hello movie 2 developers where is dueling patch

dwarf

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Ah yes you're not allowed to complain about bad decisions BECAUSE ITS A FREE MOD!! It's been like 4 years and no update on a shitty duel system
My point exactly, The new duel system is being worked on by what? One person? Forgive him If he's taking his time (In his own personal spare time) to Iron out all the kinks and address all the bugs that arise so entitled children can have their perfect new duel system.
 

Leo

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My point exactly, The new duel system is being worked on by what? One person? Forgive him If he's taking his time (In his own personal spare time) to Iron out all the kinks and address all the bugs that arise so entitled children can have their perfect new duel system.
define NEW DUEL SYSTEM
 

Hessu

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My point exactly, The new duel system is being worked on by what? One person? Forgive him If he's taking his time (In his own personal spare time) to Iron out all the kinks and address all the bugs that arise so entitled children can have their perfect new duel system.
It has been open beta ready for years. How do you expect this game to get better if the players dont give feedback?? Just because the devs work on this game for free doesn't mean they are immune to feedback
 

dwarf

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It has been open beta ready for years. How do you expect this game to get better if the players dont give feedback?? Just because the devs work on this game for free doesn't mean they are immune to feedback
Feedback in this thread being? waaah where is my game patch waaaaaaaaaah. (Not specifically you)
I do agree with some of your points such as they should just integrate the beta into a new "beta" launcher.
The mod itself used to be such trouble itself to even get working back pre 2009. Extracting files manually and having a specific patch of Jedi Academy. I can understand Defiant's statement of wanting to make this mod much more "casual" friendly. But I don't agree that listening to the feedback of players who don't even understand the fundamentals of the game is a good idea.
This mod has survived a healthy 19 years on the back of It's dedicated community, most of the good feedback coming from Wildee and Supa's beta's. However, pressing the now "thinning" development team Is not the way to go at it.
 

Hessu

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Feedback in this thread being? waaah where is my game patch waaaaaaaaaah. (Not specifically you)
I do agree with some of your points such as they should just integrate the beta into a new "beta" launcher.
The mod itself used to be such trouble itself to even get working back pre 2009. Extracting files manually and having a specific patch of Jedi Academy. I can understand Defiant's statement of wanting to make this mod much more "casual" friendly. But I don't agree that listening to the feedback of players who don't even understand the fundamentals of the game is a good idea.
This mod has survived a healthy 19 years on the back of It's dedicated community, most of the good feedback coming from Wildee and Supa's beta's. However, pressing the now "thinning" development team Is not the way to go at it.
I have no issues on making the mod more casual friendly. But the reason why a lot of people are upset is because the current duel build is total ass and people have been waiting for an update for many years now. And the update has been postponed so many times, so theres a reason people keep asking whats the status of the build. I used to be very enthusiastic about duel mode, played it every day and wanted to help make it better by joining in the beta team. Last time we had actual duel tests was in 2019...
 

dwarf

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I have no issues on making the mod more casual friendly. But the reason why a lot of people are upset is because the current duel build is total ass and people have been waiting for an update for many years now. And the update has been postponed so many times, so theres a reason people keep asking whats the status of the build. I used to be very enthusiastic about duel mode, played it every day and wanted to help make it better by joining in the beta team. Last time we had actual duel tests was in 2019...
Use your enthusiasm to rally other beta testers. Make a thread in the beta forums polling other players interest. Make it sound like a majority of people want this pushed in a sensible matter. That's how things get done.
Having people (Again not specifically you) make threads and just openly bash and provide literally zero constructive feedback to the developers doesn't really make them interested in doing that.
 

Defiant

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I can understand Defiant's statement of wanting to make this mod much more "casual" friendly. But I don't agree that listening to the feedback of players who don't even understand the fundamentals of the game is a good idea.

I think perhaps I didn't use the right word when i talked about casual players. I was referring to the assumption that alot of people seem to have that the entire playerbase is their circle of friends plus other well known circles when in fact that it a small subset of the people who play. The vast majority of players are, just like in every other game, people who come to the site just once to download, load launcher just to hit play, and remain pretty quiet on the servers. The players who are content tend not to complain - or feedback that they are happy. They just play.

It's been well documented that every change that was made from the dueling system from 2017 to now has been pretty much hit with complaints and controversy, usually following a cycle of people who are not happy complain, developers make changes to appease them, the people that were happy are now unhappy and the people who complained are amazed that their suggestions didn't fix everything and it must be the developers fault for not listening - net result everyone is more unhappy than when we started. This means our Open Beta needs to reach the people who are not complaining as much as possible which means making it as easy to access as possible for the most amount of people - especially those who do not necessarily have any major complaints at the moment. It is as important that we do not break the game for existing happy players as we try and fix the problems for those who are not happy, otherwise we just keep repeating the cycle until everyone is unhappy.

