Balance Issues And How To Fix Them - Spreadsheet

(Eox) #21

We’re not in a MOBA. One minute to wait for a cooldown to end is just atrocious.

Mines are simply countered by awareness. If you don’t pay attention where you are putting your feets, you deserve to die. Furthermore each mines have a 30 seconds cooldown. This is perfectly enough. If a mine prevent you to move forward and you can’t trigger it, just follow another path (there’s plenty of them, and a lot are not mine friendly) or call a Fragger or another Proxy to detonate it safely from a corner : this is basic teamplay.

Mines will recieve a maybe welcomed 10% nerf radius with the next update, allowing faster mercs to activate and pass them without even being harmed easly (I managed to do it once before the nerf : basically it’s just triggering a long jump at the right moment. With the incoming nerf it won’t be that hard for a good player).

(Glot) #22

[quote=“Eox;12653”]We’re not in a MOBA. One minute to wait for a cooldown to end is just atrocious.

Mines are simply countered by awareness. If you don’t pay attention where you are putting your feets, you deserve to die. Furthermore each mines have a 30 seconds cooldown. This is perfectly enough. If a mine prevent you to move forward and you can’t trigger it, just follow another path (there’s plenty of them, and a lot are not mine friendly) or call a Fragger or another Proxy to detonate it safely from a corner : this is basic teamplay.

Mines will recieve a maybe welcomed 10% nerf radius with the next update, allowing faster mercs to activate and pass them without even being harmed easly (I managed to do it once before the nerf : basically it’s just triggering a long jump at the right moment. With the incoming nerf it won’t be that hard for a good player).[/quote]

While i can agree with awareness. but in current game pace and intencity (extreme) there is no way one can notice a mine during a fight. A single placed mine in an abandoned room ofcourse is not a problem. but those mines, which are spammed right into the combat are the problem.

What i do as a proxy is engage everybattle with 2+ enemies, drop a mine right in their faces, blow it my self, or the shoot it acidently. get a lot of damage, then we usually all die. Next spawn i do the SAME thing. (resp time+travel time > cooldown). I get constant frags with that, and 1.5-2 k/d with that. Literally doing nothing apart mine spamming.
This is bad for game.

And the exact amount of seconds is to be balanced out.
mb even +5 or +10 seconds would get rid of that spam feel.

(Eox) #23

[quote=“Glottis-3D;12663”][quote=“Eox;12653”]We’re not in a MOBA. One minute to wait for a cooldown to end is just atrocious.

Mines are simply countered by awareness. If you don’t pay attention where you are putting your feets, you deserve to die. Furthermore each mines have a 30 seconds cooldown. This is perfectly enough. If a mine prevent you to move forward and you can’t trigger it, just follow another path (there’s plenty of them, and a lot are not mine friendly) or call a Fragger or another Proxy to detonate it safely from a corner : this is basic teamplay.

Mines will recieve a maybe welcomed 10% nerf radius with the next update, allowing faster mercs to activate and pass them without even being harmed easly (I managed to do it once before the nerf : basically it’s just triggering a long jump at the right moment. With the incoming nerf it won’t be that hard for a good player).[/quote]

While i can agree with awareness. but in current game pace and intencity (extreme) there is no way one can notice a mine during a fight. A single placed mine in an abandoned room ofcourse is not a problem. but those mines, which are spammed right into the combat are the problem.

What i do as a proxy is engage everybattle with 2+ enemies, drop a mine right in their faces, blow it my self, or the shoot it acidently. get a lot of damage, then we usually all die. Next spawn i do the SAME thing. (resp time+travel time > cooldown). I get constant frags with that, and 1.5-2 k/d with that. Literally doing nothing apart mine spamming.
This is bad for game.

And the exact amount of seconds is to be balanced out.
mb even +5 or +10 seconds would get rid of that spam feel.[/quote]

You can’t throw a mine at long distances, and it takes some time to put it on the ground and then make it explode (you have to lay a mine and then switch to you gun, and of course try to not miss it). At least, it’s a long enough time to get downed two times, and the enemy could at least backpedal to avoid a part of the explosion. If they can’t kill you while you throw a mine and then try to explode it, you totally deserve your kills. Furthermore that strategy will be slightly less efficient with the explosion radius nerf, making that strategy less effective without ambushing since it’ll be easier to leave the area of effect.

This is a technique I oftenly use, and against decent players if I don’t take them from behind I most oftenly end dead. A player with half a brain will just stay back a bit, kill you, neutralize the mine and then go ahead (if he managed to kill you of course, but he’ll always backpedal).

