Friendly fire penality - Better with or without?

[MirceaKitsune]

While playing with my new campaign list I've been trying quite a bunch of team games with bots. As smooth and good as everything goes in team games in the latest SVN, in my opinion the team damage penalty is a big annoyance which comes like a loud noise in the middle of a good song. The penalty I'm talking about it the one where shooting a teammate by mistake takes you damage and can even kill you in many cases.

One problem is that there are many heated fights with lots of bots on each team, and often it's impossible to avoid hitting a team mate by mistake when all bots or players make a pile in the same place and shoot each other. It's quite unpleasant to find yourself suddenly exploding because you hit a teammate by mistake, especially in non-TDM team games where you might be heading for a key, domination point or flag and loose it just because of a forgotten rocket or grenade that hit a teammate.

A second thing is that well, this also seems to me a bit too exaggerated somehow and can't see its reason well. As long as friendly fire is disabled and the teammate takes no damage to your shots what's the reason to punish the player like that for a mistake? It's also totally unrealistic too imho... it's not like you have a magical bonding to all of your teammates so all their damage goes to you if you shoot them (sometimes I find that funny cuz it looks like God is blasting you for your mistake or something like that ). Another problem is that there are situations like forgetting plasma balls (Electro) or grenades (Mortar) which are still lying around and when leaving you suddenly find yourself damaged because behind you a stupid bot stepped over them and was damaged. That isn't even your fault really.

Personally I'd really really love to see this go. The camping damage penalty for Last Man Standing is one thing I agree with and it's a very good system against campers, but this is really not what I think someone would want in a team game. If this is there I guess it was probably made for some reason though, so if there's a strong reason for a penalty like that maybe it can just be changed to something else. For example, instead of being damaged on friendly fire change that to loosing a frag if you shoot a teammate too much by mistake, without dieing yourself. Or at least have a higher tolerance and deal a considerable amount of damage to teammates before being punished (allow you to shoot a teammate more before taking damage yourself). Or if there's a cvar for it maybe it should just be made non-default, that's the best idea so those who want it can still have it but not by default.

Just my ideas and view on this so if I'm wrong with anything do tell me. But yeah, I for one would play much more relieved with this gone from most servers and my defaults. So I thought to make a vote and see if others agree on changing this and want the same thing.

[Sepelio]

I have to admit the friendly fire is really god damn annoying. I've lost flags, or flag returns a multitude of times by team mates getting in the way. The thing that also annoys me is that when you hit a team mate it steals your velocity which has also cost me dearly at times.

[divVerent]

It is a very important feature for team games on public servers, and thus has to stay, no matter if it is good for campaign or not.

Also, I cannot imagine anyone dying for ACCIDENTALLY hurting a team mate. The damage is reduced to 20% of the original damage... so even a whole Nex shot does just 28 units of damage to you - and even less if you have armor. So if you die from mirror damage, you would have died from a single shotgun blast as well.

On the other hand, we have people on public servers who empty their whole MG on a team mate. Mirror damage makes them either learn or leave. Before mirror damage, these people did that for the duration of a whole match, or even more.

Also, friendly fire being off is being abused in team games already - by "Nex boosting" a team mate. It is just fair to pay some amount of health for doing that.

[MirceaKitsune]

Well div, first thing I can confirm is that I died many times by accidentally shooting team mates, most of the time in heated fights where things got really crowded, other times when I was shooting after someone from the enemy team and a team mate just popped out of nowhere in front of me, and a few times even by my own mistake when I forgot I'm in a team game and not in DM for a key moment

People shooting their teammates on public servers... if someone enters a server and does that it means they're there to grief and annoy people rather then play, and personally I think that's something that should be solved through kicking the person as for doing other offenses on the server if need be, rather then through a gameplay rule. As for boosting, the best thing to use in boosting a teammate is the laser, and since the laser takes minimal damage that penalty will be hardly even noticed by it so if someone wants to boost a teammate with minimal damage they can either way.

Anyway Div, if removing it isn't the best thing to do here are some of my ideas on how it could be changed to make those who are bothered by it happy too, if you can find any of them useful and good to apply:

- Have to deal a certain amount of damage at a time before being damaged yourself, as I posted above. For example, you must first shoot a team mate until 50 hit points damage to the person first without anything happening. Then when you shot that teammate even more for the mistake to be considered big, you can start loosing health or explode on the spot.

- Loose a frag instead of dieing as I said above. Shooting a team mate too much would just pop you up a message telling you you lost a frag and once you've done a certain amount of damage.

- A new idea I thought of since yesterday; Allow this penalty to take away all your armor and health, but health only down to 25 points. So if you have any armor and your health is over 25 (or 10 or something else), allow this to take all your armor away and decrease your health. If your health is under 25 or the chosen value though, the penalty would then not apply to you (and only take the rest of armor away if you have any). This would just punish you by making you vulnerable but would prevent the annoying deaths.

- A fourth idea, maybe not so bright but still. After doing too much team damage by mistake, your weapon could be disabled for 10-20 seconds or so (like it disappears when you run out of ammo in NixNex mode). You wouldn't loose any health or such, but your weapons would not work or exist for around 10 seconds as punishment.

Just random ideas if anyone can make use of them. Until then maybe this can be put to a cvar if it isn't already, so people can disable it from autoexec.cfg so it won't bother them in single player or campaigns at least.

