Patch: august 4th, bug fixes, facebook integration, installer/update compression

[lamster]

improved facebook support - invite your facebook friends to play altitude!

improved resource compression, reduced installer size

adjusted tutorial difficulty levels

updated tbd_asteroids - modified rock that could damage your plane just after landing, removed exploit - thanks to protest_boy for original map and update

modified 'balanceTeams' -- increased vote threshold to 60%, all players now die/respawn whether they changed teams or not (streak stats kept, veteran bars reset)
modified 'startTournament' -- now only the administrator can initiate a tournament (unless voteability explicitly enabled in the server config)
modified 'stopTournament' -- vote threshold reduced to 49%
removed "player has joined team" messages from FFA mode

fixed a bunch of bugs

[[J.C.] Technician]

yay!!!!

[DubyaCapumWolfeGee]

The balanced team thing was getting annoying thanks.

[nesnl]

Any chance you will fix the heavy cannon secondary in the next patch? It is still grossly underpowered.

[Ferret]

Originally Posted by nesnl

Any chance you will fix the heavy cannon secondary in the next patch? It is still grossly underpowered.

I believe that the trade-off for having heavy cannon is having a weakened secondary and that this is intentional. The design behind heavy cannon is that you can defeat most planes and perk combinations at long range in 2 or 3 shots, with the extra bar damage it nears the point where one shot can take out 80-90% of the plane's health. The heavy cannon is also extremely effective at short range because the shot still does the same amount of damage and it is considerably easy to hit close targets. The trade off for this is that it is not possible to use the machine gun to kill an opponent with the same effectiveness because you have selected to go with a long range style of play. To say that there should be little penalty for missing when you have chosen to play with a big damage, long-firing gun if an enemy chooses to fly next to you is losing sight of the big picture. For useful machine gun damage I suggest you try to play with the dogfighter or recoilless machine gun perks

[as red as black]

Originally Posted by Ferret

I believe that the trade-off for having heavy cannon is having a weakened secondary and that this is intentional. The design behind heavy cannon is that you can defeat most planes and perk combinations at long range in 2 or 3 shots, with the extra bar damage it nears the point where one shot can take out 80-90% of the plane's health. The heavy cannon is also extremely effective at short range because the shot still does the same amount of damage and it is considerably easy to hit close targets. The trade off for this is that it is not possible to use the machine gun to kill an opponent with the same effectiveness because you have selected to go with a long range style of play. To say that there should be little penalty for missing when you have chosen to play with a big damage, long-firing gun if an enemy chooses to fly next to you is losing sight of the big picture. For useful machine gun damage I suggest you try to play with the dogfighter or recoilless machine gun perks

i recently made the switch to recoilless but am afraid of applauding its amazingness for fear of accidently getting it nerfed as well

[nesnl]

I am not saying return it to full power, but a 30% reduction seems a bit much. I would like to see it at maybe 15% and see how that feels. Right now it's energy per damage for the short range gun is incredibly bad. So I am not saying there shouldn't be some kind of trade off for having a higher powered cannon, but I don't think it should only be a long range style of play as that just limits the game more in an already limited environment.

[NomNom]

It's weak compared to what? It's still at least as powerful as recoiless if not more, it's just not as overpowered as it was before which was the intention.

[nesnl]

Originally Posted by NomNom

It's weak compared to what? It's still at least as powerful as recoiless if not more, it's just not as overpowered as it was before which was the intention.

This is incorrect. Using the dogfighter as the benchmark I believe that the recoilless short range gun does 4% less damage and the heavy cannon short range gun does 30% less damage. (On top of that the dogfighter also gets a slight advantage in using less energy per shot as well).

This is all the more reason to post some kind of excel workbook or stat sheet somewhere. Expecting us to keep track of all the difference between each plane and perk setup is not fun. And a lot of it depends on how long a player has been around. There is no indication in game that lets players know how effective each weapon is even when they appear to be the same in game.

[NomNom]

I wasn't talking about just the secondary weapon, but the plane's strength overall. Sure the hard cannon's secondary does 30% less damage but the primary does what? 100% more dmg? 200%? + piercing.

