Visibility:

The visibility isn't acceptable at the moment, at least on manorhouse as it is right now. I realize that a lot of the stuff that annoys me, e.g. blurriness at long distances, the lighting etc. are all due to the currently high settings, however the color palette used on manorhouse is a pretty poor choice as well. The colors of the uniforms should never be reused extensively in the design of the map, small contrasts between non moving objects are very hard to detect in the peripheral vision, manorhouse is a pretty good example of how not to do it. The map's base colors are green and gray, even inside the main building the wallpaper matches the color of the allies fairly well. In the example below there is a person peeking with his full upper body to the right of the well at the gate, even in the screenshot it's almost impossible to see him. Being colorblind this effect is magnified even more, i run into situations like this one every other minute. I understand that good visibility is hard to combine with a WW2 setting since the uniforms were obviously made to reduce visibility in the environments this game is set in, i don't expect to see a neon green fullbright keel in this game, a simple and very effective way to deal with this issue would be to display the outlines around the enemy players you see when you die permanently (but obviously not through walls), that would allow you to keep the historical artstyle and still offer visuals which are fit for a competitive game.

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Other than that i'm happy to see that the muzzleflashes have been greatly reduced in intensity, even though i'd prefer to be able to turn them off completely they are now subtle enough to not be annoying and not obstruct my view.



Movement:

The movement speed i'd say is in a good place, however the strafing and the speed decay on landing on mantling need some further adjustment. The transition from strafing on the ground to strafing in the air is still quite rough, with there being little acceleration on the ground and too much acceleration in the air. Also, there is still a massive penalty when changing direction after landing a jump or mantling, it pretty much feels like being stuck in mud for a solid second. I've illustrated the differences to CoD4 movement in this video on my last feedback thread.


I also would like to urge you to give us better tools to evaluate the game's mechanics, without a speedmeter i can tell that there is something wrong with the movement, but it's hard to pinpoint where it goes wrong and how it needs to be adjusted to be right. I don't think you can really discuss things like movement speed in depth if you can't put it into context properly.

Another thing that needs changing is the mantling mechanic, the icon indicating that mantling is possible often doesn't show up, the mantling is often jittery and most importantly the places you are able to mantle aren't consistent. For example you can't mantle the roughly 40cm tall ledge on the side roof of the center building by the trenches, but you can mantle the fence, which is roughly 2m tall, next to the barn. And even places where you definitely are capable of mantling, like the car in front of barn, are sometimes weirdly specific about the place where you can actually mantle, which leads to people spamming jump to get up. I suppose this is unintended behavior anyways, but i thought it's worth bringing up.



Weapons:

KAR98:

The KAR98 remains the strongest weapon in the game, especially with the changes made to the leaning mechanic. This probably deserves a thread on its own, i am not sure why people think that leaning is a good mechanic, it basically just enables people to headglitch any corner they want. I don't think particularly many people are fond of headglitching, it certainly doesn't make rifle players any more fun to play against. The same concept applies to being able to lay prone, there really doesn't seem to be a good reason to include either one in the game. However, if there ends up being a valid reason to include leaning, the amount of the hitbox a player needs to expose to peek while leaning needs to be increased, currently you end up getting shot frequently by people exposing merely half of their head. Also the hipfire when standing is still incredibly tight, so you can just noscope people across the map fairly consistently.

Trenchgun:

The trenchgun is the second best gun currently, which is largely due to the small scale of the map, so adjusting this gun's damage i'd reserve for the release of SnD, but i do have a few complaints. The spread is fairly tight, which makes it both inconsistent in close quarters since you are more likely to miss and also allows it to one shot people who are way outside of it's intended effective range, sometimes killing people who are at full health in one shot at distances exceeding 10m. I am also not a friend of the apparently random spreadpattern, that just adds to the inconsistency of the weapon. Make one symmetric set spread pattern and balance from there, that's the only way to ensure that the weapon will behave as intended at all ranges.

This bit probably belongs into the bug section, but i don't think it's worth opening a thread for. I've experienced very brief frameratedrops when being involved in a close quarter battle with one or more opponent upon firing the shotgun. I'm not entirely sure what causes it, but i am not the only one who has experienced it and my framerate is rocksolid otherwise.

