Suggestions for Multiplayer Improvements

I didn't know which category to put this in so if anyone wants to move it go right ahead.

So I don't play multiplayer very much, but I played some 1v1 with a friend for four hours last night and several things came to mind.

(i) The spawns. It's so much more fun to have lots of blue and platinum gems, like there used to be. If you don't want to bring the old spawns back, fine, but could there at least be an option to turn the old spawns back on? It makes it so much more enjoyable with tons of blues and platinums rather than just reds and yellows and the occasional single blue gem. I did have a workaround to this by taking the old versions of the levels from an older version of PQ (or MBP, can't remember which) and playing them as custom levels, but it would be a lot nicer to have the high value spawns either be there by default in the official versions or be available to turn on for more fun so that I wouldn't have to worry about custom copies of official maps.

(ii) We were throwing snowballs at each other and they're way too broken because with each hit, one player gains two points and the other player loses two. So halfway through one game I glanced at my score and it said 16 and I was so confused—turns out I'd just been hit with loads of snowballs. This would be a lot more reasonable if it was +1 and −1, +2 and −0, or even +1 and −0. Another way this could be improved is if you can't throw snowballs as often, but that's not as fun so I'd just decrease the point values. The current way makes it so that there can be a net gain of 16 points in a single second because of how much the snowballs are worth, so it's really not fair.

(iii) Whenever one person has to change their options, they have to leave the server in order to do so which is irritating. We should be able to access the Options menu right from the server lobby.

(iv) We were looking through the list of marbles and I noticed that the name of the MBG original marble got changed to "Groovyball" and I'm just confused more than anything else. It doesn't really affect anything but I thought I'd wonder aloud why that happened.

(v) Once my opponent accidentally pressed the Spectate button at the beginning of a game, and then unpressed it but instead of spawning on the map he just fell below it forever and I had to quit the level and restart. So I guess that's a bug.

(vi) I've never had this happen because I'm on Mac, but I've heard of it happening on Windows: my friend would type stuff in Discord and it would send in the server chat even though PQ wasn't the active application at the time. I really wish this could be fixed because if this happened with personal information it could be bad. That being said, I wonder if server chat really is private or if administrators and moderators can read it. I hope they can't.

(vii) Also, key repeat doesn't work on Windows. When you hold down a key, it's supposed to repeat like it does on Mac, but the Windows version didn't do that. Maybe it had something to do with Boot Camp.

(viii) When I use a mega marble, it just plays the normal marble rolling and bouncing sounds instead of the mega sounds. This has been a bug for years but I don't think I mentioned it until now.

That's all for now but we'll play more and I'll probably add more to this list.

1) Sounds like lots of work on our end Unlikely to happen as most people wanted less blues and definitely no platinums.

2) Mega Marble snowballs have a major effect, so this could be why too. However it seems it works fine based on your description? It replaces all gems with a single scoring method: snow balls.

3) I would agree, but it depends on HiGuy.

4) Marble Blast Mobile by Luma Arcade called the MBG Marble " Groovyball " , so we adapted the official name. It should be noted that Luma Arcade isn't affiliated with GarageGames so it's unlikely GG themselves knew/agreed to this but it has no other official name except this one.

5) Bug probably.

6) Server chat is private, 100%. PQ probably picks up because Torque can be dumb and we probably can't fix this unless HiGuy magics.

7) Torque issues.Known and unfixable.

8 ) Yeah probably forgotten to be switched properly. Bug.

Matan got most of it but here are a few clarifications
2) Snowballs are a -2 +3 technically (depends on blast and MM) and were kinda designed to be unbalanced because weeee winter
4) @FlavoredSaucer
6) We've tried like 3 times to fix this and it keeps happening

The other bugs are low priority because they're either uncommon or just don't matter much. At this point when PQ is getting rare updates, usually only the game breaking bugs are fixed.

Thanks for responding!

(i) I guess my workaround is easier than anything that you'd have to do then, and I definitely understand not wanting to do all that work just to cater to a few people.

With (ii) it's not a problem if it's just snowballs or just gems, but we were playing with snowballs and gems so that's why it seemed unfair because snowballs were far more effective than gems.

(vi) Good to know that server chat is completely private, that makes me a lot less paranoid.

Also something new I realized: Even when there's a "custom" folder inside multiplayer/collection, if I go to Collection and then select a difficulty, "Custom" doesn't even appear as an option. So I don't think there's any way of even playing custom collection levels.

And yeah HiGuy, I'm guessing that you probably don't want to fix these, and I don't blame you, but thanks for at least taking the time to read and respond, it means a lot.

Bumping this with more suggestions.

But first, thank you RandomityGuy for going to the effort to fix the XP system. I can't wait for the next update to come out! Okay now here are the suggestions.

(i) You know how all Competitive Mode does is put a timer on the gems? It would be really nice if turning off Competitive Mode also gave higher value spawns like there used to be, because I thought the spawns were originally decreased in value because it was better for competitive play. So you should keep Competitive Mode the way it is and use more fun spawns with blues and platinums for regular casual play.

