A long, long time ago, I can still remember how the shockwhores used to make scrubs cry..
Previous Unreal Tournament Australia community sites included OzUnreal (of OzForces ISP fame), oceaniaut and gibblets for instagib..
Unreal Tournament New Zealand community sites included Jetstream Games, Skankyflat and Paradise.
UNLOCK NEW ITEMS With the opening of this new season, you’ll earn in-game rewards as you hone your skills in Basic Training, compete online in official Epic hubs, and complete offline challenges. These rewards are only available until the conclusion of the Pre-Alpha season in late October, so you’ll be able to look back and show everyone that you were here when it all started.
Unlock items are available via three methods. Progression, which is multiplayer. Challenges, which are predetermined secnarios vs bots setup by epic (eg 5v1 CTF) and Training. Overall the unlocks are intended
MoxNix: two would be overkill even on a really large map meant for 10+ players.
Ignoring two kegs next to each other for a minute. Two being overkill for 10+ players seems to be stretching the friendship somewhat.
There have been quite a few comments both here and on irc relating to health > armor and how the keg is “not used” because of this. Until now this has not seen this expanded upon.
A keg offers the same amount of stack as a jacket – but a jacket spawns three times as often. With this in mind surely the jacket is relatively overpowered compared to the keg when used in duel, a gametype with 2 players? Even if only half the armor of the jacket is used each spawn (unlikely) this would give players three times the total of a keg?
Can you outline (or link to, or someone else chime in) why keg is not used beyond the usual “it was never on a ut99 duel map”. It behaves in a similar manner to belt, except it is less (100vs150), on a longer spawn time (90vs60) and if you pickup while damaged – the often repeated (downside) last second steal at low health with the belt – you can only ever benefit from damaged base+100. For example when picked up at 20 health a player has 120h and cannot heal additionally. By comparison the belt can go from 20h/150a to 100h/150a.
Maybe it is how it interacts with other ut4 armor pickups? Jacket + keg is too much? But belt + 5 vials (ASDF) is almost this amount of stack. So perhaps the aversion exists solely because of belt+keg. A match up that would happen a maximum of six times in a ten minute duel, likely less.
There are upsides/downsides to both health and armor, belt included. Straight up stack the keg is roughly equal to a jacket but it has less impact over the course of a game because of its long spawn time.
Raste;
So ask yourself in every important location: “where am I?” and try to describe it in 4-5 words top. If you can, your location is unique enough, if not then you need to give it more character.
Due to the nature of pickups this is always “flak” “shock” “belt” in arena fps. You can describe areas in 1-2 words. In other game types, perhaps, and in other games players give areas unique names. cs examples of banana, upper dark, lower dark, pit, goose, yet even these can be tied to the bomb site letter – short A, long B. etc – disconnected from any of your four points. Locations become pickup names because they are usually unique. Problems only arise when dm maps have doubled up weapons – in ctf maps doubles are handled via “their flak” vs “our flak”. Depending on the map double up in dm could be handled by high/low or similar. Only when this is not applicable do players need to look for more ways to describe things. The two shocks on temple for example – belt shock and amp shock. Easy. The map decorations will never come into it overall potentially cause confusion.
Take the outpost as an example. I only know the thing in the smelter room is a smelter because someone at epic called it that on a stream in the past. That is “shock room”. Done. If I had never heard someone call it the smelter I would wonder at they at the smelter or the drill – that is not really a drill.. and more a laser?
The pickups are concise, descriptive and for most cases, especially at lower levels are perfectly fine.
Now, having said that there are cases where additional information is required. How would one describe a player coming from rockets to belt on temple via the high route? Hm. This may need a name/descriptor, but this is at a much finer granulation than “what room am I in” scenario most players look at when trying to get their bearing. This level of naming may occur when players play together for competition. “Rockets to belt high” would suffice. Items again, but the relation of two. If there are particular routes that stand out and occur over and over then giving them unique identifiers might be beneficial – but this is going to the level where players do crazy stuff – my rtcw:et team named parts of a particular map after sections of the digestive tract. Nothing to do with the map or geometry.
This is not poo-pooing your four points at all, in fact I agree with them, but I don’t agree that they need to be done just so players can describe where they are – they can do this simply by looking at pickups.
The rocketlauncher is a ut4 weapon that shoots rockets and grenades in various numbers between one and three. Mutliple rockets has been a mainstay of the unreal tournament franchise since the original unreal single player release in 1998, which featured a rocket launcher shooting up to eight rockets.
MoxNix;The real problem with Flak isn’t the number of shards, the damage per shard or the spread, it’s the hit collision radius on the shards… The same thing that makes air rockets so easy to hit practically guarantees multiple shards hit too.
I’m not convinced it is the root cause. Stolids original post makes sense but setting up a bot shooting range and modified flak with point collision it was very subtle. Had I been able to demonstrate significant, obvious difference in a video I would have posted. Alas while it did something it was not huge. It possibly extended the range of full shards hitting but 100units? From 600 to 700 units. Maybe.
I guess you could look upon it as increasing the player hitbox? A 10unit sphere would it provide an increase of up to 10units on the player hitbox (5units on each side compared to point collision) which increases the 84unit capsule to 94. This is slightly over 11%. You could look upon this as projectiles having 10% leeway compared to other attacks, but in practice it was difficult to tell between two flaks with point and 10unit collision shards. I just don’t think it will make the difference people seem to think it will.
