I haven't played MBII consistently for 3 years, here's why.

[SeV]

It's obviously a multifaceted problem, but I will try and boil it down to get a handle on this.

I don't recall the exact patch where I started to feel this way, but it goes way back and it's not about saying 1.3 is better than 1.4 or V0 is better than X. I will be discussing game design principles aswell as what I feel is the heart of MBII sabering and yeah make no mistake, this is a veiled critique of the developers work over the years and what MBII has turned into. Because I love it and want it to be better, and I believe it can be so much better than what it currently is.

There is the inevitable breakdown of Open mode and Duel mode and changes pertaining to each. But this divide wasn't always there, you know? Once upon a time, MBII duel mode was just sith vs jedi, there was no special considerations like ACM, and thinking about duel mode specific features vs open mode specific features. Shoehorning playstyles and narrowing the meta this way limits dynamic variability in the game, and is part of why I haven't played consistently for such a long time.

But for the sake of this critique I will use the Open and duel mode categories, but excuse me when I weave in some history and explanation behind my changes and why I feel the way I do about the system in general.

OPEN MODE:

People used to say that jedi/sith were OP 10 years ago. Guess what? They still do, even with all the changes to open mode. Back then, there was more of a difference between a good jedi and a bad one. Nowadays there is hardly a difference between a mid-tier player and a top-tier player in open mode vs gunners. Why is this? Let me outline the main problems clearly for you all, then explain why they are a problem one by one.

Low FP drains and Slow FP regen.
Flinch.
FP regen debuff when shot.

Before I even discuss flinch, I have to talk briefly about the general feeling of playing the game in open mode now vs years ago. Freedom to do a variety of things, a higher variance/difference between levels of skill in the mid to upper tier brackets, faster paced gameplay and overall just more fun. This was years ago.

Now: Less of a dramatic difference between players. Good for new players, bad for those that are in it for the long haul and wanting to get better. Less freedom to do what you want as a jedi/sith, less playstyle variance both in open and duel mode.

Why is this?

The first problem is the low FP drains that necessitate slow fp regen. This inevitably leads to less force power usage and restrics how you can play the game. It also makes it a drag for both gunners and jedi/sith. It's a drag for gunners due to the low fp drain, and a drag for the force users due to the slow fp regen and inability to freely use the force and it slows the game down tremendously. The FP regen debuff when shot is a sort of tertiary shit mechanic added on to further exacerbate this problem, because the FP regen was so low that additional nerfs were needed to make it a palatable change balance wise. Instead of fixing the main problems, recent iterations of MBII have invented second and third tier solutions to mitigate the bad idea instead of removing or changing the bad idea aka the root cause.

The second problem is flinch and its implementation. Look, there have always been complaints about jedi/sith being hard to kill in melee range and flinch might seem like a good solution to some of you, but it's shit and here's why.

Jedi/sith is a melee class, yet it's diffficult for them to get a kill when they are in close range to a skilled gunner. Why? Wookiee is the only other melee class in the game, yet it's fucking strong and scary when it's in melee range and you run away from it. Even Jedi/sith have to respect it. This is not the case for current force user vs gunner combat. I never panic as a gunner when faced with a jedi, even when I am playing a soldier I know I can handle them in close range due to flinch, so I never try to drain them from a distance (BECAUSE HEY, THAT TAKES LIKE 30 SEC TO A MINUTE).

The only reason why flinch is necessary in current open mode, is because of the retardedly slow fp drains. So my changes to open are rather simple. First of all, increase the FP drain of all gunners on jedi/sith. This change necessitates higher FP regen and removing/reworking flinch. This simple change also allows us to get rid of the FP debuff, which is bad for a very major reason indeed. The FP debuff prevents ppl from using manual dodging and crouching to reduce FP drains in a volatile high drain system, which was one of the skills that high tier players used to differentiate themselves from middling players. Basically what I am saying is remove the root cause that necessitates all these stupid balance changes.

You have X, and X is bad. Instead of reworking X to be acceptable, you install Y and Z to balance X, but Y and Z negatively affect the game to such a degree that it becomes worse than previous iterations of the game. This is the problem with the recent design philosophy in a nutshell.

First you have to fix the core issues and make the game as fun as possible to play. Then you can balance the game. What developers have been doing for awhile now (more than 1 year, fucking hell). Is trying to retrofit balance changes onto bad mechanics to make them more palatable. How do we fix the fact that FP drains are so low? We have to implement flinch and an FP debuff to further reduce the FP regen otherwise the low drains are too OP. You are a doctor tackling a symptom instead of the root cause and it's ruining the game that I love.



Now let's move on to the big one for me. DUELING.

This is a more complex issue to tackle than open mode, so bear with me as I try and outline my problems with the design philosophy and why certain changes are bad for the system.

First of all, a few questions and a history lesson. Many current duelists do not remember this because they weren't around back then, but until about 3 years ago people were using many different dueling tricks to differentiate themselves. To name a few things.

Style switching was viable and allowed for very dynamic gameplay, look at some of my old dueling videos.
Mblock style was a quirk that allowed certain players to duel with their own peculiar style.
Faking low BP was a mental technique you could use to trick your opponent into becoming overly aggressive.

BP was far more important than it is currently, and so it mattered alot more how much BP you had. Now the main mechanic in dueling seems to be ACM, which is a convoluted, contrived, invisible mechanic that you cannot keep proper track of. And furthermore there are no subtle mindgames with ACM, since faking ACM is impossible/useless.

Now I know some people might say stuff like 'adapt' and 'git gud', but I think I have pretty much deleted those stupid retorts because I have indeed gotten good and beaten most of the best players in the game at dueling convincingly. I'm not bragging and saying I'm the best, because I'm probably not, but I know my way around a lightsaber so listen. What I am saying is that there are certain things that make dueling bad, the root causes I eluded to earlier and I will now outline them and explain them like I did with open mode. Dueling is obviously a complicated thing and there is no way I can cover everything so I will try and focus on the major problems.


Let's look at dueling the same way we looked at open mode above. Why does it feel bad to me?
Low BP drains. No style switching, less dynamic dueling aka a one dimensional meta and that wouldn't even be so bad if the meta was good/visible. Slow styles feel bad to use without nudge.

Why are the BP drains low? Because of ACM.
Why is there no style switching? Because of ACM.
Why is dueling less dynamic, and why is the meta so bad and one dimensional? Because of ACM.
Why do slow styles feel bad to use without nudge? Fast styles interrupt, make it a hassle to try and fight back. This problem is sort of the dueling version of the flinch issue.

There is a very simple solution to all of these problems. I'm not saying the system will magically be uber good when these things are changed, but I am saying that this is the root cause of many problems and fixing the root cause will allow us to work on better support mechanics for dueling.

Rework ACM!!!

(Return it to how it was in the old days. You had to build many ACC, like 8 for example. Then when you got 8 you received 1 ACM which boosted your AP significantly. The only way you could get ACM/AP was if you significantly outclassed your opponent, or if he simply didn't attack you back.)

You would think that making ACM more sensitive and dynamic would improve the game, but it does the opposite. ACM promotes passive, drawn out, runhit parry styles. It promotes long slow duels. And furthermore, it isn't even a visible mechanic the way BP is. You have to sit there and count your swings vs the opponents swings, but this is also difficult because sometimes a swing gives more ACM than other times. It is a convoluted mess that drags everything about dueling down, down dooooown into a very one dimensional and boring place.

The current ACM system means that we have to have lower general AP to compensate, which means you feel impotent in the beginning of a duel and BP doesn't really mean much. So you can waste all your BP playing frivolously, then run away until you have full BP and come back with an ACM advantage and destroy your opponent. This cheese is how less skilled players can beat more skilled players if they do not buy into the ACM struggle. And no, it's not an elegant dance or a contest to grab momentum. It is an ugly slugfest of noodleswings and runhitting/parrying like hell all for the sake of this one thing.

Imagine if ACM was removed and BP mattered again. You could more easily do 1v2 if you are a top player, because you can keep your opponents in check by draining their BP fast. Every swing and timing matters. One of the worst things about 1.4 was the fact that it took such a long time to kill another person, AND NOT ONLY THAT. They could make like 8 major mistakes and still be fine and hang on. All of this evaporates immediately if ACM is reworked and fixed. And I have only just scratched the surface of why ACM in its current iteration is B.A.D, but let's leave it here since I think you get my point, I hope...


Inevitably I will have to tackle the "but without ACM you can just run away and reset."
My first gut reply to this is, "yes and why shouldn't you be able to do this?" but I know it's a little more complicated than this.

First of all let me state that the solution is not to implement some obtuse mechanic like a speed increase on a bodyhit. I don't believe there really is a problem with this running and resetting thing, and if there is a problem it's a minor one at best. Actually this thinking negatively impacts open mode and is neutral in dueling mode.

To improve upon dueling mode and turn this issue of yours from a neutral thing into a positive, non issue is very simple. Have duel mode be more like baseJKA with a lobby and a longer time + freejoin and 1x1 duel challenges. I don't even want to get into the timelimit debate here because it's a seperate issue, but in fact I think that hardcoding the timer has had a massively negative impact on the game due to how many roleplayers MB2 used to have and how amazing the custom FA's were. Now all of those FA assets hardly get used at all, which is a huge shame, but let's focus on dueling.

To sum up my thoughts about dueling:

ACM ruins style switching, reduces the importance of BP, encourages runhit/passive parry styles and drawn out duels, and actually encourages running away equally if not more so that a system in which ACM didn't exist (because there's no chance of recovering the fight after a big ACM advantage, so why bother?).

I think that is the main thing I wanted to talk about with dueling, and really hammer it home. This is because devs often get caught up working on second or third hand problems instead of fixing the root cause. During my time as a beta tester I've seen this problem so many times that I cannot count them, and it goes for both open mode devs and dueling devs.

I don't want to call people out and blame them specifically, because that is rather pointless, but to give a few examples of stupidity and second/third rate symptom obsession let's take a look at recent dev history. And keep in mind many good things have happened aswell, I am just criticizing these things and spelling them out because it seems to always fly over peoples heads...

---

-Stassin made ACM the way it is because he believed running away in duels was bad and probably also because 0 BP survival was a thing back in 1.3 due to parry being free. Regardless of the reasoning though, ACM the way it is (and noodle swings), was his change and you just have to read my thoughts above to know why I list this here.

-To fix the 0 BP parrying issue, 1.4.3 came about, with 50% Bodyhit damage on all parries. Way too extreme a change.

-In 1.4.4 Tempest was worried about swinging willy-nilly and combo-spam, so he introduced very large flat drains. However, that was not the only massive problem he created. He also removed nudge yet kept fast PB counters, and all of this resulted in an absolutely shitty patch. The last time I played something so bad was maybe RC2. Even 1.4.3 with its ridiculous parry mechanic was better.

-1.4.5: This is a buggy beta build, rushed out because of viserys and incomplete and shitty because of lack of testing and tempests mistakes. It is damage control for the bad patches since 1.4, and tbh I am not very impressed at all. The main problem with 1.4.5 is the ACM meta, and the bugs and how unpolished sabering feels in it aswell as a few style specific things like red being slow and lacking nudge/faster speed to initiate.


