What are we going

[Wiley]

I have. A lot of times.

My own experience:

As long as I haven't been targeted by this very CV before, it did work more or less the way FLS and Hitech had stated: If some poor guy was closer to the CV than me, I wasn't attacked by puffy. Unless I was going really close, then it didn't matter - probably due to the bug HT mentioned. Sometimes, at larger battles, I was able to get comparatively close to the CV  before ack opened fire at me.
But once I had been fired at, the puffy ack was stuck on me. From that point on distance to the CV didn't matter (much?). Instant puffy when going over 3k, regardless of mine or any other player's distance.

I'll bear that in mind.  Thanks for the info lusche.

Wiley.

[Kingpin]

G load and distance do make a difference.

How does G-load make a difference if you happen to be unloaded (between jinks) when it calculates?

People complain that maneuvering fighters are hit instantly and bombers flying level aren't hit. Consider that what  they're really saying, because the puffy ack is the same in both cases, is that they get hit too often but the enemy doesn't get hit often enough.  

“People” might say that, but that was not MY point.  You added the word "instantly" into the argument, which I never once said.  It sounds a bit like you are dismissing my point by putting other people's words in my mouth.

What I did say, and you said as well, is that maneuvering (changing course and/or altitude) isn't a factor in ack hit probability.  I believe it should be, don’t you?

It seems maneuvering could be added to the current ack system without necessarily overhauling it.  "Maneuvering" would simply be resolved by comparing the target’s course and altitude change since the ack box was last calculated.  The more the maneuvering factors change, the bigger the ack box gets (just like speed and distance now).  The less the factors change, the smaller the ack box gets each time (perhaps halve it’s size each time).  This would be far more realistic, as it would represent a firing solution becoming better if you are flying a predictable course.  

<S>

[Lusche]

Lusche, who is the guy in your avatar?

Music for happy snails: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z4m4lnjxkY

[Wiley]

Music for happy snails: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z4m4lnjxkY

 

...I'm... going to go with, 'It must be a European thing.'

 

Wiley.

[Vinkman]

Music for happy snails: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z4m4lnjxkY

 That is classic. I've seen better lipsinking in Godzilla, Mothra, and Enter the Dragon.

[MajWoody]

I like the lyrics. 

[The Fugitive]

I like the lyrics. 

but I think they are in German, I know its very hard to sing along to.   

[TheRapier]

I think we have a perfect illustration as to why the progress in improving the game is so mind numbingly glacial. This group is as amazingly effective as the American Congress in deciding things and making improvement .

Well done everyone! I think we should all go off and have a few drinks in celebration.

As a parting shot, I'm going to suggest that the ONLY thing that matters in the long run really is game play and whether people find it fun to play. Trying to make it exactly "like the war" is a stupid goal. War is NOT FUN. This is why people avoid it.

Playing at war can be fun, the object is to maintain enough of the illusion to give it immediacy and flavor without getting bogged down in the minutiae. The death of every simulation over the past 20 years has been to get that line messed up and unclear, from the pressure of grognards to make it more and more "realistic" in an effort to satisfy their fantasies, and they end up making simulations that are built on the issue of systems management and not play. In the end, "fun" should be the deciding factor.   

[FLS]

How does G-load make a difference if you happen to be unloaded (between jinks) when it calculates?

“People” might say that, but that was not MY point.  You added the word "instantly" into the argument, which I never once said.  It sounds a bit like you are dismissing my point by putting other people's words in my mouth.

What I did say, and you said as well, is that maneuvering (changing course and/or altitude) isn't a factor in ack hit probability.  I believe it should be, don’t you?

It seems maneuvering could be added to the current ack system without necessarily overhauling it.  "Maneuvering" would simply be resolved by comparing the target’s course and altitude change since the ack box was last calculated.  The more the maneuvering factors change, the bigger the ack box gets (just like speed and distance now).  The less the factors change, the smaller the ack box gets each time (perhaps halve it’s size each time).  This would be far more realistic, as it would represent a firing solution becoming better if you are flying a predictable course.  

<S>

I said "people" so it would be clear that I didn't think it was you saying it. I guess that didn't work.   People trying to keep the CV floating think that the puffy ack should be more effective. People flying in a furball near the CV think the ack should be less effective. So the anecdotal evidence is that the puffy ack is somewhere between too effective and not effective enough.

I expect that unloading G makes the box smaller but I don't know what the limits are. Maneuvering does make the box bigger when maneuvering increases G. If you look at how far the ack is usually hitting from the targeted aircraft you may see why I don't think maneuvering needs to be considered more than it already is. You aren't shooting birds with a .22. You are shooting a shotgun. Precise tracking is not what's getting hits, it's the pellet distribution.

