So many patches, yet many more bugs.

[Tasmann]

Alright.

It's not often I come and tell you developers anything wrong about your mod. However, the numerous amount of patches that I keep having to download without seeing any fixes for the actual bugs in the game has driven me beyond senile. I've finally had enough of the glitches and bugs that overall have the ability to ruin my gameplay, that I'm now writing to you to implore you to finally fix your bug-infested mod. Bear with me, this list is going to be hefty.

I. Saber combat

1. Overall, the saber combat is just glitchy and buggy looking. I've recently been getting better at the shitty dueling system that 1.4 as a whole is, and because of that I'm able to see much more clearly just how glitchy it is. It honestly makes me think that everyone is lagging at every single saber strike, because when sabers clash, they just kinda sit there for a split second, and then teleport to another location. This makes dueling very distracting and overall not fun. Please clean it up.
2. This one will probably be disregarded, but I don't care, I'm saying it anyway. The dueling system that came with 1.4 is absolute shit. I honestly don't understand why you guys EVER overhauled the system completely from 1.3, which had a beautifully diverse dueling system. In 1.3, I saw red users, blue users, yellow users, cyan users, purple users, dual users, and staff users all over the place, with there being a healthy diversity as a whole. Then, in 1.4, you completely nerfed red, making it completely and utterly useless, to the point where even a first day noob can drain all of your bp just by holding the block button before you kill him with red. Cyan, yellow, and staff are about the only styles worth using at this point, and all of the community has realized that. I never see red, blue, duals, nor purple anymore. None of it. I don't ever see any of it. Why is that? Because y'all stupidly nerfed everything except those styles, and then super buffed those same styles. Someone can just "turtle up", so to speak, and just hold block for days, and win no matter how good your combos are. I have developed some pretty good combos as of late, but they don't matter for shit because this version favors defensive playstyle more than aggressive playstyle, and that is a fucking huge disappointment and does not promote any sort of skill competition. It's literally just a spam fest to see who the best spammer is. Fucked up. Bring back 1.3 saber system. At least with that there was a wide variety of choices, and no one style was significantly overpowered compared to the other, and each one had a counter.
3. This version punishes aggressive saberists too much. It takes away so much bp just for doing a bunch of combos, despite whether or not they're good or bad. If you attack, you're getting punished, because we shouldn't be aggressive, we should be friendly!!! It's not a fucking jousting match developers, it's a lightsaber battle. Make it more fun, allow good combos to be rewarded rather than punished. Make it fun, and upbeat, because right now, the overly defensive emphasis is boring and dull to both play and watch.

II. Saber vs. Gunner Combat

1. Yeah so this is still a problem. The balance between gunner and saberist is appallingly in favor of the saberist, and the fact that 9 out of 10 times when I join a server each 15-man team has like 10 jedi/sith each is a testament to that. Hell, some games in open the entire team was saberist and I was the only gunner out of 10 people. People aren't dumb, developers, they know that the lack of balance is favored towards saberists. I am primarily a gunner, and honestly it's stressful to get on and the only servers with people are spamming the fuck out of glowsticks. I mean, do you even play the mod that you guys make? Take a fucking look and see just how many times jedi/sith are getting spammed.
2. Flinch is problematic, but not for saberists, rather for gunners. It's inconsistent as fuck. I've blasted saberists that have come really close to me before, and hit them, and they won't get flinched. Why? I don't fucking know, it's probably because of some shitty job of coding or some shit. I'm legitimately pissed about the flinch mechanic because it was nothing more than an excuse to give jedi/sith a damage reduction buff back when 1.4 was originally released. We're now on v1.4.8.1, and it's still a fucking problem. Flinch is still glitchy and inconsistent as fuck, yet the damage reduction of course will work for jedi/sith all the time. Now, when I kick down a jedi, and blast him on the ground, it's not enough, and they're able to get up and extendo saber me, because fuck the gunners. Also, jedi/sith can now effective tank rockets. I have rocketed a jedi/sith literally right in front of me, only to see that they DON'T FUCKING DIE, BUT I DO!!!! THAT is fucking bullshit, and there is no fucking reason a jedi/sith should be able to tank a rocket point blank. And before you even say it, no, they did not push the rocket.
3. Melee combat needs to honestly get a little buffed. It takes a massive amount of time to switch from blaster to melee, and so a gunner being charged by a noob jedi has no time to skillfully knock him down with a well-placed kick. Also, the flying kick special melee move is buggy as fuck. You have to be dead fucking centered on your target in order for it to work, and even then sometimes when you visually hit the opponent, your body just kinda in a choppy, glitchy fashion grazes right off of his side, and he's able to whack you from behind with a saber. I've gotten killed that way too many times to count, and it's fucking too much at this point. I shouldn't be getting killed by some newbie on his second day just because the developers don't want to fix a fucking issue.

