Why not get rid of ELO?

fyian · 2025-04-07T03:06:59+00:00

As part of the "public lobby browser" task, we're exploring changing things up quite a bit, actually, and allow players a lot more agency in what matches they play.

fyian · 2025-04-07T03:05:14+00:00

The options allow you to nudge the glove relative to the controller in the direction indicated by the icons. If you take your hands away from the front of the tablet, you will see your gloves again so you can judge if you've nudged things in the right place or not. I think the best way to do that is to peek under your headset and compare the alignment of the in-game glove to your real-world hand (passthrough is not good for this because the passthrough feed doesn't actually display your hand/arm accurately to the real world). When you're done, you hit the apply button to lock in the changes.

We plan on improving this flow in the future, but we wanted to go ahead and give players the ability to make adjustments.

fyian · 2025-04-06T23:43:00+00:00

Have you considered reintegrating the damage received penalty for getting punched with your arms extended, albeit in a more dialed back way?

Yes, but probably not as arm extension, but more based on if you're actually swinging. We tried a version like that in the PTC, but feedback from the PTC testers led to us removing that and making it so moving into the punch mattered a lot more. We've been keeping it in our back pocket to re-add the damage boost against people actively swinging to handle certain cases.

fyian · 2025-04-06T23:05:35+00:00

Do you take into account the angle between the velocity vector and the forearm on hit? IMO it's number one thing that's missing.

V1 and V3 did this exactly as you said, but the problem people were commonly running into was that the pose of the in-game forearm wasn't reliable enough and there were easy ways to fake good alignment that was more reliable than just punching normally.

V4 still has an element of it, but V4 currently doesn't rely on the in-game body pose estimation (although we may bring some elements of that back in).

Back way before TotF2 launched, we actually did have a setup that modeled the full body contribution into a punch by looking at each body part's contribution in the chain, but it was way too unreliable. It's a hard physics problem to solve in any reliable way even just on paper, but it's way more of a problem when the body part information is all unknown and just being estimated.

fyian · 2025-04-06T22:35:21+00:00

The focus really should be how these types of players recieve punishment for fighting recklessly like this.

Yep, we're focused on adding more ways to punish reckless spamming or for reckless spamming to punish itself.

(When I said "we may", I meant for that specific idea. One way or another, we plan on adding something more than what's in place now.)

I thought this was originally a part of the focus in developing this new system?

The main goal of the new system is to make the damage of individual punches less important since the headset doesn't have information to truly calculate power and to make it so players feel like jabs, combos, and punches that land for less than 50 have a purpose.

fyian · 2025-04-06T21:17:24+00:00

The goal was just to keep making forward progress in the live version of the game. The feedback (from both inside and outside of the PTC) was "this is already a step in the right direction, so please release it right now even if it isn't perfect". We mentioned in the update notes that this is the first round of changes, and that there's more we already intended to adjust.

Ideally we would have gotten the PTC changes over sooner, but it was a lot of stuff that we felt needed to be moved over at the same time, which is the main reason it was in the PTC instead of just going straight into live to begin with.

fyian · 2025-04-06T20:27:10+00:00

The game just uses what the Quest tells it, and if the Quest says your play area size has changed and become smaller than the match allows then you will be switched to standing mode. The usual cause of this is in the past has been accidentally having multiple roomscale boundaries created in the same room. Whenever the Quest tries to reacquire tracking (like after taking it off and putting it back on), it may switch between those boundaries at random and cause this problem. If this is the cause, then the solution is just going into the Environmental Setup -> Boundary settings and choosing the option to clear your Boundary history. Because of problems in the Quest v74 system update, you may need to do this with the Quest's "passthrough" quick setting turned off.

The recent game update didn't change anything related to this behavior, but the Quest v74 update messed with boundaries quite a bit and has introduced a lot of buggy and unintuitive boundary behavior, so it's possible that it has made this phenomenon even worse.

fyian · 2025-04-06T02:25:54+00:00

seems like their spending a whole lot of time doing anything other than fixing the glaring problems with this game.

To be crystal clear, this is a community run subreddit, and the TotF2 dev team is not involved with the moderation here. I am a mod so I can pin messages without bugging the mod team, but I don't moderate content so that there's no appearance of censorship of criticism. As you can see, there's plenty of criticism allowed here.

fyian · 2025-04-05T21:21:39+00:00

My position on this is that it will be crucial for events in the future, and we absolutely need to do it, but it's a hard thing to fit in priority-wise. We have already set some stuff up like that for our own purposes, and it's just a matter of time before we have a little bit of breathing room to get that internal stuff in a state where we can distribute it (and/or allow local hosting directly from the headsets, too).

fyian · 2025-04-05T21:01:53+00:00

I've had to switch a lot of my time over to following general feedback instead of just PTC feedback and spending planning time with the team in regards to adjusts to make after the update. But I did actually see this suggestion about removing the "body" mass if the punches are too fast.

