Coop Map Feedback Thread

[Noya]

How's the layout? How's the difficulty? Have you beaten it yet?

 

 

Leave your thoughts and suggestions for our new map here!

[DBX_5]

update the main page.

[inuke]

Must be 4 line, but not 6.

[Califax]

Blink on builders can be nice.. Also fills one inventory slot, since there has been little talk how to fills those

[yoitzhiok]

Maybe it's just me, but the map looks messy as hell. Four players, six lanes, and unless there's a pre-set plan going on, everybody's either:

 

1) Mass building towers everywhere

2) Focused on their own 'lane' and not helping out.

 

Met a couple of guys on the leaderboard one game. Didn't know. End up flaming the hell outta me and the new guy. Asked for towers like Blacksmith 3, didn't want to build. /rant/

 

With 6 lanes, bounty is at 1.5x of a normal game, minus the last five waves. Don't know how much that is so I cant give an exact multiplier.

 

I really don't like the co-op version for pubs, but for playtesting sake, I'm gonna find three other people willing to try a strat out. Probably seems like the best if you wanna climb the leaderboards. As for 'for fun', it's so messy I can barely enjoy it. Better sticking to the solo map if playing alone.

 

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Towers

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People seem to favor long-ranged towers (coughlightcough) such as electricity and gunpowder. Played about 5 games, and those who, I could see, knew how to play the game, ended up only with these towers. Me, meanwhile, while trying to break the trend, played with Quake and the likes. The result? I can barely hold one lane while they're just tearing two lanes apart with ease.

 

As usual, people still tried life towers, and I can say it's pretty effective you aren't trying to climb for leaderboards. Especially good with new players playing who don't know how to play.

 

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Early (1- 15)

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Very confusing. didn't know where to build. A lvl 1 dual-element is brain-numbingly easy, allowing you to last about 5- 10 stages. Didn't try arrow and cannon towers, but I'm pretty sure other then for leaks, they're pretty much obsolete in coop because of the increased cash.

 

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Mid (15-30)

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Game spikes pretty hard for new players, who often mass their towers, get random elements and build random towers. As for the experienced players, the hard decision is whether to help a struggling side or build more on yours for that one rainy-day wave (nothing more sad than bulky dark casually walking through a vapor tower). At this point, the difficulty almost equals to v.hard on the solo map because of the lack of gold and increased creep count / creep bulk.

 

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Nearing the end (31-40)

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Most people just die, ON normal. And it's not because we used to camp our spawn so that the poor life tower builds can't handle the rush. New players never make it past here, and those who do, do build towers like gunpowder, light etc. In the current game, there really is no space for short-ranged towers.

 

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Pre-frog (41-50)

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Only been through it once. Difficulty goes back down again because by now, you know what you're doing, and whatever you are doing /works/. You just kinda upgrade the T2 duals into T3 duals, build more T2 tri-elements, and save for Pure Element Towers.

 

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UNLEASH THE FROGS

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Not much of a comment. Usually last about 2 - 4 rounds unless interest was accumulated. Nothing really different from solo.

 

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In short, only play this with a pre-made team. Playing pub is pure suicide.

[WindStrike]

35 minutes ago, yoitzhiok said:

With 6 lanes, bounty is at 1.5x of a normal game, minus the last five waves. Don't know how much that is so I cant give an exact multiplier.

 

Actually, it should be equal to the normal game, just split up over everyone. Normal game = 30 creeps for 1 player. Co-op = 120 creeps for 4 players. 120 / 4 = 30 creeps per player. Though, in terms of interest, it tends to be less than the standard game.

 

It was intentionally designed to be more lanes than players, or else it'd just turn into "everyone has obvious designated zones". Which, it's kinda the case here still, so on that part, we didn't quite achieve the goal. Regarding "pub is pure suicide", we had a version of co-op in the SC2 version of the game, and playing pub was pure suicide there. Testing of this mode in this version seemed to prove otherwise, though then again, none of said tests were "pubs". I'm not too surprised about "pub players" just massing their towers everywhere, cause that's what they do anyways in the standard version.

 

 

43 minutes ago, yoitzhiok said:

Met a couple of guys on the leaderboard one game. Didn't know. End up flaming the hell outta me and the new guy. Asked for towers like Blacksmith 3, didn't want to build. /rant/

 

Ahh, I was afraid this might happen. Now that the game is more about everyone working together, the standard dota community of flaming anyone they think is "n00b" or "holding them back" is starting to show itself here. This isn't exactly fixable, that's a fault of the dota community in general... and every competitive community out there, ie battle.net, league, counter-strike, etc.

 

 

46 minutes ago, yoitzhiok said:

In the current game, there really is no space for short-ranged towers.

 

In my playtesting, long-ranged towers work better initially, but once they stop killing fast and they're not able to cross-cover cause their DPS output isn't high enough just to kill their own lane they're covering, they fall off pretty badly. Whereas short-medium range towers, in the longrun, do end up better than the long-range towers. Of course, pubs are naturally inclined to go long range, I'm not the slightest bit surprised by that.

 

50 minutes ago, yoitzhiok said:

In short, only play this with a pre-made team. Playing pub is pure suicide.