(son!) #24

the aura nerf would make her completely non-vaible. not even that saw would be picked over her in more situations, just straight up, no one in their right mind would choose her.

nade nerf doesn’t make sense. SD obviously have a concept for the nades, so rather than try and re-design them to be an “area denial” and finisher tool, point out where in the current implementation they produce bad play.
I think most would say the priming and or the unlimited priming is the problem. big part of fragger nades is choosing when to toss them and at who to toss them given they are a huge part of your damage output. when you don’t have them to take out/damage an incoming medic/fragger combo or a proxy on objective or whatever else you’re playing fragger badly and letting your team down. being able to unprime and “re-choose” removes a big element of skill/game sense involved in using nades and makes them too strong.

arty needs to either be able to deploy his strike faster or the acceptable bounds for airstrikes needs to be more forgiving so you can actually move when you’re deploying and not get it canceled because of some geometry somewhere. also pretty sure getting hit cancels the channel which makes it even harder to pull off.

mine radius and speed nerf for proxy make sense so as far as abilities don’t think anything needs to be done. SMG primary has TOO MANY bullets. Ridiculously forgiving gun. Rather see the capacity dropped by like half and damage tweaked up slightly.

Aimpunch has a place in this game as long as there’s an instagib sniper. It’s a situational merc that should be carefully chosen. Ideally you consider that he has the best ability to get a pick but is unreliable for pushing objectives or defending against multiple targets. You remove things that make him less situational then you just get more instagib play in a game where it doesn’t make sense to have it. Considering how powerful his heartbeat sensor is and the instagib ability, he could do with more nerfing. I’d go after jumping accuracy as it gives too much area coverage relative to the amount of risk.

(Gruntel) #25

“If you don’t pay attention where you are putting your feets, you deserve to die.”

As Glottis-3D wrote. Noticing mines while actually fighting people is hard, especially with the broken sound. They can also be planted on corpses, making them even harder to spot or placed on staircases where you can’t shoot the mine and have to trigger it yourself.

“…or call a Fragger or another Proxy to detonate it safely from a corner : this is basic teamplay.”

It is not a slow paced Arma style shooter. You don’t really have the time to wait for a Fragger or do that much planning really. And why would a Fragger have to waste his nade on a mine?

“A player with half a brain will just stay back a bit, kill you, neutralize the mine and then go ahead”

Doesn’t work like that from my experience. Currently Proxy has the highest movement speed (I guess they’re gonna patch it but still, she’s going to be faster than most mercs), she has access to Shotguns and SMG, which are really effective, considering that most maps are very CQC based. Her mines can easily block off entire areas. She’s also really good at completing objectives. She’s too good at too many things.

(Glot) #26

i think, that new-comers do not deserve to be ambushed with such exploits.

how many chokepoints do we have on maps?
how many spawnrape parties did i take part in (both as a spawner and an abuser)?

dozens and dozens of them.

and pretty much every disadvantageous part is multiplied by spammy abilities.
i do not know how things will work out in the map-layouts (sadly not much news on this). but we can atleast decrease the problem via cooldowns.

100% HP revive is also one of those combined with too many bullets to gib.

my main goal here is to minimize all this - because all this chokepoints, spawnrapes, intencity played crutial role in player base emaciation (after several rapes they do not come back). and that trubbles me a real LOT.

(praskOo_) #27

Hey Gruntel, I’ve gathered a few ET clips, so you can get a bit of a feeling of how revives worked in ET:

Reviving would also restore stamina, making docruns like this possible.

This is why I want to keep the meatshield. Versus a strong defence or a tight chokepoint, those few seconds of invlunerability made those rushes possible :slight_smile:

edit: first clip @ 5:26, third at 5:15

(Gruntel) #28

@son! : Right now with Fragger you can nade the objective from afar and get 2+ kills without even putting yourself in harms way. If you push the enemy team to their spawn you can nadespam the entrance, making it impossible for the enemy team to get out of spawn (Terminal is a good example).

“they are a huge part of your damage output”

Fragger’s damage output is insane as it is, especially with his K-121.

I completely agree about her SMG though.

“Aimpunch has a place in this game as long as there’s an instagib sniper.”

Why add a whole bad mechanic to counter one class?

I don’t like jumping accuracy either. Increasing jumping spread slightly would make it inaccurate at range, but still somewhat usable extreme CQC.

(Gruntel) #29

@praskOo_ : Hey! Thank you! Gonna watch them now. :slight_smile:

Watched them. It looks similar to Battlefield’s revive system.

(homesickMailbox) #30

It seems to me that a lot of people here don’t realize how important awareness is in FPS games…

(xRoger) #31

You are completely incorrect. Very much so.