Pistols:

Pistols used to be too strong due to their one shot headshot ability, now however they are far too weak to be used effectively. Up to roughly 10m they require 3 shots to the chest, which requires a 42% (M1911) accuracy in close quarters, which is doable but in my opinion a little over the top. Beyond 10m they require 4 shots to the chest, that's a 57% accuracy on the m1911, my respects to whomever can pull that off consistently. On top of that the recoil makes the pistols pretty much impossible to spam since it's mostly bouncing from left to right and there's little to no discernible pattern to it. The weapon models when aiming are far too large, almost twice as big as the deagle in promod and the pistols' behavior when firing them is obstructive. The Luger has the latch on top, which is luckily only mildly annoying (i'd prefer any other pistol model tbh), in the case of the M1911 the weapon's barrel flinches up right towards the center of the screen, so you can't even see what you are aiming at anymore. That alone forces you to slow down your firing speed. So you end up with a pistol which has too little damage to be a slow firing high damage weapon and too much visual noise, unpredictable recoil and a too small magazine size to be spammed effectively. It's basically a novelty weapon at this point, i'd rather take my chances reloading my primary weapon than taking anyone on with that. I've discussed pistols with Linden in my previous thread




and i still think that my conclusion to give pistols a higher magazine size, changing the recoil to be heavily vertical and consistent and keeping the damage the way it is remains the best way to go.

SMGs:

The damage required to drop a player is 3 bullets at very close range, i think 2 bullets would be more adequate to solidify the role of the SMG as the fast paced class with a heavy range limitation, currently they don't pose much of a threat. The recoil is once again horizontal and random, which for an SMG luckily changes little in it's efficiency, but it is not particularly fun to deal with. The point of recoil is to add a vertical component to aim control, since tracking is mostly done on the horizontal axis in games like CoD (that's why games like Quake don't require recoil, the game already has a vertical aim component). If you make the recoil heavy on the horizontal axis you are not only getting rid of the vertical control aspect but you are also ruining the vertical control aspect since the horizontal recoil interferes with the tracking motion which already exists. Even with a consistent strongly horizontal recoil pattern you are creating a tracking motion which is almost impossible to predict since two fairly simple motions interfering with one another can easily create very chaotic patterns. With the randomness added by the recoil jumping from left to right without any set pattern that chaos gets intensified to the point where recoil control boils down to just tapfiring, i.e. avoiding the recoil rather than trying to tame it. The recoil patterns across the board should be changed to a consistent, heavily vertical one (maybe with a smooth, mild and set horizontal motion mixed in if you want it to be that fancy). Since a motion like that can be learned it would allow for far stronger recoil and instead of having recoil there just as an inconvenience there would be a skill to taming it.

/edit

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I want the SMGs and pistols to play their role in the game. SMGs are the close quarters weapons, if they were balanced properly people would be complaining about them being too strong right now because manorhouse is a very tight map and should hence be an SMG player's dream. SMGs are supposed to have a lot of damage at close range and then a sharp damage drop off, in close quarters a KAR98 player should lose a large percentage of the gunfights because that's not the KAR98's intended effective range.

I'd also appreciate it if the Thompson had 30 bullets instead of 20, 20 bullets isn't much to work with for a fast moving class. It's a bit unfair that you can afford to prefire corners with the mp40 but you can't with the thompson.

M1:

I think no weapon which isn't a bolt action rifle or a shotgun should be able to kill in one shot, so i'd appreciate it if the M1 was simply a three hit to the extremities and a 2 hit anywhere else. Being able to get a lucky kill by just hipfire spamming and getting a headshot is not a mechanic i think has a place in a competitive game. Also this small nerf can be compensated for by raising the fire rate limitation. I don't have a particularly impressive trigger finger and i still frequently manage to jam the gun by clicking too fast, it's just annoying to deal with. The gun already has a massive limitation by the small clipsize and the requirement to empty the clip before reloading, there's no need to gimp it more in that regard.

Knife:
The knife range is still too large and i dislike the quite intense motion of the camera when using the knife, i think the knife should have a very limited range, like it did in promod and preferably not have any camera motion associated with it at all.

/edit

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I still find myself quite often using the knife in situations where people chase me by just waiting for them around the corner and then charging them, it works pretty much every time. If the knife is a one hit kill it needs to have a very limited range because it requires no aim, you should have to get very close. Especially with the SMGs being as weak as they are atm it's so easy to just charge them before they can put you down.

Grenades:
When throwing grenades straight upwards they land behind the player, not sure whether that's intended and whether there are good reasons to do it that way, i certainly can't think of any.

I'd like to see weapon statistics for all weapons, they don't need to be incredibly detailed, damage values, rate of fire and drop of ranges will suffice. It's just tedious to empirically figure out the statistics of each weapon every time something gets changed and it would make assessing the weapon balance considerably easier. I have for example absolutely no clue how much damage a shotgun pellet deals, i don't like basing my opinion on hunches and estimates.



Map design

I'm not a fan of the absurd amounts of invisible walls used to block off sections which very much look like they could be walked on, the sandbags on top of the trenches are a very good example of that. Not only does it make the map a lot less intuitive to navigate, but it also allows for a lot more mistakes to slip by. For example it is still possible to strafejump from the car to the barn door because the invisible wall placed on top of it doesn't perfectly line up with the inner ledge. It's not easy to get there, since the remaining ledge is fairly small and you have to curve around it a bit, but i can usually get it within 5 tries.

