Mana Games

[Franky Franchicha]

IMO, strong/normal serves + aiming are overpowered. It’s way too easy to hit aces with zero skill. Serves with spin or combo effects should be penalized less, and “regular” serves should be less powerful. Right now the meta is just pressing a button and aiming, when it would be better if you needed at least some skill to serve well.

[Jirafalox]

I kinda agree, maybe the spread of accel serve aiming specially should be wider than it is now so you either go for pace or for placement but not both just as easily and to compensate for this more “random placement” the distribution of the speed of the accel serve could be more narrower thus making it fast more consistently so the accuracy lost doesnt feel that bad when you know at least you’ll be hitting faster than a normal serve everytime but you wont be able to aim for lines if you want to keep it in

Normal serve also could have a narrower speed spread mantaining the current aiming to make it more or a choice to go for placement or raw speed

imo that would be ideal while mantaining current autopos speed and would make serve more balanced without having to re do the whole system

[Rambobear]

Something has to be tried about the serve to change it. I sound like a broken record and its getting tedious to sound so negative because the game otherwise is the best on the market by far. But the serve, atleast for low and mid level players, is just too good without anyone having to be anything out of the ordinary at it, just press down the strike button and you are very very likely to get a great serve with speed close to or on the line. The speed i feel is alright, but its how easy it is to aim it thats the problem.

[manutoo]

Rambobear,
could you have some input lag on your monitor ? Test your reflexes here : https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime ; you should be under 225 ms to be competitive on the return.

[Rambobear]

Hi and thanks for the reply! I tried that and i was below that mark. Im also playing on a 144hz monitor so its really smooth. I did increase the ball size and added a ball outline to make it easier to see. And returning a good first serve should be challenging thats perfectly normal. But making a good first serve as it it balanced now, is much much easier than making a good return off it.

[Jirafalox]

Well making a good return off a first decently good serve should be way more hard than actually landing a good first serve to begin with... that's just how tennis is

[manutoo]

I agree with Jirafalox.

For club players, the serve is probably the most technically complicated shot in tennis. But pro players have already mastered it.

And TE4 aims to simulate professional tennis, so serving shouldn't be overly complicated or difficult to execute.

As for serve accuracy, I think the difference with real-life pro tennis is somewhat exaggerated here, although there's still some room for improvement. I may retune it in the future, though.

[Jirafalox]

Yes I think people are exaggerating a bit but still personally even if I don’t struggle to return nearly as much as the avg player I still think the aiming distribution of accel serves should be more spread out on the whole aiming reticle because now it feels with equal power and precision it always goes to the center of the aiming or goes short/long and specially on the strong serve the aiming should be way more spread horizontally wise but I would suggest to counter balance this make the speed more consistent.
That’s the best course in my opinion if you want to retune it a bit later in the future to still make the strong serve a good choice but with its compromises

[Jirafalox]

After the last update that revamped the bounce on spin safe serves like twist and topspin I've found that returning second serves aggressively from the literal baseline has become more challenging and demands basically perfect contact which is completely fine and fair for me (added that counter stat now doesn’t make returning super strongly)

I think after this change, that in my opinion has done a lot of work towards the main issue that that started this whole thread to begin with (second serve uneffectiveness), a roll back to original autopos speed on return could be taken into account or at least make it 0,10 m/s (middle point of where we are now and what we used to have before)

Since I think most agree second serves are more decent now and some players still are complaining that first serves are unreturnable and OP. (even if I don't fully agree with this later statement I have to be understanding of the objective numbers shown specially by WTSL players where characters are considerably slower because of fixed lower muscle tone and also serve power is considerably higher than the max power usable on realistic mode)

Also guys now you really can return from way deeper positions on the court bc of the latest changes and hit the ball at a very good height that allows you to actually pull off good returns but if you don't try things to adapt and still try to return everything from up close is only natural to keep getting aced.

What do you guys think?

[Madferit]

Yes I agree with Jira. Given the recent udpates to serve itself, which has made them much better, the previous "temporary" solution of lowering autopos is no longer needed at least to the current degree. I also agree first step should be a middle point between original and current one, and after we get a few days of testing to see how it's working, we can make a final decision of staying like that or going fully to original.