It seems that 252 has taken the approach of adding more features to fix existing problems.. all the while attempting to juggle the balance numbers based on data from 251.
so alien comm's ability to create infestation where ever he wants is complete trash... can you say bombard whip echo strat for the win... complete bullshit
I'm ok with very little of this patch...
Can you say viable base breaking ability for the aliens that stops the 2 hour long pointless 4 hive sieges that end in a concede?
One theme I don't like with this patch is the constant back tracking with regards to design philosophies that were seemingly set in stone previously. I don't mind if certain mechanics don't float my own personal boat, all that I ask is that UWE remain dedicated to their vision and find a way to make it work. Introducing HMGs, allowing Exos to beacon, these represent a lack of belief in the vision they originally had. And I'm not talking about "oh we tried something this way now lets try it another way", as with lifeform movement or the ability to sprint or something like that. These were core game principles that have now seemingly been tossed aside.
I hope there is still some direction here, rather than urgent triage taking place.
we always wanted that exos can be beaconed and there is no HMG in ns2.
it doesn't seem like something that should be so difficult to implement, that if you "always wanted it," it shouldn't have been put in immediately.
your saying, that something prevented you from making exo's beacon, for two years, even though that was the original design goal? yeah, that makes sense.
Stop moving the goalposts retroactively. I don't believe you.
The reason this patch went out in this state is that we have a lot of promotional things happening the second half of this week, to advertise the patch, promote the game, and hopefully bring in a lot of new players. We realized that with the immensity of the rendering changes that had to be made to the game in order to support DX11, OpenGL, and Linux, and due to those changes taking much longer to implement then first anticipated, we felt it was going to be too risky to just wait until the final release when all that promotion had kicked in. We needed to get this out to a wider testing audience, in order to get a better sense of all the issues that the new rendering changes are causing, so that we could fix them up before the final patch release. It is certainly not an ideal way of doing things, but we had hoped that our community would be understanding of this and help us to track down issues and fix them up, to get this huge Reinforced update in good shape for later this week.
Using the Beta release on steam has been tried in the past, and just does not bring in enough people playing on the beta version, to give us adequate testing, so we just had to go with a full release here.
We did not release a changelog as this shouldn't even really be considered the Reinforced patch, we just needed to get it out to test the rendering changes. If we could have released a version with just the rendering changes and not any of the balance changes and new features, we would have, but that stuff had to go out along with the release as well.
Regarding the Skulk change, yes, I was wrong that there was nothing changed, as we did discover a bug that has since been fixed, but I meant to convey that nothing INTENTIONALLY was changed with Skulk movement.
We are reading through all your feedback, but at the moment we are mainly focused on the major issues with the rendering changes.
Perhaps someone can keep reposting this post, since undoubtedly there will still be pages and pages of people who continue to ask why did we change Skulk movement and why did we release the patch so early?
The move with Exos is great imo. The issue with it previously was that it was too big a risk to invest in, partly because of cost, inability to exit, and issues with beacon. So it has never really been a step up from standard armour, but rather a giant leap that didn't ever feel right.
Everyone is going to dislike the alien vision, as it was totally op in all previous versions. The mechanic has been broken for a while, as no one ever really bothered to play without it off.
Some of the other stuff is cool, I think the bone shield could be a little useless. I can see a lot of people using it rather than running away, and they'll be easily hunted by marine squads without support.
The upgrade tree for aliens is bonkers from a UI and gameplay standpoint. Linking the different aliens upgrades to random structures just seems really off to me.
Great news on the tutorial system, looking forward to Friday. Though it is a shame to see almost everything out there already, rather than seeing it all on Friday. Lessoned the surprise for me somewhat, but I understand there are technical issues to deal with.
actually, used boneshield while running away last night, good for trolling, troll factor++.
Wang TangJoin Date: 2004-08-18Member: 30699Members
Sounds fair, Cory. A note to future things like this: announce it before you release it. This will prepare people and results in less anger than just dropping it out there without even a changelog.
Besides that, the lag is truely terrible on 5/5 servers I have played on so far. Experienced by everyone of the people on each server. Literally ( :P ) unplayable.
After playing almost 5 hours on the new patch, only two things I dislike: the poor performance and the removal of the Commander's PRes. Everything else felt very good. The grenades are awesome! Please do not NERF, pLZ BRo!1!11!1! I liked how I need to choose research paths and then unlock them with biomass. It forces you to do more strategical thinking. I love the new ability to spawn drifters on infestation, which is very handy when I quickly need one for stuff to build or to support.
