/v/ - Video Games

>>16814410

From the thread title I almost thought it was a case of 99% of the game being whitebox levels and / placeholder / dev assets, but if it's shit that's hard to implement being replaced by shit most people will already do even if the game has that function I don't see your point it's actually a smarter choice from the devs standpoint for several reasons..

i never understood the point of early access.

>>16814410

Does the game feature no bots or scaling difficulty based on the amount of players? Cause that sounds like shit if you don't have enough friends to fill a party.

Shame, I was looking forward to this game.

>>16814432

1) Discord is gay

2) Why can't you host a server and share the IP, instead of having to rely on Steam's friend list to connect?

3) Why would you consider a good idea to centralize communication of the community into a closed garden that not even the devs are in full control of?

4) If they are already selling the game and\or have their own website, they are more than capable of having a masterserver for matchmaking, there's no excuse here.

There's plenty of online games that are dead because some component of them wasn't in the hands of the community. What do you think will happen to this game if the Devs close their Discord server? Or if Discord ever "finds out" that the devs are "problematic"?

You might as well argue for a gasoline silo made out of wood.

>>16814439

>I have 80% of my idea complete

>but I don't know how I'm going to do the other 20%

<So let's ask the community

>I have a game I'm making

>But I want it to appeal to my target audience

<So I'll let them try it and give me their feedback in realtime as we are developing it

>Here's a game where difficulty\balance comes down to a lot of different variables

>I need to adjust them so the game is chalenging\fair for everyone

<Let's let the community try it and adjust values as we go along until we reach balance.

Those are 3 different good reasons, but more often than not they are just used as excuses or badly implemented.

>>16814507

>1) Discord is gay

No argument there but you're not obligated to use it either, unless you want the most randos to play with

>2) Why can't you host a server and share the IP, instead of having to rely on Steam's friend list to connect?

Has nothing to do with it being early access, and a lot to do with steamworks being simpler and thus cheaper to integrate.

>3) Why would you consider a good idea to centralize communication of the community into a closed garden that not even the devs are in full control of?

If you're referring to discord it's not an obligation, if you're refering to steam not only is it invalid because there are alternatives to using steam itself but it also has nothing to do with early access.

>4) If they are already selling the game and\or have their own website, they are more than capable of having a masterserver for matchmaking, there's no excuse here.

That would require them making their own everything and take care of it long term, not a sensible or worthwhile investment when you're not AAA and multiplayer focused on top of that.

Seems to me your issue is less early access and more that the game is on steam.

>>16814514

>No argument there

Wasn't supposed to be one, Discord is just gay and that's it.

>a lot to do with steamworks being simpler and thus cheaper to integrate

How simpler and how cheaper? What metrics are you using here? Simply costs for hosting a master server or are you taking into account development costs to integrate another solution?

You're hinging your arguments a lot on this point so you better have something more substancial to back it up.

>If you're referring to discord it's not an obligation,

Yes, I was referring Discord. You keep mentioning that "it's not an obligation", but it seems that if you want to play with anyone besides any friend you can drag into the game, you WILL have to use it.

That's like saying internet isn't an obligation to play any arena shooter since you have bots. That's technically true but you know very well that's not the point.

>That would require them making their own everything and take care of it long term, not a sensible or worthwhile investment when you're not AAA and multiplayer focused on top of that.

We are talking about a small server that keeps a list of currently hosted games that every client can connect and get so their users can join public servers.

It's basically how every FPS game used to host servers in that past and all it requires is a master server that's little more than exactly that: a list of open public servers.

"not a sensible or worthwhile investment when you're not AAA"? That's what nerds do to host their own games without any budget anyway, and we are talking "multiplayer focused" games here.

>Seems to me your issue is less early access and more that the game is on steam.

How the fuck do you even get to that conclusion when I said nothing about Steam? I have no problem buying it on Steam, it's the fact that it seems you're expected to hop on Discord to find matches that irks me since Discord is encroaching far too much in recent games to a ridiculous degree and anything that helps that will only make it worse.

