Unvanquished's potential is being wasted

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lamefun
Tyrant
Posts: 371
Joined: Mon Jun 04, 2012 10:29 am UTC

Unvanquished's potential is being wasted

Post by lamefun »

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Despite Unvanquished being out for more than 3 years, the servers are still empty most of the time.

I think the reason is simple and obvious but is being ignored and denied: the game doesn't scale down. I mean, seriously, the game is obviously meant to be played with balanced teams with at least 5 players on either side, but how do you expect the game to gain a player base necessary for such games to happen regularly if the game breaks down at low player counts and especially at 1vs1?

You can't defend at all while you're building, you can't not build and simply use the default base because default bases are usually incomplete and can't survive a single attack. Aliens have to waste morph points to go back to the builder form and have to re-build their base when advanced grangers become available.

You can't take risks, especially when playing against better players, since you have to finish kills to get credits. And if you, for example, revert to a dretch while the enemy has a Lucifer cannon... have "fun" watching your base die... or have "fun" trying to get past the turrets and waiting for free morph points.

I mean, with such a small player base you have no choice whom to play against, so the game should still be fun even with unbalanced teams or unbalanced 1vs1 and not instantly devolve into "You rifle, I tyrant". The weaker side should at least be able to build a base.

And 2vs1. There's always a point where a game is 2vs1. It should be fair, not unfair.

Also, the first launch experience, where you have to unpack the right nested archive the right way for the game to work. Like here. Or here. Or here. I mean, I know that you're working on a proper solution, but still, there is an easy temporary workaround that would solve a lot of the first time user's problems: don't pack the binary directories into ZIPs, make Daemon search the parent directory for 'pkg', and, even better, add simple launchers, Unvanquished.exe and Unvanquished-Linux, to the archive root. The launchers should determine whether the machine is 32-bit or 64-bit and launch the correct Daemon executable. I mean, ZIPs within ZIPs don't even reduce the download size that much.

When connecting to a server, the game doesn't check if the server runs the correct version of the game. Instead of telling the player to update the game, it just crashes most of the time.

And the bots. Sometimes the bots can be very effective, but most of the time they simply waste credits and morph points. They get stuck everywhere and don't have any failsafe (eg. bots could start moving randomly if they can't find a path to an enemy and respawn if 20 seconds of random movement don't help it). They don't build so you can't play a normal game against bots.

There's nothing to do while waiting for other players. I mean the training server was the best thing that happened to Unvanquished, but even it wasn't fun: no balancing, bots got stuck deep inside their bases all the time so you couldn't earn credits/morph points.

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SantaClaws
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Joined: Mon Sep 14, 2015 11:25 pm UTC

Re: Unvanquished's potential is being wasted

Post by SantaClaws »

I do agree with one point. Not being able to build and defend yourself really blows. Even in a 5v5 game, I don't understand why it has to be that way.

In NS2, every player can build structures on marine side - they do not downgrade in firepower to do so. In dirty bomb you have engineer types, they generally downgrade a little bit in firepower but they still hold their own. They have interesting traps as well (mines, sticky bombs, sentries) to compensate.

The builder-human in this game is completely defenseless except for the horrible blaster gun, which btw is a monster pain in the ass to switch to. (How the hell do I quick bind to that?)

I don't need to have the lucifer gun as engineer, I'd be content with the smg or sg.

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Ishq
Project Head
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Joined: Tue Mar 06, 2012 8:32 pm UTC

Re: Unvanquished's potential is being wasted

Post by Ishq »

Noted. There are no doubt things we need to do to make the game more fun for all sizes. The installer will be out for beta testing tomorrow. Please test it out.

As for switching to blaster, we don't have a UI for it yet, but:

Code: Select all

/bind <key> itemtoggle blaster
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poVoq
Mantis
Posts: 67
Joined: Tue Oct 09, 2012 5:01 pm UTC

Re: Unvanquished's potential is being wasted

Post by poVoq »

I think it might help if there was a COOP mode, where you can play together to defend a base against waves of computer controlled aliens. Kind of like Killing-floor or Defense Alliance.

Maybe by default if should be in this game-mode so that it is somewhat fun to play even with one player only, and when there are 6 players or more a vote screen pops up and lets players decide if they want to switch to PvP mode?

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Ishq
Project Head
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Joined: Tue Mar 06, 2012 8:32 pm UTC

Re: Unvanquished's potential is being wasted

Post by Ishq »

Potentially. An ambush mode could work well.

Enbaldur
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Joined: Tue Jan 05, 2016 12:02 am UTC

Re: Unvanquished's potential is being wasted

Post by Enbaldur »

When connecting to a server, the game doesn't check if the server runs the correct version of the game. Instead of telling the player to update the game, it just crashes most of the time.

Yes, and while this was reported at least since V0.29 many times it is still the
same. EVERY TIME when a new version is out and you don't have upgraded to
the latest version it crashes or gets messed up in the most inconsistent way you
might imagine.

EVERY TIME, yes -EVERY- TIME!

Today again with the really useful error message:
"Error during error handling: IPC: Unexpected end of message"
OK, I know, I f*** myself.

So if you cannot simply use the binaries and the package maintainer of your
favorit distro just didn't update the package right in time (even when it's an
active developer and trys really hard to keep pace) you either have to mess
around with the packager yourself, compile it from some latest git-repo or
you simply DON'T PLAY that night.

Are there some statistics to show that with about every new
release/month, several users are just too pissed to re-install/update
and just leave unvanquished once and forever?

Yes, it's alpha and we are testing only... but I definitely agree
with the topic of this thread.

Regards,
Enbaldur, pissed again.

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Ishq
Project Head
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Joined: Tue Mar 06, 2012 8:32 pm UTC

Re: Unvanquished's potential is being wasted

Post by Ishq »

Our updater should keep stuff up to date. We may be slow, but we will get around to all of these issues.

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