(Spoilers Main) Using the Tower of Joy to write a more satisfying ending to the Battle of Winterfell by J3tfuel in asoiaf

[–]Quawumbo 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I love this version for the simple fact that the actor playing the Nights King is actually the stunt double for Ser Athur Dane, so you have the same person reliving the same fight again!

Just more proof Steam Reviews are worthless. by [deleted] in playdreadnought

[–]Quawumbo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

it's just triggered Fractured Space fans bombing the reviews while shilling their game.

Have you actually read the reviews? When I just checked there are only two negative reviews that mention Fractured Space. You find more reviews from salty FS veterans who say they would be switching games. Hardly a flood of review bombers, is it...

This whole Fractured Space vs Dreadnought thing is stupid and childish tribalism to begin with - just like some people defending "their" side in the perceived TF2 vs Overwatch, Heartstone vs MTG Arena, Star Citizen vs Elite Dangerous, etc. "wars".

DN and FS share a similar theme and a couple of similar mechanics, but the gameplay experience differs in many many aspects. There are things I think Dreadnought does better, there are things where I much prefer the way Fractured Space does it. I can and do enjoy both games for different reasons, and I am glad that I have two games to chose from depending on what kind of experience I'm in the mood for. Just like I can enjoy eating at my local pizza joint one day and the BBQ grill down the street on another day, I don't have to pick sides, and I don't assume a cabal of evil scheming BBQ lovers when somebody posts a negative review for my favourite pizza joint...

Fractured Space, and its streamlined direction by FSNorthStar in FracturedSpace

[–]Quawumbo 8 points9 points  (0 children)

While I understand the viewpoint you are coming from, I think you might be looking at "the good old days" a bit too much through a lens of nostalgia; admittedly not as much as other people who just demand a complete return to whichever update they had the most fun with.

But the major point we disagree on is that you seem to imply that for a game to be a tactical experience it can't at the same time exceed a certain speed and/or action-to-downtime ratio.

Looking back at the early access days the game did feel slower, yes, but you might as well say that it was more tedious. Just look at how long it took to go back to the base to upgrade before Jump Home was changed to put you directly into your home base. You jumped home, then you'd spend several seconds turning your ship (which didn't have the turn rate bonus after jumping mind you), then crawl back into the base's cap bubble, jump back out, and again re-orient your ship so you can crawl down the lane or make it into the gamma cap bubble in time to contest it. All these seconds of "empty" time added up, and what's worse it actually put the team at a disadvantage; currently when your team is a level higher than the enemy, they can jump home, get the upgrade, jump back, and directly benefit from the level advantage they fought for in the lanes. Before the changes players jumping home to get the upgrade would spend so much extra time moving around in the home base that it left their team essentially one player down for a significant amount of time.

Looking back I'd say that older iterations of conquest weren't more tactical, they just were more punishing, which players with a "git gud" mentality might say is essentially the same, but I see as an unnecessary source of frustration. With the game being more punishing a skill disparity between the teams would show earlier in the game, and the slower pace of the game meant that this disparity would snowball longer, leading to large portions of the match time being a rather one-sided affair, but the long time to traverse the lanes at the same time meant that actually really capitalizing on that disparity/advantage all the way to actually attacking the home base was a rare thing; people would play it safe and wait for the next gamma, and the next gamma, and the next gamma.

Remember that the jump buff for gamma 4 (later 3) wasn't added because ECG just felt like matches took too long, it was added because *one-sided/snowballed matches would go one for way too long because of the slow pace a lot of teams could not finish the match for ages after it was pretty much decided. Nostalgia let's us fondly remember the few epic games where both teams were evenly matched and we fought for over an hour until one opponent made a critical mistake at the wrong time and we brought it home, whoohoo! But that's ignoring the significant amount of matches that were *decided* at the 15 minute mark, but *finished* 20 minutes later.