-----

So now that I've gotten that off my chest and outlined what I think is a major problem and a relatively simple solution, let's throw out some details and solutions/changes. These are my changes and what I think is important to bring back the good feeling that I lost about 3-4 years ago.


-First is ACM. Make it relevant only for special attacks like blue lunge, stab, YDFA and butterfly or simply remove it completely from the game or rework it to the old style of ACC/ACM/AP gain.


-Individual saber perks aren't needed. We didn't have them in the old style switching systems and each style was unique with its advantages and disadvantages. But I believe individual perks can be a good thing both for open and for dueling if done right, to give flavour and so on.

To give a few examples of good perks and bad perks.

Red: Nudge -> Good perk.
Red/blue: PB drains X BP -> Bad perk.
Blue: Each ACC/ACM empowers blue lunge/backstab -> Good perk.
Purple: PB gives X ACM -> BAD PERK.
Yellow: Able to do fast halfswings in restricted directions -> Good perk.
Purple: Attacks bleed though PB -> BAD PERK.

But again, these shouldn't be needed, but can apply flavour so it's a minor thing.

-Reintroduce swing restricions, especially style specific ones not global ones so each style is unique and mastering the style takes more effort. This is a major part of why two styles felt different back when we didn't have random perks to differentiate them.

-Introduce NB aka Normal Block aka old lightsaber blade based PB. Make it reduce BP damage taken by 10% So instead of doing 10 BP damage, an attack does 9 BP damage. With BP being relevant, this will give the mindful player the edge without really interfering much with normal dueling, assuming BP drains are properly high, which brings me to my next change(s)

-Getting hit on your NB, enables you to do a nudge/halfswing speed counter. Aka a NB Counter. This should not be fast, but just skip the first windup part of the anim like halfswings so u can react off of an opponents aggression like in the old days instead of having to wait your turn, but more nuanced and requires some skill and timing awareness due to it being on NBs only. This should deal standard damage.

-To clarify, a PB counter would be a 20% increase in damage and same halfswing speed, basically just more dmg. And we do away with Mblock PB fast counters alltogether.

-BP regen below 1/3 BP is reduced slightly. Another mechanic to emphasize the importance of BP, low BP vs high BP and being mindful of your BP vs simply retardedly ignoring it and still being fine. The threshold could be marked a darker red on the bar to indicate when you are in the bad zone.

-If not holding block, aka running, force focus is increased to 0.5 sec for FB 1-2 and 1 sec for FB 3. This will enable you to pull runners if they aren't doing a proper tactical retreat, resulting in more rewards for skillful play and making it easier for pro's to kill running noobs that don't know what they are doing.

-Holding mouse 1 drains X bp per sec. Do away with arbitrary BP costs for swings and make all swings free and cost whatever the tick is. Attacking should be cheap, not super expensive like in 1.4.4.

-Make jumps with the +use button free always. So if you have jump 3, hold use and do a shorter jump 2 non-force jump, you don't dent your BP at all.

-Mblocking someone does not stop their combo, it gives you some BP instead. This will improve the flow of gameplay in general. Also roll back the mblock changes so that it's a mechanic everyone can use constantly during a duel with a short CD and no penalty for failing. The main problem with mblock was that it stopped momentum. If it merely regens some BP and this applies to both sides ofc, the one with the better mblock will regen more BP and thus come out on top. The CD should be around 3 seconds. The specific amount of BP an MB should give obviously needs to depend on the style, more for faster swings and less for slower swings. It should not be overly significant and extreme, same philosophy here as with NB, it should make a minor impact but be enough to really set the truly skilled apart from the moderately skilled.

-Getting slapped doesn't stagger/flinch you, but will still knock you down if u arent blocking. Getting kicked with +use does stagger you even in blocking stance. Another thing to increase skill levels and differentiate middling players from Masters.

-Parries are based on bodyhit damage and deal a flat 20% bodyhit damage throug the parry to the other person. So if a blue attack is worth 6BP damage and a Red attack is worth 10BP damage. Red deals more damage than blue through the parry, but blue should have more swings in its combo, atleast 4 so that extra swing evens out the difference in most circumstances. Besides, blue is alot faster than red so giving it stronger parries than strong styles doesn't make sense. Overcomplication of invisible mechanics seems to be an obsession of Tempest and even stassin to some extent, so how about we don't do that so much anymore?

-Make grip/MT/lightning and superpush unusuable in dueling mode (or togglable via a server option, and give speed to both sith and jedi so there is no difference between them dueling wise, aka a jedi doesn't get an advantage over a sith due to speed. This speed for both sides change SHOULD extend to open mode aswell, but the devs are being retarded about it and have stubbornly refused this change for a million years, same with rolling back the harcoded timer change. Sometimes you think you know whats best for the game when you have no fucking clue. I have been humble enough over the years and exceedingly patient enduring bad design ideas, so I think I am allowed to say that there is no way you are right about speed and the timer, and there is 'every' way that I am right about it.

-And for Tempests sake, I am mentioning here that specials should not cost BP, for fucks sake. They should cost FP, and you've already made them vulnerable. This makes them undesirable to spam in open mode, but usable in dueling mode. Oh, and NB should be able to block additional damage on specials, say 50 percent?


Perk/minor style changes section:

-Give red nudge for fucks sake. And don't even think about giving the style weird staggers. Stagger has ALWAYS been bad for sabering. It was terrible in the stagger below half BP on bodyhit patch, it is terrible now.

-Cyans new perk is that it deals 10% more damage than the opponents parry vs fast/medium styles and equal damage vs heavy styles on its first two swings in a combo, this counts halfswings aswell.

-Staffs new perk is an inability to be backwhacked unless u have low enough BP. Backwhacks deal 50% increased BP damage. This makes it better for 1vx. Let us get rid of the retarded Mblock perk legacy, and all the cheesy stagger bullshit.

-Yellow: fast halfswing like in the beta is fine I guess.

-Blue perk: Use ACM scaling on its lunge and backstab, and make the backstab recovery slightly faster so its less risky and is used more for style points.

-Purple perk: Acrobatics like cartwheels cost no BP and you take no additional damage if hit during them. Speed purple up and make its swingspeeds equal across the board. It should be similar to yellow in speed and could even get a 4th hit. Give it back stab as a special instead of the kata, and make it act like blue lunge, primarily a knockback thing unless super high ACM and ofc it costs FP like the other specials.

-Duals: Damage increases throughout the combo. Not the halfswing king design, but the combo king design. It makes duals less retarded in duels.


--- End of perk/style thing for now. Kept it brief for the sake of the other changes.



Now the 'sev' changes that all devs (Stassin/Tempest) have ignored for many years and even actively sought to counteract, and my reasons why these changes are good and why counteracting them is fucking bad. First the changes. Then the reasoning behind them.

-Swingblocked attacks do 10% more damage.
-Non-swingblocked attacks do 0% extra damage.
-Running attacks deal -30% damage.

-Jumping attacks (i.e while airborne) do 10% more damage and overlaps with swingblocked attacks for a total of 20% more damage.
-You take 30% more damage if hit in the air.
-Crouching attacks deal 75% reduced damage.
-You take 75% more damage if hit while crouching.


First of all, differentiateing between a swingblocked attack and a non-swingblocked attack is a way to increase the skill difference between players and give those who practice alot an advantage and the noobs that just hold m1 a disadvantage. It takes more skill to swingblock than to not swingblock, so swingblocks dealing LESS damge than nonswingblocked attacks DO NOT MAKE SENSE.

Running attacks should deal way less damage in a BP centered system, because this way you will have an easier time chasing a retreating opponent who doesn't swingblock or hold walk during his attacks. This somewhat alleviates the problem that many systems have had, even 1.4 ACM systems have this problem, where you try and chase someone down to finish the kill, but you end up losing your ACM and BP due to runhits. With no ACM there is only BP to worry about, and with 30% reduced dmg, runhits vs normal hits will come to favor the aggressor, which is what we need to finish duels instead of all of these mechanics like increasing runhit damage, that actually promote runhit rungaying.

Jumping has long been a pet peeve of mine. You should be rewarded for doing a short jump initiation because it drains your own BP and takes more skill than a normal attack to perform. The 30% more dmg is to balance the risk vs reward more adequately instead of having it be at 50% which totally fucks over the risk vs reward. At 30% it means that u can parry the jumphits and come out on top with a slight BP gain.

The crouch nerfs are simply because crouching attacks are hard to defend against with PBs, and it is a cheesy way to play the game and also looks retarded. Crouchspamming should never be a viable tactic in dueling, so I hit it hard. In contrast, tempest wants to reduce the penalty for crouching, which is fucking stupid.

I do not understand why the devs are so reluctant to implement these numbers changes that I have been going on about for years and years. Is it because it will increase the skill ceiling and reduce the effectiveness of cheesy tactics while rewarding skilled people? I don't get it, so why not fucking try some of my changes for a... change. Instead of obsessing over stupid, meaningless changes that are then rolled back the next patch, or making bad changes that stack accumulatively and end up making the system worse? Try some sev changes, please.


----

That will be it for now. I am sure we can find other small changes and adjustments together, but the main thing is to get the gameplay back on track and then balance it after the gameplay is fun and nuanced and deep again. I left out some changes and adjustments myself, thing that might fit into the balance category of changegs even more than the ones I included, such as BP/AP adjustments. I also did not mention force power reworks and force power changes too heavily, so there are many things still to touch on. BUT, this should give you a general overview of why I, SEV, haven't played consistently in 3 years and why I can't enjoy MBII the way I used to.

I hope you will take these suggestions to heart and try them instead of developing weird parallel alternatives that dont work aswell and are fixes to symptoms rather than fixes to the root cause.



-Yours sincerely. A very patient duelist that has had enough of the stupid changes and cannot put up with it any longer.

 

[Shilling]

Jedi/sith is a melee class, yet it's diffficult for them to get a kill when they are in close range to a skilled gunner. Why? Wookiee is the only other melee class in the game, yet it's fucking strong and scary when it's in melee range and you run away from it. Even Jedi/sith have to respect it. This is not the case for current force user vs gunner combat. I never panic as a gunner when faced with a jedi, even when I am playing a soldier I know I can handle them in close range due to flinch, so I never try to drain them from a distance

+1 to this

 

[noel]

-Swingblocked attacks do 10% more damage.
-Non-swingblocked attacks do 0% extra damage.
-Running attacks deal -30% damage.

PLEASE add this


Didnt read it all but seems like some good ideas, i just dont like the NB mechanic tbh but the rest seems gucci to me, especially about ACM and switching being an option

 

[Eazy E]

It's obviously a multifaceted problem, but I will try and boil it down to get a handle on this.

I don't recall the exact patch where I started to feel this way, but it goes way back and it's not about saying 1.3 is better than 1.4 or V0 is better than X. I will be discussing game design principles aswell as what I feel is the heart of MBII sabering and yeah make no mistake, this is a veiled critique of the developers work over the years and what MBII has turned into. Because I love it and want it to be better, and I believe it can be so much better than what it currently is.

