Balancing changes, Guided missiles, Weapon balance tests

[divVerent]

Mortar needs zero aim? Why that?

MG now has more spread, so what? It is a machine gun and no sniper rifle.

Hagar - okay, that may be. It seems too strong in weapon balance anyway.

Nex needs zero aim? WHAT?

I can tell you the electro is by far not the strongest weapon, but Hagar, RL and Mortar seem above it (which may need fixing). Personally, however, I'd want the electro with more emphasis on combos and less on the primary.

HP will now lower to 100 again, armor will NOT. If you are fully stacked, you'll rot down to 100 health, 200 armor, giving a total max damage till you die of 250. That should solve it completely.

Try the current settings on rm.endoftheinternet.org:26004.

[FraNcoTirAdoR]

HP will now lower to 100 again, armor will NOT. If you are fully stacked, you'll rot down to 100 health, 200 armor, giving a total max damage till you die of 250. That should solve it completely.

Thx for the detailed answer, that seems to be very nice even for the first look, i think that will work fantastically, it was just different yesterday.

The reason why i mean that mortar needs no aim because it works technically the same, its like a mini rocket launcher on close-medium range and now it shoots ammos like 3 times faster, it feels completely spammy, you shake the crosshair around the target and there will be 4 mortarts shot immediately in the close sorrounding of the target. What I think it would be a nice idea to make mortar shoot the ammo on even less speed or more air friction, because this way on medium range it works almost like (the 2.5.1) hagar in my opinion.

I dont really have any problem with machine gun, its spammy, but maybe thats the only weapon where its "normal". Electro felt very strong because it killed a freshly spawned enemy in 1,5 second with 2 shots right after spawn, and they didnt have to be direct at all due its huge splash.

I will go tho the havoc testing server soon, and bring some guys, lets see how weapons feel Will there be feedback topic soon where we can start talking about the idea of weapon balancing for the 2.6 version? Also what would be appriciated to post there the tunings made every time on the weapons so its much easier to test. This way until 2.6 arrives it would be a nice community collaborative solution to implement the havoc weapon-behaviour with good possibility of feedback from the community for balancing.


EDIT: After plaing lot of DM matches on the server you recommended I still keep the statement: mortar is incredibly powerful, same with electro. Camping rifle is totally underpowered, the secondary is really weak. Machine gun felt mostly okey, same with rocketlauncher, but it should have slower speed, like 1700 imo. Shotgun is absolutely okey, laser feels weaker than it was. Crylink was overpowered at the beginning, but as the weapon settings very tuned it became underpowered at the end IMO. Hagar is mostly okey on close range, also nex feels balanced, however i wasnt lucky enough to get it too many times (i got laser and rifle 99% of the time i swear )

[LordHavoc]

When you're done adding guided missiles, pogostick, HLAC, camping rifle as default, maybe we can add some mountable unicorns too? if that's too cliché, we could go with reindeer. I don't know of many non-Holiday games having mountable reindeer.

Your post is the most hilarious thing I've read all day, nicely done.

[Samual]

I don't have time to make a lengthy post at the moment (Doctors appointment), but I will say that if the balance they want to apply to 2.6 happens, i'm most likely leaving.

@OHSNAPPLE LOL, nice.

[LordHavoc]

To be perfectly clear, I have been pushing for significant changes in Nexuiz balance for some time, these were all deflected by most of the dev team as dangerous changes, and put into my Havoc mode (formerly known as "pro", a somewhat incorrect title).

Consequently Havoc mode kept being an experimental mod in serious need of balancing, and my invitations for balance testing and serious discussion went unanswered, I had to take drastic steps to spark real discussion of a rebalance and revive the core of the game itself.

Contrary to claims that have been floating around, I have never suggested putting Havoc physics into base Nexuiz as I see that as a major point of community debate, I believe fast movement is hostile to teamplay and Havoc has always been teamplay focused, but Nexuiz has always been more of a FFA and CTF game and I do not want to "ruin" the heart of Nexuiz as we know it.

However some other aspects of Havoc are under constant balance testing leading toward an eventual release in Nexuiz 2.6 (2.5.2 will not have these balance changes), chief among these is the health/armor limits which ensure it is always possible to kill a dominant player with enough skill, running items will never get you over 200/200 health/armor, limiting map control somewhat, additionally player start health has been lowered and an invulnerability period added.

With the health/armor changes and changes in responsiveness come significant weapon changes which are nowhere near final at this time and being driven primarily by server statistics analysis.

Ultimately I want the game to be easier to pick up for newbies but still hold potential for skilled players who have learned all the tricks and tactics of the game, a rebalance is necessary for this goal.

At the same time, I have been following Nexuiz download statistics vs player counts since the original release, and the numbers are not merely disappointing but depressing to me as the lead game designer, the retention rate is abysmal, Nexuiz has millions of downloads (across the various versions) and only several hundred players, no amount of publicity will make up for a game that does not hold onto the players who try it.

