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causticBeet posted:The experience for the casual player will basically be “queue up, get absolutely destroyed, get next to no reward, go again.” Reducing the XP you get for landslide losses may come full circle “so bad they’re actually good,” dissuading anyone not interested in playing super competitively enough that the average match quality increases (since no one is playing it). I remember reading at some point that Blizzard would "queue" the lowest of wood league-tier Starcraft 2 players against low AI bots and rewarded it like it was a proper ranked/ladder match just to maintain a general 50% win rate per player just so that even the shittiest never-wins-a-match players would have a reason to keep interacting with the game. I don't know how true it is or was, and if matches were locked to servers it'd probably become very obvious with a small enough playerbase, but it made a certain level of sense as a carrot to keep the casual low-tier players around to be a punching bag for the stacked groups if necessary, since if you're already that low on the totem pole, are you even going to notice you're being low-key fed by bots? It seemed like a win/win kind of idea, I'd be really curious if any online gaas actually does that for pvp
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Jun 2, 2022 00:48
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:I remember reading at some point that Blizzard would "queue" the lowest of wood league-tier Starcraft 2 players against low AI bots and rewarded it like it was a proper ranked/ladder match just to maintain a general 50% win rate per player just so that even the shittiest never-wins-a-match players would have a reason to keep interacting with the game. Idk if it counts as GAAS (probably since they play hard into the battle pass stuff) but Player Unknown Battlegrounds did this at some point and it felt really bad. It felt incredibly transparent, the bots had terrible AI and were unrewarding to fight, and for as rough as PUBG is it’s way ahead of NW in terms of overall production value.
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Jun 2, 2022 00:54
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Herstory Begins Now posted:more aggressive than zero presence would be literally any presence, I suppose  At least they used PrintScreen for the second picture, but somebody on the forums questioned why the screencaps for both server visits were cropped so they had no UI in them, making it impossible to verify that the moderators had actually done anything with real players on real servers. The poster challenged players to reply if they'd actually played an Arena match against the CMs this afternoon, and so far nobody's responded. But to your point, I guess even an imaginary presence is more than 0. causticBeet posted:Idk if it counts as GAAS (probably since they play hard into the battle pass stuff) but Player Unknown Battlegrounds did this at some point and it felt really bad. It felt incredibly transparent, the bots had terrible AI and were unrewarding to fight, and for as rough as PUBG is it’s way ahead of NW in terms of overall production value. Other games have implemented the 'fake player' AI decently, with the biggest example that comes to mind being Minion Masters, a free-to-play cross between Hearthstone & a DOTA auto-battler. It works pretty well in that game, and it makes sense for a free-to-play game to give new players a chance to discover what cards are strong instead of getting beaten mercilessly by long-time players with perfectly meta decks. Of course, there are also some ethical issues about letting players believe they are winning against real players to encourage them to purchase items from the cash shop, but I guess that's kind of a different topic. Edit: The forum moderators are now just locking new threads that talk about trapping people in tents, which I take to mean they don't plan on solving the problem any time soon so they're just hoping to slow down it's spread to every server. Edit 2: I just realized the irony about how we're theorizing that AGS could improve their game by using bots effectively after they've struggled fruitlessly to fight bots in both New World & in Lost Ark. When I was looking up how much development AGS actually does for New World's content, I discovered a ton of stories about how much of a plague bots have been in that game, with AGS reporting that they've banned over a million bots from Lost Ark and it's still 1 of the game's biggest problems. Discospawn fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Jun 2, 2022 |
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Jun 2, 2022 01:11
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We're in the unfortunate age where you kinda have to design your economy around the assumption that farming setups will mass bot the game. There's ways you can mitigate it (good heuristics to try and catch and ban bots, subscription/B2P models that make them less profitable, etc.), but not planning around it at all makes all that mitigation a fool's errand.
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Jun 2, 2022 07:51
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Blizzard has software that's the next thing to, if not just a, rootkit running client-side at all times, banned multiclient input programs outright because they were having trouble telling the difference between "legitimate multiboxers" and "botting accounts" and are still managing to fail hard enough at bot removal that most classic players think they're doing literally nothing. Which is to say, yeah, if there's any slight economic incentive to bot, someone's going to bot, no matter how technically proficient your anti-botting solution is, and the only time there's actually 0 incentive in an mmo is if the game itself is just dead. Which I guess is a solution...
