How do you rate the new RA release?

Discussion about the game and its default mods.

How do you rate the new RA release

1 (love it)
18
38%
2
7
15%
3 (no change for me)
4
9%
4
9
19%
5 (hate it)
9
19%
 
Total votes: 47

kazu.
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Post by kazu. »

@Orb you are totally right ! i forgot about the wf changes, they are freaking awesome !

I voted five.

What bothers me the most is that, as .1 pointed out, i feel like i am forced to play a certain style in order to score good results in competetive gameplay. Sure with the new release there are quite a lot of new approaches to the game in terms of build order, scouting, blobbing and base layout viable/needed, but that is probably true for every new release. Unlike other releases that gave you the chance to experience those new approaches this release hits you in the face with a baseball bat, metal coated. Adapt or fail !
Which for me is pretty similiar to Happy`s "git gud".
In addition the possibilities to have a comeback in high level play drastically shrinked which is quite a concern to me. Before the new release it was really hard to have a comeback already, but now i can t see a way to comeback from a major disadvantage ever. Unless your opponent fucks up enormously, which in high level play won t happen that often. Sure it required little mistakes by your opponent to have a chance for a comeback, but now it has to be a major mistake ! Given that comeback techniques, as mentioned by .1, are not given anymore.
I watched quite a few games now and i can say that it feels like people are spamming defensive structures even more ! Not because they want to do that, but because they are forced to do so. I think no one aimed for that to happen, right ?

I voted five, not only because of all the reasons given above, but because what is happening to the ORA community during the playtests and the new release.
We split, we fight each other. Rather than finding a solution together we found two camps to chose from. Either you are pro playtest/devs or not which is the worst possible policy to our problem ever. Pointing fingers didn t ever help !
It is time to get our shit together and to reconsider our behaviour in that regard !
It took some time for things to get that bad as it will take time to recover. We all love ORA more or less which is why we are here arguing about it. That s why i am pretty sure we can find a way to settle our discrepancies. I genuinely hope we will find a way to do so !

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Clockwork
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Post by Clockwork »

kazu. wrote: Which for me is pretty similiar to Happy`s "git gud".
3 rax into radar mothafucka, git gud noobs

abcdefg30
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Post by abcdefg30 »

Maybe answering this is a bad idea. It'll just feed the trolls and prolong the discussion without any gain. I'd probably feel bad for the people wanting a reasonable conversation if I didn't answer, though.

Sorry in advance for the wall of text. However, those questions got asked often lately, so I thought I should share my opinion on them and try to answer as much as I can.

To start with an already answered question (for completeness' sake):
abcdefg30 wrote: Just to make one thing clear:
FiveAces wrote: After all, the change was implemented to make it easier to deal with basepushes.
No, it was not. To quote pchote, nerfing basepushing was only a "side effect" of that long-planned change. It simply wasn't done earlier for technical reasons (e.g. the AI had trouble with that logic). Although OpenRA is clearly not a 1 to 1 port of the original, the change to the 'Defend' stance aligns it more with the 'old' C&C games.
The second next thing I hear often is "the separation of developers of players". Is there really a divide between developers and players?
Many people say, they see themselves misinformed, or not informed at all. So to some degree, the answer is yes. Personally, I don't think there is a divide. You can always jump on IRC, look at GitHub, or ask questions on the forums. You can even ask penev or me on Discord... And after all, several playtests were issued and the Assault-Move was introduced as response to the feedback. Most of the changes were even approved by the "head of balance". (On that note, I don't want to derail this too much, so for those interested, especially SoScared: https://gist.github.com/abcdefg30/cc8c4 ... 332fa59d7a )

Anyway, the Assault-Move wasn't enough for many.

Which brings me to my controverial statement that 'the devs' kind of stopped to care that much about the RA playerbase and balance. The answer is no, not entirely. Personally I just got the feeling that it got a touchy topic because some individuals acted badly and is thus often avoided. However, that's just how I see and understand it. I can't actually answer this as we shouldn't think of "the devs" as one collective. The core team is actually just pchote and reaperrr, with others like atlimit8, RoosterDragon and r0b0v coming in from time to time, and penev returning from hiatus (maybe). I'm not speaking for all of them, neither are they for all contributors. Therefore, I think it is unfair to just blame all issues on an undefined body of people called "the developers" (or to inverse that, by blaming everything on one person, making pchote's live hard). Note that I appreciate that several individual people did the step to actually comment constructively, this thread is actually a good example for that (aside a few cases, like this paragraph...).

