Release 169: Tweaks, Fixes and Performance!

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I have to say, the jump abilities are basically useless now that they are so small. There’s no point at all to the second jump height upgrade (it doesn’t even add an extra block of jump height, as far as I can tell, not even in combo with the air jump upgrade = useless) and the air jump, both basic and upgraded is so, so small that it will help sprinters at max agility jump maybe an extra one block distance or two in conjunction with all jump upgrades? Needing all the jump and air jump upgrades just to jump three blocks high stinks too.

Edit: I suppose I’d be okay with the new extreme weakness of the jump abilities if they were 5 (or less) per upgrade, because then they could at least be gotten on the cheap, instead of being major investments (and not worth it).

Not worth it at all. I’m definitely going to ditch jump entirely and go pure grapples… as soon as I’ve ditched every last point of Vitality, because it’s purely detrimental at the moment.

The only (possibly) worse thing is that I’ve confirmed that falling damage scales with max HP now, so Vitality is useless for both lava AND falling. So… it’s totally worthless except for versus creatures? (I need a lot of cleanse points now…) I’d already mentioned that taking Vitality means you need more healing items (several times as many) to heal you, and makes regen take longer, but now in addition to issues with lava, I can fall eight blocks and take 2,000 damage… I’d rather have 600 or 1,200 HP and fall eight blocks and take 200-400 damage that I can regenerate back in ten seconds or so, or heal with 1-2 basic cooked meat pieces. I get that I suggested falling damage scaling with health rather than lava damage, but really? Both? Now lava is just 100% death guaranteed with the combined scaling lava damage and falling damage, and falling is now guaranteed death beyond about 20 blocks height as well…

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To make vitality worse only wildstock is hitting harder at the moment and they one-shot me with 3k hp on Munteen. So medium amounts of vitality is pretty much useless against creatures atm as well.

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…Devs, I think we need some serious mitigation options before things become this ludicrously lethal (especially with Vitality worse than worthless in the majority of situations).

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There’s been 12 days of notice about creatures getting stronger. It was known already, if they’re too hard, then for sure talk about it.

One suggestion I have about the matter for example is maybe make wildstock tire out or stop when ramming against stuff, giving you a couple seconds to shoot at it. Right now you dodge 2 or 3 consecutive rams and then have very little time to shoot at it.

Maybe having the option to tire him out or make him ram against things could reward the player by making him stay in place for a couple seconds.

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I’m mostly on the same wavelength with you on this, but I’ll just throw a wild guess that they want us to either invest in defence skills or there will be armour to mitigate some sources of damage (probably excluding lava, since they want that to be quite lethal).

I’ll add to your point here: I prefer the old jump stuff too, like you say, especially considering the point invesment. To be fair, currently, with the edge climb the effective height is still pretty decent, but the investment cost for a “decent” skill, is actually 5 skills… Those points could have been spent on crafting recipes and so on. You can always offset height with temporary blocks or permanent ramps/stairs etc…

Hm, maybe if they hit something hard they could get stunned/dazed?

About creature difficulty, in general their health seems fine, considering I’ve only maxed power and not any weapon mastery, although I admit that Wildstock on Munteen have a very high amount of hp, which would make it quite boring to take on several at the same time - about 40 copper slingbow shots each? (With maxed power and no mastery*)

But at the moment I’m just completely avoiding anything “dangerous”; slopes, cliffs, mobs… since I don’t particularly like to lose my durabilities and I can’t invest points into reducing that just yet (costs a lot having the durability bonus).

The last iteration or two of the game has been unbearable for me. I have 10Mbps download and 1Mbps download, and now due to the update, instead of just a read message saying high ping, it stops whatever I’m doing and saying teleporting to sanctum, and the two seconds later carries on. This has gotten me killed at least once, and nearly got me killed several times while jumping a gap or killing mobs. Before it spiked to high ping but never was killed before it, I will now literally be mid-jump and my character will go to sit while in mid-air and just fall. Honestly I don’t why my internet has such a hard with this game, even on the US East servers.

Please share a screen shot with the debugging information enabled when it happens.

Also how do you have your chunk download limit configured?

There we go, that’s the debugger of when it happens

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It shows your latency is over 400ms and regularly spiking above even 600ms. The game will not be playable with such high latencies so I would expect this to happen here.

As far as I am aware it is only with this game, and I was able to play the game without rubber-banding or returning to sanctum before the update. I am able to play other MMO’s such a World of Warcraft, Neverwinter, Final Fantasy with a latency of 80.

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Today it shows my latency as 87, but what I don’t understand is the timestamp, that seems to change more often than the other numbers. My latency sky rockets when going near more than 1 portal, and after going through a portal it shoots up to over 1000ms.

This is because the game is downloading chunks and it is overloading your networking.

What is your Chunk Rate Limit set at? Try setting it to “Low”.

and

Because these games don’t download an entire voxel world. Latency and bandwidth are not the same thing.

Please share the output from this site.

Tonight the new meditation screen has been the root of constant frustration for me.

I can deal with a bit of latency (or a lot), but being constantly disrupted by an annoying screen that pops up for a half second or two every now and again and disrupts everything is worse than the constant ads in free cellphone games.

EDIT: I’ve seen you mention previously that you design for up to 500ms of latency from client to world. The connection drop screen should only pop up after a multiple of this interval so it should take at least two seconds of bad connectivity to occur. The frequency with which I experienced the screen at with the Vulpto issues was much more regular - on and off. This implies that both the “there is a problem” and the “we’re back again” detection is overly sensitive.

Even if you have perfect control of your servers you have to accommodate traffic issues in a graceful manner. From a user experience point of view the previous release did this perfectly - I never even once thought about connectivity whilst playing. This release makes every little traffic issue into something that disrupts the user experience. Whilst it is important to let the user know that something is not quite right, it should not take control of our experience or be more disruptive than the issue it is trying to notify us of.

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I, for one, strongly prefer this method. Previously 500+ ms meant I was likely looking at the sanctum, because I got auto-driven off a cliff or into lava. Now at least instead of driving me off a cliff and losing tool durability, I’ll see the sanctum or the meditation for it for a second. Far preferable.

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Deviating a little bit from this post’s purpose. Edit:(Thought I was on “Report issues” so this is not out of topic)

While the meditation animation looks cool, I think it’s really annoying to switch the view that fast. Really feels really disruptive. A good combination would be to retain the current system (we can’t move and message pops up) but leave the player’s view as is (first person).

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Yeah I agree completely. Especially that this can happen:

I think character should just freeze in place, no sliding, no sitting etc and as you said show just the message :slight_smile:

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Updated OP for 169.1 release.

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Is that out yet? One of those things blind-sided me for just about all my HP just now. If that’s reduction, who needs escalation? :slight_smile:

Meanwhile, plants on non-flat ground are pretty darned invulnerable. One can’t tell which block they’ve grown from.

Sometimes the hitbox appears above the plant. Try swinging above it as if the plant were one level higher.

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