(ii) Usually the blast sound is just nonexistent in multiplayer for some reason, and sometimes the blast meter just doesn't fill at all and you just can't use blast. I think that might have to do with party spawns though. Speaking of party spawns:

(iii) I love party spawns! Here are some improvements I'd like to see to make them even better. Red gems give you super speeds, and I don't like that for a couple reasons. First, if I go out of my way to get a powerup like a super jump or a gyrocopter, and then I try to use it, most of the time I'll just end up using a super speed because I picked one up by getting a red gem and didn't even realize it. The way it is right now makes me have to go out of my way to avoid picking up red gems, which is not how the game should work. Another reason is that in normal spawns, we have red, yellow, blue, and (there should be in non-competitive mode) platinum gems. Obviously they don't do anything in normal mode, so I like how they also don't do anything in party mode because they're like the "normal" gems. Except for red gems. So I think they also shouldn't do anything because they're normal gems that we're already used to. Also there's a bug that makes me hear whenever my opponent picks up a powerup, so all I hear is "Super Speed Super Speed Super Speed" all the time because he's always picking up gems and I'm not. So it gets very irritating after a while.

(iv) You know how black gems make your opponents small? I think that should only last for 5 or 10 (probably 10) seconds. It's way too overpowered as it is, because it's super hard to move while small and it doesn't go away unless you get a mega marble or fall out of bounds, so I end up just chucking myself off the edge to not be small, which is again not how the game should be played. It should be like a reverse mega marble.

(v) Oh yeah and if you're in a mega marble and someone picks up a black gem you should shrink to normal size instead of going right to being small. Kind of like when you're in a mega mushroom in Mario Kart Wii and lightning strikes, it doesn't make you small, it just makes you normal again.

(vi) I heard that white gems are supposed to be +0 and make everyone float, but I've never seen or had that happen. When I pick up a white gem all it does is say +1 and that's it. If you do fix that and it does make people float, that should also only be for 10 seconds at most.

(vii) Sometimes the massive platinum gems in the air are on levels with no super jumps or gyrocopters, like King of the Marble, and they become very hard to get. Maybe some sort of timer could be put on those gems specifically if they're the last ones in the spawn. Or maybe I should just get good

(viii) The scores are kind of a mess right now. People still have scores on the leaderboards from 2014 when the spawns were different. When you turn on party spawns or double spawns the par, platinum, and ultimate scores don't change. It kind of makes the whole idea not really worth it if the challenge scores don't adjust to how many people you're playing with and which modes you have on. Also it should show the par, platinum, and ultimate scores on the level finish screen as well as how far along you are in your current XP level.

That's all for now but if I think of anything else I will certainly add to the list.

Hi I coded and designed all of Competitive and Party was not involved in Hard Mode (it used my Party mode code as a starting point but I was not involved), blablabla

1: i think a lot of other people would have to agree about this, party spawns is actually my response to the idea of blues becoming platinums, i think if someone enjoys platinum gems they would also enjoy special gems, so that's how it was born. Also it doesn't seem like most people have decided if tournaments and most games should be in Competitive mode, or what people's feedback of that is. The thing is that the non-modified mode is really a limbo state. I was planning to have Competitive eventually be the main gamemode because it is closer to the vanilla gameplay. (although I wonder if everyone would enjoy it more, if special gems had an extremely low chance of spawning but could still spawn in any gamemode)

2: fireball blasts are silent because triggering the fireball activation code is buggy, I thought fireball=orange=3 was too good of a theme to not use it though. Not sure what could be causing blasts to mess up but I have found the triple blast seems a little buggy in edge cases.

3: wrote this code 3 months ago that silences the noise and only gives it to you if you don't have another powerup. I also noticed this was pretty bad. github.com/The-New-Platinum-Team/Platinu...6236e3d5c613e6c2da64

I mentioned it before but red gems become much less likely for someone to aim for it when there exist higher value gems around. I do think it is inelegant if the others lack effects but the ability to do super speed chains is too cool for me to want to remove. If anything I'd put a ring or some small special effect over all red gems to make them more distinct or something.

4: I agree with you, it's one of a few 'debuff' I could think of (there are not many good debuffs - disabling movement is too annoying, can't jump is too annoying, can't blast is either annoying or doesn't do anything). I think being small was a better debuff than those but it still feels annoying to control. Please come up with other debuff ideas but I agree that the small marble is too annoying. (something I thought of is giving players a penalty but only if they go out of bounds, which would kind of merge the idea of punishing OOB abuse into the gamemode - also maybe black and white gems should not require their collection in order for the next cluster to spawn)

5: sure but I do think it is likely the debuff is changed in the future

6: The "everyone floats" is a way to describe that everyone immediately activates a gyrocopter, and as you know, a gyrocopter is not always a good thing to have activated. This bug happened because an unrelated datablock compression code by another developer disabled the white gem effects.

7: the more pressing issue for me is that the gem has the ability to spawn inside walls such as in citadel, which is also why I envision playing both party+competitive at the same time to have the gem timeout. Also doesn't KoTM have super jumps??

8: how do you think they should change, putting all the different scores in the files and manually setting them seems already annoying to deal with, i'd rather their display become like double spawns 1.4x and party 2.5x or something