The Tough Break Update is Coming...

[henke37]

Is that really all in there? Where?

%steamroot%\steamapps\common\team fortress2\hl2\hl2_sound_vo_$lang_*.vpk
Also a bunch of stuff in hl2\hl2_sound_misc_*.vpk, grep for "vo".

 

[Vel0city]

Yes, I felt that you coming in and making grand claims (and this goes to more than just you) that XYZ are 'broken' is somewhat disrespectful. As a designer, it kind of hurts to see someone come in and be like "Hey, this really sucks, it's broken!" within 12 hours of a major balance change without giving it a chance to settle. Meta changes take time to adjust and settle. Additionally, the way your post (and specifically this first paragraph) was written tells me that your feedback, ontop of being knee-jerk is more emotional than logical. This does not invalidate your feedback. However, it's not the full picture. It's better feedback than what you've given, but I still wouldn't call it perfect.

Additionally (and to kind of add to my point about emotional/kneejerk rather than logical) you claim (less than 24 hours after the update) that Valve is being disrespectful for releasing a balance patch that you personally feel is broken. I know you can't release a broken game to the masses and ask for a money, or provide the option to spend money on it. The game works, it plays well on almost all systems, there's minimal major bugs (except for most of those tiny ones), it's stable. By definition, it is not broken. Broken is like, Assassins Creed Black Flag or Unity or whatever. Like I said before, and will continue to keep saying: These types of patches take time to settle. After talking with Dave Riller and Eric Smith in person at Valve, no more than a month ago, I can say that I have confidence that they and the rest of the TFTeam can take this game in a positive direction.

Now, onto the Phlog: Yes, fine feedback. I appreciate that you took the time to write up all that. I personally feel that is helpful.
I'm still not 100% convinced that the Phlog buff/nerf whatever is broken. I've played maybe 45minutes in the new patch. Every minute it was against a phlog pyro. I didn't feel like it was all that bad. I don't think I've had enough time to make a solid stance on it, but so far I haven't seen it stand out to me. Using the phlog in the current Tough Break Patch means you're giving up two things: Airblast (as always) and extinguishing team-mates. Which means, you're going to be a bit harder pressed to survive since you can't reflect things back and you can't get the 20HP bonus on teammate extinguish. Now, you're not completely locked out of that because you can use the manmelter, I presume, to get the same effect. Then you're losing out on the Damage from the Flaregun/Detonator<3/Shotgun. We'll leave melee weapons up in teh air since I have nothing really to about those. To use the phlog, to get to that powerful state, you sacrifice A LOT. If the current phlog was in the OLD meta, I would agree that it would probably be OP, but this isn't the old meta. It's a new meta, it's a new environment. Things are different. I feel like you might be still stuck in the old mentality of the meta... but that will pass with time... as I continue to say, it takes time to change metas.

Funke brings up some good points, but it's kind of selection bias here. FUNKe, love your videos, and this is no disrespect to you, or your content. FUNKe's a seasoned player. He'll know how to sneak behind people to properly use mmph, he'll know how to use the mmph mechanic. I watched the video in full, then rewatched some sections. What I see is a skilled player using a weapon skillfully, not a new/inexperienced player using it well. There is a BIG difference. In addition, you only ever see him use mmph, you don't see anything in between. You don't know how many times he could've died trying to build mmph, you don't know how long it took for him to get there (how long it takes to get mmph is worth making a note of too). Again, it's selection bias. You're seeing what FUNKe edits in, to help support his point. You don't see anything in between. It's a decent manipulation technique. Again, not saying that FUNKe is bad person or trying to manipulate anyone, but it's something note.

Anywho, my two cents.

tl;dr your feedback only shows to me that you're making kneejerk reactions to something that hasn't settled yet. FUNKe's video is a skilled player using the phlog skillfully, along with a dash of selection bias.

I wasn't talking about the balance patch being broken. A game that crashes (yes, crashes) on any operating system as soon as a full server loads up due to memory management issues that have been in the game since the April 29th 2015 update even though Valve claimed to have fixed them IS by definition a broken game. No soft locking, or occasional hiccups, crashing to the desktop and then not telling why it crashed.

I'm not going into balance discussions since each person has a different opinion about it. You asked for me to be more constructive, so I did that by giving my opinion backed up with facts. That was my opinion (also based on playing the game for about an hour on my Windows partition). This is your opinion, and I'm not going to bash that into the ground since that's pointless and stupid. We'll see how balance changes go on going forward.

