Friday with Means - August 19th, 2011 - Progress

[Alternity]

The BS maps are designed for high level, run and gun proffs: title 7 soldiers, fixers, pistol advs ... and not much else

Are you sure you are talking sbout the same BS the rest of us? Because there is no run and gun anymore, it is a shoot'em out with a playing field the size of my bedroom. Only guy you'll see running is the guy with two five min drains on him.

Oh yeah someone suggested "just die then!" yeah because it's not like we have a shortage of ego-tripping-superheros in this game, so die and spend the next half hour getting "trolololo n00b!" tells from him and his seven tard brothers.

But all in all it's ok, I just decided not to do BS anymore. There is other ways to PvP, older ways, that are still fun because FunCom has not been able to utterly destroy those yet. Can buy VP anyways and in that regard I feel FunCom did something right!


Dark

[Otansaanpas]

new icons are nice, but high details may confuse atroxes..

[lizor]

(snip) so die and spend the next half hour getting "trolololo n00b!" tells from him and his seven tard brothers.

Dark

Dun care what a handful of losers want to send me in a tell. It's PVP. You're going to die. You're going to die a lot. You're going to win. You're going to lose. Someone is going to talk, and someone is just going to do what they do.

<3 to the new icons. I think it's fine that you're rolling them out as they get finished and KUDOS to those two for their great art work =D

[Metafly7]

Can we make out of these icons that the AI yalms will be castable now too and also that Bow Special attack is going to be a seperate buff from bow buff?

And uhhm Adventurers can become hecklers or rather Verocious Horrors if i spell that correctly??

[Cogline]

Looks like I'll be hitting BS for a ding more often. I'm a Neut PvM so I don't care who wins so long as I convert VP to XP. Dying is easy: had lotsa practice at it.

[Rktim]

In before Righteous!

Seriously, someone should like give him a call or something he will be ecstatic

[Armus]

Good job on the changes to the hot and on the delay. Exactly what was needed.

[Frubaliscious]

In before Righteous!

Seriously, someone should like give him a call or something he will be ecstatic

hah, yeah, he'd pee a little.

[thombgun10]

The new instances sound very exciting and challenging, i guess this also includes the shadowland dailies right?
Last time i checked i could not find where to take SL missions though. (on the test server)


Couple suggestions for BS not sure if it would be popular or not but i think it might fix a couple of issues that currently "bug" the battlestation aswell as even possibly give a playstyle option that would appeal for certain people:

- 15 minute rounds with the old system, cap points like normal and either be the side to have most points in the end or reach a certain goalpost.
Re-runs every 15 minutes with new group and allows new people to join in till both sides are even (means people get distributed randomly on a side regardless of faction just to make sure both sides fill up) or till 5 minutes prior to the round stopping.

- Last men/woman standing, no cap points at all but also with a certain time limit to prevent the neverending 2 people hideing battle.
Can be open sided (choose any side to join) or closed sided (clan/omni and neutrals only able to choose the side).
The player with the most kills wins the round (or that remains the only player) draw means both will have 50% of the end reward for the round.

- Battle royale, 200 points to reach for each side, every single kill = 1 point (for die hard pvp'ing).
Closed sided which means only neutrals can choose which side to join (or get auto balanced).

- Defend the shrine (or whatever :P), 50 points total or so?
Prevent the opposite side player(s) from reaching a objective, for each player it removes 1 point from the defending team.
Player who reaches the objective is warped back to start spot then for counts.
Time limited and possiblt open sided for balanced teams.

- Capture the flag, no cap points at all but need to hold possession of the flag a certain time.
Everyone is your friend (unattackable) except the person that has the flag, kill the player to capture it and try to win the round.
The one that carries the flag will be marked on radar / compass so it will be very hard to survive and sneak wont work.


There are more possible ideas for it but even if just these would make it in i reckon there would always be one that appeals to someones playstyle more instead of the very monotome choice we got right now.
15 minute rounds for people short on time who do want to get atleast 1 or 2 BS rounds in regardless, other options for people who prefer other playstyles.
Other then that, give up on the current system and modify it quite intensely because it doesnt appeal to alot of people for one or even multiple reasons duo to bugged rounds, not running at all, dislike of the whole idea, one sided teams where the other side doesnt stand a chance etc etc etc (we probably all know those reasons allready as its been a repeatedly beaten to death corpse).

[Variable]

Was there any word on the issue of Battlestation teleporter abuse? some form of 5 second lockout or something?

Var

[Spartanx9]

Looking at the Icons, those include yalms in it. Is that a foreshadowing of Yalms being casted rather than items?

[nitr0]

really liked the docaholic icons, they been a improvement... but those new ones really look older than the game is already, they really look retro.

[Zeephonz]

Some of the new icons are OK, but the rest look like someone just discovered the "Outer Glow" effect in Photoshop, and has gone beserk in the icon database.... waaaay over the top, and should be removed.

I really struggle to see what was wrong with them as they are. This is a sci-fi game, existing ones look sci-fi.

[Baja69]

You call that progress? What I learn here is that the rebalance is going to take much longer than planed. It's not progressing, do you think that we'll be happy for another 6 months because you fix a broken nano just like you did a few months ago?

How I see it is that you are working on too many different big project at the same time, and in the end none of them is close to be ready... ok well, the new icons are...

Thanks for the update tho

[Riawn]

First off - the tile map:
There is texture blending in the Conan engine for all ground tiles making it impossible for us to do something you would consider commonplace...place a straight edge between two textures. As a sci-fi game we have many sidewalks, paths, metal plates etc on the ground that we don't want blending with their surroundings. In Age Of Conan and straight edge you see on the ground is in fact a mesh object that has been placed there. So very significant for maintaining the look and feel of AO to get that to work...and now it does.

Height Map/ Ground Shape:
This was incredibly important as the visual and physical aspects of the ground, while close, were not perfect. This would result in floating buildings, fences, and where the ground did not match previously generated collision floating players. There are some locations where you can see this in current AO where the collision of the mesh does not match the visual representations of it. Without this great work by Parsed this week this would have been a very significant problem going into the future. This was the source of by far the highest number of visual bugs in the new engine....and now it is gone. I'm very happy about this week's progress.

Will any of this fix that annoying "You can't cast while falling" bug that frequently occurs when standing on the border between two polygons?

And speaking of that, how about the related (if not the very same) bug where you get stuck in the bottom of a V-shaped hole and can't warp out or equip a vehicle because you're "falling"?

[Mastablasta]

I'll take two, please.

[Zeroenigma]

Can you change it so we can transfer more than 2 characters every 14 days to test.

[Lektronik]

Battlestations:

There was a fair amount of discussion this week and last about the Battlestations. I took some time to speak with people who were *ahem* hostile concerning the current mechanics in place. After some discussion some modifications were settled on:

1. [Irrelevant adjustment]
2. [Extends the pain of waiting in a horribly nerfed environment.]
3. [Bug fix]
4. [Bug fix]

Hopefully these changes are a step in the right direction.

You really expect us to believe that certain persons who where hostile about the BS mechanics agreed to a few bug fixes? The hostility was before we even knew about the bugs.

And what is with extending rezz room time for the people who are unfortunate enough to be on the low end of the level gaps? You were talking to pvp fanboys, who get tired of killing someone only to see them pop up a minute later. Instead of seeing the real problem of why the PVP'ers are killing so fast, you gave in to their demands and punish everyone else.

Someone please find us a new GD.

[Superflare]

I'll take two, please.

I would advise only one, or those tight leather pants wont fit you anymore!

[Twangleman]

Truly awesome icons, good job!