>>16814522

>How simpler and how cheaper? What metrics are you using here? Simply costs for hosting a master server or are you taking into account development costs to integrate another solution?

Well it''s simple on on hand you have a plug in solution that takes little time to implement and lower QA time with an infrastructure that scale to millions of players everywhere in the world with redundancy that come for free if you're already intending to sell on steam.

On the other you have to code one solution from scratch, QA it which is usually long and painful for network stuff, rent a server that isn't shit and hope you never hit a peak player count that will need you to scale up urgently (which even if all goes well is a fucking nightmare), as well as double the cost for redundancy (and 5 times more on top if you want proper regional coverage).

>but it seems that if you want to play with anyone besides any friend you can drag into the game, you WILL have to use it.

It's on steam, it has a forum and it most likely already has a thread asking for coop partners, and yeah you can ask your friends.

But mostly why would you even consider a coop horde shooter with randos maybe that's just me though, never had any decent experience playing public rando outside of the EDF threads, and I'm pretty sure you can just play MP with the pirates if you're that desperate to play with insufferable randos.

>We are talking about a small server that keeps a list of currently hosted games that every client can connect and get so their users can join public servers.

Yeah we're talking 100 bucks per month minimum (doubt any repsectable server rental service would take any less for 1Gbps dedicated with a quadcore and 99.999% uptime, granted you could just buy the server and rent rackspace but that's not always an easy option and it's gonna be a pain if you're not close to the place) more than likely $500 to $2k if you don't want your solution to be shit or shit itself when you reach a few hundred players worldwide, probably much more if you have playerbase surges.

Unless you wanna be that guy who think a $5 OVH VPS instance / RPi in his basement is appropriate for a paid product, most likely it would shit itself as soon as you're trying to have double digit player counts and that's being generous, maybe if it's really just a server list with nothing extra but even then still will have shit uptimes and unpredictable load behavior.

I do agree that they could have had direct IP connection, it's free and really doesn't take any extra work if you're already making working network MP, usually you have to implement it simply because it makes testing / debugging your netcode a whole lot easier, you just have to not remove it for final release like Forsaken remastered.

>How the fuck do you even get to that conclusion when I said nothing about Steam?

>"instead of having to rely on Steam's friend list to connect?",

And a lot of what you're complaining about doesn't really have anything to do with early access and a lot to do with things that make sense when you're selling your game on steam.

>it's the fact that it seems you're expected to hop on Discord to find matches that irks me

Well yeah but you're not forced to do it seeing as the only "hard" requirement is having he guy you wanna play with on your steam friend list from what I get reading the OP, but I understand that if you want a quick match at any time there's a "soft" requirement to go on the discord server to have that.

Still do you really wanna play with those people at the end of the day?

>>16814410

It's being developed by the Payday 2 devs, the free alpha was fun for awhile but it's going to wind up as trash just like Payday 2 did.

>>16814542

Probably the same people who defend missing features of other early access games with the retarded logic of "They're just a small indie developer, bro. They can't be held to the same standard as big developers." or some other variation of that line.

>>16814598

> "They're just a small indie developer, bro. They can't be held to the same standard as big developers."

Well you can hold them to the same standards doesn't mean it's not retarded as that would require big devs to have any fucking standard to begin with and be so retarded as to think that having a massive budget and thousands of engine devs / other devs / artists doesn't it it a whole lot fucking easier to make a game.

But it's not like one would expect some random faggot on /v/ to have actually made a commercial game when you see some of the retarded shit that have been posted on non /agdg/ threads in regards to that, granted it's usually not on the level of "just distribute your paid game from a seedbox on your home connection" or "trust me I know about game dev I made .cdi rips for DC when that was relevant"

>>16814555

this. literally all you need to know is

> Payday 2 devs

>How Early is too Early (Access)?

When you resort to using "early access" in any way whatsoever.