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Jun 2, 2022 08:09
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Or you could lean in and say that every bot is another copy/subscription sold.
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Jun 2, 2022 08:28
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The Lone Badger posted:Or you could lean in and say that every bot is another copy/subscription sold. hell if you ban them every 3 months, not only are you selling 4x as many copies of the game every year, you're also getting a convenient quarterly users boost
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Jun 2, 2022 08:52
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:I remember reading at some point that Blizzard would "queue" the lowest of wood league-tier Starcraft 2 players against low AI bots and rewarded it like it was a proper ranked/ladder match just to maintain a general 50% win rate per player just so that even the shittiest never-wins-a-match players would have a reason to keep interacting with the game. maelstrom is a pirate ship battle royale game that for years has had a playercount so low that most of the time it is in single digits, and I encountered a bunch of people who played quite a bit of it and yet never figured out most of the opponents were just bots, so yeah I'd say that system can work if it's done right
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Jun 2, 2022 09:20
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Remove clipping from tents. Where do I apply for game developer job?
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Jun 2, 2022 12:10
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tent walls and tent traps were a thing even when I played the game in its first month, they needed your help a long time ago they need a lot more help than just fixing tent walls though
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Jun 2, 2022 16:30
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This morning they finally made an official post about their 'increased PvP rewards' patch from two nights ago: Like most of AGS' communications, it's long-winded and seems to be an admission they did something bad/wrong without apologizing or admitting fault and even managing to sound self-congratulatory. It's kind of a weird contrast to the pre-patch notes, which provided no details about the change, while at the same time still being weirdly vague by not adding any numbers to the post to actually help quantify the issue. I think the post's intent is to justify themselves by looking at that Excel chart I posted yesterday and saying, "well, technically, if you consider XP & Salt to be different variables and you only look at whether the numbers went up or down, we did improve rewards for more use-cases than ones where we reduced rewards." The official forums seem to be busier than I've seen them in a while, but the vast majority of threads are negative and the game's player count is lower than it's ever been, so I wonder if increased forums activity is a common symptom before the true death of a game. AGS doesn't seem concerned, as they're continuing their trend of only replying to threads that are vague, white-noise, positive feedback, as you can see in this screencap (the little orange hammers indicate when a community mod has replied in a thread):  And here's the actual exchange in the thread:  Players have long suspected that there might actually be a huge barrier between the players and the developers where the CM's really do only send positive feedback to them and the devs are left scratching their head as to why players keep leaving the game. Finally, here's a newly released screenshot of what the next Prime Gaming cosmetic skin will look like:  So if you ever wanted to look like the T-1000 was elected to be the Canadian Pope, here's your chance. The forums response to the reveal was that players wished they could dress as the bandits in the background rather than whatever aesthetic AGS was going for with this cosmetic (which I agree with, because I bet you could make a pretty good 'Early 90's Undertaker' outfit with their clothes & black/purple dye).
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Jun 2, 2022 21:40
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New World: A change that decreases XP but increases salt
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Jun 2, 2022 22:28
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Cat Puke posted:New World: A change that decreases XP but increases salt 
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Jun 2, 2022 22:29
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Discospawn posted:This morning they finally made an official post about their 'increased PvP rewards' patch from two nights ago: AGS hosed up (again lol and lmao) by showing that bandit armor because I would reinstall just to claim it, run around in it a bit, then uninstall again just in case the game ever gets decent enough to play again.  I really wanna know the thought process of that picture. 
