Official Overkill balance

I'd like to start a discussion about the official Overkill balance.

Currently there are at least 3 very different configs being used on servers plus the default/official one. The issue is that the default one is not actually overkill at all (just 'g_overkill 1; exec balance-overkill.cfg' will miss a lot of features including dodging, nades and spawning near temmates). My goal is to get a sane and complete set of overkill cvars into official Xonotic so players can start Overkill locally and so we can make an in-game tutorial. Mario told me that at least 2 Overkill admins should agree on the config. I didn't have much success agreeing over in-game chat so I want to try the forums and also ask the community for their input.

The configs:

• [WTWRP] Overkill: https://github.com/martin-t/xonotic-conf...erkill.cfg
  
• LX' Overkill (plain Overkill, no bs optimizations): https://github.com/RomanSixty/xonotic-co...server.cfg
  - I'd like to point out that I find the name both misleading and offensive - LX has modified nade radius and even then it wouldn't be 'plain' considering the 0.6/MoN/classic overkill had several other differences
  
• (SMB) Overkill [MUSHROOM KINGDOM]: https://github.com/MarioSMB/smb-servers/...erkill.cfg
  
• official: https://gitlab.com/xonotic/xonotic-data....erkill.cfg - this is just the 'balance' part not even including all overkill changes, the rest is missing completely
  

A bit of history:
Overkill used to be an unofficial mod in a separate branch. Around January 2015, it was partially rewritten and merged into master as an official modification. Unfortunately, there were differences we didn't spot at first (apart from the missing config). Around summer, some players got really good and competitive and the rest who played casually couldn't keep up and left. These days only experienced players remain and we usually manage to scare off any newbies who try Overkill.

What now:
I have put all overkill-related settings into one file - what is there is also always running on the WTWRP server. It has 3 sections: the first is what we started using after the merge. We guessed some values, forgot to change others (nade offset and size (which was at the time broken anyway)) and some features (MG solidpenetration) were forgotten because they were broken. The second part is what me and LX agreed on so far. We didn't get very far. The 3rd part is changes I am proposing should be made official. Some are to make Overkill more approachable for newbies while impacting pros as little as possible (walking and bunnyhopping speed, weapon switching speed, spawn protection) and others are to make the mod more appealing for competitive play (these should impact newbies very little).

Every item has explanations next to it, I am not gonna repeat them here. To test it, download the file and place it next to your config.cfg, then in console 'exec overkill.cfg; map dance' (you will need a recent autobuild or git build for all features like nade offset and solidpenetration to work) or visit [WTWRP] Overkill. I'd like people of every skill level to say what they think about the changes and offer suggestions. I'll keep refining the file until we (hopefully) reach an agreement and Overkill is official. You can see the history by clicking the History button at the top of the file.

If an agreement can't be reached we might need to consider making a casual and a competitive version similar to vanilla+XPM.

Mutator vs mod:
Overkill-the-mutator is just part of the code, Overkill-the-mod depends on many other mutators (dodging, nades, spawning near teammates), config changes and its own assets. Calling it "mode" in the server list is confusing because gametypes (ctf, dm, ...) are generally called modes too. Therefore I'd like the heading to be changed to "Overkill mod". I know technically it's not a mod because it's part of the official codebase but I feel like "mutator" doesn't properly express how much it changes the gameplay and from a players perspective it doesn't matter how it's implemented. (old discussion here: http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=6184 )

TL;DR:
Look at my suggestions (experimental section), tell me what you like, suggest better values for what you don't like. We want people of all skill levels to tell us their opinions.

Ultimately, the developers decide what becomes official, this is just a place where I'd like to discuss it.

EDIT: tl;dr

Okay, I'll try to state the other side of the argument, first in general and later in specific terms. Also note that we are talking more or less exclusively about the CTF game type.

General

What we both can agree on is that Overkill used to have more players. Also there's a feeling that it used to be more fun, but that may have different reasons (one of them being more players). So the actual point of that discussion is: how can we get users to play Overkill so that the fun returns and we don't have to play the same about 10 players over and over again?

The second thing we can agree on is that there is a huge skill gap between new players and those that play the game for years (further called "pros"). One of the reasons "it used to be more fun"™ may indeed be, that a few years back only very few players had a certain skill level that made it impossible to win against them. But since there were enough overall players, some lesser skilled ones could team up against the pros and so it could become somewhat balanced. Nowadays a few more players achieved the necessary speed for competitive gameplay and fewer players can team up against them... so there is an imbalance. (This is also not helped by the fact that some of those skilled players don't care much about balancing teams, but that's another topic).

Now martin-t's approach is: "it must be the settings", some tweak here and a little change there and balance between newbies and pros may be reinstalled (or at least imbalance mitigated). While you can look at it that way there is another side of the coin. Whatever changes are made necessarily have to change the game for those, that already play it for a while. And since nobody checks out server configs before playing, new players won't be attracted by any modifications. So in general my approach is not to make changes fucking it up for the few who DO play Overkill in favor for the supposed masses who DON'T.

