Elaborate on your poll-thoughts beyond the Likert scale

[DolphinBuffMan01]

Because it came so late that by the time it came it change the way how the perk work in general which us I'll say KF1 true veterans couldn't get behind idea that you have no ammo to kill trash and crowd control because husk gun is limited in shots. In a way it's like demo got m32 that does 1/4 of damage... you're just not used to it.



That's why you want to redo the weapon. Give it extra range, extra stumble, extra AOE to make it a better direct CC weapon. It gives variation to flamer and it has a pushback effect. IMHO whole firebug needs to be redone. Compared to KF1 if you removed the "boomy perk" he would feel crap.

Claiming that KF1 true veterans didn't get behind it seems incredibly generalized. I would consider myself and a handfull of people I know to have many hundreds of hours on it, so it doesn't really speak for us. Maybe just the really, really vocal few. It is like on KF2, I know quite a few people in game who are incredibly good at it, but do not bother with forum at all, so their opinions are essentially unheard. The same was true of Killing Floor 1.

I personally saw it as a very good weapon, but people got very stuck on the idea that Firebug should only be about crowd control. I think that is too restrictive, and something like the Husk gun (that people were begging for for god knows how long) really changed it up a bit. I don't know what people were expecting the implementation would be when they were asking for it.

I would think that adding future weapons to Firebug could meet the role that you were explaining, I still really don't see the need to remove its Scrake potential. It would essentially leave one perk that essentially counters it. As for the skill tree of Firebug, I think the zed shrapnel skill should be moved to Demo, no matter how much I love it. But other than that, the tree is pretty decent. I would go as far to say that Firebug is one of the better balanced perks right now (excluding zed shrapnel).

 

[Jr175]

Spoiler!

A loaded question can also be of controversial opinions iirc, but the main point is that it's meant to create complex questions or dichotomies with negatives that prevent proper answers, but we digress.

Opinion is largely divided on whether the game should operate on the premise of "six specialists working concurrently" or "a team of six directly working together". If you believe this is an unjustified point of view, feel free to expand upon it. In my opinion though, this discord is where the basis of the issue between balance and homogeneity lies.

Quoting what you've said:

Do you want every perk to be able to effectively deal with every enemy, or do you want every perk to be unique? You can't have both, geniuses.

I'd actually want a mix of perks that are Dependent and Independent of each other. Because to me, that is how KF should be balanced. But I'm not saying all perks should be OP or UP. I just feel that team work shouldn't have to be forced because all the perks feel too weak or disregarded because perks are all too strong individually. To me, these are just extremes that people need to stop thinking about or the game won't evolve into something better than it is/was.

My suggestion is that perk balance cannot be perfectly achieved at the same time as avoiding homogenization. Because true balance is where every perk is capable of doing what other perks can do, which to my mind sounds a lot like homogeneity. Balance to my mind is "every perk can - provided you have a reasonable level of skill and understanding - contribute meaningfully to the success of the team". This isn't perfectly balanced, and it doesn't completely avoid homogenization either. Why? Because you have basically four roles to fill in this game:

• Trash cleaning/crowd control
• Healing
• Dealing primary damage to big zeds
• Dealing secondary damage to big zeds/assisting with instant and stacking afflictions

If you have four [some fairly broad] roles in the game, there's going to be overlap in terms of what every perk has to do, and there's always going to be complaints and comparisons as to the effectiveness or "fairness" of each perk's strengths and weaknesses. From what I've seen, a lot of inexperienced players with negative views of the game's balance seem to express the "need" for rather drastic changes to the game as a solution to these balance issues. I don't believe this is the best thing for the game.

I don't feel that your representation of the definition of perk balance is spot on (but your list on division of labor is). Perks are like Apples and Oranges. They are literally Divisions that excel at different things. And as you've stated before they excel at what they're meant to excel in for the most part. But this does not mean that the perks aren't imbalanced (lacking something they shouldn't be or having/doing something that they shouldn't) or that they aren't homogenized (playing/feeling the same in terms of what can be done with certain loadouts on or off perk). I understand that asking for them to be perfectly balanced and not homogenized at all is asking too much for an ideal world but it can (probably) be done better than the game has right now.

