RTCW2 overpowered medic proposal

(Kendle) #41

I have. I’ve played Medic competitvely since RTCW from April '02. tbh, it’s a fine balance. Med is the ultimate fighting Class because of their health advantage, but as you say, taking it away would reduce their ability to do what they’re supposed to as well (run around in a mad fire-fight reviving team-mates).

Personally I think I’d still do OK as a Med without the health bonus, but it would have to be finely balanced, especially from a competitive point of view. If the Med were made too weak offensive pushes would be weakened and the game would be more defensively biased, which it already is (too much on most maps).

I think reducing their initial health, but retaining the ability to heal themselves, would kill 2 birds with 1 stone. They’d be weakened enough to make them NOT the fighting Class of choice, but with their ability to heal they could still carry out their Med duties, even if it means running away and healing up between pushes (which they do anyway).

(senator) #42

I don’t like the ideas of reduced medic health or that Medics cant eat their own healthpacks, it would only increase the number of RamboMedics. I am a medic, and I am ‘good’ Medic, I usually advance quickly in my Medic level, which is an indication that I am doing the right thing (giving health packs, reviving teammates). But one thing I noticed is that the life of a medic is a dangerous one. I am usually target nummero uno for everyone and whenever I see the needle symbol on my compass and go off to find the player to revive him I usually take a lot of fire. Without the extra health and the health packs many of my suicide runs to revive a player who is lying somewhere in the open under enemy fire would mean my death. Now, with low health I would probably die on my way to him or on my way back; and wouldn’t do it. And without the ability to regain my health again after such a run with eating medi-packs I would do this one time… and than everyone who dies after that will see a Medic refusing to come to his rescue because the Medic needs to wait 40 sec. to regain his health… fun.
If the Medic is punished too badly for helping somebody else he won’t do it, simple as that.

And let me say it again (because you always forget this and only complain about the 1vs1 medic advantages of his additional 30HP) The medic is the worst long range class and all other classes might have fewer health but can dish out more damage. And the other thing is that the medic isn’t so strong because of his extra health, but because he can revive teammates! 1 Medic: 30 extra HP. A revived teammate: 50 extraHP and another gun on the battlefield, a Lv.3 Medic and we have a full-strength player back in combat! If you want to nerf the strength of a medic take away his ability to revive teammates and you’ll see, all of a sudden no more medic-groups in clan matches, than everybody would run around as Eng with a RifleNade and you could start a new game of ‘Nerf Engs!’ crying. :moo:

(Maximus191) #43

He shoots he scores \o/

Well said m8 :clap:

(Kendle) #44

Senator, again it depends on your perspective. For pubs you’re absolutely correct. For Clan wars it’s a different story.

The Classes that can dish out more damage (per “shot” I assume you mean) i.e. Field-Op / Panzer / Rifle 'Nade, are limited in Clan wars. Panzer and Rifle 'Nade are limited to 1 max per team, and Field-Ops can’t get to Level3 (which is when they become real mass-damage players). Furthermore, Meds can’t get to Level3 in Clan wars either, so full-revive isn’t an issue.

Plus of course, in Clan wars a Med would never “refuse” to come to a team-mates aid. If he did he wouldn’t be platying for that Clan for much longer.

As I say it’s a fine balance AND one that needs to account for the very different environments provided by Clan wars and public servers.

(evilsock) #45

Doesn’t this kind of suggest that when new additions to this franchise are being considered, the makers should also take into account the differing needs of Pub vs. Clanned players? How are they gunna solve that one?

(Kendle) #46

With difficulty. ET’s biggest and most fundamental problem is that it was designed for pubs. All of the work Bani has done with ETPro, and the configs that various leagues have refined over time, have all been geared towards making ET work in an environment that it just wasn’t made for. I believe the original poster started this thread with RTCW2 in competition firmly in mind, as opposed to criticism of the ET Med per se.

edit: Although of course ET’s biggest problems (as a competitive game) are the maps (almost all of which (the standard ones anyway) are overly biased to defense, which is the opposite of that required for Stopwatch competition) and XP. I think RTCW2 could cut through the obstacles ET has put in the way of proper competition like a hot knife through butter simply by ensuring the maps are offensively biased and that XP is either left out completely or has a simple on/off server-side switch. Perhaps integrate XP into the various game modes, Campaign = XP on, Stopwatch = XP off.

(evilsock) #47

Perhaps integrate XP into the various game modes, Campaign = XP on, Stopwatch = XP off.

TBH that’s how I see as well. Kind of ties in with my pet hate - custom server configs. This is something that really should be tackled in future FPS games by Id/SD/Nerve/GreyMatter et al. I think it’s becoming clear that the online niche for Castle Wolfenstein (in general) has splintered. On the one hand you need competition biased play to attract the creation of leagues (which goes hand in hand with attracting top players which provides so much 'oomph ’ for the first 18 months) but also caters for public play.

