The PvP interactions were much more engaging than the bot play. Positioning around gems, the poke and dodge of facing a larger army, the tension of waiting for unit respawns have an energy to them that the bots don't match. However, as a low skill player, it's pretty punishing right now. Without gems you can't spend your scrap and the momentum of opponents' mercs are hard to halt short of happening to have someone with really well placed Celesta ults.
From the couple games I've played so far, I think there is quite a store of potential here. However, the skill depth for having an engaging even game is perhaps more on the chess end than the go (wéiqí/pinyin) end of things. I'm glad that there is at least the game queue effort to try to do some skill balancing.
Still, I think the interactions feel better with a skill gap than the few SCII pvp games I joined. The early game encourages feeling out the opponents and with the respawn on the squad you don't feel as behind and defeated as you would if you were facing a SCII rush. When you are low on mercs and gems, how to bring down a merc lead... that's the strategy guide that I hope someone writes in-depth to go with the tutorial video.
EDIT:
Addendum, played (and won) a game with me at the bottom 1v1 section. Made me wish I could trade resources to allies (or could we and I didn't learn about it?). As ranged vs melee enemy it felt one sided (in my favor) other than a few good engages by my opponent when they got a few tier 2 units or mercs before I did.
It also felt disconnected from the rest of my team. I hadn't noticed that they were closing out the game until it was almost over. Sure I kept my 1v1 matchup from getting momentum, but that didn't feel as impactful. That said, it felt more forgiving of the fact that I am not as skilled at this game as some. I ended up a few levels lower than my allies, but felt more like my decisions were rewarded. I will need to watch the replay to see if my decision to clear camps early on gave me what felt like a lead or if it was mainly the matchup.
I've played a few bot games over the course of the week, so I've been looking forward into dipping my toe into PvP. I played a few pvp games this afternoon, and watched a few more to see what I could learn from other folks.
The game has managed to grab me. The core gameplay of the squads and fights are fun, the decisions of when/where to expand are interesting and I'm excited about being able to get a team of friends playing together some day. I'm going to go into a bunch of nitpicky feedback, but I've Atlas generally compelling.
The Minimap
If I could improve one thing about Atlas right now, it would be the minimap. The Atlas map is very complex, with lots of important features and lanes. Several games in, I was still really struggling to figure out the locations of the main expansions and paths between bases.
The current minimap is fine for unit/hero locations, but very difficult to read the map structure from. There's very low contrast between the various browns/greens/greys used to mark various terrian types, the one-pixel resource pools are almost invisible, and there's no marker at all for titan camps. Eventually I just paused a replay, pulled out a pen and paper, and drew the map out to try and get a feel for the layout.
Some good lessons could be drawn from the way League of Legends has improved its minimap over the years. Early on, it was very detailed and literal, showing rock formations, trees, and buildings. Over time, it became more and more iconographic, and it really helped the clarity of the game. Here's the current version: It doesn't try and represent any of the details or ground colors. Passable terrain is biege, impassible is dark green. Structures and jungle camps are large, simple icons.
Other Feedback
Pings are great. Wonderful way to communicate with teammates in a real-time game.
More feedback on XP/leveling would be awesome. Some sort of XP bar, celebration on level up, etc.
I tried to watch games on one screen while working on another, and the current client doesn't really support that. It looks for your mouse on the other screen, and scrolls to that side continuously.
I keep trying to select/attack flying units by clicking their health circle on the ground, when apparently you need to select the model hovering above it. I'm not sure exactly how the models and hitboxes fit together right now, but it feels very off.
The absolute best part of this game is the 3v3 combat, so the 1v1 lane makes it feel a little awkward because, even in late game, you're on a bit of an island. That might just be because people don't know how to play it yet, but it feels hard to be part of the teamwork, which is the driver of fun in this game for me.
The ~ key, which default selects your whole army, should not be able to be rebound to anything else. That should be its only functionality. I accidentally bound it to an army grouping and couldn't get it reset to the default "select everything"
I liked being told exactly how long the wait would be.
Client and tooltips lag during the loading screen, once squads are selected
1v1 as Ryme feels very terrible. I'm sure I'm doing it wrong but vs Vex it felt bad to always have fewer units and less damage. The Eris I played against just built 30 of the level 1 tech units and dunked my butt clean off. It felt very bad and I couldn't think of a counterplay.
This is kind of compounded by the fact that there aren't any mercenary units that are just basic damage dealers other than the Leviathan. I'm SURE this is on purpose, but for a less offensive faction, it feels like mercs are less useful than for an offensive faction, who already has the damage and just needs some boost to their utility.
I really like the combat over the gems. It's a really fun human interaction.
The one game where I was in a 2v2 lane crashed 12 minutes in, but while I was in it, I VERY much enjoyed the feeling of cooperating with my teammate to get stuff done. I think the 2v2 is a lot more fun for me. I'm sure some people will enjoy the 1v1, but I am not one of them. At least not while I'm playing Ryme (the flavor of which I really enjoy). It would be nice if you could select which lane you want to go into while you're queueing up.
Bear in mind I am of course very bad at this game, so these are just my opinions, not things I'm stating as facts.
A teammate and I were "dancing" around a few gems, not wanting to "steal" the gem from the other.
It would be nice if the ping function had a little more context to it. I'm specifically thinking about the way the Portal 2 allowed you to ping a certain spot in 3-4 distinct ways, like "look here" or "shoot a portal here". Maybe in the context of Atlas you could ping a teammate to "look here" or "Rally here for a push" or "I got it" , or "you got it"
I built 3 juggernauts and crashed through the enemy base while my teammate chatted "CHAAAARGE"
Felt like I was a hero when I destroyed the nexus. I don't know if this feedback helps at all, I'm just really proud.
Overall a fun experience, and even though communication was sparse, it felt as though I was actually working together with my teammates.
First game was pretty even. Came down to mutual nexus attacks. That was pretty fun.
Second game had a player with network trouble. After he dropped, game was going okay, until another player dropped, third on opposing team left and it was over. Shame because I was in 2v2 with discord coms with partner and it was going well.
Two games had a person not select in lobby, and requeued.
Last two games I was in 1v1 lane with someone approx 2x as good. Felt pretty awful. Every encounter was team wipe, then I wait. Not sure how to catch up on XP once I'm behind. Or even where XP comes from really; in bot games it just kind of happens, but the titans weren't doing me much good.
Okay, I'm not entirely new to the RTS genre (or MOBA), but I suck pretty hard at SC/SC2, DOTA, etc. However, I had a blast! Played Alder for all my PvP games, and I actually felt like I was contributing. I like the respawn timer mechanic, a poorly timed push won't just make you immediately lose like it can in SC. Not sure I like the econ system, I think it would be more fun if you do something like resource sharing (i.e. one guy is massing mercs, funnel them your expansion's gems, one guy's building a giant army, funnel them your gold generation).
Loving the game so far, thanks for giving me the chance to try it out!
X happened:
my chosen squad (hydros) was incapable of playing bottom lane. I had spent a lot of time getting good at it and felt bad because it had no anti air or damage.
i understand the need for tank squads and love a good tank, but possibly do something such that players receive a warning or something.
I was bottom in the only PvP game I had time to squeeze in my Father schedule. I have to say, it was a lot different than a Bot Game. I will try to keep it as short as possible I think we could all write a long post on how we felt playing the game.
I played Celesta, dropping the Ult feels too hard to land it. I tried squeezing my opponent between my ult and my army but he had enough time to run away anyway. The spell is great, but the only time I was able to land the Ult was when the opponent was not looking. I suggest a faster cast rate or a longer casting distance as it was too easy to dodge.
I also felt it was hard to engage in fight on the map as the map was so vast. I suggest faster movements speed.
I felt like I was losing time when my units were Low HP I had to run back to base to heal and run back to the front. I suggest having the Teleport back like PreAlpha Week-End #1.
Cooperative, Team-Work felt very unlikely when I was bottom alone. I was gaining alot of tempo with my higher level, but my teammate never needed me to finish the game. I felt Useless. I don't have any suggestion for this at the moment. I will need to think more to come up with a solution for this.
The Game is great, I loved using the Tower disabler trinket, it helped my hit-and-run strategy to destroy my opponents towers.
I am sure that you take the feedbacks in a constructive way not in a negative one.
I hope I have access to more PvP games before the game is released and I am looking forward to play with real friends when it is going to be open to the public.
All in all I had a Great Time playing and I wish you the best guys!
Due to a scheduling conflict I was only able to get in two games. So I'll just talk about them in detail instead of giving a general overview. I should also preface by saying that I haven't played an RTS in years, and I only played a couple of bot games before PVP.
In my first game I played Hydros, top, with a Celesta, top, and I think a Vex bottom. My opponents were Celesta, Vex, and Ryme.
When I attacked players or camps I seemed to have very little impact. I felt like my units were worthless.
When I teamed up with an ally I felt like I wasn't really contributing anything and should have picked a character that dealt damage.
I fell very behind in resources because I couldn't take expansions or effectively fight players for gems. This made me feel like I had defeated myself by picking the wrong hero.
In my second game I played Vex, bottom, with a Celesta and Ryme top. My opponents were Celesta, Vex, and Ryme.
When I went to take camps I found it very easy to kite the enemies with Vex and Spitfires. It was satisfying to kite effectively, but seemed like it was too easy. I wondered if I was exploiting bad AI.
I never had to fight another player over resources on the bottom and was able to just take over any expansions I wanted with kiting. It felt good to be able to expand, and to have enough resources to build my army.
I grouped up with my teammates to push against top and encountered enemies. It seemed like kiting was a large part of combat. It felt like we mostly just played hit and run tag until someone suffered enough losses to retreat. I remember a couple of fire lizards pushing in once, and they dealt some damage, but got focus fired down fairly quickly. It felt like the best strategy was to just build as many little ranged units and possible and mass fire things into the ground. That was somewhat disappointing. I felt like there should be more head to head combat.
I ended up having surplus resources and was able to build some leviathans. I was actually able to deal some damage to structures with them, but my ally had some kind of deployable ground unit that had better range that he just sniped structures with, so mostly my leviathans felt kinda wasted. It was a bit disappointing considering their cost. I felt like the effort I had put into taking all those expansions was worthless because apparently I picked the wrong thing to kill structures with.
The fact that Celesta, Vex, and Ryme were picked by every team in which I didn't pick Hydros instead of Ryme makes me feel like I was stupid for ever picking a hero that wasn't one of those three. Obviously I only played two games, but with that limited exposure its kind of amazing that both teams went for the same comp each time.
Obviously, PvP was more engaging (played 4 rounds of PvP, only played Hydros)
Matches were more concise and last about 3/4 of the time a Bot match was taking. The play had some idle spots waiting for regen, so there was a bit of "hurry up and wait" to deal with. Chat was okay, but vox of course makes for much easier coord among squads was difficult to strategize. I agree with the statement above that pings are really useful when you are busy in an engagement, but could use more context (need help aka 911, watch here, charge!, etc). Only one match had a squad member DC which held up the match for a minute or so, no issues otherwise. I did not play Vela, even though I had tried it during bot play, would have been interesting in PvP to see how that stacked up if I had more time.
I enjoyed it overall and look forward to more chances for PvP!
