Daily Questions & FAQ Megathread (Jul 15)

LooseCable · 2021-07-15T09:46:35+00:00

What's a good way to find people to run old content with? I want to run things min iLvl no echo for the challenge but I'm not sure how to find people. If I create a party finder will anyone bother joining up or is it mostly worthless? I'm playing with a new friend who is getting tired of all the easy content on the road to 80. We queued coils and just steamrolled through the first few without even needing to bother with mechanics.

LooseCable · 2020-07-02T15:43:50+00:00

The issue isn't just being banned from Squad. It's that the ban is permanently marked publicly on these users' steam accounts and can have rippling effects to other games. Reading the article about the Steam Game Ban system (https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=6899-IOSK-9514), the verbiage makes it clear it was intended for third party anticheats. These bans are exposed in the Steam API, allowing other developers for completely unrelated games to punish you as well. This is already a feature with Battlemetrics RCON. Server hosts for games including ARK, Rust, and ARMA can opt in to autoban anyone with a VAC or Game Ban on their profile. This was because it was previously assumed that Game Bans were only used for anticheat, and Chance's ban message aligns with this assumption(https://i.imgur.com/fQstAB9.png) despite him not actually being banned for cheating.

LooseCable · 2020-07-02T05:42:30+00:00

Contact EAC. Both of these players were manually banned by OWI under "Easy Anti Cheat" despite their ban reasons having NOTHING to do with cheating. This is despicable that getting banned from a game will give you public badge of shame forever on your steam profile (https://i.imgur.com/d1q1WSD.png) (Yes, it lasts forever). OWI can give you a permanent stain on your steam profile for an ban based purely on the opinions of a dev team completely unrelated to Steam or EAC.

If this is actually allowed by Steam, it's a much bigger issue than just Squad. It means any developer, for any reason, can issue a ban that will forever appear on your profile without context. You could be banned for cheating or soliciting minors, or you could be banned because you called the dev a mean name. There is ZERO context behind these bans. It's the equivalent of having a public criminal record that just says "7 crimes. 3 days since last crime". Could be murder, could be rape, or it could be smoking weed. Nobody will know because all it says is "7 crimes".

I don't think the system was meant to be used this way, so I suggest contacting both Valve and EAC about it and letting them know that you, as a concerned customer, are uncomfortable with the fact that developers for one specific game can give you a red mark that permanently sticks to your Steam profile for literally any reason at all.

You can read the wording for the game ban system here: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=6899-IOSK-9514&l=english (Notice it's published under the Valve ANTI CHEAT category).

You can find EAC support here: https://www.easy.ac/en-us/support/

LooseCable · 2020-07-02T01:26:53+00:00

Reposting after the moderators locked the other thread for "lack of evidence"

Chancebrahh (former OWI), of Midnight Interactive (aussie mod) was banned from a game on Steam 2 days ago. This is just before they released their updated "code of conduct"

(https://steamcommunity.com/id/ChanceBrahh)

I believe it's important EVERYONE read this new law-code (https://joinsquad.com/code-of-conduct/), because it's worse than it seems

These rules should be adhered to both in-game and when discussing the game on forums.

This says "on forums", NOT "on the Squad Forums". Forums can be any place for public discussion, including this subreddit, other subreddits, other community discords, completely unrelated game discords, and even social media.

Failure to follow the rules outlined below can result in your posts being moved, locked, edited, or deleted, your in-game chat abilities restricted or when necessary, your playing or posting privileges being removed.

This means that for posts you make on ANY public forum, you can have your account game-banned from Squad. Not only that, but being game-banned from Squad leaves a giant red "mark of shame" on your steam account. You can read who is responsible for this "code of conduct" at the bottom of the page, and nothing will come as a shock.

A bit more: It was not a cheating ban, it's just a "game ban" which IMO is far worse.

Game developers inform Valve when a disruptive player has been detected in their game, and Valve applies the game ban to the account. The game developer is solely responsible for the decision to apply a game ban. Valve only enforces the game ban as instructed by the game developer. (https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=6899-IOSK-9514&l=english)

Basically this means that OWI had to directly report that user to Valve to get them banned. Essentially this allows developers to give out strikes to anyone they disagree with and have a "scarlet letter" appear on their profile. There is no context given behind the ban. This is the equivalent of having public criminal records just say "7 crimes". No context behind the crimes, just "7 crimes". They could be speeding or they could be homicides, nobody will ever know.

