PvP Feedback [Megathread]
General feedback on gameplay against other humans.
When providing feedback, please use the following format:
- X happened
- It made me feel Y (or I’d like to feel Y)
- (optional) Here’s a suggestion to improve it
Themes in this thread (by Day[9])
In an effort to be more efficient and respond in a way everyone can see, I've collected the core themes that I'm seeing in the thread so far. I'll continue to update this as more folk post here so that way, it's easy to see!
- Gemming seems, overall, quite fun -- People are enjoying it! Yaaay! Interaction! We'll continue to tune this to both guide people and to make things more impactful.
- **Pathing **-- Obnoxious and invasive. There are a FEW comments about the "joy of micro being more skillful because it's more punishing," but the pathing is more harm then help. In particular unit sizes and behavior feel off, unintuitive, or generally annoying. We plan to fully address this over the next few months. Feel free to read my full answer in the Pathing Megathread
- Map flow -- 1v1 and 2v2 feel disconnected. We completely agree and have already planned a new map redesign. It is being built right now! We want people to have "ownership of a region" but not SO much so that it's an island. Also, the general "flow" of the map is unintuitive. Hell, the middle feels like a 3rd region unto itself! We want the whole map to feel more connected so that the bottom player's success affects the top player as well.
- Expansions -- Don't feel harassable/interactable enough -- Sure you can technically kill a base, but it's hard to "sense" the same reward as you would in another RTS where killing a base is HUGE!!! We want to do two main things: help raise the impact of harassment and re-architect the map so persistent harassment can be effective for certain playstyles. Tis hard to do right now and we DO want harassment in the game.
- Games are hard to end -- We have a variety of fixes incoming for this. First, we want to have some neutral purchases that can "break entrenched positions." We might even have one in for Sunday Dec 13th. Second, the army power could get even stronger. Currently, it's very difficult for a fraction of an army to be "a big threat." After big team fights, the winning side will, at best, have some small fraction of their army left alive. So, there's almost NO way to win without weapons. By increasing army power, small fractions of army can still pose threats. There are potential issues with this (backdooring being too powerful), but we're going to test this regardless. Third, we can add neutral objectives that can help smash the front door! We've actually experimented with a variety of these so we'll go back to iterating on them.
- End games are a bit too Ion Cannon Focused -- We want ion cannons to be ONE way to end a game, that you beseige the enemy and make HIM come to YOU! But, we also want multi pronged attacks to help finish OR straight "bash down the front attacks" to help finish etc. Right now, Ion cannons are a bit of a loudspeaker. This might change as ya'll get to play more, but I think this makes sense. Solutions to this involve retuning the netural tech tree (already have full plans to overhaul this) as well as peices in #5.
- Impact of kills was not as clear -- A few possible solutions to this. First, we can make the visceral impact better -- audio/visual crunchiness for picking off a unit! Second, we're planning on building more structure/guidance on the map. That way, if you win a fight, you can make clear progress on the map (we think this is the most important area to explore). Third, we're experimenting with additional systems to help make "efficient fighting" reward you in a concrete way.
- More Informational Clarity -- There are simply not enough stats in the game -- enemy unit stats, current upgrade impact, total kills, gems collected, enemy gems collected, XP given for certain kills etc. We won't be doing much to address this right now as we wanna focus on finishing core systems, though we flatly agree there needs to be WAY more. Once we finalize them systems, we can cleanly plop in a ton of extra stats that, frankly, everybody really wants.
- Strategic Variety -- This is our #1 goal for the next 6-8 months. There simply aren't enough cool varietal things to do.
- Better Communication -- Pings/chat etc. Will be worked on
. Technically we DO have radial pings, they're simply unpolished and vague.
Comments
I think the PvP is great, however, I feel like the uneven spacing for the team mates can make things a little awkward and makes the single team mate more vulnerable. The only other thing that I have noticed is the tracking of units can be a bit odd. I have had a few occasions where one of my units has gotten trapped in the middle of a group of my ally's units and I haven't been able to get the unit out.
Collision problems were far worse when working with two other humans that actually join pushes. I'd often be trying to retreat while my ally wanted to reinforce me and we'd end up just running into each for several seconds getting killed. That was very frustrating, and only got worse with people placing neutral weapons.
It felt like armies tend to spread out a little too much while fighting, most notable when it's a big three on three fight. This is a problem because of both collision and the fact that the map is mostly narrow corridors, making it hard to just get all the units in my army to shoot.
The early game feels a little slow as I was often just waiting for gem respawns to get enough to expand again or tech up. Actually fighting with your opponent felt like a waste of time as it felt more productive clearing out neutrals for expansions. Unfortunately, fighting neutrals just means lots of waiting on gem and unit respawns which ties into things feeling slow.
