Points Reloaded 1.3 improvement thread.

I think its just type !magic

 

Next version plans

Right, simply put, we got shit done with the help from all your comments. We would like you to keep them coming.

The majority of things are being done and you should see them in the next version of PR. We felt it was necessary to get the pre-existing bugs out of the system. Not work on new things which will exacerbate the bugs.
The longstanding bugs are now being swatted and ironed out... with a sledgehammer. In fact you can see that some of them are already being worked upon in other non-PR servers such as the teams counter. Here's a list of whats done:

[8/21/12]

• Updated and fixed Tank glow.
• Fixed an anomaly where survivors getting the Paranoia Tank's speed.

[8/23/12]

• Fixed the teams counter from not being able to show the correct amount of team switches per campaign.
• Fixed tanks not showing up in Blood Harvest finale.
• Increased cost for bile shower to 40.

[8/25/12]

• Added double tanks to Blood Harvest finale.
• Stopped extra molotov spawning when donors get given molotovs.

[8/30/12]

• Changed Portal Tank HP and Speed, Ghost tank HP, Halved and swapped the Shaman and Knight tank rewards, and made a 3% and 2% probability respectively to drop an enhancement stone instead of 100%.
• Fixed tank glow for Ghost, added a new "Phase Walk" skill to Portal tank, and added reward drops to the super tanks.

[8/31/12]

• Stopped the storm from being created until we can fix it to stop clients from crashing.
• Lowered special tank music volume a little.
• Stopped the ability to perform magic as we believe, with all due respect to Luke, that it doesn't belong in a zombie shooter game.

We'll be releasing these fixes in the next version. What still needs to be done is:

*Remove (then possibly revamp) GUI, Magic, and Builder, as well as all of the other related skills like GTA as we feel it's a bit too modded. I have been doing a little bit of question asking over the course of the week and the general consensus was that it needs to go. We shall see where those classes fit in later on and how they can be implemented in due course, but for now, it's a good move to get rid of them.

Thanks for reading,
-Your dev team: Honor, Kitties, Legend.

 

Nice updates. Agreed about bile shower it was too cheap, but i think infected heal should be reduced since sometimes you become a tank and dont get team support backup, cheaper bile was a way to escape from the surround survivors melee. Otherwise tanks fight even inside the saferoom will be unfair as high level survivors can bile tank with 6 bounty, set in fire with 5 bounty, also one high lvl melee hit deal like 1k damage to tank and most times theres no boomer behind the door to put you out or a spitter spitting inside to take cover...

 

To stop the storm crash, just disable the rain entity in the pr_weathercontrol file

 

IN PROGRESS: Modifying Contagious Mutation. More details when it's all done, but what I can tell you is it involves making it less headache-ogenic, and modifying how the mutation shields work with the contagious mutation

 

I'm happy to see PR moving forward, making my vision come true! Getting rid of magic is a good first step; now that I think about it, how the hell did I manage to add that in a zombie horror game? This is not World of Warcraft lol. Please do get rid of Builder and the character class system. Just comment out the loading and initialization.

Also for any TS skill you want to remove, simply remove that skill from being bought by commenting out the ID in the arrays as well as editing ClientHasTSSkill to return false for any TS skill you want to disable.

 

I had a fun time playing on 1.3 with al the skills and magic.
On coop i think most skills and magic should stay, its a nice playground for all.
The builder should stay on coop its fun, and handy with the tank hordes
The thief class and gta can be removed imo.
Also deep tread can go
So all except the thief and deep tread should stay on coop.
these two should be removed for vs also, deep tread sometimes activates in tiny pools


On the vs its a different story, perhaps we should vote about this.
Because i wonder if the people who dont play vs should decide if the new skills
should stay or not.
most Important things are:

- Killstreaks (especially uva)
- Magic
- Builder
- new virus and medic
- new tanks (stil bugged, players die when becoming one)
- new war spitter skills (areo goo, viral goo)

Things that def should stay on vs are:

- charger steer
- hunter double jump
- kamikaze boomer

 

Question.