PVP was way better than the BOT games. I was focusing on Ryme but ended up with Hydros in my 3rd game because Mip stole Ryme from me immediately upon entering character selection. I never did find out what his ult was but the uniform game design allowed me to play w/o too bad of a handicap. The back and forth mid-game is amazing. By far my favorite part of the game so far. Positioning and harassment feel risky when they are and rewarding when you get away with it. I like the fog of war distance too. It's not so far that you can avoid everything but not so close that you're blindsided every attack you make. I think they were on average longer than the bot games. Thank you so much for allowing me to participate. I had a blast.
PvP happened, it made me feel "the fun". An auspicious test weekend result.
Feedback A
When bot lane (or top lane, if I was bot) was struggling, I didn't really feel any pressure to help them. When that happened either I'd have my own fight, or I'd just punish the missing opponent by destroying all their bases.
Replay ID: Gfd9fddca60064acca0f79b723894f1d8 19:30 in particular
I suggest some global range abilities, so that even with this current map size and travel time you can still spend some "resource" on assisting an ally on the other side of the map in a critical battle.
For some context on that "travel time", I loved the larger maps (even playing 80x80 occasionally) in Supreme Commander (not in a ranked context). It's a key strategic element to start your army marching and get them moving in the right direction early, and it's a tremendously satisfying strategic feeling when you have that build up of "I marched them over here, then got past missile range alive, then finally smashed their base". Or that you're safe from the enemy by virtue of "his army can't get here in time".
SupCom could scale up in distance way better because of huge unit caps (you can build twenty bases and field an army from each) and the air ferry system for speed. Atlas certainly shouldn't try to aim for those sizes. Just needs a feeling of "They'll never stop me in time!" or "Let's set out on a quest!".
Feedback B
When I applied strong early pressure to repeatedly destroy the starting expansion of my opponent (in a 1v1 bot lane context), I felt exultation in my masterful dominance.
A few swears later, it so happened that my opponent left the game and I felt sad.
Replay ID: Gc7aba2c061784653af50d325afcbbf09 It's probably the fastest PvP game of the day, just watch it all
I suggest a stronger defender's advantage. Currently defender's advantage (outside of the barracks super-tower) is just being closer to the squad respawn. This doesn't help if a fast damage squad comes in for a quick strike, and then pops back out. Perhaps a limited number of free wards or towers (which help you survive early game but run out by midgame) would help? Or perhaps educating people on how to build towers, it's one of the last things that a tester seemed to learn this weekend.
Of course, a better matchmaking system might be enough (with the obvious improvement being more people to match, which will come no doubt in time). I can zergling rush low level players on the SC2 ladder just fine, until it moves me up to a skill level that knows how to defend against that.
Feedback C
When I started to play with humans, I felt hope. Thee potential for cooperation and teamwork plays seemed limitless.
When I finished playing with humans, I wanted to feel hope. But alas, coordination levels varied with the individual. Often games were decided in favor of the most coordinated team and not individual skill. Reasonable for a team game, but (like in MOBAs) it makes me strongly prefer party mode.
Replay ID: G48b352f210574191b21a180e1f4458c6 See the ending where they won with better coordination, despite being down levels on average.
It would be nice if the ping function had a little more context to it. I'm specifically thinking about the way the Portal 2 allowed you to ping a certain spot in 3-4 distinct ways, like "look here" or "shoot a portal here". Maybe in the context of Atlas you could ping a teammate to "look here" or "Rally here for a push" or "I got it" , or "you got it"
The tutorial video shows you that you can ping with four different icons. But sans context, those icons could mean anything.
@obsidiandice said:
* More feedback on XP/leveling would be awesome. Some sort of XP bar, celebration on level up, etc.
There is an XP bar, I believe there's a sound when you level and when you hit level 6, the word "Ultimate!" pops up over your hero's head. Your feedback still has merit since you didn't notice it, but just wanted to point that out
@mrwizard70 said:
X happened:
my chosen squad (hydros) was incapable of playing bottom lane. I had spent a lot of time getting good at it and felt bad because it had no anti air or damage.
i understand the need for tank squads and love a good tank, but possibly do something such that players receive a warning or something.
Yeah, completely hear you on this - it's why I put the warning into my write-up for Hydros. I don't have much else to say on this except that you didn't do anything wrong, this is a pretty tough way to play when Hydros doesn't have anyone to back him up on damage. Regarding the anti-air though, if you get a single Shrike or Orion, they can take out flying units (presumably the Titans were your issue?) in pretty short order while your squad tanks the damage. Scuttleguards, with their inherent resistance, can be healed up by Hydros even on the gem expansion titans pretty easily.
I played Celesta, dropping the Ult feels too hard to land it. I tried squeezing my opponent between my ult and my army but he had enough time to run away anyway. The spell is great, but the only time I was able to land the Ult was when the opponent was not looking. I suggest a faster cast rate or a longer casting distance as it was too easy to dodge.
I bet the time it landed though, you completely wiped out anything in that circle, amirite? It's ridiculously powerful with a sizable radius, so while I can't say what the Artillery team will do with the ultimate, the ult's great for forcing armies to either run in a direction that's bad for them. When you're either defending a key structure or attacking, they're giving up lots of time not attacking you when they're running away because that tower ain't movin', they can only engage from so many directions. Just food for thought!
When I finished playing with humans, I wanted to feel hope. But alas, coordination levels varied with the individual. Often games were decided in favor of the most coordinated team and not individual skill. Reasonable for a team game, but (like in MOBAs) it makes me strongly prefer party mode.
Party mode is normally available, but with such a varying skill range here I know they wanted to prevent the SC2 GM players who were friends from queueing up together and adding even further disparity and dashing of hope, heh. So, I think they get that feeling!
@Jivira said:
Still, I think the interactions feel better with a skill gap than the few SCII pvp games I joined. The early game encourages feeling out the opponents and with the respawn on the squad you don't feel as behind and defeated as you would if you were facing a SCII rush.
The biggest thing that gives us these interactions is the ability to respawn. That is to say: respawn lets you have multiple chances to fight an opponent, and in a way that lets both of you scale up and escalate your power level between those engagements. I'm stoked to see this feedback come in because, simply put, this is what we strive for. The feeling that you get several chances, and not simply that if you lose one fight badly enough, your game is over. WOO!
EDIT:
It also felt disconnected from the rest of my team. I hadn't noticed that they were closing out the game until it was almost over. Sure I kept my 1v1 matchup from getting momentum, but that didn't feel as impactful. That said, it felt more forgiving of the fact that I am not as skilled at this game as some. I ended up a few levels lower than my allies, but felt more like my decisions were rewarded. I will need to watch the replay to see if my decision to clear camps early on gave me what felt like a lead or if it was mainly the matchup.
This is one of the primary things we're focusing on now that this test weekend has wrapped up. Making the 2v2 and 1v1 regions feel significantly less disconnected is going to be incredibly important. We've observed this same throughline not only in daily tests, but also in our own games. So, definitely tackling this one ASAP haha!
@obsidiandice said:
I've played a few bot games over the course of the week, so I've been looking forward into dipping my toe into PvP. I played a few pvp games this afternoon, and watched a few more to see what I could learn from other folks.
The game has managed to grab me. The core gameplay of the squads and fights are fun, the decisions of when/where to expand are interesting and I'm excited about being able to get a team of friends playing together some day. I'm going to go into a bunch of nitpicky feedback, but I've Atlas generally compelling.
WOO!
The Minimap
If I could improve one thing about Atlas right now, it would be the minimap. The Atlas map is very complex, with lots of important features and lanes. Several games in, I was still really struggling to figure out the locations of the main expansions and paths between bases.
The current minimap is fine for unit/hero locations, but very difficult to read the map structure from. There's very low contrast between the various browns/greens/greys used to mark various terrian types, the one-pixel resource pools are almost invisible, and there's no marker at all for titan camps. Eventually I just paused a replay, pulled out a pen and paper, and drew the map out to try and get a feel for the layout.
Some good lessons could be drawn from the way League of Legends has improved its minimap over the years. Early on, it was very detailed and literal, showing rock formations, trees, and buildings. Over time, it became more and more iconographic, and it really helped the clarity of the game. It doesn't try and represent any of the details or ground colors. Passable terrain is biege, impassible is dark green. Structures and jungle camps are large, simple icons.
These are probably ideally the sorts of things we're shooting for. Currently, we basically just print the existing map, top-down, as the minimap and overlay some information on top of it. As we get to a point where we're ready to spend time on making this as readable as possible, a lot of these sorts of things will be included in our approach. Great observations here, love this feedback a lot!
More feedback on XP/leveling would be awesome. Some sort of XP bar, celebration on level up, etc.
To be clear -- In-game or out-of-game? I assume in-game. We'll probably be punching up the "Hero has leveled up" VFX considerably, and eventually we'll also do things like animate/flash the XP bar when it's filled. So, yeah, lots of UI/UX stuff we can do there. Awesome!
I tried to watch games on one screen while working on another, and the current client doesn't really support that. It looks for your mouse on the other screen, and scrolls to that side continuously.
I've experienced this as well. I'll pass this on and see if this is cheap to solve. If not, it'll simply be another optimization that'll have to wait until we can put the time into refining other things about spectating, and bundle those features.
I keep trying to select/attack flying units by clicking their health circle on the ground, when apparently you need to select the model hovering above it. I'm not sure exactly how the models and hitboxes fit together right now, but it feels very off.
This is worth us having a discussion about. Flying units are still pretty new in our game, so we've got things like that to figure out still. It's definitely off, and it'll be worked on for sure. It'll also be important for us to communicate clearly which thing you should be focusing. Do you focus the selection halo, or the unit model?
@The Green Amoeba said:
I like all chat during champ select!
The absolute best part of this game is the 3v3 combat, so the 1v1 lane makes it feel a little awkward because, even in late game, you're on a bit of an island. That might just be because people don't know how to play it yet, but it feels hard to be part of the teamwork, which is the driver of fun in this game for me.
Experience hasn't changed the "1v1 island" feeling for the most part, so it's definitely not exclusive to being new and "not knowing it yet." This'll be a big focus for us pretty immediately.
The ~ key, which default selects your whole army, should not be able to be rebound to anything else. That should be its only functionality. I accidentally bound it to an army grouping and couldn't get it reset to the default "select everything"
Definitely a topic we're going to bring up. The functionality of a hotkey potentially transforming throughout a game from a player input can definitely be confusing sometimes. We'll likely end up making the "select all of unit type hotkeys uneditable by the player as a result of this confusion.
Client and tooltips lag during the loading screen, once squads are selected
More loading optimizations coming soon™! Woo!
1v1 as Ryme feels very terrible. I'm sure I'm doing it wrong but vs Vex it felt bad to always have fewer units and less damage. The Eris I played against just built 30 of the level 1 tech units and dunked my butt clean off. It felt very bad and I couldn't think of a counterplay.
First, I need you to know that I audibly guffawed at "dunked my butt clean off."
Second: A lot of these 1v1 squad matchups definitely need some love. Pointing at Ryme vs Vex gives us a good place to start looking when we step into this. Also worth noting: Ryme previously had an AOE ability on Frostcallers, giving them a good tool with which to deal with a high number of (for example, Eris's) T1 units. It's possible they'll need an adequate tool to deal with that for the purpose of letting them hold up in this matchup in the 1v1.
