Open is finally dead.

[Rosh+]

The main reason I ceased playing the game after some 20 odd years since the first iteration of the mod came out for JK2 is because I saw the population decreasing, and thus many of the people I came to know and enjoy playing with would disappear from the game and eventually did in the ensuing years. I was no longer interested in playing because as it turns out, wiping the floor with white names isn't terribly fun unless you actually care about how good you are, and I had long since graduated from that school of thought long before the time I quit. People I enjoyed playing with were keeping me around, and once they had gone, I had no reason to stick around, especially with how malicious the developers were to outside opinion at the time; I don't know if that has changed.

You can name just about any reason you like that is relevant, and of course there are multiple contributors to this decline, but the blame doesn't lie solely at the feet of any one individual, though I could name a few key individuals whose actions certainly didn't help. Some left because they wanted to contribute, but couldn't due to developer malfeasance and unwillingness to listen to reason, or because they were otherwise made unable to contribute due to petty disagreements resulting in their often wrongful—and in some cases, justified, permanent removal. Others left because their enjoyment of the game dwindled with patches they did not enjoy. Many left just because they no longer had the time, much of it eaten up by life obligations and duties; It's just how it is. God knows I have my own as well.

Could things have been different? Could the game still be flourishing today? Possibly, but that no longer matters anymore. What's done is done, and furthermore, it is the nature of things to fade away; "Do not be sad because it's over; be happy that it happened in the first place.", etc. For a long time, I would check the server list every day hoping to see some influx of known players due to a new patch or update, and while it did happen on occasion, they never seemed to linger, and that became more and more true as more seemingly disappointing patches released.

It's time to move on.

 

[Fang]

Hex realising what we (im luna btw) have been doing for the last (forgotten years). Rollercoaster of 15+ years for me 🤣.
I'm all for new content and I guess we're slowly getting better with NPC direction from the atrocious R20, attunement and jedi vs gunner interactions but eh we aint got the manpower.

I mostly dont complain because theres not enough manpower and my soul has given up

 

[Rajive]

we grew up playing competitive shooters, the community reflected that back then. with the newer generation and ease of access into online games the balance of competitive and casual gamers has tipped. this is something that i have come to accept in the past few years

without getting to deep into it, if you compared the mentality of the australian mb2 community back in 2005 compared to the resurgence in 2018, we had a lot more players who didnt want to play open seriously and just wanted to play for fun, where as in 2005 we were "mostly" all competitive and in current times you get labeled among the casual gamers as a "try hard"

nostalgia is a hell of a drug though, id like nothing more to go back to the days of NA/AU pugs back in 04 - 06, remember when everyone hated on AOD for playing nothing but dotf 24/7? now i wish i could go back to that, we didnt know how good we had it, till its gone, adios

I think this is more nuanced than competitive/casual gamers.

MB2 always had this duality with players here for fun and players here for competitive play it's nothing new.

I have ton of screenshots from 2007 with players having fun drawing on wall, building a tower of player by jumping on each other, spaming the clone army/jedi army/wook army/sbd army/any class army or even spaming Porkins and rushing like morrons in Dotf's main while taunting and so on.

I'm sure you can find a lot of youtube videos from years ago showing how people playing this game loved all the silly moments it offered.

However there was a common ground between all of us, we were here because we liked the gameplay of the mod it was pleasant to play. Nowadays open is not pleasant to play anymore, that's just it.

 

[n00b]

Fuck man, this thread is the gift that keeps giving.

First devs refusing to admit their Way of thinking was stupid.

Now grown men are crying over video games. Long live moviebattles2 man

 

[Skops.]

I think this is more nuanced than competitive/casual gamers.

MB2 always had this duality with players here for fun and players here for competitive play it's nothing new.

I have ton of screenshots from 2007 with players having fun drawing on wall, building a tower of player by jumping on each other, spaming the clone army/jedi army/wook army/sbd army/any class army or even spaming Porkins and rushing like morrons in Dotf's main while taunting and so on.

I'm sure you can find a lot of youtube videos from years ago showing how people playing this game loved all the silly moments it offered.