Will we get are TS skill back? I spent a lot of cash for them?

I agree with taking out the magic and build. What about taking out stealing
too?

 

It was hard looking through all of that code and we have already changed some bools to false just as you suggested I'm just actually glad you're happy with the changes. Looking at the code now, it's clear to see how much work you put into getting the magic system up along with all the other classes. Phew, makes me dizzy just by looking at it

What Kitties is doing now is removing the menu's. I'm sort of AFK till Monday, but hopefully he can manage that easily.

Yes you will keep your skills but bearing in mind that we're going to be removing some skills it might be possible that your bought skill will get deleted. We are well aware that it's going to anger all of you people that bought things, but you will be compensated. And heck, we're improving this mod for you guys so we do have you in mind at all times

 

So 1.3 is being removed for the most part.

So back to complaining that the game is boring again and we need new content.

I don't get it. People weren't playing very often because it was old, and boring and nothing new. Then Luke adds all sorts of stuff and completely revamps gameplay and people complain that it is too different, don't like it, and want it returned to the boring state they were just complaining about.

There have always been complaints after new releases. You should have given Luke's mod more time before you scrapped all his work. It wasn't even out long enough for people to learn how to adapt and use all the new stuff.

 

To me, Luke's work is more like the starting point rather than the finishing point. He added all these changes and then after getting feedback from the players, Legend and Kitties (and whoever else is included) are making the necessary changes to refine Luke's work. But essentially, it's still Luke's mod and it's still the foundation of PR 1.3. You're right: before, people weren't playing and complained it was boring and all.. but when the original PR 1.3 came out, they continued complaining and not playing. Sure you'll always have people on both sides, but I'm pretty sure Legend and Kitties got enough input from the players to give them enough of a reason to decide to take out certain things. I doubt that the old PR we had before was exactly the way it was when it was launched. I'm pretty sure HC had to edit and remove some things as well before it became the final product.

 

We did give time... The servers were up for quite a while. The servers were empty most of the time. You're a donor, would you want to be funding empty servers?

As to your comment, "So 1.3 is being removed for the most part." We actually discussed that very comment in-depth.

I decided to do some questioning. Cocaine kindly enlightened me to the fact that if we remove all the classes from PR 1.3 then there would be no differentiation from 1.2 to 1.3. I then went to another player who said that it was too confusing. I journeyed over into the servers and asked the players directly. The response was anger and sadness, mainly due to the fact that most things (such as the bugs) were not sorted out.

I then discussed things over with Kitties and Erik. The concluding thought was that we had to fix things; we had to get the old things working, we had to at least try to get some support because without support we have no motivation. A little thank you goes a long way even if it is embedded within clich

 

Scrap stuff that causes problems, and keep those that help improve gameplay. I played for a while last week, and I would permanently get rid of magic and builder because 1) it's way too overpowered and 2) trolls. It's infuriating, so please do get rid of those features. I don't find any problems with TS, so that can stay, but get rid of some TS related skills like GTA and some of the useless things like the flashlight skill and the death light skill. PR 1.3 was a learning experience for me, so there are indeed a lot of bugs and useless crap. Get rid of the character classes too since the GUI hack seems to cause crashing for non-windows users and get rid of Thief, Mage and Medic (totally useless IMO) but keep the rest. Swap the current class switch button from BUTTON_ZOOM to the shift button. Then, force the GUI to be off at all times (so it would print to the chatbox instead). There's code to prevent special tanks from spawning in VS maps, so don't remove that; someone was complaining about special tanks in VS, so that doesn't make any sense unless someone removed that code. In l4d2_pr_weathercontrol, remove the rain entity from being created in the added native. Perhaps you can have 2 character classes "warrior" for close range combat and a new class for long-range combat. Just ideas.

Once you get the old bugs fixed, it's time for that long awaited guild wars. CrazyRabbit will make maps for them, and you guys can program some of the other content as well as code modifications for valve maps. This is progress, guys, and I'm not upset; frankly, I'm quite excited!

