I write this openly admitting my hours on Quakewars since release are quite low, I think this point is valid even if you're outside the competitive circuit. Is Quakewars being dismantled too early in its life?
The main motivation for writing this column came after reading a comment by a_qwer on the Dignitas ET:QW Cup news on ESReality;
Is he right? Is there still a place for that mix in the game? Well if things are axed too quickly then certainly not and this column tackles the concept that making the wrong changes too early could have very bad consequences.
I had a conversation in the SplashDamage irc channel the other day and I felt like a black homosexual in the deep south of America. I learnt quickly that developers irc channels are only for fans of the developers vision of play, but one point was made very clear to me, this is no time for liberal thinking, Quakewars doesn’t have to be ET nor does it have to be Battlefield.
Some changes will be too hard to come back from, the moment the XP system was limited in ET it was inevitable that it would be removed. That was the right decision, but it was an easy one. I don’t think the decisions being made in Quakewars are quite as easy, and nor are they being given the time that the changes in ET were given.
I personally separate the debate into a two categories. Vehicles & Advantages, each one of them treads a fine line between enjoyable gameplay for competition and frustration.
Vehicles
You've all played or seen Valley, you've seen exactly how much of a stalement the game can become if left to its own devices. Why SplashDamage used Valley for the demo is beyond comprehension. However, one need only look at Area22 at Quakecon to see that also when left to its own devices and in its vanilla format the game can produce some great games and that mix can be fascinating.
There are these rulesets coming across which cover all the maps. So a ruleset that makes Valley a little better, doesn’t necessarily make Area22 better (or worse). In my opinion Valley should go the way of Fueldump in ET and never be heard from again once competitive consensus has arisen. When custom maps come into play and when the competitive map pool is complete, or narrowed down is a far better time to look at when to change things.
The potential for modding may change all MCP maps, increase the speed of the MCP or give it some magic beans to do its job from a mile away, regardless, making rules that are partially to benefit the MCP stages is naive when you look at what it costs you in other areas. And making changes today that may not be needed tomorrow are unlikely to get reversed.
In all I'm very loathed to make changes to the vehicles to make maps playable in competition, especially when the game is 10 days old. The maps that come from release need their own testing time, they need the chance to find ways to counter things that get in their way and vehicles may be the option. In my opinion vehicle limitations MUST be map dependant, how you execute that is a problem for the leagues to solve, but one rule that helps valley, doesn’t guarantee you success on other maps.
Advantages
Taking away Radar means that your opponents cannot know where you are unless they see or hear you, how on earth could that be a bad thing? The logic behind that seems Vulcan in how obvious it is. You have a positioning advantage before your opponent does, for competition that’s wrong.
Red Triangles above your opponents is equally uncompetitive. I can’t see you, but I'm still tracking you through a bush. The moment this becomes an optional feature, the better.
Ammo Crates - The chain reaction from ammo crates is pure grenade spam and if you're on a map like Volcano it can be horrible. The Strogg already have a huge waiting time on their revive and having infinite nades from the ammo crates just makes their life harder and the first stage too easy to defend. It moves against the checks and balances of the class system, that is not always a major problem but on a map like Volcano its awful. Perhaps only making it an option for offence rather than defence would solve that problem.
There are very difficult decisions to be made, and whilst this article may see me play devils advocate in part for the purists it doesn’t mean that I think that’s the way the game should be in two months or so, I was heavily involved in working on XP limitations back in ET and I’m all for evolution. (I actually am very in favour of all of the advantages changes) However there’s no need to rush these decisions, there’s no need in the opening months of the game to make a wrong decision.
I leave you two questions with implied answers, if you shoot both answers down then the plea to wait on change is wrong, if not maybe tournaments should slow down the changes.
What was wrong with Area22 at Quakecon? Think back to whatever game you played competitively last, did any of the tournaments in the opening six months have any baring in the games hall of fame?
The main motivation for writing this column came after reading a comment by a_qwer on the Dignitas ET:QW Cup news on ESReality;
Is he right? Is there still a place for that mix in the game? Well if things are axed too quickly then certainly not and this column tackles the concept that making the wrong changes too early could have very bad consequences.
I had a conversation in the SplashDamage irc channel the other day and I felt like a black homosexual in the deep south of America. I learnt quickly that developers irc channels are only for fans of the developers vision of play, but one point was made very clear to me, this is no time for liberal thinking, Quakewars doesn’t have to be ET nor does it have to be Battlefield.