As I've said before:

Either way, as the development furthers we should all see an improvement in these areas.

 

[Munchiesaurus Rex]

The basic thing in KF1 and why it was such a good game is that the perks could be played in two ways.

1. You have a role and you do it. You can chose the roles for the map.

2. You have complicated, hard to pull off combos, so that you can actually be skilled in the game and that payed off.

So you can chill doing your role or you can practice, learn and test and be really, really good at the game. For example Support - it's trash killer and a damn good one, but if you are really skilled you can kill SC with Axe+boomstick combo or FP with Nade, shoot, nade, nade shoot combo those were really hard to pull off and only the skilled players could do it in 6ppl HoE game.

This is what made KF1 so good - the fact that skills matter. In KF2 you have only 1 way to play it and it's the first one - you have a role - do it. Nothing else you can do. This does not force teamplay, this forces teams to have at least 1 zerker, one medic and one firebug. A team without those roles is a doomed team no matter the skills and the hours people have.

This is the main reason people don't play KF2. You have absolutely no learning curve. What you see on lvl 0 on normal it's the same on lvl 25 on HoE, it only takes time. This is typical for console games due to their slow reaction time and limited movement with controllers.

It's just plain simple. The game is not fun. It's a chore. If a team don't have a berzerker the last person have no choice but to take the role or there is no reason to play at all. You are forced to play as some role that you don't want to just because the game don't give you room for improvement except the 25 artificial levels and the "skills" that don't really give you any choice.

And instead of working on making the game better what does TWI do? They make a "game director" so that they alter zeds. Instead of giving the players room for improvement they dumb down the game even more so that now we won't even have HoE so that they can give bad players a sence of completion so that they are hooked up and buy keys for the fudging RNG drops ... we will have PvP and other stupid bullballs that someone thought of while drunk or high on cough syrup.

This is bad. TWI listen to your fans. Even with RNG drop fudging crates if you have a great game people will play it. But you don't. And you only make things worse.

 

[DolphinBuffMan01]

The basic thing in KF1 and why it was such a good game is that the perks could be played in two ways.

1. You have a role and you do it. You can chose the roles for the map.

2. You have complicated, hard to pull off combos, so that you can actually be skilled in the game and that payed off.

So you can chill doing your role or you can practice, learn and test and be really, really good at the game. For example Support - it's trash killer and a damn good one, but if you are really skilled you can kill SC with Axe+boomstick combo or FP with Nade, shoot, nade, nade shoot combo those were really hard to pull off and only the skilled players could do it in 6ppl HoE game.

This is what made KF1 so good - the fact that skills matter. In KF2 you have only 1 way to play it and it's the first one - you have a role - do it. Nothing else you can do. This does not force teamplay, this forces teams to have at least 1 zerker, one medic and one firebug. A team without those roles is a doomed team no matter the skills and the hours people have.

This is the main reason people don't play KF2. You have absolutely no learning curve. What you see on lvl 0 on normal it's the same on lvl 25 on HoE, it only takes time. This is typical for console games due to their slow reaction time and limited movement with controllers.

It's just plain simple. The game is not fun. It's a chore. If a team don't have a berzerker the last person have no choice but to take the role or there is no reason to play at all. You are forced to play as some role that you don't want to just because the game don't give you room for improvement except the 25 artificial levels and the "skills" that don't really give you any choice.

And instead of working on making the game better what does TWI do? They make a "game director" so that they alter zeds. Instead of giving the players room for improvement they dumb down the game even more so that now we won't even have HoE so that they can give bad players a sence of completion so that they are hooked up and buy keys for the fudging RNG drops ... we will have PvP and other stupid bullballs that someone thought of while drunk or high on cough syrup.

This is bad. TWI listen to your fans. Even with RNG drop fudging crates if you have a great game people will play it. But you don't. And you only make things worse.

No one likes this game, literally no fun.

Saying ridiculous things like this does not create discussion, and pretty much every point you have tried to make there is then overshadowed by the massive exaggerations you make.

And yep, I took the bait, sorry guys...

