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.

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..

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

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

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Don't put it down so quickly.

What every game needs is a way to attract new players and keep it attractive for a while.
The Beginner servers like DCC are a good idea but nobody can guarantee that good players
aren't using them as a target practice ground.

I think every game needs something like a beginners' mode and 2-3 servers using them.
And this mode may also include punishing players that are too skilled. This way newbie
players are still playing the game as it is played on other (non-beginner) servers, so
there IS a learning curve. You're just punished if you are too good and at one point
the game becomes so unattractive for the skilled players that he's leaving.
This can be done in a lot of ways, for example lowering weapon damage.

In general a beginners' mode should enable a newbie player to stay alive longer.
Nothing is more discouraging than being nexed over and over again. Vendor gave some
nice ideas here like every player starting with armor, reducing weapon damage, reducing
hitbox sizes and spawn protection (!!!). Spawn protection would be nice for CTF anyway,
lots of respawn spots that are asking for respawn camping on CTF maps. Some of these
changes like weapon damage and hitboxes might be counter-productive as newbies are not
learning to play the real Nexuiz but a modified version.

Another thing that I realized on servers is that newbies often stick to the "best weapon",
which is in most cases the weapon they are getting hit most often with, usually the Nex
and we all know that this one needs lots of pratice. So they are like: "I can't hit a
thing in Nexuiz and everybody keeps killing me with one shot. This game sucks."
People don't realize that the weapons are balanced quite well. Some don't know that
the secondary weapon function can be very useful, they don't even know there is one,
like "How can you hit at that distance with the Uzi? You must be cheating!" or "You were
shooting me and I didn't even see you. Cheater!" (Hagar and Mortar secondary weapon).
Let alone that there is a +zoom you can use for any weapon.
There could be a newbie mode like Minstagib where you can only have one weapon
each round, like one map played with Uzi only, the next one with Mortar and so on.
That way new players might pick up the subtleties of each weapon more quickly.
And a sniperwar map with just two sniper balconies in such a distance that you
can't hit without a zoom.

ZWERG wrote:There could be a newbie mode like Minstagib where you can only have one weapon each round, like one map played with Uzi only, the next one with Mortar and so on. That way new players might pick up the subtleties of each weapon more quickly.

oh, I played on an RBI server where the weapons changed that way. It was FANTASTIC !!!!!1111one

Please let us have more (and steady!) servers like that

ZWERG wrote:Let alone that there is a +zoom you can use for any weapon.

I didn't even knew that ! (but now I do , thanks)

Qantourisc wrote:

ZWERG wrote:Let alone that there is a +zoom you can use for any weapon.

I didn't even knew that ! (but now I do , thanks)

the default is mouse3, but it can be annoying if you aren't in a good spot.

Urmel... wrote:

ZWERG wrote:There could be a newbie mode like Minstagib where you can only have one weapon each round, like one map played with Uzi only, the next one with Mortar and so on. That way new players might pick up the subtleties of each weapon more quickly.

oh, I played on an RBI server where the weapons changed that way. It was FANTASTIC !!!!!1111one

Please let us have more (and steady!) servers like that

Oh, that "weapon training" mutator is NixNex ("No Items Nexuiz"), but yes, maybe I should run it again. When the server is empty, I will change the mode to NixNex DM. To play it yourself, set "g_nixnex 1".

NO WAY. I like the newbie server better.

At first I thought punishment=bad but because health regenerates the survivor usually has the advantage over a newly respawned player. Long streaks are easier to get than in basic quake. Something as simple as making a player on a 3 kill streak glow yellow and on a 5 streak glow red will make ownage much rarer. It would deal with all those snipers in facing worlds.

ihsan wrote:At first I thought punishment=bad but because health regenerates the survivor usually has the advantage over a newly respawned player. Long streaks are easier to get than in basic quake. Something as simple as making a player on a 3 kill streak glow yellow and on a 5 streak glow red will make ownage much rarer. It would deal with all those snipers in facing worlds.

I think EvilFrog had a mod that did this too, except you also got super speed with the glow.

I didn't read all of the posts (just up until tZork's) but I'm completely against the idea... and this coming from someone who gets pwned on a regular basis.

We're not all equal in the eyes of FPS games.. we all have to suck it up and deal with it, not come up with ways to accept cheating, which is what such a system would be.

I had a look at the beginners server today and it seems to me that the nex and, arguably, the rocket are too powerful in a midrange players hands. Maybe they should be removed for servers that call themselves 'beginners server'? I'm saying this because out of the 6 players on their I watched them and there is no way 3-4 of them were beginners.

Also, isn't it possible to reduce the speed of movement on the server such that player 'a' can't move more than, say, twice as quick as player 'b' regardles of how many hops and strafes he does.

In general, though, would it be possible to have, say, 3 or 4 standard configurations, i.e. beginner, midrange and advanced which people setting up servers can select from. They can always be altered, obviously, but they might provide a starting point.

It still won't make it THAT easy for the new players on DCC's server, for example, but it will be easier than it is at the moment.

I think the problem with nexuiz is that there are a lot of weapons that have fairly unique functions. The rocket launcher is the first one that comes to mind. Its not terribly common(not to mention intuitive) to be able to detonate all of your rockets that are in flight after all .

I think we should try to teach the newbies rather than castrating the pros

the problem with adding balancing to a server is that it alienates better players because they don't get credit for their abilities. i think what is needed is a system that assigns a performance penalty on more skillful players and then uses that performance penalty on the scoreboard to show who is the best player.

in this way players of differing abilities can play together, without noobs gettting horribly slaughtered all the time. if the game is properly balanced then a noob should win the occasional game, but the scoreboard will still show who is the best player. this makes the game a lot more fun for the noob, but still gives better players the respect they deserve. everyone's happy.

Not me.

I think the splidfisk mod implamented something like that. I hate the splidfisk mod though, it's horrible, all the newbs play it, and it's even worse then jaymod (for those of you who play ET)

An IMHO *much* better alternative to that:

mark the best players somehow. Give their skins special markings or so. Example: their bodies get a brighter color if they have top-scores. (best two players or so based on last games played on the same server). Their arms (those between body and hands, you know) get a brighter color if they have a high kill rate. Their legs get a brighter color if they have many kills done from a wide distance (snipers). So you could even express their abilities. The "markings" would be like medals attracting the attention from other to gain them or just to be aware of the greater power of these top-guys. It would be an in-game score list -- directly embedded into the gameplay.

Again, we would need something like a randomly generated password signed by the server and given to the client for later identification. And a score log facility on the server side.

I'm not sure about this idea yet...but...

If it were something that would "turn on" once a player was detected as dominating, then there should be some sort of visual thing (perhaps next to their name) signifying that they are being skill adjusted. The player would still be considered very good. I mean it would be like a medal, but the other players would get a chance to...well...not die so much.

Only optional (should only be on some of the servers marked "beginner") and only something dynamic that would turn off if the tables turned.

Dokujisan wrote:I mean it would be like a medal, but the other players would get a chance to...well...not die so much.

That is achieved by my idea because the rest of the players would concentrate more on those guys... they'd have a much harder time.