[nesnl]

Originally Posted by NomNom

I wasn't talking about just the secondary weapon, but the plane's strength overall. Sure the hard cannon's secondary does 30% less damage but the primary does what? 100% more dmg? 200%? + piercing.

Are you talking about comparing one bullet from the normal long range gun compared to the heavy cannon? That really wouldn't make much sense. I bet the damage per energy for the heavy cannon is similar to the damage per energy of the long range gun but I can never be sure because we don't really have access to that data.

So the definition of "overall strength" is related to what it's damage per energy it has for its weapons. The problem comes when people get penalized for having good aim. Just because I get good at aiming the heavy cannon doesn't mean it should do less damage nor the plane get nerfed due to being good at it.

[Ferret]

Originally Posted by nesnl

Are you talking about comparing one bullet from the normal long range gun compared to the heavy cannon? That really wouldn't make much sense. I bet the damage per energy for the heavy cannon is similar to the damage per energy of the long range gun but I can never be sure because we don't really have access to that data.

So the definition of "overall strength" is related to what it's damage per energy it has for its weapons. The problem comes when people get penalized for having good aim. Just because I get good at aiming the heavy cannon doesn't mean it should do less damage nor the plane get nerfed due to being good at it.

By having good aim, the target dies in 2 shots. What is the penalty? You are suggesting creating a situation in which there is no benefit for having good aim because even when you miss, and keep in mind that heavy cannon can be used and often is used from directly next to the target resulting in high close range burst damage, you can switch to the next weapon that does a high amount of burst damage in the same area. In the grand scheme of things, the only way to balance heavy cannon while maintaining a high machine gun damage/burst rate is to reduce the damage of heavy cannon which would actually punish people who do have a good aim.

[nobodyhome]

you're forgetting the major issue in heavy cannon biplane: the recoil. having recoil on the long range machine gun often makes the hc biplane a sitting duck after firing a shot or two at someone, whereas for the recoiless there is no such problem. for hc biplane, i barely use the secondary anymore, the heavy cannon is enough for most offensive purposes, but having the secondary reduced means that i can't use it for defensive purposes.

maybe the secondary's energy usage should decrease a little for compensation? so that i can use the secondary, as well as having enough energy to afterburn away from sticky situations.

[nesnl]

Originally Posted by Ferret

By having good aim, the target dies in 2 shots. What is the penalty? You are suggesting creating a situation in which there is no benefit for having good aim because even when you miss, and keep in mind that heavy cannon can be used and often is used from directly next to the target resulting in high close range burst damage, you can switch to the next weapon that does a high amount of burst damage in the same area. In the grand scheme of things, the only way to balance heavy cannon while maintaining a high machine gun damage/burst rate is to reduce the damage of heavy cannon which would actually punish people who do have a good aim.

There shouldn't be a penalty for having good aim? The penalty for any weapon is missing the shot. For heavy cannon that means a large chunk of your energy bar. Miss two shots and you have to wait for more to recharge before taking a third.

But again, I am not saying that it should be restored to full damage. I am saying that it should be increased from where it is now. It currently stands at 30% less damage than the dogfighter. Why not try doing something like 15% less damage than the dogfighter? The game took an interesting turn in balance once it was released. There was a large influx of demo players and therefore the players who had the biplane unlocked were typically more experienced. This turned into a lot of griping on the forums by less experienced players not because the plane was so overpowered but because new players weren't as good and didn't know what to do. That in turn resulted in a nerf. Ever notice that the heavy cannon seemed to do fine when the game was in beta?... no one was complaining. The same thing happened to the miranda. Noobs complain and stuff gets nerfed. It was kinda funny though that the opposite happened with the bomber. Too many newer players were playing it so it created a situation where older players complained about too much spam because demo players were now being restricted to that plane (and of course loopy).

These really are the problems in my mind is that the game was and is no longer being balanced based on a relatively equal skill range of players but rather catering towards the large influx of new players. I just want the game to be balanced so that if I am playing in a game with pillars, gameguard, blank, etc that each plane feels balanced. Right now that is most definitely not the case and you would see that more if you played in the tournament and/or had more games to choose from that weren't infested with suicidal demo players.

