Comments

• Nib Member

  April 3 edited April 5

  I think Diamond should just be Square with all units tilted 45 degrees.

  Some not mentioned changes I found for anyone interested:
  * Gems give 1 or 2 XP depending on size (neutral camps give large gems) Was always the case.
  * Bots communicate so much that it's annoying. Funnily enough they do it even if no player is on their team.
  * I swear I had a 3rd thing to write here but can't for the life of me figure out what it was.

  I remembered that it was that you can hold 3 charges of flying wards.
• snkz Member, Administrator

  April 3

  @Nib tell me more about your bot communication pains in the bot feedback thread if you have time!
• ShrikeGames Member

  April 3 edited April 3

  • Mercs being split up didn't seem significant to me but...
  • It made me try martyrs and paired it with Celesta because she was OP last patch.
  • The combination is very very good, but it relies on getting the required levels and teammates supporting/stopping them from being killed. When it worked it really, really, worked. When it didn't work so well it ended up going to a long 26minute slugfest to attrition and the enemy team also started building them.
  • I saw way more big team fights this week than before, no one seems to care to go expansion hunting anymore unless they are farming workers for XP. It's pretty dull when we can lose an expo and not care too much.
• AceAl Member

  April 3

  On the point of the economy, with the improved nexus health I've been finding that the games do drag out to "fatigue". There's plenty of combat as a team grows stronger and stronger, but without a strong coordinated strike (which feels impossible without voice comms), it becomes a long trawl to economic superiority. Usually you just keep building your advantage, until the other team surrenders because they can't build anything anymore.

  @Treisk said:
  3. What did you think about the updated item store?

  I like the new tooltips! Since item power wasn't too obvious before, the reduced item power was not too clear.
  Since you don't have the option of spending scrap elsewhere, I still get the exact same items in the same order.

  @Treisk said:
  4. What did you think about mercs in this new system?

  Usually there is only one merc I plan to use with each squad anyways. So I pick a merc faction based on that, and there's less chance to change the plan. But I don't often change the plan and use other mercs, so I didn't notice it much.
• Minor 3rd Member

  April 3

  1. In general I'm a fan of the gold system, however I've noticed when you're ahead, it does feel a little weird just bankrolling gold with nothing to spend it on.

  2. With regards to the merc groups, I find you pretty much pick the merc you like to lean on, and just pick that group. Them being split up didn't seem to impact much for me.

  In general I really like the pacing and game length currently. The game moves along at a nice clip, but it does feel more "snowball-y" than before. The team's that ahead keeps the pressure up and can kind of cruise toward victory.
• Jacen Member

  April 3 edited April 3

  1. What did you think about the updated item store?

  I like that we can see the path that the items will take. It's a small but welcome addition.

  1. What did you think about mercs in this new system?

  Lower tier mercs(excluding cubes) just don't feel like they are worth building at the moment. Especially when 'meat' is limited early game.

  Martyrs are incredibly strong right now, they can hide way behind armies while still providing a huge buff. Their ability feels more game changing that a majority of the squad leader ults and abilities. It feels like a huge swing in your favor, with very little trade off.
• wondible Member

  April 3

  Was in a few winning teams. I sort of know how to how to open the game, midgame and on I'm less sure what I should be doing. Easily lose track of what's going on (how many units are on each side) in big fights, especially when I get used to identifying allies by squad, and then the same squad is on the other side.

  @Treisk said:
  1. How did you feel about gold in the game? How did it change the way you played?

  Led to some tower raids for that purpose. Otherwise it's mostly a gauge on how the game is going, with only a globally visible one-bit-per-player output at the bottom end.

  Not sure how intentional the global broadcast is, but it might be interesting if the gold level was visible as fx on the base, so you could scout it for intel.

  1. What did you think of the XP system? What did you think about the "chunks" of XP from various actions? What did you think about getting scrap every level? What did you think about tech level = XP level?

