by Oserkos » 29 Mar 2023, 10:48
Hi manu, thanks for the update.
I'm sad it came back to the old system regarding sliced shots overall, but if most people want it, let's cope with it. But since we were on something very different and with, to me, some good things in it, I would like to report/suggest some things that I find to be not correct with the actual behavior of sliced shots. Hereafter I will refer to the previous build (with floaty slices and super short dropshots) as the "recent" build, and the previous-previous build (with similar slices and dropshots as of the current build) as the "previous" build.
First, I don't like the fact that slices are basically attack slices all time (except when clearly outpaced and using slice to "survive") whereas they are not IRL, but that's my opinion, and I feel like it's not the majority one. OK.
Second, besides speed, I find that slice shots (pure slices) do not have enough "lateral" offset especially after the bounce. The goal of a slice is to hit the ball from left to right (or the reverse) to make it spin laterally, have a slightly curved effect after the shot, and an increased lateral trajectory just after the first bounce. As it stands, I feel like after the bounce the ball barely changes from lateral direction, and it is very predictable to position yourself before the ball grounds. Whereas IRL, depending on how much lateral spin there is, the ball can shift a little bit or shift a lot lateralwards. Plus losing a variable amount of speed and of height, also depending on the "amount" of slice effect. As it stands, I feel like the "after-bounce" behavior of the ball could still be tuned to less resemble to the "before-bounce" behavior; I find that the ball should lose speed, height, and go more laterally, all of that depending on how much you prepare your strike and on the "slice mastery" talent of course. I also feel like bounces of normal and topspinned strikes are more dependent of the surface type than slice shot bounces are, but this is almost an entire different topic.
Third, regarding dropshots. In the "recent" build, the dropshots were slower and the bounce could be a bit too high to the feeling of some people. I was not feeling this, I found dropshots to be a risky thing that could be rewarding when put with the right timing, but also a bad idea if well anticipated, so with a good balance overall - but this is only my opinion. However, going to the "previous" build, we come back to some inherent flaws of the ball behavior. You asked in the patch notes to tell you if dropshots were too effective; I find them to be not effective at all. The dropshot goes as far as in the "previous" build, if not even further (preparing them with a certain time, the ball is landing at the half of the serve square, if not further, so the opponent has to be in another stadium to not catch it), and with a much higher bounce than in the "recent" build. And most importantly, as for the "previous" build, there is still a glitch that could happen sometimes with "lobby" dropshots (dropshots that look like a lob that will land in the serve square). I did not say anything before about this because I thought this was an acknowledged bug, taken into account, and that you were working on it. The "recent" build fixed this by highly changing the ball behavior, so it was fine. Going backwards and keeping this weird/unrealistic behavior, this is not fine anymore. Dropshots are now longer, higher, freaking easy to counter (so looking like high short shots), and there's still the glitch of super high dropshots that are basically free point for the opponent.
So I'm sorry, most of my points may my post to look a bit grumpy hehe. But it's about being picky, and since some expressed how unhappy they were with the previous modifications, I'm doing so too, trying to be constructive in my discontent! All are more suggestions; the only thing I would ask you to fix is about the super high dropshots that can come out of nowhere, they're really a "bug" per se.
Many thanks overall, good luck for the continuation of the game development!
).
), and answering to the drop shot by a drop shot might become often a necessity, like in real life (so I'm going to try to make it easier than it is right now).