Specific

But since this discussion is opened I may as well give reasons as to why I haven't adopted most of the proposed changes. I won't go into single config variables here but instead try to boil it down to the general intentions.

1) Armor and Armor rot
martin-t wants the shard pickups to have more armor than default, and to mitigate the result to have no pause until the armor starts to rot. While the latter may be somewhat agreeable on my part, the former is not. To me Overkill is not a mode/mod/mutator (whatever) for strategic gameplay, sneaking around in shadows, silently killing others from behind. Overkill is what the name suggests: a quick run and shoot mode that's just not as instant-killy as minsta, but kills fast enough. The more armor is involved, the longer it takes to kill enemies (hence I removed any armor except for the few large packs on my server). By default a single vortex hit kills instantly, except if you collect armor/health. There are a few pickups on most maps and those should be fought about. The shards dropped by killed players are bonus enough being 5, which is rotted away pretty soon.

2) Wall-piercing machine gun
I don't know the history about that idea, but to me an explosion (nades) might do some damage through walls, but no gun should do so. Walls are there for cover, what's the point if you can shoot through them? Nades are only available every few seconds so it's not always an option to get a covering player (and it shouldn't be).

3) Other machine gun settings
Well, I can't think of a reason why the machine gun needs further tweaking. People apt at using it will nag other players no matter what the spread or ammo settings are. People who suck at it, won't be helped by other settings (except for ammo) anyway.

4) Flag return time
Okay, this one is just a matter of taste I guess. I like the automatic return of a dropped flag after a few seconds to motivate players of the enemy team to get it as fast as possible. A longer return time may have its uses in 1on1 gameplay, but apart from that I find it irritating... especially when teaming up with players that don't know what to do when the flag is dropped.

5) Scoring Points
I made a change to the defaults by switching flag return (default: 10) and FCK (default: 5) scores. The reason is that it should be more encouraged to kill the enemy flag carrier than to snag a dropped flag from a kill another player of your team did. That's about it. From what I reckon martin-t levelled both scores to the same value and thereby reduced the value of defense compared to capturing a flag. This is probably also a matter of taste. I think a good CTF match is based on both offense and defense and it shouldn't just be mindlessly running to the enemy base and not caring about your own flag. But overall those settings base on the idea, that score values influence the way people play the game. I switched off score submission on my server anyway so I don't really care about this one anymore.

6) Nade damage/radius
I reduced the nade radius on my server (although the current value may be a bit too much of a change). The reason for that is since most pro players are quite adept in using nades it should not be the havoc weapon it is by default. On smaller maps nades thrown just in the general direction of the enemy base will almost always lead to kills. Instead I think nades should just be ONE weapon instead of THE weapon of choice and they also should require a minimum of aiming... just like any other weapon. You can try to reduce their damage value instead of their damage radius (as martin-t did), but since the pushing force of an explosion will also throw players off on space maps I don't think this would be the better approach.

7) Physics changes
If the aim of those changes is to help new players in comparison to pros, then increased fall damage is doing the opposite. Pros know how to handle that by lasering just before touching ground, new players just die.

The other settings concerning air control I actually have no opinion about - except that I didn't feel those needed tweaking.

8) Weapon switching
Okay, this one I might actually agree on, since I can't think of a reason why this would be bad.

So in general my approach is not to make changes fucking it up for the few who DO play Overkill in favor for the supposed masses who DON'T.

Reasonable stance to have, but if it results with inconsistency to the entity known as Overkill, then I don't think it is reasonable. I believe inconsistency is a bigger issue than what slight modifications may or may not do to the playerbase. When you try Overkill server #1, you'd expect things to be same over at Overkill server #2. The argument apparently is that this is not the case. The way I see it, both sides needs to agree to compromises.

To me Overkill is not a mode/mod/mutator (whatever) for strategic gameplay, sneaking around in shadows, silently killing others from behind. Overkill is what the name suggests: a quick run and shoot mode that's just not as instant-killy as minsta, but kills fast enough. The more armor is involved, the longer it takes to kill enemies (hence I removed any armor except for the few large packs on my server). By default a single vortex hit kills instantly, except if you collect armor/health. There are a few pickups on most maps and those should be fought about. The shards dropped by killed players are bonus enough being 5, which is rotted away pretty soon.

To me, this dumps down the potential the game has to be a competitive mod. If there's no value in staying alive, there's no value in strategic decision making or actions whilst being alive. Additionally, there's also less value in gunning people as they too, did not do any decisions or actions much of value whilst being alive. Simply put, there's less reward and punishment from killing/dying. This way the game is diminished into simple factor of dying and respawning, there's less learning curve and less derivative to be a competitive game with less variables in being better than the next person. In this sense, I think your idea of Overkill is less appealing to players that stick around, than those who come and go. It's as simple as there being less things to excel at with the expense of putting your time into it.