There is the inevitable breakdown of Open mode and Duel mode and changes pertaining to each. But this divide wasn't always there, you know? Once upon a time, MBII duel mode was just sith vs jedi, there was no special considerations like ACM, and thinking about duel mode specific features vs open mode specific features. Shoehorning playstyles and narrowing the meta this way limits dynamic variability in the game, and is part of why I haven't played consistently for such a long time.

But for the sake of this critique I will use the Open and duel mode categories, but excuse me when I weave in some history and explanation behind my changes and why I feel the way I do about the system in general.

OPEN MODE:

People used to say that jedi/sith were OP 10 years ago. Guess what? They still do, even with all the changes to open mode. Back then, there was more of a difference between a good jedi and a bad one. Nowadays there is hardly a difference between a mid-tier player and a top-tier player in open mode vs gunners. Why is this? Let me outline the main problems clearly for you all, then explain why they are a problem one by one.

Low FP drains and Slow FP regen.
Flinch.
FP regen debuff when shot.

Before I even discuss flinch, I have to talk briefly about the general feeling of playing the game in open mode now vs years ago. Freedom to do a variety of things, a higher variance/difference between levels of skill in the mid to upper tier brackets, faster paced gameplay and overall just more fun. This was years ago.

Now: Less of a dramatic difference between players. Good for new players, bad for those that are in it for the long haul and wanting to get better. Less freedom to do what you want as a jedi/sith, less playstyle variance both in open and duel mode.

Why is this?

The first problem is the low FP drains that necessitate slow fp regen. This inevitably leads to less force power usage and restrics how you can play the game. It also makes it a drag for both gunners and jedi/sith. It's a drag for gunners due to the low fp drain, and a drag for the force users due to the slow fp regen and inability to freely use the force and it slows the game down tremendously. The FP regen debuff when shot is a sort of tertiary shit mechanic added on to further exacerbate this problem, because the FP regen was so low that additional nerfs were needed to make it a palatable change balance wise. Instead of fixing the main problems, recent iterations of MBII have invented second and third tier solutions to mitigate the bad idea instead of removing or changing the bad idea aka the root cause.

The second problem is flinch and its implementation. Look, there have always been complaints about jedi/sith being hard to kill in melee range and flinch might seem like a good solution to some of you, but it's shit and here's why.

Jedi/sith is a melee class, yet it's diffficult for them to get a kill when they are in close range to a skilled gunner. Why? Wookiee is the only other melee class in the game, yet it's fucking strong and scary when it's in melee range and you run away from it. Even Jedi/sith have to respect it. This is not the case for current force user vs gunner combat. I never panic as a gunner when faced with a jedi, even when I am playing a soldier I know I can handle them in close range due to flinch, so I never try to drain them from a distance (BECAUSE HEY, THAT TAKES LIKE 30 SEC TO A MINUTE).

The only reason why flinch is necessary in current open mode, is because of the retardedly slow fp drains. So my changes to open are rather simple. First of all, increase the FP drain of all gunners on jedi/sith. This change necessitates higher FP regen and removing/reworking flinch. This simple change also allows us to get rid of the FP debuff, which is bad for a very major reason indeed. The FP debuff prevents ppl from using manual dodging and crouching to reduce FP drains in a volatile high drain system, which was one of the skills that high tier players used to differentiate themselves from middling players. Basically what I am saying is remove the root cause that necessitates all these stupid balance changes.

You have X, and X is bad. Instead of reworking X to be acceptable, you install Y and Z to balance X, but Y and Z negatively affect the game to such a degree that it becomes worse than previous iterations of the game. This is the problem with the recent design philosophy in a nutshell.

First you have to fix the core issues and make the game as fun as possible to play. Then you can balance the game. What developers have been doing for awhile now (more than 1 year, fucking hell). Is trying to retrofit balance changes onto bad mechanics to make them more palatable. How do we fix the fact that FP drains are so low? We have to implement flinch and an FP debuff to further reduce the FP regen otherwise the low drains are too OP. You are a doctor tackling a symptom instead of the root cause and it's ruining the game that I love.



Now let's move on to the big one for me. DUELING.

This is a more complex issue to tackle than open mode, so bear with me as I try and outline my problems with the design philosophy and why certain changes are bad for the system.

First of all, a few questions and a history lesson. Many current duelists do not remember this because they weren't around back then, but until about 3 years ago people were using many different dueling tricks to differentiate themselves. To name a few things.

Style switching was viable and allowed for very dynamic gameplay, look at some of my old dueling videos.
Mblock style was a quirk that allowed certain players to duel with their own peculiar style.
Faking low BP was a mental technique you could use to trick your opponent into becoming overly aggressive.

BP was far more important than it is currently, and so it mattered alot more how much BP you had. Now the main mechanic in dueling seems to be ACM, which is a convoluted, contrived, invisible mechanic that you cannot keep proper track of. And furthermore there are no subtle mindgames with ACM, since faking ACM is impossible/useless.

Now I know some people might say stuff like 'adapt' and 'git gud', but I think I have pretty much deleted those stupid retorts because I have indeed gotten good and beaten most of the best players in the game at dueling convincingly. I'm not bragging and saying I'm the best, because I'm probably not, but I know my way around a lightsaber so listen. What I am saying is that there are certain things that make dueling bad, the root causes I eluded to earlier and I will now outline them and explain them like I did with open mode. Dueling is obviously a complicated thing and there is no way I can cover everything so I will try and focus on the major problems.


Let's look at dueling the same way we looked at open mode above. Why does it feel bad to me?
Low BP drains. No style switching, less dynamic dueling aka a one dimensional meta and that wouldn't even be so bad if the meta was good/visible. Slow styles feel bad to use without nudge.

Why are the BP drains low? Because of ACM.
Why is there no style switching? Because of ACM.
Why is dueling less dynamic, and why is the meta so bad and one dimensional? Because of ACM.
Why do slow styles feel bad to use without nudge? Fast styles interrupt, make it a hassle to try and fight back. This problem is sort of the dueling version of the flinch issue.

There is a very simple solution to all of these problems. I'm not saying the system will magically be uber good when these things are changed, but I am saying that this is the root cause of many problems and fixing the root cause will allow us to work on better support mechanics for dueling.

Rework ACM!!!

(Return it to how it was in the old days. You had to build many ACC, like 8 for example. Then when you got 8 you received 1 ACM which boosted your AP significantly. The only way you could get ACM/AP was if you significantly outclassed your opponent, or if he simply didn't attack you back.)

You would think that making ACM more sensitive and dynamic would improve the game, but it does the opposite. ACM promotes passive, drawn out, runhit parry styles. It promotes long slow duels. And furthermore, it isn't even a visible mechanic the way BP is. You have to sit there and count your swings vs the opponents swings, but this is also difficult because sometimes a swing gives more ACM than other times. It is a convoluted mess that drags everything about dueling down, down dooooown into a very one dimensional and boring place.

The current ACM system means that we have to have lower general AP to compensate, which means you feel impotent in the beginning of a duel and BP doesn't really mean much. So you can waste all your BP playing frivolously, then run away until you have full BP and come back with an ACM advantage and destroy your opponent. This cheese is how less skilled players can beat more skilled players if they do not buy into the ACM struggle. And no, it's not an elegant dance or a contest to grab momentum. It is an ugly slugfest of noodleswings and runhitting/parrying like hell all for the sake of this one thing.

Imagine if ACM was removed and BP mattered again. You could more easily do 1v2 if you are a top player, because you can keep your opponents in check by draining their BP fast. Every swing and timing matters. One of the worst things about 1.4 was the fact that it took such a long time to kill another person, AND NOT ONLY THAT. They could make like 8 major mistakes and still be fine and hang on. All of this evaporates immediately if ACM is reworked and fixed. And I have only just scratched the surface of why ACM in its current iteration is B.A.D, but let's leave it here since I think you get my point, I hope...


Inevitably I will have to tackle the "but without ACM you can just run away and reset."
My first gut reply to this is, "yes and why shouldn't you be able to do this?" but I know it's a little more complicated than this.

First of all let me state that the solution is not to implement some obtuse mechanic like a speed increase on a bodyhit. I don't believe there really is a problem with this running and resetting thing, and if there is a problem it's a minor one at best. Actually this thinking negatively impacts open mode and is neutral in dueling mode.

To improve upon dueling mode and turn this issue of yours from a neutral thing into a positive, non issue is very simple. Have duel mode be more like baseJKA with a lobby and a longer time + freejoin and 1x1 duel challenges. I don't even want to get into the timelimit debate here because it's a seperate issue, but in fact I think that hardcoding the timer has had a massively negative impact on the game due to how many roleplayers MB2 used to have and how amazing the custom FA's were. Now all of those FA assets hardly get used at all, which is a huge shame, but let's focus on dueling.

To sum up my thoughts about dueling:

ACM ruins style switching, reduces the importance of BP, encourages runhit/passive parry styles and drawn out duels, and actually encourages running away equally if not more so that a system in which ACM didn't exist (because there's no chance of recovering the fight after a big ACM advantage, so why bother?).

I think that is the main thing I wanted to talk about with dueling, and really hammer it home. This is because devs often get caught up working on second or third hand problems instead of fixing the root cause. During my time as a beta tester I've seen this problem so many times that I cannot count them, and it goes for both open mode devs and dueling devs.

I don't want to call people out and blame them specifically, because that is rather pointless, but to give a few examples of stupidity and second/third rate symptom obsession let's take a look at recent dev history. And keep in mind many good things have happened aswell, I am just criticizing these things and spelling them out because it seems to always fly over peoples heads...

---

-Stassin made ACM the way it is because he believed running away in duels was bad and probably also because 0 BP survival was a thing back in 1.3 due to parry being free. Regardless of the reasoning though, ACM the way it is (and noodle swings), was his change and you just have to read my thoughts above to know why I list this here.

-To fix the 0 BP parrying issue, 1.4.3 came about, with 50% Bodyhit damage on all parries. Way too extreme a change.

-In 1.4.4 Tempest was worried about swinging willy-nilly and combo-spam, so he introduced very large flat drains. However, that was not the only massive problem he created. He also removed nudge yet kept fast PB counters, and all of this resulted in an absolutely shitty patch. The last time I played something so bad was maybe RC2. Even 1.4.3 with its ridiculous parry mechanic was better.

-1.4.5: This is a buggy beta build, rushed out because of viserys and incomplete and shitty because of lack of testing and tempests mistakes. It is damage control for the bad patches since 1.4, and tbh I am not very impressed at all. The main problem with 1.4.5 is the ACM meta, and the bugs and how unpolished sabering feels in it aswell as a few style specific things like red being slow and lacking nudge/faster speed to initiate.


-----

So now that I've gotten that off my chest and outlined what I think is a major problem and a relatively simple solution, let's throw out some details and solutions/changes. These are my changes and what I think is important to bring back the good feeling that I lost about 3-4 years ago.


-First is ACM. Make it relevant only for special attacks like blue lunge, stab, YDFA and butterfly or simply remove it completely from the game or rework it to the old style of ACC/ACM/AP gain.


-Individual saber perks aren't needed. We didn't have them in the old style switching systems and each style was unique with its advantages and disadvantages. But I believe individual perks can be a good thing both for open and for dueling if done right, to give flavour and so on.