 

Only one US server was running 1.3, right?

Are you removing the TrueSkill skills too?

Again, there was only the US server running 1.3...

I totally agree bugs need to be fixed, but that shouldn't mean scrapping all of the positive progress.

I think anyone who takes time away from playing the game and is laying down code instead deserves alot of respect and thanks, So thank you to all of you!

I just don't like how the leads cave to complaints so fast. There is another game mod that I have been playing that develops with the leads vision. When players complain that is what they tell them.. We are building this mod to our vision. People complain about the changes, but don't stop playing. They learn and adapt to use the new features. This keeps a positive flow of development.

 

Totally Agree. It should have been developed and fixed with input, not just scrapped. Even if a few things needed to be removed.. Still not scrapped..

The 1.3 US server was populated everytime I wanted had time to play(which I admit was not that often)
As I type this there are 3 populated servers out of the 8 that show on Sourcebans. only one is full, and the other 2 are about half.

 

Thank you very, very much for increasing the bile shower cost. I haven't experienced it yet because my graphic card is still broken but that was about ime. Thank you.

 

For a time only one US server was running, yes. Then marvel added an EU one. The EU one did not gain as much notoriety so maybe I have been making the wrong conclusions.

We are following our own vision. Luke had his own vision. Me and Kitties have a different one. We're doing things our own way and looks like Luke above is following and joining in our vision too. You're arguing that leads don't follow their own vision but look here, we are, we're doing this our own way and yes, if we have to scrap progress be it negative or positive then we will.

We're removing some TS skills, however, if some fit our vision then we'll keep them. Magic doesn't belong in a zombie shooter horror game, it subtracts from the game. If people wanted to drive cars then they'll play a bit of Mario Karts not L4D2. All in all, we're making changes which have been primarily dictated by the players and secondly governed by the admins.

Hasn't been applied yet, expect it in the next version

 

I still have my own vision; I am not changing my vision to that of you or Kitties. HonorCode had his own vision. It's this great coagulation of different ideas and visions that makes PR great-- not everyone shares the same perspective, so every update is something new for everybody.

For example, the original PR 1.3 was a mess of CoD, WoW, L4D2, and God knows what else. By setting numerous genres on the table (albeit unintentionally), we were able to find out just what kind of features our community enjoys. That along with the experience I gained by breaking the mod barrier was satisfaction enough for me.

I personally LOVED killstreaks in Call of Duty (which is why I modded that onto l4d2), and although most l4d players hate Call of Duty, there are a few who love it, and IMO you should keep that in PR 1.3 (on both Coop and Versus); increase the UAV streak count on versus only. Magic and builder can go-- after playing with them on the live servers, my level of piss was off the charts. I got blinded every 5 seconds by infected, just to get blockaded by my own teammate who used builder. GTA is too buggy, and unless you guys fix the math for it, you can scrap that skill (which also renders Thief practically useless).

 

So, if some of the TS skills are being taken away, what happens to all the cash points the people spent to buy these skills? I, myself have everything bought

And it's a shame magic is being taken out, I liked it a lot. Don't like the other things though lol. Instead of taking it out, maybe a rework for magic when played as survivor would of been better, to even the playing field that is.

 

I completely agree with Steph.
Maybe my opinion is already timeless, anyway I want to express my disagreement with the recoil that means returning to PR 1.2.
I'm convinced that most veteran players continue to literally LukeM council, mainly how to level our TS. We played hard on servers versus, we level the most of our TS, some buy the skill all the TS (500,000 cash approximately), but above all things I have learned that the most important thing in a game versus is teamwork. It is worthwhile to say that everything PR1.3 innovated, for my particular was very good.
And I think it is unfair to all players who reach the TS 50, that all that effort be rejected because some players "wept" and even tried to prove the PR1.3. Respect but do not share the opinion of these players.
I'm The_Jackal... Veteran Player... LVL 111 (actually 210 full)... TS 50 full... Played 2100 hs in MG servers...