SFJake

About the volume: Everytime a patch hits, the audio settings for everything is set to a weird amount. Set it ALL to 100%, then reset the game. Only THEN will the radio commands be back to 100% volume. (I don't know why they need a reset of the game to see the setting change, but they do)

Disagree completely, you need to lead with the automatic rifle, meaning 50% of your shots are all about predicting something you can only guess. Getting shots with a hitscan weapon (pistol) is FAR, FAR easier unless you're right in their face. Plus the automatic rifle require slight recoil adjustment, enough to make a generous difference at medium range. In fact I'd say if the recoil wasn't there, it would be quite the better weapon. In an arcade-style fight at medium-long range recoil is a huge deal.

Heh, I see single buildings fall all the time. The only problem right now is that vehicles air drops are broken and bugged, at this point I wager its luck-based who gets more vehicles. THIS is whats breaking some games. If the airdrops worked properly and weren't glitching, I think there wouldn't be any issues. I've been in some games where one building was standing off againts invasions and honestly? They didn't have much of a chance at all, even now. It did mean however, that when BOTH Teams are down to 1 building, the game didn't turn into a long, tedious, boring stalemate.

I have to add something about airdrops: HOW is it supposed to work? At first I thought this was 1 per 5 minutes. But then people can sometimes buy 2-3 vehicles in 5 minutes. Personally, the timer goes to 0 and then back up because someone buys a vehicles before I do. Its really hard to tell how its supposed to be balanced when I don't even know how it works. I think its just too buggy right now. Heck I joined a marathon game and the timer is negative. Yet some others can still buy vehicles. Its really confusing.

I'd have removed the silos completely long ago, but they got tied too deeply in all the maps (and ALL the new maps have it). I'd be fine with any nerf to it, really.

To be honest, the servers seemed to be enjoying it quite a bit. In fact, Marathon servers haven't devolved into whining about OMG WE CAN'T DO ANYTHING so far. Instead there's more back & forth and the game doesn't "end" for hours when 1 building too many dies. Not that I'm against adding an option for it (probably can even just make a mutator for it), and its not balanced yet, but so far it had a good effect on marathon.

I haven't recorded the damage values for a chart in quite some times. The autorifle might be hard to buff properly without overpowering it. In Renegade, it did 7 in the cest, 35 in the head. In Renegade X, it does 8 in the chest, 20 in the head (unless it was changed since beta 1.0, like I said I haven't kept track). This is a common problem in RenX where the body-head difference is totally different than in the original, which makes them more limited. I think a few weapons could use having more headshot damage, the automatic rifles in particular. This is to give it a bit more potential. While the shotgun, I think (I don't have the numbers, but it IS too strong) needs its body damage lowered quite a bit. (as well as lowering its range just a bit, potentially). This keeps the shotgun's potential with headshots but lower its overall ridiculous effectiveness. There are other weapons which could get this treatment and in my opinion, the balance of the game would be better for it. But we'd have to have all the numbers in front of us. IMO though, the automatic rifle and shotguns are the only obvious issues.

And just a bit more than an hour later, everyone's back and playing. I mean, really, we're getting important patches and its a minor amount of downtime. Warning would be great, but really, 1 hour without Renegade won't kill you

That would kill the point of this idea if it just gave credits.

You kind of have to give med tanks if you give light tanks. I think no mammoth-flame-stealth tanks would be fine, plus increased prices. Just giving artilleries but not the tanks seems kind of weird to me.

The difficulty of the veterancy system is all in one they design it. Honestly, they might just want to start with kills (infantry, vehicles and buildings) awards points, and thats it. Honestly, that would work well enough. If they can try and remmeber who did a significant amount of damage to count as an ASSIST and give the rewards to ONE other player, that might not be too hard. But I don't think we need more than 1 assist. Basically, whoever helped the most to kill the target besides the killer gets some points. So only 2 people could ever profit from 1 kill, but that would be far enough.

