Default balance

With the new weapons system getting closer to merge-able state, and 0.8 on the horizon, it is time to decide what we use as the default balance/physics configuration.

XPM settings will be phased out in favour of reversion tourney, as they are basically the same, but reversion includes tweaks by the community.

After multiple discussions on IRC and in-game, I feel a merge of vanilla and reversion tourney settings would work best, as reversion tourney settings are highly favoured by all.
Reversion balance has been tested a lot and in duels and some public matches, and would speed up vanilla games, helping keep players interested.
The health pickup caps would limit stacking even more, making it not such a drag to kill someone.


The winning result of this poll will be applied to the weapons system branch, and soon to master.

The health pickup caps would limit stacking even more, making it not such a drag to kill someone.

This should not be in balanceXonotic then and stay in balanceXPM (reversion to replace XPM).
It breaks CTF. Also it's too weird for beginners why they can't pick up certain health or armor packs.

How does this break CTF? I haven't tested it thoroughly, but I find it hard to believe such a change would actually break the mode...

Beginners would quickly learn, and if it really is an issue, we could allow them to pickup items even if they give no health increase (like vanilla function when health limit is reached).
Perhaps some kind of effect to show they can't pickup an item could be added?

Either way, reversion has differences in the actual weapons, which supposedly work better than vanilla. Even if health caps are rejected, it would be nice to make their weapon settings match.

Also it's too weird for beginners why they can't pick up certain health or armor packs.

You cannot go higher than 100, unless you pick up special items. It's not illogical as a piece of gameplay mechanism and could be visualized using the progress bars. On the other hand, if you can pick up everything, what is the point of different health/armor items then? Only needs two types (if at all), 25 armor/health and 100 armor/health. Shards and 50 armor/health are redundant and make the game more complicated for beginners without adding anything to gameplay. My point is, there is a reason why there are shards and megaitems, in addition to "normal" items.

It breaks CTF.

Which settings would be optimal for CTF in your opinion?

The problem is that a newbie does not have a chance to get a mega item if there is an advanced player taking it all the time.
I'm pretty sure that a newbie has more fun if he is allowed to pick some 25s' and does not have to run around with 100 HP + getting killed quickly.
The advanced player wins anyway, but the newbie might get few more kills (~fun) with more HP available.

Causal FFA should focus on fun and be the least competitive mode imo (or public modes in general).
This health system was always used in the competitve XPM balance and therefore should stay there. The weapons should be the same of course in balanceXonotic and XPM.

And for CTF the "normal" system (since it does not use XPM) as well, for the same reasons. Some maps only have a mega armor, but not armor shards or anything, which would make it pretty hard to capture.
For example Dance is one of the most popular maps and it got only just a little amount of armor shards (I guess in total ~25 in each base). You need already to collect 25 HPs to capture. It would be very hard in a crowded game with 100/0 for myself and a nightmare for weaker players.

Always gotta keep these new players in mind, because they are what Xonotic needs. Every once in a while I ask minsta players why they don't like vanilla that much and they say that it is hard to get kills. We should not make it more harder with less HP available to pick up.


tl;dr: Keep the different health systems in balanceXonotic and balanceXPM, same weapons for both obviously.

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Changes I want to see in reversion settings before inclusion:

- Use 0.7 Crylink secondary

Stuff which is worth to test before:

- Raise armor blockpercentage
- Change rot that 1 HP/AP rots per second
- Adjust damage of some weapons

Excellent points, thanks for the detailed explanation, Mirio.

A tweaked merge of the 2 is close to what I imagined would work best, anyway. I'll still let the poll run and see what people have to say about it.

Well I can say that I don't play vanilla cause its pain the in ass to kill people if you're a new player to full weapons, on top of weapon switching. To me a kill should be with in three hits after that its like whats the point of spamming the weapon.

Maybe there should be a beginners balance so new players can learn how to move in xon world, switch weapons before they head out into the normal servers. Something where it easier to kill with fewer hits from the weapons this might keep them on longer since it'll be easier to get frags but not sure how hard the switch back to normal weapon balance would go.

I feel uneasy about this poll, how is the opinion sampling fair? Will the result of this poll go through an extended team vote or are you bypassing the system?

A team vote will be the final decider after the community gives their opinions.