III. Miscellaneous Items

1. The Mandalorian class getup time is way too fucking slow. I'm sorry, but Mandalorians are supposed to be a combat savvy race, warriors who struck fear even in the hearts of jedi. How the fuck can that be the case if a fucking turtle can get up faster than them? All it takes is one force push by some newbie jedi and they're dead. The jetpack's movement warmup is already slow enough that they don't need to be getting up so slowly. Give them bounty hunter get up or ARC trooper getup or something, but just don't make them so fucking slow. It's the worst.
2. Grenades are way too fucking bouncy. You can't even properly push them back or escape them from all the way on the other end of the map because of how bouncy they are, they're kinda dumb. Realistically, grenades never bounce that much.
3. Soldier getup is kinda an unnecessary nerfing. One push from 25 feet away and a jedi can get a soldier before he even gets up.
4. Get rid of the damage reduction for jedi/sith classes, there's absolutely no reason for them to have it, and does nothing but encourage noobs to spam those all the time, making for a rather unskilled game.
5. The new DOTF is even worse than the previous one. There's absolutely no fucking reason to remove the catwalk. The pit? Sure, there were a lot of time wasters there, but the catwalk was a legitimate tactic and was a great place to have melee battles and other battles. It was a crowd favorite. The catwalk needs to come back.
6. Blocking radius on staff and duals are really fucking gay, noobs have blocked my saber from behind they backs while doing one of those gay flurry katas triggered by crouching, attacking, and moving forward. Doesn't promote skill.
7. WITH ALL OF THESE FUCKING PATCHES, IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE THAT I EVEN HAVE TO FUCKING MENTION THIS STILL: FIX YOUR FUCKING CLASS BUGS WHEN JOINING A MATCH!!!! The fucking jedi/sith classes still bug out in various ways when you switch to those in open mode, and it's really getting stupid. Sometimes when you select jedi, when the next round begins, it switches you to sith with no points, and all of the sudden you have to scramble to get back on your team and get your setup. Another bug that happens is at the start of the new round after picking a jedi/sith class, you aren't able to bring up class configuration until you click the join tab again after spawning in, giving the message in red text: "Error: Invalid class selection...." until you finally go and fix it. Then, once it is fix, it gives you the fucking default build again, so you have to go change it. Also, there's still a bug where it just won't let you join in in a round. AND STILL YET, there is another bug YET AGAIN WITH THE JEDI/SITH CLASSES! Sometimes, when switching from gunner to sith/jedi, it won't even spawn you as that class, and will leave you at your previous class with skill points invested in all kinds of wonky things, to where I get whacky class builds such as in soldier, it'll give me a 1 life soldier with full armor and ammo, full e-11 and pistol, and 2 concussion grenades, even though I selection a sith with yellow and cyan. It's the stupidest thing and makes no sense. Again, we're on patch version 1.4.8.1, you'd think that by now y'all would have fucking fixed these problems which were happening all the way back in 1.3. For fucks sake...start fixing some actual bugs rather than just changing some small meaningless thing, and calling it a "patch."

Yes, this is an aggressive post, and no, I don't apologize for it. I'm honestly sick and tired of dealing with this bullshit that the developers often times seem to just glance over, and focus on stuff no one asked them to focus on. It's time address some real issues. I mean honestly, the whole thing with the class bugs not even being fixed after like 8 or 9 patches is just absolutely absurd. How could you possibly have not fixed this, let alone address it by now? Come on, devs, please work on these things.

Sincerely,

One pissed off client.



EDIT: This is something that a friend of mine, Reverse Flash, sent me as proof of the spam I indicated.

 

[MaceMadunusus]

We can't make a MB3 for legal reasons. A spiritual successor is in the works very slowly by a few of us (myself included) but its a slow process when we have other things to do and some of us (again myself as an example) are working on supporting both. So nothing coming any time soon (or guaranteed).

 

[Blazer]

I know this sounds like an ignorant question to ask but if the code is so broken and messy wouldn't you say it's time to make Movie battles 3? Start over with it and build a better foundation. I know nobody gets payed for it and I know it would be a long and hard process but I feel the end result would be worth it. Then as the years go by people can add and take away from it and have it grow. I am very grateful with what you guys have done and how much work you have put into this and I am glad to share this platform with all of you. I trust you guys to be able to work together and solve this problem so we can all go and have a really awesome time with the game.

I agree but if you spent all this time and money and resources to make mb2 what it is, why change it at its peak?

 

[yoinkboink]

I've been saying this shit for almost a year now, nothing is going to change

 

[Marek]

I agree but if you spent all this time and money and resources to make mb2 what it is, why change it at its peak?

Well because in the long run if you keep adding to something like this when it's foundation is a mess you will continue to have major problems for years to come. However if MB3 can not be made for legal reasons that is a shame and I wish you guys well on the spiritual successor

 

[DaloLorn]

We can't make a MB3 for legal reasons.

