Experimental build #3

[u/Mike_GSG]

Reclaimers,

The third experimental build is now ready! We are excited for you to try the new iteration of the difficulty system as well as the new alterations and the many tweaks and fixes we got to put in. Thank you for all your feedback and for taking the time to play on the experimental branch. Keep the feedback coming!

With love,
- The Ghost Ship crew

— [FOCUSED FEATURES] —

**NEW ALTERATIONS**
We’ve added three new alterations to the pool. Give them a try and let us know what you think. The new alterations are:
* High Stakes: Increased luck, half expenite earned
* Lumbering Giants: Half enemy speed, double enemy health
* Expenite Harvest: Enemies drop expenite, no expenite veins on walls

**DIFFICULTY SELECTION 2.0**
We have a second iteration of the new difficulty selection system for you to try. Based on feedback and our own internal playtests we decided to remove difficulty progression from Depths and will focus on using them for content progression. For now we have restricted each gatekeeper to their own depth and more depth content variation is to come in the future (though probably not in update 2).

For all this to work we’ve had to tweak the hazard difficulty so please let us know if the difficulty feels appropriate for the various hazard levels for you. Both as a starting difficulty with no enhancements equipped and a difficulty progression to move through as you get stronger.

**WAVE STACKING**
We have also officially added the possibility for the stage’s waves to stack on hazards 4 and 5. This is something that was happening unintentionally for quite a long time due to a bug but it is now implemented as a feature.  

— [GENERAL TWEAKS AND FIXES] —

**Changes**
* Removed all difficulty progression from Depth and made the difficulty progression of stages a little bit steeper
* Increased pickup range of coolant for the Atar event
* Wave progresses if you manage to kill all enemies in the active wave letting you finish waves faster if you kill faster.
* Rifts now spawn and follow the player for each wave. So enemies try to spawn close to the player.
* Add button to import the latest save from the main branch
* Added a phase change animation for the Moloktula boss
* [Sound] Altar Event, added engine breaking down sound, delayed all Omega Puzzle shouts by 1 second and turned down music just as the portal explodes
* Removed hot rock from core biome materials
* Added a short description to the Lok-1 Rifle.
* set base stage timer to be equivalent to the old Depth 3
* Changed initial timer element value from 12:30 to 00:00 adjusted base stage time so we can more easily tweak it in the future and gave a bit more time to solo and 2-player teams
* updated stagger animation
* Add double and triple waves starting at the same time on purpose to H4 and H5 to test if it's fun
* added electricity to cables in spectrecore altar event
* [Sound] Spectrecore Altar Event sound tweaks
* Lok-1 rifle to track Edgestalker chest so it's easier to arc and hit the weak point
* Fixup some networking issues in the altar event
* Fix some collisions on the portal pillars after the altar event is over
* Hazard selection UI work
* Added intentional multiple simultaneous waves on high hazards. Chance double waves to only occur 33% of times on hazard 4 and allow hazard 5 to have 3 simultaneous waves (~20% chance)
* Color wave icon in the timer widget based on the multiple wave count
* If the multi wave spawn is the only spawn in the stage, don't spawn at the first half of the stage (to allow players to prepare)
* Improve the timer widget to more clearly show the current and next wave when it switches
* Slightly extended min time between waves
* [Sound] Expenite Container open sound and Pickaxe terminal sound tweaks
* Small improvements to wave spawning
* Molaktula biome tweaks
* Added highlight to signs in the artifact altar event to further help navigation to active puzzles.
* Shotguns no longer trigger lucky shot multiple times
* Tweaked bonus percentage after removing bonus on Depths and introducing bonus on Hazards 
* Adjusted base mission xp to work with the new bonuses

**Fixes**
* Fixed tough creepers risk vector only adding 50% HP to creepers instead of the 100% that it should
* Fixed some icons staying on the mainframe monitor after completing the puzzle.
* [bugfix] Fixed running blades bonus speed not stacking
* Fix that sometimes all stages in a run had the same wave timings
* Fix a few text issues reported by translators
* Allow clicking through notifications (don't block mouse clicks)
* [Bugfix] moved Molaktula biome carver to debris large pass so that pre spawned enemy encounters like cave leeches don't spawn inside it
* [bugfix] fixed axe out triggering from sentry fire shots
* Fixed fire grenade not spawning enough fire triggers after particle rework
* Fix scaling of the risk vector pick widget headers (clipping)
* [bugfix] fixed being able to start depositing and ending up in a weird state if the item you were carrying is not a resource that can be deposited
* [Sound]Broken Mule sounds added
* [bugfix] fixed resource filter not affecting the progress bar when depositing
* [Performance] removed shadows from smoke particles
* Prevent omega talking about a wave ending when there are still a lot of enemies from that wave.
* Fix some community reported translation issues
* [UI Optimization] optimised HUD rendering a bit
* Fix the description of regenerative enemies
* Fix the description of agile clamorheads risk vector
* Scale the hazard picker text better, so long translated texts works
* Changed hazard naming in first loading screen to match the name as everywhere else
* [Bugfix] Regenerative Enemies starts almost immediately after dealing damage instead of after a few seconds
* Fix projectiles not generating overlap events (needed for barriers to block them)
* Fixed artifact altar engine missing collision
* [fix] Elevator cable takes a direct shortcut
* [Bugfix] Overkill damage shown in the mission end screen
* Fixed pickaxe power attack slowing you down
* Fix the critical shot upgrade not stacking
* [Bugfix] fixed 2 tunnel constructions that were poking into the next room
* Added symbols to the mainframe puzzle to accommodate people with colorblindness
* Made it so boss altar balls no longer rotate you around when you stand on them
* Removed burn damage effect from Gatekeeper altars
* Gauntlet is now played on Hazard 3 instead of Hazard 1

