Competitive Brink and "The Perfect Game"

(INF3RN0) #1

Firstly I wanted to make a new thread as this is should be different than every other competitive Brink threads on here (inb4 why new thread??). This is not meant for flame wars, elitist attitudes, and other stuff that get’s comp threads locked. I went out of the info loop for a while, so I am hoping those who know more can contribute to the discussion I would like to create here. Basically Splash Damage has been working on Brink, which has more new and diverse content than almost any other game title in a while (or a combination of the best of those available). If you take a step back from the whole picture, you will see that SD is trying as hard as they can to make right where ET:QW went wrong. I think that they literally wrote out every problem on a giant white board and went down the list. This brings me to the point of this post as I would like to discuss, with anyone and everyone, what SD has already done in terms of game balance. There is a lot of stress about how there is too much content and that this game will be begging for SDK out of the water, but I am not so sure about that anymore. I know for a fact that there will always be something to fix, but I am highly doubtful that it will need the same approach as in the past. I am going to try and layout some of my thoughts on the matter before I head out to work… remember this is based off of what I have read, watched, and been told by others regarding Brink showcases and demos.

Core Gameplay Features

  1. Manual vs Smart Movement- Testers notice that manual control appears to have more instantaneous results, while Smart feels more delayed and automated. Manual movement does deliver special results for the skilled player (ie faster routes and achievements over auto-SMART)

  2. Body types- Size influences speed, HP, weapon layout, SMART access, hit box.

  3. Abilities- Limited to 3 per class, cool downs, need more info.

  4. Buffs- 1 for yourself, 2 for your friend. Equal opportunity available, but how you use it is up to you.

  5. Weaponry- Fully customizable, but modifications use an add/subtract system; ie increased damage, increased recoil. Specific weaponry only available to special body types to counter movement abuse. Probably seeing the same types of weapon balances as in the past (ex. high damage weapon=high recoil or minigun=delay before shooting+high recoil+high spread bloom).

  6. Team size- 8v8 (very close to standard competitive 6v6)

Specific Weaponry

  1. Nade spam- Crowd control rather than mini nukes.

  2. Sniper rifle QQing- Headshot 1-hits, 8 clip bolt, slow reload.

I am running a bit short on time, and there’s a lot more to add, but as you can tell SD has already come up with some pretty good ideas on how to balance out their new content. I am hoping that the types of changes the competitive community can suggest or put into a pro mod after release, will simply be slight alterations of weapon stats, removal of very few or attempt at correcting over powered abilities, etc (stuff you would see in a normal game patch). We won’t know much for sure until the game is released, but I would like to encourage some discussion regarding how SD has been attempting to balance what we already know about so that when we do start playing we will be on the right track for suggesting improvements rather than crying for removal :wink:. Remember to keep it on topic ploz.

(Ragoo) #2

They also removed weapons that have much damage+splash on impact like Rocket Launcher and Grenade Launcher knocks you down on direct hit now and explodes on a timer after the first contact which I love.

They also removed constant radars, but maybe the radar they have now is still not good for competitive gaming. I think they said this interrogation radar thing lasts 30 seconds. Maybe 10 seconds or so is enough for competitive gaming. 10 seconds of enemy movement is already quite a lot of information and basically time where the enemy team really struggles to position well or attack.

I really like the manual movement option for SMART stuff, that will be a source of a lot of very skillful movement tricks. On the other hand there is no fee planting of explosives now, which takes away certain skills/decisions you can make. But that’s minor compared to the movement stuff you can do I guess.

I would looove to see a gun being similar to the Hyperblaster in terms of balance with delay before shooting and then high damage/high rate of fire as you said :slight_smile:

Also 8v8 really is way closer to the actual size of teams we will see in tournament play, so that’s definitely a good thing.

SD said they will give us a lot of server options right away and I hope they deliver. That’ll be really helpful to set up servers with certain restrictions for 5v5/6v6 competitive gaming.

(BMXer) #3

[QUOTE=Ragoo;269995]…
Also 8v8 really is way closer to the actual size of teams we will see in tournament play, so that’s definitely a good thing.
…[/QUOTE]
+1

Re-balancing a game for smaller/comp team sizes and adding functionality needed in a tournament environment is base of “pro” mod if you as me. The fact that team sizes are much closer to comp team sizes right out of the box will make a huge difference. Hopefully all we will need is stuff like timeout, speclock, demos, etc and a few weapon/attachment/ability limitations.

(knippon) #4

At about 1:30 into the last “Matter of Class” vid. A guy is using a weapon that resembles some kind of gatling gun and firing at a really fast rate. I’ll bet this thing probably has some start up time before it startsup.

