Curious about one aspect

(Linsolv) #21

Are you guys children? Seriously? You can’t stand to be at a disadvantage for 5 minutes?

(Nail) #22

lol, play medic, let the bots do the hard stuff, you’ll be fine

(CapnHowdy21) #23

Everyone keeps making it sound like it will take all your points to make you the best medic you can be. Judging by the some of the abilities, there are more active abilities then you can use. So picking those wont make you a better medic, just give you a wasted power. Wouldn’t it be wiser to diversify some of those extra points into other classes?

(Linsolv) #24

High five, Capn!

If you want to play an Operative, but you’re worried that you might need more engies, then there’s plenty of things that are highly situational that you can cut. You need an extra Medic point? Drop Cortex bomb, it’s not necessary. Nice? Sure. Far from necessary.

(Chili Squirts) #25

Depends. If I invest in the set up that I plan to invest in, then I’ll be using 8 or so points on Engineer, which leaves me 10-12 more points to use on universal abilities. I can get all the crazy awesome engy spec’s I want like gatling turrets and buffs and still have enough points to grab the essential universals if I want.

(Weapuh) #26

[QUOTE=BMXer;281100]This is a great question. If some of you are correct, I foresee not only “quick class change binds” like we had in ETQW and W:ET but “quick disconnect and reconnect class change binds”!

Here is what I see happening… Round begins, everyone notices the team is full of specialized medics and no one wants to play objective. Since you can’t switch to the character you worked so hard to build, you disconnect and join another server.[/QUOTE]

Thx BMXer for being a beacon of light among a few dim responses. I hadn’t even imagined how frustrating that would be.
I just think it’s kinda of stupid backwards to be at the disadvantage for trying to complete and help your team. why? Doesn’t seem to be a good reason other than seeing your same guy in a cinematic at the beginning and the end.

It doesn’t ruin the game of course. Nobody said it did, as most people are suggesting, just disappointing.

(Linsolv) #27

Why is it disappointing to require people stick to their guns?

EDIT: You know… the metaphorical guns. Not their actual firearms.

(Weapuh) #28

I don’t see that making sense… It shouldn’t be disappointing for a game that emphasizes teamwork to be unable to help his team in a specific way to the best of their ability? A team with no engineer should always “stick to their guns” and hope the crane builds itself? Don’t mean to sound …mean, I just don’t get what you were trying to say.

I’m not saying it will be impossible for the operative, turned engineer, can’t do the job. Simply that if the same person had a ranked engineer they’d probably LOVE to do the job and help out the team for the delicious XP. They can’t use that character though, they’d have to use the character they currently have which possibly have 0 engi skills, so it’s disappointing in that sense.

(Linsolv) #29

Okay. Let me think of a way to phrase this.

Actions have consequences. If I go to school and I forget my debit card at home, thinking they’ve got cash in their pocket but they don’t, guess who misses lunch? THIS GUY. Sometimes, people make choices that are bad. And you have to live with those choices. That’s a basic life lesson that everyone here should learn before it’s too late.

I have to applaud SD for not encouraging the current international attitude du jour of “I can’t be blamed for things that happens as a result of my choices.”

(Weapuh) #30

That’s just completely wrong. That the game is like real life in the sense that you make bad decisions.
Upgrading your character can’t be a bad decision because you don’t know your next map will not have a soldier. Doesn’t make your decision to upgrade operative bad. The two are completely incomparable. Especially since the solution wouldn’t be “too bad” it would be “ok, screw this server”.

Edit: Niceness

(Shadowcat) #31

Assumeing the class distribution is even, then there would be around a 1/4 chance of a team that doesnt have all four classes. So one in four games, a single person will have to play something other than their main class. And thats ignoring the fact that some players will have a secondary class or focus on universal skills.

Not to mention that people will probably change character builds to suit the maps, so the important classes aren’t likely to be missing.

There’s still a sizable chance of pub teams with only one medic, or soldier, which could suck, but you don’t have to change classes in that situation if its such a bad situation for you.

All this goes to show you is that choosing to focus on one single class at the expense of all others may not be the best character build for when you’re pubbing. Its a choice to make, not required.

(Linsolv) #32

Where are you getting these numbers, Shadowcat? Because it seems like you’re not thinking it all the way through.