To give a few examples of good perks and bad perks.

Red: Nudge -> Good perk.
Red/blue: PB drains X BP -> Bad perk.
Blue: Each ACC/ACM empowers blue lunge/backstab -> Good perk.
Purple: PB gives X ACM -> BAD PERK.
Yellow: Able to do fast halfswings in restricted directions -> Good perk.
Purple: Attacks bleed though PB -> BAD PERK.

But again, these shouldn't be needed, but can apply flavour so it's a minor thing.

-Reintroduce swing restricions, especially style specific ones not global ones so each style is unique and mastering the style takes more effort. This is a major part of why two styles felt different back when we didn't have random perks to differentiate them.

-Introduce NB aka Normal Block aka old lightsaber blade based PB. Make it reduce BP damage taken by 10% So instead of doing 10 BP damage, an attack does 9 BP damage. With BP being relevant, this will give the mindful player the edge without really interfering much with normal dueling, assuming BP drains are properly high, which brings me to my next change(s)

-Getting hit on your NB, enables you to do a nudge/halfswing speed counter. Aka a NB Counter. This should not be fast, but just skip the first windup part of the anim like halfswings so u can react off of an opponents aggression like in the old days instead of having to wait your turn, but more nuanced and requires some skill and timing awareness due to it being on NBs only. This should deal standard damage.

-To clarify, a PB counter would be a 20% increase in damage and same halfswing speed, basically just more dmg. And we do away with Mblock PB fast counters alltogether.

-BP regen below 1/3 BP is reduced slightly. Another mechanic to emphasize the importance of BP, low BP vs high BP and being mindful of your BP vs simply retardedly ignoring it and still being fine. The threshold could be marked a darker red on the bar to indicate when you are in the bad zone.

-If not holding block, aka running, force focus is increased to 0.5 sec for FB 1-2 and 1 sec for FB 3. This will enable you to pull runners if they aren't doing a proper tactical retreat, resulting in more rewards for skillful play and making it easier for pro's to kill running noobs that don't know what they are doing.

-Holding mouse 1 drains X bp per sec. Do away with arbitrary BP costs for swings and make all swings free and cost whatever the tick is. Attacking should be cheap, not super expensive like in 1.4.4.

-Make jumps with the +use button free always. So if you have jump 3, hold use and do a shorter jump 2 non-force jump, you don't dent your BP at all.

-Mblocking someone does not stop their combo, it gives you some BP instead. This will improve the flow of gameplay in general. Also roll back the mblock changes so that it's a mechanic everyone can use constantly during a duel with a short CD and no penalty for failing. The main problem with mblock was that it stopped momentum. If it merely regens some BP and this applies to both sides ofc, the one with the better mblock will regen more BP and thus come out on top. The CD should be around 3 seconds. The specific amount of BP an MB should give obviously needs to depend on the style, more for faster swings and less for slower swings. It should not be overly significant and extreme, same philosophy here as with NB, it should make a minor impact but be enough to really set the truly skilled apart from the moderately skilled.

-Getting slapped doesn't stagger/flinch you, but will still knock you down if u arent blocking. Getting kicked with +use does stagger you even in blocking stance. Another thing to increase skill levels and differentiate middling players from Masters.

-Parries are based on bodyhit damage and deal a flat 20% bodyhit damage throug the parry to the other person. So if a blue attack is worth 6BP damage and a Red attack is worth 10BP damage. Red deals more damage than blue through the parry, but blue should have more swings in its combo, atleast 4 so that extra swing evens out the difference in most circumstances. Besides, blue is alot faster than red so giving it stronger parries than strong styles doesn't make sense. Overcomplication of invisible mechanics seems to be an obsession of Tempest and even stassin to some extent, so how about we don't do that so much anymore?

-Make grip/MT/lightning and superpush unusuable in dueling mode (or togglable via a server option, and give speed to both sith and jedi so there is no difference between them dueling wise, aka a jedi doesn't get an advantage over a sith due to speed. This speed for both sides change SHOULD extend to open mode aswell, but the devs are being retarded about it and have stubbornly refused this change for a million years, same with rolling back the harcoded timer change. Sometimes you think you know whats best for the game when you have no fucking clue. I have been humble enough over the years and exceedingly patient enduring bad design ideas, so I think I am allowed to say that there is no way you are right about speed and the timer, and there is 'every' way that I am right about it.

-And for Tempests sake, I am mentioning here that specials should not cost BP, for fucks sake. They should cost FP, and you've already made them vulnerable. This makes them undesirable to spam in open mode, but usable in dueling mode. Oh, and NB should be able to block additional damage on specials, say 50 percent?


Perk/minor style changes section:

-Give red nudge for fucks sake. And don't even think about giving the style weird staggers. Stagger has ALWAYS been bad for sabering. It was terrible in the stagger below half BP on bodyhit patch, it is terrible now.

-Cyans new perk is that it deals 10% more damage than the opponents parry vs fast/medium styles and equal damage vs heavy styles on its first two swings in a combo, this counts halfswings aswell.

-Staffs new perk is an inability to be backwhacked unless u have low enough BP. Backwhacks deal 50% increased BP damage. This makes it better for 1vx. Let us get rid of the retarded Mblock perk legacy, and all the cheesy stagger bullshit.

-Yellow: fast halfswing like in the beta is fine I guess.

-Blue perk: Use ACM scaling on its lunge and backstab, and make the backstab recovery slightly faster so its less risky and is used more for style points.

-Purple perk: Acrobatics like cartwheels cost no BP and you take no additional damage if hit during them. Speed purple up and make its swingspeeds equal across the board. It should be similar to yellow in speed and could even get a 4th hit. Give it back stab as a special instead of the kata, and make it act like blue lunge, primarily a knockback thing unless super high ACM and ofc it costs FP like the other specials.

-Duals: Damage increases throughout the combo. Not the halfswing king design, but the combo king design. It makes duals less retarded in duels.


--- End of perk/style thing for now. Kept it brief for the sake of the other changes.



Now the 'sev' changes that all devs (Stassin/Tempest) have ignored for many years and even actively sought to counteract, and my reasons why these changes are good and why counteracting them is fucking bad. First the changes. Then the reasoning behind them.

-Swingblocked attacks do 10% more damage.
-Non-swingblocked attacks do 0% extra damage.
-Running attacks deal -30% damage.

-Jumping attacks (i.e while airborne) do 10% more damage and overlaps with swingblocked attacks for a total of 20% more damage.
-You take 30% more damage if hit in the air.
-Crouching attacks deal 75% reduced damage.
-You take 75% more damage if hit while crouching.


First of all, differentiateing between a swingblocked attack and a non-swingblocked attack is a way to increase the skill difference between players and give those who practice alot an advantage and the noobs that just hold m1 a disadvantage. It takes more skill to swingblock than to not swingblock, so swingblocks dealing LESS damge than nonswingblocked attacks DO NOT MAKE SENSE.

Running attacks should deal way less damage in a BP centered system, because this way you will have an easier time chasing a retreating opponent who doesn't swingblock or hold walk during his attacks. This somewhat alleviates the problem that many systems have had, even 1.4 ACM systems have this problem, where you try and chase someone down to finish the kill, but you end up losing your ACM and BP due to runhits. With no ACM there is only BP to worry about, and with 30% reduced dmg, runhits vs normal hits will come to favor the aggressor, which is what we need to finish duels instead of all of these mechanics like increasing runhit damage, that actually promote runhit rungaying.

Jumping has long been a pet peeve of mine. You should be rewarded for doing a short jump initiation because it drains your own BP and takes more skill than a normal attack to perform. The 30% more dmg is to balance the risk vs reward more adequately instead of having it be at 50% which totally fucks over the risk vs reward. At 30% it means that u can parry the jumphits and come out on top with a slight BP gain.

The crouch nerfs are simply because crouching attacks are hard to defend against with PBs, and it is a cheesy way to play the game and also looks retarded. Crouchspamming should never be a viable tactic in dueling, so I hit it hard. In contrast, tempest wants to reduce the penalty for crouching, which is fucking stupid.

I do not understand why the devs are so reluctant to implement these numbers changes that I have been going on about for years and years. Is it because it will increase the skill ceiling and reduce the effectiveness of cheesy tactics while rewarding skilled people? I don't get it, so why not fucking try some of my changes for a... change. Instead of obsessing over stupid, meaningless changes that are then rolled back the next patch, or making bad changes that stack accumulatively and end up making the system worse? Try some sev changes, please.


----

That will be it for now. I am sure we can find other small changes and adjustments together, but the main thing is to get the gameplay back on track and then balance it after the gameplay is fun and nuanced and deep again. I left out some changes and adjustments myself, thing that might fit into the balance category of changegs even more than the ones I included, such as BP/AP adjustments. I also did not mention force power reworks and force power changes too heavily, so there are many things still to touch on. BUT, this should give you a general overview of why I, SEV, haven't played consistently in 3 years and why I can't enjoy MBII the way I used to.

I hope you will take these suggestions to heart and try them instead of developing weird parallel alternatives that dont work aswell and are fixes to symptoms rather than fixes to the root cause.



-Yours sincerely. A very patient duelist that has had enough of the stupid changes and cannot put up with it any longer.

Agree completely devs have just made the game progessively worse and worse since 1.0, time for a complete revamp.

P.S. BRING BACK REPULSE WITH SABER DEFENCE FOR RAGNOS SAKE. /s

 

[Stassin]

Agree with most of what you said regarding saber vs saber.

-Swingblocked attacks do 10% more damage.
-Non-swingblocked attacks do 0% extra damage.
-Running attacks deal -30% damage.

-Jumping attacks (i.e while airborne) do 10% more damage and overlaps with swingblocked attacks for a total of 20% more damage.
-You take 30% more damage if hit in the air.
-Crouching attacks deal 75% reduced damage.
-You take 75% more damage if hit while crouching.

At some point i did put some of these in as you talked to me about them and we tested them too, they were in as of 1.4.3 for sure (dunno about more recent builds but i doubt it changed), although a little bit different. If i recall correctly the numbers were a little bit less significant, like 0% on running attacks, +10% on swingblocks, +20% on walking non-swingblocks. If you really mean it when you say to make swingblocks deal more dmg than walking non-swingblocks then i don't really understand.
Taking more dmg when in the air + crouching nerf is something i definitely put in, though less extreme once again than what you are writing here. I believe crouching was 50% reduced dmg and 50% more dmg taken (which if i'm not mistaken tempest has reduced to like 25% since then for i dunno what reason, but that might not be released yet). On the other hand i didn't buff jumping attacks.
In any case i totally agree with those except the swingblocked > walking non-swingblock which seems kinda weird to me.

Agree with pretty much everything else apart from perks (no perks needed tbh, with the exception of different swing chaining restrictions and nudge for red; everything else is just invisible and bad). Also disagree with full PB counter giving extra dmg instead of an instaswing with normal dmg, i think these instaswings were great, allowing slow styles some edge over faster ones and generally for more pacing diversity in the gameplay flow. Not entirely sure about your idea of MBlock giving BP, it could be great but i'm not sure if it's good for it to be invisible to the enemy (it could be, not sure).

