[Rant] Game Balance And The Community

2 heart stomps are near impossible to get and the best feeling you can get in this game. Stomping is something that raises the skill ceiling in this game A LOT, and I don't get why you want to remove it (well, make it so you have to choose to do it or slash, which defeats the whole purpose of it).

 

I wouldn't mind if stomps were tweaked a little bit. Sometimes I cat tell why I missed a stomp or how I even landed it to begin with. Sometimes you can stomp someone so hard that they end up stomping you. As much skill it takes to land a stomp a lot of it is luck too.

 

Its sometimes actually pretty easy to slash people out of the air before they stomp you.

 

I've notcied this too, but usually it doesn't work out if the knight stomping is also slashing.
Also if you watch kittycity's stomp video it showcases a lot of really buggy stomps.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0luBorjwVk

 

Personally I think it's pretty easy to dodge people trying to stomp from long hights and when they land it's easily punishable because of the stun they recieve. It's shorter one heart damage stomp range that is more dangerous because if the stomping player misses he is still able to double or single slash.

 

It really depends on what zoom level you're playing at.

• If you're at max zoom, it can be difficult to see exactly what's going on around you (not good in a duel), but it gives you situational awareness.
• If you're at medium zoom, you can very clearly see the entirety of your nearby surroundings. It's good for sword fighting and other CQC, but you can't see things in the distance at all times.
• If you're at minimum zoom... why the hell are you at minimum zoom?

I think it's a fair trade off. Your immediate surroundings take up more screen space and you can more easily see what's going on nearby, but you lose your peripheral vision (though you can still move your camera around to check). Alternatively, everything becomes much smaller and you have difficulty focusing, but everything is in your peripheral vision at all times and you can't be surprised.

If you're playing at max zoom, you can dodge out of the way of a falling knight, and due to latency they probably won't correct their trajectory in time. If you're playing at medium zoom, you deserve to get smashed in the skull by a knight from above if you're not paying attention.

 

I agree with you here but there are good ways to avoid getting smashed at medium zoom like crouching with shield up or just have a sporadic movement pattern that's hard to track and predict. (also useful for dodging water arrows)

 

I get frustrated listening to people gripe about small potato issues like Legolas shot or bomb damage radius when the game's meta is still flawed in so many ways.

Can you tell me why builders are the only class that spawns with useful mats in CTF? Archers never run out of arrows anyway (as evidenced by the removal of being able to make arrows from trees), so why not just let them have unlimited? Can anyone tell me why the deployable spawn point in this game is combined with an expensive weapon that, by design, must be placed out in the open to be used AND dies to two bomb arrows? So much for being able to take territory and make a solid front. Try to place one underground (if you're lucky to find enough space) and there's a chance that it will glitch its way to the surface. Can anyone tell me why gold is still a thing? It's not like there's any need to fight over this resource. It's provided to your team at the start of every game... The only point of forcing its use would be the ability to permanently cripple teams from having any major offensive siege ability during late-game (and yet people want to complain about stalemates). I can go on and on.

 

All problems can be solved by adding FakeRolling.as to every config file.

 

archers spawn with arrows and knights dont spawn with anything(because theyre attack classes and its their job to kill and get gold for useful supplies). To your complaint about ballistas, a lot of people think it's somewhat balanced because their destruction power is strong(and their spawning is impossible to stop solo). Also you can easily place one underground if you know their size when they expland out(small area consider it is now completely defended unless a builder gets at it). It doesnt glitch out, you just dont give it enough room. The thing about gold is there is about 50-100 on your side of the red barrier and usually 100 or more at mid. I feel like its smart to give you gold at the beginning because you need it to build a tunnel at your own spawn(or siege if you want). Anyway back to siege, the meta ingame right now is to end any game with ballista spam(even if the other team has a strong fort) and even the losing team would sometimes take a ballista, plop it on their flagroom, and spam mid to destroy the winning team's fort. Some complaints for ballistas are that they are too strong defensively.

 

Oink, stomp rekts, and it can be countered.
Basically, I use stomp together with endless slash to endlessly stun enemy and repedeatly deal damage to him. This kind of attack is almost impossible to shield off without damage, but if u do not stomped, do not slashed or performed only jab, ur ded.
Everything balanced plox dunt nerf knights, nerf ballistas

 

Then why not just switch to builder for the free mats and then back to archer/knight? Your argument makes no sense.

Give everyone the same mats or equally good mats on resupply. Better yet, give archers unlimited arrows and just drop in builder supply crates over the tent based on how many players there are on the team.

Pretty ironic that people think the ballista has too much defensive power huh? Ever thought of separating it into cheaper/weaker classic-style outposts and purely offensive siege ballistas? Your argument kinda proves my point. Calling it "somewhat balanced" makes no sense because there's nothing to compare it to. It's the only renewable forward spawn point in the game besides warboats, which nobody uses.

Not to mention, the fact that you can waste the entire gold supply on the map with forward tunnels is complete nonsense, considering tunnels are a structure with an offensive role. If you think about any successful strategy game in existence: offensive ability increases as the game progresses, not decreases. Otherwise you get stuck in an endless slug-fest where winning takes too much effort.

 

Doesn't seem like a good idea. Crates are very large and can be collided with. If you get 1 crate per 5 people on your team every minute, that's four crates raining down per minute in a 20v20. Even if you increase it to 1 per 10 players, it just makes small player differences like 9v10 or 20v19 noticeably more imbalanced.