This is kind of compounded by the fact that there aren't any mercenary units that are just basic damage dealers other than the Leviathan. I'm SURE this is on purpose, but for a less offensive faction, it feels like mercs are less useful than for an offensive faction, who already has the damage and just needs some boost to their utility.
It's definitely the intent that mercenaries are supportive to your squad and less-so directly combative units, but the merc space is open for us to, later, have more "purely combative" units if we feel like that space could be occupied by a neutral source. Great observation!
I really like the combat over the gems. It's a really fun human interaction.
WOO!
The one game where I was in a 2v2 lane crashed 12 minutes in, but while I was in it, I VERY much enjoyed the feeling of cooperating with my teammate to get stuff done. I think the 2v2 is a lot more fun for me. I'm sure some people will enjoy the 1v1, but I am not one of them. At least not while I'm playing Ryme (the flavor of which I really enjoy). It would be nice if you could select which lane you want to go into while you're queueing up.
We'll likely let you select your region eventually. It'll also be important that we make the 1v1 equally fun, or de-segregate the regions (which is very high on our to-do).
Thanks for testing. Was a joy seeing you so active in the chat! Hope to see ya back soon!
A teammate and I were "dancing" around a few gems, not wanting to "steal" the gem from the other.
It would be nice if the ping function had a little more context to it. I'm specifically thinking about the way the Portal 2 allowed you to ping a certain spot in 3-4 distinct ways, like "look here" or "shoot a portal here". Maybe in the context of Atlas you could ping a teammate to "look here" or "Rally here for a push" or "I got it" , or "you got it"
There's a contextual ping menu if you hold B and drag the cursor, but it's also not incredibly clear what each ping means. We'll be giving it a nice coat of paint fairly soon to further contextualize what those pings mean for the player and make their intent more clear. We're also using fairly generic contextual pings that are used by other games that might not translate perfectly into an RTS setting; we'll be revisiting those down the road and making sure that the pings we provide are the best options.
I built 3 juggernauts and crashed through the enemy base while my teammate chatted "CHAAAARGE"
Felt like I was a hero when I destroyed the nexus. I don't know if this feedback helps at all, I'm just really proud.
FEEEEEEEL THE POWAHHHHH
Overall a fun experience, and even though communication was sparse, it felt as though I was actually working together with my teammates.
Success! Woohoo!
Thanks for playtesting and for the feedback! Please come back again soon! :D
@wondible said:
Second game had a player with network trouble. After he dropped, game was going okay, until another player dropped, third on opposing team left and it was over. Shame because I was in 2v2 with discord coms with partner and it was going well.
Two games had a person not select in lobby, and requeued.
Oof! Sorry you had trouble getting into a game that ran to completion! Hopefully this is just bad luck, but we'd definitely like to look into what caused those disconnects. Any chance you've got the game ID handy for the game that three total people dropped from?
Last two games I was in 1v1 lane with someone approx 2x as good. Felt pretty awful. Every encounter was team wipe, then I wait. Not sure how to catch up on XP once I'm behind. Or even where XP comes from really; in bot games it just kind of happens, but the titans weren't doing me much good.
The short version is: Killing pretty much anything gives you EXP. Ideally down the road it'd be: Doing anything grants you EXP. We've got a lot of investigation and iteration to go through on that system though, and we're not tackling it immediately; it's definitely on the list though.
@BTYM said:
Okay, I'm not entirely new to the RTS genre (or MOBA), but I suck pretty hard at SC/SC2, DOTA, etc. However, I had a blast! Played Alder for all my PvP games, and I actually felt like I was contributing. I like the respawn timer mechanic, a poorly timed push won't just make you immediately lose like it can in SC.
I covered this above, but want to restate that we're elated about this. Respawn gives us the ability to have multiple battles, and for players to feel like they have more opportunities to get back on the field and learn after losing a fight, rather than games ending in one climactic clash and not getting to find out what they do wrong. We love that players have this tool, and we're glad you felt those effects! WOOHOO!
Not sure I like the econ system, I think it would be more fun if you do something like resource sharing (i.e. one guy is massing mercs, funnel them your expansion's gems, one guy's building a giant army, funnel them your gold generation).
You can currently do this with the collection mechanism, and some strategies have formed around that. But in terms of the "funnel everything into one player" approach, I think we'd generally not enable those sorts of things as much. Limiting one player's growth was possible in previous builds, and the player that funneled money into their teammate was pressured to continue supporting that ally instead of getting to do their own thing. It was strong, but resulted in one player not really having fun and being a spectator to his teammate's destruction. However, this, in limited doses such as "hey take all the mid gems" has lead to some cool things, so we'll definitely still have some of that.
I realized this answer was fairly all over the place. Let me know if you'd like me to clarify at all!
Loving the game so far, thanks for giving me the chance to try it out!
Thank YOU for playtesting! Data and feedback are what have allowed us to fine-tune this game into something you might enjoy. Keep at it, and hope to see ya back!
@mrwizard70 said:
X happened:
my chosen squad (hydros) was incapable of playing bottom lane. I had spent a lot of time getting good at it and felt bad because it had no anti air or damage.
i understand the need for tank squads and love a good tank, but possibly do something such that players receive a warning or something.
Ideally we'd just like to, instead, make sure that most (if not every) squad can handle themselves in each region. And if we find that we can't do that without compromising their identity, then we'll try to find ways to give players tools that let them stand a chance. You've pointed to Hydros as a problematic squad in the 1v1, and others in chat pointed to Vela. Data supports that those two are probably the ones that need the most love in a 1v1 context; and it makes sense that these two squads are on the extreme ends of the offense vs defense "tree." Vela is potent but slow and squishy; Hydros is incredibly tanky but has trouble dealing damage. So seeing that the two squads on either extreme are the outliers and offenders gives us a good place to start. However, we like these extremes; they're what give squads texture. So we'll have to investigate all of that, naturally. Some of this also might be solved by just desegregating the regions a bit more. If you play for TW3, I'd love your feedback on how it feels then!
@Droite said:
I played Celesta, dropping the Ult feels too hard to land it. I tried squeezing my opponent between my ult and my army but he had enough time to run away anyway. The spell is great, but the only time I was able to land the Ult was when the opponent was not looking. I suggest a faster cast rate or a longer casting distance as it was too easy to dodge.
Oh, all of these timed abilities will definitely need their delays/timers refined once we have our battle pacing entirely nailed down (this will make more sense after my next comment). The Celesta ult is indeed deliberately difficult to land, though, and that's actually important. While it'll certainly still be tweaked, if it were easier/more guaranteed to land, it wouldn't be as satisfying when you do successfully land it. But again, just to clearly restate, it might be too difficult right now.
I also felt it was hard to engage in fight on the map as the map was so vast. I suggest faster movements speed.
And here's the comment that clarifies the "battle pacing" thing: we're immediately looking at bumping movement speeds up, and you'll likely feel the result of this iteration for TW3. We're probably looking at around a 15% difference. I believe I saw you (and quite a few others) mentioning this in the client chat, and it was suggested often enough that we immediately want to begin tackling it. So, thanks for being a voice on this one! :D
I felt like I was losing time when my units were Low HP I had to run back to base to heal and run back to the front. I suggest having the Teleport back like PreAlpha Week-End #1.
This'll be another thing we have to discuss. I think it's reasonable to have your low-HP units lose some time, but right now the trip home is so long that it feels like forever until your unit is back fighting with you. The aforementioned experiment should help soften this frustration. And if it doesn't entirely, we'll find a better solution! :D
Cooperative, Team-Work felt very unlikely when I was bottom alone. I was gaining alot of tempo with my higher level, but my teammate never needed me to finish the game. I felt Useless. I don't have any suggestion for this at the moment. I will need to think more to come up with a solution for this.
We'll be attempting to desegregate the two regions by TW3. Please let us know how this feels if you play then!
The Game is great, I loved using the Tower disabler trinket, it helped my hit-and-run strategy to destroy my opponents towers.
WOO!
All in all I had a Great Time playing and I wish you the best guys!
Stoked to hear it, glad to have ya! Thanks for testing and for the feedback! <3!
Used terrapin troopers to charge enemies. They hit other allied units in front of themselves. Charge gets wasted. Allied ranged troops start dying because they can't run away. My troops can't get in front. We mosh together and all die. Feels bad man. Pathing needs to take other units under larger consideration.
Lost a game because juggernauts simply walked past towers and started wrecking base. I ran back, they killed base after I got there while I just beat on them with my army. Felt bad.
Got wrecked by celesta's light a few times because I was trapped in by my allies. Felt bad.
Played a game where I was hydros and the ally near me was eris. We were against celesta and alder. Just couldn't get near my opponents. I really felt helpless in this game.
G74f63146b0904faab6e361abc4e2a758
Played vela a few games in a row after my loss mentioned above. Wrecked my opponents. All I did was kite them until I had a very large advantage. Used shielder one game for the engagements and just retreated when either the shield went down. Pushed towers once I had the tier 3 unit with range boosting as I outranged towers then. Used ultimate to flee if I got flanked. Felt good to win, but didn't seem all of that rewarding as using more spells/skills.
My last game was as elder. This matches my preferences a lot more. The synergy between holding people still with roots and using the seedlings was very enjoyable. Someone tried to harass me with air, so I just made a needlefern while I waited for a tower to be built. Getting off a really good ultimate could very much change the entire fight. Everything I did correctly felt good/rewarding. Things I did wrong didn't feel as bad because it felt "fair".
Several times I would win a fight, then just sit around waiting to cap all of the resources after with my hero. This was by far the most frustrating thing in the game -- sitting around staring at your hero for 5 seconds at a time just waiting to capture gems. I suggest allowing any unit to capture gems by a mechanic similar to heroes of the storm. Stand in a circle without taking damage for 5 seconds and the gem is yours. This could be implemented for base building too. This also solves the problem of having "downtime" after your hero dies as you're going to want to use any surviving troops to capture resources, scout, etc. Bonus idea is to allow regular workers to place wards -- something else to do when your hero is dead.
There were tons of times I wanted to move a unit back who was being attacked, only to have it run back and forth because it was blocked by other units. Its very annoying to have to move 4-5 units to just retreat the one being attacked by a neutral camp. You can probably he
Hero gains a level which is not level 6. I just didn't care. I would like to see all heroes have a lot of particle effects and an overlevelled hero be able to take on an army by himself (or half an army).
A lot of the spells were just a matter of spamming every time they were available such as stinging surge, retracting roll and eagle eye. Remembering to press the buttons as often as possible does not feel rewarding or fun, just like extra buttons. These should probably be autocast.
An ally took gems that I was walking towards. Super annoying.
Things/feelings that I have a harder time putting into your format.
I dislike air units, the teleporters and dropships. They remove the tactics and strategy of using the terrain. There are a lot of other ways to make harassment possible. Do not give towers detection and allow for invisible units to try to sneak past defenses. Other options include short range teleports (stalker blink), more options for disrupting towers, or units that can easily run past towers and take out workers before dying. Or a ground vehicle transport merc that does not take damage from towers or moves faster when a tower hits it that can get troops in/out very quickly.
I don't mind the different types of resources as much as when I first played the game, but it still feels like the game would be better if you balanced it around just gold. If the upgrades, tech trees, trinkets and mercs are compelling, people will still buy them. If they're not compelling, buff them until the decision on what to buy is more difficult or stylistic. Lets say you have two very tanky races next to each other. Rather than being at such an inherit disadvantage for not having a well balanced team, one person spends gold on troops while the other uses it to expand or get a lot more early game mercs/trinkets than normal.
