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UP AND ADAM posted:I've changed my mind. What does it matter if players don't know what their built-up equipment does on any given patch. I love keeping my head on a swivel during Patch Frenzy Season. Who cares if players have to pore over a gigantic spreadsheet of updated combo damage values to discern what is going on with their weapon. This is a competitive multiplayer game, I want balance! The idea that balance only matters in a competitive multiplayer game is fundamentally brain-dead.
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Oct 19, 2023 16:22
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Have you tried improving your shitposting? You clearly don't have BiS blessings and the stat spread is all wrong. The dump stat on your shitposting is clearly "funny" when it really should be "quantity", and your perks are all wrong to boot. Seriously, who takes +typing efficiency, posting more often just makes you look worse faster.
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Oct 19, 2023 16:23
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Well, rest assured, Fatshark knows what they are doing and have a great track record here. I'm happy to say none of our opinions matter when they're calling the shots.
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Oct 19, 2023 16:27
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UP AND ADAM posted:I've changed my mind. What does it matter if players don't know what their built-up equipment does on any given patch. I love keeping my head on a swivel during Patch Frenzy Season. Who cares if players have to pore over a gigantic spreadsheet of updated combo damage values to discern what is going on with their weapon. This is a competitive multiplayer game, I want balance! Oh?
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Oct 19, 2023 16:28
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Fatshark are doing a fine job and have earned a lot of goodwill from me from the effort they're clearly putting in. It's refreshing to have a dev team that not only understands why the game they've made is fun, but also identifies the pain points and only out right removes something when it can't be balanced or fixed in a satisfactory manner. Even then they still manage to come up with something that fits to replace it, even going so far as to change how a core gameplay mechanic functions to do so. Fatshark is... good.
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Oct 19, 2023 16:31
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A Cool Video Game Too posted:Fatshark is... good. ...eventually. 
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Oct 19, 2023 16:31
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Must admit I did not expect "Fatshark making huge game changing updates and improvements to the game and then tweaking them after observing the results for a while is bad, actually" to be a thing
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Oct 19, 2023 16:34
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I preferred the prepatch "up and Adam poo poo posting" blitz cooldown which was much higher than it currently is.
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Oct 19, 2023 16:43
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Edmond Dantes posted:...eventually. I'm not disagreeing with this.
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Oct 19, 2023 16:47
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I've always liked a game that gets tinkered with frequently, gives me a reason to keep coming back and trying different stuff
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Oct 19, 2023 16:53
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Legit Businessman posted:The reason why bb gets all the hate is that this can also be done with...a gun. "special deletion" is a role that most, if not all players should be on top of, and the charge up time does nothing for packs of specialists on higher difficulties or shock trooper settings. That's pretty much where things went. I'd probably prefer they were a little more situationally aware about the horde surrounding them but the vast majority of the random people I've played with are pretty good at focusing down specials. I was laughing at my frustration the entire time because people being good was actively preventing me from getting the stupid achievement. Many of those specials would be easy voidstrike kills but the imperium only gives out cool metal sunglasses if you kill them with the slowest possible method.
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Oct 19, 2023 17:23
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Tildryn posted:The idea that balance only matters in a competitive multiplayer game is fundamentally brain-dead.
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Oct 19, 2023 17:40
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cock hero flux posted:The point of balancing is to achieve balance between the strength of a playstyle and the strength of the challenges that playstyle will face. In a competitive game, those challenges are other playstyles, so playstyles must be balanced against each other. In co op or single player games, those challenges are the AI enemies, so playstyles must be balanced against them and not against other playstyles. Balance between playstyles in these games fundamentally does not matter at all, other than the fact that optimization obsessed teammates will yell at you if you aren't playing whichever one they think is the best. Balance between playstyles *does* matter in co-op contexts for a large variety of reasons, those reasons are just different than in a PvP game where the direct recipient of playstyles result is another human being. Especially when a game encourages a player to move up in difficulties, is the player whose build and playstyle with synergy that fulfills a particular fantasy (e.g. hobo with a shotgun) suddenly finding themselves unable to succeed or be as effective team wise as a another player who synergistic build and playstyle ( e.g. pew pew recon las pointman) somehow a less valid experience just because "who cares about balance in co-ops lol". Uh, no. Optimization nerds aside, a co-op game in Darktide's genre with it's particular style of progression lives and dies based on a multitude of playstyles that are fun *and* effective, even at the highest difficulties. Acting like balancing doesn't matter is just reductive and stupid, imo. edit: even Fatshark thinks balance matters as the entirety of the game's life nearly every patch has included some form of balancing or change to make worse weapons feel better to use and nerfing or removing anything that squeezes everything else out of a particular space power wise. And ya know what? It's made the game more fun! Evil Kit fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Oct 19, 2023 |
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Oct 19, 2023 18:16
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Balance matters in every game, someone always just turns it into a weird broad philosophical thing anytime an individual change happens they don’t like because I guess it sounds smarter to say balance is against your ideology than that you don’t like a specific number going up/down lol
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Oct 19, 2023 18:27
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Friend wondered about a Darktide thing and I said I'd ask: The block is 360, but is it stronger in front?