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Jun 2, 2022 22:57
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AGS has been trying to lower expectations for content over the next 2 months, with the exception of a June Double XP event they've been hinting at for several weeks. They even went so far as to answer players' concerns by saying that yes, every type of XP will be included in the event, including crafting. It seems like a simple idea to implement, just doubling the amount of XP gained from all activities for a month, as a way to encourage lapsed players to come back and to make existing players feel more rewarded for doing the same content over and over again. Here's today's official announcement:  For the month of June, from Monday morning through Thursday morning of each week (72 hours / 3 days), specific XP categories will receive double progress. Not only does this seem needlessly stingy and unlikely to entice players back to the game, it encourages people to play the game in the least fun way possible, by exclusively focusing on a single aspect of the game for a week at a time. If somebody were given the task of making players burn out on the game even faster than their current rate, this is the kind of event they would create. It's not even the majority of each week, it's not even like Monday morning to Thursday night so they can make another post like the one above where they can say, "technically, XP is doubled in at least 1 category for most of June." Reddit and the official forums haven't had a chance to react to the announcement yet, but it seems pretty obvious what kind of response this will get. They didn't even start with doubling PvP XP, the obvious choice after the negative reception to poorly balanced PvP rewards and the further reduction to XP from Arena losses with the latest patch. Edit: I mean, it seems disingenuous even to advertise it as spanning 4 days when it literally stops at the same second that June 9th starts in PST. Edit 2: And their weekly patches are deployed on Wednesday evenings, even further shortening the event if they continue to do those in June. I don't know why, but this announcement is giving me an aneurysm more than anything else I've posted about recently. Discospawn fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Jun 2, 2022 |
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Jun 2, 2022 23:45
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Jun 2, 2022 23:51
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Anita Dickinme posted:AGS hosed up (again lol and lmao) by showing that bandit armor because I would reinstall just to claim it, run around in it a bit, then uninstall again just in case the game ever gets decent enough to play again. The devs continue to show that they do not understand their players, their competition, their own game, or even games in general. People mainly want simple cosmetics that they can use to make multiple sets or realistic themes like swashbuckler, bandit, knight, noble, etc. They don’t want 10 versions of BDSM masks and horns everywhere. New World has a significant number of helms that completely or mostly cover facial features. A great picture from their article on cosmetics from launch:  And another one:  Awful. Edit: gently caress, even the ad for bonus event has someone in a gimp mask. Saltpowered fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 2, 2022 23:59
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I wouldn’t say that I’m especially fashionable or even aesthetically sensitive in games, but some of those are just dumb.
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Jun 3, 2022 00:09
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Lawlicaust posted:People mainly want simple cosmetics that they can use to make multiple sets Lawlicaust posted:Edit: gently caress, even the ad for bonus event has someone in a gimp mask. https://twitter.com/playnewworld/status/1491244113785933824 And you can't talk about New World's February skins without bringing up this abomination:  That picture is from their official promotional update on the official website. It is still live. I did not alter that image in any way. Yes, it looks like a pair of testicles on a severed head on a mannequin body. No, you can't change any of the colors if you buy the skin. Yes, it was gender neutral so male characters could wear it:  No, it didn't look better from other angles. Yes, there were other skins available in February:   No, they weren't much better. Discospawn fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 00:56
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like a bunch of rejected content from a failed season of project runway
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Jun 3, 2022 01:00
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It looks like it was inspired by the wrapper of a Cadbury egg.
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Jun 3, 2022 02:37
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Sorry but that Fool for Love skin is probably the best thing that has come out of this game.
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Jun 3, 2022 03:29
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BadLlama posted:Sorry but that Fool for Love skin is probably the best thing that has come out of this game. Gosh I'd love be trapped in a tent with someone wearing that.
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Jun 3, 2022 04:20
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fool for love would be a great skin in a game where every other skin wasn't just as dumb looking. MMOs need these kind of silly attention-grabber cosmetics, but the effect is less funny when you're not thinking "haha oh those developers, what goofy guys" and more sad when you're thinking "oh so they were being serious with all of this"
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Jun 3, 2022 04:37
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What's funny is that this feedback about silly cosmetics was already well established during the beta, as they got a ton of pushback about the $9.99 rainbow lion they tried to sell in July of last year. This was back when the game's hype train was still huge, and the cosmetic's mockery got so bad they removed the rainbow lion and replaced it several months later with the 'Ashen Tiger' cosmetic, which was the same pet just with a greyscale color scheme. Amazon's curse (where their games are so bad they cease to exist shortly after release without leaving a trace) has already started to affect New World, so this is the only video I could find that clearly shows the rainbow lion alongside the reworked version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2EESYD-uKM&t=214s I think they still left some of the rainbow version's color/texture effects on the rework, because for some reason the 'Ashen Tiger' looks really slimy: 
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Jun 3, 2022 05:27
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Oh god, that rainbow lion is hideous. Just absolutely awful. And they charged money for it!? And then the grayscale one also looks like poo poo, but it's at least not a crime against my eyes. All I can see for the Fool of Love costume is a person with a bra stuck to their head. Hell, half the premium sets look like a level 32 WoW character with gear from 4 different sets slapped together because that's what happens when you're leveling.