Some claim that I am trying to clone QuakeLive in Nexuiz, this is not true and has never been the intent, my goal is to identify what is driving away so many players and correct the problems, unfortunately these players are not as vocal on the forums as the active Nexuiz community, and there is a significant danger of ending up like QuakeWorld where newbies are destroyed repeatedly until they give up on playing online simply because it is not fun to lose all the time. (A point that QuakeLive has tried hard to fix, with limited success)

On the technical side, I think there are a few issues:

• Unresponsive controls - Traditionally Nexuiz has used 20fps gameplay and movement, which adds a hidden 50ms latency to everything you do and subconsciously feels "bad", we're changing this in the future to 16.667ms (60fps) to improve projectile weapons and allow finer timing of shots and movement.
  The specific settings are: cl_netfps 60;sys_ticrate 0.0166667
  For comparison Nexuiz used 20 and 0.05, QuakeLive uses something closer to 120 and 0.05
• Servers offering many poor-quality maps in their rotation - it makes a very poor impression when 90% of the maps played online are worse than the official maps.
• Network issues - whether it's the netcode or the server, there have been many user-visible issues with networking in every version of Nexuiz, we need to identify and fix these where possible.

I do believe there is a significant community who play Nexuiz singleplayer only (which avoids most of the technical issues in the game), and are not particularly vocal on the forums here, but I am not sure how many.

Note: In the interests of full-disclosure I should note that I am an id contractor working on QuakeLive.

[Flying Steel]

Consequently Havoc mode kept being an experimental mod in serious need of balancing, and my invitations for balance testing and serious discussion went unanswered, I had to take drastic steps to spark real discussion of a rebalance and revive the core of the game itself.

I'm sorry about this, I for one wasn't aware of where the balance testing or discussions were taking place or that the participation of general players was wanted in the later. I'm mostly just a forum go-er though, outside of the game, so if this was an IRC thing then that might be why myself and others missed it.

Contrary to claims that have been floating around, I have never suggested putting Havoc physics into base Nexuiz as I see that as a major point of community debate, I believe fast movement is hostile to teamplay and Havoc has always been teamplay focused, but Nexuiz has always been more of a FFA and CTF game and I do not want to "ruin" the heart of Nexuiz as we know it.

. . .

With the health/armor changes and changes in responsiveness come significant weapon changes which are nowhere near final at this time and being driven primarily by server statistics analysis.

Ultimately I want the game to be easier to pick up for newbies but still hold potential for skilled players who have learned all the tricks and tactics of the game, a rebalance is necessary for this goal.

Maybe I am mistaken, but my feeling is changes this drastic to the weapons ultimately will be as controversial and game altering as similarly significant changes to the movement physics.

And at the same time, they are only theoretically going to help the teamplay and learning curve issues, whereas physics changes have a much higher chance of achieving these goals if you look at the examples out there.

So at least as a backup plan if these weapon changes don't achieve their intended goals or alienate too many players, I would suggest to do things like reduce acceleration and remove bunny-hopping acceleration and such for Default 2.6+ while prominently supporting classic fast paced Nexuiz as a "Veteran's Mode" much like Havoc mode currently is or as a Mutator. And then leave the current default weapons to continue on their current path of development.

I do believe there is a significant community who play Nexuiz singleplayer only (which avoids most of the technical issues in the game), and are not particularly vocal on the forums here, but I am not sure how many.

Yeah I play singleplayer alot. I like to create matches against Pro bots or higher, often with different Mutators which are half the game for me. I'm not sure how many more there are like me.

[ai]

@Flying Steel:
If you want a CoD physics game or similar then go create one using DarkPlaces, it's free. Don't try to turn this game into that.

[Flying Steel]

For the record I hate call of duty, its weapons and its physics.

And ai is another me from a mirror parallel dimension of somekind, so whatever I say or whatever position I take he will always be there to take the exact opposite side, its just a law of the universe.

[k0jak]

Thanks for the in-depth post LordHavoc. The thing that drove away most of (ESR/warsow/quake) players was the earlier releases were so bad with lag issues and choppy movement (as well as being totally different to quakeworld/quake3/ style movemet) that they put the game 'down' so to speak after a few minutes of playing, with new releases a few of these people have said it has gotten better, but only a very very few...So the changes you are proposing do make sense, hopefully it will attract more people to play.

As for new players' I can't really comment, but I think it will bring new players, so I'm looking forward to it.

I will try out the server tomorrow before I leave for the weekend, or later-on this evening for the new settings.

[LordHavoc]

The only reason the Havoc player physics have such harsh sideways air friction (making bunny acceleration impossible, only useful for evasion or in combination with the laser to maintain momentum) is to make teamplay easier to play.

I'd really like to see discussion of this point - slow/fast physics and the teamplay impact of it, personally I enjoy FFA in Nexuiz but the teamplay always felt a bit tacked on, it's not very tactical when players can zip past an ambush or defense position.

Note: I do not mean tactical in the "realism shooter" sense, Nexuiz is not one of those cookie cutter games and never will be.