Ofc agreed on ACM. Tbh the only reason i made it that way was so that it would play more of a part in dueling in general (didn't even have running in mind at all), since old ACM would rarely kick in except basically to signal the duel was over. But it was a terrible idea and destroys style switching. And about that, if it were me i'd still force yellow style to be bought first before any other.

Other than that, in general i believe you said elsewhere that we needed higher BP drains overall and reduced BP regen overall aswell, and i agree. In fact at this point, along with scrapping all perks except nudge for red and swing chaining restrictions, i would also change purple style back to how it was before, in a balanced way, with a huge drains (higher than red) and ridiculously low BP stamina.

About feels, even with all these exact changes you won't get the same feels you know. The changes i made in v1.1 modified very base mechanics. Namely PB & parries. Before v1.1 you could exchange bodyhits instead of parrying, since it would only parry when the sabers actually touched during attacks, but it's impossible since v1.1 as i made parries occur no matter what as long as both attacks were in their harmful phase, regardless of sabers touching (in order to make them more consistent, but at the same time it reduced the possibility of having some ultra-precise timings when parrying). That and having camera-based PB hopelessly changed the feels compared to v1.0 and prior. And also modified halfswings so that they all have the same speed, though i believe that is an improvement.




On the other hand i'll have to heavily disagree on open mode changes, and i wonder what you can say to make me change my mind about that. I tried very hard to make jedi class more difficult to play, because in the past it was literally forward + attack without aim and get instakills, and for the skilled players add some strafing and some force powers. In the past, the difference between blocking and running drains was literally non-existent, you could just run forever and not care. And since there was no flinch you could just fkin literally foward + attack on any gunner even 10x more skilled than you and get a kill in exchange for 50hp. The only way for a gunner to survive that was using other abilities than their gun or landing headshots (literally impossible against a strafing target even for the best).

Sure, the FP debuff, the ultra low blocking drains and flinch vs SBD and clone CR3 need to be toned down. But that's seriously it, and just add 0.5x reduced FP drains for consecutive shots within 200ms of the last shot to help with 1vX. We really need high running drains and pretty low blocking drains in order to force jedi to care about their movement and in order for them to be unable to just run away easily when they commit to a fight vs a gunner but fail. The amount of pressure a jedi puts on a gunner used to be fkin absurd (just like the skill difference required), they can be killed in 1 swing, they need to aim really well, they have to be mindful of walking/running, they have to be mindful of and anticipate positioning since jedi have the best mobility by far in the game and can run and ambush anywhere (and since they can do that, would it be balanced for them to also have the clear advantage in direct engagements with gunners ??).

That's why high running drains and low blocking drains give gunners some space, while forcing more skilled movement from jedi yet also giving them the option of tanking more gunfire and giving more opportunities to deflect (which requires to aim a little...). The point being that if a jedi is not close to you, then he can't just run up to you freely anymore due to high drains (giving space to the gunner); on the other hand, when they get close the pressure is on and they can tank alot more than in the past, so they have more opportunities to kill you than before while they're close, yet it's also harder to do it because you can't just swing + strafe + kill anymore thanks to flinch, you have to use swingblock.

All in all, what it does is prolong the saber vs gun engagement so that there are more opportunities to decide it via multiple mistakes, making it more fair for both parties. Like in gun vs gun (except snipers), where you don't die instantly as soon as you get hit once. So that's alot of positive points in my book, forcing more skill from jedi players overall and making the outcome of the saber vs gun engagement less of a coin flipping.

Now apparently the prolonged engagements feel bad. Blocking drains being so low apparently feel bad for gunners, though they shouldn't if they know that jedi have low regen as long as they're being shot, and on the other hand low FP regen feels bad for jedi, even though they've got deflect to deter gunfire. Frankly there's a part of playstyle adaptation, but i understand that prolonged engagements is not necessarily a good design direction due to feeling like you have to put in too much effort all the time, and twitchy gameplay where a single mistake is the deciding factor can feel better than more calculated gameplay. Not sure what you could do about that apart from reverting everything, but i believe a compromise between the two extremes would be better, so just toning down the current mechanics in play would be the best approach...

 

[Gargos]

Did not read it all, not even close. I just felt like commenting on about what you said about using force powers and how they cannot be used enough. I want to say that I completely disagree with this. In fact using force powers in new innovative ways has never been as strong as it is now. This is only underlined by the fact that the usual normie build of forceblock 3, seeing and push has lost its touch due to flinch making it harder to face gunners in such manner.

Problem is that most saberists have not realized this yet. Force is THE thing right now. Defense 1 builds are viable and have been for a while. Thst is extra 12 points into force powers. Atm defense 1 means you take extra damage to fp only when you run and jump, not walking. Dueling aint too bad either if you know the secrets of mblock, sometimes I mblock even with def0. In dueling def 1 only affects the regen rate of bp, nothing else. Add the fact that you can use fb1 as long as you learn to time blocks then youre set. One of my monster sith build has grip 3, super push, def 1, jump 2, fb1 and it is one of my absolute favorite builds. You can also switch up grip 3 with lightnin 3. Then I also have completely opposite sith build which utilizes deflect 3, super push, jump 2, defense 3, fb1 then any saber style (I like purple with this one due to defense3). How is that not variable? And these are not the only ways to even play since you can go lightning and grip, or go seeing 3 to be supportive/ninja, there are many ways.

And jedi? Jedi has the best force power in the world: speed level 1. It xosts 2 points and lets you do incredible boosts for what speed 3 is not necessary for. Use those extra points on anything, for example my favorite is speed 1, staff, jump 2, deflect 3, fb1, super push and defense 2. See, a lot force powers yet still defense2. And you can still go completely different like mt2, speed 1, defense 2, deflect 1, super push, jump2, fb1 and yellow style. So many force powers yet still defense2. And you can still make many variations depending on what you like (not every1 even wants super push like I do).

So many force powers to have and make interesting combos with (baiting with grip to pull ppl or speed + mt) yet so many do not use them. It takes time to learn them I understand that since there is a lot binding to do and it takes muscle memory to actually take the advantage of these builds but NOTHING is more satisfying than perfecting those play styles. Or at least this is how I see this, maybe others do not enjoy playing in the same way as I do.

People need to explore different builds with an open mind. To me there is a lot freedom in choosing your builds, you do not always have to play the meta or the safest way. Explore and try something weird since that can be unexpected and seal your victory.

Edit: and about slow fp regen, I use meditate to boost it very frequently.

 

[Chocorope]

Agree with most of what you said regarding saber vs saber.


At some point i did put some of these in as you talked to me about them and we tested them too, they were in as of 1.4.3 for sure (dunno about more recent builds but i doubt it changed), although a little bit different. If i recall correctly the numbers were a little bit less significant, like 0% on running attacks, +10% on swingblocks, +20% on walking non-swingblocks. If you really mean it when you say to make swingblocks deal more dmg than walking non-swingblocks then i don't really understand.
Taking more dmg when in the air + crouching nerf is something i definitely put in, though less extreme once again than what you are writing here. I believe crouching was 50% reduced dmg and 50% more dmg taken (which if i'm not mistaken tempest has reduced to like 25% since then for i dunno what reason, but that might not be released yet). On the other hand i didn't buff jumping attacks.
In any case i totally agree with those except the swingblocked > walking non-swingblock which seems kinda weird to me.

Agree with pretty much everything else apart from perks (no perks needed tbh, with the exception of different swing chaining restrictions and nudge for red; everything else is just invisible and bad). Also disagree with full PB counter giving extra dmg instead of an instaswing with normal dmg, i think these instaswings were great, allowing slow styles some edge over faster ones and generally for more pacing diversity in the gameplay flow. Not entirely sure about your idea of MBlock giving BP, it could be great but i'm not sure if it's good for it to be invisible to the enemy (it could be, not sure).

Ofc agreed on ACM. Tbh the only reason i made it that way was so that it would play more of a part in dueling in general (didn't even have running in mind at all), since old ACM would rarely kick in except basically to signal the duel was over. But it was a terrible idea and destroys style switching. And about that, if it were me i'd still force yellow style to be bought first before any other.

Other than that, in general i believe you said elsewhere that we needed higher BP drains overall and reduced BP regen overall aswell, and i agree. In fact at this point, along with scrapping all perks except nudge for red and swing chaining restrictions, i would also change purple style back to how it was before, in a balanced way, with a huge drains (higher than red) and ridiculously low BP stamina.

About feels, even with all these exact changes you won't get the same feels you know. The changes i made in v1.1 modified very base mechanics. Namely PB & parries. Before v1.1 you could exchange bodyhits instead of parrying, since it would only parry when the sabers actually touched during attacks, but it's impossible since v1.1 as i made parries occur no matter what as long as both attacks were in their harmful phase, regardless of sabers touching (in order to make them more consistent, but at the same time it reduced the possibility of having some ultra-precise timings when parrying). That and having camera-based PB hopelessly changed the feels compared to v1.0 and prior. And also modified halfswings so that they all have the same speed, though i believe that is an improvement.




On the other hand i'll have to heavily disagree on open mode changes, and i wonder what you can say to make me change my mind about that. I tried very hard to make jedi class more difficult to play, because in the past it was literally forward + attack without aim and get instakills, and for the skilled players add some strafing and some force powers. In the past, the difference between blocking and running drains was literally non-existent, you could just run forever and not care. And since there was no flinch you could just fkin literally foward + attack on any gunner even 10x more skilled than you and get a kill in exchange for 50hp. The only way for a gunner to survive that was using other abilities than their gun or landing headshots (literally impossible against a strafing target even for the best).

Sure, the FP debuff, the ultra low blocking drains and flinch vs SBD and clone CR3 need to be toned down. But that's seriously it, and just add 0.5x reduced FP drains for consecutive shots within 200ms of the last shot to help with 1vX. We really need high running drains and pretty low blocking drains in order to force jedi to care about their movement and in order for them to be unable to just run away easily when they commit to a fight vs a gunner but fail. The amount of pressure a jedi puts on a gunner used to be fkin absurd (just like the skill difference required), they can be killed in 1 swing, they need to aim really well, they have to be mindful of walking/running, they have to be mindful of and anticipate positioning since jedi have the best mobility by far in the game and can run and ambush anywhere (and since they can do that, would it be balanced for them to also have the clear advantage in direct engagements with gunners ??).

That's why high running drains and low blocking drains give gunners some space, while forcing more skilled movement from jedi yet also giving them the option of tanking more gunfire and giving more opportunities to deflect (which requires to aim a little...). The point being that if a jedi is not close to you, then he can't just run up to you freely anymore due to high drains (giving space to the gunner); on the other hand, when they get close the pressure is on and they can tank alot more than in the past, so they have more opportunities to kill you than before while they're close, yet it's also harder to do it because you can't just swing + strafe + kill anymore thanks to flinch, you have to use swingblock.

All in all, what it does is prolong the saber vs gun engagement so that there are more opportunities to decide it via multiple mistakes, making it more fair for both parties. Like in gun vs gun (except snipers), where you don't die instantly as soon as you get hit once. So that's alot of positive points in my book, forcing more skill from jedi players overall and making the outcome of the saber vs gun engagement less of a coin flipping.

