I just couldn't resist.
There are two kinds of people; those who fear changes and those who accept that changes are needed as long as we quest for an ideal. In our case, we should define our ideal game by means of a simple and elegant description.
From this single phrase, we can easily solve any of the most pertinents problems long found in ET. Let's review each one of them:
Reality Vs. Gameplay
We've seen much debates over the years about how "reality" can affect our game. Whether it be spread, knockback, shakes, trickjumping, weapons or "blood". We might even argue for another decade about it. The fact is that no one even considers why they are arguing for, in the first place. There's no infrastructure--no organization that decides what's good or bad in a truly emperical and scientific way. It's only a couple of "unknowns" with a few PROs (Public Relation Officer) who decide the fate of a whole community. That said, there have been some nice changes, some bad changes and in most cases no changes at all.
Knockback
I've personally explained and proved how knockback creates prediction errors that favors the first player who hits. Consider,
-Player A is Alice
-Player B is Bob
-Alice has 50 ping
-Bob has 48 ping
-Alice is as skilled or higher skilled as Bob
-Bob is on a balcony while Alice is on lower ground*
*There are many other situations where this applies, but vertically it's easier to visualize.
Both players see each other at the same time, have the same reaction time and start shooting at the same time. By following our ideal, you would expect Alice to win or to draw (which is a technical restriction in ET smg fights, but consider 2 panzers shooting and killing each other, so it's well possible to end a fight in a "draw") but because of knockback effects, Bob is the winner since his bullet reaches the server 2 ms earlier. Thus pushing Alice back a little, and when her bullet reaches the server it's knocked back also, leading to a miss while Bob keeps on shooting and pushing Alice back. That's one reason why many players SWEAR that some players are hard to hit. In most cases it just means either Bob has lower ping than Alice OR Bob has some *unhuman* reaction time which means less than "150 ms" and always hits first.
The only thing to point out here is how it infringes on our ideal game. Knockbacks are invalidating Alice's shots in a chain reaction thus favoring the lesser skilled players.
Spread
Spread is responsible for at least 99% of hit misses even if your aim is right on your opponent. I know some might argue about spread control and I'll address that in the following lines. First off, let's examine spread as it's implemented in ET. Imagine a circle around your crosshair as a region of equal probability that represents all the possibilities where your shot might land (The following is best understood if you ever played with cg_crosshairPulse 1 or cg_drawSpreadScale 2).
Movement affects spread
-Crouching equals to half the spread
-Being in "free fall" equals to twice the maximum spread (as in jumping)
-Proning equals to the MAXIMUM spread for the first second due to recent restrictions then decays to half the spread
-Player velocities will affect scoped weapons spread*
-Looking around affects spread This is seriously broken and I've proved that already*
*Velocities have a zero effect on spread for unscoped weapons.
*Turn spread is inversely proportional to the positive difference of FPS and mouse rate. In english, this means, that having MORE fps as mouse rate will result in LESS turn spread and favor the player over equally skilled players. You can achieve zero turn spread by having twice or more FPS as mouse rate. As a simplified explanation, imagine that for each time you move your mouse, your spread increases, and that during the time that you don't, your spread decreases. Now think of it in terms of "Frames" and "Mouse Inputs".
-Having same or more mouse inputs per FPS results in an increasing spread
-Having less mouse inputs than FPS results in some frames not having a mouse input, which equals to a reduction in spread
-Having half the mouse inputs as FPS results in all even frames increasing the spread followed by all odd frames decreasing the spread; which results in zero turn spread.
For those of you still not convinced. Don't take my word for it and go try for yourself.
-Get on a high FPS map such as CTF_Multi or te_valhalla
-set cg_crosshairPulse 1
-set com_maxfps 125
-select an smg and move your mouse fast around (notice the HUGE crosshair that results due to spread)
-set com_maxfps 0
-select an smg and move your mouse fast around (notice zero turn spread)
*Make sure you have 125hz as mouse rate (which is the default USB polling rate)
The following weapons have dynamic spread:
-Luger
-Colt
-MP40
-Thompson
-Sten
-Scoped FG42
-Scoped Rifle
This means that the more you shoot, the bigger the "spread scale" becomes and the more likely you are to miss.