The squads feel like the cannon fodder while the mercs are what you want to protect. I don't have an easy suggestion on this other than, it feels like this is backwards to how it should be.
The races still don't feel all of that unique. There are some that want to go in first. Some that want to stay in the back. But I'm not going to play the game itself very differently based up on the race. Like I'm not going to ignore gems in the middle and try to take an extra expansion early on under any circumstances. Nor am I going to favor taking the enemy's tier 1's over expanding or killing neutrals, regardless of what race I'm playing. The risk/reward just isn't there for anything other than taking the easy expansions, then contesting the center of the map, then taking another expansion/neutrals. This should be different each game based upon the troop combinations on your team.
And finally, just an idea of what I would probably want out of the game. Another, alternative vision of how the game could be. Imagine if the following were put into effect:
a) Each hero is dramatically different. For grath he could take out a tower easily with 1 ultimate at level 6 and even go for the nexus by himself around level 12. Vela on the other hand never gets more HP, just more damage and range -- if a single tier 3 unit gets near her, she will die 1v1. One of the heroes never gets much stronger, but instead adds physical and magical resistance to all nearby troops leading to a more deathball play. If the hero is DPS based, he could do a mutalisk glaive bounce -- add an extra bounce for every level the hero gains, each bounce dealing full damage.
b) Any unit can cap resources and the hero is not necessary to create bases. All resources are shared.
c) Each race is dramatically different. One race wants to have the hero off by himself. Another race wants to deathball due to auras. Another race wants to spread out and capture points. Eagle eye could do double damage to tower shields to make pushing stronger.
d) Everything costs gold.
e) Leveling up means a lot more. A level 8 hero should have a dramatic advantage over a level 6 hero. Similarly a level 12 hero should be noticeably stronger than a level 10. If my hero is based around spells or direct combat, he should feel like a total badass near the end of a game. If my hero is based around auras, I should feel like I can't move my army without him. As the hero becomes stronger, it's appearance should reflect that strength. A level 1 eris should look like a female goku from the original dragon ball series. At level 6 she could look like female goku from dragonball z. By the time shes level 10 she should have fiery glowing hair and maybe start hovering over the ground when she moves.
f) Commit to regular and sometimes dramatic balance patches. For example if expanding is too strong, make it take 5 workers to get full income, workers grant more XP and have a longer build time to make expansions weaker to harass. If harass becomes too strong, buff pushing so that taking the enemy's tier 1 tower by the 4-6 minute mark is more rewarding/viable. If no one is buying trinkets because its better to have more troops, buff the trinkets or make trinkets almost a "must have" for controlling the center of the map, but tier 1 mercs even better for taking neutral camps/expanding.
Using the above, suddenly more strategies become viable. Teams can arrange to have one person focus on capturing points and expanding while the other two people control the center of the map. Or another game one person focuses on setting up defense. The defensive team automatically loses control of the center of the map (walk around and get gold), but they can then build a better economy. If the defenses are static, this team loses to good harass. One team can focus on forcing fights and winning them to get a hero level advantage and use their higher level heroes to win the game. Another team can focus on expansions to get a bigger economy and just have better, stronger forces to win the game. Another team can go for a more balanced approach of just skirmishing at middle and if the enemy doesn't engage - use their troops to take neutrals to get a very large burst of income and then push.
Concluding thoughts: The game feels like it has a lot of potential, but I really don't see why this has more to offer than the relic RTS games (the closest comparison currently), world in conflict (has similar respawn mechanics), or sword and soldiers (the most casual RTS I have played) in it's current state. Setup a foundation that encourages multiple ways to play the game. Allow any unit to take the resources. Buff the heroes and make levels more dramatic. Make decisions such as when to expand/push/contest the center map more meaningful. Remove air/teleports to make positioning and wards even more important. And finally make heroes fucking cool. People are going to identify with the hero first and the race's playstyle second.
This post came out as mostly negative, but I thought it was very good for such an unfinished game. I wouldn't take the time to write such a long and thought out post if I didn't have fun. I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys do and come up with the next playtest weekend.
@BanthaFett said:
When I attacked players or camps I seemed to have very little impact. I felt like my units were worthless.
When I teamed up with an ally I felt like I wasn't really contributing anything and should have picked a character that dealt damage.
I fell very behind in resources because I couldn't take expansions or effectively fight players for gems. This made me feel like I had defeated myself by picking the wrong hero.
These are an unfortunate side-effect of having a squad that's almost-entirely defensive. There are a few things on Hydros that we'll possibly end up touching up, though, to make sure Hydros players are able to do things like taking Titan camps or attacking expansions without feeling like they simply do so so much less effectively than someone with higher DPS. Not certain where this will land on the priority list just yet though.
In my second game I played Vex, bottom, with a Celesta and Ryme top. My opponents were Celesta, Vex, and Ryme.
When I went to take camps I found it very easy to kite the enemies with Vex and Spitfires. It was satisfying to kite effectively, but seemed like it was too easy. I wondered if I was exploiting bad AI.
The Titan aggro logic will definitely take some work to get just right. We have a few ideas, just a matter of finding the time to implement them. Hoping to have this done for TW3.
Didn't want to quote your entire block on merc/squad choices, but did want to respond to it at least. It's true that some things are in a place that makes alternatives feel slightly washed out, and we'll be shoring up things like that. We definitely noticed some things being used much more than others (both in terms of squads and mercs), and will be iterating on those things quite a lot for... pretty much ever, haha! It's also important to not overlook the tradeoffs a player makes for one versus the other though. For example, Ion Cannons shoot further than Leviathans and deal more damage, but require that an Engineer take time to construct it, and is then completely immobile. Those facets are the key to making things feel unique, powerful, and fun in different ways!
Thanks for playtesting, hope to have you back for TW3!
@Tok said:
Obviously, PvP was more engaging (played 4 rounds of PvP, only played Hydros)
Matches were more concise and last about 3/4 of the time a Bot match was taking. The play had some idle spots waiting for regen, so there was a bit of "hurry up and wait" to deal with. Chat was okay, but vox of course makes for much easier coord among squads was difficult to strategize. I agree with the statement above that pings are really useful when you are busy in an engagement, but could use more context (need help aka 911, watch here, charge!, etc). Only one match had a squad member DC which held up the match for a minute or so, no issues otherwise. I did not play Vela, even though I had tried it during bot play, would have been interesting in PvP to see how that stacked up if I had more time.
Incidentally, downtime (as in, your units' time spent regenerating and not participating) is something we'll be doing some work on (and will be helped as a positive consequence of some other changes we're looking at, like touching up movement speeds). Also incidentally, so are contextual pings; but that work is less immediate and more of just something we want to spend time on later. Great of you to indicate these things! <3
I enjoyed it overall and look forward to more chances for PvP!
WOO! Hope to see you back for TW3 and onward! Thanks for testing!
@SauceNinja said:
PVP was way better than the BOT games. I was focusing on Ryme but ended up with Hydros in my 3rd game because Mip stole Ryme from me immediately upon entering character selection. I never did find out what his ult was but the uniform game design allowed me to play w/o too bad of a handicap. The back and forth mid-game is amazing. By far my favorite part of the game so far. Positioning and harassment feel risky when they are and rewarding when you get away with it. I like the fog of war distance too. It's not so far that you can avoid everything but not so close that you're blindsided every attack you make. I think they were on average longer than the bot games. Thank you so much for allowing me to participate. I had a blast.
Awesome, good stuff! Glad you enjoyed yourself, hope to see ya back! <3
@AceAl said:
When bot lane (or top lane, if I was bot) was struggling, I didn't really feel any pressure to help them. When that happened either I'd have my own fight, or I'd just punish the missing opponent by destroying all their bases.
For some context on that "travel time", I loved the larger maps (even playing 80x80 occasionally) in Supreme Commander (not in a ranked context). It's a key strategic element to start your army marching and get them moving in the right direction early, and it's a tremendously satisfying strategic feeling when you have that build up of "I marched them over here, then got past missile range alive, then finally smashed their base". Or that you're safe from the enemy by virtue of "his army can't get here in time".
SupCom could scale up in distance way better because of huge unit caps (you can build twenty bases and field an army from each) and the air ferry system for speed. Atlas certainly shouldn't try to aim for those sizes. Just needs a feeling of "They'll never stop me in time!" or "Let's set out on a quest!".
We're doing some reshaping of the map and desegregating of the regions on the map, as well as putting some touches on the average unit movement speed in the game to alleviate these feelings. Totally agreed on both points!
When I applied strong early pressure to repeatedly destroy the starting expansion of my opponent (in a 1v1 bot lane context), I felt exultation in my masterful dominance.
A few swears later, it so happened that my opponent left the game and I felt sad.
I suggest a stronger defender's advantage. Currently defender's advantage (outside of the barracks super-tower) is just being closer to the squad respawn. This doesn't help if a fast damage squad comes in for a quick strike, and then pops back out. Perhaps a limited number of free wards or towers (which help you survive early game but run out by midgame) would help? Or perhaps educating people on how to build towers, it's one of the last things that a tester seemed to learn this weekend.
Incidentally, the change to movement speed will likely help this a fair bit. We're going to see how that shakes out before doing anything that more-directly addresses this, but it's on the table. Also, we definitely need to make tower-building more clear to players as an option. No immediate ideas, but something we'll discuss and solve sooner than later.
Of course, a better matchmaking system might be enough (with the obvious improvement being more people to match, which will come no doubt in time). I can zergling rush low level players on the SC2 ladder just fine, until it moves me up to a skill level that knows how to defend against that.
This also could be part of it, haha!
When I started to play with humans, I felt hope. Thee potential for cooperation and teamwork plays seemed limitless.
When I finished playing with humans, I wanted to feel hope. But alas, coordination levels varied with the individual. Often games were decided in favor of the most coordinated team and not individual skill. Reasonable for a team game, but (like in MOBAs) it makes me strongly prefer party mode.
Replay ID: G48b352f210574191b21a180e1f4458c6 See the ending where they won with better coordination, despite being down levels on average.
It'll be important to make sure that players feel a bit more agency in the outcomes of their games, as a result of their individual contribution. This also means giving players the proper tools to deal with mismatches (i.e. 1v2s or 1v3s). To be clear: Naturally, bringing 2 armies to a fight gives you a big advantage, but being the 1 should feel like a disadvantage, not a helpless situation. This is a big reason we've dialed up the variance in combat, and a big reason that we'll continue to!
Thanks for playtesting, and for the very well-structured feedback! Hope to see you back!
@burnmelt said:
1. Used terrapin troopers to charge enemies. They hit other allied units in front of themselves. Charge gets wasted. Allied ranged troops start dying because they can't run away. My troops can't get in front. We mosh together and all die. Feels bad man. Pathing needs to take other units under larger consideration.
Troopers in particular are going to get some love by the next test weekend. We've all seen this exact situation play out, and it's frustrating every time. So we hear ya here!
Lost a game because juggernauts simply walked past towers and started wrecking base. I ran back, they killed base after I got there while I just beat on them with my army. Felt bad.