Now apparently the prolonged engagements feel bad. Blocking drains being so low apparently feel bad for gunners, though they shouldn't if they know that jedi have low regen as long as they're being shot, and on the other hand low FP regen feels bad for jedi, even though they've got deflect to deter gunfire. Frankly there's a part of playstyle adaptation, but i understand that prolonged engagements is not necessarily a good design direction due to feeling like you have to put in too much effort all the time, and twitchy gameplay where a single mistake is the deciding factor can feel better than more calculated gameplay. Not sure what you could do about that apart from reverting everything, but i believe a compromise between the two extremes would be better, so just toning down the current mechanics in play would be the best approach...

Enjoyed the reading, for the most of it!

But Deflect fucking suck man....... For the same reasons you mentioned above somewhere, it's worth it if you can headshot!.. But yet again, also literally impossible against strafing targets.

Deflect is like half a suicide choice imo, and for the precious points that it cost, I can get much better stuff that will give me a better chance to win.

It aint worth to put more then 1 level into it.

 

[StarWarsGeek]

With saber vs gun, I agree that the current state is somewhat less fun and far more slowly paced than it used to be several years ago. For the most part, saber vs gun matchups are decided entirely at extremely close range because of the super low drains while blocking and outside IDR. If the gunner has perfect aim whenever the jedi goes to swing, he wins. If his aim isn't perfect in the split second that the swing happens during, he loses. There's more going on with force powers/other abilities but that's what it boils down to usually. This also makes the matchup extremely ping dependent. Consistently flinching a saberist with 30 ping is really easy, doing it with near 100 ping is mostly guess work and luck.

If flinch goes though, there needs to be some mechanic in place to prevent easy corner/choke point camping kills while tanking a shot or two. If not high knockback, then perhaps decreased saber damage or speed after getting shot during a swing.

Gargos summed up my opinion on force powers well. Clever usage of force powers is key when most of the skill in a saber vs gunner matchup would otherwise depend on the gunner's aim at an erratically moving target at point blank.


I don't have much to say about sabering because it's not my forte and I don't find it fun, but I heavily disagree with this:

It takes more skill to swingblock than to not swingblock, so swingblocks dealing LESS damge than nonswingblocked attacks DO NOT MAKE SENSE.

Yes it does, it's supposed to be a trade off. If you want to make swingblocks have all the advantages they currently have AND do more damage, you might as well remove swingblock entirely. Just make every swing automatically a swingblock. It doesn't take a lot of skill to tap m2 after every swing, you're just forcing people to push another button for the sake of pushing a button. That's not skill, that's tedium.

 

[Stassin]

K, after some more rereading and thinking i'll have to take back what i said at the end. No, it's impossible to get a compromise between both approaches. I believe the current system is fine (if toned down) in that it makes the saber vs gun engagement more consistent and requires more skill on the part of the jedi, and i also believe the old system was fine aswell, it's just the part about jedi getting instakills and being so EZ to play that has always bugged me and was the reason i did all this (yep, still heavily disagree with you on the fact that there was a high skillcap or whatever on jedi before - i mean it's the same as now when it comes to force powers and general positioning/strategy, but the direct saber vs gun engagement definitely requires more skill now).

But yea, i think your simple comment about wookiees kinda already convinces me. Melee wook is effective at close range and requires more than 5x less skill than old system jedi. I guess that seals the deal. Jedi is EZ to play (in pure gun vs saber, not factoring everything else) and there's nothing to be done about it, despite me trying so hard. So the old system is better in that it falls much better in line with the rest of the gameplay of the mod like wookiees, while the current system feels completely out of place. So yea, we need to revert all that just like sev is saying, eeeeeeeeeeeeh i guess i'm stupid from the start.

 

[noel]

Yes it does, it's supposed to be a trade off. If you want to make swingblocks have all the advantages they currently have AND do more damage, you might as well remove swingblock entirely. Just make every swing automatically a swingblock. It doesn't take a lot of skill to tap m2 after every swing, you're just forcing people to push another button for the sake of pushing a button. That's not skill, that's tedium.

I mean it does take skill

I can't name anyone in the current dueling community who can swingblock more than a single hit perfectly, you can 99% of the time slap someone who does more than one hit successively if you time it properly

 

[Viserys]

1.4.5: This is a buggy beta build, rushed out because of viserys

lol ok. clearly haven't read this V1.4.5 Update Released! have you? There's a whole section explaining why 1.4.5 was rushed and it doesn't say 'because viserys'

//Edit: also didn't read the whole post but my eye caught this

-Swingblocked attacks do 10% more damage.

that's so silly. besides increasing the skillgap in MBII, it makes no sense: swingblock gives you some other advantages (no mblock), that should come to a cost (less damage) not a buf. Otherwise there's literally zero need to ever use no-swingblock attacks except in the cases of newbies (who already have a hard enough time, don't you think?)

oh and

Jedi is EZ to play

No, it's not. Not for new players in the very least. The issue with newbies vs oldies should be taken into consideration when thinking of what's 'ez' or not.

 

[StarWarsGeek]

I mean it does take skill

I can't name anyone in the current dueling community who can swingblock more than a single hit perfectly, you can 99% of the time slap someone who does more than one hit successively if you time it properly

Sure there's some skill in the timing, but it's ultimately just a complication just for the sake of being complicated. If there's no reason to ever not swingblock, everyone might as well just make a macro that blocks for them a millisecond after they've tapped attack. Requiring more button presses is a really boring way to add more skill.

 

[noel]

Sure there's some skill in the timing, but it's ultimately just a complication just for the sake of being complicated. If there's no reason to ever not swingblock, everyone might as well just make a macro that blocks for them a milisecond after they've tapped attack. Requiring more button presses is a really boring way to add more skill.

You couldn't make a macro because the timing is different depending on when your saber lands/what combo you do

If theres no swingblock theres constant 4 hit spam, it's literally the best and easiest way to stop people from mindlessly spamming which is going to be incredibly effective no matter what changes are made

 

[SeV]

lol ok. clearly haven't read this V1.4.5 Update Released! have you? There's a whole section explaining why 1.4.5 was rushed and it doesn't say 'because viserys'

I read it when 1.4.5 came out, and as former team lead it was your responsibility to make sure it was tested properly before release, or release a rushed 1.4.5 and quickly start working on fixes with 1.4.6. We had one test prior to release afaik, one. And afterwards, we had a period of many, many months where what was wrong with 1.4.5 wasn't fixed. Instead we tested new maps and useless FA balancing that nobody will ever play and devs were away in dreamland doing who knows what. I don't know what you devs do behind closed doors, but from my perspective it looked very bad. And as I at one point said in the post above, I am tired of tiptoing around things so I will say it like it is. Sorry if you took offense, I like you in general but I am also going to be honest and say when something is not working. It needs to be stated clearly that the dev process was broken for many months, clearly, since it produced bad patches and no updates inbetween to fix minor issues.

EDIT: I don't want to play the blame game or the compare current with past game. All of this is meant as a slap on the wrist for MBII in general and as you can see many ppl agree with some or most of my proposed changes, not that that necessarily validates them or not. So while I mentioned invididuals I didn't mean to call them out and blame them, not you either Vis. I am just frustrated with the incompetence and lack of progress after so much time has passed.

Sure there's some skill in the timing, but it's ultimately just a complication just for the sake of being complicated. If there's no reason to ever not swingblock, everyone might as well just make a macro that blocks for them a millisecond after they've tapped attack. Requiring more button presses is a really boring way to add more skill.

I don't know why it's hard for some people to grasp the concept of Mblock and swingblock going hand in hand, and I don't understand at all how someone can say swingblocking is not a valid skill. I know many new duelists who get good at the game but still aren't great at swingblocking, and it is an integral part of dueling that happens constantly. I would rather emphasize the difference between someone who does things with skill, and someone who does things without skill, rather than narrow the gap between noobs and pro's as recent patches have done in certain areas. It's hard to reply to you Starwarsgeek, because from my perspective your whole argument comes off as 'I can't swingblock very well so it shouldn't deal more damage'.

Saying that swingblocking overcomplicates the saber system 'for the sake of being complicated' is simply stupid. ACM exists and is a much more complicated and convoluted mechanic, same goes for all the little invisible numbers and adjustments both in open mode and dueling, same for perks etc. Swingblocking is extremely simple and if its complexity is the standard by which we should judge overcomplication, we might aswell go back to BaseJKA. Truly a non-argument.

I also don't buy into the 'choice' argument. Nobody is going to choose to not swingblock unless they are comboing lightly. Some people do this, but very few and in any case it is not something I think is a good thing. I would say atleast 90% of all duelists only non-swingblock on accident. I think making something that happens primarily on accident deal more damage than something that's deliberate and requires more skill, is utterly retarded.

Agree with most of what you said regarding saber vs saber.


At some point i did put some of these in as you talked to me about them and we tested them too, they were in as of 1.4.3 for sure (dunno about more recent builds but i doubt it changed), although a little bit different. If i recall correctly the numbers were a little bit less significant, like 0% on running attacks, +10% on swingblocks, +20% on walking non-swingblocks. If you really mean it when you say to make swingblocks deal more dmg than walking non-swingblocks then i don't really understand.
Taking more dmg when in the air + crouching nerf is something i definitely put in, though less extreme once again than what you are writing here. I believe crouching was 50% reduced dmg and 50% more dmg taken (which if i'm not mistaken tempest has reduced to like 25% since then for i dunno what reason, but that might not be released yet). On the other hand i didn't buff jumping attacks.
In any case i totally agree with those except the swingblocked > walking non-swingblock which seems kinda weird to me.

Agree with pretty much everything else apart from perks (no perks needed tbh, with the exception of different swing chaining restrictions and nudge for red; everything else is just invisible and bad). Also disagree with full PB counter giving extra dmg instead of an instaswing with normal dmg, i think these instaswings were great, allowing slow styles some edge over faster ones and generally for more pacing diversity in the gameplay flow. Not entirely sure about your idea of MBlock giving BP, it could be great but i'm not sure if it's good for it to be invisible to the enemy (it could be, not sure).

Ofc agreed on ACM. Tbh the only reason i made it that way was so that it would play more of a part in dueling in general (didn't even have running in mind at all), since old ACM would rarely kick in except basically to signal the duel was over. But it was a terrible idea and destroys style switching. And about that, if it were me i'd still force yellow style to be bought first before any other.

Other than that, in general i believe you said elsewhere that we needed higher BP drains overall and reduced BP regen overall aswell, and i agree. In fact at this point, along with scrapping all perks except nudge for red and swing chaining restrictions, i would also change purple style back to how it was before, in a balanced way, with a huge drains (higher than red) and ridiculously low BP stamina.