While the following weapons have static spread:
-K43
-Garand
-Unscoped FG42
-Panzer
-Mortar
-Mobile Mg
This means that no matter what you do, you will always have maximum spread (ofc crouching etc still multiplies this value). Ever tried aiming someone far away with a rifle?
Now that we have a general understanding of how spread works, let's review it. Does spread contributes to skill? How do you call a feature that makes you miss your target even if you have your crosshair ON it no matter what I do? I could crouch but there's still a probability of my shot missing. The only reasonable choice here, is to disable spread. If you are arguing about spread control being a feature, think about what would happen if spread was removed. Everyone would still strafe because a moving target is harder to hit. Everyone would still crouch from time to time because smaller surfaces are harder to hit (yes maybe you didn't think about that while shooting off far targets? It wasn't only because of spread control). What counts is that in the end, we follow a path leading to an ideal competitive game.
Shakes
Shakes are best described as fake crosshair jumping in some seemingly random direction when being shot at. To be a little bit more precise and to reveal the shocking horror of it all:
-Bob is shooting at Alice but she doesn't retaliate.
Bob is shooting from the front. Alice's screen will shake upwards
Bob is shooting from the back. Alice's screen will shake downwards
Bob is shooting from the left. Alice's screen will shake rightwards
Bob is shooting from the right. Alice's screen will shake leftwards
-Bob is shooting at Alice and she is shooting back this time!
Bob is shooting from the front. Alice's screen will shake downwards
Bob is shooting from the back. Alice's screen will shake upwards
Bob is shooting from the left. Alice's screen will shake rightwards
Bob is shooting from the right. Alice's screen will shake leftwards
As these weren't enougth. Players accumulate up to 8 shakes at any time.
**Lower health will increase the size of the shakes.
Let's consider Alice moving around when Bob (who was leaning "somewhere" suddenly without any prior notice that Alice could "detect") starts to backshoot her. She tries with all her skills to turn, locate and shoot Bob. Now in most cases we can safely assume that Alice in dead unless Bob only installed ET few secs earlier. This is in complete seperation from our ideal view. If we have an ability to turn off blood splats and flashes, why aren't we able to turn this *feature* off?
I would also like to use this example to show once again how spread affects your aim. Notice: Alice "turned" to find Bob. As she does so, her spread scale increases thus her chances of hitting Bob is even less!
Heavy weapons
Now this has to be the most biased of all the arguments EVER debated in the history of ET. It should have been clear to about anyone that ET is a PUB game (at least it was meant to). Some developers thought that more WMDs (Weapon of Mass Destruction) would be more fun and hell they are...for the guy using it. But something admins seemed to have forgot is that when ET made the switch towards a competitive game, ALL these new additional WMDs should have also been removed. Maybe it was technically infeasible at that time (pre-etpro) or maybe they wanted to experiment with these weapons first. Mines, mortars and Mobile MGs should not even exist, while the others might be given some thought. Let's consider the panzer. As far as I'm concerned, I've always been a magnetic field but this column is about being objective and I believe that we have to consider something that we didn't scratch yet. ET is a team game which leads to our first amendment of our ideal game:
This means that irrelevant of the individual player skills, the most skilled team should always win and this has some serious impacts. If we look at the panzer from this angle, it creates its own perspective which is: teams that clog and move together should die while teams that are skilled enough to follow different paths or employ better tactics should win. This is doubly true considering competition is about stopwatch games. The same could be argued about rifle grenades, but it's more tricky. Firstly I believe rifle grenade is a more powerful and flexible than for eg. the panzer. It also allows for faster shots than the latter and has a dual function as in shooting the rifle. Finally the team doesn't end up with a useless player such as with the soldier who can't destroy/build objectices in his spare time. All this to say that, having a panzer on your team requires more team skill than having a rifle grenader.
Recoils
Recoils are the actual crosshair displacement from shooting off pistols and scoped weapons. They are heavilly affected by FPS but are not proportional to FPS. Much testing and experimenting resulted in the discovery that the smallest recoils would occur at 71 FPS while the biggest recoils would occur at 333 FPS. Some values come close to both such as 76 FPS leading to slightly more recoils than 71 FPS while 50 FPS leading to slightly smaller recoils than 333 FPS.