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Oct 19, 2023 18:43
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Black Griffon posted:Friend wondered about a Darktide thing and I said I'd ask: The block is 360, but is it stronger in front? Blocks from the rear and sides cost double the stamina
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Oct 19, 2023 18:46
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Magitek posted:Blocks from the rear and sides cost double the stamina Right on, cheers!
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Oct 19, 2023 18:59
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cock hero flux posted:The point of balancing is to achieve balance between the strength of a playstyle and the strength of the challenges that playstyle will face. In a competitive game, those challenges are other playstyles, so playstyles must be balanced against each other. In co op or single player games, those challenges are the AI enemies, so playstyles must be balanced against them and not against other playstyles. Balance between playstyles in these games fundamentally does not matter at all, other than the fact that optimization obsessed teammates will yell at you if you aren't playing whichever one they think is the best. Balance between playstyles does matter for the entire design of the game. You create play options so that players will experiment and try different options, and feel a little dopamine hit when their build comes together and they find an interaction that feels good to use. As a hypothetical lets say you have two players of equal level and skill. One of them finds a build/interaction the obliterates even the toughest enemies trivially while the other has a sub-par build that looks, on paper, to be viable but is just worse in every way that matters. On the individual level you can say, well, if the second player wants an extra challenge or just likes that playstyle, even though it is worse, they will pick it. However, collectively, you have incentivized one choice and removed the second option as a viable choice. People will feel as though they have to deliberately choose a weaker option to make use of the second one. There is certainly a kind of player who enjoys tinkering with bad options but for the vast majority of players, you're basically saying people have one choice - the good one. This reduces the feeling that players have any agency, pigeon-holes classes into a single builds and might even make one class vastly less popular than another or frustrate players who were fans of that class. As a concrete example, Zealots currently have one good aura, one mediocre aura and one abysmal aura. Other classes have a bit more choice. This means virtually every Zealot you see while have the same aura. You want people to experiment and try things, to create variation by tinkering with the system, that's why it exists. If 75% of your players make exactly the same choice at a given node, you aren't presenting them with real options. In this case, at least one of the Zealot auras needs to be radically buffer or preferably, completely reworked. Basically you don't the choice to be so simple and binary that everyone makes the same exact choice. This can be caused, as you say, by interaction between a player option and the AI environment; if you have one ability that trivializes all content, then you need to address that ability, not the content, no matter how fun it is to use. This is defacto balance between players because the degree to which their choices impact their ability to affect the AI challenge is indirect comparison between one another.
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Oct 19, 2023 19:16
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A Cool Video Game Too posted:
The first is a valid justification for change: being unable to succeed is a problem, but it's a problem that is corrected by balance vs AI. If you simply nerfed every playstyle to the point of unusability you would have achieved balance between playstyles but this problem would remain, which is why it's a pointless exercise. The second is an invalid justification for change: unless your teammate is so incredibly effective that you are left with nothing to do(which would indicate that the playstyle in question is able to do the job of an entire team by itself, which is also a balance vs. AI problem of it being too strong in a vacuum), complaining that you just don't feel like your build is as good is not a justification for change. It's not an invalid experience, but it is a subjective experience and designing the game around evening these subjective experiences out results in a game where every playstyle ends up feeling the same, which is not a desirable result.
