[Game Update] - 599141

[Yuuko]

19 hours ago, V2C said:

Hey guys, seems to be some confusion, but to clarify, we do intend to fix these bugs and exploits eventually.  For the older bosses, they were not a focus of this update.  When we have time, we want to address some of the issues with the old fights such as Fuelweaver before we unexpectedly remove some players' means of progressing past them.

Try this - DON'T.

A critical, vital, essential element of sandbox games - games that you don't want to end, games that you want to be re-playable infinitely - is player expression and variance.

It doesn't matter that the lureplant was not "intended" to block certain mob pathing, of course Klei didn't sit down in a meeting and say "we're making this thing that will block bosses."  What matters is that DST is a sand box game about emergent game play, puzzle solving, and creativity MORE than it is about boss fights.  When someone wants to fight AFW they will, and they often do because the fight is fun.  You don't need to break every cheese someone finds and FORCE ppl to fight it "legit."

This whole arc is plagued with these highly scripted QTE style fights where every single play through is pretty much identical because you just can not approach it a different way.  It makes the "end game loop" an extremely monotonous experience b/c once I've beaten these bosses once or twice I'm just DONE with them.  With AFW I can go back and re-fight it different ways.  I can do it with nm amulets and weather pains, or skip the weather pains and kite him around, or carefully balance sanity loss and gains with hivehat vs sanity recovery foods, or yes stick him with a lure plant and hold F until he's dead.  Because these are all options I can re-play the fight multiple times and enjoy it each time without quitting DST and playing something different.  When it comes to zombie bearger I'm just done after one fight.  I don't need to see that butt slam again, its done, its over with, I'm done.  My worlds used to last about 300-500 days before I'd reset.  Now I get to about 200 and I'm just burned out of BS plants, zombie boss fights, lunar hail, and acid rain.  I'm just DONE.  And rather than starting a new world I'm switching to a different game.  Its really not the direction I want DST to go.

(PS: Also a better fix is probably to just prevent things from being planted in the scrap zone eh?)

Edited March 21 by Yuuko

[landromat]

12 minutes ago, Yuuko said:

is player expression and variance.

intended variance? sure, but not exploits lol. destroy them

[arubaro]

A component of a sand box is being able to use gun powder, spamm a billion of bunnies or any other item, structure or whatever to fight the boss in your own way, being afk because the AI breaks isnt part of a sandbox 

Controller should be changed before drastic changes but i don't see why a company would like to keep these AI bugs just because there is a bunch of lazy players that dont want to make the effort of learning how to beat their content with any of their multiple tools that make it easier 

Imagine looking for a gameplay of this game to decide if buying it and witness a player afk during so much time that the video is speed up.. 

Edited March 20 by arubaro

[Szczuku]

29 minutes ago, finn from human said:

If the fight was reworked to have design more akin to modern DST boss fights

That would single-handedly ruin the Fuelweaver fight.

Look at what @Cassielu said on the previuos page: the current dst boss design philosophy is having the boss go "Oohh, aahh I'm eepy" every three attakcs and giving players like 10 seconds to freely smack them. I'd much rather the Fuelweaver fight stayed as a high-octane, intense bossfight where players are punished for their mistakes and the boss is not afraid to use all of his special attacks at once

The AF fight is supposed to be hard it's the closest thing dst has to a final boss; sure, he ain't one- as the rift updates continue I'm sure we'll only get more and more raid bosses after him but AF is still one of the most hype and important fights in the game.

Requiring players to prepare different equipment for a boss is the one thing that New Reign did right with its bosses. Dst has so many items with so little practical use - you don't use telepoofing to move around map, at best maybe in the atrium. Same thing with weather pain. Outside of AF and Toadstool where do you use this item? To chop trees? As if you don't have a bearger parked somewhere for that. These items get to shine thanks to AF, his fight requiring a more thorough preperation is not a problem, if anything its an asset - it makes the player feel like they are about to take on a great challenge (and will therefore feel even better about themselves when they win)

[Yuuko]

2 hours ago, landromat said:

intended variance? sure, but not exploits lol. destroy them

Nah, both are good.