[Smushface]

I agree with maimer.

Now hopping of his dick.

First off HC is countered in TDM or any sort of 1v1 / chase situation / killing a good bomb runner by random movement. The hit box on HC is bigger than it looks, but it is still smaller than grenade's hitbox and somewhat similiar to miranda's fully charged bouncy shot.

And while we're comparing HC to other planes, lets compare HC to grenades and fully charged miranda shots. Pretty similar in terms of straight damage. Miranda can kill planes faster than a HC biplane with charged shot / slice combos and bomber can spam shots with nades as long as energy is there. A GOOD bomber, which rarely exists, can kill so disgustingly fast its stupid. HC suffers the danger of recoil and then stalling. Attacking targets from below is risky. Fire 3 shots from straight on and you stall.

[Smushface]

And in terms of general balance towards new players, I agree.

Developers will almost always choose to go where the money is at the cost of alienating their "core" base. Which is understandable because that's whats profitable. Which is why I lost faith in the gaming industry.

But there are a few things that I disagree with. Why should all perks be created equal. There's no reason for Dogfighter / Trickster / Tracker / Suppressor / Director be in any way comparable to later perks? Maybe they should be fairly competitive, but then that countermands the incentive of a level system. It also goes against any incentive why a decent player who does well playing a demo bomber to buy the game.

To sum up. I am pretty loyal to this game. HC Biplane got nerfed, which I thought was one of the more skilled set ups (with great reward) in the game. The reason why I quit playing WoW and so many other games was because of the catering to "casuals" and generally scrubby players. So Altitude hasn't gone too far to the deep end yet. And I speak for most players who have been around for a while when I say, I don't mind promoting the game. And if having a more balanced, higher skill-cap, balanced game, means I HAVE to be nicer to bads, then I guess I will be. But please, don't take the Blizzard route.

[as red as black]

Heavy cannon should be upped 15%

reasons:

It is the weapon that requires the most precise aim. There is no spray damage, there is no bouncy, it doesn't home in. (There is pierce, but how often does that get a second kill? be honest). On top of requiring good aim, it takes a fairly large chunk of energy and has a fairly slow fire rate. The shooter only has 3 decent attempts at taking out their enemy. (it takes 2 hits to kill loopy / miranda and 3+ for everything else...that means you gotta be crazy accurate) This energy consumption coupled with the heavy shot's recoil forces biplane to always be at low or no energy. Heavy shot's secondary also has crazy recoil. So in affect, HC weapon set up saps forward momentum while eating energy, forcing afterburns.

Heavy cannon, therefore, is a bane to the biplane and should be replaced with a completely different weapon....PROTON TORPEDOES

okay maybe not....but the costs of heavy cannon setup are so great, it should be rewarded with strong payload.

again...the reason for all the bitching is just that (for the most part), 70% of biplane players are pretty damn good at the game. Don't change a plane because of the people that play it. Change it assuming that the plane itself is unfair.

[NomNom]

Originally Posted by as red as black

again...the reason for all the bitching is just that (for the most part), 70% of biplane players are pretty damn good at the game. Don't change a plane because of the people that play it. Change it assuming that the plane itself is unfair.

And 95% of those biplane users were hard cannon users because it was clearly the most powerful option...
Honestly I think if you compare HC to other planes in the game, it wasn't that overpowered but if you compare it to recoiless and dogfighter there was a very big advantage.

[ham]

i've said my piece on heavy cannon 100 times. i'm with maimer/arab/smush.

i would also i like to point out that smushface said "countermands." what a douche.


-moxie

[Kuja900]

Originally Posted by ham

i've said my piece on heavy cannon 100 times. i'm with maimer/arab/smush.

i would also i like to point out that smushface said "countermands." what a douche.


-moxie

Tack my name on that list I find the HC nerf redonkulous. It is a complete joke close range at the moment.

