Continuing the discussion from Alpha test feedback May 24, 2014:
Continuing the discussion from MMORPG.com livestream feedback May 26, 2014:
Join us at www.ageofascent.com for a 30 min playtest Saturday, May 31, 2014 at 8pm UTC, 3pm Central US, 4pm East US, 9pm UK
Release notes to follow…
Release notes so far:
Turbo feedback effect? Does that mean there will be more visual queues when players hit that boost?
At any rate I’m really excited.
Yes though still tweaking it… 
Hey guys,
So tonight’s game was fun though quite unbalanced, I think that the blue team had a bit more recurrent players though Stormcrow was a nail in our back for the entire game xD
Still issues to escape but I think the frustrating part is not so much being able to escape or not but to be able to know where the guy shooting at you is. I realized that I wasn’t able to manoeuver correctly because I didn’t know in which direction to go. Maybe that’s something to think about, try to add a new indicator somewhere in the interface to locate more rapidly where is the shooter(s).
Also I had a bug at some point when I died and it was writtent “You have been killed by Konduur” 
Anyway it was fun and the turbo effect is pretty fun 
Last comment: you should have a language filter for the player names, names like “fuck”, “anal” or “nigger” aren’t really necessary
Yeah this really was a fun session. The turbo effect is nice. I agree with Konduur about being able to know where you are getting hit from. I can never tell where it is coming from. In the off chance I will turn around and find them, it is to late. Some indicator would be grand, otherwise it is hard to tell which way to juke. I made the wrong choice nine times out of ten.
Then again because of this if I got bead on someone, with no others shooting at me… They were very hard pressed to get me off for the same reason. Catch 22.
GM_Thundercat, I am getting an error page when looking at a players Overview page.
http://player.ageofascent.com/Player/Overview/Practical%20Chrome
Same for me and Erran 
Working on it! TC will let you know when fixed.
OK, should be fixed now - thanks for your patience.
It works now though I still see all my kills from -unknown-, but at least I have access again thx!
And nicely played tonight Storm! Me and Erran were swearing your name all evening xD
Heheh… I was trying to prop up the honour of the red team; sadly failing to do so!
You two (and Psycho Romeo, plus Practical Chrome) were hard cases! Also, wheniaminspace was a new entrant on the “wow, there are some good players out there” front…
A lot of fun, even when getting completely hosed! Many thanks.
Many thanks to you guys for creating the game ^^
Definitely a lot of fun, and Ozy was also driving us crazy, a pretty good pilot!
I didn’t actually get in to shoot something, but I wanted to check if controls were the same as before. And they were. How about physics? You have a speed dial, as if it was a racing car, and you turn at constant speed as if it was an airplane. What, would you argue, limits the speed in space? No friction, and if you apply an accelerating force you would keep going faster! It would feel awkward at first, since you would swish past and then have to wait while accelerating in the other direction before you got used to it.
And turning? I have a feeling that “forward” is always in the direction of the movement vector? How about turning fast and keep accelerating in the direction you are facing? Or have another player steer. But most important, in space you do not continue with constant speed, turning “as fast as you can” - you would turn facing direction fast, but keep moving at a constant velocity vector.
Please study Newtonian physics, and make the acceleration realistic!
It looks good, but it doesn’t feel like a space battle would.
So it appears GM Stormcrow learned the anti-romeo maneuver outlined a few weeks ago. Argh.
I also noticed the top 9 players on each team element wasn’t working for me at all. It was blank.
I really slipped up today. I think I contributed the three of the team’s first seven deaths. Will verify that when match stats come up. I tried to take a video but it didn’t record properly :\
Actually now that I look at my score I’m almost certain I died more than 8 times… is that really true? I was dominated pretty hard by ubluntu and I think GM Stormcrow beat the crap out of me too.
I noticed that I had a lot of trouble controlling my speed. I would throw the mousewheel down to come to stop while turning, but I would notice my speed only dropped to 230 or something. I threw it down again and it didn’t change. I’d throw it down a third time and it would drop to zero. I would say that something was up with my mousewheel, but I noticed the same kind of unresponsiveness with my booster as well. Speaking of booster, I do like the effect.
I also noticed that you guys started blocking our player names to hide our identities. I don’t think I died a single time when you guys did that, in fact I hardly got shot at at all. You know what that means? Means red team is jerks
I also noticed that the playing player base fluctuated to a huge degree, very suddenly. Are there multiple servers to play on and did they get combined at one point or something? Is there a huge Age of Ascent convention happening out there and all the players just logged on at the same time? Did you guys merge the players from the other planes of existence into one playtest server? The world may never know.