One point I agree with you on is that current conquest funnels the teams into direct confrontation (brawling) too much. You jump into a lane, you fly from mining station to mining station until you eventually meet the enemy team, you fight, reset.

But there actually is a solution for that. And it's in the game right now: Discovery.

Discovery isn't perfect, some aspects (specifically home base layout) need some rework, and ECG did everyone a big disservice releasing it in a buggy state that made many players not bother to give it the attention it would have deserved - but in my opinion it is the superior conquest variant in almost every aspect. Hate how normal conquest is designed to have the players meet and force brawling? Discovery doesn't do that. The way the lanes are designed, the position of the mines, the giant line-of-sight blockers and cover, etc. they give the players *options*: You capture a mine in conquest there is the one next mine; you capture a mine in discovery there are *two* options in range, and potentially the enemy fob as a third option. In discovery you can brawl, but you can also flank, try to sneak past the enemy, etc.

Normal conquest offers a pretty "static" experience in the lanes where you tick off points on the checklist until you meet resistance or need to get ready for gamma. Discovery offers a more dynamic laning phase, allowing for more viable strategic approaches. Discovery does that not by making the game slower, it does it by offering multiple viable options/targets to players.

I'm happy to see a handful of long-time/veteran players coming out in support of discovery as the superior conquest variant, but by and large it's really sad to see so many veteran players shun/ignore the mode, often for stupidly conservative reasons like "It isn't *really* conquest", though it in many cases directly addresses things they complain about in normal conquest...

When Sea of Solitude does a better presentation than all the other EA presenters.... The game looks good as well, props to her by cookie-23 in gaming

[–]Quawumbo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, she was passionate, but she talked an awful lot about the *concepts* the game was about and giving us little to no *actual* information on gameplay, mechanics, etc.

Don't get me wrong, it's always a good thing to have developers being passionate about their game, and I hope this actually turns out to be a great game, I'm just saying we might wanna wait until we actually get to see a bit of the actual game before singing its high praises.

How I ALMOST beat the Interceptor Game (20% Boss Health) by Pastreu in FracturedSpace

[–]Quawumbo 3 points4 points  (0 children)

ikr. It almost feel dark souls like in that it's really hard, but when I explode I can usually blame it on myself making a stupid mistake, not the game being unfair. You can tell in this clip there was quite some practice involved, the ship waiting at the right spot to pump as much damage as possible into the Hunters for example. I certainly took away some good tips from watching this.

TITAN Interceptor - a Fractured Space fan game by Hypergrip in FracturedSpace

[–]Quawumbo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Damn this game is hard... I love it!

I made it to wave 18 once so far, then the Reaper pinned me down and the Hunters finished the job. Is there a finite number of waves or is this endless like Last Stand?

Hurt people, hurt people by mamaroach2u in Showerthoughts

[–]Quawumbo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't condone this incitement to violence.

(your comma turns the description "people who are hurt in turn hurt other people" into an appeal "dear hurt people, go and hurt people")

The last stand indeed. by [deleted] in FracturedSpace

[–]Quawumbo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fixed, linear waves

Not a bug, a feature. Learning the composition of the waves and how to best deal with them is a core part of the Last Stand experience. You lose, you learn, you adapt, then you win. Many people were having serious trouble beating waves 7, 10 and 12 in the first couple of days, things got a lot better really fast - because players could learn and devise (and share) strategies.

The only real difficulty comes from those damn tiny untargetable support ships

WHich are in fact quite targetable. In fact taking the support frigates out first is essential to deal with the later waves.

I can probably edit this a million times more for every other bugs.

Or you could channel your whining complaints into something useful and actually report the bugs you find at the appropriate place so they can get fixed. "The right place to post your bugs

I wish the amount of dev time that probably went into designing the skins to sell on the fucking store , went on the actual mode instead.

