This is something that was recently brought up in another thread, but I've though about this more and more recently.

There are natural differences in skill between players. Faster reaction time. Better hand/eye coordination. Better strategy. Quicker thinking. Memorizing the layout of the maps. All of these things are based on the skill of the player.

Then there are other advantages that come from knowledge about the game. Many of these things I still have to learn. But when I first started playing Nexuiz, I didn't know about all of the alternate fire techniques of each weapon. I didn't know about certain details of laser jumping. I didn't know that jumping made you move forward faster (just learned that a couple weeks ago). I didn't know the effects of tweeking your FOV and mouse sensitivity. I didn't know any special binds for setting up zoom for all weapons or laser jumping. I didn't even know that splash damage went through floors and walls. I didn't know you could shoot a rocket in mid air and cause it to explode.

These things make a HUGE difference in the gameplay, because some of these tricks are pretty powerful. Brand new players who have experience in other FPS games will get their asses handed to them because they are still trying to shoot rockets at the floor to kill me with splash damage while I'm right clicking the rockets next to their head. I remember my early days in Nexuiz getting killed and thinking "WHAT?!?! That didn't even hit me!"

I've played with some advanced players and gotten my butt kicked. I know skill plays a role. However, in an even one-on-one matchup with just a RL or a shotgun, I tend to hold my own. I do well on the mistagib servers where things tend to be more even. Where I lose is in regular DM or CTF when they do these tricks that I don't know how to do, like weapon combos or funky laser jumping. Often they do things in Nexuiz that I didn't know could be done. I know that there are more tweeks and binds and tricks that I still have to learn yet. I still need to improve my overall skill, but I also know that these little tricks play a role as well.

I'm on the fence with it. Probably because I'm in between the two perspectives. I'm "partially" an advanced player, but I'm still somewhat new to Nexuiz.

Two points of view:
1) these things are pretty cool to study and learn over time. In some ways, it sort of makes the game a little interesting because there seems to be a whole world of stuff to learn. I come from a martial arts background, and in some ways this is like martial arts where you learn little tips and tricks over time to become "advanced". However, in competition, you do compete within your belt level.
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2) It takes away from the game because it's just not fair.The playing field is not level. A lot of these tricks are not documented, or not documented clearly. Ideally, this game should be a test of skill rather than a test of who has spent more time studying these little tips and tricks.

What are your thoughts?

I sorta already know what the advanced players are going to say. I'd really like to know what newer players think.

The keys to improving your gameplay are:
Improve your aim through practice, with all weapons. They all can be devastating when used properly. (even the crylink)
Improve your movement through practice, and by watching others. Speed, trickjumps, and laser/rocketjumping will let you move smarter than your enemy.
Learn the timing of the items, especially armour, strength, and megahealth
Learn the maps, and learn where people tend to move on them. This helps with prediction and map control. Control the map and you will win.
Play stronger players, and you will become stronger.
Have confidence in your actions.
Deceive your enemy.

Well i'm currently about to prepare a new thread.. 'Basic basics aka stuff you should know'. I'm writing it first in plain text as it will be rather big and will touch different matters and i'm not sure yet about all paragraphs and how to present it, but here is what i have so far: http://esteel.planetnexuiz.de/nexuiz/misc/nexbasics.txt
But that thing with explosions though walls is a good point to add to it
And sorry that text looks bad in mozilla as it does not wrap it.. no idea how to change that. Best download it and open it in some editor

That being said i still think its pretty similar to what you said about your belts.. people have a certain skill and a certain knowledge and can compete on that level. Sure its harder to separate them but still it depends on the time you spend to learn those basic tricks to improve. I basicly see no difference.

If you see something that blows your mind, feel free to ask about it.

I have helped a bunch of other players learn how to laserjump or use the RL's secondary.

Kozak6: i guess thats part of problem.. you first have to know what to ask for .As Dokujisan said, he thought at first those rockets exploded because they 'somehow hit me, no idea how.. maybe its a bad game'.. so he first would have had to know one can make them explode in mid air. And i guess then it would have been easy to think about mouse2

What happened to the noob map project? That could clear up issues for a lot of new players.

The only things I consider to be 'unfair' with Nexius (at least so far) are some of the console modifications that aren't generally known. I'm not sure how many of them there are, but some seem a leetle shady.

Dave makes two really interesting points that I had previously forgotten about.

Dave wrote:Learn the timing of the items, especially armour, strength, and megahealth
Learn the maps, and learn where people tend to move on them. This helps with prediction and map control. Control the map and you will win.

I read a thread once talking about k0jak's techniques for winning 1-on-1 matches. He said something about controlling the map, and it had a lot to do with learning the timing of the respawn of resources. Interesting. The closest that I've come to experiencing that is when I'm defending on Facing Worlds. I tend to circle throughout the base collecting items. I have sort of a pattern that I follow because I can time the respawn of items. I'm also getting used to knowing when the strength rune should be available.

