Well.. here we go again. (issues with the game in general)

[iuli24]

Gosh where do I start?

Over the past few months.. ~ 1 year by now, the game has been getting worse and worse.

I will be getting straight to the important topic of this thread here:

First Topic:

My main complaint (not my most recent one) is blueprint drops in general in the game. Before some of you might start saying "oh well but the easter event just ended and of course drop rates are significantly worse now" I will say that the issue related to blueprint drops has been going on for months.. many months and its somewhat related to the easter event but not in the way you might think.

Firstly, I noticed worse bosses drops beginning around the time the last year's easter event ended. Before that event we used to get ~5+ bps in 3-4 man squad on bosses which was fine. {to clarify we on solaria call bosses.... well.. the true bosses.. [Giza Amarna and Soris] } We never got much worse than that ever. Right after the easter event passed.. (of course the drops were worse but my issue with that at the time was that the drop rates were ever so slightly worse than before the event.. so at that moment I let that pass. But then.. weeks passed.. weeks became months.. and even before the easter event that just passed.. we had absolutely horrendous drops. What do I mean by horrendous drops? Well imagine that even in full squad we got as low as... 0 bps. No joke 0 bps and the worst part is that it wasn't a 1 time thing it was quite often... quite often we saw as low as 0 - 2 bps per boss... in full sq.. sometimes even with some of the members having bp trackers. Though this wasn't the worst of it because this epic drop of 0 bps was happening like maybe 5-15% of all the bosses we killed. while the 3-5 bps was happening like 40% of the time.. while the rest were more bps.
Well.. current year's easter event just passed and guess what? Is it better? is it the same even? No, its worse, of course its worse. Drops on average don't pass 4 bps per boss even with bp trackers and we keep seeing the same pattern of 0-4 bps per boss over and over again. Only now its worse because we never see more than 5 bps at all.

Secondly, as far as I'm concerned Sirius bosses are supposed to have a guaranteed drop. What guaranteed drop? The data that drops from them when no blueprints drop at all? That's something.

Thirdly, blueprint trackers are broken or don't work as advertised. People here have 75% trackers or higher and the boss drop is barely better if not the same. Again, as far as I'm concerned its supposed to increase the drops he would get.. not the whole squad, that I understand, but it making no difference at all? What is that supposed to mean?

And lastly, revert whatever changes you have done to Sirius boss drop rates. And what I mean by that:
- guaranteed drop 100% of the time again;
- 1-3 bps per squad member like it used to be (even if its 40% 1 bp 30% 2 bp 20% 3 bp per member or some other ratio that's not 33 33 33);
- correct how blueprint trackers work so that they aren't useless.

Keep in mind that I did complain in this first part mostly about Sirius boss drops because they are the biggest time waster ever, also don't ever assume that players will buy trackers to fix this especially in the state the game is at the moment. People will give up, won't do bosses, leave and quite possibly not even bother to report these issues.
Extra info you guys should really consider: correct the drop rate ratios of blueprints type on bosses. What do I mean by this is.. we don't want to see 3 parts of blueprint x, 2 parts of y and 0 of z. Change it to be as even as possible.. ex: 2 x 2 y 2 z. The reason behind this? No one wants to do a boss that drops 2 of the 3 techs only to have to do it again to see the 3rd drop, this is a waste of time and many people here just do 1 of each and if it happens to not drop the 3rd drop.. or sometimes 2nd and 3rd because the drops are so broken right now.. then they won't bother and they will just jump.

To end this topic, what are you guys trying to do really? Make us buy more stuff? I really don't get it. Why would you change these silently in the background.. hoping that no one will notice.. (spoiler alert.. people do notice) and then have everyone complain / leave the game / maaaybe have the odd sheep that might buy extra stuff?

Second Topic:

People are complaining you guys are nerfing ships, silently in the background of course, and the worst part is that I used to not believe that.
But then.. I thought.. why do I die easier and faster with the Thunderbird everywhere? (Siri and TC) Why does my Myst get wrecked so easily in mus? (I do know the Myst has been nerfed many times before but still). And apparently.. but not surprisingly that the Chromian Corundum was nerfed in some ways too (I heard about it.. I don't have the ship to verify that but I'm sure other people here might confirm that).

I also heard "well they are nerfing these ships because they are the most used ones in the game and the devs want players to use other ships too, not just 2 of them", but consider this.. Thunderbird is one of the fastest grinding ships in the game so people of course will mainly use it to farm with it.. aka most of the time in this game. About Chromian.. well.. consider this.. its the best anti stun ship in the game and guess what you find mostly in Siri and TC? Stuns everywhere.
You get stunned? Protector... DS is following you still? Magnet Trap.. Protector went down? Well you have speed act and will will come back quick again.
This is not the only reason why people are using mostly these 2 ships in the game.. but the answer to making people use other ships IS NOT nerfing them into oblivion c: . As some sort of a joke.. I said to someone "well.. they should make the other ships good and people will use those more often too ".