>>16814410

>Getting matches with randoms has to be done through their discord

>>16814542

>there is no in-game way to get a match

This is a new level of faggotry. Anyone who buys this trash deserves to be bullied.

>>16814667

Gotta agree with this. This habit of charging (usually) full price for unfinished games (many of which are either never finished or just called done when the devs can't swipe any more funds for it) annoys me to no end. Oh and a special place in hell for devs that start doing paid DLC for their unfinished ea games. Also tired of the whole "It is early access, so that excuses any issues with it!" argument. Honestly though, even if they do away with early access bs, most games ship broken/incomplete these days with the "We will patch it later" mentality raping what were supposed to at least be complete games.

>>16814507

Man early access is such a powerful tool. Too bad most people use it for evil.

>>16815113

welcome to the human race

>>16815116

It didn't have to be this way.

>>16815133

>Yes it did, you would know that if you were enough time on the internet.

There were a ton of pivot points before the internet was even invented that could have led us away from the consumerist trash heap we live in today.

>>16815178

These fucks can do whatever they want because they are already established in the industry and have connections. A lot of other early access games are made by incompetent retards who ran away as soon as they realized gamedev is hard or just burned through all their resources because they know nothing about running a business.

I honestly prefer it the way it is. Retards will, deservedly, continue to be scammed and people with enough passion but no resources can still get their foot in the door. The barrier to entry is naturally there. Someone who has enough drive to punch their way through the sludge of shit devs will succeed, while the others will simply contribute to the layer of sludge holding the weaklings down.

The real problem of the industry is grotesque nepotism. It lets a lot of the trash float to the surface.

>>16814550

>you have a plug in solution

Discord is not a "plug in solution" unless you code a plugin for that, ruining the point of using it instead of doing your own master server.

>QA time

Are you just pulling fancy terms you don't actually know what they mean and you hope I'm in a similar position?

>an infrastructure that scale to millions of players

<millions of players in a single chatroom is a good scaling solution

You fucking what?

>On the other you have to code one solution from scratch, QA it which is usually long and painful for network stuff

Do you even know how basic bitch a master server for a game is? It's a few steps above an SQL database, all it does is register pairs of IPs and names for servers and reports back that list when queried.

>rent a server that isn't shit

If only the Devs that are hosting their own website from somewhere had a server they could this in… It's almost like I mentioned "do they have their own website?" for some fucking reason.

>hope you never hit a peak player count that will need you to scale up urgently

You mean if ALL players are trying to register\query the server list at precisely the exact same time and the game isn't coded to retry communication a few times or they outright refuse to refresh their search after a while?

That sounds like a worse problem than having "peak player count" spamming a single channel in Discord for a public match!

>as well as double the cost for redundancy (and 5 times more on top if you want proper regional coverage).

For an early access game from a company that has actually made Payday 2, apparently? Completely unfeasible, of course.

>why would you even consider a coop horde shooter with randos

I don't and likely never will. It's the idea that Discord is a good substitute that I'm arguing about.

>Yeah we're talking 100 bucks per month minimum

Listen, fucko. I wasn't talking about HOSTING THE ENTIRE FUCKING GAME AND EVERY SERVER. Just host a master server that lists public servers started by any player that keeps it public. Mount and Blade does this, with Bohemia Interactive hosting and maintaining a master server but the community itself hosts their own servers.

You know very well how this works, that was the staple for Source engine games where anyone could host but magically the server would show up on other player's game even if they weren't Steam friends with the host.

Listing a catalogue of hosting solutions doesn't show you know what you're talking about, it just proves you went googling for the wrong information to win an internet debate, and that's fucking pathetic when we're considering you're defending Discord of all things.

>And a lot of what you're complaining about doesn't really have anything to do with early access and a lot to do with things that make sense when you're selling your game on steam.

I never made a point against Early Acess and I never made a point against Steam and yet those were the first 2 things you got from my posts when I've more than expressed that my main, only and central gripe is the idea of using Discord instead of matchmaking.

You do not understand the English language and I'm afraid that it's on purpose.

