PETITION: Snub Weapon arcs to return pre-5.0

[L1ght]

This is a discussion about muzzle cone, gun arcs, not a "bring back insta snac" thread. If you want to discuss those topics feel free to make threads on the appropriate channels.

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[pillow]

The biggest reason the Irezumi doesn't fire half its guns isn't the cone angle. It's the bank angle. The ship just doesn't move. Guns don't aim downwards. 9 krillion degrees of arc wouldn't help the Irezumi because the arcs would be left to right, not down. So when the Irezumi turns left the guns on the right side of the ship still won't fire. The Titan has a similar issue with its 2 guns on the wings far to the left and right cant shoot the opposite side because they can't aim down. If the guns were on the inner side of the wing instead of the outer side, they would fire just fine.

Ultimately this is very ship specific. I could try looking into it if I had a list of all the ships people have trouble with because I'm one of those people who doesn't notice it unless it's the ship's fault (ala Irezumi which I'm about to fix, along with the Black Dragon).

[Prysin]

i think regardless what change people want, it's going to be more productive if the specific settings that causes these issues, whatever they are, the raw data, could be shared with the community. It's hard to argue productively when you don't have the facts at hand and have to go by emotion.

Is the setting(s) a copy paste to all ships? is it ship specific? can one be changed while altering another to get kind of similar results?

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DHC Discord

[Oggdo Bogdo]

The main problem I see here is that the balance team's alleged objective was to curb people with ultrawide monitors from having an advantage in firing angles. So logically, what should be done, is to test the muzzle cone numbers to find out what values would be a hindrance to problematic resolutions, but would not affect 16:9 resolutions.

This clearly didn't happen. What happens now is that you are equally penalized for playing on 16:9 compared to 21:9 because the muzzle cone values cut into 16:9 arcs and so you take an equal penalty to the number of guns that can fire as compared to say, 21:9. If people could switch resolutions, they still aren't going to, since you aren't at any more of a disadvantage at 21:9.

And if anyone is wondering, I've tested (privately, I'm not in playtest) some of the ships that are adversely affected and they are also affected on 4:3, so reducing your resolution further isn't much of a help and is pretty impractical anyway.

It's also interesting to note that the balance team, in the past, has almost always re-balanced specific VHFs so that they could fire more of their guns or have better firing angles, and never the other way around, based on feedback from 16:9 players. But for this particular patch they decided, universally, that all ships had overly generous firing arcs and that they needed to go, even though they've fixed a lot of issues that implied the opposite was true. In some cases this change has undone their buffs, such as the Prosecutor, which I'll show.

I don't know if it's possible but there are definitely fov settings in the files, I'm not an expert on the anti-cheat or server settings but there might be a way to force everyone on any resolution to have the same fov. That would definitely be preferable to forcing ultrawide players to use a lower resolution if that's the objective. There also seems to be a serious lack of consideration for players who can afford to play on wider resolutions with the current situation, so I guess it is fortunate that they aren't comparatively worse off.

The biggest reason the Irezumi doesn't fire half its guns isn't the cone angle. It's the bank angle. The ship just doesn't move. Guns don't aim downwards. 9 krillion degrees of arc wouldn't help the Irezumi because the arcs would be left to right, not down.

First of all, yes there was a slight problem with the Irezumi before the nerf. There were indeed angles where the ship only fired 3 guns. Almost every ship in the game has bad firing angles. But the idea that the arcs "wouldn't help" is ridiculous. You've added a lot more bad firing angles by limiting the muzzle cone. The video showed lots of situations of upper and mid-upper turning angles that simply don't work, which did before.

Here is one example (at 16:9) of a ship with a 45 degree banking angle (this is really high for a vhf, for people that don't know, Irezumi has 25 degrees, you can find all these values in shiparch.ini) with severe arc issues. I know that there were some people complaining about this one in particular after the patch, but was told by the balance team that they couldn't find any issues, which I find very hard to believe.


Here is another less severe example of a ship with a 40 degree banking angle. I can't vouch for the Prosecutor but I flew the Hammerhead a lot before the patch and I can tell you that the firing angles were very good. You could deactivate maybe 1 gun at certain angles and 2 if you couple a bad turning angle with a sharp change in direction, but never 3 at once by firing plainly at an angle with no tricks.


To be fair, I will include one example that had bad firing angles even before the patch, because of a 25 degree banking angle. Most of the Kusari VHFs are like this because they have their guns positioned not only at the centre of the screen but also too far behind the nose, where they simply cannot reach the opposing side without banking.

Ultimately this is very ship specific. I could try looking into it if I had a list of all the ships people have trouble with because I'm one of those people who doesn't notice it unless it's the ship's fault (ala Irezumi which I'm about to fix, along with the Black Dragon).

At the end of the day you and the other devs are going to fix this (or not) however you want. But it's a bit strange to make a general sweeping change to every VHF and that you then have to fix the situation by doing things on a case-by-case basis.

I also know you've had a lot of competent snub players helping the dev team on the playtest server. I don't presume to know or care to know what really happens there, but it is very alarming that a sweeping change like this which affects every ship differently seems to have gone through without much consideration. The patch was in production for a long time and either they all somehow failed to do their job and didn't pick up on this, or the changes were rushed, or you decided for some reason to dismiss their concerns if they did.

tl;dr If there are benefits to leaving muzzle cones as is, I simply don't see it. The fact that a 16:9 player who shouldn't be affected can easily see the difference should have alerted you to the fact that the change is too extreme.