  Pacing seemed okay. Felt like I got to ults more often, but not sure if that is me or the game. Not clear what is effective and what isn't, so that I can reflect on how to get XP better next time.

  1. What did you think about the updated item store?

  Late-game battles were less blink-and-miss it, possibly still a little fast. Still a little overwhelming choice, and a lot of possible combinations to try out.

  1. What did you think about mercs in this new system?

  Not a very big difference. I tried using a few, but nothing that felt like it was really working, and it's hard to visualize how it reduced my squad units.

  The four groups felt pretty similar. I'd almost want them to be smaller and more spikey/specialized, in the same way squads are. That still gives you 32 possibilities (growing with each new squad), with multiple unit builds within each combination.
• Anees Member

  April 4

  Main thing I felt from today was that I have no idea why either team is winning or losing. It just feels like one side has a better squad matchup than the other so they're going to consistently win fights, and there's very little you can do tactically to circumvent that. It's really frustrating to have everything tied to levels because every game I was behind, I was thinking "okay if I can just get my tier 3 stuff I might be able to make a comeback"...and then I literally never hit level 8 because I can't move out on the map or else I auto-lose to their tier 3 + ult advantage. It's very MOBA-like where you start falling behind and then it just snowballs because they can use their advantage to keep you from progressing any more.

  Splitting mercs was meh. It's another one of those non-choices where you figure it out exactly once and maybe you'll think about it again after another 10 games.
• Treisk Member, Administrator

  April 4

  @Nib said:
  * Gems give 1 or 2 XP depending on size (neutral camps give large gems)

  Playtest 199 notes

  • XP is gained from all activities
    
    
    • Collecting gems from the middle adds chunks of XP.

  So it's always been like that, but we probably could've done a better job of explaining that. And hopefully the UI will communicate that better sooner than later, haha!
• Treisk Member, Administrator

  April 4

  @ShrikeGames said:
  * I saw way more big team fights this week than before, no one seems to care to go expansion hunting anymore unless they are farming workers for XP. It's pretty dull when we can lose an expo and not care too much.

  One of the highest-level items on our to-do list is drilling into what the value of an expansion should be, and, thus, what the value of killing an expansion is. Right now they're perhaps a bit weak. Warrants a good amount of discussion and plenty of iteration though!

  Thanks for testing <3
• Treisk Member, Administrator

  April 4

  @AceAl said:
  I like the new tooltips! Since item power wasn't too obvious before, the reduced item power was not too clear.

  Since you don't have the option of spending scrap elsewhere, I still get the exact same items in the same order.
  This is very much the expected result. The best choices should still probably be the same per squad/build style, but they were a bit more influential than we wanted them to be for the time being. We've got a lot to figure out about power ramping in our game, for sure. But 350% DPS was clearly too much, hahaha

  Thanks!
• Treisk Member, Administrator

  April 4

  @Minor 3rd said:
  In general I really like the pacing and game length currently. The game moves along at a nice clip, but it does feel more "snowball-y" than before. The team's that ahead keeps the pressure up and can kind of cruise toward victory.

  Games are definitely pretty snowbally right now. Not as much as in previous versions of Atlas, but it seems more.... sturdy of a snowball now. Things won't often spiral out of control in terms of a power snowball now (unless the differential is actually huge), but it's hard to break through even a one-level deficit right now. Some sort of rubber-banding will probably help that once we start locking more things in.

  Thanks so much! :D
• Treisk Member, Administrator

  April 4

  @Jacen said:
  I like that we can see the path that the items will take. It's a small but welcome addition.

  WOOO!

  Lower tier mercs(excluding cubes) just don't feel like they are worth building at the moment. Especially when 'meat' is limited early game.

  Totally agree here! We're going to investigate a couple possible alternatives to Merc costing soon that will hopefully alleviate some of this!

