[SUGGESTION] Making Vanilla more enjoyable for Newbies

There's a reason why Quad/Strength/Amplifier powerups exists across all arenaFPS: when you pick it up, your weapons go nuclear. Powerup contests create exciting and hectic situations for DM and Xonotic makes even that easier for you by printing a text/location on your screen when it's about to spawn.
If all weapons were buffed to the max, there would be nothing exciting in DM. It would just be a contest of who spams the strongest weapon the most.

@Lyberta:

There's a reason Jeff server is so popular. Most weapons are buffed there.

Then what's the reason for vanilla servers being just about as popular? That's not a very strong point because the top populated servers consists of both Jeff and Vanilla servers. Currently Jeff's vehicle CTF is more popular than WTWRP DM, and WTWRP DM is more popular than Jeff's DM. It might be easier to take your points seriously if you disclosed the facts the way they are.

Fair point but as Lyberta said, most players now are newbie casuals and they have the most trouble getting used to AFPSes from other games (which imho usually are TFPSes). Casuals (new or experienced) would forever stay in vanilla casual. Getting pros coming from other games interested in xon is then only a matter of clearly advertising there is a pro balance (XPM) and it's differences. Having different limits in casual and XPM would not be an issue since it would be visually shown in the HUD. Jitter in casual shouldn't annoy pros because they should be playing XPM and it shouldn't confuse casuals since they never play XPM and probably don't care about items that much either.

In general is am in favor of few clearly defined differeces between XPM and casual rather than minor tweaks to many cvars but casual should not be defined by the whims of duel players.

Many times I start a conversation with random players, they don't have a clear idea of how to progress in skill (it is still their goal). For example, they play free-for-all, not because they want a casual gaming experience, but because they think it will help them improve in skill. They are not necessarily conscious about the purposes, intents, nor differences of various game balance sets. And some believe the only skill to learn in the game is aiming at high speeds.

Additionally when I started playing the game last year, it wasn't in my interests to play a party game. I played with standard settings because it was the only thing I was aware of at the time. I only became aware of XPM/XDF/etc because I hosted a server and added various game modes for variety, incidentally attracted defraggers and duelists, and got feedback that the server settings were not of the convention for the respective game modes I tried to add for the purposes of variety.
As a new player or casual by your metrics, starting the game in 2016, I think these proposals are counterintuitive. The game is still rather obtuse about its features as it ever was if your solutions are simply to add more alternative .cfg's to the growing list.

I see now in server.cfg (while in 0.8.1 it was nonexistent) that the only mod/balance that requires "exec" that is remotely indicated of is Overkill.

Hagar rockets could gently steer towards enemies. This could work against (vortex) campers too since you could be partially/completely hidden while shooting at them.

You essentially just added bullet magnetism. Even outside of AFPS you will see players complain or gawk about it.
Even with those new behaviors you add balancing concerns and "whether or not it helps" ambiguity when the simple solution would be to make better designed maps.

Particularly these proposals have my concern because talking to people outside of Xonotic [Forums/IRC] entirely (for example, I found someone who tried out Xonotic in an MMO), there are wildly different negative opinions formed about their completely different playing experiences even though the game ultimately had what they were looking for.

I've been playing vanilla for 3 weeks and I'm doing just fine so I don't know what you guys are talking about when you're saying that this game is not newbie friendly =)

I think I said it before: Most people don't join a server because of its balance, they join servers that already have people on them. Jeff was just active on his server.
"Populated" does not neccessarily mean "popular" or "well balanced".

