there is so much anger on this forum

maybe some people need to re think their mind set about all this. maybe we will get a lot more done that way

and that's all I'm going to say.

you're not helping either, however.

tundramagi wrote:

Yoda almighty wrote:there is so much anger on this forum

maybe some people need to re think their mind set about all this. maybe we will get a lot more done that way

and that's all I'm going to say.

Some people want to remove things that developers added to the game, those people themselves choose not to be developers themselves (and continually choose that non-path over long periods of time), they are unhappy that the developers do not remove those things that the developers decided to add to the game: they are unhappy that the developers do not obey them.

This is about obedience, the developers are not obeying the pro-gamers, some of the pro-gamers find this gross-insolence disgusting.

If the pro-gamers stopped pestering the developers about removing features that the devs added, there might be less stress on the devs, and yes faster development... but the "pros" don't want development... they want things removed.

So yes, you are most definitly correct: less stress from the demands of the "pros" (sometimes called "the community"), happier people that actually do things, less fear from other people that might want to become developers that their contribution could be ripped out and thrown away at the behest of the "community"/"pro-gamers"/"reasonable people who everyone should listen to and obey".

Actually, I would consider myself one of those "pro-gamers" (Which btw is a stupid term, I prefer to say competitive)... And i'm a developer. I see both sides of the argument, and yes most of the time other competitive players are just being ignorant to change. But some changes are genuinely bad for the game. You see, one major problem with the 2.6 balance is that it is designed from a BAD PLAYERS point of view (No offense LordHavoc.. But when I asked, you didn't even know what strafing is...).. Balance should be designed by the community for the community (hah), with small moderations as to avoid making the game elitist. The unfortunate part is that.. I found out a good portion of the competitive community are lazy.. They don't want to do any work, at all.... This can clearly be seen with my "Design Your Own Nexuiz" thread, where I asked the community to make their own balance. But if the community is the one making the balance, we can be assured that people will like it.. Unlike were if ONE PERSON designs the entire balance of the game. (By the way, almost everyone I have shown this new balance to hates it.. And claims they will leave the game if it is added -- I myself will probably help fork, or leave.. if it comes to it.)

Now, personally I see there to be no reason to add the fireball gun. Sure we removed the tag, but that doesn't mean we need to add anything. To be honest, the fireball is a sad attempt at a gun. It does take no skill, and the balance of it (Although I realize it's still subject to change) is less than fun. Everyone I have talked to doesn't like the implementation of it, although they do like the idea. I think adding this gun would put a wedge into the community even more, and i'm sure it's eventually going to split.

I have a proposition for the fireball gun.

instead of a "fireball gun" could we instead make it a "flame thrower" with very low range, and medium damage, but damage over time for a set amount of time, or until the player that is "on fire" jumps into a lake. also, we can say that it has very low ammo capacity, so you can't spam with it.

I'm not trying to be rude. I really don't think div attempts to be nice. He just tries to be the best developer he can be. The communication aspect is not really his area of focus. Programming is his focus. He would probably be happier if he only had 1-2 other developers to chat with.

Unfortunately, that isn't healthy for the project if he is the main person to speak with about changes in nexuiz.

TVR wrote:

Flying Steel wrote:... I find it kind of useful for shooting around corners ...

The only issue with the current Hagar secondary is it requires absolutely perpendicular surfaces; it is the only weapon that is affected by wall details.

Well then it should probably be made to bounce like the other bouncing projectiles, disregarding graphical details or whatever. About half of the weapons have attacks that bounce around corners, and if I have understood you correctly, you are saying they don't have this problem.

Flying Steel wrote:... It also needs to use ballistic ammo, not have its own ammo type to itself ...

Which would result in a lost in intuitiveness, unsimplified fractions of ammo consumption, such as 10/120 bullets per rifle shot, are confounding.

That seems like it is more of a UI issue though. The ammo readout could just tell you how many shots you have left with the weapon you are currently holding, primary and secondary.

Either way, I don't think the rifle is going anywhere, so combining shell and bullet ammo can't really make this issue worse.

Flying Steel wrote:... The explosives ammo type already does this to an extreme degree ...

Each rocket amounts to ~35 damage per unit, consistent across the three existing weapons.

