Most in-depth Feedback
Okay... I REALLY hope the dev actually reads this. YES I filled out the form... but it was just surface level feedback.
Let me just say (before starting to rant a bit :D) that I love the game and the concept. The creativity, the action, the building...just great. And letting me watch other people die over and over to my genius? Priceless! I sometimes sit there for 20 minutes watching people play my maps.
But it is still very rough around the edges. So I will list all that the game does wrong (and hope that my 20 hours of playtime are enough to say that I really enjoy the game)
First lets start with the Tutorial and how everything works:
I already gave this feedback, but let me say it agian: I still have no idea what which ressource does, how to aquire it and how much of what action gives what. A name and a short descriptor is necessary. I need to know how something affects what. Is genmat the same as advisor-XP? I don't know. Is dropchance of loot random for every trap? I DON'T KNOW. What actions can I! DON'T! KNOW!!! All I do is build bases, raid bases and watch ppl die to my bases. But I feel like there is no way for me to be productive and farm a specific ressource.
Also how does baseraiding give you? Why do I bother? (rewards especially for the red stuff are SO LOW) And what about base building? How are my maps chosen? It seems like even though I have 4 active, I still only get as many players as I had when I only had 1. So should I just leave open the one with the highest kills? And why do I sometimes have 5 raids in an hour and then none in the following 10? And why does one map not get any players (3 raids so far) while the other one has nearly 40? Nothing is explained. I mean there isn't a wiki to look it up... but ingame it is also needed.
Second building (this is a biggie):
2.1 it lacks the ability to communicate with the player. Yes there is the arrows... but that is it. It shouldnt be too hard to name the map, give a short description and maybe have something like "Goal" "Death ahead" or something as a decal. I had to write "Hint" in huge blocks so ppl would understand that the minireplika is actually helping them.
2.2 Also: lose the dog/make it optional or only for easy maps. Luckily you can kill the dog without the player being able to stop it... but it is still annoying that I have to do that. The dog ruins a lot of creativity. Grapplinghookmaps? Impossible. Anything with gravity? Impossible. Jump&Run? Pick a path? And and and. The dog is THE BIGGEST thing holding back great mapdesigns. Also players only follow the dog without thinking. It leads to repetative gameplay and thinking. Not good for such a creative game.
2.2.1 The only requirement a map should have is that the creator has finished the map himself. Which leads me to another point:
2.2.2 Right now there are unfinishable maps. Long corridors of projectiles that even with deflects and shields are intraversable. This is easily fixed by making it a requirement to have finished the map (from the start) once before submitting.
2.3 Also activationtimers/Costs need to be rebalanced (maybe I give my ideas later if I still have time), worst of all is the armored giant. Place 15 of them in a corridor with "rage" and "armor" and no amount of granades will help you. If you have the cleaver, great! Add another hallway with loads of projectiles and everyone will die. No creativity needed.
2.4 Maybe make these graves more valuable to the mapper. Like every time someone "raids" it, he also gets a few ressources. Or you can only give as many accolades as you have graves+1.
2.5 Accolades should also give much better rewards than just prestige. I'd rather play a fun and artistic map 50+ times than one of these impossible "150 projectiles in a room, good luck dodging" bases that get 100s of kills. (One of my maps has nearly 1.5 accolades per raid (most are artistic, ingenious and fun), but only about 1:1 deaths; the other one has about 0.8 accolades (nearly all brutal) but 3-7 deaths per raid. This one gave me SO many ressources, why should I keep building other bases then?)
And yes 0.7 is a HUGE increase if you remember that the perfect score is 2.0 (since you can only give 2 accolades to a map).
2.6 Give new players a few more traps to start with. Sure darts and blades are fun, but building a whole base with them is just boring. How are you ever going to get accolades with only that? At LEAST 2 more should be given, I think.
2.7 Decoys would be greatly appreciated. Be it fake traps (with 1/5th the cost), sounds and so on.
2.8 why cant I share my map and also get kills/accolades for it? I want ppl to play my maps. Why is it one or the other? If I advertise it a lot... shouldnt I also get lots of players? Random players are so rare... let me get them myself. Instead of one or the other make "social play" a checkbox. So you can make it active or inactive (if social play is active, no overdrive possible so ppl don't troll)
3. Ranking. I don't care about my raider rank... I cant do anything with it and I don't get shown more difficult maps (I think, _ if so it was never explained) but what I do care about is mapranking. I can make a beautiful artistic brutal map that even beginners can finish and a mindbogglingly hard "normal" map (once it got a few prestigelevels) that even experts will struggle with. They should be ranked by deathrate/successrate and not mapsize. This is so obvious I can't believe this was even considered. Mapsize and difficulty are two different beasts.
The best thing would be to have "normal/hard/brutal" and subpoints of size, so you can decide how big you want the map to be that you play. A big normal map will be fun to play. A small brutal map will be hell on earth.
4.1 Equipment. We need more. Especially suits and weapons. I have loads of ideas for these, but I only want to give feedback, so I wont clog this thread with my ideas.
4.2 the grapplinghook should be upgradable too. This is just a personal preference... but since the game is made for creativity, building and platforming, give us a swinggrapplinghook. It can switch between rigid (like how it is right now) and physics based (it still pulls you in but you can swing with it, building up inertia). Opens up SO many new possibilities for mapdesigns and fighting harpies will finally be fun.
5.1 raiding: why are people allowed to build such crappy bases. 20 shooters on platforms... I only have 2-4 ammunition, how am I EVER going to get across there? Same with corridors with projectiles. I've played two maps already that were impossible to beat, because I didn't have the shield thingies (and maybe even then). It was a normal map. Also you shouldnt be able to place more than 5 of each guard per levelsize (5,10,15) and not more than... lets say 2 within a 5x5x5 box. These projectile deathrooms are not fun.