Duo Rialgun Exo is boss from what I've seen. Good thing that umbra counters it hard.
Overall, this is very super cool patch, despite its buggy nature. I'm so excited for Friday, when the real deal hits!
decreases research paths. before comm chose what to get and prioritized abilities based on what was most useful, now you are locked into the research path that the developers want. also, wtf is the whip research for skulks doing in game?
SpoogeThunderbolt missile in your cheeriosJoin Date: 2002-01-25Member: 67Members
Squeal, my constructive criticism would be: if you guys ever attempt a pre-release patch like this in the future, take the extra minute to write up your intentions and let the community know BEFORE submitting the release.
Most of the resulting confusion could have been smothered if everyone knew ahead of time what was going on. It's understandable that things are crazy there right now but now you've taken the time to explain your intentions and you're also paying the price.
We needed to get this out to a wider testing audience, in order to get a better sense of all the issues that the new rendering changes are causing, so that we could fix them up before the final patch release. It is certainly not an ideal way of doing things, but we had hoped that our community would be understanding of this and help us to track down issues and fix them up, to get this huge Reinforced update in good shape for later this week.
Using the Beta release on steam has been tried in the past, and just does not bring in enough people playing on the beta version, to give us adequate testing, so we just had to go with a full release here.
--Cory
S-so does that mean when everyone was joking about NS2 being in beta they were not joking? (
People are so used to running with night vision that they don't see the great improvement to normal vision. Now I don't have to look at a green screen all the time, great job
The reason this patch went out in this state is that we have a lot of promotional things happening the second half of this week, to advertise the patch, promote the game, and hopefully bring in a lot of new players. We realized that with the immensity of the rendering changes that had to be made to the game in order to support DX11, OpenGL, and Linux, and due to those changes taking much longer to implement then first anticipated, we felt it was going to be too risky to just wait until the final release when all that promotion had kicked in. We needed to get this out to a wider testing audience, in order to get a better sense of all the issues that the new rendering changes are causing, so that we could fix them up before the final patch release. It is certainly not an ideal way of doing things, but we had hoped that our community would be understanding of this and help us to track down issues and fix them up, to get this huge Reinforced update in good shape for later this week.
Using the Beta release on steam has been tried in the past, and just does not bring in enough people playing on the beta version, to give us adequate testing, so we just had to go with a full release here.
We did not release a changelog as this shouldn't even really be considered the Reinforced patch, we just needed to get it out to test the rendering changes. If we could have released a version with just the rendering changes and not any of the balance changes and new features, we would have, but that stuff had to go out along with the release as well.
Regarding the Skulk change, yes, I was wrong that there was nothing changed, as we did discover a bug that has since been fixed, but I meant to convey that nothing INTENTIONALLY was changed with Skulk movement.
We are reading through all your feedback, but at the moment we are mainly focused on the major issues with the rendering changes.
Perhaps someone can keep reposting this post, since undoubtedly there will still be pages and pages of people who continue to ask why did we change Skulk movement and why did we release the patch so early?
--Cory
fine, my complaint is not with what was not intentional, but what was. you could've tested the skulk movement a bit, before releasing it, it's very noticeable.
the alien tech tree rejiggering: intentional, completely asinine. at some point sewlek mentioned wanting to increase the tech tree diversity in games. yeah, this goes really far in that direction.
alien vision (all encompassing): intentional, alien nerf, makes melee combat a nightmare, and that's not even talking about against marines that can actually aim. Compromise, keep normal view as is, but let us change the intensity and color.
drifter cost, redonculous
fade movement is floaty.
dual railguns, don't limit the firing, it cost 60 res for a reason, because you should be able to charge both guns at the same time.
I love how DX11 runs better of my system than DX9 did. + With an AMD card running PhysX and having no issue's at all 50 - 80fps. Thats a very good improvement to the game
The problem with the "beta" release is that its not a separate game. You have to chose if you want NS2 stable or beta.
I don't know if only Valve can do this (tf2, l4d2 beta), but it could help to have them separate. I will have both installed if that were the case, and willing to test it when this kind of changes arise.
Alot of people have been playing NS2 before its release in November, and will continue playing it, because the game is really good and different of any other game in the market.