Well that isn't really very obvious or intuitive at all. And it is subject to alot of change with future rebalances. So unless there is going to be an overhaul, the ammo system is what it is, no point in worrying about it IMO.

Samual wrote:The unfortunate part is that.. I found out a good portion of the competitive community are lazy.. They don't want to do any work, at all.... This can clearly be seen with my "Design Your Own Nexuiz" thread, where I asked the community to make their own balance.

I created a balance mod, for your mod system. I just wasn't sure if it was still wanted, with the 2.6 weapon balance overhaul and everything. But I'd be happy to submit the latest version.

(By the way, almost everyone I have shown this new balance to hates it.. And claims they will leave the game if it is added -- I myself will probably help fork, or leave.. if it comes to it.)

As an alternative to the fork or leave options, maybe it is time to make more aggressive use of the Mutator Arena system, so we can use whichever weapon balance we want upon the 2.6 release. Maybe do the same with physics sets. The popular Instagib and Minstagib use the Mutator menu.

Now, personally I see there to be no reason to add the fireball gun. Sure we removed the tag, but that doesn't mean we need to add anything. To be honest, the fireball is a sad attempt at a gun. It does take no skill, and the balance of it (Although I realize it's still subject to change) is less than fun. Everyone I have talked to doesn't like the implementation of it, although they do like the idea. I think adding this gun would put a wedge into the community even more, and i'm sure it's eventually going to split.

If worse comes to worst, the weapon could be radically rebalanced while still retaining its core feature- damage radius without detonation (and setting folks on fire). Then all you need is range-based-homing in another weapon and a melee (perhaps with shield capability) weapon and you have every possible weapon feature in Nexuiz.

Dokujisan wrote:While it's often true that people tend to resist change as a rule (human nature), I don't think that is the case here, not when so many people are giving common complaints. I mean I have not heard from one person (outside of this thread) that does NOT think that the HLAC is overpowered. I think that is a pretty universal opinion, or at least a very popular one. Same as when the crylink was overpowered in many 2.4.2SVN revisions. When we brought up the complaint back then, we got the same response ... "oh, only a few people are really complaining".

HLAC is 1. not overpowered (or it would be #1 in the weapon stats), and 2. will get changed a lot in 2.6 anyway (although I think it's secondary is overpowered in the 2.6 balance).

Anyway, there is a clear trend: there's two groups of players: "pro-gamers" and regular players (you call them "noobs").

pro-gamers hate ANY sort of change, and complain violently if their fps goes down from 300fps to 280fps because a tiny graphics change was made somewhere. They would prefer the game to show solid colored surfaces everywhere, dark for the map, and bright for the enemies. pro-gamers generally hate changes that require them to learn something, and would generally prefer Nexuiz to become a clone of the game they come from (mostly Q3A). They never help other people in a game, as all they care for is winning.

regular players don't care much for most changes, but generally like changes (and also features like the hook or jetpack, as using them gives them an edge over the pro-gamer crowd who refuse to learn using these features because they believe they are "lame"). as they make the game more interesting to them.

And indeed, most changes in the last time were made in favor of the regular players, and against the pro-gamers, in order to let "new" players have more fun in the game.

If you think every single thing done for Nexuiz is wrong, why don't you go and fork it? Clearly the problem is that there is two groups of players of the same game who want entirely different things. We can't fulfill the wishes of both groups in a single game.

Very recently, antilag was "fixed" and that caused the shotgun to be very powerful. That is the most recent complaint within the past week or so.

The shotgun in base Nexuiz is clearly NOT overpowered, but most likely will be in 2.6 (per LordHavoc's change).

A game like Nexuiz really needs to evolve over time, absolutely. Change can be a really good thing, but only if it is well thought out. All of the weapon changes over the past year seem to be a bit random and just not very focused on improving the fundamentals of Nexuiz gameplay, or in focusing the style on something more futuristic.

All the weapon changes over the past year were based on weapon balance statistics. If you claim the changes were random, you'd also claim the statistics were random, which they were not (in fact, after each iteration it took longer to see a trend in the statistics, as the weapons were much closer together).

And if you get feedback from your server - why don't you share it? Doing so should be an elementary responsibility for anyone hosting a server of a development release. The Ninjaz and you failing at doing so is the major reason why much feedback is often not even seen by any of the developers. For example, it is entirely new to me that the ghost weapon items are irritating to some people - as the people in the development IRC channel generally like them, and also the players of the Spidflisk mod liked them.