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Jun 3, 2022 06:29
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It's so difficult to contribute anything other than at this point. I'm genuinely stunned anyone still plays this at all, given just how stacked the current media market is. There are so many better ways to spend one's time. That said, the XML stuff is hilarious to me. I've worked with scripting and even code extensively on previous projects (a number of the independent games I've worked on have been translated/localized "to the metal", as it were, and I handled script insertion to the code) and poo poo like getting the variable inputs correct is what I would demand of first and second-year undergraduate college students. Casual game modders get it right on the regular. It's the easiest thing in the world to check and debug in a test environment because you can just have the sheet open and test each debuff to make sure it's Doing Thing, and if it isn't, you just zip to it and check to make sure the values are correct. That these errors are not being caught internally by the developers speaks to a truly dire development environment; this isn't even a tools issue, because the tool involved should be no more complex than Notepad++. In a single-player game, this would be the easiest thing in the world to make a community patch for. I'd been skeptical about it previously, but I'm going to have to echo Digital Prophet a bit at this point: I begin to wonder how much computer experience a number of the people who worked or are working on this have. These are not the kind of mistakes I would expect anyone with a dedicated-high-school-or-better familiarity with software development and coding practices to make, much less developers who ostensibly have years of experience, if not in games then in development generally.  And by god and christ this is the most hideous screenshot of the game I've yet seen. Are the graphics settings on low in this screenshot? That snow is genuinely sub-Skyrim level, and that game is a decade old.
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Jun 3, 2022 12:39
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After the past week, it's good to see that Amazon has it's priorities straight by posting this stickied thread to their Game Feedback section: Obviously the game's main menu seems like something that should've been focused on earlier in the game's life cycle, and is also the kind of functionality I would expect a development team to be able to test internally. But I guess AGS needs players to give them feedback like: -provide an option or console command variable to skip all the production company videos when booting the game -make 'Continue' buttons responsive when clicked on (somebody in the forums captured this clip as an example, enable sound to hear their button presses): https://imgur.com/8qqbdB7 -don't show the 'your server was merged' message on every login to the game:  -don't make the player accept the seizure/photosensitivity warning on every startup When I played the game during it's Free Weekend, I remember laughing at how awkward the game's startup was with all these screens, but I had assumed that was just the new player experience and it would improve after agreeing to everything once and creating a character. I guess that was not the case, and even just logging in to New World is a 3 minute grind every time you want to play. It's still a bizarre thing to create an official thread over. I wonder if they've been testing this game for it's entire lifecycle with a special build that doesn't use the same launch menu as the real game, and they've just now realized that might be a problem. SpaceDrake posted:And by god and christ this is the most hideous screenshot of the game I've yet seen. Are the graphics settings on low in this screenshot? That snow is genuinely sub-Skyrim level, and that game is a decade old.
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Jun 3, 2022 16:17
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The snow areas (or is it just area?) also always looked substantially worse than the rest of the game. It's probably the only example in the game of a proper prioritization being given to something that is less common and therefore should be less important and less well done. I don't remember it looking that bad though.
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Jun 3, 2022 19:17
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Those areas were hamfisted into the game toward the end of development.
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Jun 3, 2022 19:25
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Man AGS is a content monster like the glory days of Star Citizen or early FO76
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Jun 3, 2022 21:08
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DEATH COMES QUICKLY It's funny how quickly a New World server starts to die once it becomes locked for character creation and server transfers. Barri was reaching it's server capacity with a triple digit queue for over a week, but they locked it 2 days ago and it only peaked at 1750 today. Even accounting for the population decrease across all of the EU region, that's a huge drop, meanwhile it's sister server Dry Tree is now consistently reaching the population cap and seems to be growing. In the US region, Pluto was the busiest server that routinely reached the cap every night after Asmongold joined it, but AGS locked it for nearly a month and now it struggles to reach a peak population of 600. THE WORLD IS CONSUMING ITSELF The post earlier about bad snow textures convinced me to go back into the bug report thread so I could link some examples of the video issues players have experienced since the last patch. All of these examples are from different users on the forums: Game looks like the first 5 minutes of a Bob Ross painting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBGaEcBttdo Draw distance set to 0  Using Netscape '95 to load in ground textures  The imagebelow actually makes me think it's a layering issue, where the game doesn't think the lower-most texture (the dirt/path) is actually visible because there's a different layer on top of it (the rocks/gravel), so it only bothers rendering the top layer at the correct resolution. This would also tie back into my theory of why cosmetic capes broke with this build to add that ugly purple sun visual to them, when they were just trying to fix cloaks that only rendered from 1 direction.  And here is a separate visual bug that made it to the top of Reddit 2 weeks ago, before the Arena patch was released, that kind of shows that there might have already been some problems with the game's rendering. https://v.redd.it/4nxp9y2uj4191/DASH_1080.mp4?source=fallback
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Jun 3, 2022 22:17
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We’ll see how long it takes them to realize that one server per region isn’t a bad thing. Even if it’s so populated that there’s never any recourses available to harvest the market will be flooded with everything and will be cheap. Then a bunch of different companies vying for control will always keep wars coming. I don’t see the issue with removing the queue at all honestly… unless the game servers just can’t handle, what 2,000 players at a time? At which point wow. 