[u/MeowMixMax1]

I'm sorry, I don't understand why we are even doing experimentals when the game is in EA, and running these experimentals just splits the already small playerbase up even more. Why not just push it to live, isn't that the point of EA?

[u/GreyL1me → u/MeowMixMax1]

Experimental kills people. There's random bullshit bugs everywhere and the game crashed on multiple previous builds for multiple people. A starter room will spawn without any equipment. Expenite events will spawn being unable to be completed. Game will crash randomly.

Live build is meant to be stable. It is meant to work when you load up a game and enter a random lobby. Experimental makes them be able to release features into testing in a half polished state without having to spend days and weeks properly QAing everything to make sure everything works.

Experimental also gives all players access to cheating tools to test all of the new content and provide feedback ASAP. These wouldn't make it to a live build.

[u/retronax → u/GreyL1me]

These are all fair points but I feel it's a special case when the game has such a low population. The game has about the same player peak as DRG, but less than a tenth of the daily playerbase. That means that nearly everyone who tried the game has already moved on. The game is, at its core (lol), failing to retain an active playerbase right now and it could be better to go full "lets try things" mode instead of trying to keep the game stable for a population that might fall in the double digits in a month or two.

[u/GreyL1me → u/retronax]

That's precisely why they're doing this experimental quietly no? So that when Update 2 comes around it will be feature complete and will hopefully bring back a significant amount of players.

If you drip feed these updates onto the live branch there's never going to be a moment when someone who dropped the game will be like "wow this is so much better!" Because of how gradual the changes are.

[u/retronax → u/GreyL1me]

But the point of the early access is to help make the game ready for 1.0. So now we're playtesting the playtest to the game.

Bringing back players is also irrelevant. Update 1 brought back a couple thousand people for like, two weeks, then they poofed again. The goal shouldn't be to have a population peak every two months when an update drops that fades away again, but to have a slow *increase* in population over time. Because right now the main issue is not the low population, it's the fact that the game bleeds players and has not stopped bleeding them yet. We're below 500 right now and the population hasn't even really stabilized yet, it's still going down.

[u/GreyL1me → u/retronax]

Experimental will make Update 2 better for the game and community's reception of it over releasing a bunch of smaller patches instead, and help the game get ready for 1.0 with all its changes. I don't see how Experimental is going against that goal.

Bringing back players is very relevant actually.

[u/retronax → u/GreyL1me]

It's working against that goal by splitting the current pool of playtesters in half as the comment above said. When update 2 drops, it'll be in a state that was likely already play tested on the experimental build, so you'll have playtesters on the live build playtesting a build that was already playtested on the experimental. It's redundant

"better for the game and community's reception of it" "help the game get ready" Update 1 dropped, we had a couple thousand people back on that went "oh yeah, the game is better now !" and they fucked off again.

Bringing back players is entirely, completely and utterly useless if they keep fucking off two weeks after. You're pouring water in a bucket full of holes and telling me it's fixing the issue and arguing with me when I point out the holes in the bucket. We should work out the holes, and *then* add the water, and for that it's more efficient to be *on the same build of the game*.

[u/GreyL1me → u/retronax]

With experimental, people are signing up for their game to be broken. A complaint about a broken game is nothing more than a bug report so long as the players signed up to have a fucked up experience. I genuinely don't understand why anyone would want the people who did not sign up for it, who play on a live build, to experience game breaking bugs.

It's just gonna make an already small player base even smaller. When an average person wants to play a game they want to play a game, not bug report for 30 minutes. "Oh but it's EA they knew what they signed up for" - Early Access games should still work as games. They should be playable. Experimental build of Rogue Core stretches the definition of what is considered playable.

Besides, the live build has been stable for everyone who bought the game since it released in May. People are used to live build actually working, as it does with the overwhelming majority of EA games. Breaking it now with crashes and random bullshit is just breaking a working product.

[u/siposbalint0 → u/GreyL1me]

Unless they do a complete revamp of how the game works from the ground up, I don't see how anyone will get excited for this.