Dokujisan wrote:I'm not trying to be rude. I really don't think div attempts to be nice. He just tries to be the best developer he can be. The communication aspect is not really his area of focus. Programming is his focus. He would probably be happier if he only had 1-2 other developers to chat with.

Unfortunately, that isn't healthy for the project if he is the main person to speak with about changes in nexuiz.

Guess what? I never WANTED to be the main person for that. I was FORCED into that position by nobody else willing to do anything.

But thank you. Good to know you're one of the backstabbers too. All I do is obviously wrong, as you say. It is easy to complain about the work of others. It is easy to demand stuff to get removed. Anyone can do THAT. But try actually DOING something for the project, instead of whining over every change that might allow someone else to beat you in a game because you are too lazy to learn using it to your advantage.

Yoda almighty wrote:there is so much anger on this forum

maybe some people need to re think their mind set about all this. maybe we will get a lot more done that way

and that's all I'm going to say.

EXACTLY.

Instead of always complaining about every thing that changes, why can't they be CONSTRUCTIVE?

But no, that would be WORK.

Anyway, as for added weapons - it's up to the decision of the mappers whether they will be used or not. Mappers are free to place them if they like them. If a mapper does not like them, he shall not place them. A weapon does not hurt the game just because it's available in the code, and each weapon has its place. However, this place is not always "on every single map at least 2 times", like the Nex seems to be usually placed.

Oh, now that you brought it up (haven't read through all the posts), I think the ghost items are a bit too visible. I have never mentioned it before because I wanted to try it out some more and see if I could get used to it. I still haven't tried it fully, but my initial reaction was that certain items looked like they had popped but in fact they hadn't. The biggest issue here was the armour. It looked to me as it has spawned, but then I realized it had yet to do that.
After this I took a closer look on the other items and did see that they were a bit too visible, perhaps making them a tad more transparent.

But generally, I like the ghost items and I don't want them to go.

Samual wrote:But some changes are genuinely bad for the game. You see, one major problem with the 2.6 balance is that it is designed from a BAD PLAYERS point of view (No offense LordHavoc.. But when I asked, you didn't even know what strafing is...)..

This is why it's getting rebalanced on the future nexuiz balancing server - so it can match how players can ACTUALLY use the weapons, and not the theory LordHavoc used to design this.

Also, LordHavoc certainly knows about strafing, I bet he just didn't understand the way you explained. I know that because I had lots of discussions with him about that topic (e.g. also regarding strafebot, or previously regarding optimizing player physics so strafejumping doesn't have such a large impact on player speed).

That the new balance is intentionally focused on new players is true. The goal is to find what makes new players download the game, play it once, and in 99.9% of the cases delete it immediately afterwards. Obviously, something is wrong with the game from the perspective of a new player. And this has to be fixed. Whether it is the weapon balance I am not convinced. It's sure ONE part, but far from everything. And clearly, in SUCH a case, experienced players simply have no IDEA what could be wrong, as they are used to it, so indeed newbies HAVE to be asked, and their opinion considered most. And incidentally, this is exactly what LordHavoc did. He let some people he knows play the game, and let them tell him what they found weird. One part of it was the weak shotgun, and the slow rockets. Another was the insanely fast player movement of many people.

Balance should be designed by the community for the community (hah), with small moderations as to avoid making the game elitist.

The time of "by the community" is long over ever since people started to "offer" destructive critics only. Remove this, revert that, never touch anything, release 2.6 as an identical copy of 2.4.2... that can't be it. To get more say in these things, "the community" should become more constructive and actively help - and not complain louder, which is what currently appears to be done.

Now, personally I see there to be no reason to add the fireball gun. Sure we removed the tag, but that doesn't mean we need to add anything. To be honest, the fireball is a sad attempt at a gun. It does take no skill, and the balance of it (Although I realize it's still subject to change) is less than fun. Everyone I have talked to doesn't like the implementation of it, although they do like the idea. I think adding this gun would put a wedge into the community even more, and i'm sure it's eventually going to split.

