Post patch: Yes, I feel cheap...

[Kickflipper.]

I for one liked 1.02. Yes, you had DFA spammers, but fights were more lethal. A few hits ended the fight, which made for faster and better fun IMO. Now people fight, and fight, and fight, and fight. One Saber fight I had lasted five minutes. I'm not a very skilled player, but I can't remember ANY match with a single player, in ANY game, lasting so long.

 

I don't like the time it takes to kill an enemy, it doesn't feel right. A saber should kill with a few blows, not eight. The predominant tactic post 1.02 is Push/Pull repeatedly, Backstab. I can't say since I didn't play it for long, but 1.02 never had such 'Push/Pull enemy to ground, win' situations.

 

Also, I think blocking is a tad too powerful. Why you ask? It has a BIG radius. Also it seems that no matter how you move, as long as the enemy is not attacking, Medium and Light land NO blows. I think that is wrong, at least the radius should be toned down.

[Spider AL]

In other words, the role various elements had on Jk2's gameplay varied drastically with the game type being played.

 

You've hit the nail RIGHT on the head with your post Stratus. The balance across the board was better in 1.02 in my opinion, but what's more important is that Raven listens to the legitimate argument that different game modes require different things from the ruleset. What has made Duel mode much more interesting in NF, has not made CTF or FFA better in FF. If anything, it's made it worse.

 

I don't like the time it takes to kill an enemy, it doesn't feel right. A saber should kill with a few blows, not eight.

 

Absolutely correct Kf, I couldn't agree more.

[fgStratus]

The most direct effect that backstabbing has on gameplay right now is that its the only viable move to do in a close up melee. Actually, viable is an understatement. Its a guaranteed kill close up in a melee. That's the issue that needs to be fixed- not slowing down backpedalling.

 

All of the effective backstabbers that I have seen run forwards and spin around quickly when they are in range to do their backstab. However, I assume Raven is like most developing companies and prefers to not be told how to fix their game. Instead, I'd like to bring to light some other/future imbalances that will arise when backstab loses its position as the dominant close-up skill.

 

Saberthrow: This has already been mentioned by many people, but the degree to which it is imbalanced, I believe, is severely understated. The basic procedure for hitting someone with a saberswing is to:

1) Begin your swing

2) Move in to him

3) Remain with him until the saberswing completes.

Now, anytime during this process you are open to a hit since you can't block while prepping your swing. Thus, the good players time it so that they are out of range until their swing is in the arc that deals significant damage. However, as soon as you throw in saberthrow, this system gets screwed over. All the thrower has to do is jam mouse2 at any point in this process and then roll backwards, thus dealing 30 damage (which equals that of a maximum-damage blue/yellow normal swing and is half of a red swing), and putting them out of range for step 3 since their speed becomes higher than the attacking player. Even in full force duels, normal swings are almost always counter-productive. Healing 25 (out of 30) points of the saber damage w/ lightside would cost 50 force points (half your pool on force master level), while draining as darkside would cost you about 38 force points (assuming the other player had no absorb and had a full pool of force.)

 

Of course, if you nerf throw too much then saber becomes even more useless in comparison with guns.

 

Force Kick:

They did not fix force kick in 1.03. Adding in the "double tap" has only made it better. The double-tap allows you to force kick later into your jump, thus extending the range at which it can be used. Granted, the damage is slightly reduced (27 I think), it is still better than all the normal saber swings in that

1) Its unblockable

2) It pierces shielding

3) It has a chance to knock the player down

4) It cancels the other player's swing thus keeping you safe after the attack has been executed.

5) Unlike a saberswing, you are able to block at every point leading up to, and during, the flipkick.

And it is still possible to flipkick crouching players, you just need to turn your mouse so that you are flipkicking them from your side rather than your front.

 

And finally, pertaining to the balancing of saber-styles across the spectrum of gametypes, I personally don't think it can be done with simply tweaking speed/blocking/damage because the costs of each saberstyle vary with the mod type.

On no force servers, everyone has equal access to each style (no force servers are max offense/max defense and oftentimes, max throw as well.) In this case, the styles should be balanced equally so that each plays an equal role.

However, on low force servers (say, you have less than 50 points to distribute), the offensive style costs 13 more points to get than the defensive style. These 13 points could have been otherwise spend for a greater access to force powers. Making offensive stance be equally effective to defensive stance would be analogous to making level three absorb as effective as level one absorb. In otherwords, if you have to invest more force points into a skill, it should be better.