Like it or not, exploits are literally part of the game and most of the time its good that they exist.  Exploits typically extend the shelf life of a game because the number of players who will enjoy a game, and the number of times they will play it are directly related to how many different ways it can be played.  Just look at the classic Mario 1.  People play it warp-less, hit-less, and also super-speedy using every clip and glitch they can even utilizing TAS to extremely optimize the "perfect play."  The fact that these options all exist is why the game is still played to this day.  If there were no warps and the glitches were all patched the game would have died ages ago.

The only thing you should really watch for is stability issues, and PLAYER intent.  If its something that causes the game to crash, or is easily *accidentally* done, then it is a problem.  If its something that doesn't crash the game and rarely happens without a player purposefully making it happen then there is little reason to change it.  Old AG is a good example of this - the pillars were too convenient.  Just backing away from the boss and getting caught in the gap would lead to the exploit (in fact it would trap the player, so there was no option except to use the exploit.)  Because nothing the player did really caused it, its less player expression / variance and more a failing of the game.  Compare this to Dfly.  Walls don't naturally spawn around Dfly.  If a player built the walls there then they wanted them there, there is little reason to do anything about how walls interact with the dfly fight.  The interaction is the reward of player creativity and resourcefulness. 

This isn't to say "never fix a game."  Just that being a pedant and policing play styles is bad.  So what if someone takes the game you made, with your own intended interactions, and finds a different way to play - the fact that they are playing the game is success.  Unless the lureplant exploit is driving players away from the game, I don't see any reason to change it.  From what I can tell PLENTY of people are still manually fighting AFW.  I mostly see only legit fights happening in streams, and in yt I only see things like the lureplant exploit when I specifically search for it.  I think its pretty obvious this is NOT negatively effecting the game in any way - despite what some spiteful players (and perhaps devs) may think.

Edited March 20 by Yuuko

[cropo]

42 minutes ago, Szczuku said:

The AF fight is supposed to be hard it's the closest thing dst has to a final boss; sure, he ain't one- as the rift updates continue I'm sure we'll only get more and more raid bosses after him but AF is still one of the most hype and important fights in the game.

The hardest part about him is that you're often fighting more with your inventory and dated targeting controls than the Fuelweaver itself. He would be much easier if the inventory didn't have this Runescape PvP level of inventory manipulation. There's a reason he's 10x harder on console.

 

I also like the idea of Lureplants not affecting post-rift mobs, but staying consistent across pre-rift mobs. We've already accepted that ''Post rifts'' is a very different thing, so trying to argue for consistency with lureplanting seems to be specific. It's pretty messed up to want to take away a naturally found unintended mechanic with lureplants just to spite players who ''don't deserve to have beaten fuelweaver'' when player-consent has already been implied by them intentionally using it.

Edited March 20 by cropo

[grm9]

4 hours ago, V2C said:

Hey guys, seems to be some confusion, but to clarify, we do intend to fix these bugs and exploits eventually.  For the older bosses, they were not a focus of this update.  When we have time, we want to address some of the issues with the old fights such as Fuelweaver before we unexpectedly remove some players' means of progressing past them

please don't change FW, atm it's the most fun and complex fight in the game imo, with lureplant, spider den, weather pains, brightshade staff etc. strats if you want to trivialize it and dodging bone cage and luring it away from the ancient gateway for being able to kill it earlier with less preparation at the cost of making the fight harder but more fun and many character specific fun strats e.g. bramble husk or abigail or lunar fire for woven shadows, soul hopping out of the arena to prevent mind control, lightning spear for getting out of bone cage etc.

Edited March 20 by grm9

[cropo]

3 minutes ago, grm9 said:

lunar fire for woven shadows

Do they drop embers? If so I completely take back everything I said about the fight. I didn't even think to use that.

[grm9]

6 minutes ago, cropo said:

Do they drop embers? If so I completely take back everything I said about the fight. I didn't even think to use that.

iirc they don't since you can't ignite them, but you can kill most of them using it and cd is short enough to use it every time he summons 

[landromat]

1 minute ago, Yuuko said:

Like it or not, exploits are literally part of the game and most of the time its good that they exist

Like it or not, they're removing them so they're not part of the game anymore 

And no, exploits are bad lol why there is even discussion about that

[grm9]

2 minutes ago, landromat said:

exploits are bad

why?

[Yuuko]

5 minutes ago, landromat said:

Like it or not, they're removing them so they're not part of the game anymore 

And no, exploits are bad lol why there is even discussion about that

The devs are welcome to ruin their game if they want.  The more my plays, and streams of DST look like the same footage on loop the less I'm inclined to bother with it.  Its as simple as that.