I think we should give resource caches a little more utility. Make it so that, when you spawn as an archer/knight, you automatically spawn with 25 wood and 10 stone, and you get that same amount from resupplies when you touch a shop for your respective class. When you touch a storage cache, it automatically gets stored because knights and archers have absolutely no use for wood/stone unless they're going to upgrade an enemy shop. That can be a very powerful tactic, but no one really makes shops and leaves them unfinished, so I think it would work well. Obviously, builders would still get 100 wood and 30 stone.

It should also make playing builder on the frontlines a little more interesting. When every knight and archer that dies drops enough materials for a platform, a wooden block, and a stone block, you can suddenly hoard up enough materials to make a small outpost, and you can make very, very minor repairs without having to go back to base or to a builder shop for resupply.

The problem with the ballista is that it can destroy an enemy ballista in 1 to 2 hits. If you set up a defensive ballista, and your enemy's ballista either ran out of ammo or is being manned by someone that's a worse shot or has worse reaction times than you, you can kill them quite easily with just a few bolts. Thus, it's very fluid; it can change the course of battle quickly, but if your opponent doesn't have the opportunity to set one up, then you can just dominate them absolutely to the point where it's not even fun for the opposing team.

Wrong. I use warboats. Come at me.

 

If you want to use teamwork then yes do that. If you want to give everyone equally good mats, to each class, then you are insane. Giving knights or archers building supplies(stone or wood) would just irritate the players and fill up their inventories. What is even worse(and what i think you actually meant) was giving knights bombs(which would make a knight shop pretty useless and would be abit unfair to archers) and have archers have unlimited arrows(unlimited arrows would be somewhat useless as you could just reclick on the tent and grab 60 arrows and what about when they die and drop all those arrows? Unless you meant just recode the class where they have infinite arrows which would be even more lame, then you are basically saying fuck you to the builder class which would be the singular class forced to be useful only based on its inventory)

I dont think you play in pubs much........ I do not want to have to compete with minecrafting builders, building traps behind our flagroom, to get my needed mats(they should be given to me at the tent)

Somewhat balanced as it has powerful characteristics but it is also weak(vs bomb arrows and they would be way too op with huge health). Honestly i dont even think you have paid attention to any of my complaints(or other people's) about ballistas because it has been consistently suggest that the ballistas shouldnt have respawning abilities.

No. To be completely honest i think youre suggesting pretty stupid and barely thought out things. Take a look at any of the suggestions regarding the item you are complaining about and you will see alot of people share some of your opinions(and alot of people share very different ones), but most agree they dont need a health buff at this state they are in now. Also, a reason i wouldnt consider ballistas being seperated into 2 different items is because i dont expect much from the development team. I've read the threads of people begging for the ballista's respawning to be fixed and see the responses that it would be cool but they arent planning on re-coding alot of things for kag(which is their decision and is why i dont expect them to come up with huges changes like the ones you are suggesting as an obvious fix)


EDIT: i did not mean to say bomb arrows are balanced im just saying they are needed to combat the very unbalanced bolt bolt flying ballistas

 

Well, you do make one valid point in that wall of text:
The developers aren't going to do shit about most of these complaints due to them being burnt out on this game, the lack of recent sales, and fear of the community going up in flames about so much as a minor damage tweak. I honestly don't blame them.

On the bright side, I'll be modding till the day I die (or start my own project in Unity or Unreal when the last players leave KAG I guess lol)

 

It's quite ironic since I suggested regenerating arrows (basically infinite but still with ammo that regenerates overtime to prevent dirty spammers) some time ago and nobody liked it besides like 1 or 2 people who were still uncertain. And now everybody on this thread says they want infinite arrows, guess it's just no one likes me :( rip.

Back on topic...

This is true, and why THD is hiring community members to do their bidding, I hope in the future they hire competent enough community members to take hold of KAG and tweak it to their heart's content since THD is working on bigger and better things (Trench Run).

I mean there is so much that needs to be changed, so much outstanding bugs, unbalanced items and mechanics, and not to mention some additions that the community has been wanting for ages. (I don't want to come off as a noob but I honestly think if it was actually well implemented a medic/priest class would be nice and fill the role of combat/life support)

I'll just take my free-time to list everything the community has wanted for the past months/years:

bomb arrow nerfs
ballista reworking
water bomb/arrow nerfs/reworking
archer reworking
less cancerous water fighting
more advanced fire
rafts
a gamemode to replace challenges (I personally want either an attack/defend or a defend/destroy the core(s))
bucket buffs
boulder buffs
drill buffs/reworking
a better tutorial for newbies
re-add taunts (both comedic and rational)
some sort of anti-tunneling mechanic
better official maps (and maps in general)
better item system
better pickup system
rework of jabs
bomb bolt nerfs/reworking
swimming nerfs/boat buffs
trap block reworking

Disclaimer: I don't agree with/want all of these, the above is the community speaking (and my ability to shuffle through the suggestions sub-forum)

Personally I would also like to have catapults and ballistas be better at moving around, so they can fill the role of being able to offensively travel running over people. Also as I said I would like a medic/priest class, but that's far fetched. Maybe a tank that's more mobile than other land vehicles but can only ram to kill.

That's about all I can think of off the top of my head, and that means there's probably a lot more...

And I know Geti will say just to make a mod for it, but if it's been tested and people like it, why not try to add the mod to the official game?