I was thinking about BRINK yesterday, and I thought of an issue...

(deadlights) #1

I am from a ET:QW background with Splash Damage games. I played W:ET and some Doom 3 multiplayer… But when it comes down to it, I am a QW player.

Now, I liked the way the rank system worked in QW.

You have two sides to it.
You have the in game per every map campaign upgrades and unlocks.
Then the second side where you are constantly trying to rank your character and do things to gain expereance for rank and medal unlocks.

These acchievements did rank your character, but it never gave him an edge over the other players.

For example: If I was playing a Medic in the North American campaign, (3 maps)… By the third map I may have unlocked Full Health revivies and Self Shock. — When the game switches campaigns to Europe (another 3 maps)… Well I am back to ground zero.

Now the other side is, I may have unlocked some medic awards and ranked up from A One star lutenant to a 2nd star. It looks pretty and all… But it does not give me any advantage. The advantage came from the campaign and how well I played on those three maps. This resets after 3 maps…

Now, I understand and respec the RPG elements and the replayability. — But I think this will leave for some issues.

  1. In my opinion the more skilled players will all go medic so they can simply kill kill and heal heal. That is how ET:QW felt, I am sure BRINK will be similar. This could bring an overkill amount of medics in the game… This was not an issue for QW because other things balanced it out. This could be an issue with BRINK because of #2…

  2. More skilled players or players who have more time will rank faster. This will leave alot of people frusturated when the other guy has better unlocks. So this is 8v8… And now we have to face a team of 8 with 5 top ranked medics. Wow, we lose because they have superior unlocks.

See where I am coming from?

I know people who have quit games like this because they could not “hang”… I myself left Battlefield Heroes (for one I hated it) and for two, I was frusturated with the rank system.

I think QW had a great system… And hell, maybe I am wrong. But could you guys shed some light on this… Or maybe other people can give some ideas?

thx

(Wezelkrozum) #2

What about medics who can only health their team and not themselves. That’s were medics are for. To heal their team mates.

(tokamak) #3

TF2’s medic couldn’t heal himself either (though he can use his medic gun as a bong, which is useless but awesome at the same time).
Or at least receive less health from their own packs. Treating your own wounds IS harder after all.

I must admit, if I want to go around just shooting the enemy, then the technician and medics are the best classes due to their longevity. But this doesn’t really have anything to do with the fixed unlocks.

(darthmob) #4

I see where you are coming from but I have to disagree. From the 80 hours or so I played ETQW in 90% of the games I was the only medic on the team. Yeah it totally felt like a class that was played too much.

In ET it was definitely different. There you had constant self healing, the hp bonus for your team and for yourself (resulting in 156hp or so at it’s max) and dozens of medipacks to spam which made it the ultimate rambo machine. The typical public game was 90% medics and maybe one soldier / fops / engineer.

PS: Did you think of the possibility that it is meant to be played that way? You have got 8 players on your team: you need 2 players to complete the objectives, 1-2 players that go heavy / scout and the rest will play medic to keep the the team alive. If you lose to a team that has the right amount of medics; guess what - you are doing it wrong.

PPS: I’m strongly against a “useless” medic class as it is in TF2.

(Exedore) #5

To the points 1 & 2…

1. It’s something we’re constantly balancing, but it changes from map to map depending on what the objectives are, and if a team is entirely lacking one of the classes there can be quite a few buffs and abilities that are lacking. We like a good mix.

2. This happens with any MP games with unlocks, and our plan is to have rank brackets for MP play as an individual (can’t comment on other permutations of that quite yet).

As mentioned in a lot of the articles and interviews coming out of E3, however you build your character is persistent between all game modes (SP/MP/Co-Op), there’s no resetting between campaigns.

We’ve definitely been looking a lot at the classes in W:ET and ET:QW, in an attempt to take the best bits from each, add something new, and above all make sure it balances out for fun. Aaaaaand that’s the most I can probably tease right now!
:smiley:

(tokamak) #6

So a bit like World of Warcraft’s talent builds? Where you can start specialising in in a certain tree but can’t have everything so you’re not some kind of demi-god in the game.

(Exedore) #7

I still shudder when I think of my /played, but… yeah, in a way! It’s not quite the same when it comes to trees, but we’ve definitely taken some lessons from how they did things. Ultimately you’re still making the biggest choice in which class you’re playing at any given time.