Late game, the neutral weapons didn't feel particularly necessary, because large armies, especially with hero ultimates can nuke down towers in a couple of seconds. This problem was futhered by them just taking so long to build that it was often just easier to charge in blow something up and fall back before my opponent could respond. Maybe this changes once people get more strategically aware, however.
Played one bot game and one pvp game so far I definitely had a momenets of fun, but I had also a great deal of confusion. Here comes a brain dump!
The bad
The Good
EDIT:
Maybe it was covered in tutorials but I missed it but I have no clue what the "leveling" and "xp" mechanic does or how you get more. :P So that goes in the bad column.
Played two pvp games, but the second was 2v3. Here are my initial thoughts:
1) I felt like I was trying to climb a mountain when playing from behind. Catching up seems difficult. If there isn't one in place already, I'd give the players who are behind a % exp boost, and also add a respawing camp of monsters near / in the base that players can kill for some easy exp. (Players who are behind would get more exp from this). Perhaps in the place between the third player and second player?
2) I felt powerless in the first game when the enemy team rushed past our towers and planted a dozen small ion cannons near our nexus. I think the nexus should be immune when the meganodes are alive -- maybe like, all mega nodes = 100% damage reduction, then lowered by 25% for each destroyed meganode?
3) I felt ... hmm... challenged? when playing in the bot lane. It was pretty fun, especially as a mirror. I wish there was a way to select which lane you want to go to before the game starts.
4) However, I also felt disconnected while in the bot lane, like the two players top and I were playing an entirely different game. I was winning in bot lane, they were losing in top, but I didn't feel there was much I could do to help them out.
Those are my thoughts from the first two games!
Communication
I feel a radial menu with unique pings would help greatly improve communication in PUG games.
When trying to communicate, a ping is inexact, forcing me to rely on typing, which can be bad in a fight. League of Legends is a good example of doing this right, with a ping for retreating, to inform that your own your way, things like that to clarify your message and make communication more immediate.
I feel like I hardly ever attack an enemy's expansion. It seems like that should be a very good way of swinging momentum into your favor, but out of the 3 games I've played not a single expansion has fallen. This might just be because people don't know how to play the game but to me attacking an expansion requires a lot of resources and doesn't seem to do much.
Still had a lot of fun though! keep it up
More feedback; I think neutral units need to eventually timeout and die, when the middle of the map is like 100 cubs units just chilling, its crazy hard to do anything. FPS drops when they move them, and if I try to engage I need to be VERY careful to aim at enemy units and not cubes.
Also made it impossible to "come back" from. Once you take down my expansions you still have most of the cubes. You place a couple turrets and then push deeper.
Just had a ~50 minute game. Fantastic game, but towards the end I think we were all pretty lost as to how to actually FINISH the game. Both sides were very smart about destroying Ion Cannons and stopping run-arounds so we hit this sort of stalemate in the no-man's-lands. Back and forth feet at a time.
I'm sure a lot of it has to do with general lack of experience, and if you check the replay I'm sure you'll see thousands of misplays that'll make you all groan, but I really felt lost in the late game. Units died really fast, and the defenders advantage, ESPECIALLY with double Celesta, felt very difficult to overcome. Luckily, the enemy Celesta clustered her tanks and I was able to ult them down all at once (I was the other Celesta). My team came up behind and had my tanks lined up behind them.
From my PvP experiences so far, I'm a little concerned that the game feels a bit passive. The current design of siege units seems to encourage either massing a ton of gems so that you can sweep the enemy in a single sieged push or in slowly choking your enemy while placing ion cannons and gaining map control.
I'm wondering if towers are a little too powerful as well at the moment. Because you can pretty often safely that the enemy will have a similarly sized army to your own, I definitely rarely want to directly attack enemy towers, especially considering how tanky and powerful they can become with the small investment of 1 or 2 gems.
My impressions: Maybe nerfing towers a little bit and limiting the number of siege units available on a field at a time might accelerate the game a little bit. Giving players the option to self destruct their ion towers (I don't think salvage should be a thing) will let them continue pushing and weaker towers will let players act more aggressively on enemy bases.
Edit: now that I think about it, I find this kind of interesting. Fully upgrading a tower costs 4 gems. This is about the same price as the cheapest of siege units you can build.
Played 3 pvp games today. 2 with Vex and 1 with Alder. 1 game in each starting position.
Early game felt straightforward. Grab some expos, poke around for some gems, and build some units. As the game progressed, it felt less clear what we were "gaining" by poking around. I might lose my army or I might kill an enemy army - but there wasn't enough momentum at that point to turn that victory into a lasting effect on the game. Only once the army sizes and gem pick ups became large enough to really start laying down cannons did these little battles actually impact the map (killing towers, bases, etc). In all three games, my team won by one or two of us stockpiling some glass cannons by our nexus - and then pushing with a horde of them. A little anti-climactic...but still the overall games were fun and enjoyable.