This is why "difficulty" is such an important thing to understand.  If difficulty really equates to less viable options then it also equates to the game losing value to players.  If there is only 1 way to play a game then it will only be played once and only by the few players who like that specific way of playing.

[cropo]

7 minutes ago, landromat said:

And no, exploits are bad lol why there is even discussion about that

Not necessarily? Like, I get in a competitive environment they are bad but DST is not a competitive game. 

You can make your own server, and stipulate to anyone playing that exploits are not allowed and ban them if you see them using it, if you use public servers then I don't think you have any right to police the way they play. Lureplanting is such a specific exploit that requires player intent to utilize.

 

Many games evolved the way they have today because of exploits. Comboing in Street Fighter was originally not an intended mechanic, but it made the game far better because of it and arguably made it into what it is today. To just write off all exploits as something to immediately destroy regardless of context, or the effects of said "exploit" is incredibly close-minded.

[Mike23Ua]

5 minutes ago, grm9 said:

why?

Because instead of exploits Klei could make the boss fights fun and creative..

I have a few suggestions for the AFW fight even though I’ve never killed him myself, I still strongly feel like “Creature linked to being in this Area near this thing.. should obviously be able to get weaker the further away from said area the player can get said creature.”

And while I’m fully aware that’s NOT the way the AFW fight works right now… (I actually got the idea from the player running MacTusks away from their igloos before they try to flee back to their homes) 

AFW has to be built in a specific area (the only area it can be reanimated back to life in BtW) so…. It makes a hell of a lot of sense that if you can kite it further and further away from that source of life giving power- it grows weaker.

But before we can get a fight like that- Klei has to remove the EXPLOITS of being able to throw plants down to prevent it from returning back to its power source 

(Scrappy Werepig & its Trash Weapons)

[cropo]

4 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

Because instead of exploits Klei could make the boss fights fun and creative..

As much as I dislike AFW after fighting him enough times, he is probably the most creative boss fight in the entire game and utilizes every kind of mechanic you've learned up to that point. 

 

The only thing I'd actually change myself, personally, is the availability of Weather Pains, or a cheaper but far less useful multi-hit range attack for 1hp mobs(pre-rift). Fuelweaver is mostly fine, it's Weather Pains that are the problem.....for me anyway. Would be nice to change the volt goat ingredient into scrap, or make a ''scrap weather pain'' that sucks a little more than the real one but doesn't require you to farm volt goats.

Edited March 20 by cropo

[Arcwell]

Not a fan of the lureplant change :/. I understand it was intended for Scrappy Werepig and that's fine, but as others have mentioned it has implications for at least FW, Toadstool, and moonrock farming.

With regards to FW, to be clear: this does not "fix an exploit." FW was cheeseable and is still cheeseable with the lureplant change, the strategy just becomes more annoying / time-consuming, which if you ask me benefits no one.

All of that said, if the plan is to change lureplants so they can only be trampled by post-rift enemies, I can be happy with that.

[Yuuko]

5 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

Because instead of exploits Klei could make the boss fights fun and creative..

 

He asked why exploits are bad, not whatever you decided to answer.

AFW is a fun fight.  I enjoy fighting it a lot in the many different ways that I can.  That includes doing it with Wes, Wanda, Willow, Wolfgang, with weather pains or kiting, with catapults or not, and yes even with lureplant blocking.  The fight is already fun and creative, AND this exploit also exists along side it.

All that said - the question was - why are exploits bad.

[BezKa]

For once I'm not the seething "new feature bad" person, nice

[00petar00]

10 hours ago, V2C said:

Lureplants can now be trampled by creatures that can trample through obstacles and structures.

A really bad change, unless playing wormwood it isn't easy to gather lureplants and you'd need to wait for spring and kill deerclops and AG to make houndious shootius if you wanted to kill Fuelweaver like this.

There is also moon rock farming method that is very important because there are so few options.

This is much worse for Toadstool because of his HP and the fight is so much less fun compared to FW.

Like the previous Bee Queen boat patch this just removes options from players.

7 hours ago, V2C said:

We are likely going to change the Lureplant fix to only affect the newer content.  We decided to fix this now because of how it affected the Scrappy Werepig before he could even reach the Junk Pile to pick up his first weapon.