A bit OT: But has it been previously discussed to fork Overkill out of Xonotic? (Preferably while losing some of the older cruft and switching to the more or less compatible FTEQW engine that has a lot of cool new features). To me it seem too well hidden inside an already mostly obscure game to ever properly attract a sufficient number of players.
If someone is interested (and skilled enough to help out with that) please PM me to discuss details.

P.S.: I hope I didn't break some unspoken taboo with this suggestion

Overkill, as I understand, was never intended to be a strategic mod, and would much favor the coming and going of new life than the experience and training of oldies, which is what it's become now.
It should instead strive towards being a fun and enjoyable mod with less depth than standard modes.

As for the naming; It is a bit messy at the moment, as "Overkill" refers to both the mutator and the gameplay mod (which includes other mutators and a custom balance). This will hopefully be fixed in the near future when support for loading other mutators from another mutator is added.

In this sense, I think your idea of Overkill is less appealing to players that stick around, than those who come and go.

Well, apparently at the moment Overkill seems to appeal mostly to players sticking around... but that may just be the case because the overall Xonotic player base ain't large enough to fuel different game modes.

It's as simple as there being less things to excel at with the expense of putting your time into it.

I think there are quite a lot of things to excel at Overkill, the most important being speed of movement. So while players can view it as a mode for casual short games, they also can try to play it at competitive level.

I'd like to address a couple things from LX' post:

1) Armor and Armor rot
martin-t wants the shard pickups to have more armor than default, and to mitigate the result to have no pause until the armor starts to rot. While the latter may be somewhat agreeable on my part, the former is not. To me Overkill is not a mode/mod/mutator (whatever) for strategic gameplay, sneaking around in shadows, silently killing others from behind. Overkill is what the name suggests: a quick run and shoot mode that's just not as instant-killy as minsta, but kills fast enough. The more armor is involved, the longer it takes to kill enemies (hence I removed any armor except for the few large packs on my server). By default a single vortex hit kills instantly, except if you collect armor/health. There are a few pickups on most maps and those should be fought about. The shards dropped by killed players are bonus enough being 5, which is rotted away pretty soon.

The point is to make it clear they're important. Players seem to think 5 armor isn't something worth bothering picking up and then they ragequit when I kill them in one shot. The change I made is however only psychological. 10 armor without rot delay rots away after the same amount of time as 5 with rot delay. I am just making it clear they should be picked up. I would also like them to glow a bit (requires a code change), otherwise they sometimes look like part of the gibs. Effect on gameplay is minimal (unless people actually start using them thanks to this).

2) Wall-piercing machine gun

100 units of solidpenetration can look like a lot but remember, you still have to do a meaningful amount of damage after passing through the wall. Really, good luck landing more than a couple hits unless someone is camping. I could probably count the number of people I killed with it since it was fixed (about a month) on one hand. I just like it because it's a nice thing that makes the gameplay less dull. It was a part of original overkill (don't know value), just got broken after Jan 2015. If people overuse it, we can tweak the value.

3) Other machine gun settings
Well, I can't think of a reason why the machine gun needs further tweaking. People apt at using it will nag other players no matter what the spread or ammo settings are. People who suck at it, won't be helped by other settings (except for ammo) anyway.

The gun's useless. Even with my tweaks, against a skilled opponent it's only the last resort when vortex and SG are out of ammo. A symbolic gesture of resistance before dying. With overkill regeneration a second or two of not hitting results in full 100 health again.

4) Flag return time
Okay, this one is just a matter of taste I guess. I like the automatic return of a dropped flag after a few seconds to motivate players of the enemy team to get it as fast as possible. A longer return time may have its uses in 1on1 gameplay, but apart from that I find it irritating... especially when teaming up with players that don't know what to do when the flag is dropped.

Yes, some players are ...... let's just say if they don't know they should pick up a dropped flag, they sure as hell won't able to carry it very far if they pick it up in base. This way, they can keep playing TDM while we play CTF. And with skilled players, fights over the flag in other places than bases make the game less dull.

5) Scoring Points
I made a change to the defaults by switching flag return (default: 10) and FCK (default: 5) scores. The reason is that it should be more encouraged to kill the enemy flag carrier than to snag a dropped flag from a kill another player of your team did. That's about it. From what I reckon martin-t levelled both scores to the same value and thereby reduced the value of defense compared to capturing a flag. This is probably also a matter of taste. I think a good CTF match is based on both offense and defense and it shouldn't just be mindlessly running to the enemy base and not caring about your own flag. But overall those settings base on the idea, that score values influence the way people play the game. I switched off score submission on my server anyway so I don't really care about this one anymore.