Netsettings
Having played all my life at 250 ping and lately at a much higher value, I've had to learn about how Q3 engine, ET netsettings and ETPro antilag works. Netsettings is very hard to understand if you are subjective. Just forget everything you might have thought on the matter and try to make sense of what follows:
At the core, ET is based on Q3 engine which is responsible for server code, the client renderer and the client-server data transfer (to name the most important sections). First point to notice and you'll have to take my word for it unless you want to go through a whole lot of research or want to learn about game architecture.
-You cannot shoot through walls
-Antilag doesn't exist
-Warping DO exist
With the addition of ETpro, the major enhancements are the addition of antiwarp and antilag. Firstly, what *is* warping? Warping occurs when a client undergoes packetloss, which means that the server isn't receiving his movement anymore and thus can't update it on the server which in turn can't update it to the clients and a few server frames later, ALL of these new movements arrives on the server thanks to cl_packetDup (which sends the previous movements/viewing angles/etc in the new packets) and all of a sudden the server updates this movement which makes the player appear to go through hyper-space and appear at some other place. This warping is sent to ALL the clients which affects other players' aim. BUT when ETPro antiwarp is activated, it not only freezes any player experiencing packetloss, but also prevent the subsequent movement packets upon reaching the server to be updated as fast as in ETMain. We should appreciate that antiwarp applies speed limits player movements, thus completely defeating warping. I have NEVER find anyone warping EVER in ETPro. If you are enduring server-to-client packetloss, then you will see others warp as it happens often on ETTV servers, but it should be understood that it's only a local event and by no means affects other players; unless the server is suffering from some major resource problems.
Thus warping defeated, the next challenge is that of ping. Antilag comes into play and we have to thank ETPro for it, else we would have had a QCON without any Europeans (or any of the other distant countries). We wouldn't also have a community that large. Now what exactly does antilag work? it's often believe that it distorts the hitboxes, rendering them bigger and proportional to ping. Of course that ain't true. Antilag works by simply saving all the player "paths" during the last 800 ms. When "any" player shoots, and after X ms reaches the server, the latter rewinds back in time by X ms and compares the bullet with these old positions. That's all it does. Nothing more, nothing less. It's also nice to note that: NOTHING else except hitscan weapons are being unlagged. This means that panzers/nades/player movements, absolutely NOTHING else are being unlagged!
Some might argue that antilag allows high pingers to shoot behind walls and thus goes in the subjective belief that high pingers are able to shoot AT walls and still hits. But this is a lie ofc, since it contradicts what Q3 Engine is about as stated earlier. Let me give you the REAL consequence of dying behind walls:
-Alice is a high pinger at 200 ping
-Bob is a low pinger at 0 ping
Bob has 1 hp and is running away from a high pinger shooting at him. So he sees a corner and rushes to it and "feels" safe for 200 ms then dies. But let's see it in Alice point of view. He sees Bob and shoots him. Bob runs away towards a corner while Alice keeps shooting AT Bob. The last shot Alice did was when Bob was about to hide behind the wall but because Alice bullet takes 200 ms to reach the server, Bob "feels" safe for that 200 ms then dies. IF you think this is UNFAIR towards Bob, let's think of Alice of a low pinger and repeat this little experiment.
-Alice pings as much as Bob who pings 0
So Alice sees Bob and shoots him. Bob tries to run towards the corner but he dies BEFORE he could hide behind the wall. So as you can see, the outcome is the same or at least, it's nothing in favor of Alice.
Now comes the twist of our Alice and Bob story. Consider Bob at 18 hp running behind a wall then packing himself or medic regenerating his health. If Alice is a low pinger and shoots Bob, then Bob dies BEFORE reaching for his cover. Now consider the same scenario but with Alice pinging 200ms. Since Alice's bullet takes 200 ms to reach the server, Bob get a small extra time to heal and thus won't die even if he would if Alice had less ping.
Netsettings is far more than just antiwarp or antilag but involves much of the internet connection state and control cvars such as com_maxFps, cl_maxpackets, etc. But I've already wrote an extensive article on the subject a while back.