Just got to this part of the thread but I decided to leave what I wrote about lureplants previously because this doesn't confirm it 100%.

5 hours ago, V2C said:

Hey guys, seems to be some confusion, but to clarify, we do intend to fix these bugs and exploits eventually.  For the older bosses, they were not a focus of this update.  When we have time, we want to address some of the issues with the old fights such as Fuelweaver before we unexpectedly remove some players' means of progressing past them.

Here we go again, devs are pressured to make changes like these because of a few players that want to force others to play the way they play the game. The more options there are for a fight the better it is.

At first I really liked Nightmare Werepig fight but now like every new boss is getting similar mechanics charge ability and fatigue when you are supposed to dodge or hit and only have one way of defeating them.

2 hours ago, Yuuko said:

Try this - DON'T.

Completely agree with your entire post, its as if you took the words from my mouth.

A big part of sandbox games are choices and we are not getting any from the new boss fights while the bosses before rift are getting "fixed".

Choices matter so much for replayability of a game.

 

Edited March 20 by 00petar00

[Mike23Ua]

21 minutes ago, Yuuko said:

He asked why exploits are bad, not whatever you decided to answer.

 the question was - why are exploits bad.

But I answered that question? Exploits are bad, because they limit potential mechanic reworks.

Theres a difference between getting Klaus stuck on his loot stash so you can just stand there smacking him. And gathering a bazillion bees/bunnies for the CK/BQ fights.

Pinning a boss in with Lureplants is obviously another one of those “get Klaus stuck on his loot stash” situations Klei wanted to fix.

[cropo]

4 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

But I answered that question? Exploits are bad, because they limit potential mechanic reworks.

No they don't though?

[Faintly Macabre]

7 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

But I answered that question? Exploits are bad, because they limit potential mechanic reworks.

Except that lureplants keeping AFW from getting to the gate to turn it off does not in any way prevent Klei from retooling the fight, and some other things don't actually need to be changed.

Edited March 20 by Faintly Macabre

[00petar00]

10 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

But I answered that question? Exploits are bad, because they limit potential mechanic reworks.

Theres a difference between getting Klaus stuck on his loot stash so you can just stand there smacking him. And gathering a bazillion bees/bunnies for the CK/BQ fights.

Pinning a boss in with Lureplants is obviously another one of those “get Klaus stuck on his loot stash” situations Klei wanted to fix.

That was a terrible fix, very immersion breaking and only to stop Wanda and maybe it is also useful for Walter. All other characters now can't use loot stash to hide behind when he lunges at you in the second stage.

How does this limit boss reworks? It just gives you more options and you can decide how you want to kill a boss.

10 hours ago, V2C said:

Fixed Dragonfly Furnace being able to destroy the Eternal Fruitcake. Not even this heat can destroy this present.

The point of furnace is to delete unwanted items, why are we unable to delete eternal fruitcake? It literally defeats the purpose and we will still need to use lureplants.

Edited March 20 by 00petar00

[Cruvimaster]

48 minutes ago, 00petar00 said:

Here we go again, devs are pressured to make changes like these because of a few players that want to force others to play the way they play the game. The more options there are for a fight the better it is.

It is at least shameful for a developer to openly accept that there are serious flaws in the programming. This pseudo-argument that is fun doesn't work for them.

A boss that is stuck helplessly just being beaten is something that many developer companies simply would not accept in their games.

The issue is that they forgot that ending the exploid for the new boss affected the old ones and now they are going back on it.

 

However, it's good to focus on all the great work done by the developers in this beta.

Many incredible things are happening and an old exploit cannot dim the shine of this future update.

Edited March 20 by Cruvimaster

[00petar00]

1 minute ago, Cruvimaster said:

It is at least shameful for a developer to openly accept that there are serious flaws in the programming. This pseudo-argument that is fun doesn't work for them.

A boss that is stuck helplessly just being beaten is something that many developer companies simply would not accept in their games.

The issue is that they forgot that ending the exploid for the new boss affected the old ones and now they are going back on it.

Scrappy werepig being stuck on lureplant would be a good thing because it would add another option to fight the boss but I understand why it is removed as all bosses post rift don't have that interaction.

The issue I have is that game will be more boring when more content like that is added, how is it not a contradiction to sandbox genre if there is only one intended linear way to kill a boss? What If all bosses get every different method of fighting them "fixed" and you are left with one?