• Reduced Pirate Knight health to 200 (from 235)
  
• Added pvp section (requires further adjustments)
  
• Fixed bugs related to custom weapons

Mission now goes back with the original name DOVER 2. Main population file is mvm_whitecliff_rc2_adv_dover_2.pop

Ravener has NOT been updated with these changes.

• Reduced Buster Transformer damage against tanks to 2000 (from 3000)
  
• Reduced Buster Transformer health to 400 (from 800)
  
• Significantly strengthened wave 7's phase 3

Judge popfile uploaded

Didn't take long for the remnants of DD to be eradicated :>

• Increased the skill of demomen and buff soldiers on wave 1
  This subwave consistently underperforms relative to other subwaves, this change should hopefully put it on more even ground
  
  
• Reduced support frequency on wave 5
  
• Given minelayer demos self-damage immunity
  
• Significantly reduced support on wave 7's phase 2 and phase 3
  
• Strengthened boss on phase 3 to compensate for reduced support

Judge popfile uploaded

Demo: https://testing.potato.tf/demos/mvm_goldpit_rc3_adv_race_condition-1688047884.zip

Strike, Pass, or No Strike?: No Strike

Team Lineup:

• Bazooks (Demoman)
  
• Damno (Scout)
  
• UltimentM (Engineer)
  
• Hell-met (Sniper)
  
• ihaz (Heavy)

• Mission appears to be so far so good, though we may develop further opinions in future judging sessions.
  
• Try to avoid using stunned animations for phase changes - despite the uber effect this apparently causes some players to instinctively react with "boss is stunned, attack now!" and may take a few seconds before they realize their error. Taunts do a great job at this, e.g.

• This wave softlocks itself and cannot be finished.
  
• The pyro boss seems to have obscenely strong stats on its Dragon's Fury in phase B - triple damage with rapid fire rate seemed to make every other phase look weak.

Demo: https://sgp.potato.tf/demos/mvm_cyberia_rc6a_exp_cascading_steel_swarm-1687619569.zip

Strike, Pass, or No Strike?: Pass

Team Lineup:

• Bazooks (Scout)
  
• Lemonee (Soldier)
  
• royal (Engineer)
  
• ihaz (Demoman)
  
• Capitaine Garen (Sniper)
  
• Timothy (Pyro)

Reworked most of the mission, currently temporarily uses the placeholder name adv_ravener while we sort things out with the original dover2 files. It's basically a whole new mission at this point.

Demo: https://sgp.potato.tf/demos/mvm_humbridge_b7_exp_misanthrope_judge-1683636490.zip

Strike, Pass, or No Strike?: No Strike

Team Lineup:

• Bazooks (Demoman)
  
• colonel (Soldier)
  
• royal (Scout)
  
• DaMno (Medic)
  
• Hell-met (Engineer)
  
• dareaperofsoul (Pyro)

• Mission is going in a good direction. The first 5 waves *so far* look good, though there may be additional concerns on future tests.

• The Demomen aren't a threat by themselves after the Giant Heavies die, and thus should be support limited.

• Very weird for the explanation text to emphasize on "WILL". Any extra capitalization on the text is likely unnecessary.

• The boss shouldn't have the resistances from Chargin' Targe. Even without them, bullet-based weapons already perform the best against bosses. There is no need to make other weapons even worse.
  
• As of now, due to the boss' relatively low lethality and the only bomb carriers being low power and low durability commons, the bomb has a hard time making progress against red players as commons will easily die in the crossfire. The wave relies on the boss killing ALL red players or forcing them to retreat, which it has a hard time doing so at its current state.
  
• Either power up the boss to make it easier to push one way or another, or power up the commons. A combination of both can also work.
  
• As is, this wave pales in difficulty to the other waves.
  
  
• The self destruct sequence still lasts too long and frankly we're still not sure what it's for.

Demo: https://sgp.potato.tf/demos/mvm_akure_rc1a_exp_diamond_and_dross-1680954921.zip

Strike, Pass, or No Strike?: No Strike

Team Lineup:

• Yuugi (Engineer)
  
• DaMno (Scout)
  
• UltimentM (Pyro)
  
• Mudun (Sniper)
  
• Bazooks (Demoman)
  
• colonel (Soldier)

• Relative to everything else, the first subwave of this wave was quite weak. Just Super Scouts and close-ranged bots don't do much against all but one class.

• Relative to everything else, the first subwave of this wave was quite weak. Giant banners arent that strong, normal-skill hitscan is whatever and the crit bowmen definitely do not form a $5k expert difficulty subwave.

• At this money, the giant dragon fury pyros become nothing more than a pushover at their current spawnrate.

• See the feedback we posted in Gold and Grit.

Demo: https://sgp.potato.tf/demos/mvm_akure_rc1a_adv_gold_and_grit-1680952566.zip

Strike, Pass, or No Strike?: No Strike

Team Lineup:

• DaMno (Scout)
  
• UltimentM (Engineer)
  
• Mudun (Demoman)
  
• Bazooks (Soldier)
  
• colonel (Pyro)

• This wave's first subwave felt like a much weaker version of wave 1, the 22k tank and the brimstone demos are nowhere near enough to make up for the much higher money when wave 1 already sent giant scouts with giant demos.
  
• In shorter maps that tank may be enough, but Akure is very large. 22k tanks melt down pretty quickly if players get to whack at it from the start.

• The Giant Demos felt weaker than everything else in the wave.

• When designing new robots (especially bosses that do many unique things), we strongly recommend doing so through a player's prespective.
  
  
• When a player meets a new enemy, they will first try to analyze what the enemy does. For most bots, this is very straightforward.
  
• e.g. Giant Heavies spin up their minigun upon seeing an enemy, and then shoots. Unwinds when it no longer sees any enemies.
  
  
• Afterwards, the player will try to figure out what they should do against said enemy, with the class they're currently playing in consideration.
  
• e.g. If the player is playing Soldier, they can peek in and out of corners and abuse how Giant Heavies need to spin up their minigun before shooting, and how they unwind when the player is hiding behind cover.
  
  
• Try to put yourself in the position of someone that doesn't know what your boss does, or ask someone else to do this process, then try doing both of those things above.
  
• Ask yourself: how intuitive was the boss' mechanics? How fast can you pick up exactly what the boss does? What counterplays can you do as each of the 9 classes?
  
  
• We experienced this first hand, and we think the boss is very unintuitive and there's little counterplay you can do if your class doesn't have access to healing/resistance items
  
• The boss will easily outrun you as most classes if you didn't invest in move speed and homing rockets especially in akure are difficult to dodge, so for most classes there's essentially no counterplay asides from hoping your teammates milk the boss or your medic is doing their job.
  
• The intense amount of bleed stacks did not help, and made this boss even worse than its exp counterpart.
  
  
• Even after finishing the wave we're still not sure what the boss does asides from the two obvious things of run fast and shoot homing rockets.
  
• It really doesn't help that the boss stays in the same pose the whole time. Poses are the strongest visual indicator there is for telling what an enemy will most likely do.
  
• If a robot pulls out a shovel you can be confident that it'll try to run at you to melee. But if a robot melees you while it pretty clearly has a rocket launcher out you'd be confused as hell.
  
• The amount of visual clutter happening in the wave makes it very difficult to tell which weapon the boss has at the moment, especially when you're supposed to react in seconds. Pose changes make this very obvious and easy to react to.
  
  
• And finally, don't be afraid to chop down many features of the boss just to simplify things - players really don't like losing to something they don't understand, and making players resort to medic and canteen stuff is the last thing you want to do.