TheNightTerror on 14/9/2010 at 06:01

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Things like the French Epstein tools and the auto-repair tools are a complete mess, most of them are gone, but not all, either someone was very sloppy about removing them or just wanted to cut back on them. That's why I thought it would be simpler to start over, if all I needed was a bug list then at least I wouldn't be flying blind.

Look at it this way, if you were going to do the job, which way would you rather do it? Work with a bug list and start from scratch, or manually examine every single useable item in the Straylight patch and compare it with the objects from the original game because there may be inconstistencies?

TheNightTerror on 14/9/2010 at 10:11

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Fixing bugs like missing hypos, misaligned textures, etc. is the sort of thing an unofficial patch should do, but you can't alter weapons and remove tools solely because you disapprove of them. If a weapon mod isn't working like it's supposed to, you can do something about that, otherwise I'd say leave them alone.

But, I can't say I've ever seen anyone say the AR isn't overpowered, not adjusting it would alienate people used to virtually every other mod out there, which means you may as well have at the others while you're at it. Including a second .gam file with the patch that you can manually enable to more drastically rebalance the weapons could be the answer to that, it'd be a bitch to set up but at least people would have a choice.

Kolya on 14/9/2010 at 12:02

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If that seems a lot of work, you're clearly just underestimating the work that went into bugfixes in ADaoB. I doubt you would repeat it, even if there were more detailed docs.



Again you're underestimating the workload of creating and then maintaining a second bugfix-only version in future. Every single change in ADaoB would have to be done twice. This would severely limit the development of ADaoB.

Just as everyone agreed that the AR made any other gun useless once you had it, everyone also agreed that the French-Epstein devices made the Maintenance skill useless and the Auto-Repair devices did the same for the Repair skill. Everyone ended up with several auto-repair kits at the end, had all their guns in good condition and was never even tempted to learn these skills.

Fixing these problems was in fact bugfixing the game in my opinion and apparently that was also Straylight's opinion who made these changes. And the reason NOT ALL of the devices were removed is quite obvious: Even though they tilted gameplay when distributed en mass they can still add variety to the game when you find one occasionally.

Obviously there's a thin line here, but why did Irrational's devs create these skills or put work in other guns if they weren't needed? We all know they didn't have time to playtest thoroughly at the end. So balancing these things seems exactly like what an unofficial patch should do to make the whole game a more well rounded experience.

And you could rant a bit less ferociously at Nameless and not jump at him when he coquettish exclaims he was lazy, which he clearly isn't. Apart from having done most of the later bugfixes on ADaoB and implementng SHEMP, he also put back the auto-hacking tools you needed just for your very special "wrench-only" runs. Any other mod author probably wouldn't have bothered with you the way you make your wishes be heard.

In short: I doubt there's going to be a second version of ADaoB because it would be too much work, now and in future, and because the line of what's a bugfix and what a gameplay change isn't nearly as clear-cut as you make it out to be. ADaoB is still pretty conservative in my book, eg things like gibbing hybrids could well be in, but we have Secmod for that. It's too bad gamsys mods cannot be mixed.
Your best bet will be to present clear cases where ADaoB changes things that have not been agreed to be broken by the majority of players in years of discussing the game.

Kolya on 14/9/2010 at 15:17

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It only needs 3 skill points now because it is much weaker.
An unmodified AR is about the same damage wise as a fully modified pistol which only needs one skill point. IIRC the AR modifications have also been upped, making Modify skill more useful and the AR a better weapon again, although not quite the monster it was.

Kolya on 14/9/2010 at 18:33

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So what.
The AR overpowering every other weapon and enemy was a major imbalance. It was so obvious that everyone noticed it on their first playthrough.
I've played with ADaoB's AR and I think the game got a lot better by changing this.

I know by now that some people here have this weird definition of a "patch" to consist solely of cosmetical changes whereas every gameplay change is despised as "modding", ie sullying the holy SS2.
But actually a change is either well reasoned and works to fix an existing problem with the game or it doesn't. That's how ADaoB was build.
If that means it's not a patch in your book, fine. We've dropped the renaming idea long ago because of this discussion.