Third Topic:

Talking about stuns.. They are not balanced well. They are broken.. too powerful in some cases and last too long + they are buggy.
They are broken because the only way to really counter them is protector.. and nothing else. You might say "but you have aggrobeacons, turrets, traps etc" yes but do they work as well as the protector? No. Because even if you trap a ds head... it starts going after the player even if the trap is closer and stuns the player and not the trap.
They are too powerful (when it comes to npc stunning players not pvp) because you can barely move in most cases + it lasts so long that you might just as well alt f4 because you're dead anyway. I get why some aspects of the npc stun are as they are.. (to make the game more challenging and etc) but is it that the only way to achieve that? Because all is see is stuns.. wherever you go you see stuns and TC4 doesn't seem to have less stuns.. but more stuns. So expect people to use the CC even more.
They are buggy because the stun animation shows up twice or more sometimes. The animation bugging is not the true issue. Full stun effect reappearing again for 0.5 s and slowing down your afterburner is the real BIG issue. It definitely doesn't work properly and should be fixed. The stun effect should be applied only when the npc stuns, NOT start again for 0.5 s when the stun effect deactivates.

Fourth Topic:

The afterburner does not seem to work properly all the way.
What do I mean by this is that it has 2 (I would call them) major issues.

First issue:
The ship glitching and moving back and forth 2-3 times before finally going forward. I mean.. it was funny at first.. but when you try to run from something and the ship does that.. you start to see your blood pressure increase rapidly .
To be more exact.. this seems to happen often especially when you press W key and afterburner icon in the hotbar (with the mouse) at the same time or close to at the same time. It's very annoying and it caused me many pods.. enough to be mentioned here.

Second issue:
The afterburner does not transition the ship / player to the non afterburner flying speed properly.
Imagine driving a car in 3rd hear.. and you want to slow down and you have to downshift (aka ab running out), instead of simply downshifting into the 2nd gear.. your first do it all the way to 1st.. slow down to a crawl for a little bit.. only to very quickly speed up to upshift to 2nd gear where your should've been in the first place.
That's exactly what happens with the afterburner in this game. You ab... your ab runs out.. the ship clearly almost stalls and then speeds up again to the non ab speed. Why? Was the ship holding inertia and the ab "effect" would last longer than it should've otherwise? I presume this is how you guys fixed, the more or less, issue?
I mean.. at least try to find another way because this is clearly not how it should work.
And how can you notice this very quickly? Look at the minimap player arrow while your ab is running out and you will see the arrow turn 180 for 0.1 s and then go forward again. (but you will feel the breaks before you see that happen) Its almost like the ship apples the breaks for you so the ab doesn't push you further.
Again. I would love to see a smooth transition from ab speed to normal speed without the "pedal to the metal" break u guys applied to fix that.

Fifth Topic:

Quantum leap being broken as well.

When leaping to a target (while on the move and especially when using afterburner), the ship tends to fly backwards first for a bit and then fly forwards as it was supposed to do. It does this upwards of 60% of the time so its definitely not a 1 time scenario. I presume this major issue is related to the afterburner bug I saw.
The way I fix it at least.. is that I spam clicks on the map ahead to stop it from flying backwards.. but what it actually achieves is keeping it in place (because it reaaally wants to fly backwards) and only then it starts moving again.

Sixth Topic:

Item cooldowns bugging seemingly for no reason.
Especially the speed act bugs (looks like its running but with the greyed background like its on cooldown while also looking like its running). Very strange bug.. very annoying bug and probably a measure to combat possible hacks that might try to make tech cooldowns faster than they should be.
As long as it doesn't affect the average pirate galaxy player.. anti hack measures are completely fine. But when they start to glitch and prevent a player from using 1 of these techs in the order they are most likely to glitch: Speed Actuator, Afterburner, Repair Droid. I do consider it to be a major game breaking bug that should be addressed ASAP.

This happens especially after relanding on a planet because there is most likely a desync between what the player sees in the hotbar and what the server actually has for that player's hotbar thus giving the player the possibility of turning on a tech that the server thinks the player shouldn't be able to turn on. As a result the item glitches and the player must wait for the whole cooldown to finish / alt f4 out of the game and boot it back up.

Seventh Topic:

This one might or might not be related to the 6th topic above but is a game breaking bug too.
The issue is with the blasters. Sometimes they glitch in a similar way to how the techs in the 6th topic do but because the blaster cd is so fast that.. it shoots 1-3 blasters.. "shoots another" and then actually shoots again. This cycle repeats endlessly having the player "miss" blasters every so often (aka not shoot at all even though the hotbar shows that you "shoot"). As much as half of them don't actually shoot when that bug happens. The fix for us at least for now? Alt f4 and reboot the game.