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Oct 19, 2023 19:28
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Mendrian posted:Balance between playstyles does matter for the entire design of the game. You create play options so that players will experiment and try different options, and feel a little dopamine hit when their build comes together and they find an interaction that feels good to use. As a hypothetical lets say you have two players of equal level and skill. One of them finds a build/interaction the obliterates even the toughest enemies trivially while the other has a sub-par build that looks, on paper, to be viable but is just worse in every way that matters. Again: the examples you give are balance vs. AI problems. "This aura is abysmal" is a problem even when you disregard the existence of the other auras. How good the other auras are does not matter: the aura that is abysmal would benefit from change even if every other aura was equally bad. From a playstyle vs playstyle perspective this problem could be effectively solved by nerfing the other two auras to be just as bad, except that nobody would actually like that. Considering balance vs. playstyles in this context results in worse design decisions being made.
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Oct 19, 2023 19:33
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Another point is if you let a build trivialize the game it's still a team game and those other 3 people are just gonna be playing walking simulator as was the complaint about following assail psykers in lower difficulties.
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Oct 19, 2023 19:35
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cock hero flux posted:Again: the examples you give are balance vs. AI problems. "This aura is abysmal" is a problem even when you disregard the existence of the other auras. How good the other auras are does not matter: the aura that is abysmal would benefit from change even if every other aura was equally bad. From a playstyle vs playstyle perspective this problem could be effectively solved by nerfing the other two auras to be just as bad, except that nobody would actually like that. Considering balance vs. playstyles in this context results in worse design decisions being made. I mean I think it would be fairer to say you have to consider both. "We want all playstyles to be fun and good" is a balance concern. "Balance" does not have to mean "perfect numerical balance" but both playstyles need to feel rewarding. The yardstick you use for that is performance against AI, because there's no other reasonable metric, but you are comparing those playstyles. EDIT: Or put another way you're arguing for distinction without difference. If all playstyles result in roughly equal experience against the AI, you have achieved balance parity between playstyles as well. They can't be completely separated.
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Oct 19, 2023 19:43
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cock hero flux posted:The first is a valid justification for change: being unable to succeed is a problem, but it's a problem that is corrected by balance vs AI. If you simply nerfed every playstyle to the point of unusability you would have achieved balance between playstyles but this problem would remain, which is why it's a pointless exercise. the entire thrust of your arguments go against the statement you made of "balance doesn't matter in co-op video games lol", what are you even trying to argue? Variety is just as important and healthy for this style of game as being effective and efficient is. You're also acting like the only solution is to nerf everything that's too strong as opposed to buff things that are weak. Spoilers, Fatshark believes buffs are better for weak weapons, abilities and other things including the enemies!  edit: the post below taken into consideration I think this is just a confusion of personal definitions for things Evil Kit fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Oct 19, 2023 |
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Oct 19, 2023 19:56
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Mendrian posted:I mean I think it would be fairer to say you have to consider both. "We want all playstyles to be fun and good" is a balance concern. "Balance" does not have to mean "perfect numerical balance" but both playstyles need to feel rewarding. The yardstick you use for that is performance against AI, because there's no other reasonable metric, but you are comparing those playstyles. The distinction is that the goal should not be "all playstyles have an equally effective experience" but rather "all playstyles have an experience that is both fun and effective enough to be successful". This allows for a fairly broad range of experience between "so bad that you can't succeed" and "so good that you can't fail". This is good, it allows for variety and distinction between playstyles while satisfying balance vs AI. If you consider balance vs. other playstyles, however, then the result is that you make changes in order to achieve parity which almost always comes with costs in variety and serves very little purpose. This is why I am saying that parity is not a goal that should be pursued in games of this nature.
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Oct 19, 2023 19:57
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A Cool Video Game Too posted:the entire thrust of your arguments go against the statement you made of "balance doesn't matter in co-op video games lol", what are you even trying to argue? At no point did I say that balance did not matter. But what needs to be balanced is playstyles vs. challenge. Balancing playstyles against each other only makes sense when those playstyles are actually competing against each other. In co op games, they are not. Nerfing everything equally was just an example to show the point of the argument. You could also achieve balance between playstyles by buffing everything to the point of trivializing the game for every playstyle. This would also be bad.
