Turrets 2: Electric Boogaloo (Or, what are we actually doing?)

[Ranger1]

14 minutes ago, Hawk69 said:

It is possible to achieve both at same time, no we dont want 1000s and 10000s of turrets, we just want to be able to achieve same dps to keep same lvl of security that you achieve with large number of turrets. so turret they anounced is step in right direction but with 100 limit, it is still to low to compensate for what we are used to.

Well, it's not really a matter of how many turrets really, that is fairly irrelevant.  They can make 1 turret the equivalent of 10... or 100... or 1000 if needed.  No the question is how to find the best implementation to make cost and damage per turret work well in the current framework of the game, and what new levels of granularity (such as the proposed heavy turrets) needs to be introduced.

Getting the details correct will likely be a little tricky (thus this thread exists), but the conversation needs to stop focusing on the largely irrelevant (100 turret) cap.

[Matthewm61022]

On 20/11/2017 at 6:25 AM, MapleRush said:

These are great suggestions, and definitely a good step in the right direction. The only thing that I don't see addressed here is how you guys came to the conclusion that 100 turrets/ 10 000 units is the number needed to balance player experience with server performance. I worry about this number because I recall that the flyer nerf was initially overdone on purpose and then slowly buffed back to a manageable level. Due to the long-term implications that this turret change will have on the game, I just want reassurance that you guys have tested more lenient limitations before jumping to this number, rather than simply using this as a starting point. If you can't confidently say that this is the right combination, then please consider an initial iteration that looks to preserve the player experience, and then limit from there if need be. Really hoping that you at WildCard can truly collaborate with the community to come to a compromise on this.

This is very true and I hope just as much as you that they have don’t want to pick up 400 turrets and build faraway turret towers to reloaded I can move have 150 turrets down in a area

[Glerian]

9 minutes ago, DeltaEmeraldMC said:

I disagree, there are many other issues in the game that cause lag,

And you are free to do so, but the information as has been collected and disseminated does not support this point of view. The single largest contributor to lag was, as they stated, turrets. Nothing else even came close.

11 minutes ago, DeltaEmeraldMC said:

The reason everyone is hating on them is because of how stupid the amount of turrets they are allowing is.

Which is something you cannot possibly know until you have actually tested it. This isn't 100 turrets per base, it's 100 turrets per 10,000 or 37 foundations radius. A turret has a range of over 20 foundations. Knowing this it is entirely possible to place more than 500 turrets, each dealing knockback and doing 4x the amount of damage, around a normal base. That is the equivalent of 2,000 turrets as they stand, but also with knockback and reduced soaking capacity to dinos. To call this stupid, without testing it efficiently, is kind of absurd.

15 minutes ago, DeltaEmeraldMC said:

I was not asking for them to not reduce it

You did in fact ask them not to reduce it to 100. Many times actually. You suggested 500 or 1,000. You are getting caught up over nuance. The limit is 100, you do not want the limit to be 100. Throwing out other hypothetical limits doesn't make a difference when you are unwilling to accept the limit as it has been stated.

 

18 minutes ago, DeltaEmeraldMC said:

"How do we make this number of turrets work?" was what I was mostly focusing on.

It most certainly was not. You were focused on increasing that number. Those are two wildly different concepts. One is "We have 100 turrets, how do we make this sufficient" and the other is "We should get MORE turrets than the limit you prescribed".

20 minutes ago, DeltaEmeraldMC said:

idle animations are another problem

As has been pointed out by WildCard themselves, idle animations are handled client side. Read the thread, all of this is explained in detail. The single largest contributor to lag is the turrets. This has been tested and found to be true.

22 minutes ago, DeltaEmeraldMC said:

If you seriously think that putting a limit of 100 turrets will stop the lag completely, you are as blind as anybody that you are criticising.

No one has made that statement. But it will significantly help. Going from 1 fps to 5 is an incredible improvement from a single fix. Other fixes are happening as well, they are working on multiple angles. But the best, easiest, most efficient way to cut lag right now is turrets.

 

29 minutes ago, DeltaEmeraldMC said:

How about you only use quotation marks for things that I actually said

It wasn't a quote and wasn't attributed to you, it was a hypothetical argument.