This investment of force points isn't as noticeable on full force servers in this current version since there are only 4 force powers worth getting (jump, push/pull, absorb), and you have enough points to max out these, saber offense/defense, and protect (in order to recover from being pulled.)

 

In short, making the defensive/medium stance as effective as the offensive stance may balance the gameplay on no force servers since everyone always has all three stances at their disposal, but it would imbalance the stances on force servers since the red stance would essentially be the blue stance minus 13 force points.

[Etz]

Excellent post fgStratus! This thread is getting better and better, but at the same my hopes are going down because only now I'm starting to understand what a difficult task balancing this game would be (relative balance). Right now I'm pretty content to wait until 1.04 comes out. Perhaps they try to tweak things heavily, if they do I've got a feeling it's going to be a stab in to dark just like 1.03 was. Maybe they will pull it off and we will have a good game in our hands, but I doubt it. The other possibility is that they tweak couple of the biggest issues people are having with the game and then let it be. After all they got SOF2 to support as well and new games to make. Raven isn't exactly famous for their customer support even if they make high quality games (which JK2 is).

 

Now I'm going to ask you a question. If the 1.04 will make gameplay better, but (probably) only in most mandatory ways, are you going to continue playing it? This question is especially important for people like Spider Al who aim for the (hopefully) big upcoming competitions.

 

I play for fun, and because playing JKO isn't very fun for me right now I've stopped playing it. I still haunt these forums and I still make maps (that's my other gaming related hobby), but before gameplay is heavily tweaked I'm not going to touch the game itself. One of my biggest gripe with this game is that it's so good. And now in my eyes Raven either by ignorance or lazyness is throwing this game away... I can't stand it. Second part of my question is, although we know that it would be though to get players for a MOD, would you play it? Because I would, but on the other hand I've got no interest in competitive playing unless the gameplay is top notch. And a MOD would probably need pretty big user base before anyone would make competitions for it.

[Nill the Mean]

The one thing I don't get is why they beefed up things in respect to other things they nerfed. If you make one thing more effective you certainly shouldn't tone down other things that directly relate to it.

They added extra blocking AND toned the saber damage down.

They beefed absorb AND nerfed drain and grip.

The blocking radius is huge now AND you hardly get any ammo.

I would have said one or the other, not both like this.

Sigh, I gave up on JK2 now, I'm waiting until 1.04.

[Spider AL]

I think Raven's just tried to please the vocal minority in this patch. But what else can we ask them to do? It's a tricky, dangerous situation.

[Etz]

Yeah... that it is. The truth is I'm probably going to organize a mod no matter what kind of patch Raven puts out. Simply because I believe there are things inheritent to JKO, like the shield system that need to be changed (imho that is).

 

I've never tried anything like it before, but I'm hopefully about finding people who feel as I do about this game. Some of the things I'd like to see changed, or at least tested would be:

 

- Lightsaber is not affected by shields (which I would change to armor, just in the spirit on Star Wars).

 

- Kick damage down to 10 or so, it should be difficult to kill someone wielding lightsaber with simple kicks. (edit: actually perhaps not, maybe the 18-20 it's now is better, but the person using kick shoudl also be vulnerable to saber attacks during the kick to allow counters).

 

- Up lightsaber damage so it would only take 1 (clean hit to torso / head) to 3 hits to kill a person with 100 health.

 

- Change blocking somehow, perhaps only thing that needs to be done is the reduced blocking radius, perhaps something else is needed.

 

- Balance the force powers better, I also feel that lightsaber combats with force shouldn't turn into push / pull fest which they are now.

 

- Absorb should be invisible but it should eat mana much more rapidly and perhaps have a initial cost.

 

- Healing should be more effective, but should also have a drawback like meditatio etc.

 

- I think Drains primary effect should be draining enemy force as dark side is more attack oriented, healing should be a side effect, yet usefull.

 

- Grip... perhaps hard to believe but I haven't even tried this after 1.03 so I'm not sure how severe the nerf is. Should be made usefull which people are saying it's not right now.

 

- Sabercombat... probably the trickiest part of them all. I'd want to make different moves for each stance and have them separated. To actually make you able to specialize in single stance. Each stance should also have enough depth to it. Of course there shouldn't be anything to stop you from using all the stance should you choose to do so.

 

- Guns... these need to be balanced with rest of the game somehow. Guns are obviously the best weapon from afar, but close up saberist should cut gunner to pieces unless the gun toting rambo could evade somehow .

 

There's more than this of course, but that's the list that first came to my mind.

[Spider AL]

If the 1.04 will make gameplay better, but (probably) only in most mandatory ways, are you going to continue playing it?