  Martyrs are incredibly strong right now, they can hide way behind armies while still providing a huge buff. Their ability feels more game changing that a majority of the squad leader ults and abilities. It feels like a huge swing in your favor, with very little trade off.

  Investigating Martyr balance, most likely, this week. The unit is very cool, very fun, changes the layout of a fight, but is also wicked powerful without a great answer (especially for Hydros, Grath, and Eris). So we'll be taking a look at that soon.

  Thanks for the post! :D
• Treisk Member, Administrator

  April 4

  @wondible said:
  Not sure how intentional the global broadcast is, but it might be interesting if the gold level was visible as fx on the base, so you could scout it for intel.
  Pacing seemed okay. Felt like I got to ults more often, but not sure if that is me or the game. Not clear what is effective and what isn't, so that I can reflect on how to get XP better next time.

  Lots to do on the UI front for this system! WOO!

  Late-game battles were less blink-and-miss it, possibly still a little fast. Still a little overwhelming choice, and a lot of possible combinations to try out.

  WOOHOO!

  Not a very big difference. I tried using a few, but nothing that felt like it was really working, and it's hard to visualize how it reduced my squad units.
  The four groups felt pretty similar. I'd almost want them to be smaller and more spikey/specialized, in the same way squads are. That still gives you 32 possibilities (growing with each new squad), with multiple unit builds within each combination.

  Data from last night lets us trend in that direction if we want to. Totally undecided as of yet though. But it's very cool that nobody seemed overwhelmed by "too much choice." Less cool that nobody felt meaning in those choices, so that's probably the next step for this system.

  Thanks so much!
• Treisk Member, Administrator

  April 4

  @Anees said:
  Main thing I felt from today was that I have no idea why either team is winning or losing. It just feels like one side has a better squad matchup than the other so they're going to consistently win fights, and there's very little you can do tactically to circumvent that. It's really frustrating to have everything tied to levels because every game I was behind, I was thinking "okay if I can just get my tier 3 stuff I might be able to make a comeback"...and then I literally never hit level 8 because I can't move out on the map or else I auto-lose to their tier 3 + ult advantage. It's very MOBA-like where you start falling behind and then it just snowballs because they can use their advantage to keep you from progressing any more.

  Yeah, games are definitely locked into some degree of snowballing right now. I mentioned above that it's, fortunately, not as heavy of a snowball as it was before, but it's a much more "sturdy" snowball (in that even small leads are hard to overcome). Also, squad matchups are definitely a big part of that, and a hurdle we'll have to clear in the process.

  Splitting mercs was meh. It's another one of those non-choices where you figure it out exactly once and maybe you'll think about it again after another 10 games.

  Touched on this above, but would like to restate -- This is pretty much the statement that data supports, and the next step for this system is very likely to double down on each faction's uniqueness a bit. No exact plan there yet though. Lots to do!

  Thanks for testin' and postin! Woo!
• SpideyCU Member

  April 4

  I'm generally overcome with feeling of "blah" from yesterday's test so I'm going to bounce off existing feedback to supplement my own, rather than writing from scratch as I usually do.

  @AceAl said:
  On the point of the economy, with the improved nexus health I've been finding that the games do drag out to "fatigue". There's plenty of combat as a team grows stronger and stronger, but without a strong coordinated strike (which feels impossible without voice comms), it becomes a long trawl to economic superiority. Usually you just keep building your advantage, until the other team surrenders because they can't build anything anymore.

  This was my experience too - with voice comms it's a different game, and that's fine since a team-based game should have improves results for the side that's coordinating better. The economic win was the only way I saw games end.

  Taking an opponent's healing fountain didn't seem to impact the games much either - basically, if you're losing, it's due to your opponent outleveling you. Thus, the gold doesn't have much impact because it'll let you spawn one more wave than you would have otherwise been able to do, which might delay your opponent from killing your nexus for another 15 seconds.

