noggieB
noggieB
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- noggieB
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There is another consideration: Due to the current exposure algorithm, it seems like I get about 6 raids in the hour or two after I publish an outpost. After that I get zero raids for the rest of the cycle! Therefore:
- If you outpost has been raided 6 or 7 times as usual, in a few hours, but since then you have had no raids for many hours, then probably you will not get any more raids. In which case, you may as well prestige early, to get the genmat bonus.
This advice may change, if the exposure algorithm for getting raids changes.
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Based on behaviour observed in other games, kids throwing insults and racial slurs tend to be louder and more spammy than normal people. So they might be a minority, but they can be disproportionately disruptive. This is not speculation. It's the reason why so many games have removed chat. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=why+do+games+remove+chat
But this post isn't about free chat, it's about painting on bases. That is a form of speech which is relatively expensive in time and insynthite, so it would be less likely to be misused. :-)
Anyway, regarding the original question, I think the existing paint sets provide sufficient room for short messages.
A restricted set of words as suggested by root could work. But I also don't see a huge need for it.
Personally I might like to write "2 secrets" meaning "There are 2 secrets to find in this outpost". But then again, someone could easily write that, and then put 0 secrets, just to troll raiders.
For me, I wouldn't object, but I don't need the feature.
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I was getting about 6 raids per prestige before the patch, 0 raids until the bug was fixed, and now back to 6 raids.
That seems about right, because it takes me around 6 raids to gather the synthite for another prestige. (Combined with the other sources of synthite such as tributes etc.)
The new synthite drops might be slightly too high, but they are closer to what I would like than the old drop rate.
(Although the old drop rate would have been fine, if we could use accolates to help pay for prestiges. That would encourage builders to make fun, artistic and ingenious outposts, instead of just going for kills.)
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My theory is:
- Early bases are a bit too punishing for new players. Like some "Normal" outposts are fine, but some are a bit too tough for new players.
- After a couple of weeks, there is not so much feeling of progression, loss of incentive. I don't think grinding for bronze/silver/gold cosmetics will do it. But perhaps a model like Apex Legelds, where there are tonnes of cosmetics, and with enough grind you can get the ones you really want. That might keep people playing?
But as I say, it's difficult for a regular player to imagine the issues of someone who quit the game. We really need to hear from the people who aren't here!
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I had an issue like that during the playtest. Back then I thought it was related to packet loss.
But in case it's related to processing, you could try to reduce the video resolution and graphics details, to see if that helps.
Either way, it would be good to fix it. It's really a frustrating way to die! (Although I very rarely get it these days.)
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A website where people can invite viewers to raid their outposts:
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Just gonna agree that no stats metric is going to be perfect, but most of the suggestions made here would be better than what we have at the moment! Devs can of course tweak the metric over time.
I think the current calculation is a good starting point, but then metrics could bump the outpost up or down one tier.
One concern raised by Loys in https://forums.bhvr.com/Meet-Your-Maker/discussion/364123/be-friendly-to-newbies-save-them-from-mix-maxxed-normal-outposts was that adjusting the difficulty of an outpost would burn the builder who had thought it was in a different tier. Although I guess that mostly bothers min-max builders (who deserve it!) and isn't really a problem if all tiers are getting raided equally anyway.
Another thought is that Normal, Difficult, Brutal could be different for different players. I.e. a low ELO player would see fewer truly brutal outposts, and a high ELO player would see more. This would also allow the devs to distribute outposts to get an equal number of raids, regardless of their calculated tier.
Having three distinct tiers is somewhat artificial anyway, since it's clearly a spectrum from easy to murderous.
Finally, do we even need tiers? How about instead, at the end of a raid, the raider can press "Too easy", "Too difficult" or "Just right" and then the game will give them the next raid, without them even needing to go back to the Sanctuary?
TLDR: Yes, keep the existing rating, but update it slightly with raid metrics, to catch outliers.
