Xonotic's Direction? What do we have to do Learning from nexuiz's mistakes.

It is hard to remember the things you request for a normal player. Not all players are pro, and the most part of them, simply launch the game, choose the first available server and play. A friend of mine is one who can be considered a proficient player, but he hardly remember what version of the game he is currently using.
Though, you can assume that such players are simply using the latest stable version, since they simply download it when available from the main download link.

Though, in my case, almost all the things I said are valid for every version and server. Mac optimization, for example, lacks in all of them.

One of the points of this discussion was how to attract more players. Since you need new players, you need to make the game more approachable for newbies. So, temporary, give lower priority to pro features.

Nobody disagrees that the game should be approachable by new players, but there are a few things I'd like to bring to your attention.

1) Xonotic will be new to everyone, including the "pro players" with the changes coming in, it will take time to adjust. The only thing that would allow them some leeway would be aim.

2) Making the game easy for everyone doesn't solve any problems. Ever buy a new game, turn on all of the cheats at the beginning and massacre everything in your path? Did you play that game the next day? Probably not, because games aren't fun if they're easy, there's no point in playing.

3) You would do well to bear in mind that the "pro players" provide a stable and consistent playerbase for any game. They also give new players something to look up and aspire to. Driving away experienced players pretty much dooms any game. You notice how badly UT3 did, because all of the experienced players stuck with older versions of the game, such as UT99 or UT2k4.

4) I noticed your comment on the rockets. Remember that balancing a game around high ping results in inbalance, and a game that's far too easy. Since you were commenting on the rockets in Nexuiz, and didn't bother to read my post, I'll repeat myself. Rockets are by far the easiest weapon to use in Nexuiz. They're easy to use, and deal massive damage in that respect. In addition to these qualities, they're pushback and damage radius are so high, that anyone being hit by them loses all control over their movement, allowing the "rocketeer" to dominate them.

Looking over all of your posts, I'm going to assume you played Nexuiz briefly without much effort on your part, and decided to approach Xonotic as a chance to tweak "Nexuiz" to your liking, much like a few other people trolling the forums. The problem with this is that it results in a severe lack of understanding, and bad conclusions. Skill does not, and should not ever come without effort and patience.

The game should not be so difficult that new players cannot approach the game at all, but at the same time, there has to be room to improve, and an advantage to being an experienced player. If there's no room for improvement, or no reason to improve, there's no reason to stick around.

I agree with chryzz in that respect; there must be a rift between experienced and new players, with a middle class of sorts in between. As for lag, if you play at >~150 ping, there's nothing that can be done. Weapons should be balanced for people playing at 150 or under ping, I think.
As for rockets, reducing either damage or push or speed would solve those problems.

3) You would do well to bear in mind that the "pro players" provide a stable and consistent playerbase for any game. They also give new players something to look up and aspire to. Driving away experienced players pretty much dooms any game. You notice how badly UT3 did, because all of the experienced players stuck with older versions of the game, such as UT99 or UT2k4.

I think the key there is to just not go overboard in simplifying things like UT3 did. But, I think the most recent versions of Nex did a pretty good job of that with the tutorial level and full campaign, as well as the depth of customization while still being user-friendly. If something like that can be equivalently implemented in Xonotic it should be okay.

I guess the idea should be "Easy to learn; hard to master," which is what some of the best games have used as their approach. Having tutorials and such to sort of ease the transition takes care of that, imo.

I agree with chryzz in that respect; there must be a rift between experienced and new players, with a middle class of sorts in between. As for lag, if you play at >~150 ping, there's nothing that can be done. Weapons should be balanced for people playing at 150 or under ping, I think.
As for rockets, reducing either damage or push or speed would solve those problems.

There will always be a huge rift between experienced and new players, no matter what happens to the game. The only problem would be if it's too easy or annoying the experienced players will leave.

For rockets, damage, push and speed are fine imo, perhaps they are a tad too slow, it's the "extra" features that pack the punch here. RL would require quite some skill to use if you wouldn't be able to detonate them, guide them or make them whizz around at 2000 speed, and they would still be useful ....

@shoeberto, that is so true, games with depth and hence hard to master have the means to entice players to play, learn and grow. Providing good balance in weapons and physics that allow tricks are the first two options in this respect, that's what the thread is all about.

@Chryyz, I play each game with all cheats turned on for ~5 seconds, it's another good analogy of easy to learn and hard to master, if it's just easy to learn game's over.

I agree that the force/push of rockets is really way way too much, I would like to think most people believe it is too strong.

This thread seemed to go on topic-offtopic- now back on topic, let's try keep it that way and remember that.

On a note though:-

"1) Xonotic will be new to everyone, including the "pro players" with the changes coming in, it will take time to adjust. The only thing that would allow them some leeway would be aim.

3) You would do well to bear in mind that the "pro players" provide a stable and consistent playerbase for any game. They also give new players something to look up and aspire to. Driving away experienced players pretty much dooms any game. You notice how badly UT3 did, because all of the experienced players stuck with older versions of the game, such as UT99 or UT2k4."


1) This is true, I may become better or worse with changes that get made, but as long as there changes for the better I do not mind
3) Never even thought about that perspective about experienced players, but i'm sure there is a handful of player's who have learnt a lot of things from myself or a lot of the older/better/experienced players. Your right about UT3 though, that community is so small now hardly anyone plays unfortunately, thats basically what I don't want to happen in xonotic.

Committed an initial balance config "balanceFruit.cfg" into fruitiex/fruitbalance. It's loosely based on ideas from this thread, more ideas wanted!

