Hello, here to give feedback on the new smoke overlay. Basically, the idea is good, the execution way too egregious. Before the overlay was a thing you could at least still have some form of orientation in a room, which is now impossible. Just tone it down a notch, right now it's so obstructing, it's barely even interactive anymore.
Also, the smoke overlay is triggered by standing in gas as well, which should in my honest opinion, not be the case. Not only is the overlay grey, which makes no sense, but the gas itself is enough visual obstruction as is. Having a gunfight within a smoke cloud is now impossible which I think is a misguided goal. It used to be that gas was a useful tool to thin out the number of enemies in an area, and now that it's buffed, I'm using it a lot and I think it is well balanced. But having it block out vision entirely, makes it a lot less engaging from a gameplay perspective, I think it's way better to be without it. Please remove the overlay from gas and consider toning down the smoke filter entirely, as in, making you able to see just a bit further.
Thanks for reading.

Hello!
First off, I want to point out that I'm about Lvl 420. So I don't play this game just since yesterday. And I play a lot with people over the 500 and even 800 mark, who share the same complaints.

The new smoke sucks big for Co-Op! I don't know if it's any good for PvP, but I don't care, really. If you want to change stuff for the PvP players that they demanded, then pls change it only for PvP and leave us Coop-Players alone with it.
The smoke was good before. A nuissance and a hindrance in sight, but somewhat manageable.
Maybe the new smoke would not be so overpowered and a teamkiller that often if the bots suffered the same sight restrictions as humans do. Right now for a human player it's almost like the flashbang was build into the smoke. It's impossible to keep on playing in the smoke. But the Bots shoot you out of nothing from miles through the smoke...
Since the last update, bots seem to see through anything! They shoot you frequently through walls before having had any chance to see you before, even when lying prone. Pinpointing the player exactly by shot noise is a bit exagerated and not at all realistic for me (and other high level players as well). The only exception seems to be the bomber who seems to be as blind as the human players.

To me all the last attempts at raising AI-power for balancing failed badly. The results were not enjoyable bcause everything got so unrealistic. Hits without aiming the gun in the right direction, like 0.1 sec. after coming round a corner and so on took a lot of fun out of the game. The bots do not need to be harder! Get rid of the area restrictions and change the bots routes more often is enough to keep players busy! If they see me, they can shoot me, that's ok. But everything else is ridiculous!

Right now it is no fun to play at all, because one dies frequently without having made a mistake. That takes all the tactics out of the game and makes it line up with all those arcade shooter crap... Pls give us our favorite game back! Get those visibility bugs fixed. Make the bots see like humans again. Thx!

Yup. Just another example of Sandstorm sadly being very hindered by the duality of its design, making gameplay changes for both PvP and PvE for reasons that only apply to one of the two. Makes me hope NWI will just make a Coop game in it's own right, and a pure PvP game after that. If the next game suffers from this in my eyes misguided philosophy, I probably won't be there to play it.