Some changes will be too hard to come back from, the moment the XP system was limited in ET it was inevitable that it would be removed. That was the right decision, but it was an easy one. I don’t think the decisions being made in Quakewars are quite as easy, and nor are they being given the time that the changes in ET were given.
I personally separate the debate into a two categories. Vehicles & Advantages, each one of them treads a fine line between enjoyable gameplay for competition and frustration.
Vehicles
You've all played or seen Valley, you've seen exactly how much of a stalement the game can become if left to its own devices. Why SplashDamage used Valley for the demo is beyond comprehension. However, one need only look at Area22 at Quakecon to see that also when left to its own devices and in its vanilla format the game can produce some great games and that mix can be fascinating.
There are these rulesets coming across which cover all the maps. So a ruleset that makes Valley a little better, doesn’t necessarily make Area22 better (or worse). In my opinion Valley should go the way of Fueldump in ET and never be heard from again once competitive consensus has arisen. When custom maps come into play and when the competitive map pool is complete, or narrowed down is a far better time to look at when to change things.
The potential for modding may change all MCP maps, increase the speed of the MCP or give it some magic beans to do its job from a mile away, regardless, making rules that are partially to benefit the MCP stages is naive when you look at what it costs you in other areas. And making changes today that may not be needed tomorrow are unlikely to get reversed.
In all I'm very loathed to make changes to the vehicles to make maps playable in competition, especially when the game is 10 days old. The maps that come from release need their own testing time, they need the chance to find ways to counter things that get in their way and vehicles may be the option. In my opinion vehicle limitations MUST be map dependant, how you execute that is a problem for the leagues to solve, but one rule that helps valley, doesn’t guarantee you success on other maps.
Advantages
Taking away Radar means that your opponents cannot know where you are unless they see or hear you, how on earth could that be a bad thing? The logic behind that seems Vulcan in how obvious it is. You have a positioning advantage before your opponent does, for competition that’s wrong.
Red Triangles above your opponents is equally uncompetitive. I can’t see you, but I'm still tracking you through a bush. The moment this becomes an optional feature, the better.
Ammo Crates - The chain reaction from ammo crates is pure grenade spam and if you're on a map like Volcano it can be horrible. The Strogg already have a huge waiting time on their revive and having infinite nades from the ammo crates just makes their life harder and the first stage too easy to defend. It moves against the checks and balances of the class system, that is not always a major problem but on a map like Volcano its awful. Perhaps only making it an option for offence rather than defence would solve that problem.
There are very difficult decisions to be made, and whilst this article may see me play devils advocate in part for the purists it doesn’t mean that I think that’s the way the game should be in two months or so, I was heavily involved in working on XP limitations back in ET and I’m all for evolution. (I actually am very in favour of all of the advantages changes) However there’s no need to rush these decisions, there’s no need in the opening months of the game to make a wrong decision.
I leave you two questions with implied answers, if you shoot both answers down then the plea to wait on change is wrong, if not maybe tournaments should slow down the changes.
What was wrong with Area22 at Quakecon? Think back to whatever game you played competitively last, did any of the tournaments in the opening six months have any baring in the games hall of fame?
other then that i agree with hentai, sondac and some others. the esl ruleset ain't perfect, but it's good enough 'til we get some kinda mod that sorts some other issues.
and I agree with no radar and hopefully some more people will after reading this article
a good thing is, that they removed the radar and limited the usage of the vehicle, but those vehicle things should be forced by a mod or serversettings
Now clanbase is complaining that we've changed too much, not only meaning clans have to get used to a third ruleset, but splitting the community into teams who want to play the different leagues, or forcing teams who want to play all of them to have to prac with 2 or 3 different rulesets to play the same maps. Stupid tbh.
as every1 could see in valley this is a pain in the allmighty a.., leading to a gameplay which is simply based on whos got the better tanker and pilot in order to bomb the defending team down till one obj-player can rush the obj :) which isnt very interessting for a tacticbased onlinegame..
so imHo this new rules should (and they do) should aim for one goal, so that the team with the better tactic can take the win on the map, where a good tanker or cyclops can make a difference. so as u say the mix is the key and with this rules, not to say they are perfect atm :O, the vehicle management is an important point .
a word to the crates, cov´s teleporter beacon is a usefull tactic to get in an kill em or even hack allready so the spam is nice but kindoff useless, so the game has got allready the answer to many questions ;)
Ammo crates should be just ammo crates, not nade/health crate.
Rules should restrict unnecessary spam more.