(Cankor) #5

We haven’t heard anything about this but long ago I had a post about map balancing and how do you get as close as possible to a 50/50 win/loss rate for each side in objective mode. The most obvious way is to play with map durations (or I guess now that each objective has it’s own duration they would do it with objective durations). As an example, you could give a map like Quarry a better win/loss ratio by shortening the duration.

The point relevant to this topic though is you don’t want a 50/50 win loss for stopwatch. The question is, will stopwatch mode include separate map scripts which take this into account or not? If not, can things like spawn times and objective times be controlled via map scripts?

Would be cool if you could do something like they do in ETQW when the objective isn’t taken in 5 minutes where they knock 5 seconds off the attackers spawn time. For Stopwatch maybe do it every 3 or 4 minutes, this would help push an offensive bias for that mode. Hell, maybe something like this is already built into the map scripts when the mode is set to Stopwatch and it’s perfect out of the box :slight_smile:

(Bridger) #6

Spawn wave duration is another easy tweak to deal with attack/defense balance. I would also prefer if the stopwatch mode had a bit more offensive leaning to it. This could be as simple as increasing the spawn time of defenders by 10% across every map when in stopwatch mode.

(BMXer) #7

In stopwatch mode, the attacking team should, for the most part, always win. Its just a matter of who does it faster. You really dont want there to be any full holds with teams of similar skill. Full holds lead to double full holds and that sucks.

ETQW demo tourney on Valley might be a good example. Full holds were very common on that map and it led to a bunch of matches that went to 3 and 4 map overtimes. Over time is cool and exciting and all but not if its only because the maps aren’t balanced for stopwatch.

(Mustang) #8

I wonder if the respawn timers will be tweaked slightly for stopwatch to avoid full holds

(Cankor) #9

Is there an echo in here?

(MA6IC) #10

This game is looking very promising from a competitive standpoint, although I have some worries.
I could be wrong as I haven’t seen much, but the maps seem dark and dingy (I am aware of how it ties in with the story) The thing I love about ‘Monday Night Combat’ was the linear, bright and basic style the maps had.
Another worry of mine that I have seen in the past is too many people playing snipers or assassins really takes away from the teamwork element as they tend not to play their role correctly.
Consistency: Usually class based games are very consistent, however in the past few FPS’ that I have purchased I have found gun fights to be inconsistent and random, this will be something I will be looking for from BRINK.

Quick question as I haven’t done enough research. Is there going to be Dedi Servers for console/PC?

I am really looking forward to this game, I want it to be the game that rewards the dedicated fan, more than the casual player who plays it now and then.
If it:
Is Balanced
Has fluid and responsive controls
Has Good Networking/Dedi servers
You will have a very happy, loyal and loving fan! :slight_smile:

(Bridger) #11

[QUOTE=BMXer;270072]In stopwatch mode, the attacking team should, for the most part, always win. Its just a matter of who does it faster. You really dont want there to be any full holds with teams of similar skill. Full holds lead to double full holds and that sucks.

ETQW demo tourney on Valley might be a good example. Full holds were very common on that map and it led to a bunch of matches that went to 3 and 4 map overtimes. Over time is cool and exciting and all but not if its only because the maps aren’t balanced for stopwatch.[/QUOTE]

Why should there be a need for overtime? If team A only completed 3 of 4 objectives, then team B mearly has to complete objectives 1, 2, and 3 faster than team A did to win.

Say team A completes objective 3 at 15 minutes 35 seconds into the game, but cannot capture the 4th objective before time runs out. Then team B mearly needs to capture objective 3 in 15:34 to win.

No need for overtime.

(Cankor) #12

[QUOTE=Bridger;270096]Why should there be a need for overtime? If team A only completed 3 of 4 objectives, then team B mearly has to complete objectives 1, 2, and 3 faster than team A did to win.

Say team A completes objective 3 at 15 minutes 35 seconds into the game, but cannot capture the 4th objective before time runs out. Then team B mearly needs to capture objective 3 in 15:34 to win.

No need for overtime.[/QUOTE]

Only thing it doesn’t account for double full hold at first objective, but yeah, that scoring system makes more sense and was how I thought stopwatch was originaly going to play when ETQW first came out. My recollection is there was discussion before ETQW came out and that was the understanding (I guess in hind sight speculation) at that time, but obviously it wasn’t implemented that way by the game. You could still do it in ETQW, you just had to potentially watch a demo to confirm close calls.

Will be inetersting to see if this has been thought of in Brink’s default Stopwatch ruleset.