>Well yeah but you're not forced to do it

Stop being a fucking weasel. "You don't have to do this stupid solution if you don't want this basic feature that was always implemented in a simple and functional way for several decades now"

You might as well say you don't actually need a mouse since you can use your keyboard to move the camera and aim.

There's NOTHING positive for the players from having to use Discord for matchmaking and /v/ used to throw a massive bitchfit when Team Fortress implemented match making in favor of community run servers, precisely because of this bullshit idea of having your community corralled by someone else other than themselves.

This isn't about playing with randos, this is about those randos not abandoning the game because they can't use matchmaking to get a game going and the game ends up dying despite there being a market for it.

This is about not making excuses for lazy devs that can't implement one of the most basic networking features for multiplayer games with no benefit for you.

>>16814896

>>16814888

>>16814856

Check the OP, pal. You're in the wrong thread.

>>16815104

>There are no bots and the difficulty does not scale.

Oh that's just fantastic. So it's either impossibly hard solo or extremely easy when there's more players, what a great way to balance the game.

>the location of key items needed for objectives are randomized

Even better, RNG difficulty!

Thankfully, it was said that they are Payday 2 devs, so their magic ability to fuck up such a simple concept is explained.

I am now reminded that Left 4 Dead scaled the enemies and resources you encountered based around how well your group was going and despite being actually a very basic mechanism, it seems incredibly sophisticated when compared to the bullshit devs are putting out these days.

>>16815200

>impossibly hard solo

That's honestly how I prefer games sometimes. I remember I would solo a bunch of Payday 2 missions doing stealth. It was hard as fuck because 1 screw up meant restarting the mission and you could only knock out 3 guards. Not to mention a most of the game was randomized. There were at least 2-3 points in the missions where there is no reliability because the AI pathing was really unpredictable. Sometimes you'd be fucked over just because the levels are randomized and a door you NEED to do stealth didn't spawn. I still need to check out the golden grin hotel. That level looks fucking amazing for solo stealth.

The funniest thing about Payday 2 is the part I enjoy the most people say is the worst part of the game, but it's the only thing that kept me on edge.

>>16815291

Found the flat earther

>>16815200

The dumbest thing is that they are planning on making different mission sets that go on rotation. For example, right now they're on "Rundown #001" and they're working on Rundown #002. So even though there's only 6 levels (of which I think 4 are currently finished), their plan on keeping the games longevity is to basically remix mission objectives IE: One month, mission B1 will be find 12 ID badges littered all across the level. Next month B1 could be to go to one end of the level to start a reactor.

So with that in mind, why randomize the location of key items? You're already going to change it in X amount of days anyways, why the need to go the extra mile to fuck over the player? Just so that they can continue to use it's meme of "Hey, this game is super hard and requires teamwork" for it's marketing?

>>16814522

>1) Discord is gay

<No argument there

>Wasn't supposed to be one

He's agreeing with you anon. The term "No argument there" refers to the speaker's own lack of argument.

>>16815195

>Discord is not a "plug in solution" unless you code a plugin for that

Just for reference none of any of my post was referring to discord unless otherwise stated.

>Are you just pulling fancy terms you don't actually know what they mean and you hope I'm in a similar position?

>not knowing what QA is in relation to game development

>thinking you have any ground to talk about game development

Quality Assurance, aka when you try to look if your shit is broken or not and to what degree, and also what most modern devs don't do enough of.

>You fucking what?

Well I'm talking about steam and somehow you understand discord.

>Do you even know how basic bitch a master server for a game is?

Sure it's much simpler than a proper matchmaking solution, but it's not that simple, especially when you want to make it coexist with steamworks

>If only the Devs that are hosting their own website from somewhere had a server they could this in

You don't host all of your shit on the same server, unless you don't care about shit breaking, besides if anything you'd host your main site on the worse servers.

>For an early access game from a company that has actually made Payday 2, apparently? Completely unfeasible, of course.