The fireball gun is intended as a workalike to the Quake 2 BFG10k, without being extremely unbalanced. If you hated the BFG10k, you'll hate the fireball gun. This is also such a case - all the "progamers" in Quake 2 indeed hated the BFG, and found using or even collecting it "lame". That then an enemy got the gun, and killed them with it, made the gun MORE "lame" in their eyes.

That it takes no skill is a lie though. It is quite easy to run away before the thing detonates, and get only a small amount of damage or none.

ai wrote:Oh, now that you brought it up (haven't read through all the posts), I think the ghost items are a bit too visible. I have never mentioned it before because I wanted to try it out some more and see if I could get used to it. I still haven't tried it fully, but my initial reaction was that certain items looked like they had popped but in fact they hadn't. The biggest issue here was the armour. It looked to me as it has spawned, but then I realized it had yet to do that.
After this I took a closer look on the other items and did see that they were a bit too visible, perhaps making them a tad more transparent.

But generally, I like the ghost items and I don't want them to go.

Alpha got reduced now, please try again.

Hmm, the armour is better but the other items are too transparent. A middleground of the current setting and the old one would fit I believe (making it less transparent). I believe it's the armours bright color which makes it stand out so much, nothing to do about.
In darker maps (like Bloodprison) the ghost items are barely visible. I think one just have to live with that the armour is a bit more visible than normal items without fullbright.

Trying a value in between now... try this one.

Is there a way to disable ghost items?

divVerent wrote:And incidentally, this is exactly what LordHavoc did. He let some people he knows play the game, and let them tell him what they found weird. One part of it was the weak shotgun, and the slow rockets. Another was the insanely fast player movement of many people.

As someone who has never seriously played any other FPS before Nexuiz, I have never (and I mean not a single time) thought the rockets are slow. There's just no way a "regular gamer" who "likes most changes" would even notice something like that unless there was another game they like to make the comparison with -- so by making the rockets faster you're just making Nexuiz more like that other game, you're not making Nexuiz any more newbie-friendly.

As for fast player movement, I didn't think "that's weird, I hate this game" -- I realised I've just found a FPS that actually has some depth and is worth investing my time in, and all I wanted to know is "how do I do that".

divVerent wrote:And incidentally, this is exactly what LordHavoc did. He let some people he knows play the game, and let them tell him what they found weird. One part of it was the weak shotgun, and the slow rockets. Another was the insanely fast player movement of many people.

Yeah, those seem like the things that stand out the most. But 2000 IPS is still too fast for the rockets IMO, because it makes the laser guided and remote detotation features more or less useless do to lag and human reflex limits. I think trying it at 1500 on the test server might be a good idea, that's still almost twice as fast as default, but might allow the rocket special features to become useful again, which are what make it unique.

The time of "by the community" is long over ever since people started to "offer" destructive critics only. Remove this, revert that, never touch anything, release 2.6 as an identical copy of 2.4.2... that can't be it. To get more say in these things, "the community" should become more constructive and actively help - and not complain louder, which is what currently appears to be done.

Yeah that's what I was saying earlier. It feels like there is a small vocal minority that opposes any or almost any change by flaming. They don't want a contructive discussion or specific, rational debate, because then a reasonable change might get through their net. They want the next release to be a clone of the last and will repeat this as many times and in as many ways as is needed to make themselves seem much bigger and more important than they are, to make anyone who disagrees look foolish and in the minority of opinion, and thereby to ultimately make nothing happen. [/rant]

ai wrote:Btw, it's 'ai' with lowercase letters, not uppercase.

Still much better than "francinator" LOL, just had my shock of the day

I think the idea beneath camping rifle isnt bad, and it would fit maybe even better if it would shoot some plasma-like particle as div mentioned, the model itself is nice but maybe should need some tuning to match the atmosphere. Also it would be cool if it wouldnt loose too much damage after penetrating walls, or it could have a special "heat sensor function" for secondary instead so you can look through the walls and shoot the enemy with this weapon.

Hehe, that idea is actually not bad for a secondary - but I fear this would easily be abused as a generic wallhack... but I'll consider it. Maybe this function could cost cells

You're the first one who's proposing a constructive alternative to the current secondary (which is fine, I think, but this idea of yours is fine too).

Flying Steel wrote:

divVerent wrote:And incidentally, this is exactly what LordHavoc did. He let some people he knows play the game, and let them tell him what they found weird. One part of it was the weak shotgun, and the slow rockets. Another was the insanely fast player movement of many people.

