[T#185/186] Testserver Patch Discussion

[William Antrim]

For a brainport thread this sure does look pretty abusive at times.


If you are going to impose penalties on players like this then please can we have other benefits to being "bad" people. There is a difference between being a bad player and being a bad person. A bad player will have good soullight because he doesnt kill anyone. A bad person will have bad sl because he does.


If players are to truly have that experience of being the "bad guy" then they will push to pursue it. Art imitates life. We cannot run round in the real world toting huge guns and shouting our mouths off at one another so many people who would normally be quite calm and mild-mannered will live out this ideal in pc games. It is basic human psychology. Some do it for the benefit of themselves and some do it for the benefit of others!

regardless there will always be the people who want to be the villain. This patch punishes them and rightly so if they ARE villains. However you have to account for the people who want to have the choice to "go straight" at the same time. They need to be able to regain their SL in relative peace also.

How about giving them that access (in oz jail) as previously requested AND giving them adequate guard protection to do so. Also how about giving the copbots their old damage values back. I mean the practically insta-kill of NC1. Copbots should be feared.

Oz Jail guards should be almost as tough (but still raidable by a large scale police/militia force) but at the same time give the "red SL" guys a chance to choose to fight or GR out.

OZ Jail also needs its own GR. It can only be activated and used when you have BAD SL ideally. It should have guards beside it also just in case someone tries to gank the person coming in somehow.

There will be accidental issues where people lose SL - I dont care who says otherwise to be honest. It can and does happen.


There will also be people who go out of their way to make other clans/chars lose sl. This community has always had fierce rivalries/borderline pathological hatred between clans. The players in those clans can and do erupt violently plenty of times and some will push the rules. Again human nature. Revenge and all of that.

I do not think that RED sl players should be rewarded but I do think that they should be given adequate chance to repent.

Also the missions in Pepper Park sewers need to be reworked for people to repair their soullight there in the short term. They will need more mobs of each mission difficulty in the sewers down there.

[SilentEye]

...

My compliments to your well constructed criticism, as usual

My full support to everything written above by William, well put!

[nabbl]

...

Very good ideas!

I think that you should be able to regain your SL faster in the Jailhouse and automatically. To encourage people not to stand in there apparment to regain their SL.

[Nidhogg]

Thread re-opened. Please, no more flaming or trolling or you risk losing your posting privileges in the Brainport. If you see a post you don't like please don't respond, just report it.

Thanks.

[slith]

Scratch Soullight alltogether, make everything faction sympathy based (Reaction of guards, trader access, colouring to other players, sympathy loss or gain of other players).

Obviously this has to be a well thought through system of formulas that also takes into account the baserank of other players.

[Sechs]

Scratch players, alltogether, make everything AI based. Seriously, it would solve so so many problems.

[Dropout]

Snip

Very well thought out post. As usual

And I definitely agree, red SL players should have a proper way of regaining their SL.

[Strife]

Any chance we can get an APU frequency buff to test with this patch?

500k nc bribe is on the table here.

[Doc Holliday]

Chipmonk, Grogor and William Nailed it perfectly. Take these posts in to account within this thread.

SL penalties are good. Changes to the system is good. I like.

Whats needed though now is a way for the runner/clan to influence its own F6 system of neutral/allied and enemy factions. With these penalties in place people will be encouraged to move around factions to give them either the most reds overall (BD/TT) or the most reds given the current server demographic.

I fear the effect of this will make other factions obsolete (PP/DRE for example) more so than they already are. A way to alter this would be to allow more freedom of choice to who you will take an SL hit for killing and who will become your friend.

I realise this might or might not be feasible but if your going to bring in these penalties against red people then at least level the field so we get a fair stab at choosing a faction because we actually like the lore/rp etc of the faction and not just because what F6 tells us.

(wonders if i will get as much love as will considering this is one of my less inflamatory posts )

[RogerRamjet]

Scratch Soullight alltogether, make everything faction sympathy based (Reaction of guards, trader access, colouring to other players, sympathy loss or gain of other players).

