G'day everyone.
Ok, so there's no prizes for guessing which mission is the ugly duckling amongst the current missions on the ATAG server. I know for a fact there are people who like it a lot but its also apparent that an increasing number of people are voting with their feet and are no longer playing it, and this isnt the outcome i was hoping for when i set out to make this map last year. Luckily some of these people have taken the time to let me know what their issues are - thank you to those that have done so.
In the past week or so Freya and I have been reworking the map in an attempt to hopefully make it more palatable to those players who dont like it. We are hoping that this might make some people reconsider not playing it while at the same time not alienating those players who like it the way it is. Here's a summary of the changes fyi
(a) Removed Canterbury and Gatwick. Excessive vulching was identified as a negative re the map with Canterbury the main cause it seems. Sorry to those players who liked to man the AAA/flak at Canterbury but there are still several airfields that should still provide opportunities to shoot stuff down.
(b) Removed all the blue airfields in the western sector except Theville in France and many of the western red fields as well. Another negative issue for many people was the large geographic area in this mission especially with a less than full server. Apart from Theville and OP most of the spawnable airfields are now in the South Eastern part of England (plus North Weald). Most of the AAA/Flak in the west remains intact though so watch out if you are flying in the west for either side.
(c) Removed all targets west of ~ Guilford except the railyards at Basingstoke. I wanted to keep 1 x long range tgt for Blue bomber pilots who might like to fly a long mission, either from the eastern bases or from Theville. This will hopefully keep a little bit of multi-axis threat activity happening for those that like it (maybe I'm the only one that does?)
(d) Relocated all the blue ships to the east. There are still 10 Blue ships carrying Panzers to be sunk by red but these are all now in the eastern sector heading for Folkstone. Bad weather the night before has spread them out a bit so they arent all in a nice fat convoy. Red corvettes remain unchanged.
(e) Reduced the number of destroyable bomber bases to 2 per side. Gravensend and Willmington (Red fields – Blennies can still spawn in at the other fields but these are a long way in the rear) and Lympne and Littlestone (Blue – Blue bombers can still spawn in at OP and Theville)
(f) Enabled Hurricane Mk1 100 Octane pilots like Sourcerer Dave to be able to spawn in at Gravesend. Dave raised some good points in his blunt feedback (which I'm fine with - much better to get blunt feedback than none at all) on the forums and in a subsequent PM conversation we had and the map has been changed accordingly.
(g) Tank battle near Battle. Freya has set it up so players can spawn in as Blue or Red tanks near Battle and then battle. Sounds like fun.
(h) Reduced the number of stationary aircraft to less than a third of the current number on most of the fields. Although I havent heard back from Hardegen who was doing some testing for me I've also heard from other players re the FPS hit near some of the airfields and have reduced - but not totally eliminated - the number of stationary aircraft hoping this will lessen the FPS drop for some players.
(i) Some other minor tinkering etc.
Because of the changes we are anticipating there might be some fine tuning we might need to do when its road tested by a full server. In particular by reducing the number of spawnable fields the spawn points Freya created and tested will fill up more quickly and players may then end up in the default spawn points which are bugged in some cases. There's not a whole lot we can do about this but please let us know if it becomes a regular occurrence at certain bases.
Thats about it. Again I'd like to thank Freya for his excellent work helping me with the map as I couldnt have done any of this without his support. And Spiritus too for his support and for being a good sounding board for stuff. Thanks fellas.
Hopefully this update will go live sometime soon and we can see whether it is more playable as a result of these changes.
Ezzie
Bookmarks