 

Well, yeah. But only for fun, and probably only in single-player. It's depressing really, 1.02 was the best competitive game I'd ever played.

 

Guns... these need to be balanced with rest of the game somehow. Guns are obviously the best weapon from afar, but close up saberist should cut gunner to pieces unless the gun toting rambo could evade somehow

 

This is the point I agree with most violently. Sabres just don't do enough damage in 1.03 to make them dangerous against gunners, unless you knock them over and hit them.

 

And Nill, you're on the ball as ever. Perfectly put.

[TheDarkSide]

Since we've discussed this as a potential patch change previously in this thread, I felt the need to post this info here....this comes from Kenn Hoekstra's updated .plan today:

 

Name: Kenn Hoekstra

Email: khoekstra@ravensoft.com

Description: Project Admin

Project: General

Web Page: Kenn's Web Site

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Friday, May 17th, 2002 - A few things for

the weekend:

 

...<edited>...

 

2. For those of you unhappy with the increased

saber blocking in CTF and FFA modes in the 1.03

patch for Jedi Outcast, you can turn off the

changes by setting the CVAR g_saberTraceSaberFirst

to "0" in your server configs. Setting this

to "1" = More Blocking, "0" = Less Blocking. It

defaults to "1" in 1.03.

 

 

TDS

[Spider AL]

Well that's an excellent piece of news! May I commend you with this orange, TDS?

 

/me chucks an orange at TDS

 

Enjoy! Citrus goodness, well deserved... Now to inform me server admin mates...

[Etz]

Has anyone actually played against humans to see what the game plays when the blocking is decreased? I'm going to try it against bots tonight but that's not the same thing.

 

Btw, I've almost finished my first JKO level (and my first level since the original Quake ), here are two screenshots.

 

Screenie one:

 

And screenie two:

 

Sorry for stealing your thread for my sinister purposes, wont do again, promise

[Spider AL]

The only sinister thing about your post, Etz, is that you must have sold your soul to one of the denizens of the lower planes in order to make a level that looks that nice.

[Etz]

Never!

[Lucky]

Are there 'gunners' or simply people that play dm and ctf servers that have guns?

 

You might consider me a gunner, because thats about all i use, however i switch to a saber when i need to, mostly for mobility and when i get pulled.

 

I'd gladly use the saber *more* if it were more effective. Ive been saying that sabers against anyone not holding one should equate to a 1 hit kill or close to it. I want *more* viable options in CTF, i don't want less.

 

The only thing that needs to be done to balance ctf in regards to sabers vs guns is to make the saber more powerful so that its on par with the other weapons.

 

And I can guarantee you won't get any complaints from any serious CTF'rs, we want *more* methods of wreaking mayhem. I'd say most of us are concerned with the dynamics involved in getting, keeping, protecting etc rather than upset with saberists.

 

Sabers only ctf is essentially ridiculous with the current maps. I could see it being fairly interesting in a map with no powerups and a very varried interior design that let people lurk around, however the current maps need long range and powerful weapons to allow you to defend your flag.

 

On top of that. I dunno how many of you know about rage/speed, but lemme inform you: You can turn both of these on at the same time. This makes you extremely mobile and powerful. You take less damage, you clear a lot of ground because both rage and speed increase your movement speed and the effect is cumulative. + you do more damage.

 

Its difficult to kill someone with rage/speed as it is, since you can cut thru unprotected people like butter with a golan. You've got to run like lemmings and pull the person around until his rage runs out or yer in trouble.

 

With the 1.03 ammo constraints its damn near impossible to kill someone rolling thru yer base with rage/speed. You've got to rely on pulling them, and that doesn't work if they have a teamate energizing them.

 

I love the rage/speed combo, but its nearly an exploit in 1.03 simply because you don't have enough ammo to fight back. In 1.02 you've got a lot of options in dealing with attackers using the combo; not so in 1.03.

 

If rage/speed gets nerfed because people start to figure it out im gonna quit playing. Its the closest thing to JK1's speed that you can get in this game, and its brilliantly balanced in 1.02.

 

How bout the yavin roof? You guys prolly don't even know about that, but people are gonna figure it out eventually, and you'll be sorry. Sit up there with absorb and a sniper rifle and yer essentially untouchable. Its pretty difficult to get someone down now, but not as bad as it is in 1.03.

 

Guns and the saber need to be useful for CTF to work right, im pretty confident Raven will figure it out with the next patch.

 

BTW for all of you who tell us CTF'rs/Gunners to go play q3, i'd like you to tell me which q3 mod other than Jk2 has the complexity of the force in JK2? there's a reason so many of us stuck to JK for so long, even playing guns. It has nothing to do with starwars, its because we like the gameplay dynamic. Nothing else makes the cut.

