@Aurora Ex Machina

you should get jey to form his own testing squad, and get jeff to WATCH the fights to balance them, jey has a little thing where he enjoys dieing 15 times when trying an uber, and would undoubtedly give olympus an underrated difficulty(and anyone else would likely overrate it, wanting easier rewards). however, having several of jey's "best" players will give jeff a REALLY good measure on how difficult the content is, allowing him to properly balance it so that the content is hard enough, without being so difficult that players simply give up

you can never have too much balance, (and as you said, the lack of "OMGWTFPWNAGE" players in the dev testing squads may mean that if you dont test it before release with those "OMGWTFPWNAGE" players, it may need to be nerfed soon after release due to the top few teams absolutely just steamrolling the place)

We learnt this, and last night we all went in a mix of player available ships and no adum's blockers, with Papertiger / Precursor using endgame lions, rhinos present and so on. Jey made it to the Poseidon fight. I used a wattage (T21 ship, but as gunner) and Jeff used one of the new T21 player built ships as a healer.

So, yes, we certainly made sure we were testing with a good range of endgame gear! Its still being tested, and Jeff is handing out squad invites to selected people (aka, random players present when we are).


Please do note: any & all content is subject to change before going live - don't assume that it won't

MMkay i went in there on test with slaves in a ShM BS.
First, my tractor didnt let go, and the minions are somewhat bugged, along with the intense lag and 2-3-4 FPS you get
On the other hand: Looks AWESOMESAUCE

Players have already reported the following issues:

1) Tractor bug
2) Debris / drones not disappearing on scooping
3) Collision code oddities with particle based weapons (either no decay or no collision code killing them off)
4) Infinite range on some weapons
5) Bugs in PWI type porters

All of these are causing massive lag atm, and test server isn't stable.

Please report more if you find them - however, I think its safe to say that changes made last night after we did a successful test run have well & truly borked the server... really a case of fixing one thing and breaking something else.


Off to poke it with a large stick, but I think Jeff / Jey will be doing some re-coding tonight.

awesome.. still, you never know just what the "perfect squad" can do, untill they have done the content...

the last thing people want happening is for one team, like EF, to have a distinct advantage at the content, because they werent considered when the content was being balanced (and skill matters, ALOT, you put every player in SS in a lion, with identical gear setups and skill setups as Assasinat3r and 95% of them wouldnt be able to do half the shit he can do)

the content wont be properly balanced untill you test it against the best of SS, (and if you dont, those same players will probably figure out how to completely smash the new content, other players will find out, and it will get old, VERY fast, just like how lions used to be rare, but now everyone has one, within less than a year of the first one being built the first one was built, and a few months later, EF started mass producing them almost, and within a few months after that, lions were as common as zebras)

personally, i think jeff needs to assemble a squad with tallon, Ivelios, Assasinat3r, biggee, jiraque, jey, FFsV, TP, and a few others whos names i cant remember, and then see how difficult they find the new content

Bug: I went into Olympus alone, to look around. I saw a massif 2 fly by before I went in, though, so I capped it and brought it with me. It got killed, and had no stasis gen. However, it didn't blow up upon death, it just sat there. The server crashed a moment later, not sure if that was because of the slave or just a big coincidence.

EDIT: Just re-tried. The server crashed as soon as I warped out of Olympus after losing the slave (a tear this time), not when it died. Also, the slave became a kind of ghost, like they used to do if you undocked before they docked at a base. It was there, targetable, but you couldn't tractor it or shoot it.

Ye, stuff doesnt dissappear or blow up there, so some ai has infinite range and dropped items doesnt decay

This is understood - test has been left there purposefully so that players can at least get a feel for Olympus Mark #1 before going live. (HAL has just worked epically to fix the huge bugs earlier, and I think it'll be live again soon).

Some notes, to set you at ease:

These encounters are different from 'old' style content, in three important ways:

1) Dynamic environment - we're able now to have much more flexibility on certain things, and Jeff himself has added code to make player's actions actually matter. Can't give specifics, but it will matter how players interact with the PF around them, not just the boss.

2) HAL has incorporated nice <RANDOMISED> tags which are available in the boss scripting (with fully fledged weighting. i.e. any % chance of one action over another). While the scripts themselves have to have some structure (otherwise players would never be able to progress if it was 100% random), it does mean that two fights won't be the same.

3) Again, boss scripts allow a multitude of behaviours, switching aggro models, calculating range, shields, number of friends / enemies and so forth. The simple fact that no two squads will ever be the same should make each and every fight slightly different. Maybe not radically in some cases, but hopefully enough to make you go "Wait.. never seen it do that before!".



Feedback from players can only help this along - and new features are being added daily. So please do come back to us and (non-ranting) outline your feelings about content. (In fact... I've got to now go back & re-do Fields of Lemnos' AI spawners, as a new feature I was waiting for got put in by HAL... I'm not in PR btw, I'm content )

Well, you're doing a Helluva job as PR anyways. Giving players some faith in the admins

<3 Aurora

@landswimmer

We're currently testing and plan to continue to test and appropriately balance the content as needed and as stated before Test will be open for players to form squads to contemplate their own opinion on the content's difficulty.

We want Olympus to be something that players may find a challenge even when the the squad that ventures is fully outfitted in tech 21 vessels. This will not be yet another Serengeti where players simply upgrade and will be able to solo or even finish with a few players.

I did a Ares Run with a few admins and it did look very cool. I didn't see the wormholes but i got little lag (almost nobody was onine.) Please sync the servers if not done yet. I stocked my fighting gear in my ships so now i can truley fight as before my gear was in a base.

Ok some of us went into olympus today, only heph was open that we could see so we went in... cyclopses seemed reasonable and we didnt bother killing them since the gate to heph was open.
Heph himself we lol'd at. i hope you're beefing him majorly... we could tank with one shm even with his "doomsday" weapons... and his bank/regen seemed pathetic, less than mausoleum ubers. didnt have a serious team, so didnt kill him either but we could have with slightly more effort

yes, make it so powerful that only top 1 team could kill it? this game has not big playerbase, dont waste them