Grenade Shooting

(Apoc) #61

[quote=Zarel;351415]Okay, okay, so it is powerful. Now, what do you have in mind? What do you think would be a good remedy to this?
Taking out the knockdown effect? Decreasing damage? Decreasing splash range?[/quote]

Giving people a set number of grenades would stop it being overused. Also making the hitbox much smaller, would mean you had to concentrate on hitting your grenade instead of just throwing it at an enemy, then shooting the enemy in the knowledge that wherever the grenade went, the hitbox is large enough and the spread big enough that it will definately hit, even if you shoot at their head while the grenade is at their feet.

(Zarel) #62

…Hmmm…kinda like that. Say, one or two on the three class, and with it, it could also be set that the soldier has more (at least one-two more counts) grenades than the other classes, giving soldiers more emphasis on general combat…or something like that. :slight_smile:

(Apoc) #63

Soldiers already have recharging molitovs and flashes

(Zarel) #64

Ah, right! I always(especially) forgot the flashbombs/bangs. XP

(sereNADE) #65

Grenade shooting should be done away with entirely or allow grenades to be shot by anybody.

(tangoliber) #66

I’ve been using it a lot on PS3. It may be a little overpowered…but its fun, so I’d rather not get rid of it. But you could still ban it for tournaments.

The soldier grenade buffs (range and damage) don’t seem to apply when you shoot the grenades…and yea, you can shoot your opponents grenades on PS3. Sometimes it backfires, if you accidently shoot an uncooked grenade just a foot away from you.

(morguen87) #67

One thing that bugs me about all these threads on balancing is 9/10 people calling for balance are playing light all the time and wondering why they’re dying so easily. The other body types are supposed to be viable alternatives, you’re not supposed to be able to do everything in a light body type, it wasn’t how the game was designed. So yeah, grenades will mess you up as a light, they should.

Light body types with smgs were all the rage when the game came out, now it’s grenade shooting. Apparently at least, I haven’t seen that much of it, or at least definitely not an over-use of it.

What’s funny is grenade shooting was actually considered useless by a large number of players when they were riding the other bandwagon of light-carb 9ing. Something else will come along that will counter grenade shooting and all the sheep can jump to that, just let the game evolve.

If you are really stubborn about playing light 24/7, expect things to kill you, grenades are one of them. It doesn’t mean it’s imbalanced.

seems like all the serious comp players want Brink to bend around their way of playing and even force restrictions to do so. I don’t speak up about that because what you do on your own servers is fine, but to petition a change that affects everyone because something is interrupting your all light body all same smg party is just stupid. Brink was never meant to be played with all light body types and smgs, that’s why there are going to be things that can easily counter it. You can keep all your silly restrictions on your own servers to keep light body types with smgs superior to everything else, but don’t try to force them on us.

(Thundermuffin) #68

You do realize that there isn’t that much of a health difference between the 3 body types, correct? Even with that minuscule difference, you can still take a medium down pretty easily with grenade shooting. Heavy has more health than a light, but he’s so immobile that it’s not a viable alternative in comp, because comp players can hit a slow moving target easily (well we could if the spread wasn’t so random).

You can hit a grenade without even aiming near it, yet asking them to fix that is us making them bend over backwards to make the game our way? If we get 1st person spectator mode or an SDK, are you going to say we bribed them to do it and made them sacrifice resources that could be spent making even more useless clothing options?

Really, we’re asking for nothing more than what they said we were getting: a well balanced, Enemy Territory experience. Do you not want the game they said you were going to get?

(morguen87) #69

The competitive community made a stupid decision by enforcing so many rules so early in Brink’s life. It set a bad precedent. I understand that some things may have been unbalanced, but the fact is you cannot really begin to understand the game until at least a few months in, as even when there are no changes the meta game still shifts (case in point: when Brink was released many people thought of grenade shooting as a wasted ability). Competitive gamers of all people should know this.

