Weekly Steam News Update - October 20

[CSN NewsBot]

I'm a day late, and a bunch of dollars short thanks to my maxing out my weekly bandwidth for the week downloading Psychonauts on Monday. It was worth it. Let's just get on to the news, shall we?

There is now less than a week to get Dark Messiah of Might and Magic preloaded to your computer and ready for its launch next week. If you're in North America, the game will be playable on October 25th at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time. For the rest of the world, you'll be able to play on the 27th at 10:00 a.m. GMT.



Dark Messiah takes place in an incredibly rich and detailed world, and as a result is five times larger than Half-Life 2, weighing in at 10GB. If you preload the game now or purchase now, you'll be able to play immediately when the game is released.



Also, check out the new Dark Messiah Steam skin! To use it, open the Steam Settings window and select it from the list of skins.



The team at Introversion released an update for all Defcon players earlier this week, which includes a newer version of their server browser. Getting in and playing a game of Defcon is a lot easier now.

Magic, might, and global thermonuclear war seem to be the name of the game for this week's update. Anyone else catch the negative prices for some of the weapons this week in the CS: Source DWP BETA? I know that I sure did! At least now, some items are bottoming out at $1, but how's about that $4000 Deagle? Don't you just love BETA testing?

[m4elite]

Can anyone buy the glock?

[snkcube]

One dollar Mac-10s....I'm there!

[Bokuho]

Screw the Mac-10 and Glock; I'm spending my hard-earned dollar on night vision.





Seriously though, it seems bad now, but it has to go through this stage. People will be forced to use handguns other than the deagle, and may give the Mac-10 a chance. People will diversify and change up what wepaosn they use, and eventually the prices will balance out as people discover that the weapons they thought sucked, don't, and that the weapons they thought were must-haves, aren't.

[refux]

I have a real concern that server admins are just going to give all the players 16k starting money every round, and prices are just going to go nuts.



This whole pricing system works only if everyone is playing by the same rules. But as we know, in the CS world, there just aren't that many vanilla servers out there.

[FLeK0]

Bokuho wrote..

, and may give the Mac-10 a chance. People will diversify and change up what wepaosn they use, and eventually the prices will balance out as people discover that the weapons they thought sucked, don't, and that the weapons they thought were must-haves, aren't.

because you can kill people with the mac10 (or any other non-popular gun) from a greater distance, and that kill is not a totally random spray headshot. allright.

Those weapons should be removed from counter-strike, not forced on players. If they want to make these a bit more popular, then they can make it cheaper, but butchering the gameplay just because Cliffe or some random guy likes the mac-10 is not a good idea. I really hope there is a limit on how far can the m4/ak prices go up, because people will still buy them for $5k, and it makes the game really boring to save 3 rounds in a row. Also there is a little balance issue with the whole pricing thing when a team is rolling the other for several rounds.

[Thortok2000]

First off, DWP's algorithm as it currently is, is broken. It's a BETA after all, they didn't get it right the first time. I have detailed posts explaining why on the Steampowered.com forums, but essentially, they base it on money spent instead of amount purchased; this causes expensive prices to rise and cheap prices to get cheaper (or stay cheap, in the case of $1).



When the algorithm is working however, the point is to not 'save for 3 rounds in a row'. Because people who do that will then find that the price increases and now they have to save 5 rounds in a row. If they continue to do so, now they'll have to save 8 rounds in a row. How many rounds are you going to save for that ONE gun, when you could buy a cheaper gun (which won't even take that much of your money), kill lots of people, and earn the money for the gun you want, faster?



That's the point of DWP. Nobody forces you to use the weapons, they simply adjust the prices of them so there isn't a single gun which is worthless and money-wasting to buy.

[DevgruSeal H.E]

Well, something like that should've been fixed in the internal alpha version.

[entRo]

Thortok2000 wrote..

That's the point of DWP. Nobody forces you to use the weapons, they simply adjust the prices of them so there isn't a single gun which is worthless and money-wasting to buy.

What was wrong with the old system? So some of the guns suck and are a waste of money, and some noobs will swear they're good (scout? P228? five-seven?), while the rest of us know better and stick to the decent guns. A much better solution would be to simply drop the prices of the useless guns to give you some incentive to pick up that piece of shit UMP.



A cooler feature would be trading in used weapons for a portion of their original price.

[kerosine99]

I like that they want to adjust the prices, but I think they really should just do a reevaluation of the prices and do a static readjustment.

[Thortok2000]

entRo wrote..

the rest of us stick to the decent guns.

That's why. The fact that only 20% or less of the guns in the game are worth buying means that something needs to change. Hypothetically, every gun should have its use. The prices are the easiest way to balance the guns (so you don't change the recoil and stuff so they're all clones of each other), and what better way than to automatically balance them based on usage?

A much better solution would be to simply drop the prices of the useless guns

This is part of what DWP does in the first place.

[entRo]

Thortok2000 wrote..

That's why. The fact that only 20% or less of the guns in the game are worth buying means that something needs to change. Hypothetically, every gun should have its use. The prices are the easiest way to balance the guns (so you don't change the recoil and stuff so they're all clones of each other), and what better way than to automatically balance them based on usage?

What's wrong with having useless guns?

This is part of what DWP does in the first place.

It's part, but it does alot more shit that's unnecessary and apparently, unwanted.

[Thortok2000]

entRo wrote..

What's wrong with having useless guns?

When they added the guns, do you really think they sat and said "I think we'll put in another useless gun" and then spent 70 hours coding in a useless gun and hundreds more tweaking it and designing a model for it and console commands and then when CS:S came out, updating the model, etc. If they're going to spend all that much work on them, they don't want them to be useless.



That's speaking from Valve's perspective. From my own, I just want there to be more variety in gameplay. I like variety.

It's part, but it does alot more that's unnecessary and apparently, unwanted.

I agree, it would've been fine if they had just adjusted prices and left it at that. But they probably would not have gotten the 'perfect' prices to set them to on their own (unless they constantly tweaked them until they found something that worked right), so setting up a system whereby the perfect prices are achieved dynamically is brilliant. (Then they flubbed it with a horrible algorithm, but hopefully by the time it leaves beta it'll shape up a bit.)

[m4elite]

Id think it is fairly simple to add a gun to the game, at the very least edit a current guns file to a new one with different looks and damage..

[DaRk-AnGeL]

It's stupid shit like this that makes sure the professional community doesn't take source seriously....