Netsettings Explained
There are two kinds of people; those who fear changes and those who accept that changes are needed as long as we quest for an ideal. In our case, we should define our ideal game by means of a simple and elegant description.
From this single phrase, we can easily solve any of the most pertinents problems long found in ET. Let's review each one of them:
Reality Vs. Gameplay
We've seen much debates over the years about how "reality" can affect our game. Whether it be spread, knockback, shakes, trickjumping, weapons or "blood". We might even argue for another decade about it. The fact is that no one even considers why they are arguing for, in the first place. There's no infrastructure--no organization that decides what's good or bad in a truly emperical and scientific way. It's only a couple of "unknowns" with a few PROs (Public Relation Officer) who decide the fate of a whole community. That said, there have been some nice changes, some bad changes and in most cases no changes at all.
Knockback
I've personally explained and proved how knockback creates prediction errors that favors the first player who hits. Consider,
-Player A is Alice
-Player B is Bob
-Alice has 50 ping
-Bob has 48 ping
-Alice is as skilled or higher skilled as Bob
-Bob is on a balcony while Alice is on lower ground*
*There are many other situations where this applies, but vertically it's easier to visualize.
Both players see each other at the same time, have the same reaction time and start shooting at the same time. By following our ideal, you would expect Alice to win or to draw (which is a technical restriction in ET smg fights, but consider 2 panzers shooting and killing each other, so it's well possible to end a fight in a "draw") but because of knockback effects, Bob is the winner since his bullet reaches the server 2 ms earlier. Thus pushing Alice back a little, and when her bullet reaches the server it's knocked back also, leading to a miss while Bob keeps on shooting and pushing Alice back. That's one reason why many players SWEAR that some players are hard to hit. In most cases it just means either Bob has lower ping than Alice OR Bob has some *unhuman* reaction time which means less than "150 ms" and always hits first.
The only thing to point out here is how it infringes on our ideal game. Knockbacks are invalidating Alice's shots in a chain reaction thus favoring the lesser skilled players.
Spread
Spread is responsible for at least 99% of hit misses even if your aim is right on your opponent. I know some might argue about spread control and I'll address that in the following lines. First off, let's examine spread as it's implemented in ET. Imagine a circle around your crosshair as a region of equal probability that represents all the possibilities where your shot might land (The following is best understood if you ever played with cg_crosshairPulse 1 or cg_drawSpreadScale 2).
Movement affects spread
-Crouching equals to half the spread
-Being in "free fall" equals to twice the maximum spread (as in jumping)
-Proning equals to the MAXIMUM spread for the first second due to recent restrictions then decays to half the spread
-Player velocities will affect scoped weapons spread*
-Looking around affects spread This is seriously broken and I've proved that already*
*Velocities have a zero effect on spread for unscoped weapons.
*Turn spread is inversely proportional to the positive difference of FPS and mouse rate. In english, this means, that having MORE fps as mouse rate will result in LESS turn spread and favor the player over equally skilled players. You can achieve zero turn spread by having twice or more FPS as mouse rate. As a simplified explanation, imagine that for each time you move your mouse, your spread increases, and that during the time that you don't, your spread decreases. Now think of it in terms of "Frames" and "Mouse Inputs".
-Having same or more mouse inputs per FPS results in an increasing spread
-Having less mouse inputs than FPS results in some frames not having a mouse input, which equals to a reduction in spread
-Having half the mouse inputs as FPS results in all even frames increasing the spread followed by all odd frames decreasing the spread; which results in zero turn spread.
For those of you still not convinced. Don't take my word for it and go try for yourself.
-Get on a high FPS map such as CTF_Multi or te_valhalla
-set cg_crosshairPulse 1
-set com_maxfps 125
-select an smg and move your mouse fast around (notice the HUGE crosshair that results due to spread)
-set com_maxfps 0
-select an smg and move your mouse fast around (notice zero turn spread)
*Make sure you have 125hz as mouse rate (which is the default USB polling rate)
The following weapons have dynamic spread:
-Luger
-Colt
-MP40
-Thompson
-Sten
-Scoped FG42
-Scoped Rifle
This means that the more you shoot, the bigger the "spread scale" becomes and the more likely you are to miss.