No single Competitive FPS game on the Market pushes for aimpunch. In fact, no game from my past memory has EVER had aimpunch welcomed.

Here’s why:
-It adds LUCK to a fight, there is no single fucking player in DB that ever will or can control Aimpunch
-It is completely random, sometimes it causes more viewkick and sometimes it doesn’t, which means long range gun fights are purely luck based if two people of equal aim fight
-It causes distress to new players. They can’t and don’t know how to deal with aimpunch.

CS:GO had aimpunch. It was significantly lowered within a week. Valve are slow, but damn they hated the backlash from Aimpunch.

CoD4 Promod revision 1 had a LOT of aimpunch, the same as pub. They almost completely removed it.

TF2 had it for a while, it was lowered a lot too.

H1Z1 had aimpunch, it was COMPLETELY removed within a few weeks. Because it made gunfights random, streamers complained 24/7.

Sorry, but the point is…you’re wrong. Any good Competitive player will not support aimpunch, and if you’re even remotely good at FPS games you will be against it.

TL : DR

Aimpunch should be removed and anyone that supports it is probably Silver Elite Master/bad player.

(Humbug) #32

[quote=“praskOo_;12688”]Hey Gruntel, I’ve gathered a few ET clips, so you can get a bit of a feeling of how revives worked in ET:

Reviving would also restore stamina, making docruns like this possible.

This is why I want to keep the meatshield. Versus a strong defence or a tight chokepoint, those few seconds of invlunerability made those rushes possible :slight_smile:

edit: first clip @ 5:26, third at 5:15
[/quote]

those vids.
ET best game ever
those maps… played this game for ages, almost exclusively the standard maps, never got boring. would still be playing if there were people left xD

(Zenity) #33

@Gruntel: I would argue the opposite, that CS is a prime example of why gunplay does not trump everything. Aiming only gets you that far in that game (which I am quite certain off, because my aim is decent and yet I still get hammered in CS by “weaker” aimers). Situational awareness (ready: tactical camping) and proper use of the utility grenades is at least as important.

True there are no deadly explosives in CS, but that is because a single death can be game deciding. Often, one kill is enough to get the advantage to win the round, and the round can have a cascading effect on many more rounds due to the economy.

Even so, who lives and dies is only occasionally decided by pure aim. Many more times it’s about who had the better position to begin with, or who chose to check the wrong angle first. CS actually has an incredible amount of luck, which often leads to very exciting matches even between teams which are not very evenly matched. It is also a game where game sense and tactics are at least as important as pure gunplay on a top level. Of course a general level of competency in aiming is required, but above that, the differentiators tend to be other things and even five godlike aimers will lose to a team of merely competent aimers with far superior strats and game sense.

Moreover, even a newbie player can take out a pro with a bit of luck. It just happens. A random lucky headshot, camping an odd angle, etc. A good player will take the hit and realise that it makes no difference in the long run. Same with explosives, a newbie may hit you with a lucky grenade, but so far I’ve not seen horrible players dominate games through spam alone.

Valve does listen, but they don’t listen to just anybody. They pay attention to what is actually happening in the pro scene, where even the slightest balance issues will immediately be exploited and endlessly discussed in vlogs.

Let’s take my favourite example, the P90: On the enthusiast competitive player level, a lot of people keep whining about it even to this day. Why? Because it allows weaker players to take out a pro with just a bit of luck and very little gun skill required. If Valve did not have the active pro scene and would instead listen to enthusiasts, especially a small group of beta testers who haven’t played a large number of competitive matches yet, they probably would have had to remove the gun and the game would have arguably been worse off for it.

In general, Valve is being extremely cautious with changes and the general design of the game has not changed dramatically since the early conception many years ago. Of course there is no reason to change something that’s clearly working.

Players simply don’t make great game designers. For every player who has a decent grasp of game design, there are nine who are awful at it (and of course everybody believes they are the one in ten). A game designer’s job is to listen to feedback, but not necessarily react to it. We’ve probably all seen games die because developers were unresponsive to player issues, but unfortunately I’ve also seen games die because developers gave too much weight to what their players thought they want.

Again, I’m not saying any of the issues you point out can’t be real issues. I am just saying that just because something is not pure gunplay, it doesn’t mean it has no place in a competitive shooter. Even if a strategy is easy to use, using it to its maximum efficiency rarely is. This can be said about aiming itself, which really isn’t difficult at all to begin with. Aiming perfectly is.

And while we can (and do) all express our opinions and feelings already, do not expect SD to make dramatic changes simply based on the words of a few competitive players. I am not trying to influence SD, just advocating for understanding in case they do not rush to address or implement your list of suggestions.