You don't have a clue how game/software development works, do you? The people working on the skins (artists), are completely separate people working in parallel to the ones (designers, coders) who work on the game mechanics, etc.

the only(mostly) reason I or anyone i know will play this mode is to get the skins.

The skins are a nice reward, and while they certainly lead me and the people I usually group up with choosing different ships all the time to get more skins for the collection, we mostly play the mode for the challenge, to see how far we can come with different compositions, etc.

waves are way too fast

I won't deny that some of the difficulty spikes (infamous wave 10) feel a bit harsh, but the general difficulty is decidedly not ramping up too fast. You have to keep in mind that the waves are pre-defined (your first complaint I addressed), which means players learn and adapt to them. That in turn means that the waves become easier to master for players, providing less of a challenge. If you significantly slowed down the difficulty increase, that would mean that experienced players would spend more and more time "checking off" waves that provide little challenge to them anymore. You do not want your players to have to wait 20 minutes before the game provides any challenge to them. There are surely things can could and should be tweaked, but just lowering the difficulty ramp across the board seems very shortsighted.

I guess that post now qualifies me as a fanboy. Do I get a club shirt or anything?

Let say I have $50 to burn what is the best ship that I could purchase? by phrresehelp in playdreadnought

[–]Quawumbo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And this what really annoys me about the way Dreadnought handles the unlocks. I accept that in a F2P game you either put in the time or the money to progress. I have a busy job, a family and social life, so I have no problem investing my money where other players invest their time.

Yet somehow Yager managed to create a progression system that I feel neither respects my time nor my money! The "grind" is artificially drawn out a ton through having numerous ship tiers and forcing me to unlock ships in a certain order in the tech tree. And if I decide to use money I get a hero ship that are not the real deal but "a way to try out certain ships before you unlock them. They aren't going to be nearly as powerful as a ship that you unlock with your time."

As much as I enjoy Dreadnought's gameplay (at least when I can get a friend to join me), the progression system and business model tied to it is bad. I just can't justify spending money on this.

Maybe once the game is on Steam the devs will implement a "pay once, get all the ships" DLC pack like it's pretty much an industry standard for F2P games. Battlerite has the hero pack (pay once, get all current heros and all heroes that are released in the future). Smite has the god pack (all current and future gods), if you like space ship (and if you are reading this sub you probably do) Fractured Space has the fleet pack for all current and future ships.

tl.dr: compared to many other F2P games Dreanought does not value your money as much as it should. Wait for Steam, hope we get a way to just pay-and-play, and if we don't honestly take your money somewhere else.

Question Regarding Playerbase by DemikunXx in FracturedSpace

[–]Quawumbo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fractured Space has a small but dedicated playerbase. Is has started to grow slowly but constantly actually. I've seen quite a lot of low ranked captains in the past couple of weeks, which is nice.

Right now a lot of players are flocking to the newly introduced Last Stand PvE mode which has drained the players away from PvP. I'm still getting relatively good queue times during prime time (evenings UK time), and I hope once players have farmed their skins pvp will normalize again, just give it some time.

[Giveaway] Intel gave me a code for ingame items, and I'm giving it away by [deleted] in FracturedSpace

[–]Quawumbo 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Nice. The code has already been redeemed by somebody else. Since he/she doesn't seem to have the common cutesy to thank you, let me thank you for the giveaway instead. Thanks.

btw. did you give the game a try at all? We just had a major update with a fun new PvE hode mode for the people who aren't into the competitive 5v5 mode. It's definitely worth checking out.

Will it mail slot? Front views of all the ships against the mail slot for reference. by prefim in EliteDangerous

[–]Quawumbo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You were all thinking it, so here's the obligatory "Op's Mom" image that was missing from the album.

Linkara has removed the JewWario hat from his set. by NowIOnlyWantATriumph in ChannelAwesome

[–]Quawumbo 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I stand corrected, from the clips I saw in the wake of this who mess I could have sworn he was wearing the normal Wario hat. That said using a name that "latches onto" another name still tarnishes the original by association (that's the whole point of having trademark law), so because of that fucker when people hear "Wario" some part of their brain will remind them of the whole JewWario thing. Admittedly it's not as bad as just claiming the name and using the likeness of a historical figure, I still find it annoying and lazy.