Having said all that the shard collision should be changed back to point – this is something I feel rather strongly about. We have 15 years of ut and quake games with point collision (excluding ut3) and in that time I do not recall anyone ever saying that the “rocket clipped through the player and did not damage him”. Is there any reason not to have points?
There are two ways to approach flak range issues 1) Widen spread to enforce close range^ use and to put more distance between shards as distance from the shooter increases. Your side effect of “aoe cannon” is not really a problem – who cares if one or two shards hit a player every now and then? Provided you need to take 3+ shots to kill a fresh spawn beyond the effective use range your opponent its going to be able to kill you with almost anything else. This also has the side effect of differentiating the firemodes more. or 2) Aggressively tweak damage bleed over flight time so it kicks in much sooner. Tweak this so the damage reduction begins heavily at the range you want max damage to stop – because the ~1500 units it is currently is a joke, the weapon is not effective at this range at all already and the bleed achieves nothing. The down side to this is that the amount of damage dealt will vary.
The spread is nice and very quakelive shotgun-ish currently. Each shot is very similar. This is good
*like the 2k4 one. Mainly mentioning this because it comes up quite frequently as a “fix”.
^This is something I would love epic to address. Tell us what ranges are meant to be (eg close 0-500, mid 500-1500, long 1500+) for the ut4 weapons and what range each firemode is meant to be ideal at. This way the community can give feedback based on something. eg “Rockets are stated to be used out to around 800units but I find I am able to use them reliably at 1200+”.
Do you like this sort of content?
You should check out the rest of the arenafps.com general arenafps musings.
dm-sunder for unreal tournament 4- Duel and small ffa. 2-4 players.
More vertical duddddde. And levels. And connectivty. Yeah!
[B]Load out[/B]
2x Jackets
2x Helmets
2x Rocket Launchers
1x Shock Rifles
1x Flak
1x Pulse
1x Sniper
1x Bio
Barktooth;
The spawns basically become outdated because the opponent can still move around the map while you are picking. [/QUOTE]
Possible solution: Upon death the player does not receive spawns to select until they click. Their first click gives them the spawns, the next selects as usual. This has the bonus side effect of stopping players accidentally spawning after death due to frantically clicking in during combat. Spawn selection is done using the enemy location at the time of the first click, not player death. Currently the killing player knows 100% when selection will occur, taking it partially out of his hands is important. The killing player can still influence the spawn, by staying at the location of the kill, however by doing so they waste time and they cannot go aggressive directly after the kill – or rather they can but their opponent may pause to respawn for a second.
If you were to drop spawn selection this becomes easier as you simply use the enemy location pick when the player clicks to respawn with a 4-8 second delay on forcing spawn.
Using the time of player death as the decider is not ideal.
Barktooth;
On smaller maps like ASDF there’s no place to spawn you where the opponent wouldn’t be able to get within LOS to you in the time it takes you to pick a spawn.[/QUOTE]
The above change is a potential problem for maps like ASDF because they are small and have very good access between all areas from the center and imo not really fixable with a “spawn system”. With the current systems (ut4 and 2k4) players have a good idea where their opponent is spawning – with the above change the winning player can go mid and wait for the respawn. Neither is really “ideal”. imo this is asdf specific and I don’t think it would effect other ut4 duel maps as heavily – erase, solo, mimic, deck. Possibly protracted, but mainly because of the asdf inspiration. Picked these due to the recent cup..
Rather than the spawn farthest/spawn far away system an algorithm that takes distance of previous spawns into account could be used. Initially random and when the opponent gets a kill the player is given a spawn of similar “distance”. This would potentially mitigate “luck” of close spawns (due to them being reversed, giving the comeback player similar opportunities) while adding another layer of “skill” to spawns. Rather than knowing “killed him at X, will probably be at Y” players will need to remember the distance/order for their deaths in relation to the enemy player, pushing the potential “skill” cap fairly heavily. For this to work it would need to be applied at time of death with instant repsawns. For lower level players this still plays out roughly in the same way, close spawns are heard/seen and more easily converted and when the dying player becomes the killer they are given close spawns to work with as well.
Player A kills Player B – Player B spawn is selected randomly as close
Player A kills Player B – Player B spawn is selected randomly as medium
Player A kills Player B – Player B spawn is selected randomly as close
Player A kills Player B – Player B spawn is selected randomly as long
Player B kills Player A – Player A spawns close
Player B kills Player A – Player A spawns medium
Player B kills Player A – Player A spawns close
Player B kills Player A – Player A spawns long
Player B kills Player A – Player A spawn is selected randomly as long
And so on.
An example of where this may not play out as “fairly”. Player A high at rocket lift on asdf kills Player B on rocket lift – Player B spawns at pulse and dies instantly. Player B eventually kills Player A in front of jacket, under pulse. Player A spawns at upper pulse spawn because it is the “closest”. Player B is unable to chase easily as he is on the ground, nowhere near a lift. You could say in this case the player could swap to shock as soon as the killing blow lands and pop a core at the pulse spawn.. but there are less options.
The final “problem” that players would need to accept is that once a player is in “the lead” spawn killing changes from a known (killed here, likely there) to much more response based. There would be no way to know where the opponent is spawning, beyond areas of the map that happen to have more spawn points. You can spawn right next to the killer. However the usual “three bad spawns can loose the game” does not apply as hard as 100% random as you will be gifted three bad spawn when you kill them.
While 2k4 spawns did not need spawn protection they did influence how the game played, which is something that should be taken into account. Did they influence players in a good way or not?