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One issue here is that players who know the bases they will raid in advance, can game the system and earn more points than they deserve.
So any kind of sharing like this should be done via Social Raids.
Builders might not want social raids on their active outpost, especially not from streamers, because that will show viewers the secrets of the outpost. They want real, blind raids, so they can earn kills.
Having said that, it would be nice to have an easy way to share social outposts with friends. It's possible at the moment, but it's a bit fiddly. (Also fiddly for builders to load their outpost just to change the status.)
It would be great one day to play some curated lists of the best retired outposts. There must be many beautiful outposts which only 1% of the playerbase has ever seen.
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Suggestion A: Let builders put their retired outposts in the active pools.
- When an outpost is retired, if the builders still wants people to play it, they can still keep it active.
- It will no longer generate rewards for the builder.
- But it will still be there for raiders to enjoy.
- It could be promoted more or less to raiders, depending if it is still receiving accolades.
- It could auto-retire itself after 90% of the playerbase have enjoyed it (or abandoned it).
- Perhaps it should be locked from editing? Perhaps not.
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Suggestion B: Tweak how prestige works.
I understand the current prestige system tries to promote good outposts, to an extent, but it has been made more forgiving since the playtests, which isn't a bad thing. Some suggestions:
- Prestige from levels 2-5 could remain easy to achieve, how it is now. New builders will not be demotivated by losing their outpost, and will have time to tweak it after watching playthroughs.
- Prestiging to levels 6-10 could become progressively more difficult, so the weaker outposts will eventually be weeded out. It should be difficult to reach level 10.
- The later levels could extend the duration of the outpost. So a level 8 outpost might live for a few days. And a level 10 outpost maybe for two weeks. (Well you can tweak the numbers. The point is that every raider should have a chance to play that awesome beautiful outpost!)
- (To balance the longer activation time, it might be suitable to reduce the builder rewards.)
- An alternative way to do this might be to cap prestige at 100 instead of 10, but ensure that 100 is very difficult to reach. So the best outposts will be seen by 10x more raiders than they are now, and good outposts by 5x more raiders.
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Suggestion C: Improve social raid discovery (simpler solution?)
- Let retired outposts go to social, as they do now, but:
- Promote the most popular social maps to raiders in the map UI (perhaps using ELO matching)
- Advantages: No changes to the economy, just some UI. Might be simpler to implement/balance.
- Disadvantages: Raiders won't get rewards for these raids.
- Additional suggestion for social discovery: After completing an outpost, offer raiders an option to "follow" the builder if they liked the outpost, making it easier to discover that builder's new creations in future.
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I would love to hear other suggestions from the community.
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For an example of #2, in Apex Legends, if you run for 200 meters with your gun in hand, then it shows a hint which reminds the player they can press C to holster their weapon and run faster. Most players don't see this, because they already holster their weapon before that. But it's also small enough that it can be ignored, if not needed.
There are other minor ways the tutorials might be improved, but these probably have a lower cost-to-benefit ratio:
- [above]
- [above]
- Optional bonus: Keep the instructions in the corner of the screen, rather than popping up the instructions, forcing the player to close the popup and remember what they just read, with no way to go back!
- Optional bonus: Let us rewind and forwardwind through the tutorial, so we can quickly scan for any information we may have missed.
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Too many edits in a short time can trigger "Waiting for your comment to be approved". 🤷
I like the ideas for weapons targetted to counter certain designs, but the one simple idea I heard that would counter all boring/repetitive/lazy designs is:
- For prestige, make accolades more important than kills
I suspect a 70:30 ratio would do it.
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I wish I could give +2 Artistic to these beautiful outposts.
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Yes to average (or modal) time-to-complete, and maybe even the kill-to-extract ratio could be shown.
Then the long-grind high-kill outposts could be tuned to give more resources. So the challenge is there for people who want it, and the reward is there as an incentive.