[Hawk69]

17 minutes ago, Ranger1 said:

Well, it's not really a matter of how many turrets really, that is fairly irrelevant.  They can make 1 turret the equivalent of 10... or 100... or 1000 if needed.  No the question is how to find the best implementation to make cost and damage per turret work well in the current framework of the game, and what new levels of granularity (such as the proposed heavy turrets) needs to be introduced.

Getting the details correct will likely be a little tricky (thus this thread exists), but the conversation needs to stop focusing on the largely irrelevant (100 turret) cap.

nah, I dont agree that we need to stop talking about 100 cap, as the number is obsurd, going from infinite to 100 is a huge jump... dont you agree? also i am sceptical if this limitation will have any impact at all.. for example someone who has lets say 2000 turrets atm placed on and close to their main base will probably just replace ones on main base with new turrets, and then just build aditional 20 turret towers all around i large perimeter area, mybe good solution would be a crafting recipe that you put inside fabricator togeather with turrets and it gives you item that you then use to upgrade current turret to higher tier with better dmg, this way people might actually reduce number of turrets they got instead of just replacing their position in wider area around base.

[Eli]

13 minutes ago, Hawk69 said:

nah, I dont agree that we need to stop talking about 100 cap, as the number is obsurd, going from infinite to 100 is a huge jump... dont you agree? also i am sceptical if this limitation will have any impact at all.. for example someone who has lets say 2000 turrets atm placed on and close to their main base will probably just replace ones on main base with new turrets, and then just build aditional 20 turret towers all around i large perimeter area, mybe good solution would be a crafting recipe that you put inside fabricator togeather with turrets and it gives you item that you then use to upgrade current turret to higher tier with better dmg, this way people might actually reduce number of turrets they got instead of just replacing their position in wider area around base.

Considering that, as TRH flat out said,

On 11/18/2017 at 10:36 PM, TheRightHand said:

People were making new, super-dense bases with insane turret counts, far beyond anything we'd ever seen before.

Those people scattering them in a "large perimeter area" is only a good thing, because 1) the base stops having insane turret counts and 2) the base (by way of turrets) becomes less super-dense.

[ooStuStu]

3 hours ago, bigfish502 said:

Actually it will be just as bad if not worse for solo and small tribes. These tribes often don't have the luxury of spacing out turret towers like Mega tribes do as they might be trying to keep a low profile so as to not draw the attention of the Alpha Tribes or the area they are built in simply won't allow for more spacing (such as on top of a small plateau). Plus when the Alpha tribes feel insecure, they take it out on the little guys. I'm already hearing reports of Alpha Tribes engaging in, or planning on engaging in, an all out Blitzkrieg on the smaller tribes on their server before they have the chance to come to their front doorstep with their own soakers.

I am in no mega but i can assure you every tribe with more than one stego and a bronto will be destroyed by the megas in a preventive measure since the megas will be vulnerable from the smallest of threats 

[ooStuStu]

It is painfully obvious we need these things

Heavy turret with 4x to 5x damage that costs as much a 4 or 5 turrets like TRH has suggested

the already suggested 20% damage boost + 50% more ammo capacity to the current turrets

boosted knock back added to plants as well as a 20% damage buff for them

Nerf the stego plates and ability to place C4 from the saddle of any dino

and an additional 100 to 150 more turrets in the 10k unit area ....

Looking at some of the Trump Walls on PC the counters are reading 800/100  and even 1500/100 .... and they are not even the most extreme walls and bases i have seen .. We all want be able to have a defense that will be sufficient ...

 

[Rofelo]

We dont need anything stronger than 100 4x turrets if they lower dino health, all armor, and rebalance sweet veggie cakes.

This would cause problems with the bosses so that would need to be fixed as well.

[Olivar]

10 minutes ago, Rofelo said:

We dont need anything stronger than 100 4x turrets if they lower dino health, all armor, and rebalance sweet veggie cakes.

This would cause problems with the bosses so that would need to be fixed as well.