 

[ScrakeMorgendorffer]

meant to create complex questions or dichotomies with negatives that prevent proper answers

I'm a bit surprised that the statement here is that I'm intending to prevent "proper" answers by initiating a discussion about my, and hopefully other peoples', understanding of the issues with the game. That's a gross misrepresentation of the intent here.

I just feel that team work shouldn't have to be forced because all the perks feel too weak or disregarded because perks are all too strong individually.

So you've talked in ideals of what you think it ought to be - I'm interested in how you think it currently is in terms of balance. Additionally, how do you feel about the current level of required teamwork: is it too forced, too unnecessary? Which difficulty levels are you referring to?

Perks are like Apples and Oranges. They are literally Divisions that excel at different things. And as you've stated before they excel at what they're meant to excel in for the most part. But this does not mean that the perks aren't imbalanced (lacking something they shouldn't be or having/doing something that they shouldn't) or that they aren't homogenized (playing/feeling the same in terms of what can be done with certain loadouts on or off perk)

Let me be clear. I haven't suggested for a moment that the perks are perfectly balanced, nor do I want them to be. Once again though, I'm extremely interested in how you think the perks in the game are currently balanced and how they rate in terms of homogeneity.

 

[Jr175]

So you've talked in ideals of what you think it ought to be - I'm interested in how you think it currently is in terms of balance.

I find that as I've said before that the balance could be better but from all I've read on these forums, I've formed an opinion that the game should be neither a 6 man team or a team of 6 men. It just doesn't work and feels like a chore on one end but a cake walk on the other. I liked to think of myself some sort of god when it came to KF1 because of how I could just carry most pubs with most perks.

From what I've also gathered while playing, the game is pretty "balanced" when you think of the KF2 perks in comparison to the KF1 perks but things like the perk skills and what not weaken them unnecessarily I find. At least until, "good team perk skills" are made up, the sets will make some perks too strong and others too weak. Especially when whole tiers don't even focus on team work like the few that exist.

Additionally, how do you feel about the current level of required teamwork: is it too forced, too unnecessary? Which difficulty levels are you referring to?

It varies but anything above normal, even hard with enough, "playtime" and not, "practice". Part of it might be a difficulty thing when I bring it up, but hard and below feel easy with or without good/bad team work. Suicidal feels just about right because HoE feels like I'm getting smothered without a decent team or friends.

Remembering that TWI said somewhere that one of the ideals was to keep pressure up. If it becomes that I need to help pubs or god forbid good players/friends by exploiting in a corner or running around for over an hour just to ensure the squads safety, well I hope you can see why it would be boring.

Especially with the drastic RNG level change of pace at the end of a wave. I mean a scrake conga line isn't actually scary, but one made up of any number of fleshpounds will become an insurmountable wall soon enough.

Even still though, many players who are worse or better than I am have done HoE with ease. There's no denying it.

Let me be clear. I haven't suggested for a moment that the perks are perfectly balanced, nor do I want them to be.

One of those things I can't believe I've read.

Once again though, I'm extremely interested in how you think the perks in the game are currently balanced and how they rate in terms of homogeneity.

In terms of homogeneity, I guess it comes from the simplified health scaling. Maybe I might be oversimplifying or even misrepresenting the problem but I find that killing certain zed types/certain number of zeds should be harder for some perks inherently so that another perk that excels in such an area can pick up the slack. This is what I meant when I said, "Dependent and Independent perks". You would have glass canons, jacks of all trades, and supportive types. I'm not saying the game lacks these but they could be better defined in what they do when they do it.

As it is now I feel that the game's perks are lacking a few things, and need other things taken away because it does not fit their intended role. I'm not very good with being specific with details so I think that's the gist of where I feel perk balance is/should be.

Mind you, I haven't actually played in a while and this is all from memory so it might be wrong completely.

 

[ArcL!ght]

Claiming that KF1 true veterans didn't get behind it seems incredibly generalized. I would consider myself and a handfull of people I know to have many hundreds of hours on it, so it doesn't really speak for us. Maybe just the really, really vocal few. It is like on KF2, I know quite a few people in game who are incredibly good at it, but do not bother with forum at all, so their opinions are essentially unheard. The same was true of Killing Floor 1.