Happy players who just want to sit down and play are not going to follow a bunch of convoluted steps to do something when they are already happy just playing. Imagine a the simple scenario of a person who wants to eat chocolate cake. There is a chocolate cake right in front of them and also the ingredients for the cake and a recipe of how to bake it. Only those who have a special interest in baking, or those who want to change the recipe are going to take the more difficult option. All we want to do is put two similar chocolate cakes in front of people and see which one they prefer - or as close as possible. Unfortunately this has meant building a whole new bunch of infrastructure to get there which has taken a lot of time - but at least in doing so we will actually be able to find out if the hype matches the reality.
 

Hessu

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Use your enthusiasm to rally other beta testers. Make a thread in the beta forums polling other players interest. Make it sound like a majority of people want this pushed in a sensible matter. That's how things get done.
Having people (Again not specifically you) make threads and just openly bash and provide literally zero constructive feedback to the developers doesn't really make them interested in doing that.
I have actually made a public poll asking people where they think dueling should go towards to. It didn't have any effect on the dev side. A lot of people have talked about things that need to be fixed/changed but some devs are just not having it, its like talking to a brick wall. And there is a big problem in activity/availability with the beta testers, usually only like 1-5 testers attend to the tests.
 

dwarf

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I think perhaps I didn't use the right word when i talked about casual players. I was referring to the assumption that alot of people seem to have that the entire playerbase is their circle of friends plus other well known circles when in fact that it a small subset of the people who play. The vast majority of players are, just like in every other game, people who come to the site just once to download, load launcher just to hit play, and remain pretty quiet on the servers. The players who are content tend not to complain - or feedback that they are happy. They just play.

It's been well documented that every change that was made from the dueling system from 2017 to now has been pretty much hit with complaints and controversy, usually following a cycle of people who are not happy complain, developers make changes to appease them, the people that were happy are now unhappy and the people who complained are amazed that their suggestions didn't fix everything and it must be the developers fault for not listening - net result everyone is more unhappy than when we started. This means our Open Beta needs to reach the people who are not complaining as much as possible which means making it as easy to access as possible for the most amount of people - especially those who do not necessarily have any major complaints at the moment. It is as important that we do not break the game for existing happy players as we try and fix the problems for those who are not happy, otherwise we just keep repeating the cycle until everyone is unhappy.

Happy players who just want to sit down and play are not going to follow a bunch of convoluted steps to do something when they are already happy just playing. Imagine a the simple scenario of a person who wants to eat chocolate cake. There is a chocolate cake right in front of them and also the ingredients for the cake and a recipe of how to bake it. Only those who have a special interest in baking, or those who want to change the recipe are going to take the more difficult option. All we want to do is put two similar chocolate cakes in front of people and see which one they prefer - or as close as possible. Unfortunately this has meant building a whole new bunch of infrastructure to get there which has taken a lot of time - but at least in doing so we will actually be able to find out if the hype matches the reality.

I can understand that, but at the same time It's still something other than the main game that these "casual" players would have to look into and want to play. If they're so interested in the main game, The effort to make an open beta as accessible to them as the main game doesn't really seem to make much sense. Especially if you're not going to get any feedback from the majority of them.

I think the problem lies within members of the beta team themselves. If you're taking "suggestions" from players, I can imagine these suggestions are more based around their personal interests and not what's considered balanced for the game. Talking to duellists in my community, all I hear is. "I want this" or "I want that". There is no real discussion on styles, blocking systems and balance between them.
I think this is a real problem furthermore with what Hessu has stated. Having an inactive beta team. This proves my point in saying that most people joined the beta team to get a quick taste of the saber build, and then went "inactive" when the build was no longer being tested. I know this for a fact, because multiple players in the AU community signed up for the beta team for that exact reason and haven't played since.

My point being, I don't know who Hessu is, I've never played with him. But when a player who's as active as he is on the forums, Is as passionate about the duel system as what he's saying, I have reason to believe he's not just trying to get a quick sneak peak at the saber build, but he has general interest in It's development. I think a real good look at the roster for the beta team should be looked at and dealt with, and whoever Is currently running the beta tests should look into having a test with not just random people who want to test the latest build. But certain players who actually have some valuable Input to give. Tempest, being a somewhat decent duelist himself, should have a good Idea on who these players should be, So there should be no Issue in finding a strong group of testers for the build Itself.
 

Duckshark

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Testing attendance is certainly a problem, but as a member of the beta team I can say that none of us are able to access saber betas on our own, so we're not exactly here for early access or whatever. I do have interest in both the duel and open scenes of the mod, but as development time and energy is certainly limited, I understand the choices to prioritize some things over others, even if a sabering overhaul hasn't been released.