Which gets us to "what is the actual reason for the change in the first place? What problem was addressed?".
The obvious reasons already stated in the answer to the first question are that it was a long planned feature to adhere to originals (including the newer C&C titles like Tiberian Wars). And yes, it's actually not much more. You can say that this solves long standing annoyances like needing to be very attentive if you want to capture buildings. Funnily, following the discussion here, people can't decide if this increases or decreases the number of available tactics and the need of micro management, so not sure if I can use that as argument. Talking about "casual" (i.e. non-1v1/non-multiplayer players) is kind of difficult as well. We don't know for sure how those are impacted. (For example, many people playing the campaigns seem to comment on the news post, often asking about the completion progress of the other missions. Looking at http://www.openra.net/news/release-20171014/ I only see 1(!) post sent by an anonymous stating that he doesn't like the new release [sort of]. But is that representative? Probably not.) Certainly though, the new logic should be an improvement to the singleplayer campaigns as well.

So, what next?

I like how some comments here state that the new release disturbs gameplay and is thus not much fun to play, but at the same time acknowledge that people will get used to the changes over time.

Another reoccurring statement was that the changes to targeting uncovered deeper (or old) balancing problems that can and should be addressed now. As it is very unlikely that those changes are reverted, it would be good to focus on the new balancing instead of debating if the changes are good or not, in my opinion. By continuing we might just end up starting another conflict no one wants fight. In the end we all just want to enjoy the OpenRA version of RA (don't tell me to just go playing TD instead if I want fun :P ).

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Graion Dilach
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Post by Graion Dilach »

I only noticed to this topic so I'll be replying sporadically.

I still find the hate arguments on not-autoacquiring-noncombats blasphemy - this is something which defines Command and Conquer. Even Generals, the game which is more closer to Blizzardcraft than traditional C&Cs, while breaking almost everything (reducing EVA to a minimum, individual queues, proper stances, introducing abilities for micro potential, individual queues, axing resource spawners in favor of the resource stash system) left this one feature intact. OpenRA sticked out like a sore thumb by not having this feature and even new players should expect to have the Command and Conquer gameplay experience.

If the balance breaks just due to this, then the balance was wrong. If people spread hatedom just because of this, then these players should go and have some actual experience with an original Command and Conquer RTS, no matter if it's TD or RA3.

noobmapmaker: I don't believe that your thoughts regarding the competitive importance of the RA mod would help attracting more developers. In fact, I see the opposite - devs don't come for RA at all. IceReaper came to create stuff to make his KKND project possible, forcecore's implementing stuff he made for OverpoweredRA and just sends it in, I channelled stuff mostly due to CD or AS needing it, jrb0001 was interested because of CD, MustaphaTR picked up coding because of Generals Alpha... OpenRA-as-an-engine is more attractive to gain developers than OpenRA-as-RA.

How I feel at this point is that the RA community became toxic to the developers and overestimating their own importance. The fact that RA players downshooted the tank logo on first sight because it's not related to RA enough. already shown signs of this. Sure, it's nice to have a competitively played example game, as long as it doesn't try slowing the growth possible - and if the RA playerbase carries this anti-dev torch up, then there will be a point where it will be. (Like for example, demanding to leave the externalcapture-stunning-target aspect intact, sure, RA balance might "depend" on it, but Generals didn't have this, and modders might not want this and I think I've seen a complaint against unhardcoding this because "RA").

SoScared: Don't be surprised at pchote, that's common pchote. Don't argue with him IMO, it's pointless, you'll be just forced to accept his POV without any actual respect shown to yours. Keep in mind that such ad hominems from him were a major reason why I gave up on OpenRA as a project overall.
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reaperrr
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Post by reaperrr »

One additional point to consider about the "no building-auto-targeting with normal AttackMove", the mods aren't multiplayer-only, even if that is the more popular part.
The old behavior could be quite a problem in missions where you had to capture or infiltrate a specific building, because protecting the engineer/spy without accidentally killing off that building was quite challenging and made the old behavior really annoying in those situations.