I understand what Cory said, but you have to start thinking in advance of implementing this changes. We are not the small community that started testing the beta (or alpha) releases. The forum community is big, maybe more people complaining in the forum that playing the actual game but thats another story.
You need some kind of PR/Comunitty management to speak in advance of this changes or this is what happens. Too much negative feedback until one of UWE (Cory most of the time) responds in the forums to calm the waters...
For now, I really like the changes. Alien Vision is "ok", maybe some tweaks needed. And it seem that the servers are struggling too much in the performance side.
The reason this patch went out in this state is that we have a lot of promotional things happening the second half of this week, to advertise the patch, promote the game, and hopefully bring in a lot of new players. We realized that with the immensity of the rendering changes that had to be made to the game in order to support DX11, OpenGL, and Linux, and due to those changes taking much longer to implement then first anticipated, we felt it was going to be too risky to just wait until the final release when all that promotion had kicked in. We needed to get this out to a wider testing audience, in order to get a better sense of all the issues that the new rendering changes are causing, so that we could fix them up before the final patch release. It is certainly not an ideal way of doing things, but we had hoped that our community would be understanding of this and help us to track down issues and fix them up, to get this huge Reinforced update in good shape for later this week.
Using the Beta release on steam has been tried in the past, and just does not bring in enough people playing on the beta version, to give us adequate testing, so we just had to go with a full release here.
We did not release a changelog as this shouldn't even really be considered the Reinforced patch, we just needed to get it out to test the rendering changes. If we could have released a version with just the rendering changes and not any of the balance changes and new features, we would have, but that stuff had to go out along with the release as well.
Regarding the Skulk change, yes, I was wrong that there was nothing changed, as we did discover a bug that has since been fixed, but I meant to convey that nothing INTENTIONALLY was changed with Skulk movement.
We are reading through all your feedback, but at the moment we are mainly focused on the major issues with the rendering changes.
Perhaps someone can keep reposting this post, since undoubtedly there will still be pages and pages of people who continue to ask why did we change Skulk movement and why did we release the patch so early?
--Cory
No worries, this thread is literally the 80s; bad means good and the like.
8 res drifters are a joke. Considering that these things are vital for aliens now.
Commander getting punished for commanding is ridiculous. Totally discouraged me to get into hive and place a harvester while our original comm was spawning. If I get inside for a second, I lose like 5 pres next minute. If I place that harvester before comm spawns, I get like 0.2 pres at most for harvester being there 10 seconds earlier.
Vortex... come on. It was the only fade's support ability (kinda), now it's dedicated assassin.
Jetpack is acting weird, turning on only after I am past top jump point when jump momentum is lost.
On the bright side, contamination is a nice tool to solve turtle problems. Just spam the in enemy base, everything get's corroded, echo structures and spam spam spam containation.
Catpacks+nades should be fun for aggressive pushes. And I bet catpack-nano-med-axe marine can take out a fade one on one.
Arcs showing firing range when selected, finally.
But this build is still a disaster. Too many questionable changes, not to mention all the bugs and problems. I bet these problems are temporary, but those intentional changes... they are going to stay. And this scares me.
Comm pres lock was introduced to cage alien commanders in their hives, since even comp players just used them as RT dropping stations and "the comm" was playing normally as a lifeform most of the match.
Why would you want to do that? There's literally no reason to be in the hive as aliens, other than to drop structures. It's not like marine commander where you have to medpack and drop ammo. Locking the alien commander into the hive just means you have one person on your team who's getting really bored while he watches the rest of you have fun.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
Genuine question :
Everyone stating that they should have communicated this prior.. What about that front page post that also shows up on the main menu of the game??
The first sentence is "Build 252 is a preparatory release" and expect bugs etc etc.. It kind of explains everything right there, doesn't it?
/hides from rage X_X
To those having performance issues please continue posting in the tech support forums.
Thanks!
I love how DX11 runs better of my system than DX9 did. + With an AMD card running PhysX and having no issue's at all 50 - 80fps. Thats a very good improvement to the game
How do you get physx to run on an AMD card? I thought it was NVIDIA property...
Genuine question :
Everyone stating that they should have communicated this prior.. What about that front page post that also shows up on the main menu of the game??
The first sentence is "Build 252 is a preparatory release" and expect bugs etc etc.. It kind of explains everything right there, doesn't it?
/hides from rage X_X
To those having performance issues please continue posting in the tech support forums.