Stats like these might provide a better ranking than Normal/Dangerous/Brutal which don't always accurately measure the difficulty of an outpost. (Although as you say, the difficulty also depends on the raider's playstyle.)
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I did experience this on another outpost too. I recorded it on my other machine.
Feeling sad the playtest is over. Might upload later, idk.
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For me, Medium texture quality seemed to be enough, although I don't really understand why.
So if you are on Very High, do play around with the different levels. You may find a sweet spot that solves the rendering, but still keeps some framerate.
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I've also seen that on my "normal " outpost. I think the algorithm for grouping deaths could use a little tweaking.
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Once the game is live, wild experiments like (some of) those might be good as "limited time modes".
That will give the community a chance to try them out, and see the results, but everyone knows that they will stop after a certain date.
Then the devs/community can decide in retrospect whether that mechanic is worth adding permanently.
(I'm sure lots of games do this. I know Apex Legends tested evo shields and heat shields this way, before deciding to add them permanently.)
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Good points.
I have another request for building:
Description of the problem: Sometimes I remove a block (e.g. to make space for a trap, or to fly between rooms) then realise it was important, so I have to undo it. But when I do this, the block loses all its decals and decorations. The undo is not a full restore. (And the same is true when removing a block with traps, or when removing a trap: the undo doesn't restore everything back to how it was.)
Suggestion:
- When you try to remove a block which has decals or decorations on it, it could force you to long-press to remove it (like how removing a modded trap works currently), AND/OR
- Undo should restore the block with the attachment, decals and traps how they were before.
- Additionally, undo of a trap removal should restore the trap with all its mods.
Another, related feature request:
- When you middle-click to copy a block, trap or guard, it should keep the block's orientation, and traps or guards should keep any mods which were applied to them. This would make it easier to move a defense from one location to another.
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I saw someone else suggest that accolades should have greater weight towards prestige points than kills.
That would give builders an incentive to collect accolades rather than farm cheap kills.
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I assume the armour is very uncomfortable. Especially the left arm itches, and the suit keeps slipping. So that's why our character is always trying to scratch that itch, and/or pull the armour back to where it should be.
But I do think every 10 seconds is a bit too often. It would be great if it happened rarely, so it felt more special. (A few other animations would be great too.)
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Giving Harvey a grapple and double-jump won't work. He wouldn't now how to use them.
But if we put the builder in a Harvey suit, and trap them inside their own outpost, they can show raiders the way.
Seriously though, my points are:
- The rule to publish could be: a path that Harvey can walk, OR the creator beats the outpost.
- If the creator beats the outpost, then Harvey could follow the creator's path, instead of doing his usual walk. "Wow, I've never seen Harvey move like that before!"
It might be a pain for the creator if they move one trap, and then have to beat the outpost again.
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Yeah it's true, the raider unlocks are really powerful compared to trap unlocks. So I guess it would be balanced to have a bigger discount for traps+guards than for suits/weapons/hardware. (There are also a lot more things to unlock to get the full set of traps.)
I'd take that free trap for sure. It would certainly help.
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Yesterday I grabbed the genmat and had five traps firing at me. I'm not sure that outpost could be completed if the trap reaction speed was higher. Maybe, only using upgraded equipment.
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I don't mind the current RNG. I enjoy working with the existing bedrock, rather than having an idea in mind before I start building. And to level up specific advisors, I can either raid, or wait.
Also, I don't think the randomisation is so bad? It seems like you either get capacity, or you get lots of genmat, or you have to pay to get both. Like, the randomness is balanced? And even if it's not, you can spend a little synthite to reroll.
Giving builders the ability to add or remove bedrock is an intereting idea, but probably too much work for the developers to consider.
So let's try to make it easy for the developers. What one simple change could they make, to make you 80% happier?
