arne said:
oh god really?
what smart ass comments? the ones where our player population hasn't decreased? that the games per player hasn't decreased either? that's not smart ass, that's true. i don't know what to say if you feel that doesn't fit with your perception of what's happened, that's just how it is.
we are listening and we're taking the feedback that's being discussed everywhere to heart. I don't know how you want to say that makes our post ungenuine. We can't discuss everything we're looking into right now, but I felt we couldn't say nothing, which is where this post came from. mostly because I and some of my colleagues kept trying to respond in different places and a good number of people, however small the subset that is, thought we weren't responding at all and just posted the update and went away and didn't bother to come back and read. which is wholly untrue.
if you don't think I don't read what's on here and other forums and I go over to our game designers or Evan and tell them about it and ask them to address certain things since the game has launched, you're dead wrong. the blog post we went up is a direct result of the fact that we sat down and talked about player reaction to the changes and since are *are* looking into it *because* of all the discussion, I felt we could mention that we were testing some stuff out to make further adjustments. it had nothing to do with the dlc and this would have gone down the same way (the blog post) even without dlc on the way.
I get it, you hate this update. Being the loudest, most persistent voice in the room doesn't make it true. neither do your blanket assumptions.
there is some truth in what you say, no matter how much we test anything, internally or even in a limited external capacity, you can never expect the gameplay strategies and workarounds a dedicated, sizable population of players. even our limited and "open" betas prior to release of the game didn't expose gameplay behaviors and workarounds that hinder enjoyment of the game overall.
this is true for any/most games, because the constant "testing" of thousands and thousands of players outnumbers the hours of testing you could ever do with a limited population and/or time period.
we do have more than several people playing in the public modes quite a bit to see how any of our changes reflect in real-world gameplay and we listen to their feedback as well. not to mention we have gameplay data that lets us know, to a certain degree, how games are being played and that also informs what we do.
grenades are a different matter and we have been tweaking them here or there since prior to release. what we have currently, as much as you dislike it, is the best compromise so given our gameplay and animation system, etc. we have not yet found a better solution to our liking in terms of our how grenades work -- that doesn't mean we "refuse to address it" it means there's nothing we feel is better so far. sorry.
you seem to really want to paint the picture that we're just running around with our hands over our eyes and ears trying to ignore anything when you couldn't farther from the truth. we don't think our MP game was or is perfect. it's solid and, as is obvious, we feel it needs tuning because it does. we've got something different and new on our hands and we'll support and progress it to make it better over time. that's just what we have to do.
we've been trying, i know i always mention these things when we're working on updates. we put in whatever fixes/solutions we can to prevent glitching.
The smartass comments I was referring to are the ones you preface nearly every post of yours with when quoting people that have criticism of the game such as "serious business" or oh god really" like in the above post. Another person in this thread actually pointed it out before me, it is a poor way to try reduce the credibility of the poster you do not agree with, and you are just making you look immature and petty. I will admit however I am guilty of making some exagerations and using very emotive language but this is the internet and if your dont your opinions are ignored. I hope you read the rest of this post because I say some important things.
As for being the loudest voice in the room I do not post unless I actually have something important that I believe in to say, there are people on this site with five, ten and even twenty post counts everyday which is just ridiculous, I do not think I am even over one post a day.
Now a serious question I would really like to know: what gameplay elements does the Naughty Dog online team and yourself think defines what uncharted is all about?
People on GAF and other discussion boards would say that that it is the amazing traversal gameplay, epic moments and enjoyable gunplay that makes uncharted so special.
The fact is the last patch reduced those elements substantially and that is why so many people are not happy with the changes. Reduced health simply means people are less willing to take chances, more likely to camp and then these epic moments do not happen as much. If you look in this thread even people who said they enjoyed the changes at first are now saying the gameplay is simply not as fun and you know what they are correct.
If you are trying to make a tactical shooter like Rainbow Six Vegas or Call of Duty fair enough just admit and we will move on because currently thats what it feels like but it is not the uncharted online game that many of us came to love before the patch. While your attempting to balance the online which is a good thing it seems you guys have completely forgoten about these elements that make that the game fun before the patches. Crushing health punishes the player for taking chances and using the enviroment we are given thats bad gameplay design no matter how you look at it. The only thing most people want fixed is the grenades but from your responses it seems like you are trying to say that too hard of a fix which I frankly find shocking and unbelievable.
The problem with grenades is that there is no minimum timer, so a grenade thrown an extremely short distance by an enemy about to die blows up almost instantly because the timer triggers as soon as the grenade touches a surface. This unfairly gets the other player killed who really deserved to win that battle. It shouldnt be hard to increase and set a minimum timer, it wouldnt affect medium to long range grenade throws and you wouldnt have to touch the animations. Fixing this issue would make alot of people happy yet we get bizarre changes like 1 shot kills from snipers that are ridiculous, I would really like to know how anyone could consider that a good gameplay balance.
The last thing I have to say is about matchmaking and DLC implementation, in the current list you already have "ranked" and "all competitive modes" which are basically the exact same playlist except ranked tracks your skill level as a number.
Surely it would make more sense to merge these into one list I notice the ranked matchmaking takes substantially longer and sometimes doesnt even find a game at all.
Now please correct me if I am wrong but with the DLC option there will now effectively be four playlist with the exact same mode, this is an extremely ineffective way to maximise both the player pool and speed of matchmaking.
I do not think anyone in this game actually plays for the rank number it would make more sense to have t on all or no playlists. It would probably help make the matchups alot fairer anyway, since the last patch my win ration is going north of 8.5 so I do not think your latest patch has done anything to make the game more accessible.
EDIT: One more thing to the people saying to remove DTI for everyone, that makes no sense its a bad idea to introduce randomness into the game and thats what the bullet spray without DTI seems like. Would make more sense to just give it to everyone, but 90%of people use it anyway, presonally I have never had an issue with this but please think through your ideas before you suggesting them. Call of Duty complainers are partly to blame for the mess with crushing health by saying people dont die quick enough online.