  Usually there is only one merc I plan to use with each squad anyways. So I pick a merc faction based on that, and there's less chance to change the plan. But I don't often change the plan and use other mercs, so I didn't notice it much.

  This was also mentioned by multiple people - I agree with this, except for the sentinel. I'll usually throw one out because map awareness does have its advantages. Plus, with few people valuing expansions much except for the brutal one in the middle, I realized it became super-critical to see when that one was taken by the other side.

  @Anees said:
  Main thing I felt from today was that I have no idea why either team is winning or losing. It just feels like one side has a better squad matchup than the other so they're going to consistently win fights, and there's very little you can do tactically to circumvent that. It's really frustrating to have everything tied to levels because every game I was behind, I was thinking "okay if I can just get my tier 3 stuff I might be able to make a comeback"...and then I literally never hit level 8 because I can't move out on the map or else I auto-lose to their tier 3 + ult advantage. It's very MOBA-like where you start falling behind and then it just snowballs because they can use their advantage to keep you from progressing any more.

  Overall, I think this lead to my feeling of "blah" (no idea why I'm winning/losing - or yesterday, just losing!). Also, I'm not sure what the matchmaking was based on for game Gd21a752f9afa41ea96917e72df091599 but it took me (who'd lost both games earlier that day) and two relatively new'ish players pitted against two relatively experienced players and an Artillery employee. No fair!

  I completely feel helpless once I fall behind because, like mentioned, moving out will just give the other side an opportunity to kill me and there's nothing I can do to stop them. This is probably in part because expansions are undervalued/a liability, it's not like I can even poke around elsewhere to try and weaken them & get ahead. Action is all around the middle of the map after one side starts pushing the towers, and you either go there to slow them (but die, feeding them exp), or you try to do something somewhere else, but they don't care and just win.
• Deaucalion Member

  April 4 edited April 4

  I concur with AceAI that I am usually picking a merc faction for one particular unit. As such, I don't feel any loss of options due to the downsizing the unique roster of each faction to four units.

  Games have been very snowbally. Part of this is that I haven't had a lot of time to figure out the strong combinations of squads, mercs, and items. I find it very difficult to fight back once I am behind for two reasons:
  1) My opponents are higher level and have ults, hight tier units, and more upgrades.
  2) If unchecked, its possible to do a lot of damage to your opponent's structures in a short amount of time. I felt that every second I waited to recover my supply, my opponent was pulling further ahead on xp, map control, and gold. I spent a lot of time trying to push my opponents off my side with an army half the size of theirs, and ended up falling far behind on gold as a result.

  The 40s cooldown on T for building an expansion can add up. If your opponent manages to destroy your expansion early on, you need to spend 40s rebuilding it, which might delay your ability to take a second expansion, not to mention the gems that will de-pop while T is on cooldown. Xp pools are already gated by the Titan camps, so having a cost to build an expansion is a second layer of gating. There probably needs to be a safety valve to prevent players from taking too many camps to fast, but there are other ways to do this, like building all workers one-at-a-time at your main base.
• Nib Member

  April 5 edited April 5

  @Treisk said:
  So it's always been like that, but we probably could've done a better job of explaining that. And hopefully the UI will communicate that better sooner than later, haha!

  Am I crazy or was it not 2-4 XP before this playtest? It just seemed like the lower XP from gems was worth mentioning.
• Treisk Member, Administrator

  April 5

  @Nib said:
  Am I crazy or was it not 2-4 XP before this playtest? It just seemed like the lower XP from gems was worth mentioning.

  Those values haven't been touched since the initial discretization of scrap/EXP. :P
• Nib Member

  April 5

  Yeah I just went back and watched old replays. I guess I'm crazy. I must have gotten XP from some other source as I did my initial testing on it and just assumed from that.
• Treisk Member, Administrator

  April 5

  @SpideyCU said:
  This was my experience too - with voice comms it's a different game, and that's fine since a team-based game should have improves results for the side that's coordinating better. The economic win was the only way I saw games end.