Wiley if you do your experiment in the TA and film it you'll be able to count the number of times puffy ack fires on you and the number of times you get hit without having to keep restarting. Wait until you're watching the film to count.  

[hitech]

So correct me if I'm wrong, but did it not fire at you above 3k when there was an ally between you and the task group that was above?  If that's the case, did HiTech already fix the issue he said there was? 

I don't know what to believe because I have been well above 3k in a horde of allies over a task group before and got bombarded by puffy ack regardless of my location relative to my allies.  HiTech's analysis of the distance bug would not be consistent with this observation I, along with many others, have seen consistently.

It is fixed for our next patch, but all the code is client based, hence the tests are with out the fix.

Hitech

[Wiley]

I think we have a perfect illustration as to why the progress in improving the game is so mind numbingly glacial. This group is as amazingly effective as the American Congress in deciding things and making improvement .

Bah.  A bunch of players yammering on the forum doesn't have any impact on what gets changed when in the game.  The only thing that has meaning is what the company wants to do.

Hitech's already posted in this thread that he's not willing to make the change so it does a LOS check on the target.  To me that indicates he's comfortable with how the puffy works in game.

My interest in this thread and this part of the game isn't so much to get it changed, I'm more interested in how it works now.  There's stuff I think I've seen that doesn't jibe with how Hitech says it should work, and that interests me.  The people who say it works different have said repeatedly in this thread that it's easy to do and consistent, yet nobody's got video.  I don't really care what I find, I just want to find out the truth.

FLS- I was contemplating the TA, but the problem is you're not going to get the number of things going on you get in a MA setup.  The stuff people are claiming happens, happens in the MA.  I'm thinking a decent method would be to try to find a good knock down drag-out carrier battle with a large horde and go among the gorillas to observe and record.

Wiley.

[FLS]

FLS- I was contemplating the TA, but the problem is you're not going to get the number of things going on you get in a MA setup.  The stuff people are claiming happens, happens in the MA.  I'm thinking a decent method would be to try to find a good knock down drag-out carrier battle with a large horde and go among the gorillas to observe and record.

Wiley.

The advantage to the TA is that you can get enough data to get an idea of the hit probability without the data being skewed from a small sample size. If you want to look at the possibility that a larger number of players affects which one is targeted then the MA is probably easier but you know you never find the fight you log on looking for.   

[Wiley]

The advantage to the TA is that you can get enough data to get an idea of the hit probability without the data being skewed from a small sample size. If you want to look at the possibility that a larger number of players affects which one is targeted then the MA is probably easier but you know you never find the fight you log on looking for.   

The hit probability stuff isn't really what I'm after, I'm more interested in seeing who it's targeting.  Assessing the hit probability experimentally would take a pretty big sample size.  If it's a relatively consistent 1 hit wonder under certain circumstances, that's interesting.  In the TA if it does no damage that won't be apparent though.

What I'm going to be looking for is puffy targeting planes that aren't the closest to the CV, whatever form that takes.

Wiley.

[FLS]

The hit probability stuff isn't really what I'm after, I'm more interested in seeing who it's targeting.  Assessing the hit probability experimentally would take a pretty big sample size.  If it's a relatively consistent 1 hit wonder under certain circumstances, that's interesting.  In the TA if it does no damage that won't be apparent though.

What I'm going to be looking for is puffy targeting planes that aren't the closest to the CV, whatever form that takes.

Wiley.

You still see holes in the TA so you can get an idea of what the damage would be but I understand why you would prefer the MA. When looking at targeting of other aircraft keep in mind that the positions are less accurate compared to their front ends when they are further away from you and as you know the position of the CV in the central square can affect the ack coverage distance.

[TheRapier]

Wiley, do you see a lot of other sources of regular customer feedback for HTC? Just wondering cause I don't.

Of course its well known in the game industry that trying to pull meaningful and usable feedback out of a forum is problematic. Forums can flag problems in a gross way, just by what gets a lot of posts. They just aren't real useful because you run the very real risk of building a product for just the people who frequent the forum, which is sort of path to going over the edge. The actual denizens of a forum are just the tip of one iceberg of users. There are whole sets of users that wouldn't get near a forum for good reasons. Without considering those users you build the wrong thing and you lose them.   

I just don't think that there is access other possible avenues like surveys and focus groups which might result in better feedback. So what happens here I guarantee has an effect. The problem for them is to sort it out into anything they can actually do.