However there was a common ground between all of us, we were here because we liked the gameplay of the mod it was pleasant to play. Nowadays open is not pleasant to play anymore, that's just it.

the fun of mb2 has always been a mix of more serious players and trolls making up the teams, too many of either ruins it.

Unless there are some consistently good changes with patches I feel the only other way mb2 will continue is with a revert to somewhere before R20

 

[MaceMadunusus]

There's a reason I left the team before R20 release, and I've already said enough in this thread, and my wishlist for the future thread: MaceMadunusus's Roadmap to the Future

The game feels a lot more muted. I had a lot of hype going in for Beskar and Whistling Birds for example. After playing with them, they had little-to-no punch. In sore need of buffs and general game juice. Attunement was also confusing. Sabering had no weight.

However, I will address this a bit. There was a bug with armor, that made it calculate out to be the same as health. It was bugged for 8 years, which resulted in a lot of game balance changes as a result of the armor being bugged (for example proj dmg nerf). When that was fixed, the armor value was brought up too high. I told the team once we give the current baseline (which is something azu told me from a long time ago of what armor values should be) a little bit of time to see where the status was, we could reduce it as it seemed like it increased the TTK too much. It still seems like even over a year later, that that reduction to the armor value has not happened to my knowledge. But I could have missed it.

That lack of reduction in armor value resulted in Beskar being targeted instead for balance nerfs. Almost everything I did for mando: Beskar, Whistling Bird, and EE3 have all been nerfed immediately after by the current team based on knee jerk reactions rather than trying to understand what was going on behind things or understand that they are supposed to have rebel team counter part class updates/releases (but they decided to throw in legends class points, and the jedi/sith rework last minute before the R20 release instead of what I planned). And completely forgetting me saying hey, you can actually reduce armor back down again if you need to in the process. Whistling bird was going to get even more nerfs internally still I stepped up and said, hey... you're making them completely useless instead of targeting the balance problem they have (too easy to single target spam).

Attunement was also meant to come with some additional force powers, like battle meditation, stasis, rage, and arguably some others to make a clear delineation between force whore builds, and normal saber vs saber/gunner builds with level 3 giving you the "ultra mode" versions of things. Like say lightning getting a "force storm" type mode. But that kinda thing seems like it got left unfinished, so attunement makes a lot less sense right now.

Also to address the "do people even play stuff" A lot of the balance changes made in recent years were made by people who constantly play as part of the NA scrim community on sandbox... so yeah, most of the people making those decisions do play.

However, this is an example of why I just went back to mapping now as a hobby and not being a large part of the team. Mando only got created because spag and I forced the issue, and people couldn't see the design tasks to completion (mando needed counterpart upgrades on reb team for example). And just, instantly try to bandaid nerf things without understanding the root causes of the complaints. So I kinda gave up at this point.

 

[The Unguided]

The main reason I ceased playing the game after some 20 odd years since the first iteration of the mod came out for JK2 is because I saw the population decreasing, and thus many of the people I came to know and enjoy playing with would disappear from the game and eventually did in the ensuing years. I was no longer interested in playing because as it turns out, wiping the floor with white names isn't terribly fun unless you actually care about how good you are, and I had long since graduated from that school of thought long before the time I quit. People I enjoyed playing with were keeping me around, and once they had gone, I had no reason to stick around, especially with how malicious the developers were to outside opinion at the time; I don't know if that has changed.

You can name just about any reason you like that is relevant, and of course there are multiple contributors to this decline, but the blame doesn't lie solely at the feet of any one individual, though I could name a few key individuals whose actions certainly didn't help. Some left because they wanted to contribute, but couldn't due to developer malfeasance and unwillingness to listen to reason, or because they were otherwise made unable to contribute due to petty disagreements resulting in their often wrongful—and in some cases, justified, permanent removal. Others left because their enjoyment of the game dwindled with patches they did not enjoy. Many left just because they no longer had the time, much of it eaten up by life obligations and duties; It's just how it is. God knows I have my own as well.