 

Personally, I haven't really tried pubs out yet, been busy trying to work on up-and-coming features, but I'll be sure to give it a few goes and see how it goes. I'm not gonna be surprised if co-op isn't popular in terms of leaderboard playing, but I'm not too bothered by that, because the majority of the players don't play for the leaderboard. Though, if the difficulty is indeed that bad, twill see about tweaking the difficulty next patch. I dunno, it's really hard to balance because if you have the support cores together (Blacksmith 3, Well 3, and Trickery 3), it changes the balance of the game, but until the point you reach even one of them, the creeps can't be too strong, but at the same time, once you start getting them, the game scaling has to go up or else it's a complete joke. Something I'm considering applying is instead of just a flat hp increase on higher difficulties, it also alters hp scaling, so the lower difficulties don't scale nearly as high and don't require that support core.

[ArthurDent]

You can sell towers from allies. So if two players have the same towers close to each other, it might happen by accident. Maybe you can give towers a color based on the owner.

I guess this problem is related to support towers being able to buff allied towers.

 

There is no networth shown, so its hard to anticipate if you are able to afford an expensive tower if you sell your other towers.

 

Apart from that, I think the coop map can become quite a success.

Maybe you should use the regular map as pre-selected though, cause i think alot of players end up in coop right now although they dont even want to play it, which ruins the fun for the other players in that game.

I can understand you want to advertise coop right now, but the preselection brings pretty much every new player to the coop mode first. So the new players get frustrated cause of flaming/complicated gameplay, and the more experienced players whom actually want to play coop get frustrated cause of newbs and leavers.

 

Also a few general tips on how to play coop on the loading screen might help alot.

 

[WindStrike]

36 minutes ago, ArthurDent said:

You can sell towers from allies. So if two players have the same towers close to each other, it might happen by accident. Maybe you can give towers a color based on the owner.

 

It's not disconnected players only? Whoops, that's a mistake, lol.

 

37 minutes ago, ArthurDent said:

There is no networth shown, so its hard to anticipate if you are able to afford an expensive tower if you sell your other towers.

 

Had it removed cause everyone's networth was the same (unless you went on a selling spree in all pck). We could add it back, though rather than having it listed for each person in the scoreboard, what we could do is add it back at the top of the scoreboard, above everyone's names.

 

 

39 minutes ago, ArthurDent said:

I can understand you want to advertise coop right now, but the preselection brings pretty much every new player to the coop mode first. So the new players get frustrated cause of flaming/complicated gameplay, and the more experienced players whom actually want to play coop get frustrated cause of newbs and leavers.

 

Yeah, we were intending on changing it back with next patch. It was mainly a publicity thingy. Should be up within the next few days, after which hopefully that helps fix the situation on it.

[Noya]

41 minutes ago, ArthurDent said:

You can sell towers from allies.

 

That should only happen if your ally disconnected (it shares units), you should never be able to sell a tower with a yellow range overlay, if it happens it's a bug.

 

42 minutes ago, ArthurDent said:

There is no networth shown, so its hard to anticipate if you are able to afford an expensive tower if you sell your other towers.

 

We removed the networth value on the scoreboard UI because it would end up being the same for all players (until Sell) gets taken into account, but I can totally bring it back if it's better to have it.

 

 

I'll put the default map selection back to element_td after a couple more days have passed, as you noticed it was just to advertise it and make sure people tried it out

[ArthurDent]

16 minutes ago, Noya said:

1 hour ago, ArthurDent said:

You can sell towers from allies.

 

That should only happen if your ally disconnected (it shares units), you should never be able to sell a tower with a yellow range overlay, if it happens it's a bug.

 

It was actually with a disconnected player, but he reconnected again and was pissed

Edited May 2, 2016 by ArthurDent

[yoitzhiok]

Oh yeah, a cool 'All Random' mode implementation could be that there are about 30 pre-set element combinations which will happen in that order, and everyone can't have the two pre-set combinations. This might be more interesting.

 

Also, idk if this could be a feature (for both maps), but have newbie tips flash across the screen every x seconds. This setting could be turned off somewhere on the screen (like the leaderboard buttons and such). Display stuff like, "Fire does 200% against Nature, but watch out on Water stages as they only do 50%!"

 

Ontopic: How about this. A 10% bonus damage for towers of different players attacking the same target(s). Like global-wide buff. This might encourage cross-building

[kerb]

I really like the map design, it makes a lot of sense how the waves of 2 adjacent lanes pass certain areas at certain times.

In general i found this map to be very hard to beat. Had like 12 tries so far, 1 worked. Was always the same: I had to hold 2 lanes at once and a bit more alone, the other 3 players were leaking, even if they built in single lanes. And peope are very stubborn (resistent to advices).

Anyways i think it would be very interesting with an organized party of good players, but for pubbing it has a high risk of a massive facepalm incoming

[kerb]

Ok, i gave it some more testing (played myself place 13 solo in co-op mode). The only difference by playing it solo is you having less pure towers as essences are limited still to the amount 1 player has and it is harder as you will not have such diverse elementals. From what i saw from playing with other players: they tend to go for zeus towers or a load of single ele/basic towers (both fails quite hard). Best way to deal with this mode is having a good micture of tri-ele towers that deal good aoe and have decent range + buff towers obviously. So it is kind of like singleplayermap, just more range focussed.