For any given class, if we assume that any given player has a 25% chance of being a certain class, then we have 0.75^8 or 10% chance of not having a given class. Not 25%. However, the suggestion that you can only spec into one class is silly. If we were to say that each player has 2 classes, and that classes are evenly disbursed, then any given player has a 50% chance of being a certain class, and that’s a less than 1% chance (0.5^8 = 0.3%) of a team simply not having any class.

EDIT: There are, I assume, people who will say “WHERE U GET DIS NUMBER LIN.” So I’ll tell you.

If you are a medic, and we randomly roll a 4-sided die labelled with each class, there’s a 25% chance it will come up “medic.” Or, a 75% chance it will come up anything other than medic. For each player who joins the game, we would roll another die, and multiply it by the chances that it was not medic up until this point. Hence, there’s a 100% chance it wasn’t medic before on the first roll, because there were no rolls beforehand. So 1*.75 = 0.75; for 2 players, though, you have 0.75 (answer from part 1) * 0.75 (chance of not being medic) = 0.5625. If we follow this to its logical conclusion, the chance is: “chance of event not occurring” ^ “number of times the event occurs.”

(Shadowcat) #33

[QUOTE=Linsolv;281155]Where are you getting these numbers, Shadowcat? Because it sounds like you’re making them up.

For any given class, if we assume that any given player has a 25% chance of being a certain class, then we have 0.75^8 or 10% chance of not having a given class. Not 25%. However, the suggestion that you can only spec into one class is silly. If we were to say that each player has 2 classes, and that classes are evenly disbursed, then any given player has a 50% chance of being a certain class, and that’s a less than 1% chance (0.5^8 = 0.3%) of a team simply not having any class.[/QUOTE]

similar math, but you ignored the fact that the first three people aren’t 25%. The first person would be able to pick any class, the second would have a 75% chance of picking the new class, the 3rd would have either a 25% or 50% chance of picking a new class. So i simplified it to the first 3 people picked different classes, and then everyone else had a 75% chance of picking one of those three. 75%^5 = 23.7%. I rounded up to 1/4 to make up for some of the simplification.

so 1/4 is the worst case (everyone has one class)

(Nail) #34

afaik, you can swap out abilities at command posts, at a cost of course

(Shadowcat) #35

Possibly, but only if you have invested into more than 3 active abilities for one class.

You cant alter your character build in the middle of a game, so if you put all your skill points into engineering, you would be fighting uphill as anything else.

(Linsolv) #36

[QUOTE=Shadowcat;281156]similar math, but you ignored the fact that the first three people aren’t 25%. The first person would be able to pick any class, the second would have a 75% chance of picking the new class, the 3rd would have either a 25% or 50% chance of picking a new class. So i simplified it to the first 3 people picked different classes, and then everyone else had a 75% chance of picking one of those three. 75%^5 = 23.7%. I rounded up to 1/4 to make up for some of the simplification.

so 1/4 is the worst case (everyone has one class)[/QUOTE]

It might be quite late, so my math might be faulty, but that seems wrong. See, we can safely assume that all 4 classes will be needed at any given point, and therefor for any given class out of 8 members of the party 1 or more must exist. Which is the math posted above.

(Nail) #37

lol, all I want is an AR w/drum and a medic that follows me like a puppy

(Shadowcat) #38

It’s only that simple for independent probabilities, in this case, the probabilities of each person is affected by the choices made by each person before them.

Your math would work if you wanted to, say, figure out the chance of not having a medic on the team (.75 ^ 8 = 10%)

(Linsolv) #39

No it’s not [affected by the choices of those that came before]. The argument is that you can’t know what your team’s makeup will be when you join a lobby. If you can know what your team’s makeup will be, then there’s no problem at all.

EDIT 2: Of course, you can say that the class role itself will be filled, which is my point exactly and I can go to bed. But the complaint is that you can’t switch to a specialized [role that is needed] after the fact.

(DarkangelUK) #40

That’s the point, it’s the best of the players ability, not the best abilities given to them by the game. If you’re so reliant on class abilities, that you’re useless without them, then you have bigger issues it seems. If you’ve made the concious decision not to tweak that specific class, then it’s best bets that you rarely play it anyway, so class specific abilities that you don’t understand for a class you never play, won’t give any great boost to your own ability as a player.

You have your class, you have your equipment, you have a gun… you have everything you need to get the job done, lack of abilities don’t affect that.