Fun wise, I enjoyed playing in one of the two top positions a little more. Interacting with an ally there was enjoyable.
I often feel surprised when the game ends. In two of my games, I was in the middle of a fight when the victory / defeat screen popped up. Both times, one player ran to the nexus and killed it while everyone else was preoccupied. Maybe some kind of global cooldown on neutral weapons could help with that. Then, it'd be more of a team effort to rush them down.
When i was playing the bottom lane, i felt like i was playing an entirely separate game from my allies in the top lane. I did think the careful maneuvering and positioning against my 1v1 counterpart was really fun, but i felt like i couldn't really coordinate much with my allies. I think this is mostly a map design problem? I'm not sure whether i think the "top lane of 2, bottom lane of one" idea is bad or not, because i did think parts of it were really fun. It might help to have a narrower map or just differently shaped map?
I played one game that went almost an hour, and once it got to that point, it felt really hard to actually end the game, although I'm sure some of that comes down to my own lack of experience.
Sometimes I felt like taking efficient trades against your enemy doesn't really matter? Trying to do that is super fun, especially like trying to angle to pick off a unit or two for free and stuff in the early game, but it doesn't feel like we're really rewarded much for that. I know you get xp, but xp doesn't really feel that impactful other than getting to level 6 for ults? also on the topic of xp, i feel like it would be good to show the actual amounts of xp that you gain for each unit. do higher tier units give more xp? it seems like they should.
Getting stat upgrades (like +10% attack and stuff) feels not that good. Those upgrades feel not very impactful, and buying more units seems a lot more appealing because of how expensive upgrades are. Often, for the same price, you can increase your army size by like 20%, which seems a lot better. The unique upgrades seem really fun to get and feel like they make a big difference.
One thing that might help with both of those last two, is maybe xp could be tied to stat upgrades somehow? like every xp your hero gets could also be spent towards stat upgrades. or maybe even you have to choose whether to use it to level up your hero or to buy stat upgrades? that seems like it would make for interesting choices.
pathfinding seems to be a known issue, but to summarize my problems with it, it seems like your units' hitboxes are bigger than their selection circles, which makes microing them feel super clunky and bad. also, units will choose a path that doesn't actually work, and then keep trying to follow that path forever, so they just get stuck until you manually move them around the obstacle.
stutter stepping/kiting doesn't feel very good. it seems like there's a little bit of a transition between the "firing" and "shooting" states that makes that type of microing feel sluggish. part of this might be balance, so there's probably reasons for some units to act like this, but it seems like the default values are too high.
it seems like a lot of the units all feel the same to use? like, they have interesting abilities and mechanically meaningful stats, so you do actually play differently with them, but all of their projectiles feel a bit similar, and physically moving them around feels similar. projectiles especially seem like they would benefit from more differentiation. they're kinda just all fairly slow homing attacks, with the most notable exception being the purifier and melee units. it seems like some could be faster, or less glowy and more physical, or some could even use like an animation on the unit itself and then hit instantly (like marines in starcraft for example). more variation is stuff like movement speed, acceleration/deceleration rates/turn rates/etc.
it seem like respawn time is entirely based on game time, which feels a bit counter-intuitive. it seems like t1 units should respawn significantly faster, and higher tier units should respawn more slowly. this would let you still contribute sooner after taking a bad fight, while also making getting pickoffs of higher tier units feel more valuable.
i think that's all for now? anyway the pvp playtest overall was super fun and the games were really intense and engaging.
EDIT: in case this is relevant, in the pvp games i mostly played with eris, and also a little with alder. eris feels really good to me, although i always forget to use the t2 aura. alder's sapling mechanics are super fun, although alder's ult seems a bit underwhelming. it needs to be placed really close to actually do anything, but if you do that, it feels like they can always focus it down before it actually comes up.
Thanks for the opportunity this weekend to play! I really enjoyed my time testing Atlas out. Here's my feedback:
After Playing Some PvP games these are my observations.
Often times I felt like teamwork was necessary for optimal play. I feel like it will be a very teamwork oriented game. I hope there will be a system for smart pings as it is hard to type during combat. Overall I think being a teamwork focused game is a good thing.
I enjoyed the early and mid game the most. Battling over gem control in the early game was a lot of fun and making a strategic attack after wining a skirmish in the mid game felt great. A few time my games went really long and after about 35 minutes the game felt like a repetitive series of fights until it was over. That said defending a enemy push in the late game was a satisfying experience.
I really like the attack cool down bars above the health bars they make kiting units easier which is satisfying.
