[893] Balancing Hotpatch

Pretty much every beta server is using the default configuration. And the default setup has a number of balance issues, which means pretty much every beta server has balance issues. Thankfully, most of the fixes for these problems involve changing a few numbers and not necessarily core mechanics. Unfortunately KAG has a horrible tendency to remain unpatched for weeks on end. Stop leaving the game in a terrible state and using "it's a beta" as an excuse. Even changing a few of the things below would vastly improve the game and would take little time. If we're going to (pay to) be beta testers, at least spend a little time making the game fun by having some semblance of balance, and patch the game.

--Increase the price of kegs from 60 to 150 gold (or some high number) because keg spam on CTF is out of control. They're retardedly cheap at just 3 times the price of a bomb. I don't want to hear "well we changed bedrock to be invincible because people kept blasting the map into nothing" while explosives are so absurdly cheap. KAG Classic had the identical problem in the beginning. This was solved by toning down explosive availability (literally not giving everyone bombs upon spawning like in TTH, hint hint nudge nudge WINK WINK), not fucking up bedrock.
--Decrease mine explosive power and/or add a way to safely defuse them for players other than knights. Or make them much more expensive, along the lines of kegs.
--Change spike prices from 30 stone to 10 or 15.
--Remove the ability for knights to kill spikes with slashes.
--When a spike is adjacent to stone on one side and dirt on the bottom, have it attach to the stone.
--Increase the amount of stone from a single block from 4 to 6 to compensate for building being incredibly underpowered as walls are hilariously easy to grapple over, jump up, blast through, and drill, and stone is in overly limited supply on most maps.
--Remove the ability for knights to kill wooden walls. This was a bad idea. There's no reason to use wooden walls except out of desperation under the current circumstances.
--Lower ROF for the arrow launcher to about 1/3-1/4 its current rate. It is literally a machine gun. I don't know who thought that the game needed more arrow spam but they are horribly, horribly wrong and should go kill themselves immediately with the nearest blunt kitchen utensil.
--Stop having arrows, both fired and the little ammo packets on the ground, block building. Christ that is annoying.
--Fix the "doors aren't affected by explosives anymore" bug. This is a major issue. Don't leave it until you have the next major rebalance done two months from now.
--Lower the number of particles from one-way wooden walls being slashed.

There. That's it. Just a few simple things to hotfix, and this game would be a helluva lot better. I'm sure there are more simple things that need fixed, but that's all that comes to mind at the moment.

 

I agree with almost all your suggestions except those about spikes: I think if the spikes were much cheaper and could not be destroyed by knights, then it would lead to "spike spamming".

So I think either spikes need to be made cheaper and remain destructable, or same price as now and only destructable when the stone block they are attached to is destroyed.

 

Just my opinion, you might want to separate groups of related changes in your post with a space. Makes it less of a wall of text.

Like this:

Spoiler

Explosives

• Increase the price of kegs from 60 to 150 gold (or some high number) because keg spam on CTF is out of control. They're retardedly cheap at just 3 times the price of a bomb. I don't want to hear "well we changed bedrock to be invincible because people kept blasting the map into nothing" while explosives are so absurdly cheap. KAG Classic had the identical problem in the beginning. This was solved by toning down explosive availability (literally not giving everyone bombs upon spawning like in TTH, hint hint nudge nudge WINK WINK), not fucking up bedrock.
• Decrease mine explosive power and/or add a way to safely defuse them for players other than knights. Or make them much more expensive, along the lines of kegs.

Arrows / Arrow Projectiles

• Lower ROF for the arrow launcher to about 1/3-1/4 its current rate. It is literally a machine gun. I don't know who thought that the game needed more arrow spam but they are horribly, horribly wrong and should go kill themselves immediately with the nearest blunt kitchen utensil.

Building / Constructions

• Remove the ability for knights to kill wooden walls. This was a bad idea. There's no reason to use wooden walls except out of desperation under the current circumstances.
• Stop having arrows, both fired and the little ammo packets on the ground, block building. Christ that is annoying.
• Fix the "doors aren't affected by explosives anymore" bug. This is a major issue. Don't leave it until you have the next major rebalance done two months from now.
• Lower the number of particles from one-way wooden walls being slashed.

Spikes

• Change spike prices from 30 stone to 10 or 15.
• Remove the ability for knights to kill spikes with slashes.
• When a spike is adjacent to stone on one side and dirt on the bottom, have it attach to the stone.
• Increase the amount of stone from a single block from 4 to 6 to compensate for building being incredibly underpowered as walls are hilariously easy to grapple over, jump up, blast through, and drill, and stone is in overly limited supply on most maps.

Anyway, about your points, keep in mind that if you increase stone income rate from 4 to 6, you should also be suggesting 15 to 20/25 for your suggested spike price, assuming that you had originally come up with 10 or 15 based on the income rate of 4. Alpha had a default 2/4 stone income rate and spikes cost 10 stone. Knights didn't tend to bounce around a lot in that version either.

 

You're right, you aren't the ones saying "it's a beta" thing, it was a couple people who have been around in the game for awhile that I was playing with shortly before I wrote the OP. I should have made that clearer. CTF is indeed very fun (much more so than TTH). I do think that the game is in a bit of a bad state, though. Also, shopping me and arcrave together is probably fulfilling several of his fantasies so proceed with caution.

I've only been getting 4, and thick blocks last twice as long but are otherwise no different than regular. I'll test this again later today just to be sure.

Flooding maps with lots of bedrock surrounding the raised water areas isn't possible anymore. I can see some maps being specifically designed that way, but it's been the case on all of them that I have played. Water battles seem to have mostly disappeared since the last patch, though perhaps that's more due to me playing CTF and not TTH where those types of map are more common. Deep tunnels aren't possible anymore either.

Yup.

Sounds reasonable.

I feel frustrated as a builder that everything I try to make is expensive and gets destroyed or bypassed remarkably easily. There seems to be little point to building a castle as it is always easier to just destroy the other team's. Obviously, decreasing explosives availability should help with this.

All the servers I've been on have had arrow launchers that fire about as fast as an archer in Legolas-faggotry mode, all the time, so like 3-4 shots per second at least. I wish I had a video of when it was literally raining arrows across my entire screen from two guys using arrow launchers. Their ROF definitely increased massively with the last patch. There might be a bug since you said it's supposed to be slower.

Squeaky wheel gets the grease.

When a knight slashes near a bunch of wooden platforms more than once the whole area is inundated with little woodchip particles. It's a bit much. Maybe making them disappear faster instead of reducing the number of particles would fix it.

While I don't have my own server, I've played this game for years now, so I might as well set one up. Besides, morale swastikkkas seem to be banned on the official servers, and there needs to be a haven for tasteless and silly offensiveness somewhere. And please add a block that mimics the old bedrock in terms of functionality.

 

I've only actually encountered this on The Fun CTF server as they modded the bows to have both high RPM and the arrows don't disappear in
mid- air like in vanilla KAG.

 

There's no way AFAIK to make arrow launchers in vanilla CTF right now (I don't know what's up with that and I could be mistaken) so I can't immediately verify if the launchers are changed only on the server you mentioned or are like that everywhere.