Was just thinking about ammo cap..still think it's a decent move to be honest, it get's ridiculous at time's when you can just run about with one weapon and tons and tons of ammo, you don't need to think about how much you have left or go for more ammo a lot of the time which in turn makes using the same weapon even more and more common.

That doesn't even make sense. There's been a constant shortage of ammo in almost all games I've ever played, nobody ever stacks up with "tons and tons of ammo" to a point where they "don't need to think" about getting more ammo. You actually don't need to think about it, but in a different sense: you just pick it up without thinking because you know you WILL need it.

The effect of ammo caps is actually the opposite, it would leave more ammo for other players by preventing you from continuously grabbing it all.

I agree with parasiti. I can't remember when was the last time I stacked on ammo to that point or anyone else did.

Can confirm that kojn does, in fact, know what he's talking about; I can't remember the last duel, tdm or ctf game I played where I had to worry about conserving ammo or go out of my way to pick some up. Perhaps this is different in ffa dm, but since this form of the game is almost never played on servers I frequent, I can't comment about it.

That said, I think that in order for an ammo cap to change this (if indeed such a change is desirably at all), it would have to be set very low. On any popularly played map I can think of, there is so much ammo lying around that a player on the move is rarely more than five or ten seconds away from the next ammo pickup needed. Thus any modestly sized ammo cap, when reached, will still provide a plenty big enough buffer for a decent thinking player to remain stocked with ammo more or less throughout the entire game.

The effect of ammo caps is actually the opposite, it would leave more ammo for other players by preventing you from continuously grabbing it all.

Unfortunately, it won't have that effect, because you waste an entire ammo pack even if you're only one round under the ammo cap. Thus depriving your enemies of an ammo pack is as easy as firing a shot as you run over it.

In team games though, where this isn't necessarily an advantage (because you are wasting ammo your teammates could have used as well) this does help reduce hording.

harry_ftw, mappers seem to be using ammo better these days in making maps, not like a few years ago when maps were littered with a hell of a lot of ammo, take the original stormkeep for example and the amount of cell ammo around.

parasti, it does make sense, and i'd be more then happy to demonstrate to you.

( JUST AN IDEA ) To be honest i'd rather some weapons just used ammo simply, not using 2-3 ammo at a time, for rocket launcher for example, make it use one ammo per shot, same with mortar, yes I could see this would effect the hagar but that weapon I hope get's some serious change done to it anyhow and I suspect i'm not alone thinking this, then you would make the ammo boxes contain less ammo, like 5 or 10 rockets per box for example, it's easy enough to set.

I see one MAJOR flaw on the first post. Your linking to some punk-ass Warsow fanbase that ripped on the game WITHOUT ACTUALLY PLAYING IT. Sure the earlier versions sucked, but most of the suckage disappeared with the release of 2.3.

You got it mixed up here. People at ESR don't play Warsow. The replies at ESR come from Quake3 (now QuakeLive) players. Maybe there were a couple of replies from Warsow players, but that's not more than a 1% of the total.

( JUST AN IDEA ) To be honest i'd rather some weapons just used ammo simply, not using 2-3 ammo at a time, for rocket launcher for example, make it use one ammo per shot, same with mortar, yes I could see this would effect the hagar but that weapon I hope get's some serious change done to it anyhow and I suspect i'm not alone thinking this, then you would make the ammo boxes contain less ammo, like 5 or 10 rockets per box for example, it's easy enough to set.

I do approve of this idea. I'll try to dedicate this day for tweaking and coding the balance when I get home, and will be adding this to balanceFruit.cfg (which as of yet is kinda in an unusable state )

On a side note, this forum fails when logged in on IE8, so I installed chrome on the work PC. End of story.

( JUST AN IDEA ) To be honest i'd rather some weapons just used ammo simply, not using 2-3 ammo at a time, for rocket launcher for example, make it use one ammo per shot, same with mortar, yes I could see this would effect the hagar but that weapon I hope get's some serious change done to it anyhow and I suspect i'm not alone thinking this, then you would make the ammo boxes contain less ammo, like 5 or 10 rockets per box for example, it's easy enough to set.

I do approve of this idea. I'll try to dedicate this day for tweaking and coding the balance when I get home, and will be adding this to balanceFruit.cfg (which as of yet is kinda in an unusable state )

On a side note, this forum fails when logged in on IE8, so I installed chrome on the work PC. End of story.

I agree as well. It always seemed strange because rocket ammo suggests each shot is one rocket, so it feels kinda weird to see one rocket coming out of any weapon but more than one disappearing from inventory (unless you'd think they're a bunch of rockets tied together). I still think this is a good thing for plasma ammo however.

Kojn's plan screws all rapid fire weapons (HLAC, hagar, machine gun). Less ammo per pickup (this is what he suggests, correct?) means you will need to pick up more ammo boxes meaning your teammates will not have enough ammo.

But hey, it will totally remove the issue of too much ammo...

Roanoake, if MirceaKitsune's new ammo type suggestions were put in place, like grenade ammo for the mortar, and cell/plasma ammo only for electro + crylink, electry did he say for the nex? This would help a lot and fix the problems, also MG uses bullet's so I don't see what the problem there is going to be with another weapon? Just set it so when you pick up the weapon you get like 80 bullet's and a ammo pack adds 100 for example.

hagar, yes your right that would probably only be the main one to have a problem, but i'm hoping that weapon get's a serious rehaul much like the crylink.

Yeah, I posted a topic about that here: http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=584