What everyone quickly learned on PvP Day 1 was that the game is currently all about BESIEGING. The strongest strategy seemed to be to set up Ion Cannons in range of your opponent's bases and deny them gold, and set them up in the middle path to prevent mobile neutral weapons from attacking. If you could manage to send attack squads of Glass Cannons, though, you could definitely pressure the middle lane with them, and if you can do it before the opponent gets their Ion Cannons set up all over the map, then you can win.
I think this whole metagame is what makes Celeste the best squad. She basically has mobile Ion Cannons that she can move around to protect the neutral weapons from non-neutral enemies. So when you've got tons of Ion Cannons protected by Purifiers, it's pretty much a long, slow, and painful GG. Throw on top of that her ability to force entire armies to move or die (and you can't fight back when you're moving or dead), and you've got a super strong character.
And this was just Day 1. Give players a few more days and they'll know exactly where to place Ion Cannons, and they'll get them set up as quickly as possible. The question is, do you want the game to be like this?
There is a feeling of disconnect when all the real action is being done by gray, neutral units. Your whole purpose as a player is pretty much to just run around and fight for as many gems as possible so you can spawn as many neutral units as you can. There comes a critical point in the game when so much of the map is controlled by these neutral units that it feels like no amount of teamwork or cleverness can stop them. Your only hope is to try to sneak to the enemy nexus and spam as many neutral units as you can on top of it.
So... I don't know, it's certainly a very interesting game the way it is, but I'd like for the non-neutral units -- the units that represent YOU -- to have much more impact on the game. I want my squad to feel powerful, not feel like a gem collector squad. I think I'd like to see neutral units be more offensive than defensive. I like how the mobile units are, for example. They make a splash in the game, they're used for pushing towers but they do eventually go down. Ion Cannons are definitely cool, I do like the idea of besieging enemy bases and controlling the map, but I feel like they're a little too strong. Maybe they should be easier to kill, I don't know.
Well, those are my muddled thoughts from one day of play! I hope it's helpful! Don't get me wrong, I had a ton of fun! I just think the current metagame is going to get out of hand if it stays the same. BTW, I really want to share the replay of my favorite game today! Here it is!
I'm not sure how much should be attributed to bad team comps or going to the "wrong" lane, but today was either a stomp or an hour-long game. Whatever happened in the stomp games, each time it led to the team planting the big ion cannon mid and then guarding it with 2 squads while it slowly chipped away at the towers. All of the neutral weapons make towers seem like a formality, and even at the end of the early game, I can kill the small towers with just my squad and lose maybe 2 t1 units before the enemy can get there. Vision plays a role in this, but there's nothing like invisibility or high ground preventing the enemy from sniping your wards in 2 seconds or like a teleport-to-tower-or-expansion skill.
Late game kinda devolved back into early game, posturing while gathering gems but now to form a squad of ion cannons. I didn't feel the impact of upgrades, but that might be due to both teams getting equivalent upgrades at around the same times. Sniping an out of position hero or group of units didn't really feel impactful late; the hero was back in 10 seconds, and your defensive army really just does not matter compared to the offensive neutral weapons.
Early game today felt like Starcraft WOL and HOTS at the beginning of each game where you're going through the motions until you can finally start doing something interesting. The late game felt like siege tanks vs siege tanks except one team can't afford siege tanks.
My 2 cents with the games I played during PvP.
When a player placed down an ion cannon or mini ion cannon, I felt a bit helpless when the cannons could fire on buildings, bases, and towers as long as it was within its firing radius. An idea is requiring vision before an ion cannon can fire upon a target.
I do like how with the current build, placing an ion cannon down does call for some sort of player response, and I feel that the player interaction is where the most fun is to be had. I'm also enjoy the gemming as a way to have some player interaction happen throughout the game.
So far, really liking the path Atlas is taking right now.
I denied expansions.
I feel like when I denied expansions, it had no effect (or very minuscule). The game felt like it took forever. 45+ minutes.
My suggestion is to make expansions incrementally lower the respawn timer so when you lose your army, your expos speed up the respawn. That way, when you kill expansions, your opponents suffers a loss of income as well as an increased respawn timer, allowing you to finish the game. Also, if you were the superior player and expanded and defended correctly, you would have increased income due to expansions as well as a reduced respawn timer, allowing you to fight without fear of losing everything. This way, your opponent benefits from destroying your expansions because your units would take much longer to respawn as well as suffering a loss of income.
I would also suggest expansions being a rally point, allowing you to spawn your squad from your expansion. This excites gameplay because if you take an expansion in enemy territory, you can reinforce that position and provokes engagements. It would be fantastic to try out.
I played 4 games, 2 of which I had a party with voice chat. Gonna say right off the bat that having voice communication makes everything SO much easier to coordinate. I think having voice chat capabilities is a whole lot more important in this than, say, popular MOBAs. Units aren't that fast and coordinating rotations around the map can make a huge difference.