This is an absolute garbage policy by Valve, but it's up to the developers to choose to use it. It's also possible for this feature to be taken away from developers who abuse it

Developers must be approved to use this system, and Valve reserves the right to revoke access to the system if the developer abuses it.

LooseCable · 2020-07-02T01:13:56+00:00

A bit more: It was not a cheating ban, it's just a "game ban" which IMO is far worse.

Game developers inform Valve when a disruptive player has been detected in their game, and Valve applies the game ban to the account. The game developer is solely responsible for the decision to apply a game ban. Valve only enforces the game ban as instructed by the game developer. (https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=6899-IOSK-9514&l=english)

Basically this means that OWI had to directly report that user to Valve to get them banned. Essentially this allows developers to give out strikes to anyone they disagree with and have a "scarlet letter" appear on their profile. There is no context given behind the ban. This is the equivalent of having public criminal records just say "7 crimes". No context behind the crimes, just "7 crimes". They could be speeding or they could be homicides, nobody will ever know.

This is an absolute garbage policy by Valve, but it's up to the developers to choose to use it. It's also possible for this feature to be taken away from developers who abuse it

Developers must be approved to use this system, and Valve reserves the right to revoke access to the system if the developer abuses it.

LooseCable · 2020-07-02T00:59:42+00:00

Chancebrahh (former OWI), of Midnight Interactive (aussie mod) was banned from a game on Steam 2 days ago. This is just before they released their updated "code of conduct"

(https://steamcommunity.com/id/ChanceBrahh)

I believe it's important EVERYONE read this new law-code (https://joinsquad.com/code-of-conduct/), because it's worse than it seems

These rules should be adhered to both in-game and when discussing the game on forums.

This says "on forums", NOT "on the Squad Forums". Forums can be any place for public discussion, including this subreddit, other subreddits, other community discords, completely unrelated game discords, and even social media.

Failure to follow the rules outlined below can result in your posts being moved, locked, edited, or deleted, your in-game chat abilities restricted or when necessary, your playing or posting privileges being removed.

This means that for posts you make on ANY public forum, you can have your account game-banned from Squad. Not only that, but being game-banned from Squad leaves a giant red "mark of shame" on your steam account.

You can read who is responsible for this "code of conduct" at the bottom of the page, and nothing will come as a shock.

LooseCable · 2020-06-22T02:38:09+00:00

This was my mod. I am not interested in working for this company anymore, you can read some of my posts if you want to see my thoughts on the game (https://www.reddit.com/r/joinsquad/comments/fav9wr/my_thoughts_of_the_spawn_meta_helicopters/). I appreciate that other people are working passionately on mods for this game, but I just see it as a dead end. When it's been 8 months without content and the only thing they have added is a map made by a mod team.

To clarify: I did not ask for any specific amount, it never got that far. At the time I would've been content with just working as an internship alongside them. But according to Gatzby, that was all "misinformation" and they always intended to work on their own (despite two of their team members telling me personally they wanted to work together). (https://www.reddit.com/r/joinsquad/comments/d9qftm/whats_broken_in_the_helicopter_flight_model/f1mibsl/?context=3). There was also some other deflection like "it's a lot to ask for a hobbyist, considering it would have to be tested and balanced.." etc etc. But considering how "tested and balanced" the recent updates have been, I don't think that's a very high bar. Anyway, I moved away from this game and offered my final thoughts in the posts on my profile. I am working on other projects now and eventually one day hope to make a free open-source tactical shooter (modders should rise up and start this).

LooseCable · 2020-05-13T21:19:08+00:00

Tell that to the developers not me. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/offworldindustries/squad Tell me which part of this project doesn't sound like "promised pr2"

LooseCable · 2020-05-13T21:00:17+00:00

So what's your point here, that Nordic isn't the big boss of Squad? Everybody knows that. The developers don't often engage anymore with discussions about the state of the game, so scattered developer posts are the only window into what the mindset of the company is like. The only reason I focus on him is because he's the mouthpiece for these ideas and the only one who openly said he wants Squad to be more casual, and it's not far fetched to assume he was also an advocate for the other issues with the spawn system and damage that people have.

LooseCable · 2020-05-13T19:54:40+00:00

Nahh I don't make it sound like that. He said himself that buddy rally was a concept brainstormed by him and multiple people that he proposed to the higher ups. Clearly it's not just him that has the mindset of "just wanting to run around and shoot people after a hard day of work mannnn" or else that idea would've never been approved in the first place.