[tyr]

Originally Posted by NomNom

And 95% of those biplane users were hard cannon users because it was clearly the most powerful option...
Honestly I think if you compare HC to other planes in the game, it wasn't that overpowered but if you compare it to recoiless and dogfighter there was a very big advantage.

I disagree.
It was about the same except playing with recoilless is much more risky since YOU HAVE TO get to close range in order to deal some serious damage, which isnt HC's case.
I've never used HC because I don't like its playstyle, but from what i've seen with the previous version of HC, either most HC users are a lot worst than me, or HC isnt a lot better than recoilless.

[DiogenesDog]

I don't remember any of these posts from new players saying that the biplane was overpowered, but whatever.

I actually think the HC biplane balance is much better now - maybe the mgun could use a slight bump, but making it into a really viable option would be a bad idea I think. the bigger issue to me is that the super nerfed machine gun "feels" wrong and is counterintuitive. Personally, I really liked the initial solution where you got a shorter ranged biplane primary as your secondary, but meh.

Anyway, I don't think there's going to be any way to balance the HC so that the primary is still a fun, extremely powerful sniping weapon and the machine gun is also fairly powerful. I really think the key though is to change the packaging of the short ranged weapon to make it feel more right - give it different gfx/sfx or something, I dunno.

[Fatknacker]

Originally Posted by lamster

improved facebook support - invite your facebook friends to play altitude!

So is this alienating me as I’m not on FaceBook?
(and don’t have any friends )

[Triped]

Seems like my latency is worse with this patch. I was spiking > 1s on every server and usually I'm between 15 and 30ms on US servers. Anyone else having that problem? Anything I can do to confirm it's the patch and not a coincidental hardware or software problem on my end?

[hurripilot]

Once again, sniper pistol Heavy Cannon? Puhhhhleeeeeeeeeeeeeees?!?!?! It was just so right for the whole idea of the Heavy Cannon. Again, It should fire at the same time as the Primary, not alternating like it did before.

Think about it, even if the secondary did as much damage as the mgun secondary does now, it would be so much more effective because each round you aimed at the enemy would actually hit! The mgun is just a spray and pray and sometimes, the prayer is not answered

[eth]

Agreed with all the dudes saying HC needs a slight buff. I remember I tried to finish off a guy smoking black with the shortrange gun, and despite firing up his ass for like 5 seconds, he still got away. That was.. pretty disappointing. As it is, theres not even a reason to use it - HC users can just basically forget about their D.

Also, dunno if the devs read this, but: it'd be nice to get a response on the plane info, if you can release it for us desperate theorycrafters, or just tell us you won't do it for whatever reason. Instead of complete silence, which is a bit disheartening :P

Also also! I love patches, and am thankful for them, but would it be possible to get an ETA on the next major patch? Thinking along the lines of a big feature like scriptable maps/moving objects, game modes, support plane or something lke that. I mean, Altitude is my life, and I need something to look forward to

[PBS]

Anything that isn't a buff for miranda I like, so buff them all...except miranda!

[gameguard]

I beleive the current incarnation of time anchor is a bit too powerful. The effective cooldown of their warp is ridiculously short, making it near impossible to hit them in many situations. There is like no penalty for making a bad warp because you can just do it again. Before, if you juke them out into warping while you save energy for a burst, you could be fairly certain you can hit them. Now, they just simply warp indefinitely because the cooldown is shorter than the time it takes to aim at their new location. This is more of a gripe in TDM but it effects TDB as well in terms of bomb carrying.

I think time anchor should have a set cooldown time regardless of the length of their tail. Make the cooldown reasonable so there is some penalty for doing a bad warp.

[Replica]

Originally Posted by Triped

Seems like my latency is worse with this patch. I was spiking > 1s on every server and usually I'm between 15 and 30ms on US servers. Anyone else having that problem? Anything I can do to confirm it's the patch and not a coincidental hardware or software problem on my end?

Have the same prob, my normal ping in US servers was around 117/120 now its almost always 148/150.
Few days ago i heard for the first time from a player that a lagged and that sucks big time as i play mostly on US servers. EU servers latency has gone up to from 18 to around 50 now, hope this can be fixed in some way as i didn't change anything in my comp or router.