 

 

Lucky

[Jah Warrior]

Originally posted by TheDarkSide

Purplwolf,

 

I've been trying to make that point for a bazillion threads now.

The backsweep is in v1.02, and it's even more powerful than it is in the new patch.

 

yeah couldnt put it better myself. I used it far more in 1.02 and all you DFA abusers have stolen my favourite move;)

[Spider AL]

BTW for all of you who tell us CTF'rs/Gunners to go play q3, i'd like you to tell me which q3 mod other than Jk2 has the complexity of the force in JK2? there's a reason so many of us stuck to JK for so long, even playing guns. It has nothing to do with starwars, its because we like the gameplay dynamic. Nothing else makes the cut.

 

Hear hear!

[Nathan Wind]

great post lucky.

 

but spider, i always found in .02 that saberists had an advantage vs gunners anyway. with all the changes in the new version AND killing gun ammo seemed redundant and just eliminated gun viability completely.

[Spider AL]

i always found in .02 that saberists had an advantage vs gunners anyway. with all the changes in the new version AND killing gun ammo seemed redundant and just eliminated gun viability completely.

 

No gunner worth his salt would have trouble with sabreists in 1.02 Nathan mate... at least not with absorb!

 

Yep, a gunner with absorb, as in JK1, is fairly unstoppable. Now in 1.03, absorb has been made more powerful, and with the sabre damage being reduced as it has been, I can trundle round with my ST and Flechette for hours without even drawing my glowstick once. Yes, I have to be more careful with my ammo and yes, games progress slower, but absorbant gunners were always the strongest in 1.02, and in 1.03? Even stronger. Everyone else has been made weak.

[Nathan Wind]

spider, i cannot tell you how much i love your last post. it proves the argument that ive been having for days about the visibility of absorb being ESSENTIAL in the balance. (i may need to come back and quote it)

 

I could always beat a gunner with my saber. Personally, i dont feel that that's much of a brag. That i could always beat a gunner with my gun, an assertion that i am also willing to make, is another story entirely.

[Spider AL]

the argument that ive been having for days about the visibility of absorb being ESSENTIAL in the balance.

 

Frankly Nathan, Absorb was perfect in 1.02, and as you know I'm a lightsider. The only thing that was wrong with 1.02 was the DFA's bugs. That's all that should have been fixed... the forces were perfectly balanced, the weapons were all useful. Er, except the DEMP of course.

 

It's a real shame that they felt the need to fix, that which was not broken.

 

Tonight, on a 1.03 duel server with medium force, (full powered jump) Two fellows banded together to tell me how lame I was for using the kick. According to these two fellows (OneDrop and Boba Fett/Reborn Jedi were their names) kick is lame, as is hitting people when they're on the floor, using red style, not bowing before every duel... the list goes on.

 

It was THOSE kind of people, the... let's put it bluntly, the whiners, the young kids who simply could not stand to lose against someone who had figured out a way round their cunning "flail in light stance" plan, that convinced Raven to tweak JO so massively. According to my CS playing friends, the same problem has occurred in CS to a lesser degree. And some people have said on this very board that Tribes 2 has been newbienerfed beyond all recognition.

 

WHEN will it end? Can't the developers see that they're only ruining the game for people who have played it for more than two minutes? Can't they see that it would be a bigger competitive success if it was left in the state in which it was released?

 

God knows, I don't. I wish I understood. Thoughts, anybody?

[Lucky]

It will end when i get my hands on the SDK and can begin work on a mod.

 

I'm really getting sick of the arguement that people who enjoy shooting guns should go and play q3, people who enjoy ctf should go and play ut etc.

 

I must admit, its been abscent from this thread entirely, however on the rest of the forums this arguement continually rears its head. Its incredibly irritating.

 

Everything in this game needs to be made more powerful, the guns, the saber, the force. It's the user's responsibility to figure out how to use each of these without getting killed on spawn consistently.

 

I've completely given up on 1.03 for the moment. I have too much fun playing 1.02 on the select couple of servers I can still find.

 

The ammo constraints in 1.03 i could live with, so long as the weapons did more damage. It's got to be one or the other, unless the player speed gets shrunk to walking speed, simply because you routinely have to kill someone quite far away from your base simply to keep them from capping. It's like the average amount of time it takes to kill someone has increased substantially, but the movement speed hasnt, so all of the defensive points in all the CTF maps have been shifted outside of what can be considered your base.

