Uhm so what you say that the system is flawed, no matter what distance. The only difference is that the flaw on long distance seems reasonable, as it is, well, long distance.
Pretty much, yeah. The impact of the problems is LESS at longer range, although it's still not right. It's WAY worse at close range, though.
That way you'd never start!
- change health aspect
- change penetration aspect
- change angling
- change ...
D'oh, it's a list and you have to start somewhere and can't work on everything at once.
No, but Tripwire can (and should) work on fixing the system as a whole. They're the people in the best position, given the breadth of problems we face.
Why should you wait releasing a mut only because there is still work to be done?
While you add other points to your mutator people could actually try the last version and give feedback.
Why not get started? Well mostly because you likely won't fix things, and on top of that, you may make other things worse. That's not to say that it isn't nice to see things like Armored Beasts being created. But consider some of the things people have said in this thread. Yes, it improves the speed of shells and the armor and penetration values...but now the maps are heavily slanted towards the Germans and can be not that much fun to play. The only way to adjust that is on the mapper's end.
Or let's say we decide "The problem is that tanks are too survivable and need more critical areas." So some enterprising modder makes a mutator that creates a crew compartment, optics, etc., only (a) this adds a ton of strain to the CPU, and (b) it makes all the tanks basically die in one shot.
So, great, we fix an aspect of the game, but we make the maps a drag to play or make it no fun to drive a tank at all in the process, which means people shy away from the mutator.
I hope you don't have this way of thinking in real life or you'll never get anything done.
Well, for starters, that's rather a ridiculous extrapolation, but this is the internet so I guess it comes with the territory. I'm not saying "No one should attempt to fix anything here at all." I'm saying that "fixing" the system takes more than simply "Oh, we'll just make the armor on these tanks stronger and weaker on those tanks" or "Oh it's easy -- we simply increase penetration values for these shells but not for those" or whathaveyou. This is a large scale problem that involves BOTH coders AND mappers.
Right now, the armor system strikes me as sort of "scaled" to the range of the official maps. Personally I think it works a little better (or at least you find yourself saying "WTF???" a lot less often) at longer range, but your mileage may vary on that. Regardless, if you start implementing absolute real-world values, you have to do it on all counts. That means you need maps that have real-world engagement ranges, not the "CQC" style tank maps that we have now (with a few custom exceptions, of course). You'll also need to take a good hard look at map balance across the board. For example, if Tigers operate at absolute real-world values, then their availability on a map would likely need to be considerably reduced to maintain some semblance of balance.
Meaning you'd have Tigers spawning, say, once every 7 min or something, whereas T-34s and Pz IVs would spawn once every minute (or whatever -- you see my point, I hope).
So, while I hope all of this gets fixed, I don't know if it's something that the community, and especially one lone modder, can do effectively. They can fix parts of it, but it's gonna take a LOT of work to get the armor system working "right."
