The Players.

[Elias]

Still i'm curious about Managames tour playerbase reactions after RG, will be interesting to follow

It's whiner-land, like usually. It has been like this for 6 years any time I do a little general gameplay change, so I'm kinda used to it...
And it always amazes me how they complain about changes that just not exist...

Though maybe inertia is a bit too high, i can't really say now, we'll have to dig it and play more with it. And if so we can choose here to tweak our shots power anyway to balance it as we feel. Still i have to see how drops are efficient now because it usually provokes such hesitation at movement start so drops may be more efficient than before. As for serves i think i still could manage sometimes after going wrong for a fraction of a second and changind direction, to still return some serves i would'nt return now, it wasn't probably very realistic, though this wil bring more aces for sure.

[Elias]

Still i'm curious about Managames tour playerbase reactions after RG, will be interesting to follow

It's whiner-land, like usually. It has been like this for 6 years any time I do a little general gameplay change, so I'm kinda used to it...
And it always amazes me how they complain about changes that just not exist...

Well, not that i want to join the whiner wagon, but to be honest the last match i played on clay @ RG online with our settings felt like a 90's grass match with very short rallies and lots of guessing. That was less competitive and a lot more chance based.

While adding this inertia is a good move, in my opinion it's actually too heavy, and we're not even playing here i think with the power and max speed the managames tour people folks are using.

Depending the direction you may choose about it, we'll probably have to decrease significantly the ball pace by reducing char power to find an acceptable balance and preserve some interest in the rallies, building points, etc.

[manutoo]

Elias,
I have been playing 1 month with this new setting, and I don't really feel the difference anymore. Last week, when I played online to test some stuff, I even didn't notice my speed conversion was higher.
I also played this week-end, and I was quite happy to finally be able to wrong foot my opponent, and it felt quite ok to be punished for my wrong guesses ; I played on NewLine Synthetic, which is almost same than Clay, in Realistic mode, so 90% speed & power.

So I think after a couple of weeks, most of the players will get used to it.

I will likely not change it. I lowered the speed conversion by 40%. At 1st, I wanted to lower it by 60% coz it was more realistic. But to avoid too much outrage in the online community, I settled for the -40%. After all, I think it was a more consistent choice anyway, coz it matches the superhuman acceleration rate we get with 100% Speed.

For your roster, I'm not sure what is the best way to handle that. But my guess is that raising all players' speed skill by 3, 4 or 5% should do it. You can fiddle with the power, but it might be much tougher & longer to find the good balance for all players.

Now, if you wrong guess, 90% of time it's a point lost right away ; if you don't guess, you might lose the point sometimes as well, but not as often.
Before brainless guessing was very encouraged, now you can do it only smartly, usually when it's your only chance to catch an acceleration (it's exactly same than in real life when players have to choose a side) ; people who were guessing too much in the past are now trying to solve this new problem by guessing even more. It won't work. Sooner or later, they'll adapt correctly. Or die... That's Darwin speaking...

If in the past you were not guessing, ie: not moving when your opponent was striking the ball, then now it shouldn't change a thing to the way you're playing, coz your initial run speed from the static pose is the same.
Moreover, if you notice your opponent is guessing too early, you can more easily wrong foot him by changing your aiming direction at the last second ; in the past, he would have just "teleported" himself back, but now you should have this warm feeling to see him wrong footed, stuck in the mud...

Last thing, if you can aim consistently close of the lines, the Elite mode might help to counterbalance that speed change.

And super last thing, look the CPU, he never guesses, he stops to run when you hit the ball, and he doesn't look so lost on the court...

[VMoe86]

In that area I agree with manutoo: Before one could guess and not be punished for guessing wrongly. Now you have to hit a good and deep shot if you want to defend well.

Against the AI I always try not to guess (of course one anticipates certain behaviour after a while) and it works. That's why I also do it online. There are situations when I guess, for example after I hit a safe shot, because if you don't guess you cannot reach the shot of your opponent (if he executed it well).

I do the same on return: When I'm focused I just wait until the ball comes off the racquet and I can see which direction it is going to. With fast enough reactions one can return the serve, but sometimes only with a safe shot.

Elite Controls might be worth a test, because there one will play more safe tennis.

[Elias]

Well before i barely had to guess, plain and simple, it was just about replacing/recentering the char during the rally, and reaction time, good moving, now that the char is slower to react, (because ending his replacement in between shots thus suffering some inertia when restarting), i have to guess more than i had. Though we may get used to it after some adapatation time as you say.

The ball recovery was still overall too high before for fast chars and we were thinking about decrease characters speeds (about the fastest ones only though), now like you say i would rather increase it and decrease power, because i feel a bit like playing some bingo everytime i hit the ball (left .. right ? ). Though i'm pretty sure we'll find a balance tweaking the power, 86-88 mph ball pace with the current inertia setup is in my opinion too high.

I played a matchup online with chars having an accel ball speed around 80-83 mph and the gameplay felt already more balanced & enjoyable.
Elite controls may help as well for sure preventing preople to accel on every stroke when not in a good position for it.

[manutoo]

I just realized you are playing with low autopos.
That may be why this change gives you so much problem.

Actually, I don't recommend to play with low autopos. I created this setting only to match the autopos speed of TE2006, so TE2006's fanatics would have less problem jumping into TE2009 (and Arcade controls match TE2006 gameplay).