Thanks!
wow i provide a picture of an obvious flaw and exploit in one of the map changes of docking and my guess is ironhorse removes it becouse it contains 1 image SHOWING the exact location of the glitch.
Comm pres lock was introduced to cage alien commanders in their hives, since even comp players just used them as RT dropping stations and "the comm" was playing normally as a lifeform most of the match.
Why would you want to do that? There's literally no reason to be in the hive as aliens, other than to drop structures. It's not like marine commander where you have to medpack and drop ammo. Locking the alien commander into the hive just means you have one person on your team who's getting really bored while he watches the rest of you have fun.
B-but drifters! Seriously, drifters are cool and fun until marines get GLs. It's just that it's still not worth it. I am not overly happy either with the "hive prison", instead of making the drifter buffs and other stuff more useful (longer duration maybe? I don't know, maybe make the balance more dependent on them, but then since drifter management and AI is so crap it would be pretty hard to assist aliens flawlessly like some marine comms can with medspam etc), than comm being outside the hive.
I love how DX11 runs better of my system than DX9 did. + With an AMD card running PhysX and having no issue's at all 50 - 80fps. Thats a very good improvement to the game
How do you get physx to run on an AMD card? I thought it was NVIDIA property...
I think in that case is it running the PhysX calculations just on the CPU…
What is PhysX doing in NS2 anyway? Some more particles flying around?
Genuine question :
Everyone stating that they should have communicated this prior.. What about that front page post that also shows up on the main menu of the game??
The first sentence is "Build 252 is a preparatory release" and expect bugs etc etc.. It kind of explains everything right there, doesn't it?
/hides from rage X_X
Thanks!
I get what you're saying Ironhorse but I think a more thorough, open explanation like the one Squeal posted here would have done far more to quell the naysayers.
If everyone was expecting issues up front, they'd be less inclined to complain.
wow i provide a picture of an obvious flaw and exploit in one of the map changes of docking and my guess is ironhorse removes it becouse it contains 1 image SHOWING the exact location of the glitch.
That is correct. Check your inbox too. ;-)
To everyone : please do not publicly post exploits, ever. You can email or PM a dev or pt.
Thanks
current1y - yeah its not like i made that glitch or invented it, i just came across it after the changes and wanted to make it known so it could get sorted out instead of having 3 gorges every docking match sitting there f*cking around and doing no good for the match.
Comments
it's masochism for everybody involved, yes.
it doesn't seem like something that should be so difficult to implement, that if you "always wanted it," it shouldn't have been put in immediately.
your saying, that something prevented you from making exo's beacon, for two years, even though that was the original design goal? yeah, that makes sense.
Stop moving the goalposts retroactively. I don't believe you.
The reason this patch went out in this state is that we have a lot of promotional things happening the second half of this week, to advertise the patch, promote the game, and hopefully bring in a lot of new players. We realized that with the immensity of the rendering changes that had to be made to the game in order to support DX11, OpenGL, and Linux, and due to those changes taking much longer to implement then first anticipated, we felt it was going to be too risky to just wait until the final release when all that promotion had kicked in. We needed to get this out to a wider testing audience, in order to get a better sense of all the issues that the new rendering changes are causing, so that we could fix them up before the final patch release. It is certainly not an ideal way of doing things, but we had hoped that our community would be understanding of this and help us to track down issues and fix them up, to get this huge Reinforced update in good shape for later this week.
Using the Beta release on steam has been tried in the past, and just does not bring in enough people playing on the beta version, to give us adequate testing, so we just had to go with a full release here.
We did not release a changelog as this shouldn't even really be considered the Reinforced patch, we just needed to get it out to test the rendering changes. If we could have released a version with just the rendering changes and not any of the balance changes and new features, we would have, but that stuff had to go out along with the release as well.
Regarding the Skulk change, yes, I was wrong that there was nothing changed, as we did discover a bug that has since been fixed, but I meant to convey that nothing INTENTIONALLY was changed with Skulk movement.
We are reading through all your feedback, but at the moment we are mainly focused on the major issues with the rendering changes.
Perhaps someone can keep reposting this post, since undoubtedly there will still be pages and pages of people who continue to ask why did we change Skulk movement and why did we release the patch so early?
--Cory
actually, used boneshield while running away last night, good for trolling,
Besides that, the lag is truely terrible on 5/5 servers I have played on so far. Experienced by everyone of the people on each server. Literally ( :P ) unplayable.