- 1 in 4 burial sites has minimal bedrock, and they advertise it on the selection screen
- Rerolls are cheaper
- More burial sites are on offer, so you are more able to find what you are looking for
- 1 in 4 burial sites get the static stats you suggested (doing it for all of them would be too boring)
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I agree with what you said Loys. My suggestoin was problematic! So I've updated my suggested solution (but kept the original so that your feedback still makes sense!)
I think the difficulty-recognition algorithm is not easy to optimize. Because many traps use human inginuity and psychology. It would probably need to be a full A.I. trained on lots of data, to accurately judge the difficulty of an outpost.
We should probably just accept that some maps will be significantly easier/harder than others in the same category, and we'll just have to live with that. For me, I don't really mind that. I just don't want the newbies to struggle so much that they quit.
Having said that, this won't be a free-to-play game, so anyone who buys it will probably have the incentive to keep trying, longer than usual for F2P games (which really do need to optimise retention).
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Agree with all of those. Please bring that lever back. It felt so visceral, I loved pulling it. Just don't make it too often.
The current voice definitely needs more effects added, to make it more powerful. It would be great to have the choice, when starting the game, of which chimera to work for, male or female.
Changing an outpost's status from the sanctuary (and maybe even collecting resources too), would really save on loading screens.
I think after doing a social raid on an outpost, that outpost should never appear in your map pool selection. All raids should be blind (the player should not have seen the outpost before). This would of course mean remembering which outposts a player has raided in the past, so they won't be offered on the map selection pool.
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Why do we want to raid active outposts? Explanation: So my friend could try out my outpost, even if it's currently active, to give feedback, or just to share. And if I like the style of Y0ghurt's outposts, I could look up his profile, to play more of them, just for fun.
I like the idea of a toggle for social, independent from the current status. But I also think it would be great if we could just "socially raid" any active outpost. (The only reason I can think a builder wouldn't want that, is if their maps are so popular in social raids, that they end up losing kills from normal raids.)
Unfortunately, with or without a toggle, raiding active bases could be abused: Before I raid an outpost, an abuser could ask his friend to play it as a social raid, in order to learn where the traps are.
Fortunately, there is a way to mitigate this: Have the outposts in the selection screen refresh every 60 seconds. Then any abuser who does send their friend to socially explore the outpost, will not have enough time to gather intel.
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Agree with all of these. I used to love pulling that lever, so please bring it back somehow. Just don't make it too often.
If it's difficult to code seeking in the demos, a simple way to mitigate it might be 4x, 8x and 16x replay speeds. This would let viewers do the seeking themselves.
I think a player should be prevented from raiding a base after doing a social raid on it. Raiding should always be on unknown bases. (So yes, the game should keep a record of all the bases a player has raided.)
With that in mind, I would also like the ability to "social raid" any live outpost, even if it's Active or Overdrive. So my friend can raid my outposts, even if they are live. And if I love Y0ghurt's outposts, then I could look up his profile and play more of them, just for fun. (Of course, this would prevent them from appearing in the pool selection in future. We would simply warn the player of that, and leave the choice to them.)
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I like the redesign. I just want to remind readers that "hover" does not exist for controller players. They can surely show the info when the player "navigates" to one of the statuses. But they would also need to be able to navigate off the status, without changing it, if we want to show them the "kill raiders objective" again.
Additionally, I think that a button (e.g. "F") should be pressed (and held?) to change the outpost status. I don't like how lightweight it feels now to change quite an important thing about the outpost!
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According to the announcement in the official Discord...
> Trap Range Preview This new feature allows Builders to toggle on a preview of the range of the traps placed. Being able to clearly visualize the range of effects while building helps Builders to position traps perfectly in conjunction with each other to put the pressure on unsuspecting Raiders.
I haven't noticed this feature yet. Will look for it next time.
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Good points all round. Duos do play less cautiously, resulting in more kills. But they also don't restart the raid as often as solos do, resulting in fewer kills. I guess BHVR should have the stats on which effect dominates.
