ravenshining wrote:Clearly we misunderstood each-other. Whereas you seem to think we entered into some sort of obligatory contractual agreement, I just saw us bouncing ideas around with a vague notion that compilers would be better than timers.
Well perhaps you should’ve made it clearer that you weren’t actually paying the slightest bit of attention to my wishes for the fucking thing then. I actually explicitly said earlier in this exact thread that the next revision of the level would probably contain a compiler ambush
on the second catwalk, and you didn’t think it would be relevant to correct my mistaken impression, instead springing the surprise on me without warning.
As long as that's the case, neither will I. You know already that I am open to compromise and negotiation, open yourself likewise and we will find a way through this impasse.
You
haven’t compromised on this level in any meaningful sense. You keep inserting shit that I’ve already flat-out told you I hate, and then getting offended when I tell you I hate it. There’s no mystery here. I’ve told you what I’m open to considering on this level. Thus far, you haven’t yet submitted a version that adheres to it. I don’t know why the mere requirement of not forcing players into that pit until they have 3x shields is so heinously offensive to you, but you’re certainly behaving as though it’s something that’s utterly beneath your consideration. It is, however, the only solution that I will accept – and it
is a compromise on my part because I really would prefer
no ambush at all and the pit to be completely optional (or at worst, a result of sloppy gameplay).
That's not what I perceive about their opinions. One or both of us may have some confirmation bias.
Pfhorrest, a few posts above:
If I find something obnoxiously hard on account of playing with keyboard, I'll just end up changing that myself to not be so hard in the quickest easiest way I see possible, so best to plan for that not to happen.
…
in general if any players give me feedback that some part of some level was annoyingly hard just to get through, I've usually taken that as a bug report and aimed to fix it. If someone tells me that there should be an extra oxygen charger here or a higher-level health charger there, I generally favor just doing as requested. So if anyone working on Eternal thinks there should be more health/O2/whatever available somewhere on a level, please everyone else just let them add that.
So maybe read what he says a bit closer? Because he’s really not agreeing with you about this. At all. He’s pretty strongly disagreeing with you, in fact. More diplomatically than I am, but regardless, it’s pretty plain that he thinks that if this many people think a segment is too difficult, he’s probably going to nerf it himself.
And here’s Dr Sumner from a couple of pages ago:
I agree with Aaron that you need 3x shields to go through that room and gauntlet.
Again, he does not agree with you on this.
That may or may not be, but if it is it's drowned out by how every time we fight it's about you wanting to make something easier. I don't recall having fought with you over the reverse.
That’s
not what you fucking said, though. Do you not see why I find this infuriating? “We’ve never fought about a level being too easy”. OK, fine. But that’s
not what you said.
I would say that I have been dismissive, but only as a reaction to your vehemence. I am perfectly willing to work with you when you are being reasonable. We will get nowhere without mutual respect for each other's desires.
I’ve let a lot of annoying shit go that I don’t care about enough to fight about, even in the last post or two. I’m not willing to let
this particular bit go, because it
utterly fucking ruins the level for me. It turns it from a really fun, well balanced, long level, to a
horrible, intolerably hard, interminable level, and there’s probably
nothing worse in a game than an awful, hard, long level. This is, in fact, exactly why everyone hated “Deep into the Grotto” in 1.1. It was an awful, hard, long level (well, long until you figured out the shortcut, at least – which no one actually did until 2018, AFAIK). This is going to get comparisons to “Deep into the Grotto” if released in its current form, and
not in a good way. It may actually come off worse, because unlike “Deep into the Grotto”, there’s no shortcut – you
have to slog through the whole thing.
What kind words you may have had and your past apologies are currently being drowned out in the sea of your continued belligerence. For my part, I am uncertain what I need to apologise for, as I would find it morally objectionable to reward you for your current behaviour in any way.
A large part of my belligerence has in turn been in response to your repeated mischaracterisation of my arguments and behaviour, your apparent unwillingness to admit to the
slightest bit of fault, and your own unwillingness to back down on
this exact segment of this exact level. I have outlined a few things that have made me very upset, both here and in earlier posts, including one in which I explained why I blew up so badly in the first “Unwired” argument and apologised for letting things get that far. I wouldn’t have expected an apology for any of that right away either, but I can’t recall ever getting one even after things calmed down.