[divVerent]

Well div, first thing I can confirm is that I died many times by accidentally shooting team mates, most of the time in heated fights where things got really crowded, other times when I was shooting after someone from the enemy team and a team mate just popped out of nowhere in front of me, and a few times even by my own mistake when I forgot I'm in a team game and not in DM for a key moment

If mirror damage kills you, you would have died from the next shot of the enemy anyway. It's really just a little edge.

[qupte]People shooting their teammates on public servers... if someone enters a server and does that it means they're there to grief and annoy people rather then play, and personally I think that's something that should be solved through kicking the person as for doing other offenses on the server if need be, rather then through a gameplay rule.[/quote]

I honestly think that this is done more by clueless players than by punks. So kicking is the wrong thing to do.

As for boosting, the best thing to use in boosting a teammate is the laser, and since the laser takes minimal damage that penalty will be hardly even noticed by it so if someone wants to boost a teammate with minimal damage they can either way.

Wrong. Nex boost is much stronger than a laser boost. Sure, this only helps on a few maps, but it is a trick used sometimes.

Anyway Div, if removing it isn't the best thing to do here are some of my ideas on how it could be changed to make those who are bothered by it happy too, if you can find any of them useful and good to apply:

- Have to deal a certain amount of damage at a time before being damaged yourself, as I posted above. For example, you must first shoot a team mate until 50 hit points damage to the person first without anything happening. Then when you shot that teammate even more for the mistake to be considered big, you can start loosing health or explode on the spot.

Too difficult to implement, so forget it.

- Loose a frag instead of dieing as I said above. Shooting a team mate too much would just pop you up a message telling you you lost a frag and once you've done a certain amount of damage.

That won't help with the clueless players who are used to DM and still have to learn about teamplay. They won't notice if they don't die of it.

- A new idea I thought of since yesterday; Allow this penalty to take away all your armor and health, but health only down to 25 points. So if you have any armor and your health is over 25 (or 10 or something else), allow this to take all your armor away and decrease your health. If your health is under 25 or the chosen value though, the penalty would then not apply to you (and only take the rest of armor away if you have any). This would just punish you by making you vulnerable but would prevent the annoying deaths.

That won't kill the clueless players...

- A fourth idea, maybe not so bright but still. After doing too much team damage by mistake, your weapon could be disabled for 10-20 seconds or so (like it disappears when you run out of ammo in NixNex mode). You wouldn't loose any health or such, but your weapons would not work or exist for around 10 seconds as punishment.

Not easy to do, but that MIGHT work.

Just random ideas if anyone can make use of them. Until then maybe this can be put to a cvar if it isn't already, so people can disable it from autoexec.cfg so it won't bother them in single player or campaigns at least.

Just like they can already disable mirror damage. On a server for "serious" matches like ladder or clan matches, doing so may indeed be a good option. This option is mainly intended for public servers.

[MirceaKitsune]

Found it, there is a cvar for it: g_mirrordamage defaulting to 0.2, but better off there's teamplay_default who can control these rules and set it to something else forever so that's the cvar to modify if anyone wants team damage off on local servers.

Looking through the related cvar list though, an idea came to my mind; Maybe I should make a menu patch for the cvar teamplay_default for the values 2, 3 and 4 and add it as a slider, so whoever makes a server can change the friendly fire setting as well (since some want friendly fire without punishment on for more realism while some don't so it won't be abused or annoying). This is what they do:

default teamplay setting in team games. 1 = no friendly fire, self damage 2 = friendly fire and self damage enabled 3 = no friendly fire, but self damage enabled 4 = obey g_mirrordamage and g_friendlyfire

Currently it defaults to 4. Would a patch get applied if I squeezed a slider or radio buttons for that in the Create menu (visible only when selecting team games there) with the three positions which would be: No friendly fire but self damage, Friendly fire and self damage, mirrodramage and friendly fire (the current rule with the penality)? Probably with a sub-slider for g_friendlyfire so others can set the friendly fire factor like in UT. Could be fun to try

[divVerent]

Make it radio buttons instead of a slider. Otherwise - sure, that would get in.

But why not simply keep teamplay at 4, and make two sliders (for friendly fire and for mirror damage)?

[Mute Print]

Mirrordamage is wonderful, especially on public servers. I'd like to assume that people have enough sense not to shoot teammates, but a fairly large amount of playing experience screams otherwise.

'Tactics' that were reduced with mirrordamage enabled include teamkills, weapon spam, and shooting teammates over trivial issues such as standing still for a few seconds.

[Alien]

I generally do this when my team camps too much by lasering them forward from the roof.

[MirceaKitsune]

Make it radio buttons instead of a slider. Otherwise - sure, that would get in.

But why not simply keep teamplay at 4, and make two sliders (for friendly fire and for mirror damage)?

Done. Made a slider for Friendly Fire and a checkbox for Mirror damage (since having a slider for mirror damage would look uglier then a checkbox and not be useful since I don't think anyone is interested in changing it's amount too). There are only two problems with this slider however:

1 - I was not able to figure out the code on how to make it dependent on selecting a team game only, so both the slider and checkbox are enabled in non-team games too which isn't right. Left a note where, should be a SetDependent setting of the chosen gametype.

2 - This further squeezes the menu and the settings in it. For a while I had a suggestion which I'll be making now; An Advanced menu should be made for the Create window where all the advanced settings like Antilag or map voting would be at which would be opened from a button just like the Mutators... button in the Create menu opens the mutators window. There should be an Advanced window like that so all settings won't be squeezed into the same Create window. Sadly I don't know how to create a new window either since as I mentioned a lot I only know simple code, but such would be needed if anyone can figure out how.

Patch download.