While the following weapons have static spread:
-K43
-Garand
-Unscoped FG42
-Panzer
-Mortar
-Mobile Mg
This means that no matter what you do, you will always have maximum spread (ofc crouching etc still multiplies this value). Ever tried aiming someone far away with a rifle?
Now that we have a general understanding of how spread works, let's review it. Does spread contributes to skill? How do you call a feature that makes you miss your target even if you have your crosshair ON it no matter what I do? I could crouch but there's still a probability of my shot missing. The only reasonable choice here, is to disable spread. If you are arguing about spread control being a feature, think about what would happen if spread was removed. Everyone would still strafe because a moving target is harder to hit. Everyone would still crouch from time to time because smaller surfaces are harder to hit (yes maybe you didn't think about that while shooting off far targets? It wasn't only because of spread control). What counts is that in the end, we follow a path leading to an ideal competitive game.
Shakes
Shakes are best described as fake crosshair jumping in some seemingly random direction when being shot at. To be a little bit more precise and to reveal the shocking horror of it all:
-Bob is shooting at Alice but she doesn't retaliate.
Bob is shooting from the front. Alice's screen will shake upwards
Bob is shooting from the back. Alice's screen will shake downwards
Bob is shooting from the left. Alice's screen will shake rightwards
Bob is shooting from the right. Alice's screen will shake leftwards
-Bob is shooting at Alice and she is shooting back this time!
Bob is shooting from the front. Alice's screen will shake downwards
Bob is shooting from the back. Alice's screen will shake upwards
Bob is shooting from the left. Alice's screen will shake rightwards
Bob is shooting from the right. Alice's screen will shake leftwards
As these weren't enougth. Players accumulate up to 8 shakes at any time.
**Lower health will increase the size of the shakes.
Let's consider Alice moving around when Bob (who was leaning "somewhere" suddenly without any prior notice that Alice could "detect") starts to backshoot her. She tries with all her skills to turn, locate and shoot Bob. Now in most cases we can safely assume that Alice in dead unless Bob only installed ET few secs earlier. This is in complete seperation from our ideal view. If we have an ability to turn off blood splats and flashes, why aren't we able to turn this *feature* off?
I would also like to use this example to show once again how spread affects your aim. Notice: Alice "turned" to find Bob. As she does so, her spread scale increases thus her chances of hitting Bob is even less!
Heavy weapons
Now this has to be the most biased of all the arguments EVER debated in the history of ET. It should have been clear to about anyone that ET is a PUB game (at least it was meant to). Some developers thought that more WMDs (Weapon of Mass Destruction) would be more fun and hell they are...for the guy using it. But something admins seemed to have forgot is that when ET made the switch towards a competitive game, ALL these new additional WMDs should have also been removed. Maybe it was technically infeasible at that time (pre-etpro) or maybe they wanted to experiment with these weapons first. Mines, mortars and Mobile MGs should not even exist, while the others might be given some thought. Let's consider the panzer. As far as I'm concerned, I've always been a magnetic field but this column is about being objective and I believe that we have to consider something that we didn't scratch yet. ET is a team game which leads to our first amendment of our ideal game:
This means that irrelevant of the individual player skills, the most skilled team should always win and this has some serious impacts. If we look at the panzer from this angle, it creates its own perspective which is: teams that clog and move together should die while teams that are skilled enough to follow different paths or employ better tactics should win. This is doubly true considering competition is about stopwatch games. The same could be argued about rifle grenades, but it's more tricky. Firstly I believe rifle grenade is a more powerful and flexible than for eg. the panzer. It also allows for faster shots than the latter and has a dual function as in shooting the rifle. Finally the team doesn't end up with a useless player such as with the soldier who can't destroy/build objectices in his spare time. All this to say that, having a panzer on your team requires more team skill than having a rifle grenader.
Recoils
Recoils are the actual crosshair displacement from shooting off pistols and scoped weapons. They are heavilly affected by FPS but are not proportional to FPS. Much testing and experimenting resulted in the discovery that the smallest recoils would occur at 71 FPS while the biggest recoils would occur at 333 FPS. Some values come close to both such as 76 FPS leading to slightly more recoils than 71 FPS while 50 FPS leading to slightly smaller recoils than 333 FPS.