But for the record, a few other grievances: You came across, whether intentionally or not, as dismissive of a long amount of frustrating work I put into the level; you ignored a question that could’ve been answered quite simply, even if that answer was just “I’ll have to look when I don’t have finals”, while arguing at length on other points; you essentially have omitted mitigating factors from numerous accounts of our disagreements, such as the aforementioned 1x recharger in “Unwired”. I could go on, but I don’t feel an exhaustive list is either called for or appropriate here; I simply intend to indicate that my grievances are not simply founded on thin air.
I certainly never promised anything, so I don't know where you get the idea that I don't keep to my word when I haven't given it.
Perhaps you should’ve been a bit clearer that you weren’t actually going to adhere directly to the ideas that we’d set out in our discussion, because I’d come out 100% with the impression that you wouldn’t have set out any ambush on the first catwalk, let alone one that was
actually much stronger than the ambush on the second catwalk.
So you're refusing to even consider any new ideas? That'll get us far.
See, this. This is the fucking martyrdom complex I was fucking talking about. No I’m not “refusing to even consider any new ideas”. In fact, I explicitly already
was considering a new idea when I said I’d be OK with a Compiler ambush on the
second catwalk. I’m refusing to consider
this idea, because I already tried the level when the difficulty was at 20/10, and dropping it down to 18/10 doesn’t actually solve the fucking problem.
The biggest problem is probably getting ambushed by so many fucking Compilers at the twelve-minute point in the level that you may well get pinned down and be unable even to move. Compilers, as I’ve said several times, do 1/3 health bar’s worth of damage per hit. That makes it ridiculous to use
six of them in an area where you can’t manoeuvre more than 0.5 WU and keep your footing. Bungie only used that many Compilers in any one area in a handful of levels – “Eat It, Vid Boi” and “Hang Brain” are the main two that come to mind, and both of those give you a lot of room to move around, something that is distinctly
not the case in the catwalk room.
Three or four Compilers, tops, when you have 3x shields, might be appropriate. Maybe a couple more teleport in, even, if you have the misfortune to fall into the pit – then you’ll at least be able to manoeuvre around their projectiles. Subjecting players to an attack from
six of them in the 1.2.1b3 revision and then forcing them to perform that climb on what will assuredly be fewer than 2x shields (since the player just got at least 1/3 shields knocked off of them) is distinctly
not acceptable, and I find it impossible to take your further suggestions for the level at all seriously after you actually subjected me to that nonsense, Trooper oversight or no Trooper oversight.
What.
You keep going on and on about how there are too many enemies in that room, how the fight is too intense - and in 1.2.1-b3, it definitely was - but NOW you're telling me, now that I've nerfed that fight in a version you refuse to test, that it's the piddly little trapped fighters that are giving you trouble?
Those fighters - nigh-bottom-tier enemies - who you have to face one at a time because there's not enough room for the pair of them to both fire down the corridor at once, who fire the most easily-dodged missiles in the game, who are physically prevented from approaching you or gathering together - THEY are what's stopping you, after you've survived the chaotic bloodbath in the main room?
When I've cleared the room, and have a sliver of health left, I breathe a sigh of relief, because I know there's nothing standing between me and returning to the level but a bunch of restrained cannon fodder. I swish a bunch of staff bolts down the hall and they die, one by one, occasionally ducking behind the corner when they hurl bolts of their own in reply. Now there are also lookers hiding around the corner, but no big deal, I just hurl a grenade on the floor in front of them and they're gone before I even see them. It's one of the easiest stretches in the whole level.
I can see where Dr. Sumner might not like it, as he plays fist-only. One doesn't bring fists to a sniper duel. But you don't play that way, so what's stopping you? You don't even have to aim vertically or turn while fighting the fighters, so I don't know how keyboarding is going to slow you down.
That segment also has seven fucking Lookers. Y’know, enemies that literally blow up in your face if you’re not careful. Your description didn’t mention a single word about taking them out; indeed, it explicitly mentions that they’re still there. I do not find their presence to be advantageous to my survival.
But it’s not that segment by itself. It’s the whole catwalk room
plus the ascent back to the main part of the level. The Fighters and Lookers from that segment might get rid of 0.5x shields when I’m playing. The catwalk room often gets rid of 1.5x shields, and it wasn’t the Troopers who did most of the damage last time I attempted it; it was the Compilers. That, together, is 2x shields
on its own – and that’s after being knocked down by Compiler bolts that do 1/3 shields’ worth of damage
apiece. Which, again, is why having six Compilers attack the player at once in a location where the player can barely manoeuvre is asininely unbalanced, and why I outright refuse to condone subjecting a player with 2x shields to such an attack.