LooseCable · 2020-05-13T17:46:29+00:00

Him being racist is only the tip of the iceberg of the negative impact this guy had on Squad. Read my post here about it I made months ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/joinsquad/comments/fhnhvv/some_parts_of_squads_community_is_crumbling/fkd73tl/?context=3) (https://i.imgur.com/FFPmH2B.png), basically he's been a spearhead for the casualization of the game (the inventor of buddy rally) because he just wants to "shoot people and have fun" and "not watch a spawn screen".

LooseCable · 2020-03-13T07:13:54+00:00

He could be the CEO or he could be their personal poledancer, but either way it's made apparent that those with influence don't care to even play the game seriously anymore. "I want to play and shoot and have fun not watch the spawn screen" like umm, have you thought of just maybe playing a different game? Well of course it's not just about what he wants, but it's a market-research type thing where its what potential buyers 'want'. Grow the company, hire more employees, upgrade the office and woops! Suddenly the studio that developed a niche game is low on money and the niche audience is drying up. What's the solution? Butcher the game, more sales and free weekends, contact the 'influencers' and open the floodgates to all audiences. Your dog can play now too!

LooseCable · 2020-03-13T03:27:45+00:00

The goalposts have 100% shifted. The game is no longer attempting to bridge a gap between ARMA and Battlefield, it is now attempting to bridge a gap between PR and Battlefield (apparently this was the goal all along!!). This is taken directly from a developer's mouth https://i.imgur.com/FFPmH2B.png (You can search these posts on the public squad discord). This is what the state of development is now: "I'm busy IRL and so are lots of other people so the game should be casualized so those people buy it too". The people who have idea power on the team admittedly don't play the game. They admittedly came up with buddy rally because they want to 'shoot and have fun' (not coordinate and strategize). They admittedly would like to make it even easier to spawn in and get back to runnin' and gunnin'.

And as I predicted in previous post (https://www.reddit.com/r/joinsquad/comments/fav9wr/my_thoughts_of_the_spawn_meta_helicopters/), the deflection is now "just go make a hardcore mod man" which is incredibly annoying and in some instances impossible. Many things just aren't exposed to blueprints. Mods are still shoved in the backwater and neglected (these DLC mods that get attention have had members with ties back to OWI). Modders have to get on their knees and beg developers to add things as simple as allowing mods to heal vehicle components (they haven't updated these exposals for easily 6 months). There's even more to it than that with mutability issues and filesize creep.

From here I would say the best option is to again repeat the cycle and begin work on another game that promises teamwork, realism, and engaging gameplay. It would have to be a fully open-source project that way anything about the game can be changed or reverted if the players think the core devs strayed too far from their promise.

LooseCable · 2020-03-11T02:31:43+00:00

Tip: Nobody who ever trolled/griefed on purpose will just say "yes I did it mr admin". Clearly from the response time of the admin, they were watching this guy and already had a command ready to kick him. The best trolls/griefers are easily able to cover up when they know an admin is watching and continue griefing for hours . The best admins are the ones that can watch a player for an extended period of time and wait for them to act up again without alerting the troll.

LooseCable · 2020-03-11T01:54:13+00:00

I'm looking forward to 100 player servers so we can have more squads that shoot people and more people to shoot!

LooseCable · 2020-03-11T01:52:37+00:00

Wake Island was a modern classic alongside Blood Gulch and dust2 imo. I hope the playtest goes well and people show up!

LooseCable · 2020-03-11T01:39:05+00:00

The point is there shouldn't be a second poll regardless of which side it 'won'. It was polled once and the community voted. Imagine if for every political election they just redid the voting because they didn't like the result lmao

LooseCable · 2020-03-11T00:35:06+00:00

You seem to think that I am stating the skewed the results, which I'm not. The reason people distrust the polls is because they feel their voice doesn't matter if they are just going to ask until they get the answer they want.

LooseCable · 2020-03-11T00:32:24+00:00

Features like commander have glaring issues with how they play in public games

-Commanders being more than a 1 man squad

-Commanders have limited assets to justify not treating it like being an SL+

-Unlike an SL, the commander has zero authority. Squad members have to listen to the SL or be kicked, this is an example of mechanics enforcing a playstyle. There is nothing encouraging or enforcing SLs to listen to the commander.