What I do disagree with is the continued lack of changes to a select few longstanding mechanics which are universally reviled, such as 0 BP parrying, sweepkick stagger, and DFA hitboxes, which would at least turn this dueling system slightly more palatable and enjoyable. I think some of these changes would be easy to implement and test and would be met with little criticism or pushback. I can only assume the reason they have not been changed is due to a lack of knowledge about these issues, or a wish to preserve their current implementation to be compared against the saber patch when it is open beta'd. Regardless, I think given that the saber beta has been in development for several years at this point, making a few of these small tweaks somewhere along the line might have slowed the disappearance of veteran duelists, whose skill and knowledge are practically lost, but there's no changing that now.
 

Hessu

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Testing attendance is certainly a problem, but as a member of the beta team I can say that none of us are able to access saber betas on our own, so we're not exactly here for early access or whatever. I do have interest in both the duel and open scenes of the mod, but as development time and energy is certainly limited, I understand the choices to prioritize some things over others, even if a sabering overhaul hasn't been released.

What I do disagree with is the continued lack of changes to a select few longstanding mechanics which are universally reviled, such as 0 BP parrying, sweepkick stagger, and DFA hitboxes, which would at least turn this dueling system slightly more palatable and enjoyable. I think some of these changes would be easy to implement and test and would be met with little criticism or pushback. I can only assume the reason they have not been changed is due to a lack of knowledge about these issues, or a wish to preserve their current implementation to be compared against the saber patch when it is open beta'd. Regardless, I think given that the saber beta has been in development for several years at this point, making a few of these small tweaks somewhere along the line might have slowed the disappearance of veteran duelists, whose skill and knowledge are practically lost, but there's no changing that now.
Honestly having small tweaks whenever needed would have been great. Easier and faster to test and implement too.
 

Defiant

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As you point out - everyone is tending to look out for their own self interest. There are other indirect metrics we can look at other than relying just on player feedback.

We also need to be aware of the explicate bias of listening to "good" duelists. Someones skill level does not make them more of an authority on what is enjoyable and what is not for others.

There is no perfect way to involve everybody, or perfect way to gather feedback. All we can do is control as many variables as possible, listen to all feedback from all corners, pay attention to indirect metrics and then use our own judgement to move towards a more fun system.

For the record if there was a working build of Tempest's changes available it could be made available for the internal team to test. This would be up to Tempest to keep up to date with the latest changes and keep working. Before it can go open beta it needs to be tested internally by internal testers anyway,

Our goal is to avoid constant tweaks to a system no body is happy with. Personally I think Tempest's changes lack the scale and ambition to deliver an enjoyable and stable system - but that is why we are going to test it.
 

Duckshark

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I would argue that a large-scale revision of the dueling system, like the kind that brought us from the v0-v1 days into the "modern" 1.3-1.9 patches, isn't a guarantee of a stable system. I think the biggest problems with the iterative patches to dueling were breaking things that worked in order to pursue a vision of something better and have it flame out.

Tempest has stated before that he thought that v0 with small tweaks would have been a very stable and fun patch, but we are over 10 years removed from that era and we are in no better shape. I would personally argue that v1 had an extremely stable design philosophy that was for some reason torn apart when converting to aim-based PBing. Tearing apart the old system did not guarantee that the new patches would be better, nor that they would be stable.

A lot of big changes are not really beneficial in the long term if they don't help build a strong foundation for small, iterative change. We've had stable base systems in the past - v1, 1.3, and 1.4.9 come to mind, and yet every time we tear what we have down to make something new, and it's only gotten worse over time. I don't think we necessarily need a revert or a complete redesign, as long as what we do have focuses on principles of dueling and rewards skill while also being new-player friendly. From what I've seen, that's been accomplished to a decent extent, and so even if it's not perfect, it's better than a random total redesign that changes how the game is played entirely, again. (something something stassin saber beta). I would rather saber patching be somewhere along the lines of a touch-up rather than a makeover for both developmental and gameplay reasons, and so I don't think a makeover is a very good idea at the moment. Tempest changes some fundamental things like swing speed and perks, but also retains a lot of the current core mechanics that work and only need tweaking, and hopefully in the future we will never need to touch fundamental mechanics this strongly.

Also, I understand a new player's feedback is invaluable for the new beta and how approachable it is, but I do hope vet influence is strongly considered, especially given how many top tier players have left the game in the past few years. If the entire experienced dueling community agrees on something, IMHO it should take precedence over a new player's opinion.
 
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As you point out - everyone is tending to look out for their own self interest. There are other indirect metrics we can look at other than relying just on player feedback.

We also need to be aware of the explicate bias of listening to "good" duelists. Someones skill level does not make them more of an authority on what is enjoyable and what is not for others.