There is no rush, and if certain issues create obvious problems for instance in the upcoming tournament, I am sure that SD will be quick to react to it. Providing ideas of how things COULD be changed IF needed, is always a good thing of course.

(solt.) #34

To add to the conversation surrounding Arty…

The nice thing about Arty’s primary is that there are a shit ton of elements to adjust.

Damage Dealt
Arrival Time
Time to Cast
Cooldown
Maximum Charges

These changes can all be made extremely easily, and I’d be happy if some amount of balancing was attempted through them.

Unfortunately what is much more involved to fix/tweak is the ease with which you can designate an area.
Right now essentially any sort of movement of the laser while attempting to call in a strike will cause the timer to reset, simply because the slightest shift in geometry will cause the strike to be reevaluated.

Huge pain in the butt.
If they could fix this it would be a ~huge quality of life improvement for him. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

(Gruntel) #35

Hey! Would you mind telling me your CS rank? I just want to understand your point of view better, not going to judge :slight_smile:

Also, thank you for the lengthy post, just shows how much you care about the game :slight_smile:

Aim is not the most important thing is CS, far from it, I agree. But it can win you games, especially against more inexperienced players, and it should do just that. Against players that are at a similar skill level other things decide who wins and who doesn’t. Nevertheless aim is important. (FYI, most pro players say that they are far from the best aimers and that they would lose many gunfights against casual MM Global Elites/Supremes)

Things that play a huge role in CS are also gamesense (hard for me to define, comes with experience), positioning, team strats, etc. That said, Dirty Bomb is an entirely different game. It is a really fast paced game. Team strats are almost nonexistent. Yes, you can and should coordinate pushes with your teammates, but unlike CS you don’t have to do rotates (no Art of War stuff going on here :D), there are no nade spots you have to learn. It is much more straightforward. Right now sound in DB is pretty bad, limiting your awareness. Pretty much the only thing that’s left is aim. And that is perfectly fine. That’s the nature of the game. That is why I go for “Gunplay above all”

“CS actually has an incredible amount of luck”

Sorry, I can’t agree here. I’ve been playing CS since 1.5 and I have put thousands of hours into that game. As with anything, there is some amount of luck, but it can almost be entirely eliminated because of the huge skill gap the game allows.

“Moreover, even a newbie player can take out a pro with a bit of luck. It just happens.”

True that. Exactly. It can happen and it does happen, but it’s not consistent. It will happen once every 100 gunfights so its impact on the outcome would be nonexistent.

Yes, Valve listens to the competitive scene only, that’s exactly what I’d expect the Dirty Bomb team to do. I spoke with some competitive DB players, who have been playing since alpha/beta, and they told me that they had done a simmilar document with what needs to be changed and that they’ve tried talking to the game devs, but to no avail.

They would have never removed the P90. Unlike 1.6, where only a couple of weapons were being bought (AK, M4, AWP, Deagle), CS:GO tries to make all weapons good. They are constantly changing guns to prevent people from buying the same guns all the time. I personally use almost all of the weapons in that game.

CS:GO is very close to the “original” (GO is a lot better than the original, won’t go into this here). But they are constantly making new drastic changes (improvements to be honest) - they increased automatic movement spread by 50%, they recently added “tagging” (if you get hit you can’t move), etc.

“Players simply don’t make great game designers.”

Yes, game designers are amazing at their job. But that rarely includes being good at the game or playing at a competitive level. So in all honestly they don’t always know what’s best for the game. Players on the other hand are good at, well, playing the game, so I guess they should know more about balance (I’m talking competitive gamers ofcourse). That’s exactly why they should listen to the feedback from the COMPETITIVE SCENE as those are the people that spend the most time playing their game. Cooperation between the devs and the players is the key to success really.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. So grammar, much wow -_-

(smartIsland) #36

"Fragger can nade objective from afar… " God… can’t wait for the comments that will be made when pyro, Nader, red eye come out. Not to mention all the super “op” field ops

(smartIsland) #37

Y’all realize people used to infinite flame thrower and chain airstrikes for mutiple minutes over objectives/choke points in ET

(solt.) #38

Didn’t play ET so I can’t be 100% on what you’re attempting to point out.

But just because other games have had poor executions of elements that resemble things in this game, does not mean DB should carry on in the same style.

Right?

(smartIsland) #39

False. I’m saying the other splash damage games had the same stuff and people adapted. Airstrike spam? Back up and ambush incoming field ops.

(smartIsland) #40

There are usually always alternatives to maintain rock paper scissors