In a CTF game, there is only 200 points available for capping. The whoele team has to split this amount. Points for def are practically unlimited. The ideal solution is to have a "prizepool" of 200 for def as well and split it between players based on FCKs and returns. Until/unless that is implemented, we can only guess the values to make off and def balanced. I clicked through a couple matches and def now seems to be maybe slightly below 50% (but more if you manage to find a game with more then 6 players... yeah, good luck with that :/ ), Admittedly, in ctf duels, it's less than 50%. My other issue is that camping next to base and nex-nading (or vortex-nading?) players really sucks for people who attack. Generally, the amount of points should be dependant on how long the flag was stolen - how capable the FC was. Again, code change :/

6) Nade damage/radius
I reduced the nade radius on my server (although the current value may be a bit too much of a change). The reason for that is since most pro players are quite adept in using nades it should not be the havoc weapon it is by default. On smaller maps nades thrown just in the general direction of the enemy base will almost always lead to kills. Instead I think nades should just be ONE weapon instead of THE weapon of choice and they also should require a minimum of aiming... just like any other weapon. You can try to reduce their damage value instead of their damage radius (as martin-t did), but since the pushing force of an explosion will also throw players off on space maps I don't think this would be the better approach.

I also reduced the edge push force to half. We can tweak it further (damage and push) but radius 200 is WAY too much. (We're talking about the volume of a sphere: radius 200 covers roughly 3x less volume than 300 and 2x less surface.)

Ideally, the number of kills by each weapon would be roughly a quarter (including nades). So far nades are not tracked in stats so it's hard to tell how much it's now.

7) Physics changes
If the aim of those changes is to help new players in comparison to pros, then increased fall damage is doing the opposite. Pros know how to handle that by lasering just before touching ground, new players just die.

The other settings concerning air control I actually have no opinion about - except that I didn't feel those needed tweaking.

Only speed is for newbies. Falldamage is increased because a hard cutoff at 40 sucks. We might as well not have any falldamage. Also notice that I reduced the scale by half, only the hard cutoff is increased. And even then it won't kill you. Difference is minimal but sometimes makes players be careful and use the laser.

And actually I like the speed increase a lot. I thought it won't affect pros but somehow I feel more fluent. Maybe it's the difference in server versions Either way, on your server I feel slow and clumsy.

Aircontrol is NOT changed. All my changes are in the experimental section. What you're referring to is equivalent to loading 0.7 physics like in your config, I just explicitly copied over the affected cvars. (One change I omitted was stepheight, I now made it explicit but I don't see why you'd be against that one unless you wanna break maps designed for 0.8)

8) Weapon switching
Okay, this one I might actually agree on, since I can't think of a reason why this would be bad.

Ok, great if you update your config to reflect it, we can cross one item off the experimental list and start figuring out how to fix the animation. (I would vote for introducing another cvar to decouple switchdelay after a shot from the animation. That way, the animation can continue while lowering the weapon. To the devs: is it possible/hard to do?)

All in all the discussion nicely reflects the different expectations. Overkill used to be casual, now that crowd has moved on to greener pastures (jeff's / nexuiz servers). I would like us to agree on as many things as possible and if the remaining differences are too much, split Overkill into "Promode" and "Casual" (names to be determined) similar to vanilla. Then we can fuck up the movement and everything like on the nexuiz servers because honestly it keeps strong people away and newbies don't mind.

I was surprised nobody has mentioned nade offset. I found an example of why I hate it: https://youtu.be/c2gbe-MzdAU?t=27m25s . Try throwing over an edge downward. Basically it's a bug. The solution would be to move the origin forward and up. I don't insist on moving it to the left like in classic overkill. Please somebody suggest a value as whatever I say will be rejected and hated.

Mario: how it's implemented should not determine the name Buffs are a mutator, it belittles overkill to be compared to such trivial changes.

I think there are quite a lot of things to excel at Overkill, the most important being speed of movement. So while players can view it as a mode for casual short games, they also can try to play it at competitive level.

Yes you can excel at executionary skills, but your idea is deliberately de-emphasizing options to excel in strategic skills. Which means the top play in this hypothetical competition would be all about executionary skill. I don't see how it improves Overkill, rather I think it just makes it too similar to Instagib as far as the metagame goes.

I hate to be the "old guy", but I actually discussed the original purpose of the Overkill mod with the main developers back when the very first alpha showed up on that clan server.
So despite what the reasons these days are given for playing Overkill it was developed AFAIK with one main goal:

bridging the large "instagib divide". The logic was that certain people like playing on instagib server and others (usually less hardcore players) absolutely despise this game-mode (for various understandable reasons). As during that time the instagib servers were mostly the only populated ones, this had a huge effect on the overall player-base and many people were (and are) complaining that there are no populated servers to play a more vanilla like game-play. Thus came Overkill that was specifically designed to appeal to instagib players while still being also fun for people that usually hate instagib. I think it succeeded with that to a large degree, but overall player numbers in Xonotic have been kind of problematic (partially because of the continuing Instagib server problem).

Perhaps the real issue is that many see the instagib servers as a problem and a reason for the vanilla servers being empty. They have always existed, and always will, but the difference is, there used to be an active vanilla scene too.
I believe the downfall in vanilla players is due to the weapon balance, and maybe other gameplay aspects tweaked over the years to prefer competitive matches.