Yeah, those seem like the things that stand out the most. But 2000 IPS is still too fast for the rockets IMO, because it makes the laser guided and remote detotation features more or less useless do to lag and human reflex limits. I think trying it at 1500 on the test server might be a good idea, that's still almost twice as fast as default, but might allow the rocket special features to become useful again, which are what make it unique.

That's my opinion too, but LordHavoc really insists on >=2000 (currently 2200), so I'm not going to change that until after 2.6 is out with these settings. Even though I don't know any other game with THAT fast rockets...

vomit wrote:Is there a way to disable ghost items?

Cannot be done, sorry. Well, could be made a server option, but certainly no client option.

(Just making it a serverside option... will be called g_ghost_items)

I tested the new ghost settings and it seems fine. Naturally, fullbright, health and armour (big as well as small) will be more visible than the weapons and ammo. But I think it is ok right now. It might turn out that other people will think it's too transparent (based on darker maps), but we just have to wait and see if they say anything about it.
Personally, I can live with this.

After some days ghost items arent too distracting for me either, the first times it was just horrible, but i got used to it. However plz plz plz just turn the opacity down more, the problem is that when you are fighting you can see items rolling constantly in the edge of your eye that are not even there, or make opacity a LITTLE range dependant (like further items has half of the opacity). Anyhow, this value is really too high in my opinon, I wonder if its only my taste or others found it a little distracting too.

I also have an idea for the crylink too: it can be more unique if the balls would bounce more, like 4-5 times, so this way on small rooms it could be very usable even with the havoc mode refire speed. Also after each bounce it could loose like 20% of its power so it wont be overpowered.

About camping rifle heatsensor, the way wallhacking-function could be set to display enemies who are further from the wall much less opaque and on long distance they should be invisible. Also camping rifle could have a separated "ammo", just like jetpact had originally, so when you watch through wall the weapon is loosing this "ammo". (i mean not a pickable, its like energy, it regenerates, but takes LONG. to to fill up. Like you can watch through wall for 2 secs but then it takes 10 sec to regenerate) Or maybe even better, the weapon could heat up, and after a few seconds it could start damaging the player because its so hot. This way the special vision cannot be used forever.

About nex: I also sent this recommendation earlier, please tell what do you think about it! Right now Nex and Camping rifle are way too similar, camping rifle was made to replace nex on long range, and with proper bullet antilag it might be good in the future. But my recommendation is to set Nex a range dependant damage and push, because its an energy beam, and energy discipates after long range in the air, am I right? So this way camping rifle could FINALLY replace nex on long range.

FraNcoTirAdoR wrote:Like you can watch through wall for 2 secs but then it takes 10 sec to regenerate) Or maybe even better, the weapon could heat up, and after a few seconds it could start damaging the player because its so hot. This way the special vision cannot be used forever.

That is a good idea, and there is even kind of an explanation for it- it uses short wave length radiation like x-rays to see through walls, but the excess radiation so close to the user will kill him after about a minute of continued use.

More importantly though, it doesn't require two forms of ammunition, which would have been too complex, IMO.

But my recommendation is to set Nex a range dependant damage and push, because its an energy beam, and energy discipates after long range in the air, am I right?

Replace "energy" with "ion" and that statement is both true and fits the visuals of the Nex "beam". And its even true in a vacuum, the charged particles push away from each other, dispersing and getting less dangerous over time (which basically means range/distance).

The Nex is supposed to get stronger over distance. So the further the enemy, the bigger the damage dealt. This will make the Nex less valuable in close combat (which has been a problem in earlier versions).

If you really want an explanation of why it gets stronger over distance (even though it's not necessary as nothing up till now really has an explanation, so why start now), then see it like this; The beam collects energy from the air (whatever particles suits you, protons, electrons whatever) thus it gets stronger and more dangerous. When it hits solid matter it either dissipates (everything is released into the solid matter without much damage) or makes a little explosion.

This idea to making the Nex stronger over distance has been brought up before and it's a good one. As it won't be as effective in close combat.

ai wrote:The Nex is supposed to get stronger over distance. So the further the enemy, the bigger the damage dealt. This will make the Nex less valuable in close combat (which has been a problem in earlier versions).

