*Who* thought this was a Good Idea™?? Same people who gave us the Lattice, forcing us into hamburger-hill grind fights and eliminating regional strategy in favor of local snoozer-tactics??? 2017: "Oooh, I have an idea, let's change the mechanics, restricting the s**t out of where people can usefully go, and funnel them into contrived fights!! That'll be great!!" - 2020: "These concentrated fights - those have to go. " "What about the OD spam? Should we make that even easier?" "No, everyone already has 2 or 3 OS's, and they toss them around like grenades now, and don't even care about the TK's." "I have an idea!! How about a random, magical 'storm' that follows the biggest (read: most fun) fights around, and completely ruins them!! That'll spread people out!" "Woo, the playerbase will love it!!" A clue for you, from some of us who actually design software in the real world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_group Why don't you devs get off of Reddit a bit, and check out your official forums once in a while, and maybe listen to some of the comments on some of these tragic 'innovations'.
Yeah it's just stupid. They are trying to kill fights, when the whole point of the game was to generate them. It's ridiculous, and explains why most our players left. They should take input from gamers, devs or whatever decent sample of the playerbase actually understands what the game needs as is able to deliver, and can objectively steer DBG to accomplish objectives in-line with the game.
Bump for the storm hate. While I had personally advocated for severe weather patterns to go through, I never intended for them to directly attack players as a neutral-hostile thing. I would have loved for extreme weather to shake up the dynamics, but only in ways that changed fights, not killed them. There comes a point where the fight is too think to pull off any fancy maneuvers, and it becomes a grind fest. More than anything, any severe weather I might have designed would have mostly reduced visibility to create a chance for players in densely populated areas to still pull off some tricks. Maybe a bit of "electrical storm" knocking out HUD things like motion spots on the mini map to once again give players a chance to surprise the enemy with maneuvers.
I like the weather idea in itself. I even like the idea of it affecting battle and players. But having it mow down players and vehicles is just silly. At that point why not just skip the fancy graphics and have the rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail flying through the air decapitating folks. It's equally as silly but at least it would be funny.
This is some event thingy that hopefully will soon be gone. What is probably not going to change is the mind from whence it spawned. Pity that resources keep on getting wasted after dumb ideas instead of making the game faster and fun.
Stupid Storm still exists and not only is the persistent and burst damage toxic, it also causes lag. Ever since the Dx update, on my potato, I could not play any fight larger than 24v24 (before it could do even 250 players in one hex). In a storm I cannot even do that. I primarily blame the Dx update for ruining the game for me, but the storm is just awful.
Reporting in. I only have and want a 1mb up/down per second unlimited 4g/LTE internet connection. When I want to play online I connect my smartphone to my PC via USB and enable USB tethering. All online games work fine, also PS2 for one exception, that is when I'm on Esamir in a 48/48+ fight and the storm decides to come over to the party. My ping is at around 50-60 and server latency a bit higher at around 60-70, varies a bit troughout the day, I guess depending on how many people use their smartphone in my celltower range, but I never exceed above 100 ping normally. If I'm inside the storm during a bigger fight my server latency cranks up to 10.000 and beyond and increasing even further, personal ping stays the same. If I don't redeploy to anywhere else fast enough, I get trapped inside this storm, as clicking anything on the map doesn't give any response the longer I wait it out, up until I get kicked for inactivity. Not that I like to fight inside the storm anyways. There must be others with the same issue. Literally game breaking.