Whatever the original intentions, overkill is its own scene now, neither benefiting nor hurting the vanilla and instagib scenes. However, we have a bit of a catch 22 with vanilla players joining instagib/overkill servers only to complain about there being no players on vanilla servers, when there would be enough if they actually joined the vanilla servers...

However, we have a bit of a catch 22 with vanilla players joining instagib/overkill servers only to complain about there being no players on vanilla servers, when there would be enough if they actually joined the vanilla servers...

I guess you could say the same about Overkill players joining minsta because there's not enough Overkill players around

BTW: I agree with the "bridging the minsta divide" purpose of Overkill. At least that was the basic reason why I like Overkill while I dislike Minsta for being too simple (e.g. "all about executionary skill") and Vanilla for just being too slow and strategic for a more casual approach.

However we're somewhat off topic here.

---

To get a bit back on topic:

I think Overkill lost quite a few players because of some bad bugs, different ones every time the server was updated. Introducing more changes now that it finally seems to work as intended won't bring those players back. So one reason why I'm also opposed to many of those changes is the simple reason that I think a game needs a few constants to gain a steady player base. If every time you join a server something's different (the weapon you liked suddenly sucks, you die from falls that were no problem before, your movement feels different again) I don't think that's the way to keep players. Over the last few months the numer of setting changes increased quite a bit on the wtwrp server, additionally new maps were introduced as well as more vote options and nagging "in your face" hints (that luckily were replaced by less nagging ones). I don't think that successful servers (=Minsta) have so many erratic changes over such a short time.

Okay, I made a few changes to my config, the main one being the separation of overkill stuff from the basic config for better comparison. The overkill specifics can be found in overkill.cfg now.

Also I added a few settings from wtwrp's config. Those settings can be found in the last section of that file. I made one change though, I set g_spawn_near_teammate_ignore_spawnpoint_delay_death to 3 instead of 5. Also I reduced my reduction of nade radius to now 230 (instead of 200 before or 300 default).

First things first: here are a couple things K told me on chat (he didn't wanna setup and account just for this thread):

[20 23:32:53] <Gune> <K> shards should last till been hit
[20 23:33:22] <Gune> <K> fc kill should reward like cap

[20 23:34:10] <Gune> <K> mg shouldnt penetrate walls there nades for it
[20 23:34:43] <Gune> <K> speed and boony hoopping better here thjen LX
[20 23:34:52] <Gune> <K> then*

[20 23:36:21] <Gune> <K> should be a way on client version that one could choose weapons on overkill for those who dont want use the 3 types

[20 23:41:19] <Gune> <K> other thing is that when one is flag carrier kills and enemie flag carrier had a extra score

(removed unicode char from name because it breaks the post)

Zosssssss says movement on WTWRP is better (smoother and easier jumping - it might be not only config but also newer server version).

I'd like more people to join the discussion but they're either lazy or don't care

Okay, I made a few changes to my config, the main one being the separation of overkill stuff from the basic config for better comparison. The overkill specifics can be found in overkill.cfg now.

Ok, I updated the order of my overkill.cfg file to loosely match yours so I don't get lost in it. You have some redundancies there:

Code:

g_nades_pickup 0 // this is 0 by default now
seta cl_nade_timer 0 // this is clientside and has no effect whatsoever on server
captureleadlimit_override 0 // I don't consider this part of overkill, every admin can change this to whetever he wants, you should probably move it to your server.cfg file

Code:

set g_balance_pause_health_regen 5

This is actually broken (probably has been since the merge) - overkill has 2 seconds hardcoded. I also checked classic overkill and it used 2 seconds as well so no idea how this ever got into our config in the first place. A fix is already in a branch, can get merged any time. I would like to keep the current behavior so can we set this to 2?

Code:

exec physicsX07.cfg

Can you please replace this with the actual changed cvars (diff physicsX07.cfg physicsX.cfg) so we both have the same thing? If you agree with the 0.8 stepheight i mentined previously, you can then omit it as well.

Also I added a few settings from wtwrp's config. Those settings can be found in the last section of that file. I made one change though, I set g_spawn_near_teammate_ignore_spawnpoint_delay_death to 3 instead of 5.

Ok, I can probably live with 3 seconds for now. I am working on fixing the spawning so eventually it will find spots more reliably, then we might wanna increase it.

I am curious why you only chose to accept the 400 walking speed but not the slightly higher bunnyhopping speed as well?

Also I reduced my reduction of nade radius to now 230 (instead of 200 before or 300 default).

Fascinating. I like graphs so I made one that represents how quickly damage reduces with distance. Turns out you came up with the same ratio as me, just cut it off sooner.



Horizontal is distance, vertical is damage. O is original nades, L1 and L2 are your two settings, M1 is mine currently and M2 is what I am gonna try now and willing to agree on. It's already a huge difference from original nades and avoids the harsh cutoff you have.

About FCK score: I might be willing to increase it a little. Still think 10 is too much (10 FCK + 5 ret is almost as much as a cap). Maybe 7 or 8? It probably shouldn't be one number as the difficulty of capping hugely depends on the number of players. More players mean caps should give more points or FCKs less but currently no way to do it.