Okay, thanks. I guess I'll retract my vote here then for lack of testing. Still afraid that it might be unbiased though, considering that the reversion cup was quite active on this forum.

I actually agree fully with Mirio here. My thoughts in detail:

The reversion physics feel faster, which is absolutely fine for me, I like it.

0.7 Crylink secondary is awesome and offers whole new applications for that weapon (Crylink running, catapulting people mid-air, breaking opponents' trick jumps or movement in general...). I think we should definitively keep the movement impact, i.e. the negative push force. Overall Crylink seems to deal too much damage in 0.7, I'd vote for let it deal less damage but to keep the negative push force of 0.7.

Reversion Nex is too strong. I believe reducing the Nex damage to 80 has proven to be reasonable. With reversion settings it is really hard to survive without taking health, I encountered a lot of situations where I was unable to do anything because I'd be dead within one second from spawn. With 90 damage, Nex does not even leave you enough health to wall laser yourself away in order to get out of sight. Also if you're down to 10 h, you can easily be finished by splash damage of a sloppily placed rocket or mortar.

Generally I'd favor slightly less strong rockets in exchange for reducing the Rocket Launcher's switch delay to the switch delay applicable to all the other weapons (except Nex).

As for the health system I'm with Mirio, in CTF a XPM-like cap would be really difficult because as attacker you rely on faster respawning small health/armor items in the enemy base. Usually it is tricky to get the enemies' megas (if there are any) and the small shards are too few and give too little while giving away your position. Additionally it makes the game even harder for new players if it becomes more difficult to stack since you then have troubles to generate the significant hitpoint surplus over freshly spawned players that is required to successfully attack the enemy base and capture the flag.

TL;DR: My opinion: reversion physics, 0.7 Crylink secondary, slightly lower Crylink damage, 0.7 Nex damage (80), same switch delay for Rocket Launcher as for other weapons, possibly lowering rocket damage, competitive health caps only in competitive duels / tdm.

Thank you for putting development efforts into this game, Mario!

Wait, I thought *the point* of reversion balance to be exclusivly community made so it could be changed more liberaly.

That does not exclude "vanilla" from learning from "reversion" balance? This thread is about what parts of reversion balance can become part of the new vanilla balance.

The problem is that a newbie does not have a chance to get a mega item if there is an advanced player taking it all the time.
I'm pretty sure that a newbie has more fun if he is allowed to pick some 25s' and does not have to run around with 100 HP + getting killed quickly.
The advanced player wins anyway, but the newbie might get few more kills (~fun) with more HP available.

Always gotta keep these new players in mind, because they are what Xonotic needs. Every once in a while I ask minsta players why they don't like vanilla that much and they say that it is hard to get kills. We should not make it more harder with less HP available to pick up.

You forget that an advanced player also picks up all items, especially as he is more likely to have better map knowledge. Using the 200/200 cap he can deny all items and will become an unstoppable monster. Good luck killing him, especially with the nerfed weapons some suggest here. Furthermore, I think that you greatly underestimate newbies and casual players. Look at games like the new Assassin's Creed or LoL, there is so much stuff you have to learn about and people spend hours tweaking their character or whatever. If you give them the opportunity to learn (read: easily accessible tutorials on xonotic.org, ingame messages, tooltips, waypoints for megaitem spawns etc), they will learn.

And for CTF the "normal" system (since it does not use XPM) as well, for the same reasons. Some maps only have a mega armor, but not armor shards or anything, which would make it pretty hard to capture.
For example Dance is one of the most popular maps and it got only just a little amount of armor shards (I guess in total ~25 in each base). You need already to collect 25 HPs to capture. It would be very hard in a crowded game with 100/0 for myself and a nightmare for weaker players.

Sounds like a map problem, not a balance problem.

I don't know how but would like pub CTF to be solved, currently its a mess where noobs play FFA and experienced player just cap flags. Some find this very fun of course, personally it is just boring atm.

I don't know how but would like pub CTF to be solved, currently its a mess where noobs play FFA and experienced player just cap flags. Some find this very fun of course, personally it is just boring atm.