There is no perfect way to involve everybody, or perfect way to gather feedback. All we can do is control as many variables as possible, listen to all feedback from all corners, pay attention to indirect metrics and then use our own judgement to move towards a more fun system.

For the record if there was a working build of Tempest's changes available it could be made available for the internal team to test. This would be up to Tempest to keep up to date with the latest changes and keep working. Before it can go open beta it needs to be tested internally by internal testers anyway,

Our goal is to avoid constant tweaks to a system no body is happy with. Personally I think Tempest's changes lack the scale and ambition to deliver an enjoyable and stable system - but that is why we are going to test it.





PLAN OF ACTION FOR MBII DEVTEAM 2022, don't thank:
stop right now: walls of text
give now: content, duel systems and ctfs
 

Eazy E

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I would argue that a large-scale revision of the dueling system, like the kind that brought us from the v0-v1 days into the "modern" 1.3-1.9 patches, isn't a guarantee of a stable system. I think the biggest problems with the iterative patches to dueling were breaking things that worked in order to pursue a vision of something better and have it flame out.

Tempest has stated before that he thought that v0 with small tweaks would have been a very stable and fun patch, but we are over 10 years removed from that era and we are in no better shape. I would personally argue that v1 had an extremely stable design philosophy that was for some reason torn apart when converting to aim-based PBing. Tearing apart the old system did not guarantee that the new patches would be better, nor that they would be stable.

A lot of big changes are not really beneficial in the long term if they don't help build a strong foundation for small, iterative change. We've had stable base systems in the past - v1, 1.3, and 1.4.9 come to mind, and yet every time we tear what we have down to make something new, and it's only gotten worse over time. I don't think we necessarily need a revert or a complete redesign, as long as what we do have focuses on principles of dueling and rewards skill while also being new-player friendly. From what I've seen, that's been accomplished to a decent extent, and so even if it's not perfect, it's better than a random total redesign that changes how the game is played entirely, again. (something something stassin saber beta). I would rather saber patching be somewhere along the lines of a touch-up rather than a makeover for both developmental and gameplay reasons, and so I don't think a makeover is a very good idea at the moment. Tempest changes some fundamental things like swing speed and perks, but also retains a lot of the current core mechanics that work and only need tweaking, and hopefully in the future we will never need to touch fundamental mechanics this strongly.

Also, I understand a new player's feedback is invaluable for the new beta and how approachable it is, but I do hope vet influence is strongly considered, especially given how many top tier players have left the game in the past few years. If the entire experienced dueling community agrees on something, IMHO it should take precedence over a new player's opinion.
V1 and prior (V0 and beta builds) were stable. 1.1 completely destroyed the duelling system and every patch since then has been trying to fix the problems of the previous one, creating several more in the process. Devs still refuse to acknowledge that 1.1 was the original sin, and they should just go back to v1 (with repulse + saber defence included).
 

Hessu

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V1 and prior (V0 and beta builds) were stable. 1.1 completely destroyed the duelling system and every patch since then has been trying to fix the problems of the previous one, creating several more in the process. Devs still refuse to acknowledge that 1.1 was the original sin, and they should just go back to v1 (with repulse + saber defence included).
Agreed except going back to v1 at this point would lead to massive playerbase drop
 

Defiant

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V1 and prior (V0 and beta builds) were stable. 1.1 completely destroyed the duelling system and every patch since then has been trying to fix the problems of the previous one, creating several more in the process. Devs still refuse to acknowledge that 1.1 was the original sin, and they should just go back to v1 (with repulse + saber defence included).

I agree these were much much better, but I am in a minority there and they were not without their problems anyway.
 
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There are alot of players who dont interact outside of the game. They need to know a beta is going on to participate in it.
If that's actually necessary and not only a discussions, that's not a problem at all for me to have it announced with auto-message on my server. But I know your team standards to figure you rather have a more processionnal way. PM still open in any case


We also need to be aware of the explicate bias of listening to "good" duelists. Someones skill level does not make them more of an authority on what is enjoyable and what is not for others.
Agreed. Fragging or having big scores, doesn't make someone more capable in being technical and detailed when it comes to explaining all the ropes of the saber system (and the overall characters interactions and movements).

Personnaly I have large hopes to voice out many details(or not) during the open beta. Having it be in harmony with the larger crowd(white namers?) and also keeping it intense and appealing for those who play often and wants to have a competitivity aspect available...

Everyone can say his oppinion but at some point, being specific to what is fun, what isn't, and what leads to those events, what are the conditions and triggers, makes an idea into an actual impactful explanation. That amongst more deep things, is where I value important input regarding changes and what not, about our good ol' saber system.

Tl;dr: There are nerds out there, they don't necessarily are fraggers, but talk technic with them and enjoy the ride!
 
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