And finally, I found a config from old OK. RPC rocket had 2500 speed, uzi had g_balance_uzi_spread_add 0.0015 (4 times less than my suggestion!!! so people can stop crying and I am not gonna back down on making it stronger) and it's solidpenetration was ~57 (it was calculated differently back then but this seems to be correct based on testing).

I could give you the files for old overkill or post them here if Mario is ok with it in case you wanna try yourself.

Now, can you suggest a nade offset value, which is not bugged and which you won't hate so we can start arguing about that?

If you quote Zosssssss for liking the settings on your server, let me quote others:

22:42 < RomanSixty> <an old man> Does anyone elae think it's somehow more 'fun' here?
22:42 < RomanSixty> <Aurora Borealis> for xonotic game, it's my prefered server

I won't quote a third one because their wording concerning you and your ambitions was enough reason for a kickban, maybe you remember.

I updated yesterday BTW, if you want to check if something is rather code-dependent. I have to add though that smoothness of movement is also dependent on one's lag, and I can't help about that.

I'd like more people to join the discussion but they're either lazy or don't care

Well, there's people who want to develop the game, and others that just want to play it. Personally my enjoyment also lies rather in playing the game and maybe changing a single setting every once in a while if I think something's way out of balance (like the nade radius).

For example I don't see the need to "balance" every weapon (like you're trying with the uzi). Everyone has the same weapons, you don't have to pick them up, there's infinite ammo. Hence if you think one weapon sucks, just don't use it. Others may feel different about that.

Code:

exec physicsX07.cfg

Can you please replace this with the actual changed cvars (diff physicsX07.cfg physicsX.cfg) so we both have the same thing?

I could paste the content of that file into my config... but why would I do so? On the other hand: I don't trust defaults, as long as they can change code-wise with any update.

I am curious why you only chose to accept the 400 walking speed but not the slightly higher bunnyhopping speed as well?

There are maps that are highly optimised for certain movement speeds. I observed that yesterday with space elevator. Not using any movement tricks you can safely use the juppad, bunnyhop through the middle section and reliably hit the next jumppad on the other side. With increased speed you'll sometimes miss the second pad. If pros use tricks, they have to deal with that. But if a newbie just uses basic movement, it makes it harder for them.

The main reason for increased movement speed was to decrease the speed difference between pros and newbies. But let's face it: The only way to get even close to pros using blaster and wall dodging would be if you try settings that are completely off.

Ad nades;

It's already a huge difference from original nades and avoids the harsh cutoff you have.

I already explained why that cutoff is exactly what I'm after.

I could give you the files for old overkill or post them here if Mario is ok with it in case you wanna try yourself.

My approach may be conservative, but I'm no reactionary. I don't care about settings five years ago that nobody remembers anyway. I care about consistency of current settings.

If you quote Zosssssss for liking the settings on your server, let me quote others:

22:42 < RomanSixty> <an old man> Does anyone elae think it's somehow more 'fun' here?
22:42 < RomanSixty> <Aurora Borealis> for xonotic game, it's my prefered server

Actually let me quote the whole thing:

[21 22:42:17] <RomanSixty> <an old man> Does anyone elae think it's somehow more 'fun' here?
[21 22:42:18] <RomanSixty> <Zosssssss> gn
[21 22:42:21] <RomanSixty> - part: SLYCC
[21 22:42:33] <RomanSixty> ctf_dance has begun (10 free slots); join now: xonotic +connect 5.9.99.34:31000
[21 22:42:33] <RomanSixty> <LX> well, I do... but I'm biased
[21 22:42:34] <RomanSixty> <Zosssssss> than where?
[21 22:42:50] <RomanSixty> <Aurora Borealis> for xonotic game, it's my prefered server

An old man is known for trolling every now and them. He said this without any reference to the balance differences, probably just to see if I was watching IRC. Zosssssss clearly had no idea what it was about and I bet neither had Aurora Borealis. Notice he said xonotic, not overkill, my guess is he thought it was about other mods like vanilla or insta or jeff's which they both visit, not the overkill balance differences.

I won't quote a third one because their wording concerning you and your ambitions was enough reason for a kickban, maybe you remember.

I'll quote the third:

[21 23:44:36] <RomanSixty> <GIJoe> nobody visits the forums
[21 23:45:31] <RomanSixty> <GIJoe> but nobody cares about that
[21 23:46:34] <RomanSixty> <GIJoe> shut up and let us play

followed by vcalling to kick me twice. (Whole thing here) Yeah, so much for constructive criticism.

Please don't make it look everyone is against my changes when in fact this was just 2 trolls and a misunderstanding. I explicitly asked people what they thought about the differences and posted their full responses even though they didn't like all my changes and you respond by hand picking quotes. :/

For example I don't see the need to "balance" every weapon (like you're trying with the uzi). Everyone has the same weapons, you don't have to pick them up, there's infinite ammo. Hence if you think one weapon sucks, just don't use it. Others may feel different about that.

