I came, I saw, I nerfed Restuss!!

So, tonights 'extra' event on TC was the nuking of Restuss and it certainly went with a bang.

A huge rebel force stormed and took the town, the Imperials tactically withdrew to wait on reinforcements.  The insurgents sent out snatch squads to pick off any stray troopers and the forces of the Empire made several probing attacks back into town but, in the end, the town blew and it now lies in ruins...

What was your take on it then?

I wasn't there for the event but I just logged in to see Restuss. The game has now gone to where I feared it would... It's nothing more than a Counter-Strike game with Star Wars skins... people dying quickly and respawning over and over and over

and over

and over

and...

Oh Crap!!!! Was at a wedding reception!!  I really wanted to see that

@ Swiftwind: Trust me, you were better off at the reception ;)   The event last night was massively accelerated (ie, Helios manually triggering stuff to progress thru the 4 different phases in the space of 2 hours) and, while it was 'fun' it wasn't a fair reflection of what it'll be like to be running the missions, building the stockpiles, gathering resources, etc and actually doing it 'for real' on the Live servers.

@Yivvits:  My honest impressions? Welllll.... you're right, it's a very different game from SW:G now. It is SWBattlefront with a bit of an MMO twist.  Is that good or bad, well, that's a whole other debate.

Was it fun. Yes.
Was it immersive. Well... yeah, kinda...
Was it consistent/coherent withteh SW:G world vision? Hell no.
Would I log in and play PvP Round the Houses every night? I'd rather practise dentistry on myself with rusty tools.

The problems: 

No real tools for group/squad/battlefield management.
The simple lack of a planet chat makes if blimmin' difficult to coordinate getting people together, working out strategy, deveoping tactics, etc.  OK OK so an organised player would set up a channel and macro in basic squad commands, but c'mon...

Clone Zerging and Clone Camping.
With the battlefield being less than 1km across this becomes a major issue.
Last night the Rebels stormed the 400m from Rebel Base to the town, flushed through the city and out the other side in a matter of minutes.  There was some resistance from the outnumbered Imperials but through attrition and sheer weight of numbers they were forced back.
A large part of the Rebel force continued out of town in pursuit of the retreating Imperials and, after 400m or so, were within the Imperial Sanctuary. This resulted in SF Rebels being right outside the area the Imperials were cloning into and much complaint about clone camping.  (Simple answer, don't declare PvP in the sanctuary zone, heal up, get out of Dodge and THEN go overt)

NPC AI
It's crap.
Long lines of ~24 Imp or Rebel troops, marching in single column is the least 'starwarsy' troop movement I have ever seen. Hell, the meatwads in SWBF2 are smarter with their AI turned right down.
They didn't act like soldiers, they didn't even behave like the ordinary faction NPCs. They were just there as cannon fodder. (This refers to the troops spawning in town. Those out inthe free fire zones did seem to have different AI but were all silver elite, lol)

"Help us Restuss Event, You're our only hope..."
If this is the devs last ditch rally to try and save the game (and let's face it, they're not exactly shouting about MORE stuff acomin') then I hate to say it, but we really are in a bad way.

Folk are going to be well disappointed when they see how little is actually in this 'expansion that isn't an expansion'.

There is some lvl35 combat stuff (kill 40 troops).
There is some crafting. (make blasters and other items)
There is some space mining (remember, that generates NO xp and is in the Kessel zone so, hah, newbs, stay home)

There's a LOT of collecting of 'commendations' to be done (earned by doing the above, over and over and over again) and you DO get rewards when you hand in the commendations.  But we're talking 800 commendations for one piece of armour (at 40 faction kills per piece, go do the math).

The phrase MASSIVE TIME SINK and 'thin experience' spring to mind.

And that's sad, because it WAS fun.... kinda.


Right, back to d/l YaMB and reading "Legacy of the Force" :)

Oh, you know this will be in the Current!!!!

