Skill punishment

[Qantourisc]

Ideas seem to be popping into my head about nexuiz

How about a gameplay balance settings that punishes the players that are owning the field ? This way the skilled player don't scare away the unskilled players ... (It's a feature that can be on or off)?

But since this takes a bit of time (50% goes to adding it into the menus ) i'd like to ask first.

[esteel]

The way you seem to want that feature it needs to be very dynamic. On minstagib for example it often happens that you have 2-3 very good players fighting for the first place and then some more being cannon fodder for those players. Your feature would have to lower the effectivness of all three to make the field more even without being too harsh to a single one of them..

[Qantourisc]

hmmm miniinstagib +damage modifier .... that'll be VERRY tricky ... boost the refirerate of the cannon fodder ?

[C.Brutail]

WTF? Punishment becouse I'm doing good? That's a realy stupid idea!
Deathmatch is about skill. If you have skill, you win, if you don't you loose. It's simple.
Given the nature of our community, I don't have the fear about scaring away noob people.

There are two kind of people: one that dowloads nexuiz, plays, get owned, quits, delets. Downloads/buys game a, got owned, delets. Downloads/buys game b-c-d etc. got owned, delets all. Finds CS, installs, owns all, by using wh :F

The others are playing nexuiz, and when they got owned, they try again. Play again. Get better in time. Owning those, who got them owned a several days/weeks/months ago.

So, if you say, a player should be punished, becouse it plays good, you punish him, becouse he has spent nuff time to excercise, and get better.

About the idea: LOL

[morfar]

I agree with Brutal. The ones that are good in fps games are the ones that have spent lots of time practising Or maybe some are just gifted. But they should not be punished for being good.
There is at least one "Beginners only" server out there.. They should join that one and practise

[tZork]

I basicaly agree with cb and morfar for dm and similar gamemodes. wth is the point in gettin better if you get slaped with something like this. At last if the "punishment" makes it harder to play. Somethin like fragrator could work (ei the very good player gets 0.25 frags per kill etc) but its hard to control without a centeral score keeper server. without one the skiller will join a server and have untill the system recognises his/her skills to get a fragvantage. Imo skill equalization tend seems to be a bit like high gamma - makes it all flat and dull.

What would be nice is some way of encuraging more teamwork in the teambased modes. A very basic way of doing this would be to half the dmg (or 2/3, pick a number) when hes to far from his teammates. It could perhaps also lower the gunship phenonomen a bit (one player with better aim/movement then the others totaly overpowering the other teams defense)

[Urmel]

the DCC teamers already run a newbie server, which I think is very useful idea, if.... all thats missing is just that what tZork suggested.

So I voted for YES, you dont have to enable that freature on every servaz.

[ai]

I agree with Brutail and morf. Including/inventing something like that will totaly change gameplay and if we were to look at this player vs player perspective it would not work out. You can look at it this way... two carnis (both equaly strong) standing right in front of each other, both have shotgun (exact same model, exact same round, from exact same manufacturer) the first guy shoots and the other one and he survives with much health to spare, the other one shoots and the first guy is blown to bits. Now I would want THAT shotgun

Anyway.. enough rambling, NO punishment.

[Psychcf]

if they did include it, it wouldn't be turned on by default, and mos people would probably leave it off. The beginners server idea is better anyway.

[Vendor]

NO TO PUNISHMENT!

Punishing players for showing skill is a bad idea for all the reasons people have stated above. If there is a problem with newer players having very little chance, then it makes more sense to tweak some of the default settings - in other words make changes that are the same for ALL players. A level playing field.

You could rot health and armour over 100 proportional to the square of the excess for instance (so if you have 300 its going to rot VERY fast!), or reduce the "rot delay" time for large values of health/armour.
You could reduce the power of various weapons.
Players could spawn with 50 armour instead of zero.
Reduce hitbox sizes or introduce "headshot" code to make Nex-sprees harder.
Spawn protection to prevent the more skilled players spawn killing.

You could probably add more to the list - the point is that the game can be made more "newbie-friendly" WITHOUT "punishing" better players, if the will to do so is there.

On the idea of new-player servers: I was an admin for three years on a UT99 new player server. The only way to make that work, and prevent ****ers using it as a warmup server or just being unpleasant was to have a team of nearly 20 with kick and/or ban powers dedicated to keeping it clean. We would personally kick something of the order of 1000 times per week, and I had to clean the banlist weekly (around 100 bans per week). In addition we had automated systems that would remove another 2-3000 players per week. Running a new player server is hard.
I have popped in to the "new players" server that DCC run to try and give help and advice to new players - all credit to DCC as well, but unfortunately there are enough skilled and semi-skilled players owning there to frustrate the genuine new players. New-player-server-specific-settings are of limited use as well - if the settings are too far away from "regular" settings, then the new players end up learning the wrong game. Instagib could be useful for new players, allowing them to concentrate on just movement, position and aim, but for the fact that in Nexuiz it is very easy to hit other players, and so skilled players own there as well.

In short if the community wants to make things easier for newer players then tweaking some of the settings is much fairer than punishing skilled players, which in my view is a bad idea. The community doesn't have to make it easier for newer players though, but I would comment that I have introduced the game to 6 or 7 experienced UT players, all but one of who gave up because they felt as though they were just cannon fodder.

Personally I actually like the game just the way it is, but it would be nice to encourage more to play it.