Xonotic Balance Test Release

Outcome of the event
Shortly after XWIT, we will create a public balance survey where you can give feedback about the two balances and other such stuff which were tested. We want to finally settle the balance debate once and for all. With this survey we will decide upon the direction of balance in Xonotic, and stick with it. Once we have finished with that and other such decisions, we generally plan on creating a full beta release in the near future. ;-)

One thing: please don't make entering personal data like age or email address obligatory for this survey. Please don't.

Oh, and to say something positive about all this after all, I think this is the best idea in the whole balance discussion so far and I really appreciate the decision to proceed in this way. And thanks to all those who spent their time organizing this!

It's not impossible to move the event forward once again --- Honestly that may work out better for everyone in that case. Let me know what you guys think -- are more of you available May 6th through May 8th? I can't be there on the 22nd-24th (easter weekend) as I have to leave for family stuff and NOTHING would happen without me there. (I'm the one who is organizing all this)

Oh and yes, that was our mistake before on the last survey.. This time age and such will be pretty irrelevant though. By the way (before someone asks), we're working on the community survey from before. It's a lot of work to process and the only people who can do it have been busy.

I look forward to testing this balance. I think the current date is ok with me, but if it has to be rescheduled, that's also ok too.

Ooh please don't get me wrong you don't need to postpone the XWIT just because of me, there'll always be people who can't participate for a reason or another. I was just like WTF when I saw you put it just there where I already had three events concurring which are all about equally important to me. I hope to have a bit more time during the next few weeks anyway so I probably will be playing some pickup games again (if people are available). Plus I am easily satisfied so I'll probably happily go with whatever balance will be chosen, provided the laser is useful for flying around.

Just please don't put extra effort in this only because of me. That's totally not necessary.

It's not JUST because of you -- there are quite a few others who have said the same issue, for example Antibody who I rather need for statistics to be set up and such.

Downloading fixed version.

I won't be available the 30th, but other than that I think I will be able to sneak some playtime in. Actually most of my free time is on weekday afternoons. Looks like XWIT will encourage server migration, which will hopefully result in player migration as well

I think (bigger) player migration will happen once a balance file has been put in place but i'm sure they will come over and play on the weekend testing, and let's be honest it should be Samual's one anyway as it is maintained and is the best, default one was tinkered with too much in the end and became ruined then anyway imo

Either way, looking forward towards the next release with something stable in this regards.

Let's go with balanceSamual.cfg, it is an improvement over the 0.1beta balance!

Everyone who plays this game seems to agree, I honestly don't even see why we need to "focus" on that... But great to get everyone together and play finally!

It's not JUST because of you -- there are quite a few others who have said the same issue, for example Antibody who I rather need for statistics to be set up and such.

Do what you need to do.

Let's go with balanceSamual.cfg, it is an improvement over the 0.1beta balance!

Everyone who plays this game seems to agree, I honestly don't even see why we need to "focus" on that... But great to get everyone together and play finally!

I 100% agree

I also agree with what FruitieX said, I don't think there is any need to focus on the preview version balance I think people will get confused if they have to play with both, I think you should get people to test with what I call the current default which is known as Samual's Balance.

Let's go with balanceSamual.cfg, it is an improvement over the 0.1beta balance!

Everyone who plays this game seems to agree, I honestly don't even see why we need to "focus" on that... But great to get everyone together and play finally!

Let's go with balanceWTF in all seriousness, balanceSamual is the best balance file I've seen made for the game and a much better direction than I intended for my balance.

It's not JUST because of you -- there are quite a few others who have said the same issue, for example Antibody who I rather need for statistics to be set up and such.

I don't care when it is, just the easter weekend is really bad.

It's 2 weeks before the weekend and today we already had a full house (16 people+) on my CTF server for ~an hour+ This looks promising.

Yep I was there and damn that played well. Something changed performance wise too for me, much more playable now. In fact, I could not tell you a single thing yet that I think needs changing. But I will keep playing as much as I can the upcoming weeks. There is no reason for me to go back to playing Nexuiz anymore, I was even relatively speedy in CTS woo!