Yeah no.
Do you know how much damage goes around in Alpha fights?
Lowering health of dinosaurs poses a serious risk there.

[Rofelo]

3 minutes ago, Olivar said:

Yeah no.
Do you know how much damage goes around in Alpha fights?
Lowering health of dinosaurs poses a serious risk there.

They would have to drop that damage down, but that wouldnt be bad because then players stand more of a chance?

[Olivar]

1 minute ago, Rofelo said:

They would have to drop that damage down, but that wouldnt be bad because then players stand more of a chance?

That's already three major overhauls....
Just saying, the chances of breaking stuff are way bigger with this approach.

[KingGalahad]

2 hours ago, fdolan2001 said:

I would definitely prefer to have lag then no way to defend my base properly and I have seen plenty of others with this opinion as well

Why do you want the lag, and then no way to defend your base? You don't have to have both

[Hawk69]

Quote

 

Considering that, as TRH flat out said,

Those people scattering them in a "large perimeter area" is only a good thing, because 1) the base stops having insane turret counts and 2) the base (by way of turrets) becomes less super-dense.

Ok fair enough, there wont be so many concentrated turrets in one spot, but still most people will just pick up their extra turrets and just place them somewhere else, probably just outside that 32 foundation area, and servers will still have same amount of turrets, and will still need to do same number of calculations.. thus there will be almost no boost in server performance, it might even get worse as people will just build extra towers, with added generators, walls, cables, spikes, traps.. etc... meaning even more objects and probably same amount of turrets.

Putting a limit on tribe might solve the issue, but then people will just abuse and make allied tribes, as someone already mentioned and will just place all those turrets again.. and we will be right back on start... maybe a solution is linking your steam account to same tribe per server, meaning you cant make 10 alt characters each in it's own tribe, but people will find a way to abuse that to, either by having multiple steam accounts or by asking friends from another servers to build towers for them.

I believe only way to actually fix issues is to introduce upgrades and tiers to ark... if you can upgrade your turret 5-10 or maybe even 20 times, with some little dmg, ammo storage bonus and HP compared to placing that many single turrets would actually make people do just that instead of just spamming single ones... and then you can put limit on that and people will do just that what you want and that is reduce number of turrets they currently use, as they will be able to achieve same or even better DPS with less turrets, and everyone would be happy, and we might even see some server performance actually going up.

Same thing can be applied to other stuff too... my base for example has around 80 fridges atm to store food when I hatch dinos... 80 objects that server need to load every time I go to my base... why do I need 80 fridges... because game forces me to have them as I need to store tons and tons of food when hatching dinos that eat insane amounts... how about allowing upgrade of single fridge 100 times for example... making one fridge being able to contain same amount of food ad 100 fridges, either by adding more slots or just by increasing of stack size inside fridge.. so 1 fridge instead of 100... no one can convince me that number of objects placed does not matter... because it does... look at those mega bases and silly loading times...

Same upgrade scheme should be used for other stuff too... forges, chembenches, airconditioners... etc... 
Instead of forcing player to place 100s and 1000s of objects .. reward him by allowing him to upgrade single one with slight bonus, and players will do just that.

Also walls and foundations and way they work need to be worked on... why the hell is there no 2x2 3x3 or even 10x10 walls, floors and foundations... no one would
use 100 small walls to build 10x10 wall if there was big one 10x10, that has same or more HP than 10 small ones placed on first lvl... lets say small 1x1 takes 5 C4 to break, 
and big one 10x10 takes 50 c4 to break... I believe most players would go for big one 10x10.. and there with one singe wall you save 100 objects...
And maybe if we had just that bases would have less objects and you would not need to wait 10-20-30 seconds for your base to load up when you go to it... I will not even mention those monster bases that some people build that probably contain millions of small 1x1 walls.

Anyway UPGRADES is the key  !!! think about it ...

I am typing all that in here, even tho it's not all related to turrets in hope someone from devs actually see this and maybe pick up on this idea.

 

 

[invincibleqc]

2 minutes ago, Hawk69 said:

Ok fair enough, there wont be so many concentrated turrets in one spot, but still most people will just pick up their extra turrets and just place them somewhere else, probably just outside that 32 foundation area, and servers will still have same amount of turrets, and will still need to do same number of calculations..

