LDG-Gaming

I suggested a while back to have BW OLDZ where bombom is unbanned and only the weapons from two years ago are available, this sounds like the ultimate solution

When I was musing over what to do about the constant complaints (which culminated in the new sticky in this forum) I uploaded vanilla BW to the server and rigged up a quick version of 3SPN3141BW.u which would be compatible with standard. The plan was to drop it on the server if anyone cried again. I later considered that this idea would be suicide, as it would have not only pleased the whiners (both through intensity of my reaction and through severely imbalanced weaponry), it would have disrupted the experience of everyone playing the server simply because of a handful of people.

Fact is, the way the game was two years ago was broken. That's why it's changed. As the game balance evens itself out, weaker players may well enjoy themselves less because there are fewer cheap strategies to find and/or abuse. BW#1 necessarily includes players of a wide range of skills, because the playerbase is small, and this leads to the conflict at the heart of this. Players complain about imbalance and overpowered / useless weapons. If I balance the weapons, the result is that there's consistency of outcome in engagements between players - the better players win, and that, while just and correct, is not much fun for the weaker players. Thus, population problems. However, if I neglect to balance the weapons, an even worse situation results, and it occurs in stages. The first stage is inconsistency of outcome - players using certain loadouts have better prospects. Assuming that players believe the overpowered weapons will not be balanced, the second stage is meta shift - players tend towards the overpowered weapons in order to compete and/or get a just return for their skill. The final stage is reduction to a new balanced state - everyone's using the overpowered weapons. Consistency of outcome is usually the result, unless the weapon has an inherently low skill ceiling, but weapon variety has been drastically reduced because of a limited number of overpowered options. This stage is what vanilla BW reduced to - a very limited number of viable weapons which were used exclusively to the detriment of all else. It is this I seek to avoid.

What the short-sighted (Michie being a good example) don't seem to understand is that leaving the game in any given unbalanced state (or reverting to said state if it existed previously) is not an option, because that state of the game will be tested, its flaws revealed and the result will be even more undesirable to EVERYONE than balancing. Indeed, that's exactly what happened, and that's why that state was supplanted by a new one. The LK-05 is a perfect example of why this thinking is flawed - it existed in its overpowered state for many patches and was only picked up on recently. Similar problems were waiting to be discovered in old states. This general concept is what we call "metagame" and it's the reason I don't get to wave a magic wand and say "This state of the game is perfect and complete, I don't need to do anything else." We are humans and we continually adapt, discover and exploit.

When successive states of the game each have imbalances which can be used to produce inconsistency of outcome, then the playerbase are generally happy - the skilled players because progress is being made, and the weaker players because there is still cheese to abuse. When most of the cheese has been purged, this is the result.

The thaw change is a gameplay issue, but it also links into inconsistency of outcome because of the reason the 13% thaw lock was instituted, which was because dying in a group of allies led to instant thawing, allowing group size to unduly trump skill by preventing the smaller group from having any effect on the larger one - despite the existing advantage of grouping up in terms of faster proxy healing and concentrated firepower. The 13% thaw lock prevented this issue, but it also resulted in better consistency of outcome by removing a major imbalancing factor in Freon's group engagement, and THAT is the fundamental reason that a lot of players object to the change - groups of weaker players no longer suffer absolutely no penalty for individual death. At that point it doesn't matter whether the rationale for the change is solid from a neutral gameplay perspective - from their perspective, they're less powerful, I'm regarded as a better player, I never thaw and don't want anyone else to either, I obviously implemented the change to screw them and bolster myself, and that's all that matters. The result is flaming coming my way.

I can only agree with everything in that honest appraisal. The 13% lock is important to prevent instant thaw, because the proximity heal for groups is already quite strong (but necessary).

I'm just in two minds about whether a minor variable thaw rate, proportional to skill (if possible) would reduce the net spread without damaging the gameplay too much. How would it affect thawing, supporting, camping or targetting of the best/worst players? I'm not sure - it's a suggestion that's been raised before, but I don't know if it is worth the effort. Ultimately, the best players would have to accept a bit more time spent frozen, in order to keep the cannon fodder (!) coming here.

I suppose we do have to accept that this game/mod/server will die one day.

Personally, I haven't set foot in the server for over a month, maybe 2 months, so I doubt it's people tired of getting blasted away by stronger players. I know Azarael doesn't play hugely, and gizmo was very sporadic when I was last online.

Just going to put this out here, and this is just my opinion, but Freon is absolutely terrible.

In a setting where players were fairly evenly balanced and maps weren't designed to flow around powerups and the like but rather to match a flow that suits freon well, its probably pretty damn amazing, but right now, in this setting, its a gametype that's thrown in any DM map that was originally designed with pickups in it, penalizes dying by removing you from the game, and leaves you with no goal besides kill or don't get killed. Sure, players who aren't as great with pure DM skills can heal and thaw if they wanted to, but there's not really a lot of incentive to it.