We deliberately kept Juggernauts and Leviathans very strong as hard mechanisms by which to end games. While they might still be pretty powerful in TW3, they won't be overwhelming loudspeakers of power as they are now. As we suspected, though, most games ended because of Juggernauts and Leviathans that we observed. We're equally confident we can find more satisfying ways for players to close out games.
Got wrecked by celesta's light a few times because I was trapped in by my allies. Felt bad.
Asking for perspective, not as some attempt at giving you a soaring rhetoric of revelation: When you play other games (let's take a MOBA for example), and a player blocks you into a high-impact ability or a costly situation, do you feel the same, less bad, or more bad than it felt in these similar instances in our game? I would suspect that it's worse in our game, because of the combination of armies + high-impact abilities, but would love to hear you expand on this particular comparison! Also, for what it's worth: how pathing with allies should work has been one of our biggest oustanding questions for a while, and one we're working to have a strong answer for by the time we go live.
Played a game where I was hydros and the ally near me was eris. We were against celesta and alder. Just couldn't get near my opponents. I really felt helpless in this game.
Mentioned a few times in this thread that we're touching movement speeds. I think Hydros will end up benefitting the most from this (since the roll ability is based on a percentage of movement speed); so hopefully this will shore that up a bit.
Similarly, if you find yourself in that matchup in the future, you might try to coordinate with your teammate to have a Devilkin's War Dance speed you into a fight. The Rabbit's Foot charm is also helpful for closing the distance. Alder's Root is difficult to deal with as Grath and Hydros in particular though, so totally get how being Hydros into Grath could feel frustrating!
Played vela a few games in a row after my loss mentioned above. Wrecked my opponents. All I did was kite them until I had a very large advantage. Used shielder one game for the engagements and just retreated when either the shield went down. Pushed towers once I had the tier 3 unit with range boosting as I outranged towers then. Used ultimate to flee if I got flanked. Felt good to win, but didn't seem all of that rewarding as using more spells/skills.
Noted. There's a bit of a weirdness feeling with winning as Vela where you actually feel like you just gamed the system a bit. Definitely want to make winning a fight as Vela feel more satisfying!
My last game was as elder. This matches my preferences a lot more. The synergy between holding people still with roots and using the seedlings was very enjoyable. Someone tried to harass me with air, so I just made a needlefern while I waited for a tower to be built. Getting off a really good ultimate could very much change the entire fight. Everything I did correctly felt good/rewarding. Things I did wrong didn't feel as bad because it felt "fair".
WOO!
Several times I would win a fight, then just sit around waiting to cap all of the resources after with my hero. This was by far the most frustrating thing in the game -- sitting around staring at your hero for 5 seconds at a time just waiting to capture gems. I suggest allowing any unit to capture gems by a mechanic similar to heroes of the storm. Stand in a circle without taking damage for 5 seconds and the gem is yours. This could be implemented for base building too. This also solves the problem of having "downtime" after your hero dies as you're going to want to use any surviving troops to capture resources, scout, etc. Bonus idea is to allow regular workers to place wards -- something else to do when your hero is dead.
Having an alternate gem collector (whether it be a specific unit, or any unit) is something we've tossed around for a bit. Not sure we're going to act on it just yet, but we hear that you want something like this, and we do too! :D
There were tons of times I wanted to move a unit back who was being attacked, only to have it run back and forth because it was blocked by other units. Its very annoying to have to move 4-5 units to just retreat the one being attacked by a neutral camp.
This'll be another thing we need to smooth out with pathing, for sure. Will take some iterating to make this feel reasonable most of the time.
Hero gains a level which is not level 6. I just didn't care. I would like to see all heroes have a lot of particle effects and an overlevelled hero be able to take on an army by himself (or half an army).
Definitely want to punch up the impact of your hero leveling up (even if only visually, but almost certainly through efficacy as well). Great observation here!
A lot of the spells were just a matter of spamming every time they were available such as stinging surge, retracting roll and eagle eye. Remembering to press the buttons as often as possible does not feel rewarding or fun, just like extra buttons. These should probably be autocast.
Rather than make them autocast, it's more likely that we'll just ensure that using abilities like these A) feels more impactful, and feels like an important choice in a fight. However, the fact of the matter is that, typically, the less time an ability spends on cooldown, the more value you're getting out of having it as a tool. So I'm not certain there will ever be an ideal solution here.
An ally took gems that I was walking towards. Super annoying.
Heard about this one a lot from bot games. Less so from PvP because there's a bit more of a social awareness/understanding. But the MOBA players in us all have all experienced the feeling that you're "competing with your team" over resources you both want. We're hoping to make this less frustrating, but don't have any immediate actions to take to resolve it.
I dislike air units, the teleporters and dropships. They remove the tactics and strategy of using the terrain.
Worth noting that terrain-breaking has been interesting in other games. Hopefully we can make it just as interesting in ours, if it isn't now!
There are a lot of other ways to make harassment possible. Do not give towers detection and allow for invisible units to try to sneak past defenses. Other options include short range teleports (stalker blink), more options for disrupting towers, or units that can easily run past towers and take out workers before dying. Or a ground vehicle transport merc that does not take damage from towers or moves faster when a tower hits it that can get troops in/out very quickly.
Some of these are moreso things that would live within a squad than within mercs. The ground transport thing is just outright a cool idea, though; love the aesthetic of that. The general intent of this feedback, we outright agree that we want more harassment options!
I don't mind the different types of resources as much as when I first played the game, but it still feels like the game would be better if you balanced it around just gold. If the upgrades, tech trees, trinkets and mercs are compelling, people will still buy them. If they're not compelling, buff them until the decision on what to buy is more difficult or stylistic. Lets say you have two very tanky races next to each other. Rather than being at such an inherit disadvantage for not having a well balanced team, one person spends gold on troops while the other uses it to expand or get a lot more early game mercs/trinkets than normal.
Going to focus on the intent of this, which (correct me if I'm wrong) seems to be that you want more choice to come from your resource spending, and for those options to be compelling. And similarly: you don't believe these should be separate systems. There are a few different things we're still doing with resources that may actually line up cleanly with this desire.
The squads feel like the cannon fodder while the mercs are what you want to protect. I don't have an easy suggestion on this other than, it feels like this is backwards to how it should be.
We agree that it currently doesn't feel like a big deal to lose army units. This is actually something we're looking to solve with our immediate set of experiments. You'll likely learn more about this when TW3 rolls around! :D
The races still don't feel all of that unique. There are some that want to go in first. Some that want to stay in the back. But I'm not going to play the game itself very differently based up on the race. Like I'm not going to ignore gems in the middle and try to take an extra expansion early on under any circumstances. Nor am I going to favor taking the enemy's tier 1's over expanding or killing neutrals, regardless of what race I'm playing. The risk/reward just isn't there for anything other than taking the easy expansions, then contesting the center of the map, then taking another expansion/neutrals. This should be different each game based upon the troop combinations on your team.
I would compare this to a MOBA, in the sense that while what you're doing doesn't differ drastically, how you do it changes. For example, across all 8 squads, it might always be that you kill a Titan camp, take another while expanding, then fight in the middle for gems. How you handle each of those interactions should change, even if the subjects of those interactions don't. However, if you feel like you don't have options in general (regardless of your squad choice), that itself is a problem we'd like to target.
That said, I hope that the difference in playing, say, Hydros and Vex is such that, if you play the higher-DPS squad and control it perfectly, you might feel like you can successfully squeeze in just one more camp before going elsewhere; and inversely, that if you are a more durable squad, you can do those camps more safely and with lower risk.
And finally, just an idea of what I would probably want out of the game. Another, alternative vision of how the game could be. Imagine if the following were put into effect:
Didn't want to quote the full point-by-point block, but did want to comment: We love the idea of giving some squads drastically different identities. For example, a squad focused on the Hero could be cool. Or, a squad that has half respawn time and is meant to just be hyper-aggressive could be cool. We like the idea that some squads can have "minigames" that, if they nail, they get a huge advantage. For the time being, though, these unique extremes aren't quite what we're exploring, but we do understand and feel that same desire for very unique, cool, powerful things!
This post came out as mostly negative, but I thought it was very good for such an unfinished game. I wouldn't take the time to write such a long and thought out post if I didn't have fun. I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys do and come up with the next playtest weekend.
Yeah! Thanks for testing, and for taking the time to write up something this detail-oriented! Hope to see ya back for TW3! :D
Comments
It felt awesome when I could respond to my opponent's mass leviathan strat by building shrikes and countering their tech choice!
The PvP interactions were much more engaging than the bot play. Positioning around gems, the poke and dodge of facing a larger army, the tension of waiting for unit respawns have an energy to them that the bots don't match. However, as a low skill player, it's pretty punishing right now. Without gems you can't spend your scrap and the momentum of opponents' mercs are hard to halt short of happening to have someone with really well placed Celesta ults.
From the couple games I've played so far, I think there is quite a store of potential here. However, the skill depth for having an engaging even game is perhaps more on the chess end than the go (wéiqí/pinyin) end of things. I'm glad that there is at least the game queue effort to try to do some skill balancing.
Still, I think the interactions feel better with a skill gap than the few SCII pvp games I joined. The early game encourages feeling out the opponents and with the respawn on the squad you don't feel as behind and defeated as you would if you were facing a SCII rush. When you are low on mercs and gems, how to bring down a merc lead... that's the strategy guide that I hope someone writes in-depth to go with the tutorial video.
EDIT:
Addendum, played (and won) a game with me at the bottom 1v1 section. Made me wish I could trade resources to allies (or could we and I didn't learn about it?). As ranged vs melee enemy it felt one sided (in my favor) other than a few good engages by my opponent when they got a few tier 2 units or mercs before I did.
It also felt disconnected from the rest of my team. I hadn't noticed that they were closing out the game until it was almost over. Sure I kept my 1v1 matchup from getting momentum, but that didn't feel as impactful. That said, it felt more forgiving of the fact that I am not as skilled at this game as some. I ended up a few levels lower than my allies, but felt more like my decisions were rewarded. I will need to watch the replay to see if my decision to clear camps early on gave me what felt like a lead or if it was mainly the matchup.
I've played a few bot games over the course of the week, so I've been looking forward into dipping my toe into PvP. I played a few pvp games this afternoon, and watched a few more to see what I could learn from other folks.
The game has managed to grab me. The core gameplay of the squads and fights are fun, the decisions of when/where to expand are interesting and I'm excited about being able to get a team of friends playing together some day. I'm going to go into a bunch of nitpicky feedback, but I've Atlas generally compelling.
The Minimap
If I could improve one thing about Atlas right now, it would be the minimap. The Atlas map is very complex, with lots of important features and lanes. Several games in, I was still really struggling to figure out the locations of the main expansions and paths between bases.
The current minimap is fine for unit/hero locations, but very difficult to read the map structure from. There's very low contrast between the various browns/greens/greys used to mark various terrian types, the one-pixel resource pools are almost invisible, and there's no marker at all for titan camps. Eventually I just paused a replay, pulled out a pen and paper, and drew the map out to try and get a feel for the layout.
Some good lessons could be drawn from the way League of Legends has improved its minimap over the years. Early on, it was very detailed and literal, showing rock formations, trees, and buildings. Over time, it became more and more iconographic, and it really helped the clarity of the game. Here's the current version:
It doesn't try and represent any of the details or ground colors. Passable terrain is biege, impassible is dark green. Structures and jungle camps are large, simple icons.