If the devs did want to nerf duos, something like limiting to 3 revives per run might do it.
That would be enough to let duos run free at the start, but if they die a few times, they will suddenly need to be more cautious!
Another option could be to make revives a piece of hardware that needs to be purchased. But then why not have a self-res for solos?
I guess making duos easier encourages people to invite friends, which grows the player base, and is good for everyone.
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"you can actually load into the outpost and exit again and all gets autocollected"
Whaaat?! :-D
Thanks, that's a great tip.
Would be really nice if you could autocollect it without leaving the Sanctuary. To save on loading screens.
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Little update about my friend: I convinced him to keep trying, and he eventually got the skill to be able to beat the Normal level outposts. However, there was a risk that he was going to uninstall!
I was thinking how the game might be able to prevent putting off the new players. Perhaps:
- It the game detects a new player is failing a lot, and unable to survive any of the outposts they play, then present them with some known easy outposts.
A few easy wins might give them time to learn the basic mechanics, and prepare them for the tougher challenges ahead.
For some extra context, my friend didn't know he could destroy the traps with the sword, didn't know the sword would also lunge, and didn't know which key to press for the grapple! Now he knows these things, and is happily fighting his way through some outposts.
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Sorry to hear that Mefs. Which exact graphics card are you using?
Once of my machines (an Asus ZenBook UX430 with NVidia GeForce MX150) sometimes gets invisible blocks, but then the texture loads in and they become visible.
Increasing Draw Distance didn't help. But I think increasing Texture quality might have helped? Please try that. (My theory was that it was taking time to downsample the original texture, so why not just use the original large texture, and skip the downsampling.)
Now I switched to my better machine for MyM.
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This can happen due to a missing block, or a block that gets in the way of his path.
I can usually find the problem by walking the path myself.
However, I did experience one pathfinding bug, in Meredith by noggieB (me):
https://youtu.be/LIVHPzXFlk8If that's the same bug you have, then good lucky finding the problematic block!
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Looking at the prestige page now, it seems:
- If you want Parts and Synthite, then you are better off waiting for more kills.
- If you want Genmat, then prestige early to get that 15% bonus.
Also if you are in a hurry to expand you outpost's capacity, then you may want to prestige it without waiting.
Having said that, you will still get Parts and Synthite if you prestige. But if it's harder to prestige at higher levels, then - unless you have a beloved outpost that never dies - you will be shortening the life of your outpost by prestiging early.
Do I have it about right?
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By the way, I'm sorry you don't enjoy raiding. Personally, I like to do both, but raiding is just for fun, building is a passion.
The game should definitely support both playstyles. But I think it sort of needs more raiders than builders, because in order to prestige, each outpost needs around ... 9 raids? I wonder if raiding could be more fun for you, if it was easier to find the style of base you like to raid.
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I also agree that grinding for the first few unlocks should be easier. I spent hours just to upgrade my first trap.
However, once you have a few outposts set up, they will give you resources for free, so in a way you just have to wait. That said, if you want synthite, then your outposts need to be effective at killing people, which can be difficult with 0 unlocks!
So I would like if the first few upgrades are a bit cheaper, even if later upgrades are not. (Like, maybe you get a 50% discount on your first three unlocks, whatever they are.) That could lead to some interesting tactics, like do you want a particular weapon which will help you to earn more, or do you want a particular trap to help you to earn more?
Obviously, I don't know how late game balance is, but the first day did feel a bit like endless raiding for little reward, which might not be a great experience for new players.
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When the base is depleted, nobody can raid it, until to Prestige it.
If your base didn't do well (make kills or get accolades) then you cannot Prestige it. (Although I think there is some mechanism to retry.)
One benefit of Prestiging is that the base gains capacity, i.e. you can add more blocks, traps and guards to it.
(I don't know if it also generates more resources than it did at level 1 base, but I wouldn't be surprised.)