Yea and im standing in the middle of the ruins yelling * I TOLD YOU NOT TO MAKE ME ANGRY NOW LOOK AT WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!!!*

almagill:

Would I log in and play PvP Round the Houses every night? I'd rather practise dentistry on myself with rusty tools.

well consider that pvpers have nothing to do for 7 months now. people are fighting sporadicly without a cause in bestine or theed at the moment
you *** about the AI, remember the best intelligence comes from human players (well... most of the time). devs are calling for player's to make this battle interesting, I don't see the problem with that, the restuss thing as always been described as a pvp thing

restuss quest beginings go live today, i might be naive but i'm looking forward for it

I better hurry up with this week's current so i can get along with next week's.

Ima watch these guys if im not to late. Sounds like it will be quite a show!!!

selarips:

well consider that pvpers have nothing to do for 7 months now. people are fighting sporadicly without a cause in bestine or theed at the moment

/going into complete and utter rant mode

Should I be sorry for the pvp'ers? Should I sign a partition that we should focus more resources to give the pvp'ers more content? Should I just go out and blow my head off?

/end rant somewhat

Come on. I'm entertainer and have basically been one since aug 2003. Don't give me any **** about who hasn't had something to do for how long. Quite a few classes - but entertainers in special - have needed love and been promised some for so long that 7 months isn't even worth mentioning.

OK OK, I know, I'm biased toward the entertainer but all I see, is combat oriented classes are getting their moneys worth and still whining about it. The rest of us? Well, make your own or give up.

/Rebi

selarips:

almagill:

Would I log in and play PvP Round the Houses every night? I'd rather practise dentistry on myself with rusty tools.

well consider that pvpers have nothing to do for 7 months now. people are fighting sporadicly without a cause in bestine or theed at the moment

Pardon me while I laugh quietly to myself about that.  There's little to no point in the Restuss PvP either, apart from clambering into another hamster wheel grind to get commendations to wear an anachronistic armour that has, well, not wonderful stats. True, it's slightly more purpose than endless zerging the cloner in Theedstine, but, not much.

And PvPers had to make their own fun?  So what!  The PvPers have been able to PvP all the way through the past 7 months. Prior to NGE the majority of changes that came into the game were pandering, not to 'jedi' but to PvPers. Buff power increases, decreases, armour restrictions, removal of armour restrictions, weapon upgrades, degrades, regrades, TEFs, nerfing of TEF, armour drops as loot, weapon drops as loot. The whole lot, geared towards the PvPers as primary target market.  And you know what?   As soon as one attempt at improving things went in, there were the same 'uber' players screaming out for more, over and again.

True, some were jedi, some were BH, before NGE some were medic/swords/BH combos or whatever looked best in compo and wielding a baton this week.  And, until the current crop of devs became so PvP fixated that they started making really crass statements like "we're not making a world game any more, we're moving to a game game" and then rolled back on their heels as the crafters, entertainers and PvE players blasted them for once again totally ignoring the impact that their changes to the game proPvP would have on their gameplay, it was fine to concentrate on beefing things up for the PvPers because they needed to buy weapons, armour, buffs, get heals, get mind damage fixed.

Then what happened? "somebody" decided that, hey, the PvPers had a point, it wasn't 'fun' to have to search the whole server looking for uber armour, or wait for (omg the pain) 5 minutes to get a doc buff and another few minutes watching the local buffbot jiggle but it would be more 'funner' to be able to just log in, kill, loot, rinse wash and repeat. 

They looked at EQ2 and WoW and saw that they were getting PvP revamps. They looked at SW:Battlegrounds and saw that it had a huge customer base and they thought "If we can make combat fast to learn and easy to get into that'll be us next year...."

And the rest is, sadly not quite, history yet.

you bitch about the AI, remember the best intelligence comes from human players (well... most of the time). devs are calling for player's to make this battle interesting, I don't see the problem with that, the restuss thing as always been described as a pvp thing

The problem I had with the NPC AI, and I did detail it in my comments, was that the troops are just spawned and will wander blindly from point a to point b in a long strung out column.  They do not act in any way like troops landing in a war zone, they do not attempt to seek cover or avoid fire, they are literally just badly animated shop dummies, rolling across town on a predetermined route.