Some suggestions:
- Give them waypoints.. "defend here", "support him", "grab armor here" etc. This does not only encourage teamplay but also teaches newbies how to play the game.
- Give the overkill team-spawn system a try on vanilla pub ctf servers.
- Implement weapon stay, i.e. after picking up a weapon on a weapon spawn point, it stays there so the next player can pick it up too. To prevent camping, if you already have the weapon, you cannot pick it up there again. Again, if you are low on ammo, show a waypoint to ammo spawn points.
- Make it possible for newbies to kill advanced players, i.e. don't make them unstoppable 200/200 monsters, see above.

The problem I see with the XPM health/armor caps in CTF is that you need to reasonably stack in order to be able to successfully attack, as fragged opponents respawn in or near their base. Assisting team mates will respawn at "home". This means you are likely to encounter the same opponent(s) twice while loosing team mates on the way unless you are a very good runner - it is therefore vital to get your health/armor higher than spawn values in order to survive even a coordinated attack. Megas are limited and can be picked up by only one player of course - and shards are not effective enough, so I think letting everybody pick up health/armor until general cap at 200/200 is the only reasonable way to prepare an attack team. Defenders can also pick up the items in/near their base in turn, so they should be at 100/0 mainly upon spawn.

I'm absolutely no fan of the overkill spawn system though, to me it is the wrong side to approach the problem.

"Tutorial mode" waypoints for newbies would be very cool, weapon stay would be something I'd consider worth trying.

Experienced players get 200/200 monsters with both systems easily.

Experienced players get 200/200 monsters with both systems easily.

Then how does it break CTF?

THREAD CONTENT [...]

Why was nexuiz public gameplay so enjoyable (also for beginners)?
[/offtopic]


A more constructive opion on this:
IMHO its less the weapons or the health/armor system which need improvements. Public will go with either system as long as it provides a good gameplay experience, the details need a good consideration of all circumstances.
Also I would not say its the point that new players have no idea what to do. People are lazy; for most of them, it would suffice to make it easier to get an idea of the basic concept of all of that... *willing* players will learn it quickly enough; keep in mind that a lot of the players just want some fun without reading 30 minutes about the gameplay mechanics before. (But thats not the point, sorry. Actually tutorials and hints are very useful, but dont expect anyone to read that!)

As for all the minor changes, whereas everyone will have a minorily different opinion on them... Weapon usage should be easy and for every new player it should be obvious how they work and what specific effect the primary and secondary actually cause. Therefore, I am against changes which offer too easy exploitation (e.g. high RL radius for curving, *especially* super high negative force on the vanilla Crylink secondary, a too fast Laser-weapon switch). Thats my opinion, as those weapons really distract gameplay from time to time; their advantages are obvious and I would not want to see such advantages totally removed, but they are just too strong right now regarding looking at the concept in total.
(Note: All of that does hardly matter for experienced players, they will very fast get an idea when to use which weapon and which weapon advantages they make best use of)

After all that being said, for me the point of "beginner-friendlyness" is rather the correlation between the balance and the physics. Or even more precisely, I'd criticise the physics in this case (the balance is being improved every now and then; but we go with the same physics no matter which weapon changes have been applied!). They offer good players a MUCH greater advance against weaker players.
The physics were fast in 0.1 and have been changed to an even faster pace in the upfollowing versions (which is not essentially a bad thing). A new player often is *totally* new to so fast games (compare to CoD for example; Quake players mostly dont play Xonotic) and so he needs to take an even higher hurdle to get adapted, in addition to the weapon system and tons of pickups... this could get confusing on the first view and one can not blame the newbie for that.
However, advanced players now have an even higher advantage over new players: They know how the whole system works (e.g. speed yourself up with the laser [how to even do that?], make laser/rocket jumps, trickjumping,...) and they make better use of the physics themselves (i.e. using strafe mechanics to be slightly faster). Now, how should a beginner get along with that speed of gameplay and advantage?
(Note again: experienced players will find ways to be very fast using tricks/weapon advantages etc anyway. This is about the basis from which every player starts; with the basic speed being lowered slightly, the difference between beginners and advanced players is probably not so overwhelming)


To sum it up:

• Slight weapon changes make a difference, but public gameplay will get along with anything unless it totally breakes the gameplay.
  
• More information could be provided, though it does not ensure that every beginner will make use of additional information.
  
• Either reduce the advantage difference of beginners and advanced players or deny good players from joining servers with a lower average skill (which is more work to implement than actually balance all of it properly). This essentially means to keep the physics easy to use but slowing the overall pace down slightly to a more compatible speed, while keeping the weapons easy and not too advantageous.
  