[Vi*]

Originally Posted by DiogenesDog

Personally, I really liked the initial solution where you got a shorter ranged biplane primary as your secondary...

Agreed

I'm on the Dio/ferret side of the argument.
I'd like to see some suggestions beside damage buff/nerfs.

[hurripilot]

YES. SNIPER PISTOL! PLZ PLZ PLZ PLZ PLZ PLZ PLZ PLZ!!!

[Blank]

heavy cannon MG does suck. Not sure if 15% would do **** or just put us back to the same problem we had before. It's not like we have actual #'s to go by.

It'd be interesting to know the burst DPS (and DPE!) of all 3 variants. I do think a pecking order of Dogfighter > Recoilless > Heavy Cannon makes sense (and it's likely where it's at now) but maybe the #'s could be tightened some.

On the other hand, it would be WAY MORE AWESOME if Heavy Cannon biplane got a secondary that actually synergized with the rest of the plane.

Right now, none of the planes actually play differently regardless of your perk setups (the only exception being laser Miranda vrs the other two... and I guess Bomb variant bomber, but who the **** flies that piece of ****). You might detonate an explodet missile sooner/later if you're thermo/director or spam acid bombs a bit more than you would EMP, but your overall gameplan doesn't really change as much as playing the miranda. It'd be nice if heavy cannon biplane was the primarily 'ranged' biplane. Ditch the machine gun entirely, give it something better than a nerfed dogfighter primary, and see how it flies.... what that something should be, I dunno -_-




On a different issue entirely, I found out you can see farther with a higher resolution. It's not by much, but it's enough for people (on my screen) to be invisible but me be visible to them on there's. That answers a lot of my complaints about getting shot at offscreen... turns out I wasn't offscreen to them :[

[ham]

Originally Posted by gameguard

I beleive the current incarnation of time anchor is a bit too powerful. The effective cooldown of their warp is ridiculously short, making it near impossible to hit them in many situations. There is like no penalty for making a bad warp because you can just do it again. Before, if you juke them out into warping while you save energy for a burst, you could be fairly certain you can hit them. Now, they just simply warp indefinitely because the cooldown is shorter than the time it takes to aim at their new location. This is more of a gripe in TDM but it effects TDB as well in terms of bomb carrying.

I think time anchor should have a set cooldown time regardless of the length of their tail. Make the cooldown reasonable so there is some penalty for doing a bad warp.

agreed. ten characters

[lamster]

Re: Heavy Cannon, I'm open to further experimentation - the nerf may have been excessive. My goal with balance has always been to create interesting and fun variety on the battlefield. For balance decisions, I look mainly at medium to very high skill games. I nerfed HC because it felt overwhelmingly powerful to the point that serious players were forced to choose HC to compete, foregoing other interesting alternative configs/playstyles if they wanted a fair chance. I will not nerf a plane because a superior player has an advantage with it -- that's the whole point! I will nerf a plane if all extremely high skill players are forced to play a particular config which disproportionately rewards skill; otherwise expert games become very boring with everyone playing the same 2 or 3 configs. In that case, it is best to match the "expert player power" of various configs -- I think most people will agree that noone yet has completely mastered any config, and that an ideal experience would be achieved with a variety of viable high-skill configs. And yes, I realize that not all planes have equal skill caps -- in those cases I'm ok with the "higher skill" planes having an advantage at the highest levels of play, but disproportionate power that removes all battlefield variety cannot be tolerated.

Balance across skill levels (e.g. HC is great in an expert's hands, and terrible in a new player's) is mostly a separate issue which is best addressed with matchmaking. We will implement a matchmaker as soon as we have the player base to support it.

Originally Posted by Blank

On a different issue entirely, I found out you can see farther with a higher resolution...

I believe you are mistaken. Go into a server, scroll your camera to the bottom left, and make note of the rightmost and topmost visible elements.
In the chat box, type /optionsGraphicsResolution [tab-complete to the lowest resolution], note screen edges
In the chat box, type /optionsGraphicsResolution [tab-complete to the highest resolution], note screen edges -- they will be the same. If not send me a bugReport -- I have never seen an example that produced inconsistent viewable areas.