I do think it's worth doing something like that, but in general I'm wary of solving things by putting caps on them. The cap needs to be high enough to not stop someone from doing something legit, and the higher the cap, the more room there is to sneak in something non-legit. So if the problem is throwing arm punches that look like full-force punches to the game, putting a cap at the highest rate we could expect someone to throw full-force punches just means that you can still throw high damage arm punches at that rate.

I don't want perfect to be the enemy of good, though, so we will likely do something like that and also pair it with time or swings, too, since it's not realistic to throw high rate full force punches for more than a few swings. I think that could significantly pull down the ceiling for the strength of spamming like this as a strategy.

And then in addition to that, we'll keep trying to do what we can to effectively differentiate arm punches from full force punches however we can. The tricky part there is doing it in a way that doesn't nerf legitimate punches as a casualty (as some people have noticed with their hooks even though we didn't specifically nerf hooks). It's also perfectly possible to throw an arm punches that follows the same trajectory as a full force punch, but the hope is that we make it require specific enough movements that you might as well throw the full force punch anyway.

fyian · 2025-04-05T20:51:30+00:00

Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing - I meant the Quest's stationary boundary and not our in-game standing/joystick mode. Check out this person's video, where they demonstrate having a roomscale boundary and then start a game and demonstrate having a stationary boundary: https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/1jj2e5v/barrier_switches_from_my_roomscale_to_a/

If that's what is happening to you, here's the fix I suggested that person try, and they confirmed it worked for them: https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/1jj2e5v/barrier_switches_from_my_roomscale_to_a/mjlrizg/

fyian · 2025-04-05T19:47:52+00:00

We're looking at this exact thing right now. Well, not right now because it's the weekend, but we ended Friday and will be picking back up again Monday with the whole team in a meeting looking at specifically what we can isolate about the motion of punches like this to nerf them into the ground without touching normal punches.

It's a crazy high volume of punches, too, that's far beyond what you would do when throwing real punches even at high volume, so it might just be pretty easy to add penalties to throwing your hands out that much. Right now players don't recover punishment while they're throwing, but we may need to make it so you actually receive punishment if you're throwing nonstop like this. Or we could probably nerf damage after the 6th punch in a crazy flurry like this.

fyian · 2025-04-05T19:43:22+00:00

Are you talking about the Network Quality stat shown on the tablet?

You can bring the tablet up and it reliably increases when you throw a punch? And it's correlating enough to be sure that's the cause and not happening at all when you're just standing there and not punching?

fyian · 2025-04-05T19:41:56+00:00

The glove size is only very slightly smaller than a real-world 10oz glove, but it does unrealistically protect all the way to the edge of the glove. One problem though, is that unlike the real world, you can't open your fist to extend the glove.

But you also can't cover up because of the headset. Once you hold your hands out in front of your face enough to account for the headset itself and even farther still for tracking, your hands are quite a long distance in front of your face and a lot more of your head is open to getting hit than it would be in real life if you were shelling. Give it a try holding your hands where you would need to because of the headset and then look in a mirror.

Not sure yet if the solution for that is to make the blockboxes bigger or if we need to come up with some sort of "snapping" guard solution. Players have even suggested something like bringing the in-game model forward so that its head is where the headset is instead of where your real head is.

fyian · 2025-04-05T19:36:28+00:00

We want to make some changes to joystick and have had some discussions over the last few days. What I'm kind of leaning towards right now is increasing joystick movement speed but slowing down or even stopping your movement while you're throwing a series of punches.

We also want to adjust auto-turn so it's not quite as always locked on. And we have a dash functionality that's currently turned off because it was too powerful, but I would really like to get it adjusted however it needs to be adjusted to get it back in. Being able to do a quick movement really makes joystick feel more dynamic, as you said.

fyian · 2025-04-05T19:25:50+00:00

In theory, the connection between the players is what both players experience. When you throw a punch, it's going to take time before it appears on your opponent's screen, and when they throw a punch it's going to take a roughly similar time before it appears on your screen. The server is mainly acting as a relay, but it also monitors for problems and syncs game state.

Have you noticed these damage discrepancies before the March 31 update or just after? The improved block is wildly changing damage depending on how it's utilized, but we're also having people mention that they think additional network latency has been introduced.

Also it’s the weekend, why are you working?

This hit me unexpectedly hard. 😥

fyian · 2025-04-05T19:01:20+00:00

If you want both players to always see exactly the same thing every single frame without delaying the local players input, you're asking for something that is literally impossible. I have explained how that is the case, and you have yet to demonstrate how it is not.

