therealmike
Internal Beta Team
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Open is finally dead.
- Thread starter yle yatarn.
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How did this thread go from debating about open to scorning Valkyrie to shitposting to discussing about how to update the game.
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Since you've disregarded everything I'll just leave it I suppose.
Entitlement has nothing to do with anything i've discussed, so good luck with what you want to do.
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Please put this visual diarrhea under a spoiler, thank you 🙏
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yeah your game deserves to die you're an egoistical brainlet son everything that comes through one of your ears leaves through the other right away, no amount of convincing can save you from your superiority complex and neither can it save your game.
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Quite the rollercoaster indeed. Didn't think I'd see well worded essays discussing the state of the game, some jargon about some guy breaking his hand, and many tasteful images of Yarael Poof. In all seriousness though, as a relatively new player since about 2020, there's definitely a giant melting pot of different takes on here that don't mix well. After reading the back and fourth discourse for the past hour, I couldn't even begin to say what would actually bring players back to Open at this point. That said, the one thing that I believe would be a significant and compelling push to bring players back to Open would be adding the Royal Guard to the Open game mode. I think I speak for 100% of the community when i say what we are all really missing is some fun red guys with pikes running around. Their early work was a little too new wave for my taste, but when Royal Guards came out in Legends, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole character has a clear, crisp design, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the play style a big boost. They've been compared to Jedi\Sith, but I think the Royal Guard has a far more bitter, cynical sense of gameplay. In '87, released this; Red and Tall!, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is "Pike To Be Fair". A song so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends. It's also a personal statement about the class itself.
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You haven't been punished enough, I see
Infraction: Disputing Moderation
It’s truly strange that even when more than half of the comments here try to explain to Defiant or Mace that some changes might need to be implemented while others don’t, it still feels like banging your head against a wall—just like it has been for the last 10 years of this game. What’s even stranger is that our developers still don’t seem to understand the differences in feedback coming from experienced players, new players, or mid-level ones. This doesn’t bode well for the future of the game.
And let’s not forget the partial censorship—the deletion of messages. Guys, these posts are already circulating on Discord, and deleting them is pointless unless they promote pornography, executions, or hate speech. I assure you that the message of mine that was deleted contained none of those things. It’s likely that a certain individual felt so cornered that he begged for those posts to be removed.
To sum up the discussion about changes: essentially, nothing is changing. The EU player base, which includes a large number of highly skilled players, will continue to be ignored, while NA will keep pushing their ideas forward. The real question is whether the game will recover to a point where updating it will even make sense.
And let’s not forget the partial censorship—the deletion of messages. Guys, these posts are already circulating on Discord, and deleting them is pointless unless they promote pornography, executions, or hate speech. I assure you that the message of mine that was deleted contained none of those things. It’s likely that a certain individual felt so cornered that he begged for those posts to be removed.
To sum up the discussion about changes: essentially, nothing is changing. The EU player base, which includes a large number of highly skilled players, will continue to be ignored, while NA will keep pushing their ideas forward. The real question is whether the game will recover to a point where updating it will even make sense.
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No one is denying that changes need to be implemented.
And you realise that I am British in Britain right? It's complete bullshit to make it sound like there is no EU representation.
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You realise both you and mace think a noob can make equal if not better changes to the game than a 10+ year vet who has been or is top tier at the game???
I didnt reply to his dribble cuz it frankly proved my entire point, and so have you.
Edit : if you do Think that, your opinion is worthless and you should step Down as a dev. Goes for all of you.
We dont Owe you a thank you, so dont mention entitlement as you have in regards to players giving feedback. Also, dont link me a youtube video who is unrelated to the matter at hand as a gotcha like mace did. Face the fire, accept you need people who might not be the nicest with their feedback to help you make the game good or stop trying. New players aren’t keeping mbii alive, all the vets are. Look at this fucking thread
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Bit hyperbolic. Playing well implies understanding what you're doing, no? And in our case, your claim is outlandish, because you have a number of 15 year vets who have been through so many different patches that their perspectives ought to matter. Many of us have seen what works and what doesn't, first hand, and sometimes several times as idiocy has been repeated. One example would be us saying for over 8 years that mechanics should be clear, visible and readable, and Tempest in his infinite wisdom deciding to craft the most convoluted, contrived and unreadable ACM system ever.