While I agree with Konduurr’s first point regarding not being able to escape, I am personally finding the second element regarding not being able to figure out who’s shooting you not as frustrating as they do.
I noticed that the further away your target is, the easier it is to hit them. I brought it up in the Tuesday session and the score is that the plasma weapons we currently have used to be laser weapons, and have had their graphics changed since. When it’s put that way, I feel that the whole shooting dynamic we’re facing is a little more justified, but I personally never want to come across something that is impossible to defend against. One way I feel this is being targeted at long range. The only option is to close range and try to out turn them, while praying you don’t take too many hits to do so. Another way I feel this is when people just stop dead and I have to fly circles around them trying to confuse them long enough to get a shot. I’m looking at you GM Stormcrow
I think both of these really powerful elements require too little opportunity and skill to pull off effectively. I don’t know the exact situation because I don’t play the game, but I feel they would be viewed the same way that [generic console fps] views cheap grenade launchers. However, I have also noticed that the more I am exposed to this the better I get at dealing with it, so it may just be emergent behavior that needs time to be worked into the system.
As for the second point regarding figuring out who is shooting you, I feel that it’s rather appropriate that if you are shot at you should not be told who or where exactly. I think it’s one thing to indicate direction subtly, say with sound or an HUD element (though I like sound better). But I think that were it to be made too obvious, it would begin to diminish the effort and the skill of the shooter to be attacking from an obscure direction. I know that when I choose a target I make special note of their behavior (though at this point just knowing their name is enough) before I begin firing. I know that some people like to boost and arc away and others like to try start doing rolls and evasive maneuvers (and some just ignore it), and I can modify my approach accordingly (though usually it just comes down to how I fast I fly in).
That being said, I think things change significantly when things like flight mechanics and weapon types change.
Now that the scores are up, I see that I did in fact contribute two or three deaths in the first five minutes. And jeez, that guy whenamiatinspace has a pretty ridiculous score, as GM Stormcrow said.
I’m no astrophysicist (though I’m pretty sure they have one on their dev team) but wouldn’t you only be able to go as fast as your accelerating force? After that point, wouldn’t the particles from your accelerating force leave the thruster at the rate that you were traveling, and not have anything to push against therefore not move the ship at all? I assume the situation would be similar to a propeller plane that is 500m/s worth of thrust (analogically the space ship’s thrust speed) in a headwind that is blowing at 500 m/s (analogically the space ship’s current speed). Assuming the plane didn’t fall out of the sky, wouldn’t it stay completely still as far as the earth is concerned?
And at any rate there was a video or something where they talked about the space physics, or many it was a past play test where I had an insightful discussion on the matter.
Lastly, regarding the scoreboard, I can’t see how many assists I have anymore
But I had lots of fun today. See you all next week.
Hi Nesse,
I talked at some length about Newtonian physics representations and why we have to have upper limits to preserve the integrity of the game environment in this post here:
Out resident Physicist, Stew, also talks about our treatment of relativistic effects in this video, if you’re interested.
Best,
SC
Definitely, a number of items on the the to-do list have shuffled in priority.
I was debugging it when it all went a bit crazy; which caused the knock on to the names getting lost - its one thing changing the engine on a slow moving car - and another for that car to enter a race at the same time! Was pleased it failed gracefully, and then came back, will tick that off my testing list 
The lost names caused these errors as I wasn’t catering for that eventuality, and they are now shown as unknown.
We had 287 players today, however a lot of them did very badly; we are thinking of changing mouse controls to be easier for players to pick up immediately and would appreciate your feedback:
http://forum.ageofascent.com/t/controls-change/181
As mentioned in an earlier post, I can’t use the keyboard controls because of my particular layout so I’m playing with the mouse. I’ve had a pretty good experience so far, I think for most of the piloting it’s better because it offers a nice flexibility in the controls. The downsides are when you need to turn around 360° then you need to re-position your mouse a couple times instead of staying pressed on the keyboard key. Also, in full screen in Chrome when the mouse goes up I have the message saying I’m in full screen. It’s not a major problem but annoying ^^
The ideal would be to have the Xbox 360 controller available but you’ve already told us it would come in the future so I’m just mentioning it.
I think for first-timers the mouse is quite good.
Hey - in discussion about the physics - we’re using the idea of an Alcubierre drive as our main form of both energy harvesting but also propulsion. We have adopted the idea that our max speed is really a function of being able to shape a spacetime envelope without crushing your ship and then using that envelope to move you across the local spacetime brane.
Two factors are at work here - the energy needed to create and then the energy needed maintain the slanted gravitational gradient without turning your ship into a very tiny piece of ultra dense material with really bad navigational capacity.
I’ve not been in the last couple of play tests - but I will be there soon!
GM Stew