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Jun 3, 2022 22:23
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Holy poo poo, it's so obvious how copy+paste the world is with all that vegetation gone. Truly incredible art work. Did they really just build one combined mesh for grasslands and then programatically spread it across the terrain to generate the world?
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Jun 3, 2022 22:26
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if you’re talking about the ground texture that’s just a trick everyone uses where they generate the same LoD for distant ground textures instead of a unique LoD for every “variant” the player usually comes across, as it saves a bunch of texture space. Generally artists and directors won’t allow them to be so obvious but it’s hard to accuse AGS of giving a poo poo nowadays. Like you said, it’s not even really noticeable when vegetation is working like it should. That’s not to say they aren’t just copy/pasting where they shouldn’t be of course. Aren’t a bunch of the forts just the same fort but rotated a little bit? It’s extremely obvious even from just looking at the game’s map lol
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Jun 3, 2022 23:47
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Anita Dickinme posted:AGS hosed up (again lol and lmao) by showing that bandit armor because I would reinstall just to claim it, run around in it a bit, then uninstall again just in case the game ever gets decent enough to play again. Greetings Fellow Adventures
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Jun 4, 2022 00:14
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Haruharuharuko posted:New world: the glitches are in tents
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Jun 4, 2022 00:25
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That Works posted:New world: the glitches are in tents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJWEYfCquVA (it's not really the new meta, I just think that the tent clips keep getting funnier)
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Jun 4, 2022 02:40
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in tents, and porpoises
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Jun 4, 2022 04:20
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Discospawn posted:Draw distance set to 0 Like others have mentioned, in principle this is not insane, and indeed has simply been a reality that 3D artists rendering outdoor environments in interactive entertainment have had to struggle with for a full quarter-century at this point. There simply is not enough texture budget, even in the wildest, most over-rammed cards, to give the entire ground a constantly unique texture (and that would be absurd labor in any event). You need to use a repeating texture of some sort, perhaps with some variants for level of detail at distance, to handle the base terrain geometry. (As an aside, this has me wondering how precisely New World handles terrain geometry, which is often implemented differently than "object" geometry like a house.) Done correctly, you'll never notice it in normal gameplay. But this, of course, isn't done correctly, and again is something I'd tutor college students against doing. You don't want the ground tile to have, well, an obvious tile; you shouldn't have an element within the tile that very obviously draws the eye and repeats, but instead you want something that looks like it seamlessly integrates at the edges and maintains a good, consistent look between tiles. People looking closely will still notice but it won't be as obvious. You absolutely need to design your game so that it still maintains its artistic integrity and style even at the lowest settings (this is one of the things that old pre-to-early-WoW Blizzard was incredibly famous for, as an example), and clearly nobody in an art director position at AGS gave enough of a poo poo to make sure that things like this vista didn't happen. The "is there a ground texture" box got ticked, the "does draw distance work" box got ticked, done, ship it. quote:Using Netscape '95 to load in ground textures This is just hilarious, meanwhile; I can genuinely say this is reminiscent of the ground texture quality in the first Planetside, a game I played obsessively as a young college student. Literally twenty years ago. On a GeForce 3. Except that Planetside had detail textures that worked. quote:And here is a separate visual bug that made it to the top of Reddit 2 weeks ago, before the Arena patch was released, that kind of shows that there might have already been some problems with the game's rendering. Ahh, the wonders of the z-buffer. How does it work? Especially since it's not even obvious what would be in front of the player to cause this. If it's the pier object then my ascends to heaven.
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Jun 4, 2022 08:08
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