You asked why a dev would ever not wanna do this I told you that a small indie dev can't afford that neither money wise or time wise, and most devs don't wanna spend and care for it when steamworks is already free if you sell on steam, at no point did I say those fuckers are small or poor because they clearly fucking aren't.

>You mean if ALL players are trying to register\query the server list

When I mean a player peak imagine something like a free weekend or sale or whatever where instead of your usual thousand players you're having to deal with 10k+, even with the most basic serverlist solution it's not gonna go over well and it's certainly not gonna be as smooth on the players end whenever said player tries to find a server,

>I don't and likely never will. It's the idea that Discord is a good substitute that I'm arguing about.

The substitute they used isn't discord, it's the steam friendlist, the discord link is only there to make it easier to add people.

Now you can argue about why the dev made their own server specifically for that, but then you would be ignoring the almost certain fact that seeing as the game only has matchmaking through a friendlist people would most certainly have ended up making their own server just for that and it would almost certainly also have been the biggest community, and that's an entirely different problem.

>listen, fucko. I wasn't talking about HOSTING THE ENTIRE FUCKING GAME AND EVERY SERVER

Well yeah I wasn't talking about that, it would obviously be a lot more fucking expensive to have server hosted MP instead of P2P with server hosted matchmaking, you don't seem to grasp just how expensive it is to have a decent host if your intention is to rely on it for something you're selling and not just some hobby project.

>You know very well how this works, that was the staple for Source engine games where anyone could host

It's almost like Valve had a worldwide CDN they could easily leverage as matchmaking / master servers since the mid 2000s

>Listing a catalogue of hosting solutions doesn't show you know what you're talking about

So you're just completely gonna ignore that you asked me why the devs didn't host their own matchmaking solution entirely, which requires an infrastructure aka servers you rent.

> you're defending Discord of all things.

I'm not fucking defending discord, or the devs for that matter.

cont.

>>16815522

>>16815195

>I never made a point against Early Acess

Then why the fuck are you in a thread claiming to be about the issues of Early Access, granted the OP didn't understand that either so I guess you're right.

>Stop being a fucking weasel.

You're arguing that discord is a requirement when it is not, it's basically the same as arguing that you need to use the steam forums to get support because it's where you're the most likely to find an answer.

>There's NOTHING positive for the players from having to use Discord for matchmaking

Well not long term, and whoever said anything about it benefiting the playerbase outside of you, the only thing asked was whywould you do that and that's what I answered.

> /v/ used to throw a massive bitchfit when Team Fortress

/v/ used to care about that game and believed it could get better, do you seriously think people care about "new fotm horde survival shooter by shit dev" or has any reason to think it could get better by complaining?

> this is about those randos not abandoning the game because they can't use matchmaking

>This is about not making excuses for lazy devs that can't implement one of the most basic networking features for multiplayer games with no benefit for you.

Well you misunderstand completely then, in that specific case there is literally benefits from not having full on matchmaking, not even just from the standpoint that they fully control most of the community.

Why is that?

It makes community is a lot smaller and more involved in the game (and yeah having to click 5 buttons instead of 2 does actually prevent that many people from doing it) leading to it being easier to not have complete fuckwits as partners and even if you do it's very easy to have them banned, leading to a false impression that the game is better than it actually is through playerbase manipulation, so you have more people with a positive impression of the game and you have more people getting suckered into getting the game because there's a ton of positive opinions about it, you should already know the reasoning is true to a degree or you wouldn't be here.

They went for the most basic bitch steamworks matchmaking implementation because it's easy to implement, it doesn't have any negative impact for them as stated above, it's fucking free and "it just werks™"

>>16815310

Humans aren't monkeys, we're apes. We're in the hominoidea superfamily, along with bonobos, gibbons, orangutans and all the other apes. Monkeys are in the ceboidea and cercopithecoidea superfamilies. That's probably what he's mocking.

Fedorafags like to spout "hairless monkey xddd" a lot without knowing that's not even true.