That's a fair point and a lot of the currently popular mods would be considered imbalanced by the competitive community.

Ad nades;

It's already a huge difference from original nades and avoids the harsh cutoff you have.

I already explained why that cutoff is exactly what I'm after.

You explained you don't want so high pushing force which I already halved and actually probably won't mind setting to 0 at the edges. My issue is with the high damage cutoff - your nades either kill or do completely nothing.

I don't care about settings five years ago that nobody remembers anyway. I care about consistency of current settings.

Actually, it was used until the merge which was not even 2 years ago.

I am curious why you only chose to accept the 400 walking speed but not the slightly higher bunnyhopping speed as well?

There are maps that are highly optimised for certain movement speeds. I observed that yesterday with space elevator. Not using any movement tricks you can safely use the juppad, bunnyhop through the middle section and reliably hit the next jumppad on the other side. With increased speed you'll sometimes miss the second pad. If pros use tricks, they have to deal with that. But if a newbie just uses basic movement, it makes it harder for them.

That's interesting because unless I am hugely mistaken it can't make any difference here. 'sv_airspeedlimit_nonqw' affects max speed to which you can accelerate by bunnyhopping and how fast you accelerate up until that max.

1) You claim consistency. Vanilla default is now 900 (the value I use as well) so by using 800, people won't be able to make jumps on your server which they were able to make on others.

2) The jumppad gives you 1100 speed. That's higher than 900. The setting will have absolutely no effect. You can test this by changing it to anything between 1 and 1100. The jump will be the same and you won't lose any speed by bunnyhopping in between either because you're already above what the cvar affects.

---

It's clear we disagree one many things and there will never be one unified overkill. I propose this: Let's find a nade offset which we're both comfortable with, that's my last issue now because using different offsets on different servers is ugly. After that we go our separate ways. I still want to get proper overkill into master but I am OK if there are 2 official versions aimed at different audiences.

Would devs be OK with this as well? IMHO, it's the better alternative to what is in master now.

By "consistency of settings" I'm referring to keeping changes as minimal as possible... which usually means not making any. And as long as you're dealing with opposing opinions by accusations of either trolling or misunderstanding or by just flat out ignoring them, there won't be any compromises. But I figured that much already from week-long fruitless arguments in-game.

Hey hey.. calm down.



FWIW: I haven't commented cos my ping is so high on either server that it makes it very hard to play, let alone compare any differences. Which is a pity, cos I liked Overkill when it was on servers closer to me.

Hello,
I prefer wtwrp settings, but the truth is that I don't really care, since I don't really feel much difference.

It's a chance to being able to discuss these settings, and seeing them merged into the offical game (you won't say that for commercial games). It would be sad not finding a solution.

Regards

I agree, it's a bit disappointing that you 2 can't reach a compromise, and instead resort to attacking each other...
You're both running overkill servers tweaked to personal preference, but the minor inconsistencies don't matter that much. It's the big things (like nade offset, as mentioned above) that can affect the experience heavily when jumping between the servers. Those changes are the ones that need to be standardized.

LOL when MON Overkill was still around I had my server too. People would come to my server and complain that the settings were different than MON when in reality they were both same.

I agree, it's a bit disappointing that you 2 can't reach a compromise, and instead resort to attacking each other...

Well, martin-t is talking about specific settings while I argue against the very premise if setting changes are even addressing the problems he's trying to solve. Since those basic arguments have been pretty much ignored and I'm having this discussion already for a few months now, excuse me for getting upset. It's basically like talking to a wall and the echo is in a different language.

You're both running overkill servers tweaked to personal preference

I made a single change over the 3 years or so I'm running my server. The rest is directly inherited from the MoN server it replaced. On the other hand I'm discussing about two new setting changes every month on the wtwrp server ("one last change"... yeah right). So I hope you can see the difference here regarding "tweaking for personal preference".

I tried it with arguments. I tried it with diplomacy. I tried it with ignoring (which lead to this very thread). Everything I tried failed. So if it makes everyone happier then I can also just give up my server and martin-t can have his way. It's not my definition of "compromise" but I don't see anything else that I can still try to reach through. This debate has no positive influence on my life, its results so far even less so. So at least this would make me happier, although I'll miss Overkill the way it used to be.

If neither of you are willing to reach a compromise (which does not mean accepting all of martin's changes, or martin reverting all of his), then the official overkill balance will remain unchanged, and the servers will be inconsistent.
This may not be a terrible thing, given you hardly know what to expect jumping between any servers (overkill or not), but it means there's no good standard for future overkill servers.

Since they were using user feedback for reference in their arguments, maybe we should let feedback decide it then. Make a poll which the community think is better. If it's a clear 80% - 20% victory to either side, then it would imply there was never reason to compromise in first place. If it looks like 51% - 49% instead, then it would confirm that there actually is a demand for compromise.