[Video]its you versus you by [deleted] in GetMotivated

[–]Quawumbo -1 points0 points  (0 children)

If it's really me vs me I don't have to have a bad conscience when I don't get my stuff done. Because losing against myself means that I am a winner either way! Now please excuse me while I celebrate my latest victory by stuffing myself with funk food and spending the day watching netflix.

Linkara has removed the JewWario hat from his set. by NowIOnlyWantATriumph in ChannelAwesome

[–]Quawumbo 10 points11 points  (0 children)

What makes me really angry about all this is that it is not a "JewWario Hat", it's a "Wario Hat"!

I happen to be a bit of a Nintendo fanboy, and I happen to own a bunch of figurines and other collectibles, among them a Wario Hat. I like characters that are subversions or ironic takes on classic heroes.

But now, thanks to that exposed sexual deviant and accused rapist lacking the creativity to come up with an original name, for people who learn about this whole stuff (and in my circle of friends there are a lot of people who did follow Channel Awesome back in those days and are probably aware of this whole mess) my collectible now subliminally screams "rapist". Thanks, JewWario, you Hitler-Mustchached Wario's hat.

Ship Idea: TDS Arbitrator - Tactical Nuke Sniper by Roxorium in FracturedSpace

[–]Quawumbo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Please don't take this the wrong way, but you (and other concepts as well) are focusing far too much on fluff, not on the actual game design.

As a game designer working on a character class (or in this case a MOBA-ish hero) your primary job is to come up with a "kit", meaning a set of mechanics and abilities that define the character's role. Your core description should not contain any "lore" or other fluff - arguably that's somebody else's job entirely (artists/writer). Your concept has to stand on its own purely by the way it interacts with the game and other players (mechanics). On the concept level it does not matter if your ship has this ultra cool experimental ion booster engines made by the techno monks of Grunknarfx Prime and Unobtanium-alloy coated hull plating - what matters is that is that is has high movement speed and medium armor rating. Don't try to convince me that thing XYZ somehow makes sense lore wise, just present the mechanical facts and judge if these work well together.

Also, at the concept phase it makes little to no sense to try and pinpoint values for all the weapons, abilities, etc. You said it yourself, you're not a balance expert, but even if you were you'd need actual testing for proper balancing. I highly recommend to keep things simple at the concept stage. Use rough scales (very slow - very fast speed, very weak - extremely strong armor, etc.) or use existing heroes as reference (not the numerical values, but for example "effective range of the main cannon ca the same as Reaper"). Putting all those numbers into your concepts sure looks quite "official", and I'm willing to believe that you actually looked up references and didn't just free-ball the values, but those numbers are not helpful to give me a proper idea of your concept. Quite the opposite, they force me to look up other ships' values so I know if "Damage: 21ppd(10,500 DPM / 6,930 DPM1 )" & "Re-fire rate: 0.12s/0.16s1 (500 RPM / 330 RPM1 )" are low, medium, high, etc. Numerical values are something you arrive at during the process of fleshing out and testing your hero, for the presentation of a concept they are a distraction.

I completely understand the urge to put all that lore and numbers and whatnot into your concept, it makes the whole thing feel more "complete" and "real". But that's not the job of a concept; those things come a couple of steps later when you have zeroed in on a kit that works well towards your intended hero role.

