XP for artifact use

TheElectrician wrote:

All this talk of changing this or that in recent days has me wondering where this is all coming from.

I enjoy coding changes. I have been busy on the Engineer class and the monster changes recently, but now those are relatively passive. I am wondering if there is anything else which would improve the game.

TheElectrician wrote:

I see a couple issues with making all the AM's a support class only:

1. We don't get XP for anything but killing, (as has been addressed in this thread) and I'm not sure there are practicle other ways to earn XP. Handing out weapons/maxing weapons is a nice idea, but the game is way too fast paced to stand around handing out this or that or maxing weapons for people. We only get 10 secs in between rounds. Not a lot of time. At least medics can get XP for healing at any time. Not to mention that you'd have to basically strip the other classes of the ability to make/start with their own magic weapons. Otherwise there won't be much maxing/handing out. Just watch a match to see my point.

I agree. I think everyone enjoys UT because they enjoy shooting things, and that always needs to be a sizeable part of things. So a good chunk of xp will come from that - as it currently does for medics. But just as medics can get xp for other things, why shouldn't other classes?

TheElectrician wrote:

2. Let's be honest here. 99.99999% of the players on this server like to score a lot of points in a match (regardless of class). There has always been, and always should be, a bit of friendly competition. I have never heard someone say, "I'm aiming for the lowest score in DC history". To get the 'support' classes to focus more on helping LW's win the match, there should be a much, much better incentive to win. e.g. raise the XP for winning much higher, give the support classes "bonus points" added to their finally tally on the scoreboard...etc. The desire to see your name at the top of the scoreboard will never totally go away. And if we don't add any incentive to be a support class, we'll just have a bunch of LW's running around.

Agreed. It has been talked about getting xp put on the scoreboard, so there is the normal score and the xp score. However, to do so would increase replication (i.e. network loading), so I have been reluctant to do it. The idea of just adding the points on at the end is an interesting idea.

As an aside, at any time we give xp, we could also add to the player's score. So when a medic heals 100 health, we could +1 on the score. Likewise, when a AM maxs a weapon for someone else, we could +1 to the score, as well as giving xp. Score is only given for killing things because we haven't changed it yet.

Great thread and all. Whatever happens I'll anticipate it.

edit - May have sounded a bit mean and hostile. I'd rather not be banned. So this part went bye-bye.

[1/2 offtopic]

I think the #1 balance issue is the range of player levels. You've got people that have been here ~4 years and those who are just starting up which makes it almost impossible for things to ever be balanced. Right now it seams that anyone < lvl 40 or so spends at least half the map spectating which isn't really much fun. On the other hand up until recently the monsters were way to easy (I had 2 lower level characters with no health bonus that did just fine. Of course now those players are have reached the point where leveling up is a bit tougher and they can't even stay alive long enough to gain any xp anyways)

Anyways at this point I don't think there are many la's that are capable of gaining much xp from remote upgrading or what have you although I could be wrong

If it does get implemented can you make it so it requires a seperate skill to add the artifacts?? Ive got to many I can't / rarely use atm

Continuum wrote:

Anyways at this point I don't think there are many la's that are capable of gaining much xp from remote upgrading or what have you although I could be wrong

Agreed. It adds extra abilities to the LAs which will help the team as a whole. The reward of xp to the LA is just meant as an encouragement. In the short term, I still do not see LAs getting anywhere near the same xp from non-killing actions as do medics.

But that depends on how we want to pitch it. As an extreme, (which I do not want!) if you gave an LA 1000xp for running the sphere, you would see an awful lot of spheres. And if you pitched healing xp at 1% max instead of 10%, medics would get a lot less xp from healing than from killing. So, how we set the xp payback will affect how much time people focus on certain things. So we need to get it right - whatever right is.

Continuum wrote:

If it does get implemented can you make it so it requires a seperate skill to add the artifacts?? Ive got to many I can't / rarely use atm

Could do. Or could make it LA4, so only people that want it have to buy that level. As an aside, BotFodder said the keybinding was working, so try setting up the bindings?

Szlat wrote:

As an aside, BotFodder said the keybinding was working, so try setting up the bindings?

I have my middle mouse button set to scroll through artifacts. That being said, particularly if I'm using one of my other buttons, clicking one way is easier than clicking the other.

