Tank Run Mutation feedback #410
Comments
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You beat me to doing the issue xdd, I also support this but I don't see the alarm as problematic, it makes it more difficult or so I think. |
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Lmao. I just see the alarm cars as a problem because of trolls but nothing too concerning at all rn |
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The alarm car also makes it consistent with Special Delivery. Plus it gives those cars a purpose. |
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Yeah I definitely see that lmao. |
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@CrisAhr @MrGuides Do you think partially reverting the update only in Expert difficulty would be enough? |
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@alexiscoutinho I feel like at least the auto/self-revive and water slowness have to be reverted overall completely because it just completely changes Tank Run and the spark/fun this amazing mutation had is gone because of the update. The car alarms don't have to be removed (although I don't think anyone really suggested for this feature to be added so honestly, I don't know if Tank Run really needs the tank spawns with the car alarm). |
We'll figure out something and keep you informed. |
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@Tsuey Thank you so much :) |
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@alexiscoutinho In my opinion, it would be nice if only in an expert it would have an effect for tank to come out if you activate the car alarm |
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Yeah, I think adapting controversial features per difficulty is the way to go because I'm sure there are a lot of casual players that liked the new stuff (let's be honest, the self-revive mechanic is pretty cool/interesting in the game). |
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if it's something innovative but it's a pity that it was in general and not because of difficulty |
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We're going over all the Tank Run feedback, just to note random concerns that we'd love to hear discussion on:
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@Tsuey 2- I don't really think it would be difficult to communicate the difference of ~2 features between difficulty, especially when they are intuitive. There's already a couple of per difficulty quirks such as the number of required gas cans in finales and the behavior of bosses that are not explained in an "official tutorial". So I don't think Tank Run would need an "official tutorial" (besides patch notes) either. Furthermore, it's not like players would greatly miss out on something if they didn't know the differences (at least considering the auto-revive mechanic which will be blatant in the first minutes of gameplay). Yeah, the water slowdown thing would be more subtle and uninformed players could maybe think it's a bug. But still... 3- I like this idea too (through a balancing pov, because it's the most unrealistic). 5- That's why the old behavior can't be applied globally. Though simply adding "Death's Door" to Tank Run would make it even harder than it was, so I'm against. 6- I didn't really understand you final argument. On the other hand, couldn't the "crawl" keys be used to revive too? |
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I love Tank Run. It's probably my most played mutation. Quite a few of these changes really put me off from it though ): It feels like those four changes I mentioned make it too easy and really take away from requiring teamwork. Tanks are the biggest, baddest thing in the game and without your team to help you, it definitely poses a more serious threat. If those four things were reverted, I'd consider tank run pretty much perfect. |
P.S. Thank you so much for reading all of our suggestions and caring enough to ask more questions like this to get more feedback. I'm also sorry if anyone has actually been mean/angry with comments about the updates. I really wanted to make these suggestions before about the self/auto-revive and the slow water because it does change Tank Run completely and sadly, a lot of people will stop playing if it's not reverted. |
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@OoWolfenDenoO Which difficulty do you normally play in? |
I normally play on Normal for tank run. Occasionally Advanced |
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@OoWolfenDenoO Wasn't it already uncommon for people to get incapped in Normal in the first place? |
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Well, another idea would be to offer a suicide mechanic. Then at least players wouldn't get bored when they are incapped and abandoned by the mates. |
Really depends. I've played it a lot but I still get downed when I don't pay attention or goof around. |
That's a good idea |
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@Tsuey I have an idea (one that wouldn't completely separate the community in 2 and it would be fair for everyone) If you were to revert all of the updates to Tank Run (except for The Sacrifice and maybe the bile because that's a glitch that was happening), the community update team can make the "Tank Run Legacy" mutation and add all of the new updates to it (so anyone who actually wants to play with the new updates can just play the tank run legacy mutation instead). This would allow everyone who doesn't like the new updates to just be able to play the regular Tank Run mutation WITH the sacrifice finally being fixed and it would also allow anyone who wants to play Tank Run with the new updates to be able to play the "Tank Run Legacy" mutation. This would honestly be the best move because a lot more people don't want most of the new updates (except for The Sacrifice), and even the people who did like them can still play with them on the tank run legacy mutation. |
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@MrGuides How wouldn't that literally split the community in two? Also, it could be viewed that creating an extra official "legacy version" would be endorsing the old community. |
Would love to hear back! Also please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on anything. EDIT: I also wanted to add, but forgot when I was writing everything, that I feel like a suicide mechanic would not be as intrusive like adding some of the other potential features discussed and would allow for people that cannot realistically be revived to die. I also think that the "come and get me" door revive system could maybe be tweaked to increase spawn rate or something to compensate for it. However, I totally understand criticism of this and would love to hear what others think on this. |
