Decreasing playerbase

[iZumo]

Aza's logic: Modify a map favoured by lowskillers and many high skillers, be upset about losing the high skillers.

It looks like it's only Izumo successful in adapting the environment here (and adapting others).

[Skaldy]

TBH, if I imagine playing the old BW & original maps from 18 months ago, I would be totally bored of that by now.

Sunday night is packed yet Monday night is empty - I think it's more to do with player availability and a critical mass effect. I often don't bother if there's less than 4v4.

Perhaps new players should thaw twice as fast, for their first month, to get them properly hooked

[Azarael]

I guess the thaw adjustment can also read the DB for number of kills. I apologise for not having done that, I'm experiencing severe motivation issues right now as a result of many factors.

[Skaldy]

"Do, or do not" - we have no right to expect anything from you. IMHO, your efforts have been the direct cause of the survival of this server, rather than the opposite. It is natural that it is mostly complaints that get raised, but I'm sure that the silent majority are grateful.

If you were my age, you'd have stopped doing dev for free a long time ago!

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Human nature dictates that "communities" are just 75% freeloaders.

[iZumo]

TBH, if I imagine playing the old BW & original maps from 18 months ago, I would be totally bored of that by now.

As I understood there are other players who feel the exactly other way. They get used to a certain style, then it's changed later on. I could understand how that can make people frustrated and getting bored. I'm pretty sure it was unthinkable a year ago to speak about discrimination to adjust for low skilled players (Aza was referring to that as: "I don't want BW to become another RACE / AS."). Today it's being suggested and accepted.

[iRobot]

TBH, if I imagine playing the old BW & original maps from 18 months ago, I would be totally bored of that by now.

As I understood there are other players who feel the exactly other way. They get used to a certain style, then it's changed later on. I could understand how that can make people frustrated and getting bored.

You completely and unequivocally misunderstood what he was trying to say. Well done Izumo

[Azarael]

That's a slight misrepresentation. I am happy with everyone having the game being adjusted to suit their own skill level, as long as such actions either have a minimal effect on other players or are just. The killstreak threshold change, for example, affected other players, but it was just, because killstreaks are meant to be based on personal achievement and not the standard set by highskills. Similarly, players who die more often through lower skill don't need to spend all game frozen, because giving them an advantage in terms of thaw rate won't screw the game up, as they're not that powerful.

It's when lower skilled players want a change which will screw everyone or screw the gameplay that I object - for example, Michie's suggestion to buff the HAMR so that he can compete, ignoring that anyone can use it.

exactly other way

I wasn't the only one to get confused by this at first. Better to say "Who feel the opposite." He's quoting ehi with "frustration" and "boredom."

[Oska]

So the point of all of this is?

Even though Aza is sometimes an amazing pain in the ass to me (including random bans and mutes) and that he does shelter himself behind good speeches to justify most of his actions (resulting in confusion most of the time) I do have to admit that the balance is quite good. Of course changes are most of the time not understood (but the recent change logs had a "why did I do that" line) and they result in discussions and wonders, but I don't believe that it causes a huge decrease of the playerbase. Those who stopped playing because their favourite weapon got nerfed would have probably stopped playing anyway.

Regarding the map changes, I don't believe that one should change a map radically for the greater good, if players like to play maps where they can kill 10 guys aligned in tunnels why not?
Most of these maps changes have been introduced because of the skill system, because players (or mostly Aza?) care about having +1 death without being able to dodge or avoid it. But what you should understand is that most of the players do not care about the skill system, dying n times is just boring, it's not *omgomgomg I going to loose skill".

[iRobot]

How difficult would it be to set up a toast in the game when a new patch / changes are released?

Just so those people who don't frequent the forum can follow when changes are made and aren't just suddenly logging on one day to their favourite weapon doing 30% less damage.

[Azarael]

@Oska: While I appreciate that you think the balance is good, I'm sort of reading here that you think I'm "hiding" behind posts which justify what I've done. Isn't that the opposite of hiding? Hiding would be to say nothing. Instead, I make my opinion and reasons very clear. The main problem is that I'm trying to push the game towards being more correct from a skilled perspective, and that is by design not friendly to the lesser skilled players.

Regarding your commentary on maps... if the problem is that weaker players die a lot and spend a lot of time dead, that can be rectified without compromising the maps. The maps that were changed by me (WarmBody, Urban Hot Zone, Highlander) were changed because of problems that did exist and I'll readily admit that those problems were related to spam or areas of the map which focused very little on skill. With the skill system invisible there's no reason to care about it - I just consider areas of maps where one takes a forced death or becomes severely restricted in what they can do (tunnels, brick path, spam area of WarmBody) as bad design and think that they should be changed.

@iRobot: "Toast"? Is that autocorrect? The most efficient way to display change info in game would be to read an external file using the interface given in UnrealScript, but that might result in me having to duplicate changelogs. UnrealScript doesn't easily handle long saved strings of text, so it would definitely have to be done this way.