Decreasing playerbase

[iZumo]

I'm serious here, this has nothing to do with OLDZ.

A) If standard UT would have 2x moar weapons, would it be better or suckier?
B) If there were problems with finding stable balance in past with less content, it kinda means there are more problems with finding stable balance now?
C) You surely have heard that a good amount time of balancing SC2 was removing unit types from the game, and we're not speaking of totally broken units: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Cut_Features

[Azarael]

Balancing an RTS game, especially one with StarCraft's roots, for the best players in the world is a completely different endeavour.

So sick of LDG admins denying content for the players.

[Oska]

There might me something that is worth being mentioned.
Everyone doesn't have a fast internet connection, I do need to download packages for like 30+ mins in order to play on BW the first time. In the 30 mins I'm not counting the several times when the server switch maps and when a huge package has to be re-downloaded from the scratch.

That might discourage new players.

I think the "overcontent" issue is fixed by the random weapons. The default loadout for a new play should be all random IMO.

[Capaco]

Actually I wonder if the reason why BW is fading isn't simply "overcontent", i.e. too much stuff and experimenting that is going out of control. INV started to decline more significantly as well. Some people say BW was better a year ago.

im one of the guys saying a year ago everything was better.
But i cant really explain why.

Too many weps ( dunno), too many changes in weps, nerf buff, weird map changes, many many changes were made with weapons too, ls14 for example.

I mentioned one time to put up a backup from a year ago, meant it funny but what were the changes during the year?

- balancer introduced
- maps changed
- hip fire was increased ?!
- melee changed
- wep functions and ammo changed
- freon facts when frozen/ thawed
- Ks kills changes for lower skilled ppl

I wonder we had more ppl on the server when there wasnt even a balancer, but for the ppl wasnt this important..but they can play for example as they wanted with their weps on the maps , and not everything gets changed and fun was gone, but i dont know

[Skaldy]

I don't think "overcontent" is really a problem - the first thing anyone does is spectate a decent player and imitate their tactics & weapons.

The mod is a lot more sensible than it was, thanks to the updates/fixes/extras & map changes. But maybe this has just widened the "net spread" between the best & worst players over the past year? IMHO, the proportion of time spent frozen (I know, we dumbly vote Freon) is too frustrating for both lower-skilled and potential new players.

Possible solutions are:
* Low-skilled players should thaw faster
* Lose all KS on death or new round
* Vote TDM more often

[taries]

You should also deal with the fact that this game is 10 years old, people get fed up from or they are playing something else, for example when Diablo 3 was released some ppl i know focused on it instead of UT.
I personally like new content, but not too often, it might be better to release "a pack of weapons", for some players it takes time to get used to it or to weapon changes. For example if you know game WarThunder (WW2 planes and tanks) there was a patch with new content last week after like 6 months? Ppl was bitching a lot that there are few Japanese planes on higher tiers, so they added like 7 new planes (2 on lower tiers) + changed their tree. Also often updates means often download and some ppl with slow internet might not be happy redownloading every 3rd day same file cos 2 changes.

[CaptainXavious]

Any changes that happen in three days are almost definitely code changes that are under 1mb in size. I have to wonder about your overall quality of online performance if that's a big enough download to gripe about.

Changes to assets, which are the big downloads, don't happen often at all, when they do, its usually from a new weapon, which has been happening no more often than once a month, or some fixes to said weapons, which again, isn't often and still is fairly limited to generally only one or two packages at a time.

In your example, taries, said developers released a pack of planes, which makes a much more signifcant impact on gameplay than say, a single weapon added. You only have to adjust to one new element as opposed to a whole bunch of them. This should make it easier to adapt to and easier to dial in for balance as opposed to just pouring 8 guns in at once.

[Jiffy]

* Low-skilled players should thaw faster

My new god.

[iZumo]

So sick of LDG admins denying content for the players.

Nobody is denying content. What I started questioning is, that whether adding new content to BW (weps) actually make the server better or whether it's becoming a mess. It is perhaps hard to say where the threshold is, but adding more content undoubtly means that it will be managed more poorly.
For instance, a history of Dark Star / Nova Staff changes a two years back, since 18/10/2012 (based on the changelogs topic):

02/11/2012: Dark / Nova

• Adjusted recoil values
• Increased Projectile speed

13/01/2013: Dark/Nova

• Mag ammo down to 28 from 40
• Fast Charge firerate is slower for same dps
• Fast projectiles no longer have a larger collision than normal
• Renamed some firemodes

23/01/2013: Nova Staff

• Tentatively increased the healing done by enhanced Nova Staffs by 50%

15/02/2013: Dark/Nova

• Increased Rapid Fire recoil
• Halved the speed of Rapid Fire projectiles

18/02/2013: Dark/Nova

• Increased fire rate of Slow Bolts
• Increased DPS of Rapid Fire
• Cut speed of Rapid Fire projectiles
• Nova heals from splash damage also
• Dark can gain max 25% bonus DPS from soulpower
• Nova can gain max 50% vampire from soulpower

15/03/2013: Dark/Nova

• Have hipfire expansion

24/09/2013: Dork Star / Noob Staff

• Rate of hipfire expansion increased by 50%
• Fire delay of Slow Bolts reduced from 1 to 0.9

06/10/2013: Dark/Nova

• The first two firemodes of these weapons create backlash against the wielder if fired from the hip.
• This backlash is inversely proportional to the weapon's soul power.

29/01/2014: Dark/Nova

• Fixed hipfire abuse.
• Fixed Dark Slow Bolt OP.

08/02/2014: Dark/Nova

• Slow Bolt hipfire is worse.
• Slow Bolt has backlash.
• Slow Bolt and Rapid Fire do locational damage.
• Hip recoil is worse.
• Slow Bolt costs 3 ammo, up from 2.
• Staff capacity is 21, down from 28.

11/03/2014: Dark Star

• Whilst sawing, takes 1/4 damage from frontal melee attacks.

09/05/2014: Dark Star

• Chainsaw no longer overheals.
• Chainsaw heals user for all damage dealt.
• Chainsaw inflicts slow with every hit. The total duration is equal to 1.25 * number of hits * fire interval of chainsaw.

18/05/2014: Nova Staff

• Quadrupled the healing output of Lightning mode (yes, it heals teammates)

30/06/2014: Dark Star

• In light of the recent melee fatigue and displacement changes, the Dark Star saw became too strong. Reduced vampirism by 66%. Dark Star no longer inflicts Slow.

30/07/2014: Dark Star

• Displacement has thoroughly broken this mode, so it's been reverted to its old handling. For anyone who forgot: Leeches all damage dealt as HP, inflicts 10% slow.
• Changed X-axis recoil path to better match other staves.

02/09/2014: Dark Star

• Fixed temporary reload lock which would occur if the Dark Star was switched out during or just after using the melee attack

04/10/2014: Dark Star

• Will not inflict slow on a melee strike.

This doesn't really look like you'd be reaching anything stable, there is double amount of changes within the last year, than within the same year ago.

[Azarael]

Good work cherry-picking the most feature-rich and volatile weapons. The Dark Star and Nova Staff, aside from having so many firemodes and odd melee functionality, had two major functionality revamps in there: one was the removal of improved performance with soul power and the other was the change from perfect hipfire to conventional handling with iron sights. Changes in the metagame and unforeseen consequences sometimes result in a revert, such as in the DS slow, but nobody gets things right first time.