Here are the main thoughts I have based off of the new experiences in PvP.
Vision
Getting wards actually felt very meaningful in PvP. Vision control is a pretty fun gameplay element IMO, and in my games vision control felt meaningful but not game-deciding. If you can maintain control of your/enemy wards, you can get an edge in decision making. However, losing control doesn't put you at a huge disadvantage.
That being said, the current state of wards feels a bit too weak for their cost. Wards are visible and have very limited spots to be "hidden" in. If you have to constantly have units around to defend your ward then it sort of defeats the purpose.
Ion Cannons
I really don't think that Ion Cannons should reveal a huge area once it's completed. Once an ion cannon starts constructing, the only counterplay that exists is to go kill it. This forces an engagement on enemies. While I'm generally in favor of mechanics that would force interaction with the opponent, in this case it can force players who are behind to risk highly unfavorable fights to kill the cannon. The team that starts constructing a cannon will (or at least should) be in a good defensive position. If the team is already ahead, which they likely are if they're starting a siege, you have no choice but to lose your base or take a bad fight.
Taking away the huge vision from the cannons would allow for additional levels of counterplay for teams that are behind. The besieged team can poke forward to deny vision, position defensively against advancing enemy units (that are advancing to get vision), or construct their own ion cannon to shoot down the enemy cannon (and this would require the besieged team to find a way to get their own forward vision).
Plopping down an big ion cannon and sitting back just feels wrong.
Gems
Still love em in PvP.
Bottom Spawn
The person at the bottom spawn feels extremely disconnected from the other two players. Since the bottom spawn basically plays like a 1v1 for the early game, it is very easy to get behind and drag down your teammates. Because the map is so big, teammates moving down to help you ends up just putting everyone further behind (the two top-mid spawn enemies will punish your teammate who is left at top, and by the time your teammate gets to bottom the enemy bottom spawn will just retreat to safety). The 1v1-ness might also make life miserable if you spawn against a squad that "counters" you (I don't have enough experience to know if any squads can be considered counters to others).
At the very least, I think that the spawn points of your team should be closer together. It's a terrible option to have the bottom spawn move around to the top in the early game because your units take a much longer time to arrive. If the spawns were designed so that there is less of a "this player goes bottom" feel, it would also make it easier for your squads to switch around positions on the map.
Late game, due to the unit caps, I felt I had little choice in what my army was. At the beginning of the game you can choose to build lots of tier 1 units or save for tier 2 or even tier 3 units, or prioritize an important upgrade. As the game progresses, though, all of these diverse builds converge into the same prescribed late game composition for each hero. Once you have reached the limit for each unit type the only differences between two player's builds for a given hero will be in the global upgrades they have researched.
I played several games today (1 bot game, ~5-6 PvP games), all as Hydros. Overall, I really enjoyed the game, though I don't think I understand the strategies/teamwork that are supposed to be used yet.
I think that my favorite part of the game was the respawning of units. I really loved that I didn't lose the game for taking a bad fight and losing everything, and I felt that it really helped the player who was behind. I had several back and forth games where players were able to catch up and even get ahead after early setbacks. When I first heard that units would respawn, I thought that it sounded really stupid, but I felt that it made the game much more fun and less punishing to play. I think it's a great comeback mechanic and is far less punishing; I also felt rewarded for winning fights.
I also liked how the hero wasn't as important of a part of the army (except for the ultimate ability). I liked how it felt that I was escorting the hero around the map to collect gems and build bases, instead of my hero playing the whole game and my units sitting there watching. I realize there are a lot of people who enjoy heavy hero-based play, but I personally have always felt that the focus being on units opens up more options. The way that the hero's gem collection encouraged map control but didn't punish me too much for waiting for a better opportunity was enjoyable as well.
I did think that it was hard to communicate with my teammates effectively. I ended up playing independently most of the time, even in the top lane. This felt a bit strange, but I think the most likely cause of this is that I was trying to figure out how to play the game and familiarize myself with the mechanics (likely my teammates were, too). I did think that it was difficult to go down and help in the bottom lane when the other team sent multiple players to the bottom late, by the time I got there it was generally too late. This might have been caused by me playing poorly, though.
Attacking enemy defenses with neutral weapons felt awkward to me. I didn't do much with ion cannons, just glass cannons. It seemed weird to have super-powerful neutral weapons that could shoot down their defenses by out-ranging them, but my army (which I'd focused on) would die if it tried to attack the defenses. But I needed to keep my army by my super-powerful neutral weapons to prevent them from dying. The enemy would typically move forward to fight my army and them move back, trying to draw my army in range of the defenses, which would force me to pull my army back. It felt like a strange dance that only delayed the inevitable, as I don't remember any times where something changed that made it so I couldn't eventually break down the defenses with my glass cannons. Perhaps with better teamwork, delaying for help would make this interaction much more important and actually meaningful, instead of annoying.
