FreeGameDev

There are a lot of stupid possible mutator combinations. However, from what I am aware, there is only one combination that is literally useless. And that combination is Instagib and Vampire.

Why am I making a topic about this? Well, it's of course so small you can barely even call it an issue, but a good discussion is always a good thing. Therefore, I want to tell you what I believe should be the result of this combination, and I'll leave it to all of you to decide what you think is best, with a fancy poll!

The current situation:
If you kill someone in Instagib Vampire, your HP will go from 1 to 2, but you will still die in one hit, no matter what.

My proposed change:
- Weapons in Instagib should do 1 damage, except on headshots (they will still 1-hit kill)
- The default health value should stay at 1
- When killing someone, your health value will become 2 (as is the case now)
- When your health is at 2, it will take 2 shots or 1 headshot to kill you
- Health should probably be capped at 2 or so, to prevent people from gaining an impossible advantage, though I must admit I am not sure what the current Vampire code does here

The good:
Instagib Vampire will actually have a different result than just Instagib.

The bad:
I personally don't see any here, but of course I'm open to reasoning.

Please vote in the poll and share your opinion, I'd love to know what you think.
(Please tell me I got the current behavior right, I'd hate to be wrong here)

The combination should not be possible, Like insta ballistic, insta medieval or the horrible insta arena.

LuckyStrike-Rx {l Wrote}:The combination should not be possible, Like insta ballistic, insta medieval or the horrible insta arena.

I must disagree here. No matter how stupid I consider those combinations, they DO change gameplay and therefore are doing their job as mutators. Even though we both may not like them much, I don't see any use to restrict such "stupid" combinations. Making instagib vampire an impossible combination would be fine though because it actually doesn't do anything, but as long as a mutator combination still changes something I do not believe they should be blocked from being selected, no matter how "dumb" or "stupid".

Even though I still prefer my option, I must admit that making it impossible to both select would be a viable solution to this issue. In the end, a combination that does nothing will cause more confusion than not being able to select said combination.

I understand your reasoning, but I have tro agree with Lucky on this one. Instagib is instagib. Instant kill. So selecting this with vampire seems useless.

Ulukai {l Wrote}:I understand your reasoning, but I have tro agree with Lucky on this one. Instagib is instagib. Instant kill. So selecting this with vampire seems useless.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I accept Lucky's idea completely and it's most likely a much easier and more effective solution than mine, it's just the part of blocking other combinations "Like insta ballistic, insta medieval or the horrible insta arena." as well that I disagree with.

LuckyStrike-Rx {l Wrote}:The combination should not be possible, Like insta ballistic, insta medieval or the horrible insta arena.

I think Insta Arena was removed in the 1.1 (but i do remember the days before 1.0 when people chose that, annoying as hell) but in relation to this topic, I've always chosen Insta with no other mutators besides things like Survivor, Team, and Duel. Insta Vampire sucks and I could never get it because of what LastProject stated, It's not you are really gaining health since it's always OSOK (one shot one kill). I think these proposed changes might actually make me reconsider using vampire in Insta because as of now, it's sorta an unneeded mutator to be associated with Insta.

Off topic here, IMO insta ballistic is nooby (cause u don't really need to have a clean shot) and I don't really choose Insta Medieval because its just a melee fest of who can get the most people while they aren't looking. /offtopic

Tweaked and stickied, interested to hear everyone's opinion.

they DO change gameplay and therefore are doing their job as mutators

The problem is for combination that end up with bad/uninteresting gameplay. May give a wrong opinion about the game if your first game is something insta arena.
Also, noobs often vote for the worst combination.

Insta-medival : It's just luck, You just have to keep spamming primary slash facing a opponent and pray (often end up both death anyway)
Insta-Ballistic : Rocket are already nearly insta, Make it 1hit kill just make it more random, as you don't have to land your shoot correctly
Insta-Arena : The worst of all, take smg and spam randomly everywhere. It have been removed because noobs was always voting for this (I suppose it was easier to make frag for them)
Insta-vampire : If It have no effect, that's indeed confusing to allow it. If it give you +1hp per kill, why not.