The main building has a few elements i find mindboggling, why are there perfect hiding spots behind the doors in the rooms upstairs and why is there a camping spot behind the railing of the staircase? Those doors have absolutely no reason to be there and if that spot behind the railing is supposed to remain then the railing has to go. It's silly how many corners you have to check if you dare to go upstairs. I don't really understand the point of the newly added path and building behind the barn either, it doesn't really add a new route and it's basically the safest headglitching spot a rifle player could wish for.

I don't think that manorhouse has the potential to become a competitive SnD map, so i'm not even getting into that, but with a few tweaks it could become a decent TDM map.



UI

The bleeding eyes effect is not a good way to indicate health in my opinion, it's hard to distinguish differences in health and it heavily messes with visibility. Why should a player be punished twice for getting hit, he's already taking damage, there's no point in making his situation even worse. I'd much prefer a simple healthcounter.

Teammates could be a little bit more clearly distinguishable, currently the nameplates are so small they are barely noticeable. At the moment it's not that important, but when we get SnD there should be no doubt who is on which team.

The user ID tag sometimes takes very unfortunate positions, mainly the one right in the center of my screen. Making sure people stick to the NDA is important, but i'd appreciate it if the reminder to be a good boy wouldn't interfere with my ability to see what i am aiming at.



Sound

Footsteps are sometimes quite hard to hear, even though i think overall it's already in a better place than most other games.

There are a lot of noises which may add to the immersion but really add nothing of value to the game or are even to the player's detriment in a competitive environment. For example the heavy breathing noises the player makes after getting hit (this kind of ties in with the bleeding eyes) or the artillery noises in the background.

I'd also much appreciate it if i could somehow get rid of the menu music, i already associate a lot of anger with that one because it starts over every time you join a full server, which on the first alpha weekend happened quite frequently and still happens from time to time. It's like suddenly hearing your phone's alarm jingle going off. This is obviously not exactly high priority stuff.



Various

I'd like to have bodies despawn a lot quicker, i'm somewhat tired of shooting a dead body because it accidentally fell into a pose which resembles that of someone crouching or laying prone.

When you join a server and it's full the game throws you back to the front menu screen instead of the server browser, a small inconvenience.

A command like cg_brass from CoD to remove the flying bullet casings would be nice, the more clutter i can get out of my game the better.



Update right here:
Camera

On some reload animations, most notably the shotgun pump animation, the camera moves following the motion, i suppose for immersion. But it's just annoying because it's an involuntary motion and you end up trying to compensate for it in a gunfight.



Weapons

M1911:

The M1911 has a quite severe muzzleflash effect when hipfiring, that needs toning down (or just delete it).

Kar98:

I don't think the KAR98 should be able to reload without going out of scope first, getting a kill on the second shot is too easy.

Hitflinch:

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This game will have a lot of bolt action rifles, without aim punch those could easily win a fight in close quarters vs an smg or assault rifle. The damage taken wouldn't be a punishment for them since they only require one hit to win the fight. Hence aim punch needs to be in at the very least for bolt action rifles, however i would be in favor of adjusting it on a per weapon basis, e.g. SMGs would receive nearly no aim punch while rifle players receive a significant amount. The flinch should also follow a pattern.

Weapon switch time:

I think it should be a tad quicker when switching to the pistol, i think the way CoD4 did it, where switching to the pistol takes longer when the primary weapon is empty makes sense, that way the decision to switch to the pistol will depend a lot more on the player's confidence in their ability to get the kill with the remaining bullets in the primary weapon.

M1:

The M1 might be fine with the firerate it currently has, but only if the clicks which exceed the firerate are buffered till the next shot, so you don't end up jamming the gun all the damn time. It also seems like the odds of jamming the gun on the second shot are significantly higher than after, not sure whether that's because my clickrate decreases after that point or whether there's an actual technical reason for that.



Movement

The amount of time you can sprint seems in a good place, but it takes quite long to regen. This may be because it's TDM and i'm rushing around all the time, but i do think the flow of the game would benefit from a somewhat quicker sprint regeneration.



Sound

As i've said the positional sound is already pretty good, unfortunately this only applies to some sounds. The weapon firing sounds are very easy to locate, which is fantastic, but the footstep sounds get drowned out very easily, they definitely need a boost in volume. Also the volume depends heavily on the surface a person is walking on, with there being pretty much no sound when someone walks on mud and quite a lot of sound when someone walks on wood. I think this can be used to make some interesting maps, similar to silent drops in CoD4, but when 2/3 of the map is covered in silent dirt that's no good.



Netcode

It probably doesn't make a lot of sense to complain about the netcode at this point in time, but i've noticed some severe rubberbanding in the game and firing the shotgun for some reason seems to make the player rubberband all over the place occasionally. This might be tied to the framerate drops experienced when firing the shotgun in close quarters.



Various

Team balance needs to happen. I'm so tired of playing every round on allies because everybody stacks germans for the kar98.