Ranald’s Sparking Gift is a mutator for the Weekly Event, which causes players to occasionally explode, dealing damage and knockback to nearby other players.
Please consider the following changes to this effect:
it shall no longer trigger while the party is riding an elevator. Some elevator sequences are taking long enough that there is a guaranteed explosion, even if everyone waits for the explosion to happen before boarding. In the worst case, all four players are selected for explosion, and the group is downed without a possibility to avoid this.
Bots shall no longer receive the explosion effect OR don’t actively try to approach other players. Yeah, nothing like frantically trying to escape while 1-2 bots think it’s cuddle time when their bomb is ticking. And yes, they can teleport next to you (their catch up mechanic) as a nice surprise effect. Boom.
There is someone who likes this Ranald’s Sparking Sh… Surprise?
Because I play with bots only, asseptable way for me to do a MANDATORY Weekly Quest with a weekly event is a speedrun on a recruit. Was it really planned?
But that’s not all, there were times when I was thrown into abyss out of the Exit Portal by an explosion to hit me! That is, I will add another point:
Explosions should not affect players / bots standing in the Exit Portal.
There is some bot AI for this modifier implemented that works in your favor: Bots actively try to gain distance to you when their bomb is ticking. It might be against your instinct but just take one or two steps in their direction and then stand still. If there is enough wide open space (and no other interference) they will move away from you and they will try to avoid each other (when there’s another bot bomb ticking). But it’s unreliable af as it’s mostly dependent on map location and bot priorities not being overwritten by something else.
Weekly events should be eliminated. Apart from Tzeenchian Twins the modifiers all suck. Just make us play a twitch game or deed. They are way more fun and a lot less janky.
I like a lot of the modifiers in Weekly Events, just not stretched out over the 25 minutes required to finish a game. I find the suicide rats especially annoying, not because of the mechanic but because the audio is so freaking unbearable - I don’t wanna hear them screech every 30 seconds for half an hour. In twitch mode it’s a different story, the suicide rats show up briefly and the a few seconds later you get a different enemy spawn. IMO, twitch mode, deeds, and weeky events are just variations on the same theme - hell, they even share modifiers. Why do we need all 3? Deeds modifiers are OK but deeds are rare and there’s no matchmaking. Twitch mode can be entered at will and the variation in spawns makes it by far the most fun and challenging mode, but there is no matchmaking system so you play with bots if you aren’t in a pre-made team. Weekly Events have a lot of badly implemented modifiers (like Ranald’s Sparkling Gift) or modifiers that are fun for a few minutes (Darkness, Suicide Rats, carry the statue) but not for an entire game; but, inexplicably, this is the only mode that has a proper match making system. IMO, all deed and weekly modifiers should be incorporated into twitch mode and twitch match making should be introduced and replace the weekly events. Fatshark introduce 2 cool modes (deeds and twitch) but didn’t allow matchmaking, and a broken shite mode (Weeklies) with matchmaking and a shilling reward. It’s all backwards and makes me think that Fatshark have no idea about how people play their game.
Yeah, people can join twitch games through regular QP matchmaking, but it gives them no warning it’s a twitch game or the ability to filter twitch games in or out of QP. Most players that join twitch unexpectedly just leave straight away, so inevitably I make all my twitch games ‘private’ and play with bots. Adding a ‘deed’ or ‘twitch’ tag in the lobby browser to the standard ‘custom/event/quickplay/weave’ tags and allowing players to choose which tags they want to include in a match making search would go a long way to solving the problem.