When I do tuning & stuff in the gameplay, I always test only in medium autopos, so it's the actual recommended setting (fast is only for newbies ), as it's the only setting that I check the overall game balance.

So you may want to look into setting autopos back to medium as a possible another solution to your current issue with the new speed conversion.

[Elias]

Well, we may try but i never been favorable to faster autopos, always felt better having to find the right position by ourselves to hit clean shots. Low autopos also allows more freedom to hit early i guess, feeling more natural and allowing to go for some more risky shots from time to time.

I can't really see a connexion with autopos and inertia, autopos will not help when you are already 2 meters away from the ball really, it's mostly helping to get the perfect positioning when you already reached the ball.

[L Sanchez MD]

The whole point of this tour is slow autopositioning, so maybe this is an issue we need to deal with.
We've already got plenty of arcade games with tours, no point making this another one.

[manutoo]

Elias,
when you run to the ball on the side, you'll have to run a tiny bit longer when using slow autopos, which means you'll lose a bit of preparation time on your strike, and in average it leads to less good shots so your next opponent shot may be better, and so on ; if you go too far, you'll also stay too far a bit longer and thus will need a bit more time to replace yourself after the shot.

All in all, it's just fractions of second, but in the end, I guess it can make the difference between being ok with the speed change or not.

Anyway, I did a quick try at slow autopos, and in a general way, I didn't feel much differences ; it's actually most annoying on balls that come close to my player coz I'm used to prepare early & to the distance my player will move with autopos on medium, which means I'm still a tiny bit too far with autopos on slow.

[Elias]

I did some tests tonight, playing the Federer-Djokovic match-up with C4iLL, reducing significantly the power values on both wings to reach an average max ball pace (without counter speed bonus, eg. from neutral incoming balls) of ~ 83-85 mph max, and the gameplay felt very good, a lot better, with a reasonably good ratio of <5 hit / <10 hit rallies. This is encouraging.

This ball speed implied we used as FH/BH power values, 77/72 for Federer (30 spin), and 77/81 for djoko (50 spin), but these stats weren't intended to balance those two chars, but only to play with an average equal ball pace. As a note, with those stats, Federer hits 85 mph max speed shots, and djokovic 83 mph max, from a neutral incoming ball (typical warm-up start ball).

I think the gameplay was even better than before thanks to the new inertia with this setup, still good wrongfooting, and no need to fire tremendously fast bombs for it. The winner ability still was pretty good, we tested clay and wimbledon grass (modified one here though, much higher bounce than vanilla), and it felt pretty good on both. We had some fun back, good tactical fights and not too much 2-4 hits "rallies" like we have moslty with the current setup.

I'll do more tests with Vmoe86 probably the next days but i think we can reach something pretty good just by tweaking the power (moreover ball pace eg. power/spin values).

Just as a note Manu, it felt really good with such values, but i wonder how Managames tour folks will manage this if they only have the "fair" setting mode as the only stat restriction, you should probably enforce realistic stat mode there, and maybe remap power to 30%-80% instead of 30-90% in realistic mode then, especially considering they often play with very low or no spin. my 2 cents

[L Sanchez MD]

Hopefully you aren't going too far. It's good to have lots of 2-4 shot rallies on grass...

[Elias]

Hopefully you aren't going too far. It's good to have lots of 2-4 shot rallies on grass...

We still had a good bunch of it don't worry we just don't want to have 60-80% of those, especially on slow surfaces, right ?

We'll do more tests anyway and any change will not be carved in stone hopefully. The game is still pretty winner friendly with those values with current movement scheme, but more tactical again. Still it was an overall ball pace test to find a good compromise, it wasn't especially aimed to these two characters.

[manutoo]

Elias,
what is the speed % for Fed & Djoko ?

[Elias]

Elias,
what is the speed % for Fed & Djoko ?

it's 86 and 94 respectively.

Still it was only ball pace test, but for balance purposes i would probably have given a bit more on the FH to federer to be more fed like, maybe 78-80 power should have been better, though he was still pretty winner friendly like this. As a note, it feels really more real playing online vs a human being about the wrongfooting / inertia management, the CPU doesnt get that much wrongfooted in comparison.

[manutoo]

Elias,
I just posted this in the v1.0e topic in MG's Forums :

ok, I did some tests, and I think I found the root cause of your issue ; currently, there's a forward inertia after each strike & serve, and it was not too noticeable before because it wasn't too much above the speed conversion limit, but now it's way beyond it, so for next Build, I'm going to drastically reduce it, so you'll have a better control of your player after your strikes & serves (which should help lower the number of return winners) ; I won't reduce it on accelerations, though, coz the balance is ok for them (ie: it's easy enough to hit winners, so it's ok to be a bit get penalized if you use an acceleration that doesn't give you an advantage in the rally).

I'll add this just here : so I may even reduce more the speed conversion limit ; I lowered by 40% so far on all surfaces except clay, and I may go to 45%, so it'll be almost same than on current Clay (which is currently reduced to 46% if you used the un-modded Court.ini, and next Clay will get reduced by 47.5%).

So don't spend time tuning the whole roster right now.

I'll try to release the next Build around end of this week, I'm going to let my idea mature a bit 1st...