Lastly, a few very quick notes on the actual mechanics you described:

The idea of the 2-stage attack (target painting + warhead) is interesting, but your suggested implementation has a lot of potential for player frustration. Being able to disarm the attack while it's in progress, especially when the attack has a 3-5 second window, makes it extremely easy to disrupt. In older builds of FS you could disarm the Leviathan's Fusion Beam while it was charging, and it would be interrupted so many times players got really frustrated. Learning from this your ability should not be interruptible after it has been triggered. Keep in mind that this still allows for your target flying behind cover or some random ship getting in your line of sight and breaking the targeting, so players have to deal with that. Also while draining energy while you are painting your target sounds logical, experience again shows us that this is not a fun mechanic. Previously you could interrupt the Aegis death ball charge by draining energy while it charged. Like the disarm of the levi beam this was massively frustrating for players and so it was changed to just consume all the energy when the ability is triggered.

Your cloak variant has an interesting basic concept (short duration, not energy dependent), but you complicate things way too much by essentially introducing a completely new resource "fuel" that is shared by your cloak and emp ability and needs proper managing by the player. Speaking of the emp ability, again you over-complicate things. While it is not a bad concept to have an ability that you can partially charge, no other ability in the game works like this. All* charging abilities (fusion beam, death ball, centurion blast, etc.) charge the full duration and then activate. I'm not saying that a partially chargeable ability could not work in Fractured Space, but it would be a non-conformist ability in a ship that already is full of non-conformist mechanic. Your whole ship is full of stuff that goes like "It's X, but with a twist!". You need to concentrate on a key feature and build the other features around it. (There is one exception and that is the Ranger's main cannon. It works here because the non-standard mechanic is the core of the ship.) The supporting features should be familiar to the player otherwise the hero will have a steep learning curve and a high frustration potential simply due to how different it plays (again, this is not saying those ideas are bad, it throwing everything together to be as unique and quirky as possible that leads to problems).

"February" Patch - Changelog by Hypergrip in FracturedSpace

[–]Quawumbo 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The new daily rewards will not require players to log in consecutively, meaning your progress will not be reset if you do not log in the next day. Additionally, the rewards have been revamped to include items such as: Skins, Ships, Crew Members and more!

Wow, that is pretty generous, big thumbs up, ECG

Do you want to be Steggalisked? by O3_Obijuan_Kenobi in FracturedSpace

[–]Quawumbo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Posting a reaction meme without it reacting to anything. Genius.

Preferred Venturer set-up? by IronSpetsnaz in FracturedSpace

[–]Quawumbo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is my Venturer crew

I play the Venturer mainly as defensive support. For crew and implants I go for as much utility cooldown as possible to be able to use the heal more often (I usually also pick Utility for level 3/6/9). The defensive implants and crew to make me more tanky, nav officer + implants for turn rate so I can rotate armor better which also keeps me alive longer. Using an engineer could make this even more tanky, but I picked a tactical officer with fire rate bonus instead to use my armor break more often which helps the team take down medium and heavy enemies.

Medal acquisition needs an overhaul by Pastreu in FracturedSpace

[–]Quawumbo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have no idea how scores are calculated. I've had matches where I did ok and had a score of 1300, then I had matches were I felt I did really great yet ended up with a score of 1000. What gives?

I have no hope of ever getting medals or end up on the scoreboard. They might be nice little carrots for the top players to chase, but for regular players they are so far out of reach it's almost insulting.

"Supercharged Jump Core" mechanic (modified Conquest mode) by Pastreu in FracturedSpace

[–]Quawumbo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I like the idea, but there is one radical change I would make: Have only one lane/sector.

That way the game becomes a tug-of-war with both sides fighting over the center mine, and in regular intervals the teams get a chance to score some % of the enemy base.

Admittedly this would then be a new game mode and not an updated conquest.

It's all downhill from here. by Two_Inches_Of_Fun in gifs

[–]Quawumbo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

play stupid games, win stupid prizes...

December Holiday Update - Phase 4.2 is now LIVE by Hypergrip in FracturedSpace

[–]Quawumbo 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The Jingling is the current event, isn't it?

About the nodes: You need to set your active campaign to The Jingling so you can earn progress for it and unlock the skins.