Netsettings
Having played all my life at 250 ping and lately at a much higher value, I've had to learn about how Q3 engine, ET netsettings and ETPro antilag works. Netsettings is very hard to understand if you are subjective. Just forget everything you might have thought on the matter and try to make sense of what follows:
At the core, ET is based on Q3 engine which is responsible for server code, the client renderer and the client-server data transfer (to name the most important sections). First point to notice and you'll have to take my word for it unless you want to go through a whole lot of research or want to learn about game architecture.
-You cannot shoot through walls
-Antilag doesn't exist
-Warping DO exist
With the addition of ETpro, the major enhancements are the addition of antiwarp and antilag. Firstly, what *is* warping? Warping occurs when a client undergoes packetloss, which means that the server isn't receiving his movement anymore and thus can't update it on the server which in turn can't update it to the clients and a few server frames later, ALL of these new movements arrives on the server thanks to cl_packetDup (which sends the previous movements/viewing angles/etc in the new packets) and all of a sudden the server updates this movement which makes the player appear to go through hyper-space and appear at some other place. This warping is sent to ALL the clients which affects other players' aim. BUT when ETPro antiwarp is activated, it not only freezes any player experiencing packetloss, but also prevent the subsequent movement packets upon reaching the server to be updated as fast as in ETMain. We should appreciate that antiwarp applies speed limits player movements, thus completely defeating warping. I have NEVER find anyone warping EVER in ETPro. If you are enduring server-to-client packetloss, then you will see others warp as it happens often on ETTV servers, but it should be understood that it's only a local event and by no means affects other players; unless the server is suffering from some major resource problems.
Thus warping defeated, the next challenge is that of ping. Antilag comes into play and we have to thank ETPro for it, else we would have had a QCON without any Europeans (or any of the other distant countries). We wouldn't also have a community that large. Now what exactly does antilag work? it's often believe that it distorts the hitboxes, rendering them bigger and proportional to ping. Of course that ain't true. Antilag works by simply saving all the player "paths" during the last 800 ms. When "any" player shoots, and after X ms reaches the server, the latter rewinds back in time by X ms and compares the bullet with these old positions. That's all it does. Nothing more, nothing less. It's also nice to note that: NOTHING else except hitscan weapons are being unlagged. This means that panzers/nades/player movements, absolutely NOTHING else are being unlagged!
Some might argue that antilag allows high pingers to shoot behind walls and thus goes in the subjective belief that high pingers are able to shoot AT walls and still hits. But this is a lie ofc, since it contradicts what Q3 Engine is about as stated earlier. Let me give you the REAL consequence of dying behind walls:
-Alice is a high pinger at 200 ping
-Bob is a low pinger at 0 ping
Bob has 1 hp and is running away from a high pinger shooting at him. So he sees a corner and rushes to it and "feels" safe for 200 ms then dies. But let's see it in Alice point of view. He sees Bob and shoots him. Bob runs away towards a corner while Alice keeps shooting AT Bob. The last shot Alice did was when Bob was about to hide behind the wall but because Alice bullet takes 200 ms to reach the server, Bob "feels" safe for that 200 ms then dies. IF you think this is UNFAIR towards Bob, let's think of Alice of a low pinger and repeat this little experiment.
-Alice pings as much as Bob who pings 0
So Alice sees Bob and shoots him. Bob tries to run towards the corner but he dies BEFORE he could hide behind the wall. So as you can see, the outcome is the same or at least, it's nothing in favor of Alice.
Now comes the twist of our Alice and Bob story. Consider Bob at 18 hp running behind a wall then packing himself or medic regenerating his health. If Alice is a low pinger and shoots Bob, then Bob dies BEFORE reaching for his cover. Now consider the same scenario but with Alice pinging 200ms. Since Alice's bullet takes 200 ms to reach the server, Bob get a small extra time to heal and thus won't die even if he would if Alice had less ping.
Netsettings is far more than just antiwarp or antilag but involves much of the internet connection state and control cvars such as com_maxFps, cl_maxpackets, etc. But I've already wrote an extensive article on the subject a while back.
Netsettings Explained
reasons seem and deem quite obvious, if you catch my drift.