Anyway, if I were playing this shit in
someone else’s level, I would probably rage quit. I’m not going to put up with it in
Eternal and I doubt Pfhorrest will either.
You say that, but I'm having a hard time believing you. You also wanted 3x chargers on either side of the catwalks or some such nonsense.
Because even Dr Sumner agrees that that segment is unfair without 3x shields. I would be open to considering any solution that subjected the player to that segment at a point when they would have full 3x shields, and could very well tolerate it as long as it were fun. You have thus far been steadfastly refusing to consider any such option. You even
said Dr Sumner’s suggestion for requiring the player to run through that segment with 3x shields might be an acceptable compromise – and then completely ignored his statement about that segment requiring 3x shields in your future revisions.
I don't - in fact, those troopers don't even teleport in half the time. I go straight for the fighter in front of the 1x, and once that 1x is secure, I take on the troopers if they're there. The first two are easy since they are restrained and cannot pursue you, the third, also because you can sneak up on it and start firing before it can get a shot off. It's not until after the 2x that you're faced with an unrestrained trooper out in the open.
Again, I find them easy too, but I know they’re there. I tend to be gentle with players at the start of a level. There’s plenty of time to ramp up the difficulty later.
After you fought tooth and nail to have the orbs nerfed and their spawn rates nerfed, after a traumatising argument that Pfhorrest had to step into and broker an agreement for, now you have the nerve to complain that you nerfed them too much?!
I was perfectly fine with their spawn rate in 1.2.0 – they were enough of a nuisance to push the player forward without the level getting repetitive or tedious. The latest version
actually was repetitive. The central orb can attack the player at several key points in the level, so I kept taking it out, and it’d be back there thirty seconds later. I wasn’t taking it out because it was a serious threat, to be clear – I was taking it out because otherwise I’d have to keep running back to a recharger every minute or so. Of course, I wound up having to run back to rechargers roughly that often
anyway, because that wound up being roughly how often I was taking out the central orb – so either way, the player has to recharge way more often than is actually fun, because the enemies are an annoyance rather than a serious threat. It didn’t help that I didn’t fully remember the path through the level, and if someone who’d that level as much as I did found that segment to get a bit repetitive, imagine what someone who has never seen it before will think.
I’ll post a video after work today and it may explicate why I found the revision less fun more clearly than that description did. Most players won’t feel compelled to kill orbs as often as I do – I rarely go out of my way to kill them, but if one is in my path, it’s gonna die if I’ve got the shields left to deal with it – but anyone who does is liable to find this version not to be an improvement. But I do think randomising their positions more fully would make the current spawn rate a lot less annoying.
…or to put it in fewer words, the increased spawn rate of the orbs actually slowed down my progression through the level,
a lot, but I think randomising which positions they spawn to would speed it back up quite a bit.
The indignity aside, if you're able to predict where and when they'll spawn, you probably aren't running from them fast enough!
Only because I had to keep destroying the central orb to feel comfortable progressing!
Huh. Well, maybe you could consider it a therapeutic excercise in letting go of things that don't matter.
Weird. That's not at all what I ever see happening - usually they'll fly about for minutes if I let them, raining fire down at me. It's only if I duck around a corner for too long that they will teleport out, and even then, I had a hard time testing the level to verify that they will indeed teleport out. I do usually attack them right from the ground at the start, though, maybe by suggesting you walk right up to them I've misdirected you into a way of getting them to teleport more easily.
I had actually played the level before you’d made that suggestion; I don’t know if following your advice would lessen or increase the likelihood of their teleporting out. All I know is they would often teleport out when I was directly in their field of vision, even in many cases when I’d attacked them just a few seconds before. I did not save any such films because I would simply suicide at that point and retry.
ETA:
·
Second to Last of the Mohicans: it’s possible to take out the Juggernauts before they all get away, but it requires firing on all of them fairly consistently
·
Run, Coward, indicating that I probably spend far too long fighting with the orb in the centre, but to be fair, I’m still used to the old spawn rates. Regardless, it’s evident that some orb positions almost never get spawns and others get them often enough to be annoying (to me at least)
· Eat S’pht and Die is encoded but I won’t post a link until after work tonight probably. The only thing I can think of to change there is slowing down the flood rate so as not to fry unsuspecting network players.
i’ll give them better names and video descriptions later; i need a bit more sleep for now