Other Feedback
I like all chat during champ select!
The absolute best part of this game is the 3v3 combat, so the 1v1 lane makes it feel a little awkward because, even in late game, you're on a bit of an island. That might just be because people don't know how to play it yet, but it feels hard to be part of the teamwork, which is the driver of fun in this game for me.
The ~ key, which default selects your whole army, should not be able to be rebound to anything else. That should be its only functionality. I accidentally bound it to an army grouping and couldn't get it reset to the default "select everything"
I liked being told exactly how long the wait would be.
Client and tooltips lag during the loading screen, once squads are selected
1v1 as Ryme feels very terrible. I'm sure I'm doing it wrong but vs Vex it felt bad to always have fewer units and less damage. The Eris I played against just built 30 of the level 1 tech units and dunked my butt clean off. It felt very bad and I couldn't think of a counterplay.
This is kind of compounded by the fact that there aren't any mercenary units that are just basic damage dealers other than the Leviathan. I'm SURE this is on purpose, but for a less offensive faction, it feels like mercs are less useful than for an offensive faction, who already has the damage and just needs some boost to their utility.
I really like the combat over the gems. It's a really fun human interaction.
The one game where I was in a 2v2 lane crashed 12 minutes in, but while I was in it, I VERY much enjoyed the feeling of cooperating with my teammate to get stuff done. I think the 2v2 is a lot more fun for me. I'm sure some people will enjoy the 1v1, but I am not one of them. At least not while I'm playing Ryme (the flavor of which I really enjoy). It would be nice if you could select which lane you want to go into while you're queueing up.
Bear in mind I am of course very bad at this game, so these are just my opinions, not things I'm stating as facts.
It would be nice if the ping function had a little more context to it. I'm specifically thinking about the way the Portal 2 allowed you to ping a certain spot in 3-4 distinct ways, like "look here" or "shoot a portal here". Maybe in the context of Atlas you could ping a teammate to "look here" or "Rally here for a push" or "I got it" , or "you got it"
I built 3 juggernauts and crashed through the enemy base while my teammate chatted "CHAAAARGE"
Overall a fun experience, and even though communication was sparse, it felt as though I was actually working together with my teammates.
First game was pretty even. Came down to mutual nexus attacks. That was pretty fun.
Second game had a player with network trouble. After he dropped, game was going okay, until another player dropped, third on opposing team left and it was over. Shame because I was in 2v2 with discord coms with partner and it was going well.
Two games had a person not select in lobby, and requeued.
Last two games I was in 1v1 lane with someone approx 2x as good. Felt pretty awful. Every encounter was team wipe, then I wait. Not sure how to catch up on XP once I'm behind. Or even where XP comes from really; in bot games it just kind of happens, but the titans weren't doing me much good.
Okay, I'm not entirely new to the RTS genre (or MOBA), but I suck pretty hard at SC/SC2, DOTA, etc. However, I had a blast! Played Alder for all my PvP games, and I actually felt like I was contributing. I like the respawn timer mechanic, a poorly timed push won't just make you immediately lose like it can in SC. Not sure I like the econ system, I think it would be more fun if you do something like resource sharing (i.e. one guy is massing mercs, funnel them your expansion's gems, one guy's building a giant army, funnel them your gold generation).
Loving the game so far, thanks for giving me the chance to try it out!
Well said BTYM :D
X happened:
my chosen squad (hydros) was incapable of playing bottom lane. I had spent a lot of time getting good at it and felt bad because it had no anti air or damage.
i understand the need for tank squads and love a good tank, but possibly do something such that players receive a warning or something.
Hey Artillery,
I was bottom in the only PvP game I had time to squeeze in my Father schedule. I have to say, it was a lot different than a Bot Game. I will try to keep it as short as possible I think we could all write a long post on how we felt playing the game.
I played Celesta, dropping the Ult feels too hard to land it. I tried squeezing my opponent between my ult and my army but he had enough time to run away anyway. The spell is great, but the only time I was able to land the Ult was when the opponent was not looking. I suggest a faster cast rate or a longer casting distance as it was too easy to dodge.
I also felt it was hard to engage in fight on the map as the map was so vast. I suggest faster movements speed.
I felt like I was losing time when my units were Low HP I had to run back to base to heal and run back to the front. I suggest having the Teleport back like PreAlpha Week-End #1.
Cooperative, Team-Work felt very unlikely when I was bottom alone. I was gaining alot of tempo with my higher level, but my teammate never needed me to finish the game. I felt Useless. I don't have any suggestion for this at the moment. I will need to think more to come up with a solution for this.
The Game is great, I loved using the Tower disabler trinket, it helped my hit-and-run strategy to destroy my opponents towers.
I am sure that you take the feedbacks in a constructive way not in a negative one.
I hope I have access to more PvP games before the game is released and I am looking forward to play with real friends when it is going to be open to the public.
All in all I had a Great Time playing and I wish you the best guys!
Droite
Due to a scheduling conflict I was only able to get in two games. So I'll just talk about them in detail instead of giving a general overview. I should also preface by saying that I haven't played an RTS in years, and I only played a couple of bot games before PVP.
In my first game I played Hydros, top, with a Celesta, top, and I think a Vex bottom. My opponents were Celesta, Vex, and Ryme.
When I attacked players or camps I seemed to have very little impact. I felt like my units were worthless.
When I teamed up with an ally I felt like I wasn't really contributing anything and should have picked a character that dealt damage.
I fell very behind in resources because I couldn't take expansions or effectively fight players for gems. This made me feel like I had defeated myself by picking the wrong hero.
In my second game I played Vex, bottom, with a Celesta and Ryme top. My opponents were Celesta, Vex, and Ryme.
When I went to take camps I found it very easy to kite the enemies with Vex and Spitfires. It was satisfying to kite effectively, but seemed like it was too easy. I wondered if I was exploiting bad AI.
I never had to fight another player over resources on the bottom and was able to just take over any expansions I wanted with kiting. It felt good to be able to expand, and to have enough resources to build my army.
I grouped up with my teammates to push against top and encountered enemies. It seemed like kiting was a large part of combat. It felt like we mostly just played hit and run tag until someone suffered enough losses to retreat. I remember a couple of fire lizards pushing in once, and they dealt some damage, but got focus fired down fairly quickly. It felt like the best strategy was to just build as many little ranged units and possible and mass fire things into the ground. That was somewhat disappointing. I felt like there should be more head to head combat.
I ended up having surplus resources and was able to build some leviathans. I was actually able to deal some damage to structures with them, but my ally had some kind of deployable ground unit that had better range that he just sniped structures with, so mostly my leviathans felt kinda wasted. It was a bit disappointing considering their cost. I felt like the effort I had put into taking all those expansions was worthless because apparently I picked the wrong thing to kill structures with.
The fact that Celesta, Vex, and Ryme were picked by every team in which I didn't pick Hydros instead of Ryme makes me feel like I was stupid for ever picking a hero that wasn't one of those three. Obviously I only played two games, but with that limited exposure its kind of amazing that both teams went for the same comp each time.
Obviously, PvP was more engaging (played 4 rounds of PvP, only played Hydros)
Matches were more concise and last about 3/4 of the time a Bot match was taking. The play had some idle spots waiting for regen, so there was a bit of "hurry up and wait" to deal with. Chat was okay, but vox of course makes for much easier coord among squads was difficult to strategize. I agree with the statement above that pings are really useful when you are busy in an engagement, but could use more context (need help aka 911, watch here, charge!, etc). Only one match had a squad member DC which held up the match for a minute or so, no issues otherwise. I did not play Vela, even though I had tried it during bot play, would have been interesting in PvP to see how that stacked up if I had more time.
I enjoyed it overall and look forward to more chances for PvP!
PVP was way better than the BOT games. I was focusing on Ryme but ended up with Hydros in my 3rd game because Mip stole Ryme from me immediately upon entering character selection. I never did find out what his ult was but the uniform game design allowed me to play w/o too bad of a handicap. The back and forth mid-game is amazing. By far my favorite part of the game so far. Positioning and harassment feel risky when they are and rewarding when you get away with it. I like the fog of war distance too. It's not so far that you can avoid everything but not so close that you're blindsided every attack you make. I think they were on average longer than the bot games. Thank you so much for allowing me to participate. I had a blast.
Executive Summary
PvP happened, it made me feel "the fun". An auspicious test weekend result.
Feedback A
When bot lane (or top lane, if I was bot) was struggling, I didn't really feel any pressure to help them. When that happened either I'd have my own fight, or I'd just punish the missing opponent by destroying all their bases.
Replay ID: Gfd9fddca60064acca0f79b723894f1d8 19:30 in particular
I suggest some global range abilities, so that even with this current map size and travel time you can still spend some "resource" on assisting an ally on the other side of the map in a critical battle.
For some context on that "travel time", I loved the larger maps (even playing 80x80 occasionally) in Supreme Commander (not in a ranked context). It's a key strategic element to start your army marching and get them moving in the right direction early, and it's a tremendously satisfying strategic feeling when you have that build up of "I marched them over here, then got past missile range alive, then finally smashed their base". Or that you're safe from the enemy by virtue of "his army can't get here in time".
SupCom could scale up in distance way better because of huge unit caps (you can build twenty bases and field an army from each) and the air ferry system for speed. Atlas certainly shouldn't try to aim for those sizes. Just needs a feeling of "They'll never stop me in time!" or "Let's set out on a quest!".
Feedback B
When I applied strong early pressure to repeatedly destroy the starting expansion of my opponent (in a 1v1 bot lane context), I felt exultation in my masterful dominance.
A few swears later, it so happened that my opponent left the game and I felt sad.
Replay ID: Gc7aba2c061784653af50d325afcbbf09 It's probably the fastest PvP game of the day, just watch it all
I suggest a stronger defender's advantage. Currently defender's advantage (outside of the barracks super-tower) is just being closer to the squad respawn. This doesn't help if a fast damage squad comes in for a quick strike, and then pops back out. Perhaps a limited number of free wards or towers (which help you survive early game but run out by midgame) would help? Or perhaps educating people on how to build towers, it's one of the last things that a tester seemed to learn this weekend.
Of course, a better matchmaking system might be enough (with the obvious improvement being more people to match, which will come no doubt in time). I can zergling rush low level players on the SC2 ladder just fine, until it moves me up to a skill level that knows how to defend against that.
Feedback C
When I started to play with humans, I felt hope. Thee potential for cooperation and teamwork plays seemed limitless.
When I finished playing with humans, I wanted to feel hope. But alas, coordination levels varied with the individual. Often games were decided in favor of the most coordinated team and not individual skill. Reasonable for a team game, but (like in MOBAs) it makes me strongly prefer party mode.
Replay ID: G48b352f210574191b21a180e1f4458c6 See the ending where they won with better coordination, despite being down levels on average.
The tutorial video shows you that you can ping with four different icons. But sans context, those icons could mean anything.
There is an XP bar, I believe there's a sound when you level and when you hit level 6, the word "Ultimate!" pops up over your hero's head. Your feedback still has merit since you didn't notice it, but just wanted to point that out
Yeah, completely hear you on this - it's why I put the warning into my write-up for Hydros. I don't have much else to say on this except that you didn't do anything wrong, this is a pretty tough way to play when Hydros doesn't have anyone to back him up on damage. Regarding the anti-air though, if you get a single Shrike or Orion, they can take out flying units (presumably the Titans were your issue?) in pretty short order while your squad tanks the damage. Scuttleguards, with their inherent resistance, can be healed up by Hydros even on the gem expansion titans pretty easily.