Could things have been different? Could the game still be flourishing today? Possibly, but that no longer matters anymore. What's done is done, and furthermore, it is the nature of things to fade away; "Do not be sad because it's over; be happy that it happened in the first place.", etc. For a long time, I would check the server list every day hoping to see some influx of known players due to a new patch or update, and while it did happen on occasion, they never seemed to linger, and that became more and more true as more seemingly disappointing patches released.

It's time to move on.

I can empathize with the sentiment that not being able to play with the friends you once played with can make you not to play anymore. It can never be the same without those people. When all my IRL friends stopped playing, when all the clan members I gathered stopped playing, after a while I stopped playing too. And yet, after getting through university, after having all kinds of life experiences, after playing many other games I came back - or did it come back to me?
Perhaps I figured I wasn't playing for my friends, I wasn't playing for clan members, I wasn't exclusively playing for others. I was playing for myself. Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps it's like being in a relationship believing the other person makes you happy and as you get older, you realize that happiness comes from you despite with whom you're together with. Silly parallel but you know, probably we're all just different.
Sure, I have new buddies to play with nowadays but it doesn't really matter who the teammate or the opponent is at the end of the day. What matters is I can still play on a full server (Open mode included) at midnight and have fun in a Star Wars themed environment after all those years. Doing so without obligation and have the freedom to do anything else besides.

 

[Noob]

View attachment 8616

Amazing bait

 

[Shady]

revert attunement
fix blue
bring back 1.4.8 saber system + saber style perks

 

[RenegadeGaming]

There's a reason I left the team before R20 release, and I've already said enough in this thread

 

[Teh Evil Cow]

Maybe not as sour of a take as Hex's here. Dev is an often thankless job and it's not easy.

Having tried Open and Legends today with an open mind. The biggest thing I'm missing is the punch. The game feels a lot more muted. I had a lot of hype going in for Beskar and Whistling Birds for example. After playing with them, they had little-to-no punch. In sore need of buffs and general game juice. Attunement was also confusing. Sabering had no weight.

I hope the game can get a bit more love in making it juicy and dynamic.

Maybe I'm just old. New music sounds like ass, movies are predictable and my donger no longer works as it used to. Perhaps it's the same with this game.

Matt: exactly, exactly!!

Good to see you write again. You summed it up - game feels overbalanced; muted, precisely. I had the same impression when I returned a few years ago.

Pleasantly surprised that a veteran reunion happened over the weekend. I was on FA for a lot of it - a pity we didn't meet.

P.s. I never quite recovered from losing my "Ben's Little Pony" role when the old MB2 forum was sabotaged.

 

[Teh Evil Cow]

Probably the most impressive frag video in MB2 history, but it couldn't be done today. Time to kill is so much higher on blasters that most frags just wouldn't be feasible, not to mention secondary frag nades and proj quickscoping...

 

[foggy]

Garglos used to make awesome vids

 

[DEAD]

With how tragic the game is now, we should look back at our favourite MBII videos. Some of my personal favourites are from Rat, he put lots of effort into making funny edits and montages.

 

[Gargos]

If we are going to be reminiscencing then I will post the video I am most proud of and a bit sad I wont be making these anymore. The journey of making each of these videos were truly some good times. I get em feels at the very end of this video when the mb2 logo fades into darkness

 

[Kokoro]

Why not just revert to pre 20?

 

[YamThePrussian]

Why not just remove legends mode?

 

[yle yatarn.]

Legends should if anything, serve as a game mode for new/amateur players to get used to the game. Since the average legends class is as imbalanced as the average MB2 player’s screen time per day. Open should be the main attraction.

 

[Vogolt]

Legends should if anything, serve as a game mode for new/amateur players to get used to the game. Since the average legends class is as imbalanced as the average MB2 player’s screen time per day. Open should be the main attraction.

I imagine a new player knowing nothing about the game would be overwhelmed the moment they select a team and are faced with a billion different characters, each with different abilities and some with different build options.

 

[yle yatarn.]

I imagine a new player knowing nothing about the game would be overwhelmed the moment they select a team and are faced with a billion different characters, each with different abilities and some with different build options.

Wow i guess that the tutorial button that was meant to first appear in front of the players screen when first playing MB2 was not displayed well. Even if the tutorial doesn't cover much you should at least understand a decent amount of the game.