I still do have problems with this new download. I made some sreanshots, but can't find them, someone know where screenshots are saved, so i can post them?

You can find screenshots in My Documents/My Games/xonotic on windows and ~/.xonotic on Linux. They are probably within the data folder there.

Yep I was there and damn that played well. Something changed performance wise too for me, much more playable now. In fact, I could not tell you a single thing yet that I think needs changing. But I will keep playing as much as I can the upcoming weeks. There is no reason for me to go back to playing Nexuiz anymore, I was even relatively speedy in CTS woo!

kojn you missed it so you should be crying now, i'll give you a shoulder to cry on, hf

I was 'about' but was getting drunk and doing other stuff in my house :p

I do however really need to start playing a lot more ffs! Too rusty :p

Ok, the feedback from my group is in.

Samual's balance was liked much better, they liked the changes to the MG and Electro. Nex's automatic charging went over well also. Much thumbs up to Red Planet's improvements. The RL fell out of favor to the Electro. Extremely negative reaction to the Rifle's headshot damage nerfing (I'm looking at the balance now... regular is 60 and headshot is 50? WTH?).

BIG thanks for letting me take all health units all the time. However I do still like the idea of health being stable between 100 and 150. And why should armor rot at all?

One thing I don't like is the new models for armor and health, to me they are way to low visibility. They have
a) less color
b) less glow
c) less surface area
d) less distinction (for example the 25 armor looks similar to the 5)

The Hagar's primary as well as the HLAC's primary were BOTH lowered, now they nearly identical

The Crylink is less powerful that default (but this is good I think, it was over-powered then). Also the secondary's slow refire makes it not so spammy, you actually have to guestimate the angles now.

The Seeker idea of tagging with secondary is a good idea, but it's missiles are WAY underpowered. Also the chase feature really only works in open areas, rather useless indoors. Perhaps we could take it back to 4 missiles that do about half the damage of the (old) rocket.

The RL felt underpowered but that is likely just because we've been used to it being the top dog for so long, now it has to compete with the Electro.

Reloading on the MG is good but only if it is kept powerful. It makes you attack and retreat more tactically, because you can wreak havoc with it, but if you run out you are vulnerable. Encourages you to move more. Also the secondary seems to be under controversy, maybe we could put the reload there?

The Mine Layer is useless and too complicated now, what with the safety parameters and 3-mine limit and detonation after so long. Very cumbersome. Still has potential though.

All in all I and my group say make it default

One more thing, my rifle crosshairs are missing and the ammo ring for it shows up really tiny. I'm using per-weapon and that's the only one that's missing.

Will Xonotic continue distribution of its official releases through Bittorrent? It just seemed odd that this one isn't using Bittorrent, but I'm guessing thats because this is more of a beta than 0.1.0preview is. Once I'm done downloading I'll generate a torrent file and magnet link, maybe even figure out how to include the mirrors as web seeds

Edit1: Got done downloading awhile ago (verified the md5sum before creating torrent file), torrent link is below, url tag refused to work with magnet link. For those who already downloaded through http and want to seed, add this torrent in a paused state, make the save folder match where xonotic-20110414.zip is, then do a force recheck, everything should be good to go when you resume the torrent. Now if only I could get Deluge to work with webseeds, there is supposed to be a plugin somewhere...

Development build torrent - 814.7MB - 512KB Piece Size
md5sum: 350c215223d6673ad464c0160e679400
Info Hash (SHA1 base16): 7e8d9e54bf2728d9e55fab1d98612d8d364a7401
Magnet: magnet:?xt=urn:btih2GZ4VF7E4UNTZK7VMOZQYJNRU3EU5AB&dn=xonotic-20110414.zip (url tag doesn't work, copy/paste into address bar should work)
http://members.thebestisp.com/~damian/li...ip.torrent (Anywhere || Nowhere... Hopefully the former >.>)

Edit2: Peers can't connect to me because I'm behind a NAT, so I updated the torrent file to include openbittorrent as a tracker. To include the tracker either redownload the torrent file and open with your client or add "udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce" to your tracker list.

