Agent

While this is technically true, it drastically increases the cost of initially joining a server, and makes custom content servers completely nonviable (since they may very well have to download several GB of content to join the server). That's not really a benefit.

The development team does not control what levels server owners load onto their servers. We often include new levels from the community in our game patches though, particularly the ones server owners seem interested in having on their servers, for exactly the reason you've mentioned. Again though, servers are capable of serving custom content from their servers if they make appropriate infrastructure decisions. Since this seems too complicated for the average server owner though, we're considering setting up a centralized custom content repository for FPI and CT to use (or any server by default). Yes, that's near-ideal. The only existing issues with the in-game download mechanism is that it doesn't notify you that a download is in progress when transitioning between levels, and it seems to have a timeout. Download speed is the largest existing issue, which again is an infrastructure issue, not a code one.

To be as clear as possible, this is not an issue with the download mechanism. A launcher downloader would be susceptible to the exact same issues, except even more so since it'd be a centralized repository. It also doesn't really make sense to download potentially massive amounts of custom content that you're very likely to not need (i.e: a custom map server loaded with many custom levels would no longer be viable). The previous launcher based solution wasn't well thought out, and can't be re-added. This has been discussed internally repeatedly. An in-game solution should be preferred, and the in-game solution should ideally only download custom content on demand, which the current mechanism does. Again, this isn't an issue with the download mechanism, this is a server infrastructure issue. We can't just invent more bandwidth.

I think this is more an issue with download server bandwidth than actual custom content or the download mechanism. When 64 players all hit the download at the same time, if that server only has 1 Gb/s uplink, that means that the average player will have at most 15.625 Mb/s, or a little under 2 MB/s. That assumes the server's upload is fully utilized, which it may very well not be. The burst bandwidth demand is just way too high for their server setup. Custom content desperately needs to be moved to some sort of shared CDN, which I've already poked at freaky and Goku about privately slightly, for the aforementioned reason.

Max is currently being given another chance, and is being monitored for now. For what it's worth, his behavior has substantially improved over what it used to be. Unless he slips back into using hate speech and targeted slurs, he likely won't be muted, at least not globally.

Assuming this is an all time dream team we're talking about, in no particular order: boxes - master strategist, renegod, wildcard (infantry, tanking, support) yosh - yell at people until they do what they're supposed to, tanking, commander powers, gin poi - offense (infantry path control, tanking) SMayhew - base defense, support, tanking Gliven - tanking, support Sarah - wildcard (infantry, tanking, support) Madkill - Morale boost, tanking DoctorB0NG - Morale boost, yell at people until they do what they're supposed to, tanking, support, spood beast Minji - wildcard (infantry, tanking, support, sneaking) LavaDr4gon - wildcard (infantry, tanking, support, sneaking) if this were top 20 instead: Havoc89 - tanking, support jpjtyld - offense (infantry path control, tanking) Fr4nt1c - Morale boost, tanking, support Legolas - Morale boost, wildcard Bananas - offense (infantry path control, tanking) Xeon Wraith - offense Quincy - offense KrypTheBear - tanking, possibly morale boost testman - tanking Glacious - tanking, gives best chance of GTA shenanigans afterwards

For transparency, MintLemonade's most recent post (made < 5 minutes ago) has been hidden due to grossly inappropriate language and assaults, and his posts are now moderated (require approval by any moderator) as a result. I ask people not to degrade into personal attacks, otherwise the topic will have to be locked, as Kaunas suggested.

You claimed there was an actionable offense in-game. It's my job to look into that, no matter who complains. I'm not looking for jabs, I went looking to find out what happened, just to learn that nothing actually happened and that the entire scenario seemed fabricated. Your reluctance to give me any data to help me filter these chat logs just verifies that. I fact checked the game time bit not as a jab, but to point out that you do play nearly as much as poi, and that the comparisons aren't fair. You're saying a player has no life, that they play the game endlessly, yet you have similar game time this month. You're trying to manipulate and frame a false narrative that simply isn't true. Yes, poi is my "clique", even though we haven't played a game in the last 3+ weeks. I play PUGs more than I play with poi. This false narrative that I'm defending 1 person, is false. This false narrative that that 1 person is some incredibly close friend of mine, is false. We're friends for sure, but I don't think you know where I put my time, and how much I value level-headed discussion. You're arguing in bad faith. You're deceitful, and it shows. When you're called out, you last out. If you can't handle discussing issues based on merit, fact, and fairness, you shouldn't join in discussions at all.