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Oct 19, 2023 20:04
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cock hero flux posted:At no point did I say that balance did not matter. But what needs to be balanced is playstyles vs. challenge. Balancing playstyles against each other only makes sense when those playstyles are actually competing against each other. In co op games, they are not. I'm rereading your original post and I can see your point was clear originally with better context now, I will apologize for misreading that. I still don't agree with you though. Even in co-op playstyles need to be balanced vs each other because there's going to be a certain amount of overlap in roles fulfilled across classes even if the fundamental style of the interaction is different and that does actually matter imo.
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Oct 19, 2023 20:45
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In short: The idea that balance only matters in a competitive multiplayer game is fundamentally brain-dead.
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Oct 19, 2023 21:07
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Sounds like everyone learned a lot from this discussion. You're welcome.
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Oct 19, 2023 22:14
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cock hero flux posted:The distinction is that the goal should not be "all playstyles have an equally effective experience" but rather "all playstyles have an experience that is both fun and effective enough to be successful". This allows for a fairly broad range of experience between "so bad that you can't succeed" and "so good that you can't fail". This is good, it allows for variety and distinction between playstyles while satisfying balance vs AI. If you consider balance vs. other playstyles, however, then the result is that you make changes in order to achieve parity which almost always comes with costs in variety and serves very little purpose. This is why I am saying that parity is not a goal that should be pursued in games of this nature. "Playstyle is so good that you can't fail" is a bad goal though, I think we both agree on that, and anything closer to that end of the spectrum is imbalanced with respect to the AI challenge. Playstyles on either end of the spectrum result in poor return on investment as far as player choice is concerned; people will gravitate towards the best builds and avoid the worst ones. "Don't nerf builds that are way better than others because I think destroying the AI challenge is a valid playstyle" is fine, obviously. But I have to play in the world with those players, and more players will pick the Very Good build over a medicore one. Even if I prefer the challenge of the game with a worse build, odds are good I will have one or more Very Good builds in my party every game I play. In the best case scenario the developers allow the Very Good build to persist but don't tune the whole game around that experience; I end up bored because I'm just being carried to victory every game by Very Good playstyles. In the worst case scenario Very Good becomes the new baseline and either new content (difficulty) is added to account for the higher levels of player success that the Very Good build creates, or all content is brought up to a new standard of difficulty to challenge the Very Good players so now I'm even worse by comparison. A game like this feels best when all players are barely succeeding but not failing so hard as to become frustrated. It never needs to be perfectly balanced against one another but I shouldn't look down at the party composition and go, "ugh a psyker" and immediately backseat myself because of it. Darktide isn't at that point, it's actually pretty okay in that regard, but saying balance against other players isn't important is... well, it's false, it impacts the relative difficulty of my own game and difficulty is the entire point of a game that focuses on player skill. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Oct 20, 2023 |
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Oct 19, 2023 23:10
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I was playing a Damnation Maelstrom last night, live streaming it to a friend who played DT a bit on release and telling them all about the changes. On the one hand this means I didn't realize no one was delivering the sample results to the servo skull for like 5 minutes so we ended up wiping from essentially taking too long on the final mission setpiece, but on the other hand my friend is planning to re-download the game and get back into it so we call that a win in my book.
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Oct 19, 2023 23:12
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I can't proc the infinite lightning bug at all it seems lol
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Oct 20, 2023 01:56
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drat Dirty Ape posted:Maybe it's because I just don't have the right gear but ranged ogryn doesn't feel nearly as good to me as hard hitting ogryn. Point blank fire has a large cooldown and ammo is always a problem. Also lucky bullet seems pretty underwhelming so far. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klbc1iCO04U Some other guy did a lot of testing and seems to agree with you, so I propose an alternate gun ogryn build.  Just walking through it: Definitely take gorgonum with charmed reload 2 or 3 at least, and you won't feel the loss of lucky bullet much at all, and not needing to reload means reloaded and ready can be dropped. Mobile emplacement's 15% damage resist makes steady grip seem unnecessary too. You get damage and crit boost from the gun line, the talent cooldown reduction from tank line, and the rending from bruiser line which makes you really good at mulchine the heavier specials and even crushers. With a veteran buddy or two you'll not need to be very judicious at all with ammo either. Feel no pain is honestly great just by itself, and you don't really need to dive much deeper into that tree.