The problem now is that there are so many rules and enforcements, you guys may as well be playing a different version of Brink while leaving very little room for experimentation with different builds and stratagies. I don’t want to play with everyone using a light body using an smg. That’s not Brink to me. It’s Brink to everyone who played with the competitive rules though because things started to get tinkered with way, way, way too early and I doubt at this point it will ever change. Any balancing SD has done to get people away from using lights and smgs all the time has been rejected by the community.

By making so many rules regarding ability usage so early on, there was never any time for people to figure out a way to counter or avoid it. The competitive community literally went through and just removed everything they didn’t like in a matter of a couple weeks. Haha, a couple weeks of testing and we’re talking about a competitive game here…does something seem wrong with that to anyone else? It’s like playing Quake 3 for a couple weeks and being like “Man, that red armor makes people overpowered, okay, new rule: no more red armor in competitive games.”

Grenade shooting is just another one of those abilities you want to get rid of instead of giving time for the community to evolve. Only now you are trying to do it universally.

(Thundermuffin) #70

You do realize that the competitive community played with everything on at the start and the only thing that happened were fullholds because Splash Damage did not balance the game well whatsoever, correct? The game wouldn’t be played with only lights and SMG, if they weren’t the only useful combo. Don’t blame the competitive community for using the best combo and having to ban things, because the blame should fall on SD for not making medium/heavy/rifles/anything useful and for doing such a poor job of balancing the abilities. That’s besides the point, anyways, as this is about grenade shooting and not your opinion on what the competitive community is doing “wrong.”

Grenade shooting is unbalanced, period; play with any competitive player who still plays this game (if there’s any left, everyone may have left for TF2, CS:S/CS1.6, or QL, lol) and watch as they kill you quickly because of the ability to shoot grenades without even trying to aim at them, which will knock you down and make trying to fight back all about luck because the spread of guns is so wacky.

We don’t want to get rid of things we don’t like; we want to get rid of things that aren’t balanced. They bragged this game had only skillful kills. Hitting a grenade with lotto spread is not skillful in any shape or form.

(Apoc) #71

Firstly, the comp community didnt “want” to play light, it started off pretty evenly spread amoung the classes, it quickly became clear however that the mediums and heavys got raped by lights. Anyone who went medium or heavy was basically a lost frag. Because of this, people went light.

Secondly the comp community started off using all the abilities, but some like downed fire and self revive and adrenaline were quickly shown to either be overpowered, or for want of a better word…annoying. And so some abilities were taken off. Please, other than downed fire, give me an ability that has been taken away that makes lights have an advantage, or stops heavys or mediums being used. Please enlighten me.

Thirdly, grenade shooting kills heavys just as easily as it kills lights, heavys go down quicker in firefights anyway as they cant move fast enough to stop the quick spray of headshots. Also heavys are even worse effected by grenade shooting as they are so slow and their weapons have such big spread, its firstly easy to hit them with the grenade (as opposed to lights who can sometimes jump or strafe out of the way if the thrower isnt that sharp). And second their weapons have the biggest spread, which gets bigger when on the floor. Not to mention the fact that heavys are useless in general, and even if they did deal with grenade shooting well (which they dont) it wouldnt be enough to make them worth using as they just get mowed down anyway.

The rules arent restricting brink. Brink restricts itself. In its current shape, with no restrictions, full holds are more commen than victories. Thats not how a game should be…constant draws…The restrictions try to make the game playable.

People arent playing lights because they are trying to shape the game, brink has forced people into playing lights by shaping us.

But the topic is grenade shooting, and regardless of your beliefs that magical counters to it will be found in the metagame, im here to tell you that i cant see that happening, and i believe that it needs a nerf…not removing…just nerfing. Its an interesting concept, just one that is running the game all by itself at the moment.

(morguen87) #72

I’ve played a lot of games competitively on the pc in my time and while I don’t have the time for that anymore, I can say I’ve never seen the competitive community take a game and turn it into such a bastardized version of itself as the competitive community has done with Brink. What makes a competitive community fun to be a part of is playing the game at a high level while the meta game evolves. The restrictions that were made on Brink were made way, way too early and it leaves little to no room for the game to ever evolve. You’ve sentenced it to a life with no growth before an inevitably quick death as a result. I know you wanted to get rid of abilities seen as unbalanced or annoying, but the fact is, no one is qualified to make those decisions after only a couple weeks when no one truly knows the in/outs of the game.