Apart from that, AssaultMove just needs one more pressed key. Certainly a little annoying and less convenient when you need it, but with some practice it shouldn't be that much harder/slower to trigger.
Alternatively, you just need to Alt+A once after you selected your attack squad, and you'll effectively get the old AMove behavior without the need to hold Ctrl.

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that every additional key press costs time and adds a little inconvenience, but that applies to all players, so on this particular matter I think the main problem is currently just that some people haven't gotten used to it (or don't want to).

Finally, there's a good chance that next or next+1 release will feature Default stance logic for production buildings, which would make it even easier than the above solutions to trigger the old AMove/targeting behavior.

eskimo
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Post by eskimo »

I think the two posts above essentially sum up our predicament.


reaperrr wrote: One additional point to consider about the "no building-auto-targeting with normal AttackMove", the mods aren't multiplayer-only, even if that is the more popular part.
The old behavior could be quite a problem in missions where you had to capture or infiltrate a specific building, because protecting the engineer/spy without accidentally killing off that building was quite challenging and made the old behavior really annoying in those situations.


Apart from that, AssaultMove just needs one more pressed key. Certainly a little annoying and less convenient when you need it, but with some practice it shouldn't be that much harder/slower to trigger.
Alternatively, you just need to Alt+A once after you selected your attack squad, and you'll effectively get the old AMove behavior without the need to hold Ctrl.

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that every additional key press costs time and adds a little inconvenience, but that applies to all players, so on this particular matter I think the main problem is currently just that some people haven't gotten used to it (or don't want to).

Finally, there's a good chance that next or next+1 release will feature Default stance logic for production buildings, which would make it even easier than the above solutions to trigger the old AMove/targeting behavior.

I think that's a very very sound point about the single player, one that is very important too.

Regarding the micro, it's not that people mind about having to micro kill buildings, it's that the attacker doesn't need to micro to eliminate what is most important in an attack (killing units inbetween buildings). So attacking now is essentially easier in fortified positions as opposed to coordinated attacks by higher skilled players. This has been covered more in depth in previous posts.

So now we are left with this:

Graion Dilach wrote: If the balance breaks just due to this, then the balance was wrong. .
I feel you are completely right. It's a shame it happened this way due to the work that has been put in, but at least we had a good run and time was enjoyed on the way to it also.

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SoScared
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Post by SoScared »

@abcdefg30: I left a response that I hope clarifies the situation.

In short there's no way I could have come out against the stance changes before the official playtest without any idea on how it would affect the game balance. Nobody would accept that and I would certainly be vilified as someone who simply don't like changes by default. What better way of testing the stance changes than putting it through a playtest.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I'm more than prepared to lay this issue to rest, at least on my part, but obviously my position left a bitter taste with some people making them resort to slander and fabricating falsehoods in order to put me in a bad light and historically I've never been the type not to call out such nonsense - which is also why I'm really sorry for using the term 'developers' loosely in my above post although the people of which was targeted with the statements that I made was pretty obvious.

This whole discussion is a huge weight lifted off my shoulders and it's been really nice to have be able to speak openly about issues under the hood for quite a long period of time.

I can appreciate the position of the RA mod being a promotional tool for the OpenRA project as a developer platform. In that context, RA pushing the boundaries and reach a greater audience through exposure has been beneficial to the flow of developers and contributors towards GitHub. The competitive aspect of RA has certainly helped stretch the possibilities and diversity of its gameplay and shown how far OpenRA can bring an old classic back to life, but as for pulling in more people to the project it usually follows reviews, articles etc. which showcase OpenRA in its entirety, often with the RA mod as its flagship.

The toxic RA community is a myth. What transgressed was a few individuals spamming the forum and the Discord channel with close to no moderation whatsoever, allowing a few voices to overshadow a hundred+ dedicated members of the community. That's not a phenomena limited to one mods' community but a human phenomena within any non moderated space on the internet. Same thing happened to me with the map pool RAGL "uprising" and as Graion pointed out with the OpenRA logo discussion in January this year of which I myself reacted badly over the lack of a proper moderation of the subject.

