The Competitive Appeal
Radix
Join Date: 2005-01-10 Member: 34654Members, Constellation
Join Date: 2005-01-10 Member: 34654Members, Constellation
I've recently been posting a lot about newbies, and felt it was time to discuss the other side of things.
This thread is discussing what currently non-existent elements you could put in a game to make it fun after the first six weeks of play. <b>Specifically I'm referring to combative minigames here.</b>
For example, NS has circle strafing, two stepping, aiming, hitbox desyncing with strafes, wall crawling and dodging and pancaking (call these evasion), airspeed control (including blink hop, bhop, bdropping from high altitudes, etc.), hopping out of danger with rails etc, and more that I haven't covered. I'm specifically ignoring medpacks and the commander interface for this thread.
<b>The essential point here is that the combative minigames we have come to know and love in NS are not requisites of NS2 but if removed should be replaced by equal or better counterparts in terms of gameplay.</b>
Since over 9000% of the replies to this thread will be from people who have no concept of balance, game design, and certainly not organized play, I will spend entire minutes of my free time summarizing the good points made as they come in, that is if the onos that is homework doesn't eat me first.
This thread is discussing what currently non-existent elements you could put in a game to make it fun after the first six weeks of play. <b>Specifically I'm referring to combative minigames here.</b>
For example, NS has circle strafing, two stepping, aiming, hitbox desyncing with strafes, wall crawling and dodging and pancaking (call these evasion), airspeed control (including blink hop, bhop, bdropping from high altitudes, etc.), hopping out of danger with rails etc, and more that I haven't covered. I'm specifically ignoring medpacks and the commander interface for this thread.
<b>The essential point here is that the combative minigames we have come to know and love in NS are not requisites of NS2 but if removed should be replaced by equal or better counterparts in terms of gameplay.</b>
Since over 9000% of the replies to this thread will be from people who have no concept of balance, game design, and certainly not organized play, I will spend entire minutes of my free time summarizing the good points made as they come in, that is if the onos that is homework doesn't eat me first.
Comments
<div align="center">Movement</div>
Wigglewalk and sidestrafe add something to do when you would otherwise be in a boring state of holding w, as does bhop.
If complex articulations are to be in a game (and they should), they ought to be taught at least a little, so that they are moved from the realm of exploit into skill in the mind of the novice.
Implement queued jumping.
For movement, key combinations and environmental advantages (chained wall jumping, etc.) would improve the game.
In general I don't believe anything that cannot be a least <i>interpreted</i> readily by an initiate will make the game good, on the contrary 'skills' based on engine exploits only serve to widen the gap between technically knowledgable and not-technically knowledgable, when the gap should be between experience/skill.
In short, everything that makes you better at the game should derive from practice and natural ability, not from engine/hardware exploits, non-intuitive player actions or griefing. I'm not talking about dumbing NS down, I'm talking more about making it easier to see how to improve and pull off more difficult manoeuvres. The more the game helps newcomers learn the ropes, and the more transparent its difficulty curve.
To give an example, it is transparent that bunnyhopping and air control help you to stay alive, increasing your ability to affect the game, but it is NOT transparent how you pull off these actions. Conversely, it is obvious that welding your teammates, protecting your resource nodes and having good aim helps your team win, and it IS transparent how you go about doing these things.
I like bunnyhopping, I think it suits the Aliens. But I do think that if it is supported it either needs to be taught, or better still, it needs to be intuitive enough to learn without formal instruction. If, in NS2, a newbie can be told "Just hold jump and forward when you hit the floor to maintain your speed", or if bhopping can be explained in similarly facile terms, I think the game and community (recreational and competitive) will be better off for it.
In general I don't believe anything that cannot be a least <i>interpreted</i> readily by an initiate will make the game good, on the contrary 'skills' based on engine exploits only serve to widen the gap between technically knowledgable and not-technically knowledgable, when the gap should be between experience/skill.
In short, everything that makes you better at the game should derive from practice and natural ability, not from engine/hardware exploits, non-intuitive player actions or griefing. I'm not talking about dumbing NS down, I'm talking more about making it easier to see how to improve and pull off more difficult manoeuvres. The more the game helps newcomers learn the ropes, and the more transparent its difficulty curve.
To give an example, it is transparent that bunnyhopping and air control help you to stay alive, increasing your ability to affect the game, but it is NOT transparent how you pull off these actions. Conversely, it is obvious that welding your teammates, protecting your resource nodes and having good aim helps your team win, and it IS transparent how you go about doing these things.