(Apoc) #73

To be honest, the ristrictions are there to let the metagame evolve, if you played a couple of matches in a team with the setup, then again without it, you would see the difference. Things like grenade shooting are forcing the game to be a particular way due to how powerful they are, there arent counters to it, theres no prefferable alternative, SD gave us a very powerful weapon in grenade shooting and if we arent careful, the metagame will stop evolving and just be grenade shooting. It has no counter. If you can think of one, other than “go heavy” which doesnt help, then please let the rest of us know, we are all trying to find one too. The danger is that it dominates the game to an extent where it kills it.

(Thundermuffin) #74

You keep bypassing the fact that these abilities resulted in full holds every time. So, you would rather us sit there and play the same 1 stage of a map every scrim, rather than try to fix the problems? It’s obvious Splash Damage isn’t going to fix them, by the way; a quick change to the spawn timer would fix some of these problems (both pub and comp related problems) and people would probably reevaluate the rules, but they aren’t doing it. They have to reinvent the wheel to fix problems like that.

You do realize the reason none of those other games aren’t so restrictive is because they came out pretty well balanced, correct? They didn’t have downed fire, self revive, or grenade shooting. If you died there that was the end of that life and you sat and waited to respawn or for the next round to start. There was no second chance or some crap like that unless the game had medics.

(riptide) #75

[QUOTE=Humate;351364]No, I meant that theres no counter to someone nade shooting you in the moment.
A player can take any popular weapon, spray it at someone and nade shoot and the result will be a kill.
None of that takes any skill whatsoever. The spraying part, nor the nade shooting. On top of that, theres no defensive counter to it. Its not something you can see happening in the moment so that you can take the necessary action to avoid ( like the blue smoke in an airstrike :wink:).

What you can do however is you can take note of the players outfit and name, that way you can try to avoid them head on and flank. Or if you see them, you can play their game and beat them to the punch. But at the end of the day - the kill is still a no skill kill… hence the big quote. In fact the spray nature of the weapons make nearly every kill a no skill kill, but thats a discussion for another thread.[/QUOTE]

Shoot their nade as they throw it.

(TeoH) #76

[QUOTE=morguen87;351474]What’s funny is grenade shooting was actually considered useless by a large number of players when they were riding the other bandwagon of light-carb 9ing.
[/QUOTE]

Nope. Here’s last months argument on it: http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28372 Feel free to note the names involved.

One thing that bugs me about all these threads on balancing is 9/10 people calling for balance are playing light all the time and wondering why they’re dying so easily. The other body types are supposed to be viable alternatives, you’re not supposed to be able to do everything in a light body type, it wasn’t how the game was designed. So yeah, grenades will mess you up as a light, they should.

The light is the best body type for anyone playing with any amount of FPS skill, and i really mean ANY amount, there isn’t some steep entry point here. This persists regardless of the use of grenades, heavies are bad and are not a ‘counter’ to grenade shooting, people play light in comp because light is better.

And guess what? I think the game works better that way. We already have spray cone SMGs and relatively slow movement as lights, we don’t need to reduce the speed of targets to a crawl and introduce giant spray miniguns that could potentially hit things in the rough 90 degree angle you are facing in, or rapid fire grenade launchers to spam doorways with. The body types are not balanced, but the game is better for it, because with everyone using lights in comp, player skill (In Brink terms at least) is rewarded more, and the gameplay mechanics are more interesting.

Balancing all the silly options that a developer has thrown into a game against eachother is not the holy grail of game design. The game could have 1000 weapons and 996 of them could be useless, and it wouldn’t matter so long as the 4 useable weapons were rewarding to use and had some tactically relevant differences between them. Even this choice isn’t necessary, the game can work perfectly well with only 1 weapon if the weapon is interesting enough to use and the rest of the game provides enough depth to it to compensate. The choice of body types is of no tactical interest at all, as you cannot change in game, and you can exploit your FPS abilities much better as a light body than anything else. The game plays better with all lights, and they are also the strongest body type, which is fine. Heavies are currently just another novelty toy for people to mess around with on pub servers that is of no importance to the comp scene, and it’s completely fine for them to stay like that.