Give 'em a break guys!
Most of the resulting confusion could have been smothered if everyone knew ahead of time what was going on. It's understandable that things are crazy there right now but now you've taken the time to explain your intentions and you're also paying the price.
S-so does that mean when everyone was joking about NS2 being in beta they were not joking?
green is much easier on the eyes.
fine, my complaint is not with what was not intentional, but what was. you could've tested the skulk movement a bit, before releasing it, it's very noticeable.
the alien tech tree rejiggering: intentional, completely asinine. at some point sewlek mentioned wanting to increase the tech tree diversity in games. yeah, this goes really far in that direction.
alien vision (all encompassing): intentional, alien nerf, makes melee combat a nightmare, and that's not even talking about against marines that can actually aim. Compromise, keep normal view as is, but let us change the intensity and color.
drifter cost, redonculous
fade movement is floaty.
dual railguns, don't limit the firing, it cost 60 res for a reason, because you should be able to charge both guns at the same time.
the rest, i'm fine with, if not happy.
I don't know if only Valve can do this (tf2, l4d2 beta), but it could help to have them separate. I will have both installed if that were the case, and willing to test it when this kind of changes arise.
Alot of people have been playing NS2 before its release in November, and will continue playing it, because the game is really good and different of any other game in the market.
I understand what Cory said, but you have to start thinking in advance of implementing this changes. We are not the small community that started testing the beta (or alpha) releases. The forum community is big, maybe more people complaining in the forum that playing the actual game but thats another story.
You need some kind of PR/Comunitty management to speak in advance of this changes or this is what happens. Too much negative feedback until one of UWE (Cory most of the time) responds in the forums to calm the waters...
For now, I really like the changes. Alien Vision is "ok", maybe some tweaks needed. And it seem that the servers are struggling too much in the performance side.
No worries, this thread is literally the 80s; bad means good and the like.
Commander getting punished for commanding is ridiculous. Totally discouraged me to get into hive and place a harvester while our original comm was spawning. If I get inside for a second, I lose like 5 pres next minute. If I place that harvester before comm spawns, I get like 0.2 pres at most for harvester being there 10 seconds earlier.
Vortex... come on. It was the only fade's support ability (kinda), now it's dedicated assassin.
Jetpack is acting weird, turning on only after I am past top jump point when jump momentum is lost.
On the bright side, contamination is a nice tool to solve turtle problems. Just spam the in enemy base, everything get's corroded, echo structures and spam spam spam containation.
Catpacks+nades should be fun for aggressive pushes. And I bet catpack-nano-med-axe marine can take out a fade one on one.
Arcs showing firing range when selected, finally.
But this build is still a disaster. Too many questionable changes, not to mention all the bugs and problems. I bet these problems are temporary, but those intentional changes... they are going to stay. And this scares me.
Why would you want to do that? There's literally no reason to be in the hive as aliens, other than to drop structures. It's not like marine commander where you have to medpack and drop ammo. Locking the alien commander into the hive just means you have one person on your team who's getting really bored while he watches the rest of you have fun.
Everyone stating that they should have communicated this prior.. What about that front page post that also shows up on the main menu of the game??
The first sentence is "Build 252 is a preparatory release" and expect bugs etc etc.. It kind of explains everything right there, doesn't it?
/hides from rage X_X
To those having performance issues please continue posting in the tech support forums.
Thanks!
How do you get physx to run on an AMD card? I thought it was NVIDIA property...
Don't expect common sense. This is the internetz.
B-but drifters! Seriously, drifters are cool and fun until marines get GLs. It's just that it's still not worth it. I am not overly happy either with the "hive prison", instead of making the drifter buffs and other stuff more useful (longer duration maybe? I don't know, maybe make the balance more dependent on them, but then since drifter management and AI is so crap it would be pretty hard to assist aliens flawlessly like some marine comms can with medspam etc), than comm being outside the hive.
I think in that case is it running the PhysX calculations just on the CPU…
What is PhysX doing in NS2 anyway? Some more particles flying around?
I get what you're saying Ironhorse but I think a more thorough, open explanation like the one Squeal posted here would have done far more to quell the naysayers.
If everyone was expecting issues up front, they'd be less inclined to complain.
To everyone : please do not publicly post exploits, ever. You can email or PM a dev or pt.
Thanks
good job not reading the news in the OP.