DM/TDM at least lets you keep playing after death even if you don't expect to win, and the health packs help to direct flow so it adds a bit more order to the chaos. Objective games like CTF allow weaker players to play a support role to help protect flag runners or defend the base, their 1on1 skills, if weak, can be offset by playing in a different role.

If a new player comes along, waits through the downloads and finally gets in a game, first time he dies he's sitting there waiting to play again. It doesn't leave a great impression, I imagine.

Just my opinion. I realize Freon is popular and surely it has its merits, but I don't see how its any good at letting vastly different skilled players enjoy the game equally.

Skaldy wrote:I'm just in two minds about whether a minor variable thaw rate, proportional to skill (if possible) would reduce the net spread without damaging the gameplay too much. How would it affect thawing, supporting, camping or targetting of the best/worst players? I'm not sure - it's a suggestion that's been raised before, but I don't know if it is worth the effort. Ultimately, the best players would have to accept a bit more time spent frozen, in order to keep the cannon fodder (!) coming here.

If variable thaw rate will help anything, I'm more than happy to include it. If we can brainstorm some approximate numbers, I'll update LDGGameBW with it.

iRobot wrote:I know Azarael doesn't play hugely, and gizmo was very sporadic when I was last online.

In my case, it's not just a simple matter of walking into the game and playing. I suffer the same problems as gizmo in that I can always be identified regardless of my name, which means that players will then start interacting with me. I also have to worry about the state of the balance as I'm playing and about complaints that do appear while temporarily incognito. For me, there's no such thing as logging on and just having fun.

Captain Xavious wrote:Just my opinion. I realize Freon is popular and surely it has its merits, but I don't see how its any good at letting vastly different skilled players enjoy the game equally.

It isn't. Freon has advantages, in that it structures the play for two teams and for BWs far better than DM and TDM do with their random spawning, but it also has problems, in that it's new-player unfriendly with respect to time spent playing. Variable thaw rate is at this point a certainty.

Azarael wrote:brainstorm some approximate numbers

OK, keep it simple - I reckon the current thaw rate is fine as the baseline. And it has to work on active players' skill ratings, not the theoretical min/max. For the extreme situation of 8.XX versus 1.XX, perhaps a multiplication factor of four would be appropriate for the low-skilled player. The more normal situation where the best/worst players taking part were a top-25% player and a bottom-25% player would only give a factor of two for the low-skilled player.

Of course, if everyone is similarly low-skilled (late afternoon), or similarly high-skilled (occasional late nights!), then their factors would all need to end up around one.

Hmmm, it's difficult to foresee what strategy changes would emerge - only time will tell.


And at the very least, the whiners will be thrown a bone without compromising the integrity of the BW mod.

Azarael wrote:Fact is, the way the game was two years ago was broken. That's why it's changed. As the game balance evens itself out, weaker players may well enjoy themselves less because there are fewer cheap strategies to find and/or abuse. BW#1 necessarily includes players of a wide range of skills, because the playerbase is small, and this leads to the conflict at the heart of this. Players complain about imbalance and overpowered / useless weapons. If I balance the weapons, the result is that there's consistency of outcome in engagements between players - the better players win, and that, while just and correct, is not much fun for the weaker players. Thus, population problems. However, if I neglect to balance the weapons, an even worse situation results, and it occurs in stages. The first stage is inconsistency of outcome - players using certain loadouts have better prospects. Assuming that players believe the overpowered weapons will not be balanced, the second stage is meta shift - players tend towards the overpowered weapons in order to compete and/or get a just return for their skill. The final stage is reduction to a new balanced state - everyone's using the overpowered weapons. Consistency of outcome is usually the result, unless the weapon has an inherently low skill ceiling, but weapon variety has been drastically reduced because of a limited number of overpowered options. This stage is what vanilla BW reduced to - a very limited number of viable weapons which were used exclusively to the detriment of all else. It is this I seek to avoid.

The sign of a balanced game is decreasing amount of changes over time, which doesn't happen. It was considered already a difficult task more than a year ago, with more content, it's going to be even more difficult.

Then second thing, as of now, there is 124 active players, with 5 players having skill over 7.xx. A year back there was 14 players having skill over 7.xx out of 131 active players (checking Log_S3/13_10_17_at_05-50-01_LDGBWFreon.ini). That message is clear, there isn't problem with noobs, but you are losing skilled players (nearly 3x). Maybe that has some fingers in the fact that the "peak hours" are now much shorter than they used to be.

Izumo wrote:Then second thing, as of now, there is 124 active players, with 5 players having skill over 7.xx. A year back there was 14 players having skill over 7.xx out of 131 active players (checking Log_S3/13_10_17_at_05-50-01_LDGBWFreon.ini). That message is clear, there isn't problem with noobs, but you are losing skilled players (nearly 3x). Maybe that has some fingers in the fact that the "peak hours" are now much shorter than they used to be.

Maybe the lower tertiary improved, thereby lowering the top skill spread.

You also have hidden skill now, of which people are less likely to preserve.

Izumo wrote:The sign of a balanced game is decreasing amount of changes over time, which doesn't happen.

*citation needed*