[nobodyhome]

I think the main argument that is being made is not that the game is being balanced from a low skill perspective (otherwise, heavy cannon would not have been nerfed, since heavy cannon biplanes sucks at a low skill level). You argue that the reason why many high-level players were opting for the heavy cannon was because the heavy cannon was the most powerful at a high skill level. However, I argue that the reason why high-level players chose heavy cannon is because of the high skill ceiling of the heavy cannon--i.e., the players chose heavy cannon because it's fun to play a high-skill plane, rather than the players choosing heavy cannon because it's more powerful than recoilless in the hands of a high-skill player.

Although I agree that in the unnerfed incarnation, the heavy cannon biplane was slightly more powerful than the recoilless, it seems that it was nerfed too hard because it was perceived that the high proportion of heavy cannon biplane was directly related to the powerfulness of the plane, rather than a combination of the powerfulness and the funness of it.

The solution to keeping the amount of players on each plane roughly equal, then, is not to nerf the heavy cannon so hard, but to increase the level of skill it takes to play recoilless so that it is roughly the same as the heavy cannon but without changing the overall power of the plane--thus increasing the funness of recoilless but without changing its power.

[Triped]

Originally Posted by Replica

Have the same prob, my normal ping in US servers was around 117/120 now its almost always 148/150.
Few days ago i heard for the first time from a player that a lagged and that sucks big time as i play mostly on US servers. EU servers latency has gone up to from 18 to around 50 now, hope this can be fixed in some way as i didn't change anything in my comp or router.

Just wanted to say that I fixed my problem. We have new neighbors upstairs and they were using the same wireless channel. Hope you fix yours. :\

[Rechtschaffen]

I feel that the 2ndary on heavy cannon biplane should be something really different. Not the current burst machinegun - we already have that twice. Not a version of the dogfighter gun - not popular enough.

I say just try something crazy. Maybe an <i>up thruster</i>. It lifts the plane from the plane's 'floor' (where the wheels are). This will help you to stabilise the plane to snipe, to correct for stalling when the cannon's recoil knocks your speed out, avoid returning fire... of course if you're upside down the effects are different, but maybe still useful sometimes.
Or perhaps something the deploys out the back to deter chasing enemies - like a burst grenade with a thermobaric effect.

Something to help the heavy cannon get out of close range situations.


I personally so rarely use the burstgun on the heavy cannon I forget it's there, because I try to kill mid-to-long-range using reverse thruster to get the advantage.

Maybe we could get some player involvement on this. Some collective thinking and voting could help?

[gameguard]

machine gun at this point is useful for one thing. Using the recoil to get out of tough spots. You can shoot a plane spewing black smoke with it and they still get away sometimes. Thats just retarded. I Personally dont even see how FD is usefull on this plane. FD does not one shot anything. Its much more efficient to shoot 2 heavy shots. FD also causes massive recoil that can stall you.

I personally wouldnt mind a different gun alltogether. If we are keeping the machine gun 15% might be more reasonable. Maybe you could comepensate by changing the machine gun range to REALLY short so that it can only work when you are rigth in front of the enemy.... (which really wont be much of a nerf cus thats the only time you FD anyways. But still this limits the use somewhat)

[Blank]

random idea for a new "d" button: Dead stop. The biplane basically becomes an immobile turret (think time wizard... except you actually have to use a button to stop... and it uses energy). I'm thinking a slow constant use of energy to prevent perma-turreting somewhere. Turning speed is also increased. Coming out of dead stop is like coming off a runway/coming out of warp (IE, you have forward momentum).

Added bonus would be to allow planes to collide with HC's in dead stop (both would take damage).

This could either be crazy awesome with reverse thrust or completely pointless/worthless like most of my ideas.

[Kuja900]

I didn't mind the initial reincarnation of HC with the medium range D. It made it so you did less damage to the target but had more time to inflict that damage which was a fair trade off imho. I would of course prefer old HC back however I wouldn't mind that again but may be with some recoil slapped onto it.