As for you meeting TF2 devs in person: I don't have that luxury (I'd love to though, it's a game designer's dream), and from my view in front of my computer screen the way Valve has handled updates of any kind, whether they're small patches or big content updates like Gun Mettle or Tough Break makes me lose confidence in them being capable of keeping this game up and running. No, I'm not talking about balancing, I'm talking about the technical side of things (the whole first paragraph of the other post was about that. Should've made that more clear in hindsight. My bad). Almost every update for the past 1.5-2 years has been a textbook repetition of preceding updates: fix one thing, break something completely unrelated in the process. Sure, a mishap can happen at any time (we're human after all) but some alarm bells should be going off when it's happening almost every single time. I'm sure you want examples of this, so I'll give you a few of the bigger ones (note: these have nothing to do with weapon balancing or operating systems). Here goes in totally random order:

-Around November, 2014. Control Points on certain attack/defend maps such as Gravelpit can no longer be blocked by standing on them as the defending team. This is left in the game for about 2 weeks before finally being patched out. The update that caused this bug to begin with has no indication of anything being changed to the control point mechanic or code.

-March 2014. Numerous updates released shortly after each other breaks all sorts of things (again unrelated to the patch notes). First it's door animations that have to bite the dust, basically flickering open and close all the time. It's so bad you can see the still working areaportals close before the door model itself closes fully. On OS X the font gets completely washed out making it impossible to read anything, even gameplay-critical related things like health and ammo.

-Smissmass 2014. Something broke player rendering and still isn't fixed to this day, resulting in people randomly being drawn with all their weapons out at once. You've probably seen the videos/screenshots, but just to give an example here ya go.

-Somewhere in 2014 ragdolls get broken to a point where they just don't fall over. So you'll have a dead Sniper standing on the spot where you put a bullet in his head and after about 10 seconds you forgot that that Sniper is dead, so you think you have to counter snipe the dead Sniper. This same update actually broke physics in general, especially payload explosions on maps with a lot of animated physics debris such as Goldrush and Badwater. This one took a little while longer to fix.

-Late February 2015. The sound system gets broken, cutting any player-issued voice lines in half. This also silenced Demoknights so the moment you'd know you have one charging at you you'd be headless and very dead. Credit where it's due, this was fixed the next day (this falls in the "a mishap can happen at any time" category but still worth mentioning since the update that caused this never mentioned anything about sound related stuff).

-April 29th 2015 update broke memory management on OS X. The game kept eating memory without returning it resulting in TF2 eventually reaching its 32-bit memory address limit and crashing because of it. And then...

-Gun Mettle. The game on OS X already had an unstable memory management at this point but for some reason Gun Mettle just threw it out of the window, breaking the game in the same what it does now: running out of memory when loading up a map/server. A day later we got a temporary fix by limiting TF2's texture quality to medium "while work is being done on a permanent fix". That permanent fix is supposed to be the Tough Break update but it's not. TF2 pre-Tough Break runs. TF2 post-Tough Break doesn't.

-Somewhere late 2013 (before Smissmass 2013): The sound system gets screwed up on OS X for about a month, refusing to basically play any sound other than the main menu startup music. This also introduced a bug still not fixed to this day (2 years later): reflected sentry rockets will emit the default flamethrower sound on the point of impact.

-Finally, not sure what updated caused it but for a long time prop_dynamics were broken to a point of actually giving me actual headaches. They would flicker as soon as you shot them with any hitscan weapon, so playing Nucleus was basically a no-brainer since one Heavy on that map spamming the other side meant a constant flicker taking up 2/3rd of the screen.


These are some examples of the big things that happened that should not have happened, ever. Again, mishaps can happen, but with the current track record of TF2 updates you'd think Valve is a startup with a bunch of fresh college grads with TF2 being their first game and not an established multi-million $$$ company with some of the finest games in the world under their belt that's only 5 days younger than I am.

Anywho, my two cents.

 

[Pocket]

I can't weigh in on the above, but the one thing that really grinds my gears is, they have a GitHub set up specifically so people can report bugs, discuss them, and potentially narrow down the causes... and nobody from Valve has actually accessed it in over a year now. How exactly are they supposed to even be aware what needs to be fixed if every time people try to report bugs, they essentially plug their ears and go "LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU"?