 

That's just flawed, the most dangerous spot in a ctf map should be inside a person's base. This is one reason i dislike garrison so much; the best defensive spot is actually in the middle of the map. It's not utterly apparent to most people, so they run around in circles right next to the flag. You can't really defend, all you can do is interdict. Now the *whole* ctf mode of play is like that, and its terrible. I hate ctf with 1.03 as much as i hate garrison in 1.02.

 

Eveything needs a significant oomph. The saber *should* be viewed as just another weapon in CTF. It *should* be more useful, but not at the detriment of everything else.

 

I'm really starting to like al's idea about seperate skillsets for the different modes of play. In a duel, you want a really engrossing and entertaining match against *one* person. In ffa and CTF you want to quickly dispose of one person and move on to the next to accomplish an overarching objective that doesn't have anything to do with the combat you're currently engaging in necessarily. It needs to be fast and significantly less time consuming.

 

A quick fix would be to up the damage delt in a ffa or a ctf match. Then you could easily un nerf the guns and the game would resume intact.

 

A more direct fix would be to up the damage against people holding a gun, making the saber a very powerful weapon in the balance of things. The problem is that it would only address ff guns CTF, and in the spirit of trying to pay attention to everyone's complaints, thats not gonna work too well. The damage needs to be upped for sabers vrs sabers apparently as well. And possibly another damage level should be set for duels.

 

So there's 3 different damage levels that need to be tweaked and seperated, and that would allow the game to at least *flow* right. True, there's another hundered things that need to be done, but seperating and tweaking those damage levels would make the game flow correctly.

 

Another issue i'd like to bring up, is the force. In JK, all the forces would have been considered vastly overpowered in the light of JK2. However, what JK did right, was give everything a specific use and never keep you from using it. The skill involved was in doing *all* of the things you needed to do at the same time.

 

It wasn't tic tac to, it was multi dimensional chess played on top of a nascar.

 

Some things you did constantly, absorb/speed/seeing, were things you left on all the time, not things you used for specific instances. pull/grip/destruction/healing/jump were what you used selectively.

 

The challenge of course, was not in maintaining your force pool. It was to some extent, you could keep everything on and continue to move as normal for about 5 minutes. At which point you needed mana. So the game *was* essentially fought over mana boosts.

 

However, there were enough mana boosts that it definitely didn't keep you from doing anything you wanted to. In fact, that was one of the only ways the really talented people could kill eachother, they had to dominate the level and not let their opponent *get* any of those boosts.

 

They had to do very spectacular and amazing things to accomplish essentially the same thing as *drain*.

 

And again, let me reitterate, the skill was *not* in what you had just done and thus in conserving mana, it was in actually countering the force use of an opponent. To some extent thats present here, but the focus is definitely more on conserving mana than it is on *using* the force.

 

JK2 should try to take both of these into consideration. Mana conservation and actual use of the force need to be balanced in such a way that yer never focusing on just one. Then and only then, it will be a better balanced game than JK.

 

 

Lucky

[Spider AL]

Absolutely, you've hit the nail on the head Lucky. There is no balance in 1.03. Guns are now more powerful than sabres (they weren't before, only whiney newcomer types thought so, and affected this change) But people are camping more ammo because of the constraints. The whole game has slowed to a crawl. There are silly uber-moves that people have no defence against (DFA was easily defended against, only silly whiney newcomer types thought it was unbeatable) Ultra-powerful powers like Absorb, weak sides of the force... like Dark.

 

Etz and I have been discussing the necessary changes we'd have to make in a mod... The more people who think like that, the better. Power to you Lucky.

[Etz]

As Spider_Al said we've been thinking about the mod. In the end there aren't that many things that need tweaking. We could do with changes to blocking and saber damage at first and then continue from there. Of course we will need the SDK but at least we can talk about the changes while waiting for it to come out.

 

All who are interested could mail me: hannu_hurme@msn.com

 

We have an irc channel and as soon as I can set it up, a forum as well.

[Nathan Wind]

i still dont believe guns are made stronger

[Spider AL]

i still dont believe guns are made stronger

 

We-ell, let's just say that a gunner using absorb faces a sabreist of equal skill who is also using absorb... It's a given that the gunner will win that point. Pre-patch, I could hit a gunner twice with my sabre, and kill em straight off, even if they were moving. Now it's much more difficult to kill anyone with vanilla sabre moves.

 

And should I wish to resort to cheapness, I'd have to have good luck trying to backstab a gunner who's light on his feet, without pulling him over.

 

The guns haven't reeaally been made stronger per-se, but everything else has been made weaker, so the result is the same.