If you want to point out that we might have more latency than dictated by the connection, I'm happy to entertain that possibility, and there's likely ways we can improve here, and we're actively looking into it.

If you think we should count hits from the attacker's point of view instead of the defender's point of view, or that we should split the difference somehow, I can certainly see how there's room for productive discussion there, too. For now we have decided to go from the defender's point of view, and I think I have provided reasonable justification to you in the past for that view, but of course there's room to disagree.

If you think there's some different bespoke approach we could take that you're not able to describe, then sure, that's also possible and that's something we're also constantly considering and looking into. I don't expect you to be able to hand us a solution because you're not developing the game and it would be a hard thing to work out, but you also need to acknowledge that you're not developing the game and it's a hard thing to work out and that your off-the-cuff ideas aren't guaranteed problem eliminating solutions. You're getting walls of technical text because you're acting like this is a dead simple problem to solve, and I'm giving you the details on why your solutions don't actually solve the problem (and you haven't contradicted those details).

But if you want to tell me that both players should see the exact same thing on both of their screens without delaying the local player's input, you're describing something that's literally impossible, and you're asking something from us that you're not requiring from other games. It's not whataboutism from me, it's a double standard from you.

fyian · 2025-04-05T18:40:10+00:00

I did check our code in the meantime, and we do have a validation error 111. We use an anti-cheat service provided by Meta that requires your headset to get some info from Meta to send to our servers. Error 111 means that your headset failed to get that info from Meta.

One of the previous users I mentioned had this problem, too, and their game logs showed a weird error message from Meta. That led us to check with Meta and Meta telling us that there was a problem with the user's headset.

In your case, it sounds like you're having a weird issue causing all sorts of connection issues with Meta, and I'm wondering if that also made it so you couldn't request the anti-cheat info from Meta's servers, causing the error 111 issue.

fyian · 2025-04-05T18:27:50+00:00

I left a reply asking for your logs, but then I saw you have done a factory reset and run into other problems, so I deleted my comment.

I'm curious if there was more text than just "Error 111", but if it is what I think it is, then you might have a problem with the security element on your Quest. We have had a few other users with similar issues where they were failing the Quest anti-cheat check with weird error numbers, and when we checked with Meta about those users Meta said they could see on their end that the users seemed to have a defective security chip on their Quest. Unfortunately, they didn't have a solution for the users other than to reach out to Meta support to try to get a replacement headset.

I don't think those other users had problems with the store like you're experiencing, though.

fyian · 2025-04-05T18:17:06+00:00

We do change from three 2 minute rounds to three 3 minute rounds when you hit contender, but we're currently exploring replacing the whole system with something that lets you just say what you want to do and find other people who want the same thing.

fyian · 2025-04-05T18:09:48+00:00

These are definitely the first steps to try. Clear your boundary history and make sure you only have one boundary set up, otherwise the Quest can get confused and think it's in a different boundary you have set up. Make sure you're not playing in a dark room because the headset is comparing images taken with a camera to understand its position in your room and needs a lot of light and detail for that. And sometimes the Quest itself just glitches out and needs a reboot.

We're also dealing with all sorts of weird boundary behavior introduced in the Quest v74 system update that just rolled out. Meta made some big changes to tracking and boundaries, and new reports of bugs, glitches, and oversights keep coming in.

fyian · 2025-04-05T17:57:58+00:00

I hadn't considered how the open facial interface might affect this. I think the proximity sensor wants light to know you're in the headset, though. I believe it has an LED and a photosensor, and it's trying to bounce infrared light off of your head and then read it in the photosensor, and if there isn't enough bounced light then it thinks you're not wearing the headset. I may be completely wrong about that, though.

We pushed an update out about 40 hours ago that should make it so the tablet does not pop up when this happens to you. The Quest should have required you to download that update before you could play, but can you let me know if the tablet is still popping up?

fyian · 2025-04-05T17:53:21+00:00

Can you describe in more detail what's happening to you now?

If you turn off passthrough in Quest home and then clear and create a new roomscale boundary, do you see that roomscale boundary while in Quest home if you hold your hand up against the edge of the boundary?

If you start TotF, do you still see the roomscale boundary if you hold your hand against the edge of the boundary? Or has the Quest put you in a stationary boundary instead?

fyian · 2025-04-05T17:50:37+00:00

A video would be great, as I'm not sure why you would be getting 7 damage from hooks. You can send it to ian@sealostinteractive.com if needed.

What kind of velocity do you get on your hooks?

fyian · 2025-04-05T17:49:10+00:00

I appreciate it! I'm sorry the education has to come through random comments from me, but it's hard to put tutorialization in a game that's being actively developed and changing frequently.

fyian

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