honestly I'm impressed you think that, but I disagree. Nothing is weirder than literally being a nazi furry.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 02:00 |
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Psion posted:I just want the No Mercy remake because it means I can kick No Mercy in the balls repeatedly on Deathwish to make up for the PAIN AND SUFFERING which was Payday 1 no mercy The only pain and suffering from No Mercy was all the civilian bullshit at the start. Once the cops showed up it got fun. Yeah, trying to hold out was harsh, but then we learned to stop holding out and move around the map and it was fun again!
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 02:05 |
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ClonedPickle posted:The only pain and suffering from No Mercy was all the civilian bullshit at the start. Once the cops showed up it got fun. Yeah, trying to hold out was harsh, but then we learned to stop holding out and move around the map and it was fun again! Actually I'm still suffering from the deep existential pain of knowing that we haven't completed that one on Overkill 145. 100% achievements doesn't mean anything when we haven't 100%ed the game. THE CHORSE fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Mar 1, 2016 |
# ? Mar 1, 2016 02:06 |
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Discendo Vox posted:I agree in general terms, but I think the opportunity cost to benefit ratio isn't in the right place at the upper end of the game. To repeat my original statement, I'm not proposing nerfing the RPG! I want to add explosive damage resistance to Winters and his phalanx, turrets and Bulldozers. (I also talked about giving Winters et al some amount of fire resistance to counteract pyro GL spam). This would also limit the current extreme efficacy of the China Lake against these enemies. So nerfing RPG and all explosives by other means. So it's not nerfing if you call it something else? Don't be silly. You're giving up the secondary slot in a game where a lot of secondary are more powerful than primaries given the right investment. I regards to balance in PD2, I like options, more the better as it allows people to find their style of play, more ways to kill cops, more fun ways to kill cops, potentially faster ways to kill cops. They don't have to all equally effective to a given player, that's a trap in game design, there is no one given player as some players will use other methods more effectively than the so called pro methods. This is why I love X-com 2, it provides multiple paths to victory by opening up tools of your choosing. Want to rush PSI? Special grenades? Ammo? Intel? Magnetic weapons? Income? Engineers or scientist? Special armours now or higher tier later? That's just on the strategic layer compared to XCOM EU where it's rush satellites all day, everyday. Yeah it's "Balanced" or easier to do so, but it's not fun. Grinder is maybe the highest or the second highest skill based perk deck in the game that is usable. There are other perk decks that demand higher levels of skill, but that is to make up for how garbage they are(Hitman). With grinder if you can't aim, it does gently caress all for you. If you can aim, it allows you to snowball upwards until you hit maximum health. It is this snowballing effect you don't like, but it is a counter to death spirals. If you made a game out of death spirals, it's not fun, it's basically flappy bird, you will lose and how long is based on your Masochistic tendencies. Again not fun unless you are Dwarf Fortress where modes of failure is the game. It doesn't mean a game should be an automatic win, that would be cow clickers or Skinner boxes and wouldn't be a game. The Black Dozer issue is one of player response time, as in there is almost none. One rolls up on you in close quarters you are done on DW and to a far lesser extent on OK. If they increase the players ability to respond in a timely manner even if it is not successful, less people will get put off by it. Even skull dozers give you a little time to respond! You are still very likely to go down, but you get a chance to maybe call it out or take off a layer of protection. The problem with you Vox is that you see everything as Bimodal. You are either having fun or you are not, there is not less fun or more fun. It's either all balanced or none of it is. You are either down or up. Think grinder, sure you escaped with one HP, but now your option are reduced as you don't have the health to spend to take risks, so while you're "UP" you are far more constrained than when at full health. It is this constant closing and expanding of options with the associated opportunity cost that make the game, not a single point of "Balance". You will end up chasing that whale forever and piss everyone off on the way. It's why Overkill doesn't keep "Balancing" the game. Lastly, think of someone other than yourselves. We probably have the top 10% in this thread in skill and DLC weapon choices. But think of the other 90% where the game isn't easy even on less than Overkill, where they don't have all the DLC, they need options. Why did you think they gave everybody an LMG and a Sniper rifle? "Balance" with options and Overkill has done well given the massive number of moving parts, I bloody Salute them for this. Remember, Overkill is the default difficulty, not Deathwish!
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 02:24 |
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For the record, 1994 X-COM:UFO Defense/UFO: Enemy Unknown was a deeper game than either of the newer ones. It was also harder, less user friendly, and really buggy. So I guess the PD:H and PD2 analogy holds.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 03:43 |
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1994 is less abstract. It's more complex sometimes in a bad way like handling equipment, wounding and in some ways TUs. I am not sure whether it is deeper, but it is more complex, 1994 also hides a lot of information from you. XCOM 1/2 abstracts out a lot of the needless busy work like crouching, equipment/ammo, stats progression/classes, movement/aiming, cover, health. You do miss somethings like free aiming, non-pod engagements which resulted in overwatch creep but in itself was born out of the two action system. One thing 1994 will still hold supreme is bringing almost enough explosives to level a map.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 04:44 |
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Discendo Vox posted:The RPG can remove Winters ... in one hit By the way, under what circumstances does this happen? I'm genuinely curious, because Winters' current explosive resistance % should and does require 2 rockets minimum to get rid of him. I can understand (and have probably experienced) a few edge cases where Overkill's damage calculations gently caress up and he's gone in 1, but that's not the norm. Do you typically play with a crew that runs more than 1 RPG at once and you don't notice a double rocket go out? vvvvv I just did a Dockyard and fired on him from above, on top of a train car. I wasn't hosting though, so that might make the difference. ClonedPickle fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Mar 1, 2016 |
# ? Mar 1, 2016 05:22 |
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The only time I think that might happen is if you are in Hoxton Breakout/The Diamond on the second floor firing down into the middle on OK, it also might have involved some light BBQ. Either way it requires a top down attack with near perfect accuracy and possibly hosting. I also means his bitching about RPGs being to OP is BS considering if you're firing from the side it take 3+ as the blast doesn't reach far enough and takes two rockets to start killing. Better off arcing 3+ renewable GL's on top to take out Winters if you have the skills.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 05:33 |
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ClonedPickle posted:By the way, under what circumstances does this happen? I'm genuinely curious, because Winters' current explosive resistance % should and does require 2 rockets minimum to get rid of him. I can understand (and have probably experienced) a few edge cases where Overkill's damage calculations gently caress up and he's gone in 1, but that's not the norm. Do you typically play with a crew that runs more than 1 RPG at once and you don't notice a double rocket go out? A direct or near-direct hit (within ~4 meters, I think) from the RPG will cause Winters to retreat instantly on DW if you have a maxed perk deck and pretty much any other damage increasing skill active (though some don't work with the RPG). This is because the explosive multiplier and other skill/perk multipliers are applied after normal damage clamping, and RPGs and GL grenades have slower damage falloff with range than other explosives. 800*6*1.25=6000, and the retreat point is 6400. Even when Winters is in position, a large number of heists offer an elevated defense position that makes hitting Winters from above relatively simple from across the map- Rats day 1 is infamous for this. Even without a raised position, it's usually 2 rockets because the phalanx doesn't get the epicenter of the explosion far enough from Winters to significantly diminish the base damage below the 800 clamp. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Mar 1, 2016 |
# ? Mar 1, 2016 05:50 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 15:50 |
I have played DW rats and cook off religiously and I've never seen Winters taken out with just one rocket and 2 is rare. Not saying it can't happen, just that the build and accuracy required to make it happen is not something worth counting on.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 06:23 |