As a Starcraft 2 player who put the unit health bars on "always display", the health bars in Atlas were hard for me to see. In battle, I had a hard time distinguishing them from the attack cooldown bar, and this made me basically a-move and use my abilities and not worry so much about pulling back damaged units as I would in Starcraft 2 (and as Day[9] did in the tutorial video), which would increase the involvement in engagements. Perhaps an option to make the health bars more visible would help here (I can understand that not everyone wants to have health bars prominently displayed).
The first several times my army got killed by standing in circles on the ground, it was frustrating. It took me longer than it should have to realize that if my army is standing in a circle, it's about to die. I was still able to recover from losing my army like this because of the army respawn function, and I think it's fine now that I figured it out, but it was frustrating for several games. Without an extensive knowledge of the game, I can't tell which circles mean what, so I don't know which ones I absolutely have to move out of or which ones I can stay in to keep my position, but suffer a setback of some kind.
I did feel that when playing versus a worse player, I could completely shut them out of the game. The army respawn comeback mechanic works really well if you lost your army due to a mistake, but if you lost your army because you were outplayed, nothing will change at all. It's definitely good that the better player wins, but it didn't really feel like the worse player could even get small accomplishments.
The squad selection screen text box was really laggy, making it difficult to communicate with teammates about the squad selection (though I don't know enough about the squads to have meaningful squad selection at this time, I expect this to be problematic in the future).
From my experience, the end of the game seemed a bit weird. Most games ended by one team making a bunch of glass cannons and just rushing the nexus before the glass cannons died. I don't think this was bad, as by the time that one team could get several glass cannons to the enemy nexus, I generally felt like I'd gotten a complete army and done everything that there was to do in the game (four bases, at the limit or close to it for all of my units, several upgrades). I didn't get every single upgrade, or take every single base, but I felt like I'd had a chance to do whatever I wanted to do. It seemed that the glass cannon suicide attacks at the nexus would be difficult to consistently block, which allowed games to end more easily. In one game, the enemy team built a ton of defensive ion cannons near their nexus, which was frustrating because it meant that I could not kill them without waiting for a TON of glass cannons, however the only defended one side and one of my allies was able to kill the nexus from the other side (I'd damaged it significantly already) before it was too big of an issue. I do feel that an ion cannon defensive turtle strategy would be frustrating to play against.
As for the specifics of Hydros, I enjoyed it. It didn't feel like that complex of a squad to play, and maybe Hydros lacks depth, but for now it was fine. The most enjoyable part for me was using Hydros' Tier 3 unit to jump on a group of enemies and then (when the pathing allowed me) shield and heal the unit. Using the ultimate felt gratifying as well (though I would expect that ultimate to be annoying to play against), and being able to temporarily increase the effectiveness of the Tier 1 unit really helped with defending early on. I'm not sure if this is what Hydros is supposed to feel like, but I felt like I was always able to win 1 on 1 fights (not sure if this was caused by me being ahead, though). This might have been caused by my doing a greedy build and not being punished for it (I did what I felt ought to be a greedy build, but in all of my games I never felt in too much danger early in the game). I've noticed some people complaining about Hydros' lack of DPS, and I never felt that this was much of an issue, because the abilities make Hydros fairly strong in a fight. It did seem like Hydros' abilities worked really well between the Hydros units, but I'm not sure that Hydros would work well with teammates, it felt like I was generally best alone, when I could isolate my opponent and fight one on one.
Overall, I really liked playing the game. It felt great to not be punished so severely for mistakes compared to some other games. Looking forward to playing again!
I really like alos's idea about ion cannons not providing so much vision. right now it feels like ion cannons make better wards than wards do. they're WAY tankier, and they're permanent, and they can siege bases, and they can defend against enemy neutral weapons, all for only 2 more gems? it seems like having to get vision for them from something else might make them more vulnerable, and also cut down on the "attack by defending your ion cannons" aspect of gameplay
I'll do a longer write up under it's own thread, but for now just this then off to study for finals.
edit: meant to edit but accidently quoted, my bad!
So to start off I really enjoyed playing today it was awesome! I ended up getting to play 6 games during the PvP test and it was soooo much fun! I love the 3v3 aspect of the game, at least for me its a lot more fun than the typical 1v1 of something like starcraft where the whole game rests on my shoulders alone. It's fun to strategise with other players and just general team-play. Along with this something that frustrated me was a lack of communication between players. Typing isn't always ideal especially if you need to relay something to a teammate quickly in a battle. I didn't get a chance to play with anybody using it but I know that some people were using Discord voice chat during their games which I think would have helped a lot in that respect. Along with this I played one game as the bot lane and I felt a bit disconnected from the rest of the team for much of the match. I know this doesn't have to be the case (I played as Vela and was all over the map helping bot and stuff so I know it does happen) so maybe this is just something that will come with playing with the same people or just communicating better when I need something.
