I know you have all the answers for how we should be maintaining the repository we own, for a game that we like and play far too many hours of to be good for us, that you obviously no longer play in anything resembling its current form. However, I think we will continue to ignore your advice and play the game we're enjoying. As I've said, despite our insistence on adding and improving features and game balance we want to add and improve, the community at large only seems to add more people who want to play what we're making. And, to date, for all I hear (mainly from you and two or three other people in this forum) about how we're ruining everything, nobody seems to want to step up to maintain the much vaunted playstyles of yore. There are several doors and they're all wide open.
I've already pointed this out to you once, and I will not hesitate to continue to do so if you don't get the point.
TONE DOWN THE GODDAMN PASSIVE-AGRESSIVE SHIT.
This shit is WHY there are people here who act so fucking disgruntled and you bringing it to this forum will make things WORSE.
There is no cause for it, you don't have to respond to FD or anyone else being negative, and doing so makes YOU into the target for their ire.
This is
exactly it.
This is not how I was posting when I started to notice things going odd. I was curious and asked questions. Kevin and his supporters were arrogant, passive-aggressive dickbags about everything.
There are changes that make me avoid playing builds more recent than ~6mo ago, but the primary reason I'm not willing to try to live with the current state of the game is because I know that every time I question any decision it's going to be met with a wall of passive-aggressive bullshit. I don't put up with that from people who are paying me to do things for them, much less people who are allegedly trying to convince me to play the current version of the game.
I'm sorry, but that is so incredibly false as to be completely hilarious. You clearly have no idea what recent cdda gameplay is like.
This is some deeply ironic Johnny-come-lately bullshit coming from you, since your apparent total lack of knowledge of the history of Cataclysm's development is the principle thing that keeps steering you wrong here. Most of us aren't pissed off about the nightly build now, we're pissed off about stupid decisions that happened months or years before you got involved, which were handled badly then and only grew worse over the years. This is a PR problem and you're handling it in pretty much the worse way possible. Cataclysm used to be one of the top names among contemporary roguelikes, but the name is in the mud now.
There were people who liked the Mad Max-y car-building side of the game. ... Those playstyles and more besides were both possible and viable. All of them have been to some degree curtailed so that they no longer work or are much more tedious and/or unreliable.
So as one of the developers who has been making a lot of player visible changes in the vehicle code, can I ask you to specify what about Mad Max car-building that has become so much more unreliable?
Since I started playing about 4 years ago in early 0.C, the vehicle system has changed in a couple of significant ways:
1. electric motors have been adjusted a couple of times, but the net result is there a wider range of electric motors, from very small to fairly large, and all of them get decent efficiency
2. gasoline and diesel engine sizes have standardized and made to support multiple fuels
3. steam engines and freaking huge gas turbines have been added
4. infinite fuel engines like the vortex engine from blazemod have been simplified and standardized
5. lifting and jacking requirements have been added, but satisfying them is fairly trivial
6. vehicle parts have descriptions of what they do when you install them, making it easier to figure out how to configure your vehicle
7. electrical power generation got reduced, but so did the energy costs of most things - you're no longer burning 250 battery charges/turn just to keep the stereo going.
8. rams have been added to vanilla, and most vehicle parts have gotten decent amounts of armor
9. the way that vehicle speed is calculated has changed substantially, but it's still easy to put together a deathmobile that will travel 15+ tiles/turn and most people don't like driving that fast. Vehicles don't have nominal top speeds of 3000 mph any more, but if you put a 6,000 HP gas turbine on your racing bike you will go crazy fast enough.
10. boats were mainlined, and vehicles can now be made amphibious and you have a variety of choices in your boat hulls
12. bike racks were added, so you can attach a little scout bike to your deathmobile, drive from town to town in your deathmobile, and have a little scout bike to scout inside a town. you can even put bike racks on your scout bike and attach small vehicles to it. (and your scout bike can be amphibious, if that's your thing)
12. there's a limited autopilot to cut down on the tedium of driving from point to point
13. we've got working prototypes of towline towing and helicopters
14. there's a definite plan for adding vehicles that span multiple z-levels themselves, and allowing ground vehicles to drive up and down ramps
15. various other convenience features (single button powered curtains for your entire vehicle, vehicle heaters, off-road tires, the mechanics profession that starts with a welder and welding goggles) have been added
From my perspective, going Mad Max in CDDA is easier and better than ever, and if for some reason you don't like some of the changes, modding even higher performance vehicles is really easy.
The only things that I really acknowledge as nerfs are:
1. foot pedals no longer produce the equivalent of 15 horse power, so some power generation strategies got busted
2. you can't fix everything with duct tape
Tastes very, but I'll trade those two drawbacks for all that other stuff.
First, thanks for bothering to respond like a civil human being.
Full disclosure: I was never much for the vehicle side of things to begin with (again, I don't have a dog in every fight, but I'm pissed off about how people who did were treated).
How lifting/jacking was handled is one of the main things. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but when that change was originally implemented it was
mandatory to build a separate vehicle to act as a crane base (when cranes were already rare to begin with) just to lift out storage batteries (which by their nature
should be easy to swap). That was one of many blatant attempts to keep players interested by adding unnecessary tedium (as most vehicle-building characters would lack 15 STR). Bear in mind, the change was from 3 STR to 15 STR. Which was wildly overtuned. And the "solution" to that was to let you mount the crane on the vehicle it was lifting.
So, for example, a sensible middle ground would have been to allow someone with, say, 10 STR to use a rope or chain as an even cruder lifting mechanism when within a certain range of a tree or structure (assuming for the sake of gameplay flow that there are carry handles or eyeholes on the battery and a convenient branch/bar/whatever on the adjacent terrain) to hoist the battery out. But instead it was SEND THE CHANGE, CRANE OR GTFO, FUCK YOU CAR PEOPLE.
Also worth noting that that wouldn't have even been a big deal if it had been implemented sensibly in the first place and people who criticized it hadn't been lambasted for it.
That's kinda the story of DDA in a nutshell: a couple bad decisions (like nerfing all gun accuracy into the dirt and leaving it that way for fucking ages instead of doing a proper rebalance or leaving the pre-DDA accuracy system in place until it was possible to do so) combined with a FUCK YOU MY GAME GO AWAY approach to PR and dissenting opinions that leaves people pissed off. Most of what's been done has been good, a few really dumb tedious things (dirty clothes) have been made optional, but bad blood the ongoing assholery of certain parts of the development team and fanboy crowd, and certain continued stupid hasty changes (like food freezing, jesus wept that was a mess) make people like me bounce off any time we try to reenter.
Frankly, I'd be happy to test the nightly build and suggest improvements if there weren't people like Kevin and Erk that I
know are going to treat me like shit any time I question anything or suggest doing something differently. Anyone who remembers the small shield blocking pull debacle knows why I don't trust them any farther than I can throw them, and I don't even have development time invested in the project.
Ninjutsu got pretty fucked in the recent rebalance though. That alone was enough that I have no interest in current builds, since it was my favorite MA. Don't even know why it got hit, since it was solidly second-tier and only viable if you were good enough to get going without a good starter MA anyways.
Author
Topic: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (Read 124629 times)