LuckyStrike-Rx {l Wrote}:

they DO change gameplay and therefore are doing their job as mutators

The problem is for combination that end up with bad/uninteresting gameplay. May give a wrong opinion about the game if your first game is something insta arena.
Also, noobs often vote for the worst combination.

Insta-medival : It's just luck, You just have to keep spamming primary slash facing a opponent and pray (often end up both death anyway)
Insta-Ballistic : Rocket are already nearly insta, Make it 1hit kill just make it more random, as you don't have to land your shoot correctly
Insta-Arena : The worst of all, take smg and spam randomly everywhere. It have been removed because noobs was always voting for this (I suppose it was easier to make frag for them)
Insta-vampire : If It have no effect, that's indeed confusing to allow it. If it give you +1hp per kill, why not.

Ah, yes, that issue. Totally forgot about that. A bad first impression is the last thing we want to give our new users (and in my opinion, the "--- APOCALYPTIC SERVER ---" is doing a great job at achieving just that with their insane modifications). The game has a small (but loyal) community that should be expanded, and if the first thing they see is "Instagib Arena", they are surely going to have a feeling that this game is as unbalanced as can possibly be, something we'd rather not have happen. We could always discuss about perhaps adding a small dialog box like:
"The mutator and/or variable settings on this server are known to be unbalanced and are recommended not to be played if a fair and balanced match is wanted. Please make sure you want to continue and press the OK button, otherwise press Cancel to be moved back to the server selection screen."
(with a "never warn me about this again" checkbox, of course)

At any rate, the discussions of blocking those is another discussion than this topic, and I personally do not believe that Instagib Vampire would be as awful as Instagib Arena. As you stated in the quoted post, it's more of an issue of "you can select it, but it does absolutely nothing, huh?" than of anything else, which is why I'd prefer it to actually do something (or be removed, as it is bound to cause more confusion than something else).

qreeves {l Wrote}:Tweaked and stickied, interested to hear everyone's opinion.

The "tweaking" is adding "POLL: " to the topic title and adding ", just disable the combination" to the end of the first option, right?

Changed my vote to the 2hp stuff, why not after all.

There could be kind of combomutators, that replace the behaviour of unwanted mutator combinations. That solution is more interesting than just disabling these combos, but disabling them would be still a lot better than leaving it like it is atm, imo. I dont see these random multi-mutator games that often anymore, but it is often a good reason to leave. Plus, for new players, it might be confusing, and for certain combinations, even appear silly.
Maybe it is possible to arrange the mutators in a tree-like structure? If you click one, some others that are not related at all, become greyed out (even if its solved now, but as example: click arena, and instagib is disabled), and insta and vampire lead to some new one, that works as described above, and also needs a new name, instapire or vampgib as working titles
There are other combos that are basically good, just need some tweaking to get rid of annoyances, like expert+insta, where kick and grenade damage should be zero. I bet there are tons of others examples.

Now my maybe a bit harsh idea: What about all combinations are disabled in first place, and then step by step bring tested combinations, that are able to deliver good gameplay, back. If they need tweaking to be good, they will be there when its done, else they stay disabled.

And an annotation to the insta/vampire idea:
I would prefer a headshot taking away 2 or 3 health instead of being instakill, and that kills/actual hp is not in a 1:1 ratio, but more like a level system:
1 hp for 0 kills, 2hp for 1k, 3hp<-3k, 4hp<-6k, 5hp<-10k .. quick offhand example. Some cap cant hurt here too, I guess.

LuckyStrike-Rx {l Wrote}:Changed my vote to the 2hp stuff, why not after all.

I'm actually torn between the too. Because on one hand, it only makes sense and It would be kinda cool to do the 2Hp thing. But on the other hand, I'm not incredibly sure because it wouldn't be exactly Instagib anymore. So I'm not sure what to choose. If someone could set up a test gametype to see what it's like, I'd love to play it so I could get a better opinion. Cause I mean 2Hp for Insta sounds like fun but If we were to just not allow Vampire with use of Insta, that would be fine for me too.