About feels, even with all these exact changes you won't get the same feels you know. The changes i made in v1.1 modified very base mechanics. Namely PB & parries. Before v1.1 you could exchange bodyhits instead of parrying, since it would only parry when the sabers actually touched during attacks, but it's impossible since v1.1 as i made parries occur no matter what as long as both attacks were in their harmful phase, regardless of sabers touching (in order to make them more consistent, but at the same time it reduced the possibility of having some ultra-precise timings when parrying). That and having camera-based PB hopelessly changed the feels compared to v1.0 and prior. And also modified halfswings so that they all have the same speed, though i believe that is an improvement.




On the other hand i'll have to heavily disagree on open mode changes, and i wonder what you can say to make me change my mind about that. I tried very hard to make jedi class more difficult to play, because in the past it was literally forward + attack without aim and get instakills, and for the skilled players add some strafing and some force powers. In the past, the difference between blocking and running drains was literally non-existent, you could just run forever and not care. And since there was no flinch you could just fkin literally foward + attack on any gunner even 10x more skilled than you and get a kill in exchange for 50hp. The only way for a gunner to survive that was using other abilities than their gun or landing headshots (literally impossible against a strafing target even for the best).

Sure, the FP debuff, the ultra low blocking drains and flinch vs SBD and clone CR3 need to be toned down. But that's seriously it, and just add 0.5x reduced FP drains for consecutive shots within 200ms of the last shot to help with 1vX. We really need high running drains and pretty low blocking drains in order to force jedi to care about their movement and in order for them to be unable to just run away easily when they commit to a fight vs a gunner but fail. The amount of pressure a jedi puts on a gunner used to be fkin absurd (just like the skill difference required), they can be killed in 1 swing, they need to aim really well, they have to be mindful of walking/running, they have to be mindful of and anticipate positioning since jedi have the best mobility by far in the game and can run and ambush anywhere (and since they can do that, would it be balanced for them to also have the clear advantage in direct engagements with gunners ??).

That's why high running drains and low blocking drains give gunners some space, while forcing more skilled movement from jedi yet also giving them the option of tanking more gunfire and giving more opportunities to deflect (which requires to aim a little...). The point being that if a jedi is not close to you, then he can't just run up to you freely anymore due to high drains (giving space to the gunner); on the other hand, when they get close the pressure is on and they can tank alot more than in the past, so they have more opportunities to kill you than before while they're close, yet it's also harder to do it because you can't just swing + strafe + kill anymore thanks to flinch, you have to use swingblock.

All in all, what it does is prolong the saber vs gun engagement so that there are more opportunities to decide it via multiple mistakes, making it more fair for both parties. Like in gun vs gun (except snipers), where you don't die instantly as soon as you get hit once. So that's alot of positive points in my book, forcing more skill from jedi players overall and making the outcome of the saber vs gun engagement less of a coin flipping.

Now apparently the prolonged engagements feel bad. Blocking drains being so low apparently feel bad for gunners, though they shouldn't if they know that jedi have low regen as long as they're being shot, and on the other hand low FP regen feels bad for jedi, even though they've got deflect to deter gunfire. Frankly there's a part of playstyle adaptation, but i understand that prolonged engagements is not necessarily a good design direction due to feeling like you have to put in too much effort all the time, and twitchy gameplay where a single mistake is the deciding factor can feel better than more calculated gameplay. Not sure what you could do about that apart from reverting everything, but i believe a compromise between the two extremes would be better, so just toning down the current mechanics in play would be the best approach...

I am 50/50 on perks, but think that if the system works without them and it should, removing them should be heavily considered. Many perks work invisibly and even depend on ACM, so I agree that the simplest and cleanest thing that could be done about this is to remove them and go from there.

About the 'sev' changes as I called them, lol, I believe we currently have a system where swingblocks and non-swingblocks deal the same amount of damage, and you get a 15% dmg boost when walking. This change really does not impress me overly much lol. I'm glad to see you agree on ACM, it's been a battle and a half for me but I think we are approaching the finish line with regards to this mechanic. Or atleast I hope so.

 

[GoodOl'Ben]

Really nice and thought out commentary. I do have to admit that I tuned out half-way through the sabering. Shit just got far too complicated. That's the system's biggest problem first and foremost. That's what I'd set out to fix, but nobody vocally agrees with me so I think I'm in the wrong there and everyone else knows better.

I won't say anything about the dueling ideas or anything. This is roughly where we should be with our system, just a bit faster paced:

Attacks need to have impact and weight to them. The receiver currently does not react for shit. Poor timings are punished through random RPG numbers rather than visual turn exchanges like in most notable fighting games such as Tekken.

I loved a lot of what you said about Saber vs Gun. It brings out good points here and there. However, just to quickly tackle the wookiee argument. I would note that wookiees tank with a diminishing resource while Jedi/Sith tank with a regenerative resource. This in itself changes the nature of these confrontations. Wookiees are brute force and Jedi/Sith are finesse. Different fantasies and styles of play.

With that out of the way, let's get stuck in!

Our current solution stemmed from a desire to create 1 v Many more viable for Jedi/Sith as this was perceived to be lacking in the old mechanics. This is why block is powerful and running drains are high. I believe the regen debuff was added in essentially to offset block's strength. The added durability that the modern strong block grants gives back some of that old sustain Jedi/Sith had in B17-B19 era. The high running drains maintain the high stakes of RC1-V1.2(ish).

At the end of the day. I think no amount of new features will make the system a lot better than it is now. First and foremost this is a balance rather than design issue. The design itself is still pretty much the same it's always been with some added details here and there.

I would love to see people break their issues down into TL;DRs. Here are a few examples of what they could be:

• Jedi running force drains are too high
• I don't feel the gunner deserved to flinch me when he used Clone Rifle 3 to land his hits on me

This helps my job in going through a lot of opinionated posts.

All that said, I want to experiment with various solutions during this year. I'm always browsing through the forums on the prowl for differing opinions and ideas.

 

[StarWarsGeek]

It's hard to reply to you Starwarsgeek, because from my perspective your whole argument comes off as 'I can't swingblock very well so it shouldn't deal more damage'.

Ah, the classic "I don't care about your opinion because you're not skilled" arguement. Very nice. Anyway, I can swing block just fine thank you very much. It's really not that hard even for someone who doesn't care about dueling. In 10 years of MB2 I usually get mblocked maybe once or twice a year at most because I'm not expecting it. Slaps happen much more often of course, and it's inevitable that slaps make it through anyone's swingblock attempts occasionally in the fraction of a second it takes to press block. When someone is spamming slap extra hard, it's not that difficult to put in the extra concentration to make sure you've got your finger on block as soon as you've initiated a swing. It's more of a concentration issue than a skill one. The skill required there is moreso in the hands of the person timing the slap.

ISaying that swingblocking overcomplicates the saber system 'for the sake of being complicated' is simply stupid.

Good thing I didn't say swingblock as it is now overcomplicates the sabersystem. It WOULD overcomplicate it if there were no drawback to swingblocking, because then it would just be a required extra button press with every swing.

I also don't buy into the 'choice' argument. Nobody is going to choose to not swingblock unless they are comboing lightly. Some people do this, but very few and in any case it is not something I think is a good thing. I would say atleast 90% of all duelists only non-swingblock on accident. I think making something that happens primarily on accident deal more damage than something that's deliberate and requires more skill, is utterly retarded.

If your opponent's slap is on cooldown and you think they won't be fast enough/skilled enough to mblock a certain swing, why would you bother swingblocking? There's very obviously a choice involved there. You just always choose the same choice. On the other hand, your changes to swingblock would make it not a choice because a regular swing would be worse in every way. Requiring more button presses doesn't raise the skill cap, it just makes playing more tedious.

Shit just got far too complicated. That's the system's biggest problem first and foremost. That's what I'd set out to fix, but nobody vocally agrees with me so I think I'm in the wrong there and everyone else knows better.

I agree with you Ben, simple and intuitive saber system with a high skill ceiling when?

 

[Viserys]

I read it when 1.4.5 came out, and as former team lead it was your responsibility to make sure it was tested properly before release, or release a rushed 1.4.5 and quickly start working on fixes with 1.4.6. We had one test prior to release afaik, one. And afterwards, we had a period of many, many months where what was wrong with 1.4.5 wasn't fixed. Instead we tested new maps and useless FA balancing that nobody will ever play and devs were away in dreamland doing who knows what. I don't know what you devs do behind closed doors, but from my perspective it looked very bad. And as I at one point said in the post above, I am tired of tiptoing around things so I will say it like it is. Sorry if you took offense, I like you in general but I am also going to be honest and say when something is not working. It needs to be stated clearly that the dev process was broken for many months, clearly, since it produced bad patches and no updates inbetween to fix minor issues.

Well ok, what you are saying is so wrong I feel I shouldn't even try to correct it. Yes I take offense when you say I released untested stuff and then did nothing afterwards. We did many, many things, they just weren't sabering changes, because Tempest has been working on those exclusively since then (with you). But I guess if it's not sabering it doesn't count.

MBII is not sabering. MBII has other things as well, as evident by the 1.4.6, 1.4.7, and 1.4.8 releases. 'Useless FA balancing that nobody will ever play'? FA is actually played, as you can see on the server list, and it needs some love and attention, which it hasn't seen in a while. Besides the tiny attention to FA, many things were worked on, some were released, and some were not. But nothing happens without a lot of work going into it, not DOTFv2, not the models, not the trailer, the website, or anything else. So sorry, no, we weren't 'in dreamland doing who knows what', and no, we are not incompetent, because if we were, there would be no releases.

The 1.4.5 sabering changes were the bare minimum I could agree with Tempest as a small patch to the issues with 1.4.4, as he understood them. I in fact stopped the release of a bunch of additional changes that were not sufficiently tested in my judgement. And I asked, time and again, both Tempest and beta testers (duelists) if 1.4.5 sabering was better than 1.4.4, and I was told 'yes' every time.

As for 'quickly start working with fixes', there is no such thing, as you well should know by now. There is 'these minor tweaks and then it will be perfect' which turns into months and months of endless tweaks and tests.

But I guess the untruthfulness of your post does highlight the problem of communication between devs and beta testers.

But since we're being honest, let's do the math, shall we? 1.4.4 was released December 2016, the sabering Open Beta in January 2017 and 1.4.5 was released July 2017. Between the Open Beta and 1.4.5 there were 10 scheduled beta tests, and that doesn't count your 1 to 1 sessions with Tempest on the beta server. And in the last beta test before 1.4.5 was released, your feedback was that there were no issues besides missing sounds.

Want me to remind you of your feedback on second to last test before 1.4.5, which had the same sabering changelog as 1.4.5? 'No glaring bugs in sabering, most things worked fine, other than sounds'.

Tell me again how I released untested buggy stuff.

I find it extremely frustrating to see you complain (again) about sabering in releases that you were, to my knowledge, involved intimately in developing through 1 to 1 sessions and tweaks with Tempest. We had no direct communication, but what I was told was 'SeV likes these changes'. Your written feedback supports this.

Funnily enough, when I confronted you about contradicting yourself a while back, I remember you complaining to me about not releasing a bunch of sabering changes Tempest had done since the Open Beta that were, and I quote 'ready for release', when no, they were not ready for release.

So which is it SeV? Are we bad because we are releasing untested stuff or are we bad because we are NOT releasing untested stuff? Do tell.