Eight Topic:

Broken not at all well balanced engineer ships aggro.
If you as the player dare to use onyx marble or any other similar engineer and you do as much as 1 repair target in Siri to a player in your squad... the boss immediately goes after the engineer player. Repair field is a death sentece because you will get so much aggro that even if you run for a while.. when you come back the boss magically has aggro on you again.
Rebalance this because its very clearly broken and TC engineer isn't an option anymore because of the incredible aggro you get.

Ninth Topic:

Game crashes, instability and graphical glitches.
The game seemingly crashes for no reason from time to time, literally closing itself to desktop and sometimes crashing so hard that even trying to "end task" in task manager takes a while before it fully closes.
Although rare.. it should happen as little as possible. All it takes is 1 hard crash during a very hard and long mission in TC and that player is gone.
The instability is related to a previous forum thread of mine related to the 512 mb ram limit this game has. I also talked with a gm soon after I posted that.. and he also thinks that 64 bit java for this game wouldn't be such a bad idea really. It would get rid of all the ram issues this game has. The instability the game has now is just acting up sometimes. Sometimes it uses more ram otherwise it doesn't which is why I suspect it stutters + drops fps so much sometimes and other times it runs smooth as butter.
The graphical glitches we keep seeing are but definitely not just:
-scaling issues of various techs (protectors being huge sometimes, other times very small);
-invisible techs (protector, repair target repair field, repair field turret field etc not being able to be seen by the player);
-relogging close to a wall (because sometimes the game crashes in spots like that) results in a fully black screen, almost like the camera is stuck in the wall or something and the only way to fix it is yet another restart.


That's pretty much all the issues I can remember for now. If I forgot to add something I will add here later.
I hope all of these issues get resolved soon because they have been annoying all of us for quite some time and it doesn't seem to get any better as time goes on.

 

[iuli24]

** forgot to add these:
Bp trackers might not work because 75% multiplied by 0 bps from bosses =... 0 bps .

Some units stun like ninjas.. thus me calling this behaviour "ninja stun". Literally horus, ds heads etc will stun you even if you ab fast past them. Stun DS will get you in TC most of the time this way. You think you got past it with ab and then boom... ninja stun. Very unfair and not well balanced as I said before.

 

[Vesperion]

Oh boy. A post with tons of text where i can provide my 2-cents? Call me in for that. I mainly talk here from my experience of the Askone server.

First Topic:

In terms of drops it is not unknown that even the "Big Boys" (like i call them) can drop 0 BPs no matter if only in a Squad of 2 or a full Squad of 5 players. I may or may not be right with this but my personal guess about this droprates is that in the end each drop is (since the Squad/Drop change some years ago) now personalized. This also is the reason of "Multidrops" that happen when you play in a squad as in the moment of the kill eventually 2-3 Players hit the drop RNG and so a single unit drops multiple BPs/Cryos at the same time in compare to Solo play

So if RNGesus decides in a man of 5 that no player will have a drop then it will not give a drop at all.

The issue i have with the BP trackers is the following:
They do not clearly indicate if a BP drop is now "just a regular one" or if it was "a boosted one". What i mean is that everytime a BP drops the player with the booster will get the "jingle" and so let him belive "My BP Tracker droped that BP" while in reality it may have been just a regular BP drop or the drop from another player in the squad.

The only way to "really solve this" would be to give Giza, Soris and Amarna guranteed drop for at least 1 BP/player in squad while having the aditional chance to get extra BP drops and SSG is able to change drop values as certain Event Missions (Like RDX, Easter, etc.) do show.

Second Topic:

This is more or less related to the usability of certain ships and Chrom is currently one of the "best ships" what is mainly due of the factor that it has speed, prot and OS what makes them so "perfect" for many players. You have an Item that can protect you from stuns and has a quick CD vs a Shield that can not protect you from stuns and has a long CD. You have an insane burst damage item with an relative quick CD and in combo with Speed an near infinite amount of Prot and quick OS with armor and repair capacity.

The MT on the other hand was nerved quite a lot into the ground with the HP reduction of 50% what was imo the right decision as it was way to OP in most situations of the game.

Third Topic:

Well a reason for this is another change in the aggro mechanic that seem to have happened somewhere inbetween after the MT change. From my memory the "old MT" was the "x-times better Aggrobeacon" as it has an AoE effect that hinders the speed of enemies and so redirects the aggro to the MT where in compare the Aggrobeacon... well is just there but seems to do nothing.