With the limitation, there won't be more than 70 * 100 = 7,000 turrets that are not into stasis (structures into stasis doesn't tick on the server -at all-). And this is the worst case scenario where all single players connected to the server are all rendering 100 different turrets (which is unlikely to happens quite often).

[hoffnbeard]

Some things I think could be added that I haven't seen mentioned are different types of turrets/ammunition.

 

I think a rocket turret or something with an AOE damage would be interesting

I like the knockback effect being added

How about some type of tranquilizer ammo for the turret to knock out the stego's getting dropped in the base

poison darts that rapidly drain health

armor piercing bullets that break saddles, stego plates, armor, ect

 

other forms of defense that aren't turrets for your base:

land mines

status effect traps- poison, freezing dino in place for period of time, setting it on fire

allowing chain bola's to be set up on auto fire to trap dino's and knock player off saddle

 

[hoffnbeard]

14 minutes ago, invincibleqc said:

With the limitation, there won't be more than 70 * 100 = 7,000 turrets that are not into stasis (structures into stasis doesn't tick on the server -at all-). And this is the worst case scenario where all single players connected to the server are all rendering 100 different turrets (which is unlikely to happens quite often).

 

How do you get this math? an alpha on a server or a mega could just take over the entire server and place a turret tower with 100 turrets every 32 spaces on the map on player only

[invincibleqc]

6 minutes ago, hoffnbeard said:

 

How do you get this math? an alpha on a server or a mega could just take over the entire server and place a turret tower with 100 turrets every 32 spaces on the map on player only

Turrets will be limited to 100 within 10,000 units. Which is the maximum distance a player with Epic settings can render. When a structure is not rendered, it becomes into stasis state (think of it like the structures/creatures are "paused" and are waiting to go out of that state to performs any logic). So since official servers have a maximum of 70 player slots, a full server won't ever be able to render more than 7,000 turrets because every one of these player cannot "wake up" more than 100 turrets each (which is again, the worst case scenario).

[Poseidon888]

@TheRightHand @Jatheish

What about primitive/primitive plus servers? We can only use plant x and once again you’ve fixed the problems for the non-primitive servers but not us. Are you going to give us a new plant turret? Plant Z maybe? Or are you going to continue to ignore us?

You’ve already made all primitive servers legacy, which you don’t support any longer, deleted all primitive scorched servers, and despite the fact that you said we can use primitive + instead, you’ve only created a single server cluster for primitive + on Xbox and there are absolutely no scorched primitive + servers. In addition, primitive + hasn’t had any of its engrams updated in months, so we can’t ride any of the dinos that have been released in that time, and you haven’t enabled any of the scorched engrams on primitive + which means we can’t use any of the scorched earth engrams, resources, or dinosaurs on Ragnarok. I have posted this multiple times on all of your twitter accounts and contacted support but haven’t received any legitimate response from you. Either answer and address these problems or give us our money back. 

[fdolan2001]

4 hours ago, Ranger1 said:

Then I invite you to perhaps participate in the main discussion taking place now. 

Namely how the turret reduction can be implemented (because it will be) without causing too much disruption to base defense.  The boost amount to current turrets, the new heavy turrets and their capabilities, possible tweaking of bullet soakers and vegy cake use. 

Discussions that actually matter.

Well if the turret patch has to happen which should only be the case if there is no other alternative to reduce server lag I have a few suggestions

first of all 100 turrets is a laughably ridiculous amount. You can't expect bases with 15k turrets to be able to cut down to just 100. Surley the turrets aren't causing so much lag that they need to be reduced so drastically. They should start with a high cap and see how it goes from there 

Second of all all of the tanking dinos need to be nerfed dramatically especially the stego and I think the stego should be nerfed so it no longer fully protects users from turrets on survivors only and I also think you should no longer be able to use any explosives whilst riding it

Third of all I think that they should make it easier to utilise dinos in base defence by having it so your dinos will not go outside a certain are even if they are on neutral /aggressive and are being led away

[BigRad]

lol all you guys are crazy man.... just add saddles with durability so they can break. duh, problems solved.