 

[Stassin]

No, it's not. Not for new players in the very least. The issue with newbies vs oldies should be taken into consideration when thinking of what's 'ez' or not.

Well, i meant jedi is ez compared to gunners. While this not may be the case when considering players who have already played other shooter games (but then the same could be said for people who have played sword games and not shooter games ?), for someone who has no gaming experience jedi is definitely much easier to play than gunner in this mod.

@SeV i forgot to mention something, don't you think starting swings, since they are slower than halfswings, should be buffed for example in the form of being impossible to full-PB but only semi-PB ? It's something that's been bugging me for a while since i introduced the new PB in v1.1, starting swings are much easier to PB than halfswings which seems to artificially deter straight offense for no reason in favor of defense. Leading to artifacts like swinging first in the air to get a halfswing on the enemy, which i don't believe should disappear (and they wouldn't with that change, since a faster swing could lead to a full bodyhit instead of a semi-PB), but starting swings just seem way too heavily disadvantageous.

 

[SeV]

Well, i meant jedi is ez compared to gunners. While this not may be the case when considering players who have already played other shooter games (but then the same could be said for people who have played sword games and not shooter games ?), for someone who has no gaming experience jedi is definitely much easier to play than gunner in this mod.

@SeV i forgot to mention something, don't you think starting swings, since they are slower than halfswings, should be buffed for example in the form of being impossible to full-PB but only semi-PB ? It's something that's been bugging me for a while since i introduced the new PB in v1.1, starting swings are much easier to PB than halfswings which seems to artificially deter straight offense for no reason in favor of defense. Leading to artifacts like swinging first in the air to get a halfswing on the enemy, which i don't believe should disappear (and they wouldn't with that change, since a faster swing could lead to a full bodyhit instead of a semi-PB), but starting swings just seem way too heavily disadvantageous.

Yeah I've thought about that aswell, since nudge leaves a void behind with first swings. It would probably be a good thing for them to be uninterruptible atleast. A slight bleed-though on PBs is also an option, but I would prefer to keep that as simple as possible. Changes to this can quickly get out of hand like with the +3 ACM first swing, +2 halfswing +1 consecutive crap. So I would want things to be straight forward if possible. Starting swings defo seem to disadvantageous and that's been part of the problem with sabering, it just slipped my mind but I'm glad you reminded me. Not sure what options would be best since I haven't thought deeply about it, but I think something should be done about them in the absence of nudge.

Now for the le sigh.

Well ok, what you are saying is so wrong I feel I shouldn't even try to correct it. Yes I take offence when you say I released untested stuff and then did nothing afterwards. We did many, many things, they just weren't sabering changes, because Tempest has been working on those exclusively since then (with you). But I guess if it's not sabering it doesn't count.

MBII is not sabering. MBII has other things as well, as evident by the 1.4.6, 1.4.7, and 1.4.8 releases. 'Useless FA balancing that nobody will ever play'? FA is actually played, as you can see on the server list, and it needs some love and attention, which it hasn't seen in a while. Many things were worked on, some were released, and some were not. But nothing happens without a lot of work going into it, not DOTFv2, not the models, not the trailer, the website, or anything else. So sorry, no, we weren't 'in dreamland doing who knows what'.

The 1.4.5 sabering changes were the bare minimum I could agree with Tempest as a small patch to the issues with 1.4.4, as he understood them. I in fact stopped the release of a bunch of additional changes that were not sufficiently tested. And I asked, time and again, both Tempest and beta testers (duelists) if 1.4.5 sabering was better than 1.4.4, and I was told 'yes' every time.

As for 'quickly start working with fixes', there is no such thing, as you well should know by now. There is 'these minor tweaks and then it will be perfect' which turns into months and months of endless tweaks and tests.

But I guess the untruthfulness of your post does highlight the problem of communication between devs and beta testers, and, it seems, shows you just haven't been paying attention.

But since we're being honest, let's do the math, shall we? 1.4.4 was released December 2016, the sabering Open Beta in January 2017 and 1.4.5 was released July 2017. Between the Open Beta and 1.4.5 there were 10 scheduled beta tests, and that doesn't count your 1 to 1 sessions with Tempest on the beta server. And in the last beta test before 1.4.5 was released, this was your feedback:



Want me to remind you of your feedback on second to last test before 1.4.5, which had the same sabering changelog as 1.4.5?



Tell me again how I released untested buggy stuff.

I find it extremely frustrating to see you complain (again) about sabering in releases that you were, to my knowledge, involved intimately in developing through 1 to 1 sessions and tweaks with Tempest. We had no direct communication, but what I was told was 'SeV likes these changes'. Your feedback supports this.

Funnily enough, when I confronted you about contradicting yourself a while back, I remember you complaining to me about not releasing a bunch of sabering changes Tempest had done since the Open Beta that were, and I quote 'ready for release', when no, they were not ready for release.

So which is it SeV? Are we bad because we are releasing untested stuff or are we bad because we are NOT releasing untested stuff? Do tell.

Alright, if you wanna do this then let's do it, though this should be the final exchange because I want this thread to be focused on the future not the past, which is why I neglected to go into detail about my dissatisfactions with the beta process but I concede the necessity of doing so on the basis of what you posted, since I am clearly not the only one being 'untruthful'.

I'm afraid you and I see things very differently indeed, which may help to explain why the dev process over the past year or so has puzzled me so greatly.

First let us get a few things straight. All I have been doing is trying to tell devs what I think. This does not equate to or directly translate to changes in patches, which you should be able to see clearly from my continued complaining. The fact that you fail to see this and just want to slap a 'SeV approved' tag on shitty builds is deeply disconcerting to me. You also cannot use this strawman to invalidate my points.

Moving on.

Disregarding the fact that 1.4.5 being better than 1.4.4 was no great feat as all that took was reverting the retarded BP drain changes, I fail to see your point here. And I think 3 months of 1.4.5 should've been enough time to start working on some fixes and run some open betas on tempests stuff. It still puzzles me how a year has gone by and yet it's all theory and it feels like we haven't even started chewing through the new system yet. 1.4.3 was rushed, 1.4.4 was rushed, and 1.4.5 was rushed! And then there was atleast a 3 month gap during which no fixes to 1.4.5's blatant bugs/mistakes took place. Say what you like about other priorities as I am certain other things have occupied your time, but I am not wrong when I say the beta process has been shit for the past year, atleast as long as I've been a beta tester. The best time I had testing ever, was when stassin was working on 1.4. I don't claim to be infallible, but atleast I am trying and to me it feels like devs aren't trying, or are going about it wrong, or are half-assing it.

What I have been saying for a long time now is that the beta process is broken to a certain extent. The open beta was amazing because it very quickly exposed flaws in the sabering system. Let's do the math, shall we? So obnoxious... anyway, 1 Open beta 1 year ago. Huge success, not repeated since. Why? And 1.4.5 has pretty much 0 of what I tested with tempest, and I was mostly used as a dummy for his code experiments not gameplay testing so you cannot count those as any sort of test for 1.4.5. A Major fallacy and rather disingenuous on your part or perhaps you truly think thats how things went down, which of course partly explains the clownshow, but is still no real excuse. It's fine if you take offense and want to attack me, but please don't be disingenuous and lie about this because I am fairly certain about the pre 1.4.5 release test since I was and still am desperate for sabering changes and try to make myself available at all times for tests etc.

Prior to the release of 1.4.5 we transitioned from tempests stuff to 1.4.5 stuff and had one test, which didn't last very long, was disorganized and half-assed and during which I got very few duels and most of my opponents were alot weaker than me or had 200 ping. You can't call this any form of acceptable testing prior to a patch, but let us put aside how bad this actually was because I think the aftermath of 1.4.5 just proved my point. Simple bugs remained unfixed for months while we tested FA balance changes or new maps, and I am not opposed to such tests, it's just that it felt to me like you got your priorities backwards.

Another thing I wish to mention and draw attention to is the fact that your game development philosophy is flawed. Correct me if I am wrong, but tempest said that you denied implementing his changes due to QA, even fairly mild ones. Yet you can hardly call the one, shitty test we had prior to 1.4.5 QA can you? I think since we are such a small community it would be more productive to run more open beta test, since internal tests are clearly insufficient. The internal betas would be best employed with bugs to theory, and after major bugs like crashes etc have been dealt with you can push the theory stuff to an open beta for proper gameplay testing and just repeat this cycle.

Anyways... if that is how you see this situation Vis, then I am happy you aren't the team leader anymore. And I don't mean that I a bad way, just that I want the best for MB2 and I can't see how recent patches have been anything but failures. They have thier strong points and a few great things have come out from them for sure.

*Big breath Vis* And let us move on since we don't see eye to eye. Please focus on my propsed changes not on drama.

 

[Viserys]

I fail to see your point here.

My point is that the feedback I was given, by devs and beta testers, was that 1.4.5 sabering was an improvement to 1.4.4. That's why it was released. As a lead I need to recognise that I have to rely on other people's opinions on deciding things that I'm not best placed to have an opinion on - and I'm not a saberist. That's what I did, I trusted the feedback, including yours, in the feedback threads.

Leads cannot be aware of every single issue/bug on on-going developments. We have to rely on devs to develop and test their stuff until it's bug-free (as far as can be detected), and beta testers to provide feedback on what was tested, and then act on that feedback and their own judgement. As an example, I still I had concerns with 1.4.5 testing before release which is why I pulled Aaron and SK5 on a beta server and asked them to duel, then tweaked according to their feedback.

Prior to the release of 1.4.5 we transitioned from tempests stuff to 1.4.5 stuff and had one test,

The beta test threads are all available in the beta subforum. Look at the test agendas prior to 1.4.5. Count again.

1 Open beta 1 year ago. Huge success, not repeated since. Why?

Because it wasn't ready. There were no bug-free consecutive beta tests of a stable build for a second open beta. Nor was only picking the changes that were working possible, since the whole huge amount of work was on the same branch.

Simple bugs remained unfixed for months while we tested FA balance changes or new maps, and I am not opposed to such tests, it's just that it felt to me like you got your priorities backwards.

Different devs work on different things. Tempest worked on sabering, he didn't look into the FA changes at all, so your argument that one is somehow prioritised over the other is invalid. Both can happen in parallel.

Yet you can hardly call the one, shitty test we had prior to 1.4.5 QA can you?

No, the three(!) tests we had prior to 1.4.5 were not the QA I wanted. But it was enough to convince me I was releasing something better than 1.4.4 in terms of sabering, based on feedback and the options I had at the time (which was to release those sabering changes, or release no sabering changes and no fixes at all - 1.4.5 could not be delayed).

since we are such a small community it would be more productive to run more open beta test, since internal tests are clearly insufficient.

We were aware of this. The ability to run Open Betas easily through the Launcher is something that has long been in the pipeline. As for running Open Betas manually, we could still do that (even with the limited participation), but we didn't get to the point where we said 'ok, we have code suitable for open beta as it is now'.

then I am happy you aren't the team leader anymore

See, we agree on something.

Please focus on my propsed changes not on drama.

You called me by name in your initial post, and then proceeded to accuse me of releasing bad patches. I am responding to your comments. But you're right, the rest on PMs (discord).