Actually, I think I was looking at the wrong numbers for game time this month -- I was looking at GDI game time. Corrected data: MintLemonade: 138659 seconds = 1 days 14:30:59. poi: 149015 seconds = 1 days 17:23:35.

If you think I'm trying to exclusively defend poi, you're mistaken. I'm trying to defend players' right to play games with friends, which applies to everyone -- you, me, poi, Gliven, MintLemonade, and everyone else. It's for everyone's benefit. Everyone deserves to be treated fairly and equally. If what people dislike is their play style, then there's no reason to complain about stacking. This is part of why I'm becoming increasingly convinced that "stacker" is just becoming a word of hate. It's not about the stacking (those people playing together), it's about their play style or game skill or just who they are. We should instead be talking about and focused on team balance. We can come up with some neat ideas to try to help with team balance. As I showed earlier, there's not an easy or effective way (that I'm aware of) to address team stacking, and even the most brutal solution (disabling team swapping and forcing people back onto the same team, regardless of team player counts) will only impact at most around 1/4 games. They're separate issues, separate things. We should encourage team play and communication. We should encourage playing with friends. We should encourage addressing team balance issues. We should discourage hateful language. And you don't deserve to be attacked in-game either. If you have a name, or a time, or screenshots, I'll gladly look into the chat logs and investigate. That's the same burden of proof I ask of everyone who reports an issue. Unfortunately I can't find the word "turkey" or "MintLemonade" in the global chat logs, despite having been logging all day yesterday. So I hate to have to ask, but did this actually happen, or is this just yet another slanderous smear? As a fact check, you've played RenX for at least 19 hours, 26 minutes, 45 seconds this month. poi has played 25 hours, 57 minutes, 56 seconds. Neither stat includes games which were left early. So yes, poi does play more (about 33% more) , but not nearly as much as you claim. We want people to play the darn game and have fun. We all want to be able to play the game and have fun. Nobody on the team wants to dive into the swamp of an issue that's team stacking, because we're trying to come up with ideas to address the real issue: team balance. I agree. If there's a map design issue though, please open a separate topic about it.