(Zarel) #77

[QUOTE=TeoH;351544]
Balancing all the silly options that a developer has thrown into a game against eachother is not the holy grail of game design…[/QUOTE]

Some questions I find interesting for you to answer. How often do you play Brink(how much a day/week, how many hours per play)? What weapons do you usually use(favorite primary/secondary)? And what combat tactic do you usually go to (spray-n-pray, suppression, guerrilla, crouch fire, controlled fire, etc…)

(its al bout security) #78

to my knowledge grenade shooting goes both ways, you can shoot enemies and your own. i have shot a granade out of an enemies hands that was directly in yjeir face after the throw.

its a good mix while short range shot gunning

(morguen87) #79

TeoH, Apoc, Thundermuffin, I don’t have anything else to say without recycling what I already said. I’m going to be smart and do what I, admittedly, should have done from the start and keep quiet since I’m not playing Brink competitively.

However, as I’m sure you guys are aware, pub play is leagues apart from comp play. It’s like a different game. Since devs are reading this thread and taking notes, I’d ask you to not to petition to nerf pub play (where I haven’t seen grenade shooting exploited [yet? maybe]) and instead make it clear to put a stop to it in comp play.

Maybe a promod would be in everyone’s best interest. There aren’t competitive gamers on consoles, regardless of how totally rad their sickest clan in the world is. A promod on pc couldn’t hurt and it may be beneficial to everybody. Maybe instead of the devs making universal changes, they should look into platform specifics. I don’t like the idea of mods in general this early with such a small community as the risk is there to further fragment the community, but if it’s only 1 mod and helps the competitive community (a strong competitive community is good advertisement for the game and that helps everybody out, afterall) then I’m for it.

Basically I don’t want every comp play change coming to public play, there has to be a middle ground. I just don’t want devs nerfing public play (the majority) based on competitive play needs (the minority). Fair enough?

(TeoH) #80

Keep in mind that, at least from my perspective, i don’t think grenade shooting should be removed from the game. I actually really like the mechanic because it allows some more interesting methods of attacking rather than just hitscan machine guns everywhere. Unlike some other very poor ideas like cortex bombs and caltrops, grenades do enhance combat significantly, having the ability to attack out of line of sight, by say throwing a grenade up a staircase and shooting it, or throwing one over the top of cover from range and detonating it to knockdown someone hiding behind a crate, then running in on them. Playing defensively by dropping around corners as you back up. All of this is good stuff, and without the ability to shoot them, ‘cooked’ grenades would see little or no use by skilled players - not because they can’t time them, that’s trivial, but because putting your gun away and priming them several seconds in advance is prohibitively costly, and prevents them being used ‘on demand’. The game is slow, but not THAT slow.

The issue is, Soldier grens thrown at people and shot are so deadly that they become far too important in all types of combat. It’s generally the case that if you walk into a room and see someone on the other side of the room, it’s actually perferable to chuck a grenade and shoot it rather than just opening fire on them, despite you being in direct line of sight of them the whole time. This puts too much emphasis on the single ‘shot’ of landing that grenade, which is an issue for the same reason that 1 shot kills are undesirable. The damage dealt is massive and it’s easy to finish someone immediately as they’re knocked down assuming they don’t just die. If the damage dealt was reduced, then throwing them at people in the middle of an open firefight would be less viiable, as the grenade damage wouldn’t outweigh the damage you would take while lifting and throwing it, and aiming low during flight time. Get the damage right, and you could leave it as a viable tool for attacking out of LOS, by throwing them around corners or over cover. If the radius and knockdown range was left alone, they would still work to knockdown people activating an objective. I believe that’s the best solution.

Since the issue is largely soldier related, a good change might be to replace the solider grenade damage upgrade with some other combat upgrade.