Thats not true. It doesn't do that with Renegade X, for starters. More importantly, if your card overheats at full load, your cooling is NOT adequate.

Uh, of course but, this isn't the old Renegade, and the free infantry balance is out of whack.

Looks like a cool map. Hope to see it in action eventually!

I consider the engineer, the shotgunner and the grenadier FAR better than the basic soldier. I have never been threatened by a soldier. They are not threatening, they are silly, they die to pistols while they fire their crappy automatic weapon at me. I beat them as a shotgunner, I beat them as an engineer. They are bad. Thats just me, though.

GG snipers? No. Supressed sniper? Yes. Pretty damn easy to not die to those. Splash damage isn't magical like in Renegade where it went through wall, apply proper positioning and some basic reactions and you can avoid most of it, and only far away tanks can even have any chance of suppressing you.

I guess I had an infantry route in mind, not a pure sniper safe spot that people can just camp on. Its a very lame addition precisely because its safe. While the base defense is up nobody is going to just get up there alive, so snipers can just use that, view the entire battlefield and be vulnerable only to snipers. I always hated Field but this just didn't help.

A better, old idea I saw on this forum was to make you spawn as your "last used free class". But I'm fine with how it is. The default soldier is literally the worst in the game so at least it means I get to see him sometimes...!

Renegade was never designed for huge player counts in mind in the first place either but thats just what people played. The old Renegade had 50+ player servers from what I remember and people played it. If they play it, its because the masses prefer bigger player count, designed for it or not. I find that most maps in Renegade work really well with more players. Realistically, most maps are designed for not even 20 players. But the masses do not play that way. Like I said, thats a community choice to make. The more competitive and serious aspect of Renegade was always on lower player counts, but most people look at the game very casually, and thats why a lot of people like big servers. Its your choice to make, but in the end, I think that A-It can actually work, it just needs a very good server. And B- Some people prefer that, and if the community flocks to it, then thats their choice, regardless of what player counts the game was made in mind. And I'd prefer everyone playing in a 50+ player server than 2-3 groups of 30 player servers. But thats the point, everyone would have a different opinion here. Technical reasons are always understandable, but I think the devs should let the choice of servers to the community. If the original Renegade was made with that mentality, we would all be playing in 16 player servers. You accuse me of talking about things I know nothing about, but I never talked about any of this. I have no idea what CPU, what computer or what -anything- they were using. I didn't say anything about that. All I did was swear to the gods at least 1 server adapted and worked at 64 player without wobbling in the first beta back when 1000s of players were playing. Maybe it is out of the scope of most server owner to provide a stable 64 player servers. I don't know. Heck maybe it was fluke or my imagination or I was on drugs. I just think it'd be worth a try again.

Except even in the first time you had 64 players server, some servers were capable of it. I saw it right before you pulled it out. One server I don't remember which had almost no issues (played for at least 30 minutes) and then the plug on 64 players was pulled and it was gone. Not every server should just cap themselves at 64 but some could. 64 players really should be back in a non-default way so that specific servers can try it out. Isn't it possible to just make a mutator to raise the cap? I'm telling you, with absolute conviction, a good server CAN handle it. Just make it a non-default setup so that most servers don't cap over 40 unless they really want to try it and if they really think they can handle it. I'm dying to get this. 40 feels low and in some maps it feels empty. I don't even join a server at 30. Big servers are a community choice and it should be available.

...and make those vehicles great against infantry on top of everything? What about "no"?