I guess there's a few things here. Different people find different things fun -- some people don't like playing on opposing teams, some people don't like playing on the same team, but I think most people like variety. This is also where perception can really matter though I think. If 2 people are on voice chat together, there's a 50% chance they'll end up on the same team naturally. That's not really stacking, that's just people playing together and happening to be on the same team. Then there's a chance they might just prefer to play together, especially if they just played against eachother or its their first match on voice chat. See below for "stack math". Just personally, I don't play Renegade X by myself ever. I really never have. I've always played with EKT folk, then TmX folk, then CT folk, and more recently just whenever someone invites me to play or PUGs. In general, I just don't play multiplayer games by myself. If I want to play a game by myself, I pick up something singleplayer, like recently I've started a new play through of Ogre Battle 64. I'm not saying everyone (or even a majority) should be like that, or that people who solo queue into games don't exist, because obviously they do. I don't think this game would survive without those solo players. I just also don't think this game would survive without group players. Knowing my own habits, if I felt discouraged from playing with friends, I probably just wouldn't play at all. Now for the fun stack math: If we're talking about a pair playing together on the same team, 50% of games by default aren't "stacked". They're naturally assigned. If you end up on opposing teams but want to play together, there's a 50% chance the teams won't be even (i.e: there's an odd number of total players). Assuming they're the only people who want to switch teams, or that they have the fastest ability to click the "Change Team" button, that means there's a 50% chance they can still swap onto the same team immediately. Then if the teams are even, there's still an unknown% chance that one of them will be able to swap anyways, as the result of a request team change. I suppose as the player count grows, the chance of a request-team-change succeeding also grows. This means that if you're determined to play with someone you can manage that for 75%+ of your games, depending on the average success rate of a request team change (a stat I don't have) and your ability to change teams before anybody else. I suppose this means if two people are playing together and have a preference to playing on the same team, 50% of their games will be together by happenstance, ~25% will be truly "stacked", and ~25% will be against each other against their own desire. These rates will also be affected by: people leaving (makes switching easier), other people wanting to change teams (can potentially make switching harder). Assuming the rates above are accurate, if people were only concerned about genuinely stacked pairs, ~25% of games (assuming max rate of swap success) are what people are saying merit concern. For any groups larger than 2, the rate of successfully stacking decreases for each additional player in the group (because it's harder to get those swaps successfully). So, what can be done to reduce the ~25% game impact? Disable team swapping. I'm personally vehemently opposed to this idea, as it's easily bypassed and has unintended consequences. It actively discourages people from trying to play together, which in my personal opinion moves Renegade X away from being team-based and about teamplay. It's also easily circumvent-able using F5 -> reconnect. Disable request team changes. This might honestly be worth revisiting? This can also be worked around though by using F5 -> reconnect (you leave, person who wanted to swap is able to swap, you rejoin on the other team). Limit sequential games together for any two players, essentially just disabling team swap for those two players. I'm not sure if this could actually work at all and would probably have many unintended consequences, and would be incredibly nontransparent. Can partially circumvent using F5 -> reconnect. Limit sequential team swaps for any individual player (i.e: only swap once every 5 games). Again may lead to unintended consequences (if you're like Tom and like you swap to the losing team, you suddenly aren't able to do that often). Can partially circumvent using F5 -> reconnect. A common theme with the above possible ideas: they can be broken using F5 -> reconnect. Can we make that not the case? Yes, we could force people back onto their previous team. Should we? I personally don't think so. If you F5 -> reconnect and one team has fewer players, logically you should end up on that team. If you're put back on your old team, then the teams are stacked by player count (i.e: 22 v 20). So what can you do, if you want to implement one of the above, but also want to put people on the best team at the time of join? Well, you could punish players for doing that. That seems a bit unfair though since rules like that will lend themselves to be enforced inconsistently (enforcement relies on ability to identify a user doing so) and, at that point, you're saying "we'd rather you not play at all, than to play together". All of that begs the question, why are we trying to discourage people from playing together to begin with? Would we rather them not play the game at all? All we stand to gain by trying to address stacking, is a maximum 25% of games. I still feel the cost is greater than any possible gain. But there's still the over-arching issue of team balance. Naturally having a bunch of people who are statistically more likely to win on the same team will more likely result in a win for those players than not. This is something that can, in theory, actually be addressed. We can address this by trying to use more than just the last game's score to balance teams. We can try using leaderboard rank. We can implement a separate MMR. We can implement a login system, so that everybody has a leaderboard rank and MMR. We can implement a squad system so that players who want to play together aren't team swapping at all, so we can take that into account when balancing teams. The fun part of the last possible idea is that it makes stacking much easier, but for the sake of improving team balance. Which I personally think demonstrates that the issue isn't really stacking, and that it never should've been about stacking. Stacking is largely perceptual. Team balance is impossible to make perfect, but we sure as heck have room to improve. Complaining about team stacking, in my very personal opinion, is more about expressing hatred towards those players than it is a yearning for more balanced teams. Which is part of why I said in my previous post: we've got to stop jabbing at each other, and calling someone a "stacker", no matter who they are, is a jab. This ended up being about 5x longer than I'd intended, but that's my rant for the day.