This is not necessarily true. While it's obvious that you're talking about moving from JKA to a different engine, it's not at all clear what kind of solution Marek has in mind. Rebuilding the mod's codebase from the ground up could also qualify as 'making MB3' while retaining any JKA-related legality MB2 might currently have.

Of course, that still runs into the non-trivial logistical issue of "who will do something that big"...

 

[Defiant]

This is not necessarily true. While it's obvious that you're talking about moving from JKA to a different engine, it's not at all clear what kind of solution Marek has in mind. Rebuilding the mod's codebase from the ground up could also qualify as 'making MB3' while retaining any JKA-related legality MB2 might currently have.

And if you're gonna do that you might as well do it bit by bit, using the existing known good code whilst at the same time being a playable game. That's pretty much the direction in which my thoughts lie at the moment. The code base is messy and not streamlined, but it's also not bad in the sense that broadly speaking at its core it works.

 

[Richard Nixon]

Well because in the long run if you keep adding to something like this when it's foundation is a mess you will continue to have major problems for years to come. However if MB3 can not be made for legal reasons that is a shame and I wish you guys well on the spiritual successor

MB2 has been around for more than a decade now and the player base is peaking to almost the highest it's ever been, I think the game will be just fine. If it didn't collapse when the only active server the whole day was AOD DOTF, it won't die anytime soon

 

[Blazer]

MB2 has been around for more than a decade now and the player base is peaking to almost the highest it's ever been, I think the game will be just fine. If it didn't collapse when the only active server the whole day was AOD DOTF, it won't die anytime soon

Exactly what I'm trying to say. A switch to MB3 would be disastrous. It would split the whole playerbase and start the whole "MB2 IS BETTER THAN MB3" bullcrap.

 

[Tempest]

Oh boy another one of these.

Most have already covered gun related stuff but I'd like to add that I made a large push (maybe 2? weeks ago) to actually sit down and examine a lot of the aspects of gameplay (Ben mentioned a few). It's felt like it's one of those "yeah we all think this needs to be done and we'll get right on that" things. No more! We've been getting good baselines for public discussion and I'm already confident that the community is going to be happier about the state of things (20 FP drain on secnades reeee).

I saw no DEFINITIVE STATEMENT that said that NONE of the changes except those listed for the beta were implemented.

None of the previous open beta stuff got moved in or is accurate by any measure in regards to the current system. Most of the bugs (in the current system) are side effects of wide-sweeping (most prominently being the block animation that gets played every time you're hit outside of a parry; this is also what has ruined Red for the most part) changes that weren't super easily foreseeable but that have been pretty much all cleaned up for the next (and hopefully last or second to last) batch of saber balancing. Side note, I have been doing small tests with everything that's come together and everyone has agreed that it's a vast improvement over the current build in pretty much every way (clunkiness/inputs, skill involvement, variety in regards to playstyle, etc).

Fine, if your devs have spent so much time on these bugs, and with it being a volunteer project, then bring other volunteers in that would know how to do some of these things and fix these bugs better than your current devs can.

Yes it's very easy to fix the multiple obscure POSSIBLE causes of SEPARATE/MULTIPLE class bugs with snaps of a finger. Identifying the cause of bugs is generally the most difficult part. When it isn't, it's because the extent of things affected (as Defiant mentioned) is either extremely large or we're not sure if we can actually do anything at the time without breaking other things. I'm sure server owners would love us spitting out hotfixes for new bugs that pop up as results of trying to fast-fix whatever comes up on the spot.

The thing I would like you to keep in mind with MB2 is when we say spaghetti code we don't mean just regular spaghetti code, we mean spaghetti code that has largely been written by inexperienced developers.

On this note, the reason why the new saber stuff hasn't come out is because at least 70% of the time I've spent working on it has been cleaning up messy code (mostly collision stuff) so it's clear that nothing is being done to fix any bugs. No point trying to rebalance how the styles interact with each other when most of the backend stuff is broken/not working properly -> delays in getting stuff done/released.

 

[President Bossk]

While I feel flinch was good for normal style and faster, it has destroyed the usefulness of red and purple. I think something needs to be done so it's actually possible to hit a gunner with purple or red. Also, what would these changes you propose include tempest?

 

[Blazer]

While I feel flinch was good for normal style and faster, it has destroyed the usefulness of red and purple. I think something needs to be done so it's actually possible to hit a gunner with purple or red. Also, what would these changes you propose include tempest?

I agree with this. I also just feel like red needs to be rewarding. Even against things like wookies, by the time i swung one red, I could slash 3 times with yellow. But I don't think there's anything to fix that.

What I have in mind is to allow red to take ONE more blaster shot and be able to deflect while swinging, so red users can swing and be shot by a proj or a pistol and be able to immediatly deflect it with a 1.3x fp drain. That would most likely fix things.