Bugs in the patch
The v3251 patch made a lot of changes, but apparently not all of them are for the better. Already, several major new bugs have been reported. First off, while the Cybran T3 fighter has always been kind of broken, it seems that it is now broken in a new way. While it can now actually hit its targets, the amount of damage it does is so pitiful that many people on the forums seem to think that its damage rating is a typo. Also, apparently the UEF T3 fighter cannot hit fast moving targets at all. You can read about this on the official forums here and here.
Also, it appears that there is now a new ACU instant-upgrade exploit, that allows for a very easy instant win for any player who knows about it. Details on this are still a bit sketchy, but it has been reported and confirmed by several users here. While this bug is nasty, it is at least easier to spot in a replay than the mass extractor duplication bug that was just fixed.
These are just two of the most extreme examples of problems with the new patch. There are a whole host of other issues, some of which may just be poor balancing, but many of which are probably bugs.
May 28th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Wow, it sounds like GPG should really open up the patch beta testing to a wider subset of players the next time around, because this current subset missed a lot. In particular, I wonder how many testers were actually playing it with a playtesting mindset rather than just a competitive match mindset. Had I been in the beta, I probably would’ve discovered at least one of these bugs on my own, just because I’d be testing out all of the new balance changes in sandbox mode to see how good each new unit is.
Also, more modders should be let into the next beta run, because they’re the ones who discovered a lot of the current bugs by looking in the lua files and playing around with modifications to see how the balance changes probably should’ve been. For example, it was a modder who saw that the Wasp damage radius was set to 1 in the unit file, which was causing huge problems. The modder tried increasing it in increments but it quickly became too powerful. His final conclusion was that the damage radius should just be 0, which would (mostly) fix it. Also, the Gemini DPS appears to be a simple typo, as Grokmoo points out, that was found by looking in a unit file.
Also, a few units still suffer from bad balancings where one of their weapons has been changed but the other hasn’t, so you get weird situations where, say, the left gun’s projectiles travel a lot faster than the right one’s, making it a lot more powerful.
May 28th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
I don’t know that the Gemini DPS is a typo. Only GPG can confirm/deny this.
As for the other bugs, some of them just don’t make any sense, and could easily have been averted by assigning somebody to test that all unit properties were working as inteneded.
Example: Monkeylord has SonarStealth=true in it’s unit BP, but it shows up on sonar anyway. I posted about this in the SupCom General before the patch, but nothing was done. Post patch I posted about it on the Mod forums under the guise of asking a modding question: How do you get sonarstealth to work if a unit also has radarstealth? Sure enough a dev shows up and says it should work. I reply that it doesn’t work on the Monkeylord, and he says: “Oops, we didn’t catch that bug, I’ll fix it in the next patch.”
If you want bugs fixed, post in the mod forums.
May 28th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
GPG needs to put up a public bug tracker or bugzilla. That’d really be the best way to handle the bugs.
Also, I heard that the instant ACU upgrade exploit also applies to SCUs. Cheating with the ACU is easy to catch, but once someone has a herd of SCUs that they’re shepherding, it’d be mighty hard to catch him if he’s insta-upgrading some of them for that extra economy boost. I hope we get another bugfix patch soon, and by soon I don’t mean “in two months”.
May 28th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Well i was in the testing group and if they payed me i would activly search for bugs. But well i dont get payed and bug searching/play testing isn’t fun as competitive play to find unbalanced units.
May 28th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Well, there is the “Report feedback”-button…
May 28th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
What Cauldr0n said. The patch testers were probably all looking at the balance, because that’s way more fun, but we posted bugs if we just happened to come across some, which did happen occasionally.
May 28th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
Given the ridiculous extent of time it was supposedly tested, such a variety of bugs and errors is unacceptable.
They didn’t even get around to fixing some of the bigger issues such as the memory usage crash around 2GB, the sound issues, and so on. Apparently though, those are serious enough issues they require a lot of work and a large enough patch that it would essentially be like downloading the game engine again so those will probably not be addressed until it comes as part of the expansion, whenever that comes.
May 28th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Btw, can someone explain the insta-upgrade bug for the SCUs / ACU (assuming Cyde is okay with that). It will be handy for me in skirmish to insta-RAS my SCUs until it’s fixed.
May 29th, 2007 at 12:19 am
werd: Skirmish, meaning versus the AI? Why not just enable cheats and spawn yourself some resources?
May 29th, 2007 at 12:36 am
I’d like to see how the insta-upgrade is done myself. If you’ll recall, we were very open about explain the previous mass extractor dupe bug. I feel that as long as it is out there and being exploited in the wild, everyone has a right to know every little bit of information about it, thus they’ll have the best chance of catching it if it is ever exploited in an online game. Once I get home I will get my networking on, figure out how this is done, and write it up, because the people have a right to know.