IMO Pub <> Clanned play : not by that great a margin but it’s clear enough that what’ll keep the pubs alive in 5 years times is not necessarily what’s required for competitive play.

I suppose there are a few ways you could handle it and your suggestion is pretty good. I’d also like to see the server configs handled in the same way PB updates are handled i.e. take the config away from the server admins by providing an ‘auto config’ service. You could of course override it but just the fact it’s there and a selectable option as opposed to the daunting prospect of a n00b game server admin having to configure a server themselves would be useful.

*sighs, welcome to the X-Box generation…

(EvilBaga) #48

ETpro really destroyed the pub scene . It totally ruined 2 maps. At first I was pissed, really pissed with bani. Then I realized it was meant for competition play, and was simply being implemented by noob server admins on pub servers (not to say I think highly of the changes even then though but I can accept it).

Right now, I play 90% of the time on servers without the new ETpro maps, but sadly most of the time the reason for the lack of new maps seems not to be a conscious decision on the server admins part, but a lack of upgrading/concern.

Usually when I play Battery nowadays as an Axis Covert it goes like this (Scenario repeated about 3-5 times per game).
EvilBaga TeamChat: Im going to blow their CP!!! I need an engineer as backup!!!
EvilBaga TeamChat (after blowing it): WTF…I SAID I NEEDED BACKUP!
(repeat 5)
Finally a noob wises up.
Call Vote: Kick EvilBaga
:moo:

On the bright side… the allies have noob coverts and engineers who make it their (ET) lifes goal to blow the Gen…

(Kendle) #49

I’m still not a big fan of Battery with the ETPro map script. OK for comps, but much too easy for Allies on pubs. Trouble is it was much too hard for Allies on pubs before so it’s no worse, just it’s no better either.

Fueldump however is another story. The ETPro map script for Fueldump has made it playable again. It was quite simply the most attrociously horrible ET map before, now I actually enjoy playing it. Well done Bani!!

(senator) #50

I like the new changes at battery, even if I am defending! I had some boring games playing the old battery as the axis, just yesterday I scored 80 kills on that map alone, half of them by arty repeatedly spammed on the assault ramp construction box… booooring.
But on maps that allow to dyna the backdoor I usually spawn at the CP and immediately start defending the back alley, and if I have 2 other Axis as support we usually manage to hold this way even against repeated allied attacks :slight_smile: But that of course means that the front is now weaker and allies trying to break through there now have an easier time.
This also give the game a whole new dimension because it adds indoor fighting, as soon as the backdoor is breached and the forward bunker taken a good axis team usually falls back and defends the gun controls itself instead of trying to repeatedly attack the forward bunker or block the narrow entrance directly infront of their spawn.

The new changes make the map easier for the allies but against a good and organized axis team its still far from a walkover! I enjoy Banis changes a lot, no matter what side I play and I only play on random pub servers :slight_smile:

Good job! :drink:

(evilsock) #51

Fwiw I actually agree with everyones comments. Battery is much fairer for being able to blow the back door - just confusing sometimes because it’s implemented on some servers and not on others. I filtered out etmain some time ago from my ASE. Props to Bani, Rain and the team for all their efforts - it’s been appreciated and is helping keep the ET scene alive (but lets not forget the chaps at SD for putting it together in the first place :slight_smile:

I didn’t explain the config updates very well - do you remember when ppl started to see a green spike on their lagometers for certain servers? Turned out to be PB auto screen shots, something like every 5 seconds - irritating on BB, unplayable on 56k - simple enough thing to put right if you know how to configure PB - not so easy if you’ve just downloaded a PB config from somewhere and don’t really have a clue about the var settings.

I’ve played on servers where I suddenly start getting hammered for using picmip at my standard picmip setting, or r_intensity or any number of ET vars.

Conversley, I played on servers where PB was active but noone had actually told PB to check for anything - bit pointless tbh.

Ever played on a server where it’s running an older version of PB and whines constantly about the fact your using a newer client?

I know some of these things are kind of sorted now and this certainly isn’t a rant but it leads me to the conclusion that if Shrub was a bit of a nightmare for consistancy, so is ET-Pro to an extent. Why? Because each server admin is allowed great freedom in the configuration of their server - a good thing? Well yes in theory - I can setup a server without too much grief and I bet most of you guys can as well because we’ve all been exposed to server environments or are smart inquisitive ppl. But what about the rest?

If you rent a clan server then my experience of this (Barrysworld fwiw) was that you could still adjust all the server vars from an HTML page. The opportunities to screw things up are great.

The debate over XP (which still seems to me to be a game device that allows decent gameplay for those large maps) could be brought to a swift end if the following were possible;

Within the game configuration there could be the following options;

Pub play with XP - campaign
Pub play without XP - SW

Both of those configs are not going to enforce comp cvar regs but because these settings are common to the game the cvars are standard server to server.