I also recently experienced the second point (learn where people tend to move) in a match against Dave. It was me and TVR and another person against Dave and two other guys (one of which was damn good). Our team was losing early on. Toward the end of the match I switched to defense. The base has three main entrances, and it dawned on me that they tended to take the middle path into the base. I was able to stop quite a few incoming attacks just by myself because of that.

GunHammer wrote:The only things I consider to be 'unfair' with Nexius (at least so far) are some of the console modifications that aren't generally known. I'm not sure how many of them there are, but some seem a leetle shady.

http://www.alientrap.org/wiki/pmwiki.ph ... GameTweaks

http://www.bosskey.net/q3a/tips.html

this may not be for nexuiz but it has the same concepts. Worth a read.

http://forums.alientrap.local/viewtopic.php?t=1344
Please comment.. i'll make it look better though soon

Just to let people see what i'm up to and that i really think we try to help people and not keep our 'unfair advantages' to our selfs. Which i still think are not unfair, its just more knowledge like sportsman have better equipment, better training and YES better and more knowledge.

Thanks for the link, cyberfreak. I'd been wanting an etiquette guide. And your FAQ is equally usefull, esteel.

Just as learning maps is a part of getting better learning weapon combos and tricks etc is too, i rather like this since it makes it more interesting when theres room for improvement in many areas.

The thing that would need to be more clear is the basic stuff like weapon secondarys and basic environment stuff like the splash-though-walls. and laser jumps.

The noobmaps project is on ice, and its not looking like it will be revived anytime soon. It sounds like a nice idea, but the amount of work involved and the benefits from it seem not worth it. Some nicely formated quickstart guide in html of some other general displayformant would be mutch faster to produce and easier to maintain.

Overall more and better maintaind documentation are imo realy needed for Nexuiz, bot on the player and developer side.

Just found another example a few minutes ago
I was playing on the RBI server on the map Blood Prison CTF

Xeno is evidently known for hiding in a certain part of the map that I guess is difficult to get to. Well, TVR happens to know that spot, so he hid in that spot with the flag. No offense to either of those two, but it completely stunts gameplay to have things like that in CTF. I had the flag and in order for me to find out where he is, I would have to leave the game and spectate him.

I know that it is a flaw in the map design and not necessarily a flaw in Nexuiz, but it just gives another example of how gameplay in Nexuiz can be create unfair advantages like that and negatively affect gameplay.

ALL games have an imbalance between established and new players, to a greater or lesser extent. By design Nexuiz has a large imbalance, and that is just the way it is - it's neither "fair" nor "unfair".

The developers put in a huge amount of their own time for no reward, so they are free to develop the game in the direction they want. Dokujisan, your comments would make sense if you were talking about a commercial game - clearly commercial developers want a level playing field (so players don't feel ripped off) and they want to build a big playerbase (more money). Neither of these pressures exist in Nexuiz, which means that we have the opportunity to play a game that wouldn't be possible in the commercial arena.

One thing that comes to mind is that there could be done some kind of "Tutorial" like in UT2004. Where they bring up the movement (double clicking in one direction would make you dodge) and weapon combinations. And then put this tutorial with the menu options. Or alternatively make a demo named tutorial which new players could watch and grab a perspective on.
Though what esteel is writing is a good thing but some just hates to read (which is their loss sure) Like me, I won't even bother and I think watching something or trying it out for yourself is much more fun.

ai wrote:One thing that comes to mind is that there could be done some kind of "Tutorial" like in UT2004.

Once tZork and me started to map some tutorial maps, but the project grew over us, and soon we lost interest too It was the Noobmaps project, you still can find it's thread somewhere here on the forum. Maybe one days we should finish it, but two people is simply not enough for mapping those tutorials

Vendor wrote:Dokujisan, your comments would make sense if you were talking about a commercial game - clearly commercial developers want a level playing field (so players don't feel ripped off) and they want to build a big playerbase (more money). Neither of these pressures exist in Nexuiz, which means that we have the opportunity to play a game that wouldn't be possible in the commercial arena.

This has nothing to do with money. It has to do with making the game more enjoyable. That applies to commercial or open source. You can have that as your goal without making it an issue of money. I'm sure the developers of Nexuiz want the game to be as good as they can make it, regardless of whether they are getting paid or they are volunteering their time.

ai wrote:Or alternatively make a demo named tutorial which new players could watch and grab a perspective on.

That sounds like a great idea. That is why I was thinking of the idea of a demo displaying button presses, for that very reason.

C.Brutail wrote:

ai wrote:One thing that comes to mind is that there could be done some kind of "Tutorial" like in UT2004.