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@alexiscoutinho The reason I say it won't completely be splitting the community is because there is way more people that want the old tank run (aside from The Sacrifice fix) than there are people who want the new updates in Tank run. They could name the new mutation anything else other than legacy lmao, I just think that would be a better fix than completely changing Tank Run all randomly. |
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@MrGuides Well, we can't really be sure if "there is way more people that want the old tank run" simply because it's too early and because the dislikers are usually much more vocal. Besides, the very casual players who may have enjoyed the new features might not even know about the community forums, discussions, github, etc. ;) |
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@alexiscoutinho Honestly, there is a lot of people who commented on the steam news section for the tank run side of the update and there was almost nobody that actually liked the auto/self-revive or getting rid of slow water (which is why I mentioned making a new mutation that adds those features for anyone who would actually want it). Plus, nobody really ever talked about any "problems" or fixes/updates with Tank Run before this update (and if they did, it was to fix The Sacrifice because it was unplayable due to the train car not opening because of a glitch). I have been playing this mutation since just about the beginning, so I definitely know that more people will want the old version (no offense at all, I just know because I have gotten the opportunity to play with a lot of the players and even become friends with some of them and I know most of them like/love the challenge of having to go and save others and having to strategize reviving or getting through the water because it was slow). The only update that anyone ever wanted for Tank Run was The Sacrifice (and we finally got it and that's amazing) but no one really asked/expected Tank Run to completely change with it being fixed. I don't want people to argue over who wants the old/new version of Tank Run or even the updates at all. I just wanted to suggest and point out that a lot of people really don't want the self-revive or the non-slow water because it changes Tank Run completely. |
While this is totally true, as someone who read all the TLS feedback I could get my eyes on, the Tank Run reaction is extremely unique. With TLS we got a lot of non-constructive hate on things we didn't even change, which was also completely justified since we changed too much at once and our circulation of changelogs was very ineffective. Absolutely all of the Tank Run feedback has been articulated in a constructive, apologetic way, which makes this situation an unusual outlier -- Valve is open to imminently accepting a correction, after a decision is made, which might take until next week at worst. |
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@Tsuey I completely agree with the unique part (since Tank Run gets a lot more support/defense/love than the TLS update in general which does suck because that whole project was still cool, and I am genuinely glad it happened because it got me to switch to pc l4d2 and that's the whole reason I met all my amazing friends and the reason I play tank run). I also understand that you and the team were just trying to make a big update to change things and make people happier because l4d2 got a pretty big patch/update and the fact that you didn't know at the time how much/many people liked tank run the way it was and how big the tank run community really is. I honestly don't mind how long it would take for the update to be made (I'm just so glad that you and the community update team altogether is completely understanding and really listens to the community and how they feel about updates). Thank you again for listening to all of us and being really caring about how we shared our opinions about the updates :) I hope you have an amazing day/night. |
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Feel free to reach out to Rayman or myself on Discord if you'd like an invite to a small group chat for discussing Tank Run. To quote Rayman from that group chat, which pretty much covers everything aside from testing the updated VPK:
The team met for an hour this morning on this topic and we felt it best to not over-complicate / over-engineer a solution that could risk an unknowable number of follow-up patches. This issue will remain open indefinitely so we can continue collecting feedback. Ideally, we'd push for getting this patch in early next week. |
Tsuey
changed the title
Great! 🙂 |
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A problem with the suicide mechanic is that, depending on how it's implemented, we would see a lot of people accidentally killing themselves. |
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@MrGuides and others: would you be ok with keeping the fast water movement in Easy difficulty to ensure that players could beat a water filled map (not just official) if they get really stuck on it? |
On easy mode, tank's health is lower. Not sure if water slow down would be necessary |
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@alexiscoutinho I feel like it would be useless since people would just be able to use the tanks hits to boost across the water since they won't have to worry about health as much on easy or normal. On the self-revive thing though, I could see Rayman (or someone else) making an add-on that adds self/auto-revive so that way if anyone wanted to play tank run with it because they either like it or they want to use it to practice, they can. Truly I just feel like the non-slow water and auto/self-revive should be removed from tank run because it really does change the mutation itself and plus most (or even all) of the people that play tank run don't like them and they feel like it makes tank run too easy and gets rid of the challenge/fun. |
I doubt anyone on easy would even think about using tank boosts to their advantage. Besides, it's much more likely for the boosts to work against them, either by being thrown backwards or to close corners. Thus I disagree with that point. Also, I'm not talking about Normal [I get what you meant now], that could have a water slowdown revert like the higher difficulties. |