I'd love to know who Tempest consulted, because since 2017, he's held these mysterious private testing sessions and never once invited me or any other actually good duelist (at least from EU). He has only ever listened to feedback that he agrees with, and stonewalled gaslighted or misunderstood most negative feedback because he thought he knew better than 15 year veterans who have dueled at the top since before 2009.
Even when the vast majority of players told him for over 4 years that return on PB was needed, he did not listen. In fact, I think it's so bad that probably every single duelist worth a pot of piss would stand in opposition to his views, yet he went with his own flawed design decision. He's actually a good example to disprove your earlier hypothesis about there being zero relationship between playing well and designing well. The man could not play well, and obviously could not design well, and he made his flaws worse by arrogantly ignoring feedback from top duelists with very clear objections and good reasons behind their objections.
I think the attitudinal volte face can be attributed to his isolationism, as not many people were exposed prior to release. I don't think he deserves all the hate, of course, but neither does he deserve any accolades for serving up the steaming pile of shit that is R20.
This neatly illustrates the lack of understanding that you guys have, if I may be so bold. Sure, you can play reasonably well without knowing everything, but you won't be anything but average, or slightly above average. Those who you claim to be accidentally good, are not actually very good compared to really good players and you not getting this very fact is part of the problem.
For many years now, I've divided duelists into four categories. Low-tier (new), mid-tier (knows what they're doing, average), high-tier (good at the mechanics and knows some stuff and finally, top-tier.
This top tier category is what we're concerned with. You cannot be a top-tier without intricately understanding the mechanics and the interplay of the game systems, because to push higher, you need to work on increasingly small things in your gameplay, to take small advantages that add up, rather than simply relying on being good at shooting, or PBing or whatever. Any top-tier will eat a high-tier mechanics god for breakfast, whether in open or duel mode, precisely because of their advanced understanding of the game and NOT because of better mechanics, because there's an upper limit to how far mechanical skill will carry you in a game like MBII.
I'm not sure I'm articulating it very well, but your above statement is a big issue and one of the traps that caused tempest to develop whatever the hell this current abomination is.
Feedback from people who are good, actually good, at the game, should be prioritized over those who are not. It's not just about skill and execution of mechanics. Any MBII player should know that you can't just win by aiming well or PBing well, you need to have more substance than that, with a deeper and wider skill-set and an understanding of how rounds and fights play out. I mean, I've never had the best aim, or been the very best at PBing, but I absolutely slaughter people in open mode (rip) and duels despite someone else maybe being mechanically better than me at a certain skill, because the game is much more than just these obvious mechanics. There's a lot of game-sense and experience required too.
Your quote accurately describes where tempest went wrong: he ignored feedback from good duelists in favour of those who shared his vision (whoever these mysterious internal testers of his patch were). Valuing bad players with a yes man attitude over players with more than a decade of experience is precisely why R20 happened.
To end with, I'd like to say that I don't feel particularly entitled having my feedback ignored by tempest for 8 years.
May I be so bold as to turn it around and say that the claim of being arrogant and entitled, and 'knowing better', applies to the devs as well. They have enjoyed an incredibly loyal and obsessed playerbase for a very long time, willing to test, willing to write long feedback posts, but in the face of abject neglect, this is now crumbling.
I do not think it's productive to throw stones when living in such a glass house.
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You see and understand that changes are needed, yet you dismiss suggestions and ultimately do things your own way anyway...
I think you misunderstood my point—I wasn’t referring to the state of the developers themselves (and yes, I know you’re from Britain, just as Unguided is from Hungary and Eksha from Russia). What I meant is the lack of effective feedback collection, which in Europe is truly fragmented and underwhelming.
How many communities are you actively part of, and how closely do you follow gameplay issues raised by players? Specifically, I’m talking about European hubs. Compare this to someone like Frenzy, who effectively engages with games like pugs or screams, and is genuinely part of his regional community. The same goes for NPC, who now manages feedback collection and is clearly in tune with his player base.