The effort of moderation overseen by Murto on this forum has proven to work as exemplified with this discussion thread. If communication between developers, contributors and users can be maintained in such a respectable format then there's no reason why OpenRA shouldn't be able to grow further and hopefully one day involve greater titles such as Tiberian Sun and beyond.

noobmapmaker
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Post by noobmapmaker »

@Graion: I did not meant that Red Alert itself attracts developers, but that a sound and large competitive scene is good for overall OpenRA growth. It's a catalyst for many aspects of OpenRA, one of them being the casts on youtube and Twitch, and this leads to more exposure and eventually more players. Of those players 0.01% (or so) is interested in modding and developing and eventually - I think - will bring more people who actively contribute to development (not only by coding, but also by reporting bugs, discussing on Github).
How I feel at this point is that the RA community became toxic to the developers and overestimating their own importance.
I would like to point out that the RA community, just like 'the devs', is not a single entitiy. I've seen many RA players voicing their opinions in a nice way, sometimes void of evidence sometimes with tons of evidence, and yes, a minority that has been rude. Others that have joined the discussion in a normal way have gotten frustrated because the communication from the developers side hasn't always been that nice (or supported by evidence) as well.

The "overestimating their importance" could be true and might be what leaves a bad taste with some devs. And yes, it is something that few realised enough (incl me) and probably realise better now that there are more things aside RA, like the importance of progression for the engine and singleplayer campaign. I do hope that the developers who currently frustrated about RA competitive want to reset their opinion at some point and want to list again to the constructive RA competitive people. Specifically I hope that Pchote and SoScared reconcile, but that is something they two have to work out.

And we'll have to see how the new balance works out. Current criticism is that the new feature has reduced strategic/tactic intensity of Red Alert. Maybe it's just because it's new and new strategies emerge over time that show that there is in fact 'emergent complexity' in the new stance. But it could also be that this stance does make RA more bland. In that case we could look for new things to again create depth in strategy/tactics, or in the ultimate case: remove that specific stance for this specific mod.

Imagine a new stance: all units automatically target the unit within reach that they do most damage against. After it is introduced RA people complain that battles have changed fundamentally and become more bland as it removed the need to micro. This new stance however is fun (end even nescessary) for other mods. Should we then come up with all kind of new balance changes to fix the mod or decide that we should remove the functionality for that specific mod?

Well, Im starting to repeat myself. But with the growth come new people and old ways of organising and interaction change and rebalance, sometimes with rimples in the pond and unwanted extremes. There is a common ground and common goal (enjoying OpenRA, bringing it a step further) so that should be a good basis for the future.
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SafwatHalaby
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Post by SafwatHalaby »

The second next thing I hear often is "the separation of developers of players". Is there really a divide between developers and players?
That other day on IRC, some of the devs were surprised when I said that pretty much everyone disables shroud on multiplayer except for absolute beginners. Anyone who'd played for a couple of hours knows that..

It was suggested that perhaps my observations are skewed toward the hardcore scene, no, I'm just a casual player.

It doesn't prove anything, just evidence of the apparent divide.

Edit: Link.

Edit2:

Code: Select all

&#91;11&#58;50&#58;15&#93;	<Scott`> i don't play, the devs don't play in general lol 
...
&#91;11&#58;57&#58;32&#93;	<abcdefg30> "how do devs balance the game" we don't ^^ 
&#91;11&#58;58&#58;01&#93;	<abcdefg30> I don't think we care about balancing that much, we rely on community members to do the changes 
...
&#91;11&#58;58&#58;56&#93;	<SafwatHalaby> Is the dev community generally "Detached" from the gamers?
&#91;11&#58;59&#58;01&#93;	<SafwatHalaby> i wouldn't say it's healthy long term
&#91;11&#58;59&#58;34&#93;	<Scott`> to a point yes 
&#91;12&#58;01&#58;30&#93;	<Scott`> wasnt always the case tho 

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AoAGeneral1
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Post by AoAGeneral1 »

@Noobmapmaker: In general there are a few good RA players I agree. Here is what happens though:

>Devs releases stance changes

>Get screamed at by 12 year olds.