I'd like to expand on this a bit since the thread's heading more towards just talking about stacking in general. Whenever I hear that one or two players are having a drastic effect on the outcome of games, I look at the leaderboards and see how they're comparing to their peers. Here's the data I see: I see poi has about as much impact on a game as Kaunas, bioz 4d, Owl, or MARIUSZ. If you're on a team with poi, you have a 60% chance of victory. If you're on a team with Sarah, you have a 58% chance of victory. He has slightly less impact on win chances than ef-, for example, who wins almost 2/3 of their matches. These stats aren't perfect of course, but data doesn't lie. I think a 10% impact due to skill, assuming the average player has a 50% chance of victory, is fair. As I've said before time and time again, I largely think the issue is perceptual. The other name dropped here is jpj, who is more likely to make your team lose than win, according to the stats: That's a 44% win rate for his last 50 games. The dev team takes team balance seriously, and we do genuinely hope to improve that, but I still think it's important to realize how much of this issue genuinely is perceptual. These "elite players" aren't so elite at all; they don't carry the games themselves. They just do what they're supposed to do, which is play the game, and hopefully they're inviting their friends along for the ride. Whether it's the "CT Stack" or the "jpoi stack" or the "German stack" or the "dev stack", I don't think it makes sense to attribute entire matches to a small handful of people. I don't think it makes sense to punish people in these "stacks" with verbal abuse and harassment. It just doesn't make sense to me to discourage people from inviting their friends to play the game. If we discourage people from playing together, they're still going to play together -- it just won't be on Renegade X. We spent years encouraging people to play together. That's what made TmX and CT fun places to be, hanging out with others and playing games together, and occasionally trying out silly tactics such as spood beast APCs and the occasional SBH shenanigans. I don't think we should ever discourage that. I still don't think we should ever discourage people from playing with their friends. What does need discouraging is the senseless jabbing at one another. Stop calling each other "elites". Stop calling each other "stacker". Don't bash people for "rage quitting", don't call eachother "2 faced cunt" or "rat", don't call each other "catfish". Don't claim people's posts have great "cognitive dissonance" just because they're trying not to stir shit. Don't drag people's personal lives into the chat of a video game for ffs, as none of us are without sin. Just play the game, and play with each other. If you can't stand the idea of playing with or against someone, then ignore their existence. If you want to get along better with someone, try playing with them rather than against them -- we have voice channels on the Renegade X discord for a reason. I hope more than anything to see the community embrace teamwork again. I hope to see people make the same wonderful memories I have from playing with people in EKT, TmX, and CT. I hope to see the community have fun again.

I'm sorry you feel this way. I know moderator inaction has been an issue for many years, and I hope you know that we're genuinely trying to address the problem by empowering global moderators to take action. We're providing new tools (the ability to place chat bans from in-game, for example), comprehensive guidelines, and streamlined procedure (such as chat ban auditing). Hopefully these new tools will be useful to server owners too, and we're adding more, such as admin messages (akin to old ren's) and warning messages (very similar to admin messages). Some of these changes are completely internal and very recent, so they might not be as visible as they need to be. It takes time to ensure everybody is both treated fairly and given chances to improve their behavior. Muting people after you've been targeted for so long isn't meant to be a token action just to make you feel better. It's to try and improve the situation for everybody. It's the result of the new procedures for escalation, and in order to maintain fairness, we have to start with warnings and 24-hour mutes -- we're avoiding jumping straight into long-term chat bans now. As far as game design choices go, I'm glad to say they're generally agreed upon by most of the team. The CQC implementation changes may be mostly the work of a single dev, but they're in the game because they were discussed by everybody in the team who's interested in balance discussions. They're in-game because we generally agreed that the changes were for the better. They're in-game, because the game needed to be more "noob friendly". Not every game design change is going to be immediately popular, but I certainly hope players are able to warm up to them. Rest assured, balance discussions are still constantly held, and we're continually improving. There's even some small balance changes in the upcoming patch, which we're eager to release. Stacking is still a common topic within the community and the development team. There's no easy fixes to the issue, and much of it's perceptual. Sad to say, you've become the unfortunate posterchild for the issue. For what it's worth, we are trying to address the issue of team balance. I believe RypeL has some planned changes for the in-game team balancer, and I know Havoc has been talking with server owners increasingly about the issue. As a very long-term goal, I personally hope to be able to add some sort of MMR-based balancer once we eventually have a login system. Even with all the changes in the world though, nobody can completely control how others behave toward one another. All we can do is try our best, and hope that players will try their best too. When someone smears your name or throws insults at you, it's probably best not to react emotionally, and rather to ignore it and possibly report it. We're pretty much all adults here; I still think we can act like it. I hope to see you in-game again sometime, Agent

Nope, my understanding is that UDK is essentially hard coded to use the default Windows audio output, and doesn't allow any way to select the audio output device. We're essentially writing that functionality ourselves.

This is easier said than done, but this has actually been getting worked on in the background. The sound bug (or at least, a sound bug) is caused by a bug in the way unreal engine interacts with Windows -- the solution is to essentially override that, and as a consequence it allows us to expose that option in the process. There's no specific ETA for this, however.

Topic unlocked, toxic comment chain removed, and @DoMiNaNt_HuNtEr has been banned from posting for 30 days for ignoring multiple warnings from multiple moderators.

Ideally we should try to get more than 1 or 2 options for people to pick from in general. I still think more discussion is needed to see if there's other possible solutions here.