If you really want an explanation of why it gets stronger over distance (even though it's not necessary as nothing up till now really has an explanation, so why start now), then see it like this; The beam collects energy from the air (whatever particles suits you, protons, electrons whatever) thus it gets stronger and more dangerous. When it hits solid matter it either dissipates (everything is released into the solid matter without much damage) or makes a little explosion.

This idea to making the Nex stronger over distance has been brought up before and it's a good one. As it won't be as effective in close combat.

But then whats the point of camping rifle and its wall penetration bullets? Also my idea is this because of the game's title, NEXuiz, so its means nex should be a strong weapon, but if it gets too weak in close range (and dont forget ALL the stock maps the game comes with are small/small-medium ranged ones), then people wouldnt be able to fight with nex effectively on stock maps, its importance would reduce way too much. The current problem is that nex is way too universal in ranges, unlike ANY other weapons (execpt MG, but its fine i think)

ai wrote:The Nex is supposed to get stronger over distance.

Well then it at least seems like either you or the dev tracker has it backwards:

"The values used above give a Nex that is very powerful near the player (it does a lot of damage and gives a big push), however at a great distance it does minimal damage and no push."

divVerent wrote:All I do is obviously wrong, as you say.

That is not what I said.

divVerent wrote:But try actually DOING something for the project

The one thing that I can not be accused of is NOT doing something for the project. I've poured countless hours into doing the things for Nexuiz that should be done by the alientrap team. I've put countless hours into conversations with people and helped manage or spearhead lots of Nexuiz projects. What helps is that I actually get along with most everybody in the community.

Among community members who are not developers, I've probably put more hours into improving Nexuiz than anyone.

divVerent wrote:And if you get feedback from your server - why don't you share it?

Pfft.. I thought I already explained that. Who are we going to share this information with? You? Nobody enjoys talking with you. You are not pleasant to converse with, and you have a tendency to disregard things anyway.

divVerent wrote:HLAC is 1. not overpowered (or it would be #1 in the weapon stats)

This is a good example, you have always referred to statistics a lot in your arguments about weapon balance, but there is a flaw to relying so much on statistics. They don't account for human behavior. To really understand the issue, you have to observe human behavior and figure out how that might affect any statistics that you are reading. For example, I never use the HLAC because it feels like a lame weapon. It's not fun to use. Other advanced players have said the same thing. I feel like a dirty whore when I use the HLAC, like I committed a sin against the gods of nexuiz. I felt the same way about the crylink and machinegun, when those weapons were previously overpowered. Weapons are not fun (for advanced players) when they can obliterate people in seconds by simply holding down a button, and without requiring much skill.

(note: this is also why the fireball weapon is a bad idea, in theory)

divVerent wrote:pro-gamers hate ANY sort of change

This is not always the case. That is an oversimplification. The truth is that you don't relate to, and you don't understand, pro-gamers, so you make these wild generalizations about them....like this one...

divVerent wrote:They never help other people in a game, as all they care for is winning.

This is pure crap. There are a number of us advanced players who have spent countless hours training people and improving their skills. That is largely what the batcave servers were for. Many of us worked on a Nexuiz bootcamp project specifically for this purpose. Admit it, you really don't know anything about advanced players. From here on out, you should stop talking about advanced players as if you know them, because you clearly do not know them.

divVerent wrote:And indeed, most changes in the last time were made in favor of the regular players, and against the pro-gamers, in order to let "new" players have more fun in the game.

This is a flawed approach. I explained this pretty well in IRC yesterday in the dev channel. The reason why this is a flawed approach is that the goal should be to have EVERY player become an advanced player (someday). However, if the game is not setup with very much depth of gameplay, then there is nothing of interest for advanced players. So the theory of lowering the ceiling to make it fun for new players will eventually result in those people being disinterested in the game over the longterm (much like a lot of Nexuiz regulars have started to become recently).

Instead, the goal should to properly develop the gameplay so it does have depth to it, but also work on ways to more quickly bring new players up to intermediate skill level so they can actually enjoy the game for its depth.

The game should always evolve, but it should evolve properly.

FraNcoTirAdoR wrote:Still much better than "francinator" LOL, just had my shock of the day

haha. sorry. I couldn't think of your exact name at the time.
If it is any consolation, mikeeusa called me "doujuk". o_O