Hi,
disclosure:
   - I consider myself a casual player (partially self-enforced, like I will not allow myself to remap weapons from 0-9).
   - I play almost exclusively on Jeff's vehicle warfare   

my problems with vanilla games and possible suggestions:

  - DM with 8 players on duel map (Fuse) turns into mindless game where people just run around with shotguns. 
I think that reasonable solution for this is to set max player count for maps and if game ends with more player, don't include such maps into next map selection. I know that this may sound like a big change, but if the voting for the maps has no restrictions, this may actually change very little, because new player's probably won't vote for maps they don't know and if 8 experienced players wants to have DM on fuse, for some reason (6 wants to spectate?) then can just vote for it. Sure its not perfect but i also don't think it will break much. (I also know that it may be near impossible to implement, because of the shear number of custom maps) 
 
  - (personal opinion)Maps that are just couple of platforms and one big fall killzone are just casual unfriendly because of all the suicides and pushing. Some may say that casual player can easily frag by pushing someone out with blaster, that does not happen anyone who is semi-competent can recover in the air from 1-2 blaster shots, therefore its even more demoralizing, eg. when I shot someone with the blaster he/she just lands back, but when someone shots me I'm out.
Obvious solution.

  -  weapon pickups with long recharge time  are imho stupid because it may actually discourage players from looking for weapons, sure every semi-competent player can efficiently use all the weapons (and will get them anyway), but lets assume that some casual player:
  - just does not want to use devastator, because its rockets are so slow you can literally outrun them.
  - consider s electro one big gimmick
  - does not quite get crylic
  - and machinegun makes him/her think its starting weapon in some RPG based on its damage.
(again just a made up scenario, not a weapon rant (I can rant about weapons if you want))
Imho such player is absolutely OK.
so with long recharge after pickup he/she knows, that getting his favorite mortar and voxel will be near impossible because 2/3 times she/he gets to pickup its not available, so why risk your life for 1/3 chance to get the weapon that you want, when you can just try to shot people with shotgun and hope they die and drop that weapon, may even be faster, sure you die 2/3 times but who cares same as your chance to get the pickup only less boring than running.
Obvious solution. Sure people will get weapons more easily and it will be impossible to starve people of weapons, but outside of duel I don't really see that as important strategy. 
 
ok I have more, but  I have no idea if this post is not just one big irrelevant spam.

also this is repost of https://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.ph...4#pid82534, because I mistaken it with the more current thread about this sort of topic, sorry about that.

Hi,
disclosure:
   - I consider myself a casual player (partially self-enforced, like I will not allow myself to remap weapons from 0-9).
   - I play almost exclusively on Jeff's vehicle warfare   

my problems with vanilla games and possible suggestions:

  - DM with 8 players on duel map (Fuse) turns into mindless game where people just run around with shotguns. 
I think that reasonable solution for this is to set max player count for maps and if game ends with more player, don't include such maps into next map selection. I know that this may sound like a big change, but if the voting for the maps has no restrictions, this may actually change very little, because new player's probably won't vote for maps they don't know and if 8 experienced players wants to have DM on fuse, for some reason (6 wants to spectate?) then can just vote for it. Sure its not perfect but i also don't think it will break much. (I also know that it may be near impossible to implement, because of the shear number of custom maps) 
 
  - (personal opinion)Maps that are just couple of platforms and one big fall killzone are just casual unfriendly because of all the suicides and pushing. Some may say that casual player can easily frag by pushing someone out with blaster, that does not happen anyone who is semi-competent can recover in the air from 1-2 blaster shots, therefore its even more demoralizing, eg. when I shot someone with the blaster he/she just lands back, but when someone shots me I'm out.
Obvious solution.

  -  weapon pickups with long recharge time  are imho stupid because it may actually discourage players from looking for weapons, sure every semi-competent player can efficiently use all the weapons (and will get them anyway), but lets assume that some casual player:
  - just does not want to use devastator, because its rockets are so slow you can literally outrun them.
  - consider s electro one big gimmick
  - does not quite get crylic
  - and machinegun makes him/her think its starting weapon in some RPG based on its damage.
(again just a made up scenario, not a weapon rant (I can rant about weapons if you want))
Imho such player is absolutely OK.
so with long recharge after pickup he/she knows, that getting his favorite mortar and voxel will be near impossible because 2/3 times she/he gets to pickup its not available, so why risk your life for 1/3 chance to get the weapon that you want, when you can just try to shot people with shotgun and hope they die and drop that weapon, may even be faster, sure you die 2/3 times but who cares same as your chance to get the pickup only less boring than running.
Obvious solution. Sure people will get weapons more easily and it will be impossible to starve people of weapons, but outside of duel I don't really see that as important strategy. 
 