(kamikazee) #8

[rant]
Can we be done with all the silliness of the “official” ranks and such if we are talking about the PC version?

Granted, I have 0.5% of play time on ET:QW seeing how I only recently got a PC capable of running the game, but the way ranked vs. unranked servers split the community into two is not pretty.

Now I’m not pleading to completely get rid of leader-boards and such. However, it might be interesting to allow every server administrator to run his own stats collector for his set of servers, whereas the stats at brink.com only list the gathered stats on the official SD servers.

This should allow for servers with custom content, and yet we don’t need to fear they’ll b0rk the stats - after all, it’s the server administrator’s responsibility.

Heck, publicize the API and maybe you can let game server providers rent stat servers instead of “officially approved ranked servers”.

Maybe I’m a whiny old nut (in gamer’s years) who doesn’t understand the whole picture of the business model. Still, I don’t like how the modding scene gets pushed in a corner from the start when the PC allows for a lot of refreshment. And let’s face it, SD actually started out as a modding team.
[/end rant]

(tokamak) #9

You mean there were unranked servers? :rolleyes:

I agree that rigged stats should be the least of our concern. People have already demonstrated that they’re perfectly capable of statpadding on official ranked servers.

Ranked servers did more than that, they were also our quality insurance, making sure there’s always ‘clean’ servers around without annoying additions which spoiled W:ET for me.

(RR2DO2) #10

The whole problem is with global leaderboards. The PC is an inherently untrusted platform. You can’t trust clients or servers by default. The ranked servers were a solution to ensure we could have global leaderboards on the PC platform without having to worry about people running dodgy servers with random settings. Obviously this isn’t ideal, but it is the fairest way you can go without having people complain about unfair stats. The untrusted nature of the PC platform is the main reason why you will not see any public APIs for stat contribution to an official central database.

Now keep in mind, we never stopped anyone from running a normal dedicated server, or custom servers with maps. We just ensured that the global leaderboards stayed a fair and even game. In the end it does turn out that the hardcore community slightly suffered from this because the not-so-hardcore community appears to prefer to play for stats rather than play on modified servers or on custom maps.

There are various potential solutions to this. The most obvious one is to not support global leaderboards on untrusted platforms so there is no worry about global stats, you only compare your stats with your friends list and if one of them stats pad they aren’t really your friend. I believe Valve have gone this route as well and the CoD games behave similarly on the PC. Any global stats can potentially gathered by a 3rd party in a limited scope by servers such as splatterladder.

All of this doesn’t guarantee that people will want to play on custom content/mod servers though, as they might prefer their base content and want to play the core game (there are always a lot of arguments under gamers about playing ‘vanilla’ vs the flavour of ‘pro’ of the day). Our goal is to not actively stop people from making this choice themselves.

(kamikazee) #11

Sure, I understand the whole “don’t trust the client” thing. I was just saying “do we need the global leaderboard and all the draconian stuff around it?” So if third parties gather stats, an API to read stats could make sense.

Anyway, you explained it better than I did.

[QUOTE=RR2DO2;194667]All of this doesn’t guarantee that people will want to play on custom content/mod servers though, as they might prefer their base content and want to play the core game (there are always a lot of arguments under gamers about playing ‘vanilla’ vs the flavour of ‘pro’ of the day). Our goal is to not actively stop people from making this choice themselves.[/QUOTE]Fair enough…

If you would go the W:ET route (i.e. every server is potentially customized), a “vanilla” marker would be a nice addition for the server list. Forcing the game into “vanilla mode” may be the hard part though.

(Floris) #12

[reply to post quoted below]
Hmm but from the interviews I gather that you do have a ranking system which is shared between SP, Co-Op and MP, so how will that work then?

[QUOTE=RR2DO2;194667]The whole problem is with global leaderboards. The PC is an inherently untrusted platform. You can’t trust clients or servers by default. The ranked servers were a solution to ensure we could have global leaderboards on the PC platform without having to worry about people running dodgy servers with random settings. Obviously this isn’t ideal, but it is the fairest way you can go without having people complain about unfair stats. The untrusted nature of the PC platform is the main reason why you will not see any public APIs for stat contribution to an official central database.

Now keep in mind, we never stopped anyone from running a normal dedicated server, or custom servers with maps. We just ensured that the global leaderboards stayed a fair and even game. In the end it does turn out that the hardcore community slightly suffered from this because the not-so-hardcore community appears to prefer to play for stats rather than play on modified servers or on custom maps.