(INF3RN0) #13

To add to the weaponry balance subject, Brink is going for something quite a bit different than normal. Since multiple weapons are available to every class, it would appear that there would be a much greater focus on balancing the weapon itself completely separate. I kind of like the fact that you are able to still use your weaponry of choice for the most part, without having to pick a specific class to use it instead. The entire idea of any kind of weaponry that differs from a base default gun revolves around creating a challenge in order to use the item effectively. Every gun that is not the default gun is potentially going to be better than anything else, if the player is skilled enough to use it. One of the main reasons specific guns become limited is because most players break the skill cap more easily than anticipated, essentially giving them an overall advantage. How can we eliminate the whole need to limit or remove OP guns? Well in a sense SD has made a good attempt at it with the sniper rifle in comparison to other games. Headshot aim bolt action forces the player to be extremely skilled in aim precision to use it effectively, while the slow reload and bolt action forces them to play more defensively. In this case the usefulness of the sniper rifle is much more situationally dependent then a standard rifle. The same goes for heavy weaponry, once the barrels start to spin it becomes deadly, but again the player must put themselves in a situation where the gun is going to out perform another. My thoughts are that when you don’t offer an identical arsenal during a game, the special guns should be designed to truly be most useful in those specific situations they are meant for. Your going to get those uber leet close range snipers that push the limit of what the gun was meant for, but when you reflect on just how difficult it is to use in such a way, you probably need to step up your game. For example drawing the line between what needs fixing and what you think needs fixing depends on how you approach the situation. If you got a big guy walking down a hall spraying his gatling gun, you might want to reconsider walking head on into it, as his reduced mobility and slower gun reaction times will make him much less reactive to a flank or a much easier target for a sniper. I am not 100% sure how every weapon in Brink was dealt with, but I am hoping there is a solid science to it.

I am also curious about how the buffs will work exactly; do they stack? I was a bit curious as to whether the buff aura, similar looking to the Quake quad damage, was meant to purposely make the buffed player more visible to the enemy. Also was curious what the exact numbers are per buff as well and their duration.

(BMXer) #14

haha, nice wall of text :slight_smile:

I personally think it all boils down to luck/lotto situations when it comes to limiting weapons for comp. IMO the limits should come into place when weapons allow for one equally skilled player to win over another equally skilled player only because he got lucky with the random lotto spread. Remove or limit the potential for luck to play too big a role in the outcome of situations.

(Humate) #15

Whoa lots of text!

Heres something that has been on my mind:

Competition is about giving both teams access to the same resources, so that its skill that primarily determines the outcome. However with the persistent character system, it poses a problem of players having access to certain abilities or certain weapons that the other team may not have.

So it might be a good idea for stopwatch at least, to have a system that allows teams to create characters temporarily for that match - with the rulesets determining what is locked/banned and what is available.

(INF3RN0) #16

[QUOTE=BMXer;270173]haha, nice wall of text :slight_smile:

I personally think it all boils down to luck/lotto situations when it comes to limiting weapons for comp. IMO the limits should come into place when weapons allow for one equally skilled player to win over another equally skilled player only because he got lucky with the random lotto spread. Remove or limit the potential for luck to play too big a role in the outcome of situations.[/QUOTE]

Well I am hoping it all comes down to aim skill for the most part. My view is that basically specific weapons used by equally skilled players should only outpower others in specific situations. For example, smgs lose to rifles at longer range, snipers beat out most every gun at very long distances, etc etc. In a lot of games there really isn’t any sort of sensible balance, they just base the guns on real guns and it sucks when everyone is killing you with a scoped smg from a mile away lol.

(Thundermuffin) #17

I really hope there’s just a cvar that lets everyone on the server have access to all the body types, perks and weapons (minus whatever we ban which is hopefully nothing or just stupid stuff) for whatever character they’re on without having to switch characters at command posts or however SD is doing it (a little out of the loop on this part, lol). This would just let us hop on any character we like, join the server, customize to whatever strat we’re running and be good to go instead of hopping onto 3 different characters to find our “uber offensive build for reactor” character before the game starts. It just seems like a simple solution.

(INF3RN0) #18

“We’re trying to get rid of that problem of when you buy the game a month after everyone else or you just don’t have enough time to grind, these other guys have unlocked these magical weapons that you have no defense against,” he said. “We’re trying to get rid of no-skill kills. No air strikes. No grenade spam, all the grenades are on a cooldown. Also, grenades are assist weapons, not kill weapons. They knock you down and make you vulnerable but they don’t do that much damage.” -Ed Stern

Anyone else find this quote encouraging? lol :).

(Cankor) #19

[QUOTE=INF3RN0;271113]“We’re trying to get rid of that problem of when you buy the game a month after everyone else or you just don’t have enough time to grind, these other guys have unlocked these magical weapons that you have no defense against,” he said. “We’re trying to get rid of no-skill kills. No air strikes. No grenade spam, all the grenades are on a cooldown. Also, grenades are assist weapons, not kill weapons. They knock you down and make you vulnerable but they don’t do that much damage.” -Ed Stern

Anyone else find this quote encouraging? lol :).[/QUOTE]

I’m hosed.