Obviously this has to be a well thought through system of formulas that also takes into account the baserank of other players.

That would be along the lines of something I'd like to see, faction symp more important than it currently is. I think an update to the zone rules is due too.

I would love to see the intricacies of the faction system back. Was it zoltans post that mentioned the game has the rpg element? The guys right, and I hope this returns to the community one day.

[Powerpunsh]

Hmm nice soullight system and william has good ideas. This should be worked out further.


May i ask why did you reduce the disruptor damage? As far as i know john doe managed to balance all weapons with a damage over time value which affects frequence, damage, reloadtime. Why not just increase the disruptor frequence so the damage gets calculated down and it requires more skill to hit either. I always felt the damage over time fine it was just the lenght of the disruptor which made it hurt too much (bursttime is like 2-3 seconds). With the ak he just fucked up. :P

Another point is stealthwhoring. You are able to get out of fight anywhere and get healed up while in stealth. I would like to see a delay for stealth of 2 seconds (which makes sense in my opinion) and a reduced heal effect OR make the true sight sanctum more powerful. A revealed spy/pe shouldnt be able to stealth again. There should be like a 2-3 secs debuff which prevents them from stealthing again.

btw: i would like to see other weapons viable again. Since you got some tools done i hope it wouldnt be that hard to manage. :P

[SilentEye]

May i ask why did you reduce the disruptor damage? As far as i know john doe managed to balance all weapons with a damage over time value which affects frequence, damage, reloadtime. Why not just increase the disruptor frequence so the damage gets calculated down and it requires more skill to hit either.

Reducing the damage on the weapon would require the least from users to get used to the rifle again. I can imagine if you try and change the frequency or handling it would take a lot more time to get used to the weapon.

Reducing the weapon damage seems the most logical thing to me, as it doesn't change much else in regard to it's handling. The only thing users would have to get used to is the fact that hey will have to keep pounding a little longer (35% to be exact)

[Deus Ex Machina]

You can be a badass all the time but be a badass who accept all consequences too.
[...]
There is no place for carebear-badasses

Thanks for that, really made my day :-)

Regarding the patch:
Very nice work and changes, I like it that the Dev Team has a vision of NC and follows that for the most part (and still compromising when a change was a wrong one).

I especially like the Soullight and possible zone changes in addition to each other.
But some of the concerns regarding negative SL I think are quite valid, a few steps in the consequences might be nice like it was mentioned.
And also the punishing according to damage done would be nice - for example the system could consider, if possible, the last damage done in height of the total health someone has (meaning everyone who shot at the person before but their damage got healed again doesn't count). For every one percent of damage done one gets two percent of the Soullight loss, maxing at 100% SL loss at 50% damage. That would mean if I accidentally hit someone allied in combat I do not need to sync to avoid loss of much SL, and possibly don't loose any at all. It would also mean the progress towards negative SL is slower for those not caring.
I am even thinking about making the loss of items a bit less harsh, but that would only be useful with the new changes implemented.
I still hope someday I am seeing a NC where people with Red SL are not only just sitting around in safezones or appartments (for example because it doesn't bring back their SL anymore, and they are hunted in safezones), but are still hunted by players for good reason.

Also nice to tone down the damage of apparently overpowered weapons before the real balancing takes place as a temporary solution.

Also: MANY thanks for the Copbot changes ;-)
And the City Admin NPCs

Not sure why the weather changes, and why snow is bad :-)
Wouldn't mind some around Tech Haven, but can happily live without it too I guess ;-)

[Powerpunsh]

If you argue like this then the ak should be impossible to use due to its high frequence.
35% is kinda heavy and i can bet other weapons will find back to runners hands *sees the first RoG spies lurkin around*

[William Antrim]

If you argue like this then the ak should be impossible to use due to its high frequence.
35% is kinda heavy and i can bet other weapons will find back to runners hands *sees the first RoG spies lurkin around*

variety is what made nc1 so great.