To clarify, the baseline proposal for detonation time adjustment is: MaxBeaconTime = 120.0; MinBeaconTime = 60.0; MaxBeaconTimePlayerCount = 24.0; MinBeaconTimePlayerCount = 8.0; PlayerCountRange = MaxBeaconTimePlayerCount - MinBeaconTimePlayercount; BeaconTimeRange = MaxBeaconTime - MineBeaconTime; TimePerPlayer = BeaconTimeRange / PlayerCountRange; BeaconPlayerCount = Clamp(PlayerCount, MinBeaconTimePlayercount, MaxBeaconTimePlayerCount); BeaconTime = (MaxBeaconTime + MinBeaconTimePlayerCount * TimePerPlayer) - BeaconPlayerCount * TimePerPlayer; So a linear drop in beacon detonation time from 120s to the current 60s. Those numbers can certainly be adjusted though. An entire extra minute should be enough as a starting point though to allow players to more effectively respond to beacons and their associated infiltrator. Given that there aren't actual options on this poll, it's just a straight yes/no vote, I feel like the poll should be closed and replaced with one that provides actual options to choose from.

So as mentioned on Discord, I really think we need to look at alternative options other than just gating game mechanics based on player count. My preferred solution is to adjust detonation time, and possibly disarm time. There's also some non-direct bits that need to be tried out, like moving the bot regulation logic from Jupiter and into the base game, as well as filtering level availability based on player count. Gating item access based on player count is the worst possible solution to this issue. I think something needs to be done, but gating isn't the solution here. Voted no on all 3 points.

If anybody's still having this problem, please let me know whether or not you're able to access the version info from a web browser: https://static.renegade-x.com/launcher_data/version/release.json

Version information isn't retrieved through the download mirrors; this error indicates failure to reach the version file: https://static.renegade-x.com/launcher_data/version/release.json Version files are hosted on google cloud.

The issues around subtractive gameplay mechanics have definitely been a long known and long debated. While I agree that subtractive gameplay mechanics aren't desirable and should not be expanded, I actually disagree that they should be further watered down. As it is, RenX is already far more forgiving around building death than old Ren ever was. If you're wanting to experiment with the gamemode, I'd encourage you to investigate recovery ("counter-subtractive") mechanics so that teams can genuinely recover from their losses. Further watering down building losses just makes building kills less meaningful, and will encourage stalemates.