I bet the time it landed though, you completely wiped out anything in that circle, amirite?
It's ridiculously powerful with a sizable radius, so while I can't say what the Artillery team will do with the ultimate, the ult's great for forcing armies to either run in a direction that's bad for them. When you're either defending a key structure or attacking, they're giving up lots of time not attacking you when they're running away because that tower ain't movin', they can only engage from so many directions. Just food for thought!
Party mode is normally available, but with such a varying skill range here I know they wanted to prevent the SC2 GM players who were friends from queueing up together and adding even further disparity and dashing of hope, heh. So, I think they get that feeling!
The biggest thing that gives us these interactions is the ability to respawn. That is to say: respawn lets you have multiple chances to fight an opponent, and in a way that lets both of you scale up and escalate your power level between those engagements. I'm stoked to see this feedback come in because, simply put, this is what we strive for. The feeling that you get several chances, and not simply that if you lose one fight badly enough, your game is over. WOO!
This is one of the primary things we're focusing on now that this test weekend has wrapped up. Making the 2v2 and 1v1 regions feel significantly less disconnected is going to be incredibly important. We've observed this same throughline not only in daily tests, but also in our own games. So, definitely tackling this one ASAP haha!
Thanks for testing, hope to see you for TW3!
Strategic choices and counterplay! Woohoo!
Hope to see ya back soon! :D
WOO!
These are probably ideally the sorts of things we're shooting for. Currently, we basically just print the existing map, top-down, as the minimap and overlay some information on top of it. As we get to a point where we're ready to spend time on making this as readable as possible, a lot of these sorts of things will be included in our approach. Great observations here, love this feedback a lot!
To be clear -- In-game or out-of-game? I assume in-game. We'll probably be punching up the "Hero has leveled up" VFX considerably, and eventually we'll also do things like animate/flash the XP bar when it's filled. So, yeah, lots of UI/UX stuff we can do there. Awesome!
I've experienced this as well. I'll pass this on and see if this is cheap to solve. If not, it'll simply be another optimization that'll have to wait until we can put the time into refining other things about spectating, and bundle those features.
This is worth us having a discussion about. Flying units are still pretty new in our game, so we've got things like that to figure out still. It's definitely off, and it'll be worked on for sure. It'll also be important for us to communicate clearly which thing you should be focusing. Do you focus the selection halo, or the unit model?
Awesome stuff, thanks for playtesting!
Experience hasn't changed the "1v1 island" feeling for the most part, so it's definitely not exclusive to being new and "not knowing it yet." This'll be a big focus for us pretty immediately.
Definitely a topic we're going to bring up. The functionality of a hotkey potentially transforming throughout a game from a player input can definitely be confusing sometimes. We'll likely end up making the "select all of unit type hotkeys uneditable by the player as a result of this confusion.
More loading optimizations coming soon™! Woo!
First, I need you to know that I audibly guffawed at "dunked my butt clean off."
Second: A lot of these 1v1 squad matchups definitely need some love. Pointing at Ryme vs Vex gives us a good place to start looking when we step into this. Also worth noting: Ryme previously had an AOE ability on Frostcallers, giving them a good tool with which to deal with a high number of (for example, Eris's) T1 units. It's possible they'll need an adequate tool to deal with that for the purpose of letting them hold up in this matchup in the 1v1.
It's definitely the intent that mercenaries are supportive to your squad and less-so directly combative units, but the merc space is open for us to, later, have more "purely combative" units if we feel like that space could be occupied by a neutral source. Great observation!
WOO!
We'll likely let you select your region eventually. It'll also be important that we make the 1v1 equally fun, or de-segregate the regions (which is very high on our to-do).
Thanks for testing. Was a joy seeing you so active in the chat! Hope to see ya back soon!
There's a contextual ping menu if you hold B and drag the cursor, but it's also not incredibly clear what each ping means. We'll be giving it a nice coat of paint fairly soon to further contextualize what those pings mean for the player and make their intent more clear. We're also using fairly generic contextual pings that are used by other games that might not translate perfectly into an RTS setting; we'll be revisiting those down the road and making sure that the pings we provide are the best options.
FEEEEEEEL THE POWAHHHHH
Success! Woohoo!
Thanks for playtesting and for the feedback! Please come back again soon! :D
Oof! Sorry you had trouble getting into a game that ran to completion! Hopefully this is just bad luck, but we'd definitely like to look into what caused those disconnects. Any chance you've got the game ID handy for the game that three total people dropped from?
The short version is: Killing pretty much anything gives you EXP. Ideally down the road it'd be: Doing anything grants you EXP. We've got a lot of investigation and iteration to go through on that system though, and we're not tackling it immediately; it's definitely on the list though.
Thanks for testing and posting your feedback! =)
I covered this above, but want to restate that we're elated about this. Respawn gives us the ability to have multiple battles, and for players to feel like they have more opportunities to get back on the field and learn after losing a fight, rather than games ending in one climactic clash and not getting to find out what they do wrong. We love that players have this tool, and we're glad you felt those effects! WOOHOO!
You can currently do this with the collection mechanism, and some strategies have formed around that. But in terms of the "funnel everything into one player" approach, I think we'd generally not enable those sorts of things as much. Limiting one player's growth was possible in previous builds, and the player that funneled money into their teammate was pressured to continue supporting that ally instead of getting to do their own thing. It was strong, but resulted in one player not really having fun and being a spectator to his teammate's destruction. However, this, in limited doses such as "hey take all the mid gems" has lead to some cool things, so we'll definitely still have some of that.
I realized this answer was fairly all over the place. Let me know if you'd like me to clarify at all!
Thank YOU for playtesting! Data and feedback are what have allowed us to fine-tune this game into something you might enjoy. Keep at it, and hope to see ya back!
Ideally we'd just like to, instead, make sure that most (if not every) squad can handle themselves in each region. And if we find that we can't do that without compromising their identity, then we'll try to find ways to give players tools that let them stand a chance. You've pointed to Hydros as a problematic squad in the 1v1, and others in chat pointed to Vela. Data supports that those two are probably the ones that need the most love in a 1v1 context; and it makes sense that these two squads are on the extreme ends of the offense vs defense "tree." Vela is potent but slow and squishy; Hydros is incredibly tanky but has trouble dealing damage. So seeing that the two squads on either extreme are the outliers and offenders gives us a good place to start. However, we like these extremes; they're what give squads texture. So we'll have to investigate all of that, naturally. Some of this also might be solved by just desegregating the regions a bit more. If you play for TW3, I'd love your feedback on how it feels then!
Thanks for testing and for your feedback!
Oh, all of these timed abilities will definitely need their delays/timers refined once we have our battle pacing entirely nailed down (this will make more sense after my next comment). The Celesta ult is indeed deliberately difficult to land, though, and that's actually important. While it'll certainly still be tweaked, if it were easier/more guaranteed to land, it wouldn't be as satisfying when you do successfully land it. But again, just to clearly restate, it might be too difficult right now.
And here's the comment that clarifies the "battle pacing" thing: we're immediately looking at bumping movement speeds up, and you'll likely feel the result of this iteration for TW3. We're probably looking at around a 15% difference. I believe I saw you (and quite a few others) mentioning this in the client chat, and it was suggested often enough that we immediately want to begin tackling it. So, thanks for being a voice on this one! :D
This'll be another thing we have to discuss. I think it's reasonable to have your low-HP units lose some time, but right now the trip home is so long that it feels like forever until your unit is back fighting with you. The aforementioned experiment should help soften this frustration. And if it doesn't entirely, we'll find a better solution! :D
We'll be attempting to desegregate the two regions by TW3. Please let us know how this feels if you play then!
WOO!
Stoked to hear it, glad to have ya! Thanks for testing and for the feedback! <3!
Final impressions after pvp.
Things I can put into your format:
Used terrapin troopers to charge enemies. They hit other allied units in front of themselves. Charge gets wasted. Allied ranged troops start dying because they can't run away. My troops can't get in front. We mosh together and all die. Feels bad man. Pathing needs to take other units under larger consideration.
Lost a game because juggernauts simply walked past towers and started wrecking base. I ran back, they killed base after I got there while I just beat on them with my army. Felt bad.
Got wrecked by celesta's light a few times because I was trapped in by my allies. Felt bad.
Played a game where I was hydros and the ally near me was eris. We were against celesta and alder. Just couldn't get near my opponents. I really felt helpless in this game.
G74f63146b0904faab6e361abc4e2a758
Played vela a few games in a row after my loss mentioned above. Wrecked my opponents. All I did was kite them until I had a very large advantage. Used shielder one game for the engagements and just retreated when either the shield went down. Pushed towers once I had the tier 3 unit with range boosting as I outranged towers then. Used ultimate to flee if I got flanked. Felt good to win, but didn't seem all of that rewarding as using more spells/skills.
My last game was as elder. This matches my preferences a lot more. The synergy between holding people still with roots and using the seedlings was very enjoyable. Someone tried to harass me with air, so I just made a needlefern while I waited for a tower to be built. Getting off a really good ultimate could very much change the entire fight. Everything I did correctly felt good/rewarding. Things I did wrong didn't feel as bad because it felt "fair".
Several times I would win a fight, then just sit around waiting to cap all of the resources after with my hero. This was by far the most frustrating thing in the game -- sitting around staring at your hero for 5 seconds at a time just waiting to capture gems. I suggest allowing any unit to capture gems by a mechanic similar to heroes of the storm. Stand in a circle without taking damage for 5 seconds and the gem is yours. This could be implemented for base building too. This also solves the problem of having "downtime" after your hero dies as you're going to want to use any surviving troops to capture resources, scout, etc. Bonus idea is to allow regular workers to place wards -- something else to do when your hero is dead.
There were tons of times I wanted to move a unit back who was being attacked, only to have it run back and forth because it was blocked by other units. Its very annoying to have to move 4-5 units to just retreat the one being attacked by a neutral camp. You can probably he
Hero gains a level which is not level 6. I just didn't care. I would like to see all heroes have a lot of particle effects and an overlevelled hero be able to take on an army by himself (or half an army).
A lot of the spells were just a matter of spamming every time they were available such as stinging surge, retracting roll and eagle eye. Remembering to press the buttons as often as possible does not feel rewarding or fun, just like extra buttons. These should probably be autocast.
An ally took gems that I was walking towards. Super annoying.
Things/feelings that I have a harder time putting into your format.
I dislike air units, the teleporters and dropships. They remove the tactics and strategy of using the terrain. There are a lot of other ways to make harassment possible. Do not give towers detection and allow for invisible units to try to sneak past defenses. Other options include short range teleports (stalker blink), more options for disrupting towers, or units that can easily run past towers and take out workers before dying. Or a ground vehicle transport merc that does not take damage from towers or moves faster when a tower hits it that can get troops in/out very quickly.