Killing one Easy tank surely would be trivial in general, but what if there are multiple? What if the team is too noob to bother killing all tanks? What if the map has a very nasty water layout that makes it hard for more than one player to shoot the tanks at once and it's much easier for them to catch up (by climbing walls, for example)? Finally, what about cursed finales with a lot of water like Questionable Ethics? It might not be that trivial to kill 2 tanks in those conditions fast enough before the other pair spawns. And, imo, easy difficulty should be very easy for all mutations. |
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@alexiscoutinho It would just be really unrealistic to have non-slow water and plus there is a lot of possible adrenaline spawns on the passing, swamp fever, and hard rain (the 3 official campaigns that have the most water in them). I only said normal because you take the same amount of damage from hits by tanks on easy and normal lmao. |
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Potentially the final Tank Run revision for Monday, not including a much longer-term re-assessment for which we'll continue collecting feedback for:
We do not expect any further patches after this. Erring on the extreme side of caution, assume another patch won't be for several years. |
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I'm a bit late for the discussion, but I want to thank the developers for listening to the feedback and actually trying to figure out a solution that might be appropriate for both expert and casual players. My take on this situation is that Tank Run is the most adrenaline-packed of all hard mutations in Left 4 Dead 2, and that is why 'insta-down' difficulty attracts experienced players with very good skills. It feels like a fast paced Dark Souls type of game inside Left 4 Dead 2. I personally have hundreds of hours on tankrun expert difficulty, and I can confirm that A LOT of work was put into deriving strategies to pass certain hard campaigns. For example, on expert in C6M2 (passing, underground), it is highly desirable to have two adrenalines to go through the water part of the finale, and it is required to pass the second adrenaline to the person who will use it first so one player will have two speed boosts and can make it to the end. And this is assuming the idle glitch (an actual mainsteam technique) will not be used. In C2M2 (dark carnival, fairgrounds), it is required to collect multiple pipes, so it is possible to go through 'tunnels of love' in C2M3. It is requested to precisely time tank spawn in C5M3 (parish, cemetery) so you can pass the sewerage on adrenaline in less than 20 seconds. This is why even disabling water slowdown will significantly affect the perception of certain maps on expert difficulty. I don't have a solution in mind, but I think there are other then auto-revive methods for making normal difficulty more friendly for casual players while not forcing them to kill tanks. For example, increased spawn distance, spawn time and slightly decreased chasing speed. Or reduced effects from hits (for example, tanks may not throw away players with their hits, but this will be odd because of cars). Ideally, we need to invite more casual players into the discussion. I agree with most of @MrGuides points. The suicide mechanic will definitely be abused to decrease survivor respawn time. It will make the game a bit easier on expert, roughly about 2-8%, depending on the map, inventory and playstyle. That being said, yet again, thank you for your hard work and participation in the discussion. Besides this issue, most of the fixes and changes in recent years have been awesome. I'm sorry for the long read and probably bad timing. |
Timing is fine, as long as you see nothing wrong with the above Tank Run revision, which has been sent to Valve. Also this issue will stay open and pinned, as we appreciate the incredible amount of quality feedback for what now feels more like a base mode like Scavenge than just a Mutation. |
Taking into consideration how popular Tank Run is as a gamemode, shouldn't it be added to the Main Menu? Modes like Scavenge where added to the Main Menu because of how popular they were back in the day, i think that the same should happen to Tank Run! Would probably bring even more people to the gamemode if that was the case. |
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If it's more popular than Versus Survival I see a case. |
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It's definitely more popular/active than versus survival (and tank run is the most active mutation out of all 30+) |
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I've been checking that ever so oftenly and every time i checked it had more matches goinf on than both the Scavenge and Survival Versus combined lmao |
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One thing that can be quite annoying is the long time you need to wait in the saferoom when everyone else is dead except for you... I kinda wish that survivor_incap_decay_rate was increase to 6 seconds(currently 3) in this gamemode since Tanks will mostly ignore incapped players. That would mean that it would take a average of 50 seconds for a incapped player to die instead of almost 2 minutes! Also i have a question, does the Explosive Ammo have any special effect on the Tank on this gamemode? Bile and Pipe Bomb were changed accordingly to make them valuable but Explosive Rounds seem to have no benefit whatsoever! If that's the case then those should be replaced with Incendiary Ammo in the gamemode. |
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I made a mod to experiment with the idea of Tank Run being in the Main Menu: It's a experiment so the Icon is just a upscaled version of a already existing in-game image and the title and description aren't translated to other languages(The translation files don't include translation for the Title, Description and other things of it, so i couldn't use them... Some other mutations have this problem as well). |
The decay rate should only be increased while all alive survivors are inside the end safe room, which is possible. Otherwise it would break the balance.
Doesn't explosive ammo deal more damage by default? |
That would definitely be a much better solution! The long waits get really tedious.