I voted for Server Settings and Community. Server Settings Much of my frustrations have already been expressed in the other thread, and so I certainly shouldn't rehash it here. Much of those concerns have since been addressed anyways, so I'm not sure if I would still actually vote for this. I do absolutely agree however with other members however that 64 player limits don't seem constructive to the game, and it was certainly not how the game was designed to be played. I hope I can soon come up with an automated soft-player-limit framework to allow the best of both worlds, that we can incrementally continue to improve on over time. I think a lesson that can be taken from here is that striving for a single perfect solution that can be implemented all at once isn't going to be realistic. Instead we should implement something that we know will be an improvement, and we know can continually be incrementally improved upon over time based on some road map and feedback. I'll see if I can't make a post going further into my thoughts here elsewhere sometime soon. Community The Renegade X community is by far one of my favorite things about Renegade X, and also one of the most frustrating and sometimes outright heartbreaking. There's always been and always will be toxicity, but that's inherit to almost any game or gaming community. However, there's still a lot we can do to improve ourselves to try and become better people individually, and also a greater community as a whole. Toxicity towards high-skill frequent players is something that was discussed heavily in the other thread, but to sum up my frustrations, I feel many players are treated and harassed unfairly based upon both their skill level and frequency of play. These players aren't necessarily the absolute best in Renegade X, but their solid skills and frequency of play is high enough that they've earned name recognition. I feel that it's important to ensure these players aren't treated unfairly or specially based upon those things, and that we should encourage and assist servers and their staff to try to address harassment targeted towards these players. There's still more we can do to discourage the community from blaming or targeting these players. We should also try to focus on encouraging all players to coordinate with friends, and there's a lot of things we as a community can do to that end; we can try to get more players onto Discord, invite our own friends, skill share with newer players, and overall just befriend other players in-game. There's also things we can do on the development side of things; we could increase the priority of implementing an in-game voice chat solution, we could investigate methods of keeping friends together and adjusting the default balancer to accommodate for this, we can investigate new alternative balancer algorithms that take into account leaderboard rank. This is definitely an issue that should be addressed both as a community and as a development effort. Toxicity towards new players is very similar to the toxicity towards high-skill players, and many of the solutions are the same to try to address this. Skill sharing and befriending these players will have by far the largest impact of anything we can possibly do. More on the development side, we really still need to start (and finish) the development of a tutorial level, and hopefully we can start prioritizing this once City is wrapped up. If there's any community members who might be interested in contributing to a tutorial level, please reach out to me privately so we can talk about it, especially if you're at all familiar with kismet in addition to level design. Toxicity towards developers is hardly new, but I do feel it's gotten worse as of late. I really feel much of this is rooted in poor communication and lack of community presence. I'm personally trying to help in this area by trying to be present and active more in the community, such as joining EKT's Discord server, but not every developer is going to be able to do the same. We're already rather strained, so I'm hesitant to encourage others to heavily focus on engaging with the community more as opposed to focusing on the rather large backlog of work we have queued up. I feel like community engagement is a key responsibility that falls heavily upon myself and the other leads collectively, and that we need to step up engagements with the community on a personal level. We need to be active to make sure people remember that we're all human, we love the game as much as anybody, and that we're still kicking. Community engagement aside though, I do feel that other developers are often unfairly persecuted by the community. This is an issue that's been brought up more than once. A common source of toxicity that's gone on for years is when a bug or other error is introduced -- if it's known who introduced or pushed that bug, that developer is unfairly blamed and bashed by the community. We've done some small process changes to try and mitigate the possibility of that, for example anonymizing the patch notes, but we really need to do a better job about advertising who worked on what features. Claiming credit for work should be done at your own risk, and publicly naming which developer worked on a feature or possibly introduced a bug needs to be discouraged -- an area I can improve on myself as well. A good example of toxicity and misinformation towards developers, I feel, is in this very thread: I don't want this to be interpreted as any personal attack, but this post is littered with erasure, revisionism, and absolutely unwarranted baseless attacks against unnamed developers based upon what I believe to be a personal and unnecessary grudge. Based on context, the two unnamed developers are myself (see comment about Whisle), and Sarah (see comment about leaving). I try not to respond to these types of remarks, truly, but seeing 7 community members react with "Thanks" makes it clear that I absolutely have to, because there's some strong misconceptions. I don't think any developers are responsible for player frustrations around team stacking, nor harassment, except myself for my own inaction until recently. Community members and developers expressing frustrations in both this thread and the other thread are certainly not bad things. These were (and still are) major issues that needed to be addressed, and nobody else seemed to want to be driving a public conversation around the issues. That's why it was important to reply to the other thread, and to this one. We need to drive a conversation so that we can hopefully resolve those frustrations. If you're referring to a frustration other than the ones I've just mentioned, then I apologize for not being able to catch and address your concern there. This is clearly pointed towards me. I did not harass Whistle, but instead had a very inappropriate outburst. I recognized very shortly afterwards that the outburst was absolutely inappropriate, and as a consequence apologized to @Whistle the very next day. In private we both recognized our own contributing mistakes, most of which were my own, and we moved on. I don't think it's fair to judge me, any other developer, or any other person on earth for a single inappropriate outburst. This seems pointed towards @Sarah.. Sarah is not the first developer from the team to leave as a result of stress, in part caused by the community, but I most certainly hope she'll be the last, and I most certainly hope that her most recent departure is not permanent. I would like to point out that developer departure is not an attention seeking act, and often has permanent consequences (such as the developer simply never returning). Trying to blame someone for leaving for the sake of their own mental health is unfair, absolutely infuriating, and disgusting. I don't believe anybody has chalked off community members leaving as "attention seeking acts" when they become frustrated with player toxicity. People leave because they do not have the tolerance or ability to withstand other people's actions. In this case, Sarah has left because the community has very unfairly targeted her. Nobody should have to deal with the level of unfair scrutiny, public bashing, harassment, and mistreatment that she has endured. If you have issues with any person's behavior or actions, you should try to resolve them with that person. In the special case of a fellow developer, if you're not able to reconcile and truly believe they're malicious and damaging to the community, then please just reach out to me so I can try and diffuse the situation. I cannot resolve issues that I'm not aware of. Bad mouthing that developer you've formed a personal grudge or issue against is entirely unnecessary. Report the issue to me instead. If you don't like whatever response I take, or the lack thereof, then please by all means criticize me to your heart's content. Please however do not bash other developers. It drives them away, which does great harm to the development team and, consequently, the game and community. I have no idea what "only to return with power enabling the behavior" is intended to mean. I'm not aware of any developer targeting new players, or any players. I'm not aware of any developer attempting to gaslight the community. I'm not sure what tools you refer to, all source code is shared between all developers. No single person has sole access to any portion of our infrastructure, access is heavily shared among system administrators. I'm not aware of the development team becoming suddenly apathetic; we all love and adore Renegade X and want to see both the game and the community prosper and have a good fun time. None of this is clear or makes sense to me. Again, claiming that developers are targeting players seems unsubstantiated. I've not heard of any such incident where a developer has targeted any players. I believe this refers to your temporary ban from the Renegade X discord, which was admittedly somewhat improperly handled, but not unwarranted. Your behavior was absolutely inappropriate for the Renegade X discord server, devolving into unnecessary personal attacks. Targeting or harassing members of the Renegade X community, including developers, is against the server's rules. The entire development team absolutely cares about the community as a whole. One developer making a poorly worded comment a single time does not negate that. It's absolutely fair for developers (or anybody) to get frustrated when they're constantly being bashed or harassed and they're unable to do anything about it. I don't think the development team has anything close to a "self-centered culture", but I suppose our constantly, daily internal discussions on a wide range of topics aren't exactly the most visible. It's not that we ignore or don't listen to the community -- feedback from the community definitely gets read and discussed internally. Just because we decide not to incorporate changes based on a piece of feedback, does not mean we ignored it. It could mean literally anything from "this is a great idea but we don't have the development resources to implement this", to "well we just had an hour+ long discussion on this and it seems like it would be best not to do this based on <x> <y> <z>". We're not trying to drive people away, nor do we have any reason to believe people are actively being driven away. Player activity has been rather stable. I'm very saddened that anybody feels that way. We as a team have put a ton of hours into being active on the Renegade X discord, which has really helped improve community engagement. I'm really glad I set it up, and that the community has been rather active on it as well and really thrived. I do still want to improve its visibility on the main page by implementing the originally planned social media / affiliated links block, but yeah, I'm glad we decided to add the Social dropdown menu for the interim time.