Now it is so that the MT does "catch" the aggro first but this aggro will switch to the user of the MT after some seconds and depends also how close the user is to the unit he used it on. In case of a DS you will mostly see that it first targets the MT but after 1-2 shots will switch back to the user if he is in the close range. Do you in compare place the MT in front and then fly a bit away from it the aggro will stay on the MT until it is down and most of the time the MT will catch "all of the DS love" (Stun, OS, Thermo, etc.). So this is more playing with the range and in some relation to the aggro mechanic.

It also does depend if the DS was head by an attack before the MT was placed as damage has an higher weight as the MT effect.

Fourth Topic:

Well it is known but not exactly known what causes it as it can happen all the time and can screw you up. Why i mostly do before i trigger the AB is shortly press A or D while holding W to "confirm my Camera direction of flight" as it seem most of the time to happen that an "backwardsflight" occurs if you have looked back with your camera with the mouse and then turn it forward again. But as it occurs without any real indicator what input may cause it it is only my personal guess that this is what causes it to happen.

Fifth Topic:

This is also just a personal guess as i experience it more then enough as main Slate Player in TC (For Squad reasons ) that the ship faces to the direction of the unit you have leaped to and so uses this direction as "forward" while you face in another direction with your camera. As the Leap will ultimately stop your ship for this brief moment after the leap did happen it uses the new faced direction as "new forward" resulting in the weird behaviour of movement that can be anything then with the camera direction you face to.

Sixth Topic:

I think you refer to the (At Askone known as) "White Item" Bug/Glitch where the item does start and then turns in the white background but nothing happens. Sadly also here it is absolutely unknown what causes this as it can happen with any item and without any indicator of the why. I have seen this kind on ships with Speed and without Speed along with on the Speed itself. Aside from that it can happen to basically every item in the game.

It´s one of the most concerning things that can happen at any point and screw you up if it is an important item like the RD as it will not trigger and so may put you into a pod that could have been averted. Again a personal guess here is that a "minimalistic hicup" between the Client and the Server may have happened where you activate the item but the command did not reach the server and so the item is no stuck into this "limbo" between activated and not activated but runs his normal "active time cycle" through but without any effect taking place.

Seventh Topic:

This is what i like to call the "Game didn´t properly log me in". I notice this kind of Bug most of the time when i started the game and then for some reason "eats every 2nd or 3rd shot" before the blaster shots again. The only solution i could find to this kind of occurance is simply reloging the game entirely.

Eight Topic:

Well the good old "Effort system overhaul" that happened a lot of years ago and also did turn the whole Aggrosystem upside down and making Taunts, Beacons and Bombs the "most useless Aggroitems in the game". I remember the old times when the "holy trinity" between Tank, Storm, Engi/Stunner was still a thing and the Tank could hold the aggro over th whole fight while Storms dealt the damage and the Engies and Stunners supported the ships.

Well this was all thrown out of the window with the introduction of the "Effort system" that should benefit Engi Players to get "more XP when flying in a Squad". For some reason this change also brought the change into the Aggro mechanics making Supportive ships aggro magnets that can override an Taunt or Beacon in seconds and even outperform any damage dealing ships in no time so that they more have the role to try and kill the stuff asap before the engi gets taken down,

Ninth Topic:

Here i must say is my experience limited as it happens very rarely for me that the game crashes without any reason for me. So either i´m just very lucky or something else is the case.

 

[iuli24]

It's very nice to see that these issues are well known. Then why are they still in the game? I get that the devs are busy with TC4 and what not.. but don't you think that the game breaking / very frustrating bugs should be out of the game by now?

Also i totally forgot about something. The devs should really consider adding some sort of page somewhere with:
-known game issues: etc etc etc;
-currently working on: etc etc etc;
-issues fixed: etc etc etc.

Similar stuff to how other game devs keep their player base up to speed to what they are doing at that moment. Because pg devs don't have such things.. i may have very well reported / complained about some bug / issue that is very well known already by the player base and the devs. Them having such a list would considerably reduce the "spam" of forum threads and tickets that are about stuff already known by the devs.

 

[-BoH-]

It's very nice to see that these issues are well known. Then why are they still in the game? I get that the devs are busy with TC4 and what not.. but don't you think that the game breaking / very frustrating bugs should be out of the game by now?

Also i totally forgot about something. The devs should really consider adding some sort of page somewhere with:
-known game issues: etc etc etc;
-currently working on: etc etc etc;
-issues fixed: etc etc etc.

Similar stuff to how other game devs keep their player base up to speed to what they are doing at that moment. Because pg devs don't have such things.. i may have very well reported / complained about some bug / issue that is very well known already by the player base and the devs. Them having such a list would considerably reduce the "spam" of forum threads and tickets that are about stuff already known by the devs.

You gotta understand they're a small team so I very much doubt they would be as organised as other game developers. They've got loads of stuff on their hands so it's not going to be easy to do all these simultaneously.

 

[KingSub]

*hidding in a corner*