>Devs add a new stance called Assault-Move.

>Get screamed at by 12 year olds.

>Bug found with submarine vs submarine.

>Get screamed at by 12 year olds.

>Devs change auto targets to select units only.

>Get screamed at by 12 year olds.

This is pretty much the pattern that happens which is why I always joke when a playtest or release comes out "Prepare for the hatred."

---------------

@SafwatHalaby:

Not everyone. Personally when I play a competitive game of TD I turn shroud on. It eliminates pre-planning of your forces and routes and takes more emphasis on scouting quickly. (IE: In CNC95 you took your starting units and scouted quickly. In RA95 you built a barracks and built a few quick infantry to look around. D2K you did the same taking your starting units and roam the map.)

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Clockwork
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Post by Clockwork »

AoAGeneral1 wrote: @Noobmapmaker: In general there are a few good RA players I agree. Here is what happens though:

>Devs releases stance changes

>Get screamed at by 12 year olds.

>Devs add a new stance called Assault-Move.

>Get screamed at by 12 year olds.

>Bug found with submarine vs submarine.

>Get screamed at by 12 year olds.

>Devs change auto targets to select units only.

>Get screamed at by 12 year olds.

This is pretty much the pattern that happens which is why I always joke when a playtest or release comes out "Prepare for the hatred."

---------------

@SafwatHalaby:

Not everyone. Personally when I play a competitive game of TD I turn shroud on. It eliminates pre-planning of your forces and routes and takes more emphasis on scouting quickly. (IE: In CNC95 you took your starting units and scouted quickly. In RA95 you built a barracks and built a few quick infantry to look around. D2K you did the same taking your starting units and roam the map.)
You ask for flame if your lighting the fuel with shitty comments like that :)
I don't think it's fair to characterize people that disagree with the development of the project as "12 year olds".

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AoAGeneral1
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Post by AoAGeneral1 »

"The one who replies is guilty at charged."

Normally this would be true, however in regards to the sub vs sub bug being labeled and flamed on IRC as "Stances shouldn't be changed because then you get things breaking" When stances had nothing to do with it is a clear indication that the mindset is being enacted as "12 years old"

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Clockwork
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Post by Clockwork »

AoAGeneral1 wrote: "The one who replies is guilty at charged."

Normally this would be true, however in regards to the sub vs sub bug being labeled and flamed on IRC as "Stances shouldn't be changed because then you get things breaking" When stances had nothing to do with it is a clear indication that the mindset is being enacted as "12 years old"
No I replied because your clearly trying to start some sort of flame war with antagonizing comments on a so far respectable thread, the first since the whole debate. If I recall rightly that is against forum rules to purposefully entice flaming (may be wrong).

Furthermore I have no idea how sub vs sub and stance changes have any correlation unless it's a bug I've never heard off and I haven't heard of any flaming on the topic. If this is related to Catgirls then I think everyone on every side of the debate knows that person is not to be taken serious and it a detriment to any side he is apart of PR wise.

As well to fully understand the issue I would like some replays detailing this sub vs sub bug as a genuine threat to players interests. Also I would like some IRC log links to this "flaming".
Last edited by Clockwork on Mon Oct 30, 2017 1:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

lawANDorder
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Post by lawANDorder »

AoAGeneral1 wrote: "The one who replies is guilty at charged."

Normally this would be true, however in regards to the sub vs sub bug being labeled and flamed on IRC as "Stances shouldn't be changed because then you get things breaking" When stances had nothing to do with it is a clear indication that the mindset is being enacted as "12 years old"
And in regards to this thread you see how things have improved. No need to bring this up again, at least I can't see how this is helping. Back to topic I'd say.

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anjew
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Post by anjew »

SafwatHalaby wrote: That other day on IRC, some of the devs were surprised when I said that pretty much everyone disables shroud on multiplayer except for absolute beginners. Anyone who'd played for a couple of hours knows that..
I think they say that because they know, as well as many other players, that their is a glaring exploit when shroud is turned off yet I think everyone acts as if its part of game. I'd argue the hardcore players prefer shroud off :p
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