May 29th, 2007 at 12:54 am
Cyde if you see me on GPG pm me and I will explain to you how it is done. Although I am hesitant about posting it here.
May 29th, 2007 at 1:56 am
would someone tell me how ob earth some people seem to be so excited about using exploits in game ?
May 29th, 2007 at 2:23 am
Hint: The insta-upgrade is Aeon only…
May 29th, 2007 at 6:24 am
The people have a right to know! Cyde Weys hard hitting Citizen Journalism courtesty of his two fists of truth, Law and Order.
May 29th, 2007 at 7:14 am
Testuda: Because you can’t instant-upgrade your command units via cheats.
Cattletech: Ah well I don’t play around much with Aeon so I won’t bother then. =)
May 29th, 2007 at 9:33 am
Seriously balancing and patch fixing a game is a long process, just because a few slip through no need to lose the plot.
It took ages because of the graphics changes, not because of the balance testing and at the end of the day thats only the same as a beta group that test when they get time not internal paid testers.
Shame about a new exploit though, people will always try find these things. I would expect more after every patch.
May 29th, 2007 at 10:14 am
Well since CydeWays wanted it published (took me about 5 minutes experimenting to find out, so it’s not that big a secret anyway), the exploit is this:
[SPOILER]
1. Build a tech 1 engineer.
2. Start any upgrade on your commander (eg: RAS)
3. Pause the commander.
4. Tell your engineer to sacrifice on the commander.
5. Un-pause the commander.
6. The upgrade has now been completed, at the cost of 1 engineer, and practically 0 time.
[\SPOILER]
Pretty big exploit really, more unbalancing than the Mex one, although a little harder to do by accident, and pretty noticeable in a replay.
Now I can sit back and enjoy the fireworks.
May 29th, 2007 at 10:30 am
0_o
that is very poor.
May 29th, 2007 at 10:43 am
It should be noted that SonOfShagrat has posted about the exploit on the front page of GPGNet, so the secret’s out anyway. He also mentioned that ‘the map editor will be out soon’.
May 29th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
werd:
“Given the ridiculous extent of time it was supposedly tested, such a variety of bugs and errors is unacceptable.”
How do you know how long the patch was tested for? Would you care to fill us in on how long they had some public players testing it?
May 29th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Woden, that is one of the exploits there is another one and I heard SoS say it is not bannable… o.0
May 29th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
The other one that I heard of was Aeon T1 engs giving more than their mass towards sacrifice so that upgrades could be completed way too quickly.
May 29th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
The other “exploit” in a lot of debate online also deals with the Aeon commander. If you start out a game and build 20 engineers and start the heat sink upgrade (without using the pause exploit), you can get fully through it before the 5 minute mark of the game if you sacrifice them all. Given, this can be countered if the other commander uses air units, but it’s still a bit ridiculous. From what people are saying, the devs haven’t deemed this an exploit, but I was really curious what the rest of you thought about that. I have a replay of it being used in a ranked game if you’re interested. Seems they added quite a few more bugs =/.
May 29th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Similarly, you can upgrade your commander to tech 2 with only ten or so engineers, which is probably cheaper than getting to tech 2 any other way, and gives you a very fast builder to boot.
May 30th, 2007 at 3:42 am
I just tested it and the T2 upgrade was done before 10 T1 engs had sacrificed on the ACU, so it probably only takes 5-8 of them get to T2. That’s pretty dumb. I suspect they’ll “fix” that next patch. Odds are they’ll just remove sacrifice altogether because giving it to all factions gives them all access to that method of getting to T2. It’s only useful in the early game where the mass sacrificed actually makes a dent in the overall cost, so it’s not like it’s a good feature to have. All it’s done is allow for cheap tactics and exploits. :P
May 30th, 2007 at 9:02 am
And let’s not forget about how powerful UEF T3 sonar buoys are for their cost. Much better than any sub, even if they can’t submerge.
May 30th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Instead of removing sacrifice altogether, they could just remove it from T1 engineers, or even T2 also. After that point, people should have enough mass that it’s not really overpowered. Just a thought.
May 30th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
T2A’:
“Odds are they’ll just remove sacrifice altogether because giving it to all factions gives them all access to that method of getting to T2″
I very much doubt that they will remove sacrifice alltogether. People already complain about the lack of sufficient faction diversity. A better solution may be to restric sacrifice to only being used on units or buildings, not on upgrades.
May 30th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Also, UEF and Cybran S-bombs seems to be able to pass through shields now. Sandbox testing indicates that shields still work against Aeon S-bombers though.
May 30th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
There are plenty of times where sacrificing two or three T2 engs has finished a T3 fab and pulled me out of nanostall long before I might otherwise have.
May 31st, 2007 at 12:31 am
Woden: can you provide a link to that official word about the map editor?