  Our current design roadmap has us tackling the ends of games during the leadup to Test Weekend 4. No plans to directly tackle this for TW3. But we're seeing a lot of the same thing; and in fact, this is one of the purposes stock was meant to serve!

  Also, I'm not sure what the matchmaking was based on for game Gd21a752f9afa41ea96917e72df091599 but it took me (who'd lost both games earlier that day) and two relatively new'ish players pitted against two relatively experienced players and an Artillery employee. No fair!

  This comment lead to a chat internally about how MMR is set. We looked at a few other examples and saw that the output isn't matching our intent. Not certain when we'll get to tackle this, but it's on the radar now; thanks for bringing it to our attention! That's quite the mismatch!

  Thanks! <3
• Treisk Member, Administrator

  April 5

  @Deaucalion said:
  I concur with AceAI that I am usually picking a merc faction for one particular unit. As such, I don't feel any loss of options due to the downsizing the unique roster of each faction to four units.

  This is what we're observing more and more, for sure. We may be doing some doubling-down in faction strengths/identity before too long. No timeline here yet.

  Games have been very snowbally. Part of this is that I haven't had a lot of time to figure out the strong combinations of squads, mercs, and items. I find it very difficult to fight back once I am behind for two reasons:
  1) My opponents are higher level and have ults, hight tier units, and more upgrades.
  2) If unchecked, its possible to do a lot of damage to your opponent's structures in a short amount of time. I felt that every second I waited to recover my supply, my opponent was pulling further ahead on xp, map control, and gold. I spent a lot of time trying to push my opponents off my side with an army half the size of theirs, and ended up falling far behind on gold as a result.

  A big part of this, it's worth noting, is due to how discretizing EXP/Scrap put things on rails a bit. We're discussing a different approach for this, and hope to have something by Sunday for this, but no promises unfortunately!

  The 40s cooldown on T for building an expansion can add up. If your opponent manages to destroy your expansion early on, you need to spend 40s rebuilding it, which might delay your ability to take a second expansion, not to mention the gems that will de-pop while T is on cooldown. Xp pools are already gated by the Titan camps, so having a cost to build an expansion is a second layer of gating. There probably needs to be a safety valve to prevent players from taking too many camps to fast, but there are other ways to do this, like building all workers one-at-a-time at your main base.

  I should be super-clear that the 40-second cooldown for expansion-building is totally just a temporary fix. We made expanding free to test these systems, and we needed SOME cost for them; so we just used a 40-second cooldown on the ability for now. It's on the to-do list.

  Thanks so much for testing and posting! WOO!
• AceAl Member

  April 5

  @SpideyCU said:
  Also, I'm not sure what the matchmaking was based on for game Gd21a752f9afa41ea96917e72df091599 but it took me (who'd lost both games earlier that day) and two relatively new'ish players pitted against two relatively experienced players and an Artillery employee. No fair!

  As one of the relatively experienced players who crushed Spidey in that game, I concur. I think I've mentioned it in another thread, but unfair matchmaking is a serious issue even now. I won six straight games on Sunday, which means either I'm the best Atlas player around or the matchmaking isn't working right. As much as I want it to be the former, odds are significantly higher that it's the latter.

  @Triesk said:
  This comment lead to a chat internally about how MMR is set. We looked at a few other examples and saw that the output isn't matching our intent. Not certain when we'll get to tackle this, but it's on the radar now; thanks for bringing it to our attention! That's quite the mismatch!

  I don't think you can postpone fixing it. That the issues of balance and squad match-ups are really hard to pin down right now, simply because match-making is so iffy (possibly due to the small player pool). Martyrs are a bit strong right now, but rushing an objective while they're still reading item tooltips will always be super strong. A good Hydros ally should be worth more to Vela than martyrs, but you don't need either if the opposing team can't setup a good-enough flank!