I agree, it's a bit disappointing that you 2 can't reach a compromise, and instead resort to attacking each other...

Well, martin-t is talking about specific settings while I argue against the very premise if setting changes are even addressing the problems he's trying to solve. Since those basic arguments have been pretty much ignored and I'm having this discussion already for a few months now, excuse me for getting upset. It's basically like talking to a wall and the echo is in a different language.

Sorry if I was a bit harsh on LX in my post but I also feel like talking to a wall. Old Overkill was popular for 3 years straight and after the merge it was almost dead within a year. So yes, I blame the balance change, at least partially. Sure, we fixed the worst by reducing nade size but now LX keeps thinking if we don't touch anything, people will somehow come back. They haven't so far. I am at least trying to do something. Like introducing hints for new players. All I got for that was being ridiculed. Hint says to spectate stronger players, LX and 'an old man' tell players to spec bots. Hint says to try using G for nades (the key most players use) and they start telling me how I discriminate people who prefer E. So sorry if i was a bit too aggressive. Even this paragraph is too aggressive, at least now we know neither of us is happy about the situation.

I made a single change over the 3 years or so I'm running my server. The rest is directly inherited from the MoN server it replaced. On the other hand I'm discussing about two new setting changes every month on the wtwrp server ("one last change"... yeah right).

You made (unknowingly) one GIANT change when you upgraded the server and everything broke. Nades? Now they're rockets because the offset is right on the gun. Throwing? No, they bounce off the edge. Uzi? A joke that can't hit anything. Defending against nades with shotgun? Nope. Then you made one change (smaller nades) because it was unbearable. At least half my changes are fixes for the rest. They keep piling up because I keep discovering things that are wrong. (BTW, I am pretty sure nades exploded WAY more often by shotgun (perhaps even while being held?), one of the reasons they still feel OP now) I also tried giving advantage to weak players like a bit of armor on spawn (weak players die often so they use it more) but I gave up on that because the strong people suddenly weren't winning with the huge margins they were used to and complained.

I tried it with arguments. I tried it with diplomacy. I tried it with ignoring (which lead to this very thread). Everything I tried failed. So if it makes everyone happier then I can also just give up my server and martin-t can have his way. It's not my definition of "compromise" but I don't see anything else that I can still try to reach through. This debate has no positive influence on my life, its results so far even less so. So at least this would make me happier, although I'll miss Overkill the way it used to be.

What Overkill used to be died in 2015 when people discovered they could abuse the unbalanced game. I was one of them. I enjoyed raining nexed nades on players who had no idea how to do it or how to defend themselves and I only noticed they quit after there was nobody left to abuse with it. Sorry.

What Overkill used to be was chaos and fun. These days it's one or two players on each team who determine the result of the game and everyone else could be replaced with bots.

Please, let's find a good offset that fixes throwing and doesn't break nexing. Honestly it's the only change people will notice between servers :/ Then each of us can have his favorite variant.

---

I like how Mario is trying to pressure us into cooperating but whatever happens I don't think it's ok to keep the "official" config. It's basically artificially half broken because nobody who knew about the differences bothered to copy the fixes all overkill servers were running into master. If anything, it should be a replica of the classic/old/MoN balance with proper workarounds to match the old behavior using up to date code.

@Mario, am I to take this that you're not ok with 2 overkill variants for competitive and casual gameplay? Vanilla has them (although they're not as different as I think they could be to suit each group).

@Smilecythe I really want to avoid that because
A) there are so few people interested in this debate (5 unique visitors on github where i *actually* explain the changes) it could go either way and not mean anything
B) I wanna discuss individual cvars, one bad value could make everyone hate the whole otherwise perfect config (it happened with spawn armor and i backed down on that, maybe there is more)

I would be ok with voting about individual changes where both sides present their arguments.

I am at least trying to do something. Like introducing hints for new players. All I got for that was being ridiculed. Hint says to spectate stronger players, LX and 'an old man' tell players to spec bots.

Please get your facts straight. While I occasionally ridicule the hints you introduced (since it's usually only well-known players on the server reading them) I never mislead new players. After all if there's one thing we can both agree on then it's that we want more players to enjoy Overkill.

Hint says to try using G for nades (the key most players use) and they start telling me how I discriminate people who prefer E.

You basically want players to play the same way you do, while my stance is to just tell people what is possible and some pros and cons and let them figure out the rest themselves. There is no only way to play. I think our tutorial is a good means to do so.

Now people only have to become interested in Overkill. And at the risk of repeating myself: I don't think the right way to keep new players is to change settings on a weekly basis. Overkill suffered a player loss not because of bad settings but because of outright bugs. Huge nades were one of them. But do you remember glowing nade trails even when not released? Or the time you could only shoot horizontally no matter what you aimed at? Now that drives people nuts, not some minor weapon imbalance you're trying to fix.

See it this way: back then every time you came back and the server was updated, something got fixed but another thing was broken. Notice the similarity people might feel today if they join a server where the only constant is its name?