5.2 why can I only have 2 projectiles anyways? Yes getting them back is great fun. But that makes certain boring killcorridors impossible. Maybe give us an item/ability to give us rapid fire and infinite ammo for lets say 5 seconds. That would already nearly eradicate this problem (just dont lock it behind a suit or weapon, but as equipment).
5.3 every base is nearly the same. I have already mentioned a few solutions (dog, grapplinghook) but this really needs to be adressed. I can see what the base does within the first 10 steps. Because there is only so many ways you can build. Killrooms, bombramps, guard/projectilespam, trickroom (where traps have traps on them so if you collevt your darts or loot you get roasted), and every base goes down into either a tight corridor or a big room with stuff shooting at you. One reason for this is the limited blocknumber. A base with walls and roof is of the blocklimit.
5.4 aiming your sword at armored opponents is a nightmare. Even if they hold still I cant seem to target the head.
6.1 balance issues
There is so much to talk about I could write a novel about it, so I will keep it short:
-red stuff is too hard to come by (after leveling up a few times, early it is abundant) Why do my bases not earn any of it? Maybe as a reward for accolades?
-certain combinations are just too strong (as mentioned for example giants with armor and rage (so they all come for you at the same time in a 1:1 corridor) for the gameplay value they bring.
- giant with armor&rage
- flamethrower rangeupgrade (endlessly triggerable, with incredible range)
- invisible block (luckily, most ppl dont use them) with basicially any trap
- Plasmathrowers with these dartguys on platforms in a room (you only have 2-4 darts to kill like 20 things)
-every projectileguard&plasmatrap can be XP farmed (if that would ever be necessary)
-maps are not equally visited. Maybe it has to do with the prestige? Nowhere explained.
-leveling crawls to a halt after a few levels... playing like 5 hard maps for 1/3 of a chimeralevel? OUCH. And you need it because it is the only source of red stuff, which you need for EVERYTHING (not a fun grind)
-overdrive bases should get more players
-"more prestige for your bases" is laughably bad. Like... I am lucky if one of my maps even gets a player in an hour and the boost only holds like 40 minutes. And yes I realize that the duration seems to increase with advisorlevel... but then maybe explain that better and lock boosts behind a levelcap. You need your ressources for other stuff anyways (I wasted all my red stuff early on because I had like a thousand but none of the others... now I have thousands of the others but earn like 500 red stuff an active day)
7.0 bugs:
there are A LOT OF BUGS.
A few off the top of my head (there are so many more):
replay station shows new raids, but none are there. Or it is an unwatched one at the top. Or you went socialplaytest your map. Which also permanently gives you positive skulls (testing your map with friends. My map now has permanent +7 skulls because my friend died 7 times on the playtest, but there are no deathmarkers on the map). When building and switching row linedrag if you have oyur mouse in the wrong position it tries to show infinite blocks, either crashing the game or pausing it for 2+ Minutes, until an earshattering sound placing blocks occurs. Invisible blocks get triggered by traps next to them that shouldnt trigger them.
This should be all for now. There might be more, but my brain can't think of it anymore.
But it should be the most important stuff.
Comments
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PS: i cant confirm my email... I don't get one to confirm it.
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PPS: a block that slows you down would be IMMENSELY helpful (like magmacube, but the dog can walk through it) because most maps are easily beaten by just being fast enough.
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I actually read all of that and agree with most of it :)
But... i see many people complaining that they dont get raids and complain that there are only so few ways to build a map and all would be "cheese" at the same time. Maybe the problem is that they themselves build cheese and the system with accolades/prestige/whatever actually works?
I mained a builder and just raided a bit in the first two days of beta so i could buy plots, then i started building outposts. I cant complain about amount of raids - i just summed them together, i had 650 raids over 10 outposts since beta started (i was pretty early), thats 65 raids/outpost (keep in mind that i havent had 5 active all the time from the beginning) and like 90 raids/day roughly?
The thing is: Each of my outposts is unique and i dont use the cheese strategies you described (there are more btw). I would say my outposts look even somewhat pleasant and are not the ugly concrete cubes you see everywhere on the previews (i use A LOT of the glass blocks for example, people could actually scout a lot of what awaits them in some of my bases). Also tombs are always accessible, i actually build my bases around the tombs and lead the players there (to kill them ofc :D).
And all of my outposts have AT LEAST a 1.5 accolade/attempts rating (just screened it rn but its pretty close).
That doesnt mean my outposts arent deadly. I have a few fun/gimmicky ones though that naturally dont get that many kills (and are easily speedrunned/no challenge for good players), i guess averaged out over all 10 i have a kill/attempt ratio of 6, which is pretty good in my book. I kill people in fun and cool ways pretty often, i surprise them, and i even get 2 accolades from many people that should actually be super frustrated cause they die a lot to my stuff and still cant beat it (the skillgap i see between players is horrendous btw...), but they have FUN (i guess at least).
Sorry for the lengthy reply and intervention in your thread, but i just wanted to give a different perspective on that aspect of your feedback...
As example here a screen of my most played outpost (was the 2nd i build iirc, medium plot and started as brutal, didnt get better :D):
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Epic feedback. Fully agree with building comments.
Also, 600 raids? I've had bases up since the start of beta and I have nowhere near that many?
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As said, maybe there is a system in place that already works regarding accolades and prestige...
Another pic to underline my point: Would these players spend that much time on a level and endure that many rips to beat it if i used cheesy ######### and they wouldnt have fun?
If any1 wants to try one of these lmk btw, i can set them social :D
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