I personally saw it as a very good weapon, but people got very stuck on the idea that Firebug should only be about crowd control. I think that is too restrictive, and something like the Husk gun (that people were begging for for god knows how long) really changed it up a bit. I don't know what people were expecting the implementation would be when they were asking for it.

I would think that adding future weapons to Firebug could meet the role that you were explaining, I still really don't see the need to remove its Scrake potential. It would essentially leave one perk that essentially counters it. As for the skill tree of Firebug, I think the zed shrapnel skill should be moved to Demo, no matter how much I love it. But other than that, the tree is pretty decent. I would go as far to say that Firebug is one of the better balanced perks right now (excluding zed shrapnel).

I'm not saying it wasnt good... it just made you play firebug more different and in a way it was not played up to that point.
Hell people wanted Molotov Xbow for Firebug and Explosive for demo... we got Husk gun when husk was introduced to reduce room/hallway camping.

And I agree that many KF1 players never hit the forums. I can say I was one of them. I remember the days when scrake HS hitbox was under his chainsaw arm, when husk was aiming at your face, when patty's rocket was traveling at light speed... All those things are "general" in which Tripwire learnt how to construct enemies, but didn't get well behind how to design a good class.

A lot of people are complaining about homogenisation and that is true. That firebug is in good position is really to be put to discussion, I for example put that it's a bit underperforming only due to range and DOT of weapons. People today are making home made flamers on GAS (not fuel) which have more range then current flamer with range has. DOT also feels too low, panic effect from on fire a bit too short etc. Some stuff is not right, some is great. Perk tree > Epic, but flarotov should be default nade, then have option to extend it. The risk/reward for getting into zeds faces is too low, especially on HOE where you just cannot "proc" the on fire effect quick enough.

KF1 bug was all about DOT. Save ammo, just make them panic, then set them on fire again and let DOT kill em. KF2 bug is about killing them faster and expending more ammo in the process. You lack the range to put DOT in effect, you lack the DOT total damage to make it useful. You are pretty much commando with ton of ammo people are asking for in fire form.

 

[ahcos]

Boss balance - Hans

Being killed in 1-2 swings without being able to react is never fun. I do have to agree with OP that i really liked the gas grenades, it was challenging and fun to dance around the grenades, demanding awareness, skill and knowlegde. Current Hans makes me quit most of the time, he's just absolutely not fun at all.

Boss balance - Patriarch

Like him a lot. Tweaks to make him more fun are always appreciated, but he's already fine imo.

Zed balance

I'd really like to see Crawlers used walls/ceilings etc., right now they feel weak
Bloats feel too weak (unless you're Demo, in which case they're ridiculous)
FPs are a pain to deal with, honestly. I really HATE the melee mechanic for Hans, and i do hate enraged FPs charging at you with no proper way to stop them. It's flat out stupid, no other way to put it. I do love the fact that a FP can tear a whole team apart when you are not careful and i do not agree that one player should be able to deal with a FP on their own, but if you work together there has to be a proper way to control/stop/kill them pretty much no matter how what your team looks like. At the moment, it's either Zerker+Med with proper DPS on top or get facepunched.

Wave difficulty

Well, FPs are too hard and Hans is flat out stupid, other than that i think it's well done.

Bugs

I never thought i'd say that, but honestly - bugs should be far down on your priority list unless they are game breaking. This game was basically bug free from the first version of EA, up to the point where it was a LOT better than other products on release (for example, Borderlands 2 on release and years after release was hell of a lot more buggy than KF2 EA). What you need is balance and content. I've 180 hours into this game and i haven't witnessed a single bug that forced me into something more than raising an eyebrow. Yes, there is annoying stuff like projectiles disappearing, reload bug with less ammo than you should have etc., but nothing serious.
Oh, nvm, just remember there once was a Zed stuck somewhere in the map and we couldn't find it. That's the kind of stuff that shouldn't happen, but considering it only happened once in 180h of gameplay and even was on a custom map (!), that really a non-issue in my eyes.

Perk balance/progression/leveling

Well, now this really needs work. Like really really, it's the most pressing issue in my eyes.