ok I have more, but  I have no idea if this post is not just one big irrelevant spam.

also this is repost of https://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.ph...4#pid82534, because I mistaken it with the more current thread about this sort of topic, sorry about that.

You're quite right about maximum capacities not being respected in usual public vanilla ffa games. That is, when public ffa games happen on my server I have to explicitly tell everyone which map is big enough for the current party of players and hope they all vote for it in time. Additionally I've seen an issue like this in one of Xonotic's repo's- to implement something with regards to player capacities per map.

I disagree with your scenario of the weapons however. Running at someone with a shotgun will only work for those overcrowded DM matches. In many other scenarios without the benefit of high player density in an area and shortage of health resources, it is essentially a death wish to charge in with a shotgun unless you know what you're doing, i.e experience, with the melee+shot combo.

I also agree about the map capacities. It would be nice if we had a  recommendation system wherein only maps suitable for the number of players connected were displayed for voting. 8 players on fuse wouldn't be recommended, obviously. It's mayhem. On the other hand, it's also somewhat fun to see how many shots you can fire before dying in a mass of confusion. It doesn't always have to be a chess-like strategic match.

As for weapons, you will see a large distinction in performance between players who know how to use weapons and those who don't. There are of course some general purpose weapons that everyone tends to rely upon (vortex, devastator, mortar), but those will only get you so far versus someone who knows the right situations/places for the other weapons. Some examples:

- The area near the mortar on stormkeep forms a perfect bathtub for electro balls and the corresponding combo.
- The open window to the mega health on finalrage is great for rushing in with a loaded hagar secondary.
- The MG serves well for depleting the remaining health of an already chewed-up enemy.
- Crylink primary hits will slow down flag carriers pretty effectively on the lower corridor of Dance.
- That oh-so-slow devastator's guidance can be used to hit otherwise difficult to reach spots (e.g. hitting the two-25 HP area on hub from the lower floor). Doing so gives you the chance of dealing a huge amount of damage while affording you protection at the same time, provided you've positioned yourself well enough.

To put it plainly: people who are put off by recharge/reload or even finding weapons are only depleting themselves of options to win fights. They can choose to do so, but at their peril!

people who are put off by recharge/reload or even finding weapons are only depleting themselves of options to win fights.

Not really, the net effect is empty servers.

Of course they are depleting themselves of options to win fights.

My point with the long recharge of weapons was, that on Jeff's vehicle warfare you can find maps with normal recharge time and almost instant recharge and I personally do not notice any difference in my ability to get weapons on these maps, therefore I personally think that recharge time has no real impact on semi-competent players getting weapons. Which puts in on my list of things that can be adjusted to help new players without any real impact on the game.


A bit offtopic but to me this is similar to strafe jumping, once you know how to do it, its literally pressing 2 keys and moving mouse in pretty constant manner. you just get it into your muscle memory and don't even know, that you are doing it (for normal gaming purposes, not race). But for new players its a barrier. And I consider it a stupid barrier (that was originally undocumented feature), because if you just give everyone solid speed by bunnyhoping as xonotic does its literally the same result. (my opinion after playing both xon and warsow).

My point with the long recharge of weapons was, that on Jeff's vehicle warfare you can find maps with normal recharge time and almost instant recharge and I personally do not notice any difference in my ability to get weapons on these maps, therefore I personally think that recharge time has no real impact on semi-competent players getting weapons. Which puts in on my list of things that can be adjusted to help new players without any real impact on the game.