[quote=]Also, noobs often vote for the worst combination.[/quote]

I had to quote you and +1 you on this one because it don't get no truer than that. Those games when people pick so many mutators.
Team-Insta-Vamp-Resize-Survivor-Ballis DeathMatch
Yeah, this fails.

I can't understand this whole debate. Just give people options and let them choose.
If Instagib + Vampire is not sensefull atm, let's make it senseful. Much better than just prohibiting it.



BTW: apocal is balanced but kr1egsgott still approves

sv_servermotd "(ATTENTION: THIS SERVER IS MODDED AND NOT RECOMMENDED FOR NEW PLAYERS.) HAVE FUN!" // server message of the day

BTW2: know what confused me the most when I started playing this game? Chat is T by default (ok, no hard job just look at the options what key it is, but: did you ever mention that new players wont chat with you?)

kr1egsgott {l Wrote}:I can't understand this whole debate. Just give people options and let them choose.
If Instagib + Vampire is not sensefull atm, let's make it senseful. Much better than just prohibiting it.



BTW: apocal is balanced but kr1egsgott still approves

sv_servermotd "(ATTENTION: THIS SERVER IS MODDED AND NOT RECOMMENDED FOR NEW PLAYERS.) HAVE FUN!" // server message of the day

BTW2: know what confused me the most when I started playing this game? Chat is T by default (ok, no hard job just look at the options what key it is, but: did you ever mention that new players wont chat with you?)

Must agree with you. Didn't see the MOTD of apocal though, perhaps I just can't look or so, don't know how obvious it is =/
And yeah, chat being T by default was fairly easy to get used to for me, seeing as I've played Team Fortress 2 before (even though T is Team Chat there) but seeing as most games still put it on Enter is can be quite confusing (the person I got to try Red Eclipse was confused by that as well, had to explain it before said person understood it).

Must agree with you. Didn't see the MOTD of apocal though, perhaps I just can't look or so, don't know how obvious it is =/

Maybee you didn't saw it because I just added it today as I read your post further above?!

/OT

kr1egsgott {l Wrote}:Maybee you didn't saw it because I just added it today as I read your post further above?!

/OT

Oh... Well, thanks for that!

TheLastProject {l Wrote}:The "tweaking" is adding "POLL: " to the topic title and adding ", just disable the combination" to the end of the first option, right?

Yeah, sorry. Just wanted to standardise and clarify a little so it was more like an official poll (which at this point it is). I should note that v1.2 actually has instagib-vampire disabled at the moment, this topic came up early after the v1.1 release and I modified it accordingly. That isn't to say we can't revisit the topic now, just saying :P

TheLastProject {l Wrote}:And yeah, chat being T by default was fairly easy to get used to for me, seeing as I've played Team Fortress 2 before (even though T is Team Chat there) but seeing as most games still put it on Enter is can be quite confusing (the person I got to try Red Eclipse was confused by that as well, had to explain it before said person understood it).

Oh, really? Well I've added RETURN to the default keys for that now

qreeves {l Wrote}:

TheLastProject {l Wrote}:The "tweaking" is adding "POLL: " to the topic title and adding ", just disable the combination" to the end of the first option, right?

Yeah, sorry. Just wanted to standardise and clarify a little so it was more like an official poll (which at this point it is). I should note that v1.2 actually has instagib-vampire disabled at the moment, this topic came up early after the v1.1 release and I modified it accordingly. That isn't to say we can't revisit the topic now, just saying :P

No need to apologize for that, it's better this way. I totally forgot about the option to disable it (stupid me). And thank you for updating me on the current planned state for v1.2, it's always good to know what's already planned and what not, even though it can still be changed.

qreeves {l Wrote}:

TheLastProject {l Wrote}:And yeah, chat being T by default was fairly easy to get used to for me, seeing as I've played Team Fortress 2 before (even though T is Team Chat there) but seeing as most games still put it on Enter is can be quite confusing (the person I got to try Red Eclipse was confused by that as well, had to explain it before said person understood it).

Oh, really? Well I've added RETURN to the default keys for that now

Great!