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So, my brother put it much nicer than i did. But we pretty much Said the same thing. Listening to assmunchers, not good people cuz of ego, ignoring good people cuz of ego, and the entitlement being even bigger from the devs. Rofl, its almost like all good players have had the same experience
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it's pretty funny how you penalize and punish perfectly rational and constructive posts as a defense mechanism because you're in the wrong
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We just lack vision… wonder what dev Said that to a vet after asking them for their feedback
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I don't have the energy to respond to everything here, but I do want to clear up a few things from my perspective.
First and foremost, the changes to the saber system should have always been done incrementally, not in a giant patch. Tempest never wanted his work to be held back as long as it did, but it was. When the green light was finally made, it was years and years later and his motivation for the game had dwindled and so too his trust in the process due to being held back so much. He has gone on leave from a mix of things (perhaps permanently) because of a new job and a busy life where he has very little time to actually play the game much less work on it. It makes sense that he would step down, but I will say his timing sucks because of all the problems he left that for the most part only he knows as to why they exist or where the direct fix would be. It will be quite some time until someone is onboarded enough to fix them in a timely matter as far as I can tell.
As far as gameplay for Open goes, I think it was a mistake to rush the force power changes out alongside the saber stuff, but Tempest wanted to do all saber and force changes in one fell sweep as he had ideas for this work many years ago. It makes some sense to do it all at once, but it also makes sense not to release if the changes are not met positively by the community. The same can be said for other implements, the biggest one probably being the changes to inputs as well as armor. It required a lot of tweaks after release to get all of these back to a 'right' place. I only feel like we are reaching that point now, and I'm very burnt out from it all.
That leads me to the next point, and this one points the finger back at the people...
The Open Beta was a failure of the community, on all sides, both in how the devs hosted it and how the players would fail to populate it.
Not enough people came and tested or played changes, especially in the later stages. Even when all of the reports by people were logged, listed and fixed, we still had tons more that we were not aware of due to the lower attendance at the Open Beta. I can't tell you how frustrating it was to spend what felt like my whole summer working on getting fixes out from reports only for the release to come out even buggier than some of the previous Open Betas. Just, sad. Very sad. And for it to now take us 7 patches to get things back to a more 'normal' state (not even speaking on the saber stuff as that was never my focus) is also quite sad. It's even slower now without the help of more Sr. Developers who have left. Our team is at very small numbers currently. The best way to make things work for the future is to show up to Open Betas and give good actionable feedback as to what you think is wrong or how it should be changed. Saying something is shit may feel good to type, but lacks any constructive merit most of the time for us to use to help improve it.
As far as changes go and the whole smear campaign about them being catered to NA or comp specifically, I don't feel that is a fair statement, but I can understand why people think that way. The truth of that matter is that the people who showed up the most to test and be a part of the ongoing developments were people who were slowly trusted more as they had the most relevant information. And there absolutely were EU private or open testers who had a lot of their feedback implemented, just as there was a lot of duelers or legends players who also got their feedback implemented. Hell, I made a whole section in the Discord just for feedback and haven't stopped reading through that swamp since I started both topics. Tempest did something similar with duel, even having an alpha version which recieved tons of feedback and was generally open to all, in a similar way to how Open Beta was. We write down notes when there are bugs or proposed things, but most of the time it's just people bitching with no idea of how it should be changed, not giving precise feedback.
I was also very transparent about this process and what was changing for the most part and those who were in beta test even had access to adding items to that list so we could be sure nothing was missed. And even still, things got missed, but that was mostly because there were so many things to fix that the bigger issues had to be prioritized first. TLDR I have mostly been on damage control with stuff for over 6 months now. @_@
There's also a pretty big difference between 'not listening' to people and not having the energy to make the change with what little time you have in your day for a passion project. For what it's worth, I think most big issues people have brought up have been put on lists, but have not been done due to a serious lack of coder energy. If we want to see more changes happening quicker, we need more people helping out to make those changes happen.
I have more thoughts on all of this but I'll leave it at that for now.
First and foremost, the changes to the saber system should have always been done incrementally, not in a giant patch. Tempest never wanted his work to be held back as long as it did, but it was. When the green light was finally made, it was years and years later and his motivation for the game had dwindled and so too his trust in the process due to being held back so much. He has gone on leave from a mix of things (perhaps permanently) because of a new job and a busy life where he has very little time to actually play the game much less work on it. It makes sense that he would step down, but I will say his timing sucks because of all the problems he left that for the most part only he knows as to why they exist or where the direct fix would be. It will be quite some time until someone is onboarded enough to fix them in a timely matter as far as I can tell.