A bit offtopic but to me this is similar to strafe jumping, once you know how to do it, its literally pressing 2 keys and moving mouse in pretty constant manner. you just get it into your muscle memory and don't even know, that you are doing it (for normal gaming purposes, not race). But for new players its a barrier. And I consider it a stupid barrier (that was originally undocumented feature), because if you just give everyone solid speed by bunnyhoping as xonotic does its literally the same result. (my opinion after playing both xon and warsow).

Strafe jumping is variable or 'dynamic' acceleration with the granularity of mouse inputs (as opposed to a keyboard's digital input e.g a sprint key). I disagree with you here.
I don't know what you mean by recharge time (respawn time, refire time, Vortex's recharge, MG reload).

Allow me to turn Lyberta's asinine comment into something relevant to the discussion at hand: shots taken wildly and without real consideration of your opponent's location are rarely effective and usually only hit the wall. What they do succeed in, however, is exposing your position and how weak it may be! This is as true in the game as it is on these forums.

ok so I was misunderstood, I mean the tame it takes to create new weapon pickup after the weapon was picked up, I don't mean reload time of the weapons themself

edit: respawn time is probably the right word

(skip to last paragraph if you want to read actually relevant things)

ok to elaborate on my reasoning behind strafe jumping, it will have to be based on Warsow, cos thats a game where i actually strafe jumped.

I could not care less why strafe jumping works, what I care about is the result of it. In warsow your base speed is I think 320 and with strafe jumping I was able to go around 700 without really concentrating on the act of strafe jumping itself, not a particularity good result but that speed was good enough for gameplay,  unlike 320 which meant that you were pretty much a static target.

To me it would be better for new players to simply allow holing jumpkey to give you speed of let's say 600-700 because anybody can get to that point with little practice, but has to know it exist and then find a tutorial and then spend max 3 hours practicing it to get to 600-700m which to me is just a very long and convoluted method to get to what is essentially baseline speed, because in case of warsow (in my opinion and in the time I played it and not competitive, etc...) 600-700 was probably minimum you had to have to have a chance.

So for me on it was just uselessly convoluted way to get to the actual baseline level of speed.

So may poorly constructed argument was, that long respawn time of weapons only  discourages new players from looking for them no matter how stupid such decision is. And from my personal experience fast respawns don't really change the speed I obtain weapons ingame, therefore it maybe possible to consider shortening them.

RE: strafe jumping
That's essentially what a sprint button is (hold button, go faster), but strafe jumping and a sprint button are two very different things. You completely get rid of accelerating at lower values, which is something one would do if they wanted to control how far they'll jump or any form of speed control.

Flat acceleration/velocity when it comes to 'sprint-jumping' can be clunky in its own way (underjumping, overjumping, hitting walls, with no control over trajectory or acceleration), as opposed to regular sprinting in modern games where the character's feet is generally in contact with the ground & can change direction.

I also agree about the map capacities. It would be nice if we had a  recommendation system wherein only maps suitable for the number of players connected were displayed for voting. 8 players on fuse wouldn't be recommended, obviously. 

there was something like that in nexuiz 1.x-2.2. It was available in the menu, when you select a map. You could see the recommended amount of players.
It was an addition to the mapinfo.

Don't try fake arguments on me. Your reply does not make sense, and your emphasis of "only" does not change anything. If fights are not worthy, then why play the game in the first place. If players don't like to pick up weapons and also don't like to move, maybe they should play Moorhuhn instead of Xonotic.

You made your point that you don't like this game. Why don't you go do something productive? Spreading negativity all around the forums is neither welcomed nor acceptable. It's like spamming a soccer simulator forum telling everybody that you hate soccer and that the game would be much better if you could build a home base with defense turrets.

Spreading negativity all around the forums is neither welcomed nor acceptable.

As someone who frequents negative physical distance from my prey, I welcome all sorts of negativity as long as it's based on something real.