>buy early access

>get an unfinished, half assed proof of concept game

>full of bugs, crashes, missing features, incomplete parts, unpolished assets, shit performance

>permanently ruin the your experience with the game for yourself, you'll never be able to experience the game for the first time, and the game isn't even out yet

>high chance of game and/or developer getting cucked before release

>high chance of game getting cancelled or abandoned with 1.0 slapped on top

>high chance of you waiting years and years for release

>low to no chance of getting a refund

>directly funding these people and encouraging more developers to do the same

Anyone who buys, and to an extent anyone who even plays early access is an NPC-tier retard sheeple, it's always been this way and it'll always continue to be this way.

There's only 2 acceptable forms of "early access". The first is an open beta, basically the game is finished but there may still be some last remaining bugs to find before proper release and letting people play it is the most effective way to find them. The second is some kind of alpha/beta testing for an MMO, because MMOs aren't technically ever "finished", and servers are hard to test properly without people.

>>16815574

>>16815578

What the fuck? Do we have another bot that can now actually spam about vydia an improvement over the userbase or is this some ranting autist again?

>>16814507

<So let's ask the community

<So I'll let them try it and give me their feedback in realtime as we are developing it

<Let's let the community try it and adjust values as we go along until we reach balance

If all of that worked as well as you seem to be idealizing, early access should be bringing a full on video games renaissance to the video games industry carried on by indie crowdfunded early access games, full of new timeless classics that would eclipse the 8-bit, 16-bit and PC MS-DOS eras. Instead, almost all early access games are complete development trainwrecks that are often directly proportional to the amount of "feedback" they take from the "community". And once they finally leave early access, the end result is almost always shit, unfinished and feels like it left early access too early. All the beloved classics from older eras have been developed without any of this bullshit, they didn't even have internet as we know it today.

Steve Jobs was human scum and I'm glad aids took his life before his time, but I have to admit his opinions and ideals were often right about a lot of things. One of these was his opinion that consumers have no idea what they want, and you should never use consumer feedback such as focus groups when developing a product.

At most, you only listen to feedback based on older versions or different products that your consumers have already used for years, but even that should be handled with care and skepticism. Main reason being that average joes are just apes with a bit of self awareness like >>16815133 pointed out. You really don't want NPCs without inner monologues to give any feedback on your product.

>Getting matches with randoms has to be done through their Discord

Oh joy, this fucking shit again. This is the reason I don't play the Gigantic private server. Why is Discord so ungodly popular when TS/Mumble was barely so? Do people really want those useless points and avatar/profile customization options?

>>16815924

Just to pull something out of my ass: the centralization makes it so that anyone can get the persistence of a permanent IRC with eternal logs and distribute tweet-compatible short invite links without having to host anything, work out any server anything, or set anything up. It's like leaning on your cellphone to be your GPS and notepad and calculator. Plenty of people don't want to do that and know how not to do it effectively, but plenty, plenty, plenty more just want it to be easy and work for many good and bad reasons. Wouldn't surprise me if we saw more of this discord-is-the-only-way-to-interact-with-devs-or-the-community thing in the future. Want mods? Oh, they're all on the discord, just go there. Want wiki? Oh, we don't have one, just go page through all our discord shit for your answer you lazy ass. Want to email or PM the devs? lol no we don't even have a forum go join the discord. I dunno. I sound like an old man complaining about new things since I'm so vague about why people like the new thing, but I'm pretty sure I'm right that the new thing actually is shit nevertheless.

>>16816192

None of those choices were made because they were better. That's not how normalfags work.

>>16816192

It kind of mirrors how getting in touch with anyone from Hirez(fuck you, Tribes Ascend and Global Agenda were wonderful) required going through fucking Reddit since the official forums were abandoned and then outright nuked. If the alternative to not getting information is going through that sewer pipe of a site I'd rather just be in the dark. I miss Gigantic to all hell but I'm not downloading some flavor of the month software to interact with most likely the biggest faggots on the internet just to play a hollow shell of it.