I like bunnyhopping, I think it suits the Aliens. But I do think that if it is supported it either needs to be taught, or better still, it needs to be intuitive enough to learn without formal instruction. If, in NS2, a newbie can be told "Just hold jump and forward when you hit the floor to maintain your speed", or if bhopping can be explained in similarly facile terms, I think the game and community (recreational and competitive) will be better off for it.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Uh, ditto
Obviously we implement the queued jump system from Warsow. =]
I for one am in the middle of the player spectrum. I realize there's these cool maneuvers, and I know in theory how to perform most of them. I simply haven't taken the time to master them, so I still manage to be outrun by a bl1tz gorge. =[
I particularly agree that there should be competitive play. This implies a level of skill available to players to make competitive interesting and worthy of spending their time on. Since I'm not pro, I can't directly judge what these elements are. However, I can say that any such abilities should be more relaxed in their learning curve.
Since we all love bhopping, it's a great example of something you can hone your skills on and gives a definite advantage, just like accurate aim and map awareness. However, bhopping, at least from my viewpoint, it very close to a binary advantage. You either can do it, or you can't. Plus, the trouble of learning the theory behind it and the practice to become one who can can be a burden. Thank goodness for things like NSLearn and the Dojo that helped open my eyes on how to actually perform them, and when I actually practiced I could use them at times. But, it took that extra bit of inquisitive nature on my part to step out of the game and seek help.
I would recommend that any feature be more available to the players. Create a gradient of skill for each avenue, and let players progress on it feasibly without external resources. Aim is a basic skill of even gradient, you can get better or worse or oscillate in between. Bhopping in Warsow is amazingly fluid and yet still allows new players to skip around while the pros never touch the ground. Explain the feature and don't make it such that you have to grind to become a competent player, but can play the game to improve yourself.
Other alternatives (by now some WS players might be catching on to me) are a side-jump button that would allow any alien life-form except Onos to quickly do a short lateral jump in a particular direction of strafing movement without having to turn using the mouse.
Hopefully the marine movement won't be crippled in NS2 just to allow walker skulks can catch up... instead, it would be much more fun if skulks would be boosted a little bit with these types of ideas so it is more fun to battle.
Other alternatives (by now some WS players might be catching on to me) are a side-jump button that would allow any alien life-form except Onos to quickly do a short lateral jump in a particular direction of strafing movement without having to turn using the mouse.
Hopefully the marine movement won't be crippled in NS2 just to allow walker skulks can catch up... instead, it would be much more fun if skulks would be boosted a little bit with these types of ideas so it is more fun to battle.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
At first I thought you were suggesting adding skill move combos like D, DR, R + Punch(which wouldn't work because they would just be scripted/macroed to oblivion) but I like your actual suggestion a whole lot better :-) Adding depth to the combat with short jumps and other dodges and wall-jumps would be interesting.
Quite a generalisation there wouldn't you say? To be honest I'd expect people who actually bother posting on these forums to <i> In general </i> be people who feel quite passionately about the game, and to have played NS1 to a sufficient degree to grasp how the balance between the teams works better than an average player (then again I guess I'm just generalising in the opposite direction now - damn you hypocrisy!).
Anyway to the subject, all of the 'minigames' you listed weren’t really implemented by design, but rather were either indirect flaws of the engine or players working out the best way to servive as with circle strafing or wall hopping for example. The best way I can think to encourage the growth of these kind of quirky, yet enjoyable (and extremely useful) 'minigames' is to follow Sarisel's line of thinking - that is more player interactions with their environments (personally I'd love it if players could knock objects over to use as temporary cover or to slow an enemy down for example), as well as a more intuitive and responsive control system.
How to design this is I think the main problem. B-hopping for example is great in that it is a skill to master and takes patience and practice to learn. On the flipside of this it gives good players an even bigger advantage over newer inexperienced players than they already had, which can leave a very bad first impression with a player. If there's two distinctly different kinds of players, could two different control sets work? E.g. Warhawk (It had an easy mode, where using the right stick performed automatic, and quite cool looking evasive manoeuvres, but sacrificed complete control - or a pro mode which gave you full flight control). As for how this could be implemented in a FPS environment however I'm not so sure how or even if it could work.
FYI the ability to wall vaunt was explicitly coded into NS. It was rather late in development too, 3.0 I think.
pardon my french, but what's wall vaunt?
You misunderstand, he's talking about wallhopping not jumping off a wall with spacebar. Wallhop is like ... basically bunnyhopping. Except along a wall instead of the floor. Doesn't really count in this discussion though really since theres only about 5 players MAX in the world who can actually do it properly and consistantly.
Ah I did see someone do that once, up the broken tram tunnel from the middle hive on ns_lost. I think it would have been more prominent if wall vaulting had been implemented earlier because I remember thinking it was pretty powerful.
Hopefully it gets implemented, since right now the skulk seems to be underdeveloped in NS1 in terms of movement capability. Regardless, some players have done very well with it - but this will add so much more.
sounds epic, got a vid?