1. Some skills are flat out useless, Demo skills being the most prominent ones
2. Roughly 1/3 of all weapons are useless, especially T3 weapons
3. Some Perks are that much stronger than other classes that there's really no point in playing certain classes (unless you're looking for a challenge)
4. Some Perk special abilities need rework, especially things like Zed time enhancement for Commando or door welding for Support
5. Healing is insanely important, yet it's not fun at all. I mean, i've played "support/healing" characters in tons of games and thought i'd do so again in KF2, but KF2 is maybe the least rewarding game in this regard i've ever played. I'm not sure if this is an issue with the class, healing as a mechanic or insane damage spikes you can not control even if you try, but it's depressing. And i gotta be honest, i hate the fact that you just can NOT win the higher difficulties without one or two dedicated medics. This ain't a freakin MMORPG, lads.

It IS possible to keep balance and still have a great variety where each perk is unique and useful, Dota2 for example has insane variety and still is balanced almost perfectly (yes, there are stronger heroes, but they're not THAT much stronger as some perks are in KF2 right now) - and this one is a PvP game where balance is really crucial. KF2 is PvE, co-op ... i mean, really it's not that hard. Please start to try things out, gather data, get silly - balancing means testing the water.

 

[FoolishNinja]

About balancing.
They should remove the "non-parryable attacks" from big zeds. Its just not fair seeing a big guy running to you with a unblockable attack. There is also a bug, when you block the attack, your character is lowering the block, what makes you vulnerable to the next attack of the big zed.

 

[ScrakeMorgendorffer]

Regarding the Game Conductor implementation - or plans to implement it - I feel like it's putting a bandaid on a symptom and not the inherent problem.

Here's the way I look at difficulty settings. It's relative to Suicidal and Hell on Earth, so if you play the game on normal and hard for enjoyment's sake only, please disregard this as it doesn't apply to you:

• the easiest difficulty is there to help initiate new players into the game
• the middle two difficulties are there to provide a basis of reference between how far you've progressed from the easiest difficulty, and how close you are to the hardest difficulty
• the hardest difficulty is there to challenge a team at a variety of points in time

The problem stems, as I've mentioned in numerous topics on numerous forums, from a lack of knowledge, understanding of the game and application of this knowledge into a team-oriented environment. Normal and Hard difficulties do not encourage teamwork - of that I am entirely certain. The HP values of the enemies are low enough that quite a few perks can solo them with high-tier weapons without any regard to their [or their team's] continued good health.


Despite the fact that the lower difficulties are - relative to Suicidal and Hell on Earth - meant to prepare players for the progression to these difficulties, there are essentially no tactics or elements of teamwork required for the takedowns of big enemies. Many players have voiced their feelings on the matter in other ways - "it's just a cluster**** of firing" - "unload your highest tier weapon into the enemy and pray" - "spam nades, fire until it's dead". I read these kinds of frustrated remarks and see this kind of behaviour in games every day.

The problem is the discord between what works on higher difficulties and what works on lower difficulties; it doesn't translate and it doesn't prepare players at all for higher difficulties. It's for this reason that I think the difficulty system and its relationship to the tactics required to kill certain enemies is inherently flawed when viewed from a "progression from normal/hard to Hell on Earth" perspective.

I think this system detracts from the replayability of the game for part of the community. Naturally, there's a lot of players that just stick to normal and hard - that's cool, I can appreciate that, and there's a variety of reasons as to why.

However, for the players that dabble in Suicidal and Hell on Earth, I can similarly appreciate why they'd get discouraged with the game as easily as they often do: you've got a small proportion of the community with a pretty decent degree of knowledge, and high expectations of how the rest of the community ought to operate in-game. However, when you couple this discord of how the lower difficulties "teach" the game to you, and what the small, knowledgeable group of hardcore players expect you to do, you get a group of players that want to be on the hardest difficulty but are somehow excluded or driven out of the HoE community by the combination of these factors.

I think the game suffers from this inherent issue, and will continue to suffer regardless of whether the Game Conductor is implemented, or how finely and accurately tuned it is.

If you give players the opportunity to create a solid, healthy foundation for progression in this game, you keep more people playing the game.