Another thing that was somewhat frustrating was that in at least two of my games the late game got very stagnant. Essentially the enemy had a bunch of Heavy Ion Cannons which made it extremely hard to push up with neutral weapons even after winning a team fight that completely destroyed 2 of the opponents. Generally we were winning most team-fights but by the time we could finally get to their towers they were able to defend well enough that we had to back out and gem farm for a while again. Mainly it got tiring of the same thing happening a few times until we broke through. On the flip side of that there was another game that a really enjoyed that went back and forth several times in a very tense set of battles. It was awesome to win a fight and start pushing and almost make it but then they push back and now i'm scrambling to set up a defense and another counter. I'm not entirely sure what the difference between the two games was but I know at least in the first one we were having trouble just figuring out what to do to get past the Ion Cannons.
Something that I've seen mentioned several times is pathing (i'll post about it specifically in the thread for it) but suffice to say that some of the pathing especially when trying to maneuver around an ally was rather frustrating.
One thing I really enjoyed was the early game skirmishes over gems and other significant points on the map. One thing though was that it didn't necessarily feel like the biggest deal even if I pushed someone out or killed their army early. Part of this probably comes from my inexperience in the game and not knowing how to best take advantage of this so I won't say too much yet (I played against one particular person who did and he punished me pretty badly when a lost an early skirmish bot).
Overall I really enjoyed myself today and look forward to practicing more this week and then next Sunday's PvP test, keep up the great work guys!
I gathered from what Day9's tutorial video indicated that the cannons are stagnant offense, and that the cubes are pretty much designed to counter cannons and then not be entirely useless afterwards (you can use them to attack undefended towers/bases). I've been primarily using the cubes as seige-breakers, and I've found some success there.
@KonTiki Yeah they are definitely the way to go to break down strongholds like that (though at least a few of my games I had forgotten about that). My problem was that it was hard for my team to get in range to use even the cublets because they die so easily that in the chaos of a team battle its hard to get them forward. (which partly comes down to my skill level) That being said if you can wipe the team and then spawn them it does work a bit better.
Loved the PvP setting! I think that it was pretty well paced and was pretty fluid in terms of latency and gameplay.
Something to mention about some balance might be the neutral weapons, I really feel that they provide a great twist to the game and provide a great addition to the battlefield. I do think that some of the towers actually have too big a range (the ion canon). I think that it provides a really easy way to camp a position from which to blow down the towers, of which the towers can not retort themselves. This clearly is hinting to the player to protect their towers from the incoming siege but some players can't respond fast enough as an opponent could setup multiple neutrals at the same time. I think that a change may not be needed for the neutrals besides maybe a range nerf.
Also, this conclusion about the tower neutrals could be an effect of player novelty to Atlas, and this could become a non-existent problem as the player-base improves as a whole.
Thank you all very much for the wonderful playtest, I can't wait until more players are able to enjoy the game as much as I did!
I mostly played Grath (He's the engineer right?) for all but one game. Jet turtles were too awesome, did not learn their name or consequently want to play not-Grath.
One thing I noted while playing is that I didn't feel much motivation to ever split my army up, with a couple of minor exceptions. I used terrapins (see I remembered) in bushes to act as early wards, since they can jet out of danger or stun a wandering unit for an ambush, and I sometimes used Grath to go cap some gems / expands alone while the army (which doesn't really seem to need him that much btw) held down the front. Otherwise, since all that resource gathering and expanding can't be done by other units, and the map shape makes most engagements big battles to try to take out a fort (by the midgame anyway), I kind of just wanted my whole army together all the time. Not necessarily bad, but I wonder if that's just a matter of me being new or if this is the usual pattern. Maybe a possible suggestion would be to allow T3 units to cap gems or build turrets (one or the other).
On a similar note, I get the impression that Grath is designed for ambushes and possibly siege rushes. His harden ability is awesome early game, but later feels increasingly weak even with the shorter cooldown - like saving one unit doesn't mean much to the outcome of the battle. Also, I feel the health bars become pretty hard to read in big battles where everything is jumping and jetting around like crazy, especially when looking for a good harden target. Putting the bar above the unit might make things clearer (or maybe that's the same, I'm not sure).
Also, I'm sure this has been brought up and is maybe even already in the works for all I know, but being able to see specific stats for selected units would be great. I have no idea how strong my hero is, assuming he gets stronger when leveling. I actually don't know if he does or not. It would also be useful as far as seeing what kind of upgrades the enemy has researched when selected so I can maybe respond accordingly.