There are various potential solutions to this. The most obvious one is to not support global leaderboards on untrusted platforms so there is no worry about global stats, you only compare your stats with your friends list and if one of them stats pad they aren’t really your friend. I believe Valve have gone this route as well and the CoD games behave similarly on the PC. Any global stats can potentially gathered by a 3rd party in a limited scope by servers such as splatterladder.

All of this doesn’t guarantee that people will want to play on custom content/mod servers though, as they might prefer their base content and want to play the core game (there are always a lot of arguments under gamers about playing ‘vanilla’ vs the flavour of ‘pro’ of the day). Our goal is to not actively stop people from making this choice themselves.[/QUOTE]

(SockDog) #13

I like the Valve method. Stats but no E-Peen encouraging leaderboards to top.

L4D is a nightmare to play when you want a vanilla server, a switch would be good. BUT. I would say you need to allow some flexibility in there otherwise if you miss out one single feature in the vanilla game and it has to be modded in then you undermine the whole game.

(RR2DO2) #14

[QUOTE=Florisjuh;194676]
Hmm but from the interviews I gather that you do have a ranking system which is shared between SP, Co-Op and MP, so how will that work then?[/QUOTE]

Don’t confuse global leaderboards (which is what the ETQW stats site is) and personal achievements/ranks/whichever. One is isolated to an individual, the other affects every person playing the game.

(tokamak) #15

A good way to do that would be to have a very clear distinction, a toggable option between ‘official’ and ‘custom’.

Quake Wars and Wolfenstein ET are two sides of the spectrum here. One side there’s QW where the custom content was so obscure nobody plays it, and on the other side is W:ET where everything is modded, every server require has a wait time because somethings need to be downloaded and some mods even change the entire menu of the game permanently.

I said this in another thread already, but I think Unreal Tournament 2004 nailed it:

This simple toggle puts all the power in the hands of the player.

(Slade05) #16

Come to think of it, did SD ever post something like postmortem for ETQW?
Cuz judging by yet another “OH NOES THE GAME IS DEAD” thread, it`s almost time and it certainly would be an insightful reading.

(deadlights) #17

Well I think this thread went a little off topic, but that is ok!

I have an issue with stats as well, and I am glad that has been brought to attention.

In ETQW the stats were not a HUGE problem, because even when you had stat padders, you still were getting things done. But it did get annoying a year after the game was out and people cared more about being a medic and getting kills, over objectives. I was that guy who was always like “fine, I will be the enge…”

I think eradicating global stats would keep the e-Peen to a minimum. I think it is fun for some people to flex at eachother, but for the majority of the community… Not so much.

And to SD: You guys seem to be really fond of getting new people playing MP with the eradication of the “2 exe method of building games.” You have added the SMART button, and have become the “gateway drug game.” Now, why would you ruin all of that by adding global stats to allow the “big players” to prove their superiority over the new guys you just brought into the game? I think this could cause problems… Stats also limits team play and awards individuals.

Now I am a good player, and have been a captain of a few ETQW competetive teams. So I am not some n00b crying about stats. But I think is important to see the other side.

But back on topic of the thread…
When you allow perminant class ranks and building, IMO you really can unbalance the game. BUT if you allow for, lets say, lvl 1-6 to play together and 6-12, and 12-18 etc etc… Then that becomes less of a problem and I have no issue with it.

Then that opens more issues… What if your best friend IRL or clanmates play more than you? Then you never catch up? Then what?

Ideas?

(RR2DO2) #18

deadlights: would you say that TF2 and Call of Duty are unbalanced by allowing people to level up?

(tokamak) #19

TF2 has a very rudimentary way of ‘levelling up’ though, most weapons are hardly an upgrade but more of a special option. Though there have been some complaints about the scout’s new gun which is something everyone walks around with as soon as they get it.

But overall they executed everything very well. An option is only balanced if it becomes really hard to chose between both. Like in TF2 the medics ubercharge granting either invincibillity or critical strikes.

(acidrain) #20

I really don’t think the problems with custom content in ETQW was so much driven by the leaderboard but more so that it was just a pain in the arse to set up. Fortunately ETQWPro fixed the megatexture download issue, but having to restart the game multiple times just to join a custom game was what scared most people off.

Yes I understand the reasons for the restarts, but the user experience was just blah.