Well this clearly isn't an official release, you can go ahead and make a torrent for it but it sincerely isn't needed in this case. This is a development release, it's not going to last long.

You greatly misunderstood that cvar, nowego4 -- the 50 damage for headshots is ADDED damage, so it's actually 110 (60 normal PLUS 50 headshot) damage in total. And as for the health/armor models, we can easily improve the textures and scale them properly later. Some other people have noted the same thing, so i'll keep it in mind and see if there's any way we can improve them in such ways.

I have no idea what to do with the minelayer. ;3

Ok, the feedback from my group is in.

Samual's balance was liked much better, they liked the changes to the MG and Electro. Nex's automatic charging went over well also. Much thumbs up to Red Planet's improvements. The RL fell out of favor to the Electro. Extremely negative reaction to the Rifle's headshot damage nerfing (I'm looking at the balance now... regular is 60 and headshot is 50? WTH?).

BIG thanks for letting me take all health units all the time. However I do still like the idea of health being stable between 100 and 150. And why should armor rot at all?

One thing I don't like is the new models for armor and health, to me they are way to low visibility. They have
a) less color
b) less glow
c) less surface area
d) less distinction (for example the 25 armor looks similar to the 5)

The Hagar's primary as well as the HLAC's primary were BOTH lowered, now they nearly identical

The Crylink is less powerful that default (but this is good I think, it was over-powered then). Also the secondary's slow refire makes it not so spammy, you actually have to guestimate the angles now.

The Seeker idea of tagging with secondary is a good idea, but it's missiles are WAY underpowered. Also the chase feature really only works in open areas, rather useless indoors. Perhaps we could take it back to 4 missiles that do about half the damage of the (old) rocket.

The RL felt underpowered but that is likely just because we've been used to it being the top dog for so long, now it has to compete with the Electro.

Reloading on the MG is good but only if it is kept powerful. It makes you attack and retreat more tactically, because you can wreak havoc with it, but if you run out you are vulnerable. Encourages you to move more. Also the secondary seems to be under controversy, maybe we could put the reload there?

The Mine Layer is useless and too complicated now, what with the safety parameters and 3-mine limit and detonation after so long. Very cumbersome. Still has potential though.

All in all I and my group say make it default

One more thing, my rifle crosshairs are missing and the ammo ring for it shows up really tiny. I'm using per-weapon and that's the only one that's missing.

Agree with the armor having low visibility and the health being hard to distinguish between. My major complaint outside of that is that I like to play with the crosshairs turned off (I've been fragging competitively since Goldeneye 007 when I was a kid, which didn't have them) and there's no other place on the HUD that ammo is visible at. I disagree with moving reload to the secondary of ANY weapon (hell, the zoom would be ditched as well if I had it my way as you can already bind that somewhere else and use it with any weapon), especially if we have multiple weapons that need to be reloaded. Also, the headshot damage is ADDED damage, so a headshot would be 60+50=110 damage done to an enemy. The only thing I hate about the rifle now is the lack of panic-fire (allows you to unload the magazine quickly in a bad situation at the expense of doing only a fraction of the rifle's potential damage) which was present in a few older balances such as Nexuiz's balance and my balance. Don't know what to do with the mine layer or seeker, I guess reserve those weapons for special purposes, like for if and when vehicles are introduced.

Mine layer is seriously fine, perhaps a bit higher damage, something along he lines of 50-60 per a mine. It's quite powerfull in guarding doors and elevators and anything else that's worth of sneaky. Mining flags is also great. IT should insta explode tough or very very low delay. Also 10 seconds lifetime may need tweaking too so get to testing on the values!

(hell, the zoom would be ditched as well if I had it my way as you can already bind that somewhere else and use it with any weapon)

Not everyone has one of these:

;P