• While keeping things easy, always consider the whole playerbase (i.e. especially the community). Newbies shouldnt have a too high hurdle to get started and to enjoy gameplay while experienced players should still have the possibility to make a proper use of their knowledge.
  

Good thread with good arguments, I'm looking forward to the results!

Nex suggestions:

• 40 dmg with insane pull force
  
• 60dmg with 90dmg if charged (hold for 3 sec or something then release, charged should give severly longer weapon switch time)
  
• Constant 70 dmg with current settings
  
• Current settings but longer but goes only up to 80 and goes down to 40
  

Ctf suggestions:

• Fragging FC and he throw flag but fail (example: shooting FC out of maps) gives a FC frag (seen many people throw flags to troll noobs so they never get any scores, the throw feature is very important for proper gameplay but its very easy to spot when its missused which is a lot unfourtunally)
  
• Enable XPM settings for pub CTF so "pros" can't cap as easily since they actually need to time items (which they should know how to do) and cant go 200/200 with 25's and shards
  
• Add classes to CTF
  - Attacker, gets 25 extra health and a crylink (if newcrylink secondary is back, otherwise not sure which weapon, rl feels too strong) and an explicit message when spawn "GO GET FLAG"
  - Supporter, spawns with mortar, with explicit message "SUPPORT YOUR TEAM"
  - Defender, gets 25 extra armor and a MG with text "DEFEND YOUR FLAG"
  

EDIT: One addition to classes, perhaps there could be 2 weapons per class, but you only get one of then when you spawn, the better you perform (score) the lower tier gun you get, and if you are really good you only get sg and laser as usual. (only for pubs though ofc)

EDIT2: Maybe too complicated, three classes with only difference is they spawn nearer their objective and the message is still there (or announcer could work too when you spawn "DEFEND", "ATTACK", "SUPPORT" for example).

Either reduce the advantage difference of beginners and advanced players or deny good players from joining servers with a lower average skill (which is more work to implement than actually balance all of it properly). This essentially means to keep the physics easy to use but slowing the overall pace down slightly to a more compatible speed, while keeping the weapons easy and not too advantageous.

Using a 100/100 cap MIGHT help significantly with this as using laserjumps and rocket-secondary explosions to move forward extremely fast would drain a higher % of your health/armor stack. In general I think most players will agree when I say that CTF was more fun in Nexuiz, simply because you actually had a chance to defend the flag without coordinated teamplay (which, let's be honest, cannot be expected on pub servers). I don't say that the physics should be altered, but imo making them even faster in git is ridiculous.

Nex suggestions:

When you make such concrete suggestions, it is very helpful if you describe the effect that you expect from these changes. Otherwise it is hard to understand why one person says 70 dmg, the next one 60 dmg but faster refire etc.

Good thread with good arguments, I'm looking forward to the results!

I agree, it is nice to see such a good, open discussion on this topic.

Nex suggestions:

• 40 dmg with insane pull force
  - Effect: will probably be used more as a utility weapon, pushing people off maps and denying item pickups.
  
• 60dmg with 90dmg if charged (hold for 3 sec or something then release, charged should give severely longer weapon switch time)
  - Effect: Less OP with regular usage (that is in combos and general lucky shots), good positioning and more prediction is required to use it for higher damage output*
  
• Constant 70 dmg with current settings
  - Easiest solution, keep same switch time and just make it less OP and also easier to predict your damage output
  
• Current settings but longer but goes only up to 80 and goes down to 40
  - Essentially what we had in 0.8 balance
  

* By far most interesting solution imo, current animation will of course be used but reversed when you charge up your shot. Biggest drawback is predicting damage output, but shouldnt be worse than what we already have

What makes you think that the nexgun is overpowered in the current rev balance? Or do you mean overused? If it is the latter, then that will change once the lg is being introduced, as atm the nexgun is the only hitscan weapon without spread. Which means, your only choice if you need a guaranteed amount of damage (supposing that you hit) in a fight, e.g. to finish a player off.

Also keep in mind that the nexgun is the easiest weapon to use for newbies and players who have experience in COD, CS, instagib etc, and if you nerf it too hard, it will be even harder to defend in CTF for example.

It surely is overpowered, at least if we gonna keep the old weapon switching system.