Is that bitching? Hell, yeah!  Because it's lazy programming. If you are adding an element to a battlefield to make thing smore believable, more challenging then take the extra time and make them challenging and believable.

Since the events went Live the AI does seem to have been tweaked (one of the risks of commenting on things on Test) and they now behave slightly better, responding to enemy faction more agressively etc. Later waves of troops are better organised but that is more to do with placement of individual routemarkers for the troops guarding the sensor arrays etc.  The dropship troops still behave like meat in a can.

The whole Restuss 'thing' was advertised as a PvP battlefield with PvE elements. But saying that the devs expect the players to 'make the battle interesting' is avoiding the simple fact that the NPCs are poorly set up.

In fact, I'm going to bitch some more.

WALK THROUGH WALLS????  What in the name of Yoda's underwear is that about?  There are some walls you can walk through and some walls you can't. They look the same, they are on the same 'pallet' of bombed out structure.  Then you find a gap between two walls that's way wider than shoulder width and... you can't get through.  That's shoddy, really shoddy. 

Why? Because it is inconsistent. If players have some magical ability to walk through walls (/boggle) then they should be going thru them all. Why is it happening? Well, somebody forgot to tick the 'collidable object' toggle when they dropped the asset into the database. Basic.

restuss quest beginings go live today, i might be naive but i'm looking forward for it

Believe it or not, despite the negativity in my original post, I really, and I mean REALLY wanted Restuss to be a major success. Something that had people in *other* games saying "Oh man, you  have got to go give this a try, it really rocks..."  Why? To make the devs feel good? Heck no!  Because if they managed to pull it off then WE would be the ones saying "Hey, see, we told you this could be good and look, it IS!"

At best, it's very, very subpar. I'd not even say it's 'average'. Note, I'm not saying it's bad, bad, bad, but, like the Curates Egg, it's good in parts.  And it's the good parts that make you realise the bad parts really stink.

The new contestable faction bases are ideal for *casual* pvp. Get a group up, find one that's badly defended, hump it. Yay! A little bit of KotH for an hour or so.  Some useful no trade loot items and, well, a bit of a score for your team in the GCW.

For the enxt month they're likely to be the domain of jedi/BH pvp as the professions that haven't had their expertise pass are going to be quite significantly disadvantaged, but hey, the bulk of PvPers are in that demographic so it makes business and planning sense to deal with them first. 

Of course, it'd be nice if they'd wait until everyone else has had their pass before kicking off with the complaints and demands and whinges again,but the chances of that happening? LOLZ

I really have to say that they should have done the Pvp like in EQ2 after all they are from the same company they could be consistant with thier games. have perhaps 3 servers that were all Pvp and al the "uber" whores could go on there and smash the living hell out of each other. All you do is walk outside and get splatered by a bunch of people 8 lvls higher than you and get looted. SO let them have that if they fell so uncared about and they don't get to have any fun.

almagill:

WALK THROUGH WALLS????  What in the name of Yoda's underwear is that about?  There are some walls you can walk through and some walls you can't.

Ugh yes, this is just stupid really. Pre-CU there never seemed to be a problem with some of these things. It wasn't as common to aggro npc's two floors below you, nor did they walk through walls. I know there were problems, it just didn't seem like as many.

almagill:

The new contestable faction bases are ideal for *casual* pvp. Get a group up, find one that's badly defended, hump it. Yay! A little bit of KotH for an hour or so.  Some useful no trade loot items and, well, a bit of a score for your team in the GCW.

Here's what really pisses me off about these bases - no class interaction required. They seem to think requiring interaction between classes is teh devil. "Oh God no! We could never require that more than one class be in the group in order to take down a base... or do anything at all for that matter!"

It's frustrating beyond belief that they still are trying to push this WoW/EQ questing POS on a game that is on the edge of collapse.