Upcoming Release Balance Discussion (SVN)

[Habluka]

Arguments stating that multiple weapons are being used are completely off. In the past, yes smg and sniper only were used, but they were two different classes, two different game styles, two different opponents.

This isn't exactly true. Just because smg and sniper were most common, doesn't mean they were the only ones used. Take for example people like MorganKell, who pretty much only used shotgun in matches, Drakas, who found times to rape with every weapon including AR and shotgun, and other people from notable clans. There were far more than 2 choices as each weapon had it's own purpose, so the argument about how you would only be able to pick sniper or smg to be taken seriously is completely wrong.

Now, all I see is AR or smg. Same class. Same style. Same sprint. Same opponent. EVERYBODY IS JUST PLAYING COMPLETELY IDENTICALLY.

This, from what I've seen from public games and a couple scrims from the past few months, seems true, but I doubt that this is actually the case as there are always people who will innovate to be better than others, but I'm probably not one who should be talking about this as I am pretty detached from the more competitive side of things right now.

I would like to point out that in the inters that I've played in during the past few months (not very many by the way), I only saw sniper, ar, and smg, but smg was for the most part only used by people who stopped playing a lot after 1.0 like me and were just deciding to randomly start playing again. It would be nice to see someone use AR in a unique way, make good use of shotgun, or even find a practical use for nades even though pickups only give you 1 now.

What brought me here were demos I watched from 1.0, where people played with different tactics and the game was open for creativeness, competitiveness and fun; the amOunt of fps didn't define the skill of a player, the creativeness did.

I would have to really disagree with you right here as back in 1.0, I would be forced to use different computers from time to time. On some, I would get ~40-50 fps, while on others, I would get factors of 10 higher, and I would definitely say that frame rates played a large factor. When I joined iOD after playing this game for a couple weeks on a laptop that was pretty bad for gaming, I was pretty terrible, and I stayed terrible for a long time, until I eventually got a decent computer, at which point I started actually being able to improve. It's true that there were some very good players who played on complete shit computers, but it was very rare for most people with bad hard ware to get to a point where they were anything more than decent at best. While it's true that 1.0.4 was released with a fix to a problem stemming from frame rate that has shown up again with the 1.1 releases, people with high framerates still had an advantage compared to those who would get 40-50 fps.

And, if you say that pubs are a big part of Ac, you are being rude to the game itself. Ac isn't made for pubs, the play style in matches (sometimes felt in pubs) is what makes it unique and playable. Anybody will laugh if you show them a public game of assaultcube, but some will realize the creativeness behind it all in matches.

This is something that I would have to agree with now. With the end of 1.0 support and hi-skill, pubs have turned into a complete joke, but this wasn't always the case. Towards the end of 1.0, a lot of games in public servers were essentially inters as most of the more casual players left with the first releases of 1.1, and the hi-skill ladder that Drakas set up was able to allow for public servers that actually were commonly populated with very good players. The problem is that when hi-skill was taken down, there was no real replacement that came close to having the website's aesthetic appeal or the overall server quality that you would get from servers like sol(the hub), idis, or loki. After this though, pubs devolved very quickly into just random people playing ctf on douze or other bullshit maps/modes in 20 person servers, so right now, the only way to get a good experience out of AC is to play in inters or cms.

Overall, I would give your post a 7/10 as you are able to point out some places that have been causing problems, but some of the explanations aren't exactly correct. The general point of pubs being dead, the lack of apparent uniqueness in playstyle with different weapons, and an overall decrease in quality, though, is pretty much correct.

When it comes to fixing these problems, I have my own ideas.

For fixing the problems with pubs just being retarded in general, I think that the best course of action would be to hard cap the maximum number of clients connected at something more reasonable like 14 and to take out the flag/team spawns on douze. Another thing would be to have guidelines similar to the ones Drakas had for hi-skill, where if a server followed them, it would be at the top of the server list, but that's just my opinion and the general enjoyment that most of the player base gets from tosok and ctf on douze and other things of the sort shouldn't be ignored as the devs want their game to be successful, which will only happen if more than members of 5 or 6 clans are able to enjoy the game.

When it comes to the uniqueness in playstyle of various weapons, I honestly think that the best course of action would be to use the values from 1.0 for the sniper, shotgun, smg, and ar, but that's just because I have had more experience with seeing people experiment with that build than the current one when it comes to those weapons. Maybe, if the ar becomes a little too weak, it would be a good idea to cause it to sort of pierce through armour, so it still does a decent amount of damage and has its place in the game if people don't want to just use it to abuse its decent range and mobility boost.

The main way I can see the quality of the actual game improving in terms of how well it runs would involve taking out the anti-cheat system, which in the eyes of most people would seem really strange since cheaters are bad and should all be publicly burned alive. The only way I would see this actually being accepted by the community is by creating closed binaries that are the solely accepted binaries on all but some modified servers, but I'm not sure if this would cause any backlash from the modding community. The main reason behind my wanting this is when everyone is forced to use the exact same build in order to play on certain servers, those servers will be free of people using hacked clients and many of the performance problems brought about by a system that is meant to detect cheats would not be present at all. (please don't ban me for this statement as I do not hate brahma or his anti-cheat system and I do not cheat or enjoy playing with cheaters)

thanks for reading this and considering my opinions on the case.