LuckyStrike-Rx {l Wrote}:The problem is for combination that end up with bad/uninteresting gameplay. May give a wrong opinion about the game if your first game is something insta arena.
Also, noobs often vote for the worst combination.

Insta-medival : It's just luck, You just have to keep spamming primary slash facing a opponent and pray (often end up both death anyway)
Insta-Ballistic : Rocket are already nearly insta, Make it 1hit kill just make it more random, as you don't have to land your shoot correctly
Insta-Arena : The worst of all, take smg and spam randomly everywhere. It have been removed because noobs was always voting for this (I suppose it was easier to make frag for them)
Insta-vampire : If It have no effect, that's indeed confusing to allow it. If it give you +1hp per kill, why not.

Lucky really hit the nail on the head here. I can't count how many times I've sat games out for this very reason. Some n00b hops on for probably the first time, sees a whole bunch of options and thinks: "Ooooo! SHINEY!! *CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK*" (Accurate depiction of a new RE player: http://i.minus.com/iMDFiKH1rpmUb.gif ) and then we end up with shitty combinations of the like that Sona made mention of. However, Froggy admins and Wazubabelfish are good about that and force vote something agreed upon by users more familiar in the art of making the game not suck.

I mean seriously... Insta-Ballistic-Resize-Hover-Vampire-Duel Defend the Flag ...


Insta-Medieval: This is something I would LOVE if it wasn't for the fact that both people die 90% of the time, which makes things quite frustrating. I've noticed this happens with kicks very frequently as well. But it would be very fun, because you get to go NINJA MODE and one-slash some people, which to not die while doing so would require some skill. (though this is raped by the fact that it happens anyway nearly all the time)

Insta-Ballistic: No. Just...no. -_-

Insta-Arena: http://i.minus.com/i6OH7F9TraVWM.jpg

Any other mutator super combo by the likes of what was already mentioned: Please uninstall Red Eclipse. You clearly do not know what you're doing.

As far as Insta-Vampire goes...while I do think TheLastProject's idea is a good, and interesting one, it defeats the purpose of chosing instagib at all, which should be OSOK no matter what. "Insta" meaning "instant", and "gib" being just that. I'm very much against this, actually, because think about it. You get a player or players like DAMIEN playing this...who could probably win by 100 points with his eyes closed, FFS; and what happens? You get someone who would be quite literally un-killable, because those players would have around 10-20 health, and unless you headshot them, you'd have to hit them 10-20 times, ASSUMING they killed no-one in the interim. Even with a cap, having to hit someone multiple times with a 5-round clip and low-ROF rifle that requires pinpoint accuracy in a fast-paced game would be an absolute nightmare.

TheLastProject {l Wrote}:A bad first impression is the last thing we want to give our new users (and in my opinion, the "--- APOCALYPTIC SERVER ---" is doing a great job at achieving just that with their insane modifications). The game has a small (but loyal) community that should be expanded, and if the first thing they see is "Instagib Arena", they are surely going to have a feeling that this game is as unbalanced as can possibly be, something we'd rather not have happen.

Oh wow, someone who agrees, THANK YOU. While I don't have a problem with the server perse, I DO believe that it could serve as a misrepresentation of how Red Eclipse is, which is of course not what we want. Of course, I'm not saying "TAKE THE SERVER DOWN, RAAAAAAAAAAAAAWR", but a notice in the MOTD that Apocal is an extreme gameplay modification would be a great thing.

[OFFTOPIC]
As far as "T" for chat goes, I figured that out instinctively. I've played more games with "T" for chat than I have "ENTER" for chat. Many of them were older games like Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior, DOOM, etc.

As far as Insta-Vampire goes...while I do think TheLastProject's idea is a good, and interesting one, it defeats the purpose of chosing instagib at all, which should be OSOK no matter what. "Insta" meaning "instant", and "gib" being just that. I'm very much against this, actually, because think about it. You get a player or players like DAMIEN playing this...who could probably win by 100 points with his eyes closed, FFS; and what happens? You get someone who would be quite literally un-killable, because those players would have around 10-20 health, and unless you headshot them, you'd have to hit them 10-20 times, ASSUMING they killed no-one in the interim. Even with a cap, having to hit someone multiple times with a 5-round clip and low-ROF rifle that requires pinpoint accuracy in a fast-paced game would be an absolute nightmare.