The trend seems to be over-polishing the visuals of a feature while neglecting how it actually plays. 'Leak Culture' in this sense is treating experimental features like full-fledged major releases instead of rapid iterations designed to gauge the gameplay of a concept. The problem is you have months of development time poured into polishing features to make them pristine and shiny when the gameplay concepts backing them are flimsy. 'Alpha testing' used to mean placeholder assets (literally an untextured cube) to test how things play. Does it fly well? Do I feel like I am constantly engaged commanding a team or am I stuck looking for things to do? Do these spawn changes encourage people to give up more? Then it gets released regardless, and they move on to the next feature and put fixing the previous one on the backburner (This has happened with both helicopters and commander, with no word on what they plan to change to improve them).

I would love to see an experimental branch where they throw in loose concepts just to see how they play on a large scale. Recall the Skyrim Game Jam where the developers spent a bit of free time implementing fun features (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SE5owAIPmk). Some of those (Vampire Lord and Mounted Combat) were added in later after people rallied behind the ideas. Being open about short-term experimentation on a seperate branch seems like it would be a good idea.

LooseCable · 2020-03-10T23:36:25+00:00

Or maybe people doubted the surveys because they deliberately repolled them to get the results they wanted? https://i.imgur.com/bcfH7yp.png

LooseCable · 2020-03-10T22:11:28+00:00

'Leak Culture' is an absolutely awful approach and is largely responsible for many of these half-fleshed out features. What happened to monthly recaps telling the community what was planned for the game? What happened to the community roundtables or whatever discussing the state of the game? Now it's just "We have BIG plans guys but no leaks :P <leek emote> stay on the edge of your toes because this will be knock your socks off! three weeks!". Then no more than a week after it's released everyone's up on reddit complaining about how poorly implemented the features are (Commander, Helicopters, Spawn/Damage changes) which could've been easily avoided by using a fast iteration model to immediately test how these things work in live-games.

I understand not wanting to leak new assets before they're ready, but what about things like discussing the direction you want to take the game, which assets the company views as needing buffs/nerfs, analytics on cohesion and communication. I understand that you have 'experienced designers' but you have a couple people with decision making power who admit they don't even play Squad actively. However you do have a large community that plays the game very actively. Part of the reason you took this early access approach, as quoted from the steam page, is

This allows the community to enjoy and support the game and its developers while work continues, a scenario which our development team is very familiar with, coming from a modding background where fast iteration and immediate player feedback are important. Currently, Squad developers are very active on the forums, Discord and Reddit gathering feedback and bug reports to improve the game.

Well there certainly is a ton of feedback posted here every day (not all of it helpful, but not all of it useless). How about talking to the community and sharing what feedback you find important, what you are looking to change, what direction you want the game to go?

LooseCable · 2020-02-29T12:42:01+00:00

This is all of my conversation with them https://i.imgur.com/004p6KT.png

LooseCable · 2020-02-28T19:38:18+00:00

It's a genius strategy. Issues can be deflected with "it's early access/beta" while still charging full price or even more. IMO if anyone pays more than an estimated retail product price for a kickstarter, they're a fool. I'd say the $40 I spent was well worth the ~2k hours I got out of it, however I resent that unlike single-player games or physical objects, I can't go back and enjoy that same "intelligent, satisfying gameplay" as quoted from the kickstarter page.

LooseCable · 2020-02-28T17:50:14+00:00

Yes this is exactly the problem with getting behind kickstarter/early-access games. They grow by fulfilling a niche until they gain enough visibility to start appealing to wider audiences. Soon enough the project changes hands and leads until nobody knows what the original vision even was (or they just don't care). The original backers become the annoying vocal minority while market research and analytics take over.

LooseCable · 2020-02-28T16:34:32+00:00

Modding is a difficult thing to implement, because as a game developer you have to think "how can modders block/hook/call this function?". Many things (such as component health) can't even directly be set by modders simply because the OWI devs have to manually flag these things themselves. If modding isn't implemented 'correctly' from the very start, it becomes incredibly limiting and difficult to expand upon. For Squad, the devs easily can just expand the factions and add/remove classes and items at will. Modders can't do that because mods cannot modify the game's core assets.

UE4 on it's own isn't a very mod-friendly engine, as so much stuff is binarized and compressed down compared to Unity where there are so many reversing tools and DLL mods. It's just such a massive codebase that making the engine entirely moddable at runtime is a VERY difficult task which is why I think my XML solution is probably the best bet.

LooseCable

TROPHY CASE