I don't mind the different types of resources as much as when I first played the game, but it still feels like the game would be better if you balanced it around just gold. If the upgrades, tech trees, trinkets and mercs are compelling, people will still buy them. If they're not compelling, buff them until the decision on what to buy is more difficult or stylistic. Lets say you have two very tanky races next to each other. Rather than being at such an inherit disadvantage for not having a well balanced team, one person spends gold on troops while the other uses it to expand or get a lot more early game mercs/trinkets than normal.
The squads feel like the cannon fodder while the mercs are what you want to protect. I don't have an easy suggestion on this other than, it feels like this is backwards to how it should be.
The races still don't feel all of that unique. There are some that want to go in first. Some that want to stay in the back. But I'm not going to play the game itself very differently based up on the race. Like I'm not going to ignore gems in the middle and try to take an extra expansion early on under any circumstances. Nor am I going to favor taking the enemy's tier 1's over expanding or killing neutrals, regardless of what race I'm playing. The risk/reward just isn't there for anything other than taking the easy expansions, then contesting the center of the map, then taking another expansion/neutrals. This should be different each game based upon the troop combinations on your team.
And finally, just an idea of what I would probably want out of the game. Another, alternative vision of how the game could be. Imagine if the following were put into effect:
a) Each hero is dramatically different. For grath he could take out a tower easily with 1 ultimate at level 6 and even go for the nexus by himself around level 12. Vela on the other hand never gets more HP, just more damage and range -- if a single tier 3 unit gets near her, she will die 1v1. One of the heroes never gets much stronger, but instead adds physical and magical resistance to all nearby troops leading to a more deathball play. If the hero is DPS based, he could do a mutalisk glaive bounce -- add an extra bounce for every level the hero gains, each bounce dealing full damage.
b) Any unit can cap resources and the hero is not necessary to create bases. All resources are shared.
c) Each race is dramatically different. One race wants to have the hero off by himself. Another race wants to deathball due to auras. Another race wants to spread out and capture points. Eagle eye could do double damage to tower shields to make pushing stronger.
d) Everything costs gold.
e) Leveling up means a lot more. A level 8 hero should have a dramatic advantage over a level 6 hero. Similarly a level 12 hero should be noticeably stronger than a level 10. If my hero is based around spells or direct combat, he should feel like a total badass near the end of a game. If my hero is based around auras, I should feel like I can't move my army without him. As the hero becomes stronger, it's appearance should reflect that strength. A level 1 eris should look like a female goku from the original dragon ball series. At level 6 she could look like female goku from dragonball z. By the time shes level 10 she should have fiery glowing hair and maybe start hovering over the ground when she moves.
f) Commit to regular and sometimes dramatic balance patches. For example if expanding is too strong, make it take 5 workers to get full income, workers grant more XP and have a longer build time to make expansions weaker to harass. If harass becomes too strong, buff pushing so that taking the enemy's tier 1 tower by the 4-6 minute mark is more rewarding/viable. If no one is buying trinkets because its better to have more troops, buff the trinkets or make trinkets almost a "must have" for controlling the center of the map, but tier 1 mercs even better for taking neutral camps/expanding.
Using the above, suddenly more strategies become viable. Teams can arrange to have one person focus on capturing points and expanding while the other two people control the center of the map. Or another game one person focuses on setting up defense. The defensive team automatically loses control of the center of the map (walk around and get gold), but they can then build a better economy. If the defenses are static, this team loses to good harass. One team can focus on forcing fights and winning them to get a hero level advantage and use their higher level heroes to win the game. Another team can focus on expansions to get a bigger economy and just have better, stronger forces to win the game. Another team can go for a more balanced approach of just skirmishing at middle and if the enemy doesn't engage - use their troops to take neutrals to get a very large burst of income and then push.
Concluding thoughts: The game feels like it has a lot of potential, but I really don't see why this has more to offer than the relic RTS games (the closest comparison currently), world in conflict (has similar respawn mechanics), or sword and soldiers (the most casual RTS I have played) in it's current state. Setup a foundation that encourages multiple ways to play the game. Allow any unit to take the resources. Buff the heroes and make levels more dramatic. Make decisions such as when to expand/push/contest the center map more meaningful. Remove air/teleports to make positioning and wards even more important. And finally make heroes fucking cool. People are going to identify with the hero first and the race's playstyle second.
This post came out as mostly negative, but I thought it was very good for such an unfinished game. I wouldn't take the time to write such a long and thought out post if I didn't have fun. I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys do and come up with the next playtest weekend.
EDIT: Cleaning up some formatting.
These are an unfortunate side-effect of having a squad that's almost-entirely defensive. There are a few things on Hydros that we'll possibly end up touching up, though, to make sure Hydros players are able to do things like taking Titan camps or attacking expansions without feeling like they simply do so so much less effectively than someone with higher DPS. Not certain where this will land on the priority list just yet though.
The Titan aggro logic will definitely take some work to get just right. We have a few ideas, just a matter of finding the time to implement them. Hoping to have this done for TW3.
Didn't want to quote your entire block on merc/squad choices, but did want to respond to it at least. It's true that some things are in a place that makes alternatives feel slightly washed out, and we'll be shoring up things like that. We definitely noticed some things being used much more than others (both in terms of squads and mercs), and will be iterating on those things quite a lot for... pretty much ever, haha! It's also important to not overlook the tradeoffs a player makes for one versus the other though. For example, Ion Cannons shoot further than Leviathans and deal more damage, but require that an Engineer take time to construct it, and is then completely immobile. Those facets are the key to making things feel unique, powerful, and fun in different ways!
Thanks for playtesting, hope to have you back for TW3!
Incidentally, downtime (as in, your units' time spent regenerating and not participating) is something we'll be doing some work on (and will be helped as a positive consequence of some other changes we're looking at, like touching up movement speeds). Also incidentally, so are contextual pings; but that work is less immediate and more of just something we want to spend time on later. Great of you to indicate these things! <3
WOO! Hope to see you back for TW3 and onward! Thanks for testing!
Awesome, good stuff! Glad you enjoyed yourself, hope to see ya back! <3
We're doing some reshaping of the map and desegregating of the regions on the map, as well as putting some touches on the average unit movement speed in the game to alleviate these feelings. Totally agreed on both points!
Incidentally, the change to movement speed will likely help this a fair bit. We're going to see how that shakes out before doing anything that more-directly addresses this, but it's on the table. Also, we definitely need to make tower-building more clear to players as an option. No immediate ideas, but something we'll discuss and solve sooner than later.
This also could be part of it, haha!
It'll be important to make sure that players feel a bit more agency in the outcomes of their games, as a result of their individual contribution. This also means giving players the proper tools to deal with mismatches (i.e. 1v2s or 1v3s). To be clear: Naturally, bringing 2 armies to a fight gives you a big advantage, but being the 1 should feel like a disadvantage, not a helpless situation. This is a big reason we've dialed up the variance in combat, and a big reason that we'll continue to!
Thanks for playtesting, and for the very well-structured feedback! Hope to see you back!
Troopers in particular are going to get some love by the next test weekend. We've all seen this exact situation play out, and it's frustrating every time. So we hear ya here!
We deliberately kept Juggernauts and Leviathans very strong as hard mechanisms by which to end games. While they might still be pretty powerful in TW3, they won't be overwhelming loudspeakers of power as they are now. As we suspected, though, most games ended because of Juggernauts and Leviathans that we observed. We're equally confident we can find more satisfying ways for players to close out games.
Asking for perspective, not as some attempt at giving you a soaring rhetoric of revelation: When you play other games (let's take a MOBA for example), and a player blocks you into a high-impact ability or a costly situation, do you feel the same, less bad, or more bad than it felt in these similar instances in our game? I would suspect that it's worse in our game, because of the combination of armies + high-impact abilities, but would love to hear you expand on this particular comparison! Also, for what it's worth: how pathing with allies should work has been one of our biggest oustanding questions for a while, and one we're working to have a strong answer for by the time we go live.
Mentioned a few times in this thread that we're touching movement speeds. I think Hydros will end up benefitting the most from this (since the roll ability is based on a percentage of movement speed); so hopefully this will shore that up a bit.
Similarly, if you find yourself in that matchup in the future, you might try to coordinate with your teammate to have a Devilkin's War Dance speed you into a fight. The Rabbit's Foot charm is also helpful for closing the distance. Alder's Root is difficult to deal with as Grath and Hydros in particular though, so totally get how being Hydros into Grath could feel frustrating!
Noted. There's a bit of a weirdness feeling with winning as Vela where you actually feel like you just gamed the system a bit. Definitely want to make winning a fight as Vela feel more satisfying!
WOO!
Having an alternate gem collector (whether it be a specific unit, or any unit) is something we've tossed around for a bit. Not sure we're going to act on it just yet, but we hear that you want something like this, and we do too! :D
This'll be another thing we need to smooth out with pathing, for sure. Will take some iterating to make this feel reasonable most of the time.
Definitely want to punch up the impact of your hero leveling up (even if only visually, but almost certainly through efficacy as well). Great observation here!
Rather than make them autocast, it's more likely that we'll just ensure that using abilities like these A) feels more impactful, and
feels like an important choice in a fight. However, the fact of the matter is that, typically, the less time an ability spends on cooldown, the more value you're getting out of having it as a tool. So I'm not certain there will ever be an ideal solution here.
Heard about this one a lot from bot games. Less so from PvP because there's a bit more of a social awareness/understanding. But the MOBA players in us all have all experienced the feeling that you're "competing with your team" over resources you both want. We're hoping to make this less frustrating, but don't have any immediate actions to take to resolve it.
Worth noting that terrain-breaking has been interesting in other games. Hopefully we can make it just as interesting in ours, if it isn't now!
Some of these are moreso things that would live within a squad than within mercs. The ground transport thing is just outright a cool idea, though; love the aesthetic of that. The general intent of this feedback, we outright agree that we want more harassment options!
Going to focus on the intent of this, which (correct me if I'm wrong) seems to be that you want more choice to come from your resource spending, and for those options to be compelling. And similarly: you don't believe these should be separate systems. There are a few different things we're still doing with resources that may actually line up cleanly with this desire.
We agree that it currently doesn't feel like a big deal to lose army units. This is actually something we're looking to solve with our immediate set of experiments. You'll likely learn more about this when TW3 rolls around! :D
I would compare this to a MOBA, in the sense that while what you're doing doesn't differ drastically, how you do it changes. For example, across all 8 squads, it might always be that you kill a Titan camp, take another while expanding, then fight in the middle for gems. How you handle each of those interactions should change, even if the subjects of those interactions don't. However, if you feel like you don't have options in general (regardless of your squad choice), that itself is a problem we'd like to target.
That said, I hope that the difference in playing, say, Hydros and Vex is such that, if you play the higher-DPS squad and control it perfectly, you might feel like you can successfully squeeze in just one more camp before going elsewhere; and inversely, that if you are a more durable squad, you can do those camps more safely and with lower risk.
Didn't want to quote the full point-by-point block, but did want to comment: We love the idea of giving some squads drastically different identities. For example, a squad focused on the Hero could be cool. Or, a squad that has half respawn time and is meant to just be hyper-aggressive could be cool. We like the idea that some squads can have "minigames" that, if they nail, they get a huge advantage. For the time being, though, these unique extremes aren't quite what we're exploring, but we do understand and feel that same desire for very unique, cool, powerful things!
Yeah! Thanks for testing, and for taking the time to write up something this detail-oriented! Hope to see ya back for TW3! :D