Desktop Specs: Windows 10 Intel i7-8700K Nvidia GTX 1080 1TB Samsung Evo SSD 3x 4K Dell monitors with Renegade X runs at 1920x1080 (so non-native res) 32GB DDR4 RAM ASUS motherboard EVGA PSU Headset Info: 3.5mm audio + 3.5mm headphone jack that merges into 1 output cable; using built-in motherboard sound Model: Sennheiser Game One No additional ACTUAL audio outputs used, however Windows does register additional potential outputs Worth noting, I think Unreal Engine actually shuts down and restart something regarding audio between level transitions; what makes me think this is that IF I RECALL CORRECTLY the Bink videos can't have audio, despite Bink videos actually supporting audio normally.

If you can do that using legal team changes (i.e: not using mod/admin powers), I totally encourage you to play with your friends, have a good time, and by extension invite as many of your friends into the game to play with you so you can all have a good time. The important thing in games is to have fun, and in multiplayer games especially, to have fun with friends. I also think it's an awesome idea to try to encourage high-skill players to try playing against each-other more often than not. Setting those into stone as rules however, as opposed to friendly encouragement, just creates a hostile environment and sets the stage for toxicity to brew not only among the mod team, but the player base in general as a whole. It's this toxicity and hostility, not the stacking itself, that's become the core issue. Developers, administrators, moderators, and players need to lead by example when possible. Leading by example and boosting your team's morale, and encouraging plans and action among your team, will always have a much larger impact than any single player or couple of players can ever hope for. Remember, it's really hard to get more than 2-3 players all on the same team due to the built-in rules behind team switching. In a 40+ player match (assuming no AFKs), morale is going to matter much more than specific players' skill levels. I'm glad to see the stacking rule removed, but I do really want to see a conscious effort to improve attitudes and a shift towards better sportsmanship. Embracing sportsmanship as a core value, and consistently encouraging it, will inevitably create better team play and give everybody a much more enjoyable experience.