>>16815924

>>16816192

It's the same deal with Facebook overtaking Myspace. Any business, the internet in particular here, that relies on social networking will always favor the platform which has the most people. It takes a tremendous fuckup on the incumbent or a competitor with a much better service (and even then it really needs the prior anyways) to overtake it. People prefer a shitty service with other people using it rather than a superior one that doesn't fuck you in the ass with your own data.

>>16814410

Holy fuck. I saw the vids of it and thought it looked like it had some potential but holy fuck, that's fucking absurd. How can you not have even basic matchmaking features and even consider selling a game?

>>16830236

Because it combines IRC with Ventrilo/Mumble while also working as a media sharing platform with hotlinks and image-inline preview and shit.

It also helps it's run and funded by jews so it gets shilled hard by (((all those people))) including their goyim "journalists".

It's probably the most successful data-harvesting scheme gaming has ever seen.

>>16830265

And what are they going to do with it? They specifically say their data collection is anonymized and used to improve their services

>>16830281

Sell it to marketers and governments.

>>16830286

But they can't legally do that, it's in their terms of service (TOS)

>>16830288

Corporations routinely break their own agreements all the time, in their favor. If you believe otherwise, you are naive beyond belief. Most people are not paying for discord nitro, and there is an absurd amount of videos, images, and text posted directly into discord. Investment capital isn't covering all the expenses, they have to show they can make a profit somehow. They axed the game store for discord, at that.

>>16830304

They got rid of the game store on Discord because it was always a chat client, and moving away from a storefront let's them streamline that experience, though.

>>16830236

>>16830265

>>16830281

>>16830286

Discord developers likely snoop on users they don't like or have stalkerish tendencies towards. It's a sickening reality that has made me disillusioned to online chat groups as a whole.

I was… let's say 'chummy' with a group of developers for a semi-popular social application and the guys in charge would routinely gather up private chats between people they didn't like and sometimes didn't even know and make fun of them without their knowledge. One guy in particular made their "blackmail" folder publicly visible and the rest of the development group just laughed and shrugged it off.

I have no doubt the same will happen or is happening with the developers behind Discord.

Fucking hell, if you create a Discord bot and let it garner enough popularity on servers it can collect every word of text chat in that server. I am very aware of one discord in particular that is doing that right now, and the developer behind it is a raging psychopath.

>>16830317

> I am very aware of one discord in particular that is doing that right now, and the developer behind it is a raging psychopath.

Is it Bui?

They actually had a solid enough roadmap too, with 4 phases of content that would add things like Match maker in BEFORE putting it in early access. Around the first alpha though, for god knows what reason they changed it to "lol i dunno, features come whenever" and decided it was successful enough to just dump on steam

>>16830304

>They axed the game store for discord, at that.

My tinfoil hat says that was to avoid competing with the Epic store, given how they're both funded by China in the end.

>>16814410

Matchmaking is the last issue of this game, the fundamenta flaw is the attempt to force group play at all costs.

Difficulty scaling based on player count would mostly fix things, but even then solo play wouldn't teach a lot of stuff needed for group play, and the devs won't do it because it's not hardcore enough.

I got into the alpha for this back when they were releasing it to "influencers", but dropped it after they added the paywall.

It's a game defined by interesting concepts but lacklustre execution.

The difficulty of the game is balanced around 4 people, so matchmaking is somewhat essential if you're unable to badger 3 other people into buying this and making your own VoIP solution, other than that, you have the sole option of their discord.

Which is its own kettle of fish, in short it's a shit solution, but they seem to have some ARG ERP going on in there last I checked so maybe it's not all bad if you're into that kind of thing.

The reason stated for no matchmaking is that they're a 'small dev team' of 10-20 people, when the risk of rain 2 devs number 3 people and had matchmaking and more game content on EA launch.

Oh yeah, there's no bots, and the devs stated there never will be, apparently it's too complicated for the 'small dev team' they have.