That's how I've seen it. It each jump "landed" back on the same wall; I don't know if you could do it between multiple walls. I'm also not sure if the person I saw was able to "bhop" with it, just go faster than normal running speed.
but then again i cant try this in-game atm, so i might be completely wrong
<div align="center">Movement</div>
Wigglewalk and sidestrafe add something to do when you would otherwise be in a boring state of holding w, as does bhop.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->It's not that simple. The point of these things -assuming that 'sidestrafe' is wallstrafe (strafing perpendicularly into a wall and holding forward for a speed boost)- is that they are hidden exploits. They are not in the manual and even watching someone running much faster than you along a wall doesn't implicity explain how it's done.
This impacts negatively on both newbies, AND on level designers, since most/some level designers may not be aware of these exploits and will only discover a Marine is getting to a key location too fast through 3rd-party testing (and even this relies on the tester knowing the exploit), instead of being able to test map limits themself.
Wallstrafe is a bug but it can be solved. It's present in Source as well but it has a very easy fix (I'm told, I don't know what the fix is exactly). There is no reason for it to be in NS. When you're walking there should be sufficient interest such as checking corners, using voice menus/hotkeys/mic to communicate, *listening*, checking the map, checking the scoreboard, etc.
The bottom line: wallstrafing affects map layout and room design (trick jumps), and it serves no real benefit to the game other than giving tech-heads another trick up their sleeve they don't really need or deserve (and it also nerfs newbies unfairly). It is not skill-based, other than using it to get short bursts of speed to get to otherwise inaccessible areas, which in most cases is not really that much of a demonstration of skill. Any trick jumps of this type currently designed (or otherwise present) in current maps are obtuse, and there's no reason they could not be replaced with a more valid trick jump in NS2.
I can't think of any valid argument for keeping wallstrafe. It's non-transparent, it gives an unfair, unworked advantage (no matter how marginal) to those in the know, and it makes level design that little bit more complex for no real reward.
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Wigglewalking is not in character, it's positive effects are very slight, and it's also non-transparent. Most of the time it's better to perform a different movement altogether. I also can't see any valid reason for keeping it in the game.
how did he maintain height during the arcs?
Wallhopping looks great, but in the end it only helps against marines that aren't used to it.
A simple walljump on the other hand always comes in handy in certain situations, when you need to accelerate faster towards your opponent, for example, when you attack from an ambush spot, or when you move up a wall in a fight, instead of dodging/circle strafing, and walljump over a marine's head to throw off his aim and attack his back.
It also helps to drop faster from a ceiling than just pressing +duck and letting gravity do its work.
I agree whole heartedly, also I think marine bhop adds nothing to the game besides nonsensical human based movement.
You got the nonsensical human based movement part right. Nevertheless, you might actually want to try to understand the movement aspects before claiming that they add <b>nothing</b> to the game. Of course it depends whether you referred marine bhop as the nonstop hopping or the present limited system, but it's still wrong to completetly ignore the gameplay aspects of it.
QFT.
Fixed.
<!--quoteo(post=1699897:date=Feb 9 2009, 09:36 PM:name=Crispy)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Crispy @ Feb 9 2009, 09:36 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1699897"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->The bottom line: wallstrafing affects map layout and room design (trick jumps), and it serves no real benefit to the game other than giving tech-heads another trick up their sleeve they don't really need or deserve (and it also nerfs newbies unfairly). It is not skill-based, other than using it to get short bursts of speed to get to otherwise inaccessible areas, which in most cases bla bla bla I hate good players<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The reason it's good isn't because it's skill-based, it's something to do at intervals of rest. Otherwise you would have literally nothing to do but hold w in some cases, which is boring.
If you're not aware, boredom is not good gameplay. You're welcome to suggest something to replace it - which is the point of this thread.
I've always found that even when I'm just running along, my senses are still doing a lot of work. Checking peripherals on screen, listening for sounds, and constantly doing the jump-look back-to maintain forward ground speed maneuver are things I always find myself doing as a marine. Lets just say it's not completely boring.
That is how it's done, and yes you can do it between multiple walls if they're close enough together.
<!--quoteo(post=1699912:date=Feb 10 2009, 11:14 AM:name=pSyk0mAn)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(pSyk0mAn @ Feb 10 2009, 11:14 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1699912"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Wallhopping looks great, but in the end it only helps against marines that aren't used to it.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Okay, I'd like to see you try and hit a wallhopping phil. It's more of a distraction/lolyoucanthitme than something you do to get speed to kill marines. Really good as a distraction technique.
I once somehow pulled this off while wiping out a squad of Marines. Not sure how I did it, there was a lot of jumping and mid-air biting. I had to since the corridor's floor was mined. After they all died I stopped, congratulated myself, and while leaving stepped on a mine. =[
I didn't mean to start a bhop discussion here, but I still disagree and think that it adds nothing to the game besides a way you can have skillz to move around the map faster by jumping. ( <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/skulk.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="::skulk::" border="0" alt="skulk.gif" /> is a different story)
I doubt that.