I played one game as Alder, so I don't know as much about him, but I will say that it was hard for me to place the buffs on the seedlings. Small targets in the middle of a battle can get obscured. it might be useful to give them a bigger "hit box" (not sure what to call it) when casting the buffs, or maybe just have the buff affect the nearest seedling, though this takes away some control so preferably not.
That's all I can think of for now, it was a lot of fun and way more developed than I expected. Awesome work.
As a bunch of other people have mentioned, I think a radial ping system would be a good idea. I think of the ping system in LoL as a good example here. Having more ways to communicate quickly with your team during a fight would be great!
I feel like I was doing a lot of just wandering (especially in the early game). It just didn't feel like there was too much happening... grab a base, pick up some gems, maybe skirmish with your opponents a bit, but overall a bit lackluster.
In one game my team was getting pushed hard and the enemy team set up cannons behind themselves that were attacking our towers. It felt like there was no way to save out towers as we would have lost the engagement in a full out fight, but we couldn't leave the position or we'd lose the tower faster. It felt like a standoff where they had the edge because they had the cannons behind them and we had no way to stop it.
I like the idea of units not costing any gold once you've bought them once. Definitely a unique idea in the genre that I think works well.
I found it a bit annoying when I'd my units would respawn and trying to get them back to the front lines. It was annoying to have to go press 'v' then '~' then click near my current position to get them to the action. I think it's be a good idea to be able to allow warped in units go to your hero (allow rally points to units).
The UI is a bit lacking for information of units. I know this is work in progress, but I'd like to be able to click stuff and get some info on what I'm clicking on. Being able to click on a unit and getting its health, AD, AS, abilities and other such things would be nice. It'd also be great to be able to click on expansions to see how much coin is available/left. Oh, and also on gem deposits to see how many gems they'd be worth if collected.
As another user mentioned, I'm a bit lost when it comes to upgrades. I know that they'd definitely be good to get, but I don't know what constitutes as physical/magic damage and I don't know what path I should follow here.
Unit collision. I don't know how many times I was frustrated by getting blocked by either my own units or my ally's units. I don't like the difficulty with which it takes to reposition your army, especially during a team fight, only to get blocked. I feel like being able to pass through your own units would be a welcome change here. I can understand wanting to block enemy units, but I don't really see the sense in blocking your own units.
I loved playing Ryme. I felt his 'd' was extremely satisfying to hit (if not maybe a bit overpowered). I don't think this is a problem though, as when people play against him, they'll learn to position behind their hero behind their front line when playing him. Overall though, I found squad's kit to be extremely awesome and fun. (I played 3-4 games with him).
I also played one game with Alder. In theory, I like the idea of the saplings, but I feel like too much relied upon it. Then, combined with unit collision not letting me do what I wanted, I found it difficult to place them. In the late game, I didn't find it very fun as it was mostly just me spamming buttons trying to get a sapling down, followed by trying to find it and upgrade it... then missing, having to reselect my army. It just felt a bit clunky. I like the idea of the saplings, but when everything is tied to it I found it to be more of a spam fest to try to get as many saplings as possible, then any strategic endeavor (like I felt with Ryme's squad's kit). I liked alder's 'd', and the saplings at the beginning, but once my army reached critical mass, it just felt like too much spamming, less focusing on the battle.
Also back on the subject of respawns, I wasn't a huge fan of having to constantly check when my unit's spawned to press 'v'. I think it's be a good idea to have an auto warp in feature to mitigate this.
A few times in the game I accidentally clicked 'b' and then sat in sorrow! With no way to cancel a back, I was doomed with having to trek all the way back to where I was whenever I mistyped the 'b' button. I think having someway to cancel this would ease the frustration in this area.
Sean says a lot in his streams that a lot of the time he's frustrated by feeling the potential for fun in the game, but when playing finding that it's not quite there. That was the impression I got from the Atlas. I think there's a lot of cool concepts, and I loved Ryme's squad (and will be playing him again next sunday!), but I feel that there's definitely some ironing out to do.
I think the tutorial, which gave a good basic overview of things, was lacking information on the game. I found myself constantly noticing things while playing and thinking, oh is that what's happening here?!? That I wish were in the tutorial or documented. The atlas alt-tab guide is great, I wish I found that earlier. Once again, I know this is WIP, but having a bit more documentation (it doesn't have to be a video, could just be an article) on some of the more intricate features would be nice.
So, sorry for the gigantic wall of text and if it's not too helpful for you! I think the game has the potential to be fun, but it's not 100% there yet (obviously... it's a pre-alpha! if it was nothing but sunshine and rainbows there'd be no need for this!) .