[wardem0n]

Our tribe personally has to go from 1300 to 100 turrets.  Which blows.  My question is if the turret buff goes live on December 5th and the reduction to 100 goes live on December 5th.  They stated that they’re giving warning so you can take care of things by December 5th.  My question is why would anybody start removing there turrets now ahead of dec 5th.  Wouldn’t it make sense to buff the turrets one week and put the restriction a week later.  By doing it on the same day you’re leaving you’re base at a risk.  So the December 5th prepare yourself for notice is for nothing.  As is the red writing on the turrets.

[cjhcatapult]

 the PS4 fps lag is more bothersome than the official server lag (which a good 80% of the time isn't even horrible).

 

Sure on PC you can buy new hardware and you have more graphical setting sliders to circumvent this, but on PS4 (ESPECIALLY older model ps4s) you are dead in the water. You can switch between one of two quality settings, and you can disable vsync but that's about it. 

[Roland151b]

In essence this new turret type is 4x stronger. Ok, sweet... So theoretically you can place the damage output of 400 turrets within the specified range assuming you upgrade all turrets to this new type. Watching the youtubers experiment with the restriction range has really shown that even with these new turrets it will be incredibly difficult to defend a large area. 

The new turret type along with the concept of turret knockback has me hopeful but I remain dubious as I have been in many large and small scale raids and invasions and honestly I think the devs are grossly underestimating the power that megatribes can bring to a fight. The logical conclusion is megatribes wiping servers etc and stamping out the little guys, invasions will be faster and more aggressive; PvP will increase dramatically for a month or two and then official servers will become ghost towns. 

With that said, the issue is with the quantity of turrets effecting server performance. Having seen megatribe bases with uncountable amounts of turrets which have still been destroyed turret density isnt the gameplay issue here. Their punch per round is. Turrets were great when max dino level was 30... Turrets have been relatively unchanged since the very early days and now you are witnessing the result of escalation. 

I can agree with the reasoning behind what they are doing but the execution is so out of place that only drama will unfold... Can't wait to watch it all burn!

[ForzaProiettile]

With regards to the changes my own thoughts are as follows:

1. If you increase the turret damage/ add "Heavy Turrets" what will happen to the ground game? Not all players love to ride dinos (I being one of them). Players are already quite fragile, increasing the damage by 20% will effectively remove any kind of ground raiding which I think will be bad for the game. I would like to see the damage being differentiated between dino and player in the same way a gun in this game does less damage to dinos then an arrow.

2. With the extra damage of turrets coming into play I think its now more prudent to ever to rethink siege options in particular the lacklustre highly nerfed garbage that we meant to use such cannons and catapults. Players need a metal tier siege weapon and a TEK tier siege weapon. This would give them more options when assaulting bases other then the boring standing there with Brontos tanking mechanic which is neither fun for the attacker or defender.

3. Unraidable Caves. Certain cave bases are already nearly ticking the box for "unraidable location" which is an extremely bad thing to allow on any PVP server. If this change goes ahead these caves which are currently only raidable on foot and only because the turrets have trouble tracking the targets will become entirely unraidable. I suggest either not allowing turrets in caves or changing the layout of all caves so that every cave can be raidable using some kind of tankable dino.

4. What is to stop tribes just spamming their turrets all over the map or using an allied tribe to build additional turrets within the restricted 100 area? I'm hoping all turrets regardless of ownership in an area count to the limit and also it is likely you will need some kind of tribe turret cap in order to effectively reduce the lag since tribes will just relocate their thousands of turrets otherwise.

[ooStuStu]

2 hours ago, ForzaProiettile said:

4. What is to stop tribes just spamming their turrets all over the map or using an allied tribe to build additional turrets within the restricted 100 area? I'm hoping all turrets regardless of ownership in an area count to the limit and also it is likely you will need some kind of tribe turret cap in order to effectively reduce the lag since tribes will just relocate their thousands of turrets otherwise.

I am pretty sure no matter who owns the turret the 100 per 10k units still applies .... Not 100% sure but pretty sure