How about max 2 or 3 health?
In my opinion 2 would be very interestering. If it must be 3, lets degenerate it to 2 after some time.

kr1egsgott {l Wrote}:

As far as Insta-Vampire goes...while I do think TheLastProject's idea is a good, and interesting one, it defeats the purpose of chosing instagib at all, which should be OSOK no matter what. "Insta" meaning "instant", and "gib" being just that. I'm very much against this, actually, because think about it. You get a player or players like DAMIEN playing this...who could probably win by 100 points with his eyes closed, FFS; and what happens? You get someone who would be quite literally un-killable, because those players would have around 10-20 health, and unless you headshot them, you'd have to hit them 10-20 times, ASSUMING they killed no-one in the interim. Even with a cap, having to hit someone multiple times with a 5-round clip and low-ROF rifle that requires pinpoint accuracy in a fast-paced game would be an absolute nightmare.

How about max 2 or 3 health?
In my opinion 2 would be very interestering. If it must be 3, lets degenerate it to 2 after some time.

Vampire is capped to twice the spawning health by default, from what I've seen, though servers can change the variable. In my version of Instagib Vampire that would mean a maximum of 2 hp. In other Vampire matches (without Instagib) this should mean a maximum of 200 hp. Though I must agree, the idea doesn't fit together with the name "Instagib" well (I've played enough shooters to know what Instagib is supposed to mean).

I agree, "instagib" should always be OSOK.

ZeroKnight {l Wrote}:As far as Insta-Vampire goes...while I do think TheLastProject's idea is a good, and interesting one, it defeats the purpose of chosing instagib at all, which should be OSOK no matter what. "Insta" meaning "instant", and "gib" being just that. I'm very much against this, actually, because think about it. You get a player or players like DAMIEN playing this...who could probably win by 100 points with his eyes closed, FFS; and what happens? You get someone who would be quite literally un-killable, because those players would have around 10-20 health, and unless you headshot them, you'd have to hit them 10-20 times, ASSUMING they killed no-one in the interim. Even with a cap, having to hit someone multiple times with a 5-round clip and low-ROF rifle that requires pinpoint accuracy in a fast-paced game would be an absolute nightmare.

I didn't actually think about that either. I mean put someone like Damien in Insta with this modified Insta-Vampire business, and you'll be left wondering "How'd I not kill him??" So yeah I quite get that one would keep the "Instant kill" mechanism of Instagib in every mutator Insta is associated with.

ZeroKnight {l Wrote}:[OFFTOPIC]
As far as "T" for chat goes, I figured that out instinctively. I've played more games with "T" for chat than I have "ENTER" for chat. Many of them were older games like Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior, DOOM, etc.

If i may add this bit, Halo on the PC, it's chat for Talking to the whole server is "Y" and Team Chat was "T". But I always thought the 'talk' feature should be "T" because it helps noobs understand better. But most likely, Y will always be for all and T will always be for Team.

@kriegsgott, TheLastProject
I made note of you mentioning a low cap, but even with a cap of two, that would STILL be extremely difficult. Take these scenarios into consideration:

Scenario 1:
Player kills someone, now has 2HP. Player gets shot, loses 1HP, kills his attacker. Player now has 2HP, repeat.

Scenario 2:
Two players with 2HP square off. They trade shots for 5 minutes until one of them manages 2 consecutive shots. Exciting at first, but could very quickly get boring, as that will most likely happen just as frequently as scenario one.

@Sona
I have noticed games that use Y for regular chat and T for Team chat. I think it's silly and flip them :P I guess I just prefer Legacy ^^

[VERY OFFTOPIC EDIT]
But awesome nonetheless. As of this time, (13:47 - EST) Myself and Sona have the same amount of posts XD
http://i.minus.com/isoucoIz69E7L.PNG

I switch my vote back again, Now it's 5/5