There has been a few changes done to the core balance of the game that does some right or wrong. Some I thought would be great but turn out to be not so great, and some that very much depends on the opinions of everyone. I'm making this topic to discuss those changes and what to change. Ideally, we need the opinions of a bigger part of the community. Its difficult to know what people want and truly think about various features. ---The Refinery now gives 1$/per seconds when destroyed--- This is a big balance change that was probably too much. The idea behind this change, I would guess, is to allow players who don't have any money a way to get some, but from experience already, the refinery down, its actually TOO easy now to get what you need and makes the Refinery a much less valuable target. Yes, they lose the ability to harvest, but it still feels like its not enough. If the player would still get a small income from the refinery, it should be 1$/2-3 seconds. An ideal fix however, would be to remove this entirely and use something like Hate's veterancy system (viewtopic.php?f=26&t=74772) to allow players to use their own skills to buy things when the refinery is down. Otherwise, a change to the credit-point system so that you can get at least a decent amount of money through things that aren't sieging or repairing buildings. The whole problem also is that we don't want this income of credits to make the cash-pilling issue (see under) even worse. Instead we need a refinery-down meaning the other team cannot still just keep buying what they want. ---People pile up too much cash--- There are multiple problems here. For starters, even in a map like Complex, you can get a lot and I mean a LOT of cash, too easily, just waiting the game out. And all that WITHOUT the Tiberium Silo. I'd suggest lowering the amount of cash the tiberium silo gives. 1$/seconds would still be a fair amount. I lack solutions in this area. It was easy enough in the old Renegade to pile up money and it didn't have silos. ---Vehicle Air Drops--- The problem with air drops as it stands is that they are much stronger on GDI's side of things. Every 5 minutes, the team will gain a mammoth tank, because why build anything else? I would disable Mammoth tanks from air drops. But then that wouldn't be fair either for GDI, so stealth & flame would need to be disabled from air drops. Or increase the prices of the better vehicles by a LOT. As much as asking for 5000 credits for a mammoth airdrop. There's a good money sink. I like having ways for vehicles to still be bought since long marathon games get boring. But at the moment, it doesn't feel quite right. Also, I would also expect Air Drops to be a server-side option. Marathon benefit from it, but AoW servers would probably not normally want to use it. --- Please share your ideas and opinions about the various concepts, so that we can help the developers balance this game, which is a very difficult task. Agree, disagree, just share it with us. Feel free to add other balance discussions to the topic as well. (but not bug-physics related issues)

Sorry RypeL. I know you work hard for this game. I'm just trying to the beta tester job of pointing out the big issues. I feel like they should have seen it earlier. The airdrop system is good for vehicles. Only 1 vehicle per team per 5 minutes is fair. But something like that for infantry wouldn't work with a team-wide cooldown (otherwise people would just spam the buttons trying to be the one getting the characters they want and some could buy a bad character to screw their team). And I have no idea what the community-TMX-EKT thinks about all that/what they'd actually want. It might be better to just make all of those server options but thats still more work for you.

Is there any reason why the team opted only for vehicle drops and not infantry? Basically, we can still buy low class infantry only, while all vehicles still remain available as drops after the WF is down. Not saying its a bad decision, just unexpected. I haven't yet tested the impacts of those anyhow. There's a few key changes I'd like to point out that are being quite the negative for me. -The infantry movement feels incredibly odd and the initial acceleration to move is much slower, making infantry feels FAR clunkier than they used to be. This honestly feels quite bad and I don't understand why it was necessary to make infantry worse. -The vehicle explosions being removed is a gigantic negative. I think I'd rather get the freeze than to have no explosions. It just kills all the feeling in the game. Its only 2 bad things in a sea of great additions and really, I love beta 4 in all other aspects so far, but these issues are core and constantly in your face. I'm hoping with the auto-patching system that fixing whatever issues is coming up with beta 4 isn't as much as an hassle anymore? I'm honestly hoping those 2 things can be reversed swiftly because its killing all the fun. I thought this is what the closed beta was for. Here's a list so far: -Vehicles have no explosion (its my understanding only the debris were supposed to be removed) -Infantry lack initial acceleration. -Pre-match chat is out of the screen on a 4:3 resolution Will check in if I find anything else.

LOL. Right. Thats what it is? It slipped my mind completely. Its just something we talked about in one topic, I guess I didn't really expect to see it. Nice! That doesn't say how exactly they're implementing it, but nice!