As far as gameplay for Open goes, I think it was a mistake to rush the force power changes out alongside the saber stuff, but Tempest wanted to do all saber and force changes in one fell sweep as he had ideas for this work many years ago. It makes some sense to do it all at once, but it also makes sense not to release if the changes are not met positively by the community. The same can be said for other implements, the biggest one probably being the changes to inputs as well as armor. It required a lot of tweaks after release to get all of these back to a 'right' place. I only feel like we are reaching that point now, and I'm very burnt out from it all.
That leads me to the next point, and this one points the finger back at the people...
The Open Beta was a failure of the community, on all sides, both in how the devs hosted it and how the players would fail to populate it.
Not enough people came and tested or played changes, especially in the later stages. Even when all of the reports by people were logged, listed and fixed, we still had tons more that we were not aware of due to the lower attendance at the Open Beta. I can't tell you how frustrating it was to spend what felt like my whole summer working on getting fixes out from reports only for the release to come out even buggier than some of the previous Open Betas. Just, sad. Very sad. And for it to now take us 7 patches to get things back to a more 'normal' state (not even speaking on the saber stuff as that was never my focus) is also quite sad. It's even slower now without the help of more Sr. Developers who have left. Our team is at very small numbers currently. The best way to make things work for the future is to show up to Open Betas and give good actionable feedback as to what you think is wrong or how it should be changed. Saying something is shit may feel good to type, but lacks any constructive merit most of the time for us to use to help improve it.
As far as changes go and the whole smear campaign about them being catered to NA or comp specifically, I don't feel that is a fair statement, but I can understand why people think that way. The truth of that matter is that the people who showed up the most to test and be a part of the ongoing developments were people who were slowly trusted more as they had the most relevant information. And there absolutely were EU private or open testers who had a lot of their feedback implemented, just as there was a lot of duelers or legends players who also got their feedback implemented. Hell, I made a whole section in the Discord just for feedback and haven't stopped reading through that swamp since I started both topics. Tempest did something similar with duel, even having an alpha version which recieved tons of feedback and was generally open to all, in a similar way to how Open Beta was. We write down notes when there are bugs or proposed things, but most of the time it's just people bitching with no idea of how it should be changed, not giving precise feedback.
I was also very transparent about this process and what was changing for the most part and those who were in beta test even had access to adding items to that list so we could be sure nothing was missed. And even still, things got missed, but that was mostly because there were so many things to fix that the bigger issues had to be prioritized first. TLDR I have mostly been on damage control with stuff for over 6 months now. @_@
There's also a pretty big difference between 'not listening' to people and not having the energy to make the change with what little time you have in your day for a passion project. For what it's worth, I think most big issues people have brought up have been put on lists, but have not been done due to a serious lack of coder energy. If we want to see more changes happening quicker, we need more people helping out to make those changes happen.
I have more thoughts on all of this but I'll leave it at that for now.
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I'd also like to say that the ideas for the future involve bringing new abilities and weapons which will bring back the spice that people feel has been lost gradually over time. We are now set in a way which allows for this like never before. The sad part is that with all that backend work done, there is hardly anyone around to now really make those implements happen in a timely manner. But, those new fun things will come. Soon ™
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Neither of us said that. Neither is us believe that to be the case. You can be very knowledgeable and well informed without having a good k/d ratio.
And you could know every mechanic inside and out, have hung around for 20 years and still only be an average skill player. The knowledge is important not the level of success in the game.
What does this even mean? We can't do sll suggestions and have to make decisions or else nothing would change. I get it, you would make differnt choices, but it's not ego to not pick yours.
Who are the good people and who are the ass munchers? It is ego to think that you personally have all the solutions and that only your recipe can save mb2. Maybe stop cutting your hair and grow a beard to complete the look? I am before you all now answering this because *I* feel I owe you all. I am here to talk suggestions and improvement to explain how we got somethings wrong and to explain how we are going to try and make things better. I thank the people who want to engage respectively on those terms, to everyone else I understand your anger.