Vehicles have still too big role in game on some maps.
the bf players did it ritgh the gave feedback etc...
understand it
The option is there but atm people want this.
If people want a very specific game they should play that game, or the closest thing. Making other games into it ruins the experience as a whole. Players needs to start accepting games for what they are, not what they want them to be.
Anyway played a decent amount of 4/4 and that was allot of fun with the ESL rules.
And at antipop welcome to the year 2007 go play doom...
In retrospect, only 1 map from ET (Radar) from the original six still stands as it was intended. When the SDK is released and the mappers and modders get a chance to work, you'll find that the majority of issues will not exist because new maps will be built purely for competitive play and existing maps will be altered.
Just a matter of time, stop being impatient! :P
Maybe that's just my interpretation of the whole issue but I don't think SD are a lot smarter than most of us, they created ET after all. :P
Good point although, then team can't be that different that worked on ET, especially the "higher-up" type fellows.
Also, in my opinion, they should prevent MCP's being damaged whilst being repaired, so can only be reduced on health after it is built enough for it to continue moving which should help out the attacking team.
As far as supply crates (and the hordes of naders surrounding them) in Volcano, they can be handled with one air strike.
I agree with taking away the red triangles, but not taking away radar. The attacking team can always put a radar far enough forward to see a large portion of the area of interest and if the attackers are GDF, the third eye camera is amazing.
Everything in this game has a counter. The trick is finding it.
I don't see red triangles being a big problem, prolly worth waiting for a mod/patch for that - Radar is a whole different thing though...needs to be gone for sure.
I would rather we tried modifying problematic features rather than remove them altogether.
That outside only idea sounded ok, shame it can't be done either in combination with the above.
Maybe someone could find a way around it like how they got drivable tank into ET which was meant to be impossible too.
you do not get nades by this crates anymore...!
100% agree
I mean all those rules which are completely useless without a mod:
For example: Just get a mod running that disables the vehicles which are NOT allowed to use @any given mapstage. Let the team only be able to spawn a specific amount of crates and turrets at any given time. Its really not hard to achieve a proper baseline once the SDK is released.
Just give it some time.
because it removes depth and strategic options from the game
Huh ? Either team can have radar coverage of most objectives. So the "positioning advantage" goes to the one that has it up. If both do, it's equal, and if neither do, it's still equal.
The "wallhack" aspect of radar isn't much different than lean camping and listening to sounds in ET.
Radar in the game forces to you make make decisions. Which class do you sacrifice to have radar up ? Do you push now, knowing the enemy can see your advance, do you send someone to destroy it and attack a man down, or do you delay ? If your radar goes down, someone has to go out and redeploy it.
You can argue that there's already too much to do in ET:QW maps (and this is a valid point for reasonable match times), and you can argue that you can re-deploy stuff too quickly, but it seems to that eliminating radar entirely just removes a whole branch of possible diversity in the game.
The third eye throws a bit of a wrench into this, because it's hard to see, and potentially hard to destroy. OTOH, the range is short. It certainly possible to think of ways to adjust this without eliminating it entirely.
edit:
Also, I find it very amusing that people think brightskins are a "pro" feature, but triangles are noob. The result is largely the same. Similarly, people are clamoring for headshot hitsounds (which let you know more clearly how much damage you did) yet at the same time complain that having health bars on the enemy is noobish. Same thing really.
This is the same for pretty much anything that needs looking at in my opinion we should be approaching these things in this order, modify the problem first, restrict the feature if modifying isn't enough, then if all else fails and you tried everything else but still the said feature is a problem, remove only as a last resort.
I was going to add more to this reply but I'm still excited over last nights rugby league final, Leeds Rhinos ftw.
The reason people want radar out of competition is because it removes the aspects of the game that reward skill - gamesense, map knowledge, experience, hearing...little things like checking a corner before you run in that draws a line between a player with skill and that guy that looks at his radar every 2 seconds.
Radar makes the game easy. Competition doesn't need easy - it should reward the better player and team.
Sure, defending with radar is easier... but it's up to YOU whether your enemy has radar.
This seems to me more like a prime example of a particular group of gamers hating change than anything to do with skill. Instead of exploring the depth of the game, you just chop off everything that doesn't carry directly over from ET.
That is stupid. If BOTH teams have equal opportunity to use it (as they always will in stopwatch) the best team will STILL win.
http://www.et-quake.com/
basically I think the game should be left as is for competition and left to evolve map per map. Leave as many vehicles in unless one totally dominates the other team.