The game itself is okay at best, it revolves around playing red light green light until you smash everything in with a hammer and complete objectives, I think most people are just invested in the lore of half insane death row prisoners being sent into a pit of potentially infectious experiments to complete seemingly random objectives for reasons, probably set somewhere in Russia. I know I was.

There's a cool computer terminal system for locating objectives and items that I enjoyed using, but it's fiddly so I imagine it will get removed or streamlined not too far in the future, the gunplay is okay as long as you're the host.

If you're not the host, then every enemy moves with the fluidity of a console trying to render 1/10th of what a PC can do.

Enemy variety is basically 3 different types, big guys, small gays and tentacle rape guys, but they're only interesting in terms of the tentacle rape guys breaking stealth & spawning a horde of small guys on you if it feels you up.

Supposedly more guns and enemy types coming in future, but right now it's DOA unless you're a star citizen type.

In short, they've rushed out early access to try to fund the game and drum up interest cause either no one wants to support these guys after they ditched payday 2, or more likely they don't want a publisher after what happened to payday 2.

There should be no 'Early Access'. ALL released games should be finished bar the addition of expansions if it proves to be worth a shit.

'Early Access' seems to increasingly mean: 'We've stopped giving a shit and this is all we're gonna do'

>>16830878

Early access is tempting for some devs, I think, because they get in a mindset of making the least amount of game possible before money stops coming in. Lots of folks using it have no idea how much more money they would (or maybe wouldn't) make releasing a finished product of a certain quality. It's probably tempting to gamble on making at least some money immediately as opposed to committing to a finished product, releasing that, and possibly making less money for not delivering on promises. After all, most game devs (especially small ones) have literally no idea how much money they can expect to make from their game other than looking at other indie devs who've done this sort of thing. Combine that with not having much experience actually delivering finished products and the gamble probably looks good, but only if they assume not very many of their backers will abandon their next and subsequent efforts.

>>16830961

I thought the Patreon rolling-funding-for-nothing model was big for early access devs these days, rather than the chunk-up-front Kickstarter model. Maybe it only is for porn games. Dunno.

>>16830878

>increasingly

Early Access was that from day one, same with Kickstarters: the potential for scams is too high for nobody to try it.

>>16830961

Issues with dynamic adjustments I can understand to a degree, I don't expect enemies to get an instant nerf if your teammate ragequits for example, my big issue is the "no solo play" mentality.

Devs needs to take their head out of their ass and realize theirs is not the only game in town: if you want to get gud at GTFO (as in, even just get familiar with controls and weapons) you need another player or you'll get a warped experience, meanwhile out there you have a thousand other great games you can play on your own AND with friends, usually with customizable difficulty too.

Also, the game being very heavy on methodical and tactical combat is completely at odds with enemies spawning out of thin air when the mission demands it: ideally they should have all enemies on-map at the start, but the engine clearly can't handle it given how the reactor level was cheesed solo (behead enough small guys, no more enemies can spawn, ez kite and win).

Stealth clearing should be less of a chore and more of a choice with significant risk and strategy involved, the tentacle-hair things are nice but not enough, and fights should be a reasonable option too outside of scripted sequences.

>>16830970

Patreon is massive for porn (and furry) games because people make poor decisions when thinking with their dick.

It's a financial model that rewards delivering as litte as possible as late as possible and hope your supporters forget about pledging so their spare change keeps rolling in, while at least Early Access only makes you more money if you manage to sell more copies.

There is however one silver lining to Patreon funding, and that is the way it approaches the pirate's utopia of free games + optional donations to the dev: when it works, it works pretty well.

If the price isn't worth the game as it currently is. If further updates are needed to make it worth that price, it shouldn't be bought.

>>16831854

I mostly agree with your post, but

>As an example, on average, music composition costs $300-$500 per minute if you don't want trash.

I'm used to see half as much on fiverr (for full rights license), and the result is usually pretty good and doesn't have to be relegated as background music.

Perhaps I got really lucky, or orchestral stuff is unusually cheap.