Additionally there could be;

Comp play <insert your league name here> without XP - SW

Now the smart part is that by default, every server can enforce it’s cvars rules but because they’re standard to each ET install there’s not much scope for controversial settings.

Add to that server cvar configs that can be updated by leagues in the style of the PB client (maybe even via a bittorrent stream) and proporgated so that effectively the updates are P2P based and you have the beginnings of a system that caters for all.

Who knows maybe a flag could be implemented so that when you use the ingame browser or ASE, Pathfinder - any of the game server clients, it’s possible to see a visual que as well as the standard ‘bumf’ you normally see which could show the config of the server deviates somewhat from the games inbuilt options before you join it.

Sorry to be so long winded but I felt that I didn’t explain my last paragraph very well yesterday.

(Kendle) #52

OSP (for RTCW) included a sv_autoconfig setting, with 3 values, public / comp / none. AFAIK it still works in ET. Trouble is, all the settings the 3 options activate can and are overridden by whatever the server admin wants.

I’d agree tho that the many and varied server settings are annoying and unhelpful. I also filtered out Shrub a long time ago because it has too many game altering options and 1 Shrub server could be wildly different from another Shrub server. Trouble is ETPro is going the same way. Although it doesn’t have the mad game destroying options of Shrub, it can still do plenty of stuff to make 1 ETPro server significantly different from another (although of course 1 ETMain server could be set-up very different from another, so it’s not entirely the fault of mods, ETPro or Shrub).

I believe COD has far less server-side options, thereby ensuring a more consistent game, so maybe the RTCW2 developers could also take that on board.

(Rain) #53

It’d have been better if we could’ve made the back door rebuildable, I think. :confused:

Battery is one tough balancing act. It’s generally been my least favorite map (on pubs), 'cause I’ve always been good about sneaking into fueldump as a covert. :smiley:

FWIW, I’ve seen battery very well defended on pubs by the Axis, but to do this, they concentrated on the gun room instead of the bluff.

(eq-Shrike) #54

my 2 pennies worth …

Medics are fine as they are. The problem lies not with the medic but with the etpro tweak to how much damage it takes to send a body into limbo.

(EvilBaga) #55

You got a point there, before anyone says it… yes ETpro made it so you have to give the same amount of damage as RTCW for a guy to go to Limbo.
Only problem is… THE GUNS FIRE SLOWER in Wolfenstein:ET than RTCW!

(evilsock) #56

A-ha! The solution stands before us :slight_smile:

(senator) #57

How about: after a player was killed but not gibbed a countdown starts (from 10 to zero?? or random ?) and if a friendly medic fails to revive you during that time you die (bleed to death). Only friendly medics and the dead player can see this countdown and enemy fire will further reduce/speed up the countdown.

Discuss :slight_smile:

(Kendle) #58

@Rain, not having a dig at ETPro re: Battery btw. I just think Battery and Fueldump are inherently borked and no amount of scripting will fix them.

Re: Gib damage, yes ETPro increased the amount of damage required to send a body into Limbo. It was necessary because ETMain’s gib damage was so low you could easily gib a body just by firing a few extra shots into it (which you’re likely to do anyway) and the player would be gibbed before their body hit the ground, making Meds pretty much useless (in regard to their primary role of reviving). Higher gib damage was an absolute necessity and it was one of the first things Bani fixed with ETPro.

Question is: What’s the right “amount” for ET, seeing as the guns do fire slower?

If it were reduced attacks could be repelled easier as defenders would need less effort to put them into Limbo. Of course the same hold true for the attacking team, but generally in a match the defenders rack up more kills, so it would benefit them more, which would not be a good thing for competition. Indeed, some people want gib damage increased even further for that reason.

Plus, gib damage still doesn’t address the real issue with Meds. Lowering it would nerf their ability to do one of the things they’re supposed to do, revive people. It would do bugger all to nerf their ability to do what they’re not supposed to do, which is run around as mad-ass seemingly invunerable killing machines.

(Kendle) #59

Senator, first thought would be it’d weaken attack. I’m an Allied Engy at North Gun. I’m dead but not gibbed. A friendly medic is on the way. Currently, he gets to me, revives me, I plant, we win. If he only had 10 seconds to revive me and didn’t make it in time, I’m in Limbo and unable to complete the objective. Generally, in Clan matches, being put into Limbo disadvantages the attack more than the defense, so “bleeding to death”, whilst sounding reasonable, would probably also be a bad thing for competition.

(EvilBaga) #60

As I remember it the problem with meds was not just the killing machine aspect…but the “one med is One Tough Bastard, but two (or more) are invincible”
Giving Enemy players a decent chance to get gibs in solves this problem.