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Oct 20, 2023 02:41
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The Demilich posted:I can't proc the infinite lightning bug at all it seems lol So I'm not sure what's going on, but when I proc infinite lighting, my game starts to rubberband after a few minutes pass (even when just standing still) and I lose connection to the game. Seems not worth trying any further tbh
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Oct 20, 2023 02:59
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Sharkopath posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klbc1iCO04U Yeah I like that build, I think I'll switch over to it when I find a decent stubber for sale. I should have mentioned I was posting from the perspective of a level 26 Ogryn still leveling.
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Oct 20, 2023 03:22
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Side note to current conversation: While it was funny to nonstop crabwalk and I'll miss it, meh to the force sword change. It's a cool mistake to be there, and I'll always miss cool mistakes, but I don't think I'll notice it in the intended game loop.cock hero flux posted:At no point did I say that balance did not matter. But what needs to be balanced is playstyles vs. challenge. Balancing playstyles against each other only makes sense when those playstyles are actually competing against each other. In co op games, they are not. So much this. The conflation of PvP and PvE balance is what leads to "Ability 1 is better than Ability 2, nerf Ability 1, balance!" commentary and that's never made any sense to me. That's not really where Fatshark went but it does seem to be a pretty common thread. If one thing sucks to use for some reason then cheering on the nerfing of another thing so it also sucks is super weird. I think the intent of buffing Brain Burst is a good thing, I just think it's the cast time that really needs it and not the damage. Peril gen still needed to be reined in a bit, though, so that's a good thing.
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Oct 20, 2023 04:22
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Mailer posted:Side note to current conversation: While it was funny to nonstop crabwalk and I'll miss it, meh to the force sword change. It's a cool mistake to be there, and I'll always miss cool mistakes, but I don't think I'll notice it in the intended game loop. It's never this black and white. You base the decision of whether to buff stuff or nerf stuff on where you want the class to wind up. What I hear a lot of times in these discussions is, "I like X ability, so they should leave it as is, it's fun, this is a co-op game" which is an extremely superficial reading of what you should do. Like, yeah, sometimes you do need to buff underperforming skills to make them better, particularly when their design is bad. On the other hand, sometimes an ability clearly trivializes content in a way that is not intentional or which makes all other similar abilities worse by comparison. And most of the time it isn't clear either way. I don't think most people exclusively 'cheer' for nerfs, unless you're talking about reddit or the steam forums, which like, you shouldn't be there anyway, it's terrible.
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Oct 20, 2023 05:13
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cock hero flux posted:At no point did I say that balance did not matter. But what needs to be balanced is playstyles vs. challenge. Balancing playstyles against each other only makes sense when those playstyles are actually competing against each other. In co op games, they are not. This is a PvE game. Assail projectiles just pass through other players; you can't challenge your Veteran to a deathmatch and win because Assail hits really hard. So the only way you can possibly measure one class/ability/playstyle against another is by how good they are at PvE. Before the patch, Ogryns were weaker than other classes because they were bad at killing enemies. They got buffed and now they're better at killing enemies and therefore on par with other classes. There is no distinction.
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Oct 20, 2023 05:56
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Is there anything that would make the Achlys Mk 7 on par with the Antax for a zealot? I got one that rolled insanely well, but I can't imagine the vertical strike pattern matching up to swinging the Antax neatly at neck level with Brutal Momentum.
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Oct 20, 2023 07:22
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Speaking of axes, are the blessings still brutal + headtaker or are the buffed blessings worth looking at now?
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Oct 20, 2023 08:27
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| # ? Jun 4, 2024 12:19 |
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Mendrian posted:On the other hand, sometimes an ability clearly trivializes content in a way that is not intentional or which makes all other similar abilities worse by comparison. I feel like the latter is cited far more by players. I'm really only talking about the player-driven idea (rarely, but sometimes used by devs) that any time A > B a universally good course of action is to reduce A. That might coincidentally be the right thing to do if something is trivializing the game and sapping all the fun out of it, but mostly when I see this that's not what's being considered. And yes, reddit is a terrible place but it's a viewpoint you see across any game with a class/weapon/etc choice anywhere and that includes here. The weirdest, dumbest conversation I've ever had about PvE choices was on an SA discord so welp.
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Oct 20, 2023 08:46
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