I'm not sure that's why i'm asking. From what i know it simply has AOE Damage and stumbles the SI, but the Tank is immune to stumble from those bullets and i don't think that AOE makes that much difference here taking into consideration that most of the time you will have Laser Sights in your weapons and that Tanks will oftenly not be close enough to each other for it to cause damage to multiple of them... I think that if those where replaced with Incendiary Ammo it would be much more benefitial overall. |
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Ewww, it actually does the same amount of damage. Indeed pretty useless. Thanks for the notice. I think buffing its damage would be more interesting though. |
In relation to damage the Incendiary Ammo already exceeds in that regard on Tank Run since Tanks die much faster to Fire, so i don't really see much purpose on just increasing the amount of damage of Explosive Ammo when Incediary Ammo already does a much better job at that. |
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However Incediary Ammo is better used sparingly, preferably shooting a single bullet at a Tank and switching to the Magnum to save as much of them as possible. Explosive Ammo causing more damage would be the kind that you spend more since it's effect would be instant, but then there are some questions to be answered: How much damage it would cause? Will the amount of damage vary depending on weapon or will it be the same regardless? Is the damage increase meaningful enough to be easily identifyable by the players? |
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I suggested 20% boost in another issue across all game modes. Maybe in Tank Run it could be even more given that all other benefits of the explosive ammo are useless. |
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I think that a alternative to the damage increase could be that it instead reduces the speed of Tanks similarly to how Mounted Guns do! While the Tank is too bulky to be stumbled by mere Frag Rounds it being slowed down would make sense and could be really benefitial in though spots like sections that you need to move in water or help support friends from far away that are in a though spot witha Tank. This way the Fire Bullets would be responsible for Damage Over Time that are better used sparingly, while Frag Rounds would be a Debuffer that's more efficient if used continuosly. |
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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3080878542 Me and Alexis made a mod that includes multiple experimental changes to Tank Run: •Explosive Ammo slows down Tanks for a brief period of time. •Tanks move a bit slower on water to make water levels in general more enjoyable and reward smart usage of water to your advantage. •Tanks now take a bit longer to attack again after hitting a survivor so you don't get cornered as easily. •Survivors will stand up quicker after being revived by a defibrillator so they actually have a chance to react. •Church Guy will now become a Tank that has much less health then others, meant to be a neat easter egg. •Pressing the second bridge button in the Second Chapter of The Passing will make Tanks take longer to spawn so the final section of the level isn't as frustrating or extremely rely in Adrenaline RNG. •Hard Rain Finale will now only last 8 minutes to compensate for the small holdout spot surrounded by water and reduced visibility and audio feedback caused by the storm. This is just like the original Finale. Please give feedback about all those changes, will be really helpful |
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A new version of the Addon with Experimental Changes has been released: •Chapter tweaks are now done via map-specific scripts. •Improved Tank model customization for maps. •Players no longer need to wait for incapped Survivors in order to progress at areas like elevators. •Restored The Passing 2 respawn interval of 20 seconds after starting the alarm. •Made the Train Car Tank more special by making his model unique in the chapter and giving him 25% more health. •Made the Train Car and Church Guy Tanks force spawn even when the Tank cap is filled. •Increased respawn interval of Double Tanks in the Hard Rain finale to 50 seconds. |
Suggestion
If anybody from "The Last Stand Community Update Team" is seeing/reading this, please take this comment/suggestion into consideration.
Two of the Tank Run updates (from August 22nd) will surely be the ones to ruin the Tank Run community and even the mutation overall (because they just suck and make Tank Run completely different). I'm talking about the auto-revive specifically. This just makes the game mode WAY too easy and it gets rid of a bunch of strategies along with having fun trying to revive and maybe playing a fun game of passing an item to others. This also takes away the challenge that tank run had and the spark and the reason people even played tank run in the first place.
I love Tank Run so much and it's the only reason I even play l4d2 anymore (and I'm sure that's the same for quite a bit of other people as well). I know at least some of the people who worked on this update (specifically Rayman cause I'm pretty sure he does the tank run updates because he made the mutation lmao) care about this game still (so if you're one of those people, PLEASE consider getting rid of the self-revive on tank run AND bring back the slowness in water).
P.S. I know that this could be the most useless comment ever, but I can promise that I'm not the only one that is thinking this way and I'm dead serious that this could really be the fall of the Tank Run community if you don't revert the 2 changes I talked about above (the auto-revive and the slow water). Thank you :)
(btw I'm very appreciative for the update (especially The Sacrifice being fixed!) and the fact that the community update team is still trying to make more updates, but the auto-revive and the non-slow water definitely changes Tank Run and it makes the mutation completely different from what it used to be).
One last thing, I would also suggest reverting the car alarm update because of trolls being an issue (but this one is not a huge concern lmao).
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