Once tZork and me started to map some tutorial maps, but the project grew over us, and soon we lost interest too It was the Noobmaps project, you still can find it's thread somewhere here on the forum. Maybe one days we should finish it, but two people is simply not enough for mapping those tutorials

Maybe the primary dev team should take a look at trying to integrate what you had done into the project and add on what was left for a major release version. It really would help with new people.

Back in the old forum i did some demos to explain the weapons and some basic stuff. However if you want to explain CTF or TDM you would need to have other people also and then you would need some sort of script first. But then you could show some pretty nice stuff.

Dokujisan wrote:This has nothing to do with money. It has to do with making the game more enjoyable. That applies to commercial or open source. You can have that as your goal without making it an issue of money. I'm sure the developers of Nexuiz want the game to be as good as they can make it, regardless of whether they are getting paid or they are volunteering their time.

I think it does have something to do with money, albeit indirectly. It is the "making the game enjoyable" part where it comes in - in a commercial game that implies "making the game enjoyable for as large a number of paying customers as possible, because that money is what drives our work". For Nexuiz, the work is only driven by how much volunteer work the developers are prepared to sacrifice - ie "making the game enjoyable for developers (to work on and play)".

That doesn't mean they aren't interested in making a game that is fun for everyone else, or that they don't care about new players - far from it, as can be seen by the huge amount of effort that esteel in particular has put in to documenting and writing guides.

I'm not aware that it is an explicit design goal to appeal to a mass market (I could be wrong!). The imbalances (between weapons, and particularly between newer and established players) are so obvious (and have been pointed out by many). Now the coders are clearly very competent, and yet haven't addressed these imbalances, which indicates that the kind of game they are trying to make, is one that isn't easy for new players. That gives them additional freedoms to take the game into areas that are new, and very interesting.

In short I think the devs are more than happy to do what they can for new players, but not at the expense of changing the gameplay they are aiming for.

As for learning the game, as with all FPS's, learning comes from playing and spectating players who can do stuff you can't. Once a newer player gets their head around the value of spectating, they will rapidly improve.

I kinda fail to see those unbalanced weapons. Granted http://mensa.ath.cx/~polzer/nexlog/totals.html shows that some weapons are use more often to kill someone but every weapon has its use but that statistic is heavily influenced by the ctf game mode on one of the two servers. In normal deathmatch the machinegun is fine but its too hard to aim with it while its almost an overpowered weapon in the large and open ctf maps. I'd pick the mortar or electro over machinegun and rocketlauncher in non-ctf matches. The fact that the laser and shotgun are not used often to kill someone is kinda clear too. The laser is no real weapon and the shotgun feels too much like a starting weapons although its rather strong and underestimated by a lot of people.
But maybe you can tell us what you think is unbalanced.

Honestly i really think Nexuiz is one of the more beginner friendly games as it does not use uber leet trickjumps like quake 1/2/3/4.

As usual, stahl is correct.

The lack of uber 1337 trick jumps make Nexuiz a hell of a lot easier for new players, and our community is super helpful.

And, the Nexuiz weapons are generally well balanced. The Crylink isn't terribly useful, but I am sure someone is working on it. Other than that, it's pretty much fine.

To give you something to compare Nexuiz to, go install Enemy Territory Fortress (you need to install Enemy Territory first, but it's all free).

Enemy Territory Fortress is standard team fortress stuff.

To even be able to kill another player, you need to be able to bunnyhop around each map at Mach III. To capture a flag, you need to be so perfect at bunnyhopping that you can do it with your monitor turned off and a hand behind your back.

These people have been playing TF since Q1, so the concept of a new player is completely unthinkable. You will be laughed at and ridiculed, and then kicked and/or banned for not following bizarre gentlemen's rules like not being allowed to fight in the middle of a map.

Really, Nexuiz isn't that bad at all. You can figure it out readily enough if you stick around for a couple weeks, and you can actually ask questions or ask for help if you need it.

I was speaking to esteel, i will look into writing a advanve tdm guide for the current maps in the 2on2 ladder, going over positions, item's spawn locations and more, if it helps to improve people's level of game and skill.

As i understood you, you want me to write a general TDM guide first so that you can then add some map specific things..

Well yes, i was going to go specifically into each map after.

That's awesome. Looking forward to it!

esteel wrote:Please comment.. i'll make it look better though soon

OK, a comment, or rather a suggestion:

I have seen that you announce the CTF guide with a tinyURL.... which people with
a brain as small as mine can't remember anyway.

Wouldn't it be nice to put the learning docs (basics guide, ctf guide, links to demos...) on www.nexuiz.com/help and announce that page?

Such a URL could easily be remembered when noobs see it ingame.

Wasn't it esteel who made some cool demos about laser-jumping?

As mentioned above:
What about just adding them to the release as "Tutorial demos"? Probably by adding some "say-comments" in them to show *how* some things work.

Sorry if this idea is dumb, but it just jumped into my mind.

I can't do the most tricky stuff as well. I am too clumsy so I am happy when I don't kill myself.