First, remember where things are in relation to other things. My Triple tends to be three clicks from my Beam. So Beam is one of my two artifact bindings. The DMM is the other, and I know that the MWM is one click from that (and the Max Weapon is one click the other way).

Finally, so far I've only seen binding work when done manually (INI edit), so perhaps Szlat or someone who isn't working wonky hours like me could add a post to the Keybindings thread with the list of possible mappings?

So, what's the final feedback on this one? Do we want a LA4 level that supplies extra artifacts e.g.

Bolt of MWM Cost 100 adr. Randomly modifies the weapon currently held by the target player. LA gets 10xp.

Bolt of Maxing Cost 150 adr. Maxes the weapon currently held by the target player. New weapon not droppable. LA gets 15xp.

Bolt of Piercing/Vampire/Energy etc Cost 200 adr. Modifies the currently held weapon of the target player to be of the selected type. New weapon not droppable. LA gets 20xp

Bolt of Triple/Invulnerability Cost 100 adr. Gives target triple damage or invulnerability for 10/8 seconds respectively. LA gets 10xp
( any others? )

We could also give the LA +1 score each time he uses one of these, but that is a secondary thought really. I don't suppose they will be used frequently enough to make a significant difference to the score.

Those would be awesome additions. I'm sure most players have caught onto my constant suicide's in search of piercing weapons, so LA's would be able to make a nice living making piercing weapons for me.

I know that I and other players are sometimes hesitant to ask for weapons to be maxed, particularly in later waves, but now with XP to gain I think both parties will want to get the maxing, etc. going.

I tried that dropadrenaline input a couple weeks ago, didn't work. I'll try it again soon because that would be helpful as well.

Mach wrote:

I tried that dropadrenaline input a couple weeks ago, didn't work. I'll try it again soon because that would be helpful as well.

There are two ways of implementing key binding.
When I did all the bindings for artifacts, I thought people might want them to use them in combinations/macros, so I made them console commands.
For some really brilliant reason, which I just can't quite remember, I decided people wouldn't really want DropHealth and DropAdrenaline in macros, so I implemented them a different way - the same as the keys in the standard UT2004RPG are implemented. So, typing DropHealth or DropAdrenaline in to the console probably will not work. Sorry.

It might be worth trying to bind it to a key in your user.ini file, and see if that works e.g.
PageDown=DropHealth
PageUp=DropAdrenaline

(Full list of commands is here in the third post)

I keybinded those two commands szlat (drop adrenaline/health) and they worked. Very nice job on that. It should be very helpful in terms of helping out other players.

Szlat wrote:

The difficulty in using the beam method is co-ordination. The target player has to be still, and has to have the correct weapon selected when the AM initiates the max/mwm. If you got the wrong player, or the correct player but before he has the correct weapon, then it could cause problems. We could really do with some way for the target player to latch that he is ready.
. . .
I think all in all, the beam method may be best - but I am not entirely convinced. Is there a third way?

Link beam logic.
choose the beam arti, face the guy, press the key to initiate the beam, release to send the effect. Different colored (or effect) beams for the different beam arti's. I'm not too keen on the "effect on release" part, but it works. If you get the wrong guy, turn away till it unsnaps and then release . . . and nothin gets sent.

the alternative would be to pop the beam out when they choose the artifact (which is a bit silly, i can hear the sexual appendage jokes already) or to give the AM a link-style "artifact weapon" . . . altfire to (un)latch, primary to send the effect.

This weap could also be used for dropping adren. Drop a standard adren, lock on to the pill with your adren weapon, and inflate it (visibly and technically) 1:1 from your own adren. a 10x sized pill has 100x the adren. There's a mod out there where you can do just that to spidermines with your link altfire... you can charge up the damage and the size.

for experience gained, rather than tabling it (10pts for this, 1 for that, 5 for the other) make it something flatter . . . like 0.1 xp per adren pt spent or for the medic, 0.1 xp per pt of healing. this could work on the spheres as well.

anyway, my $.02

Do we want a
Bolt of Max+1 Cost 250 adr. Sets the modifier of the weapon currently held by the target player to the max+1. Only works if the weapon is already maxed. New weapon not droppable. LA gets 25xp. Will also add +1 to a medic weapon.

Not many LAs currently have 250 adrenaline max, so it would not get used much.

Could perhaps also make it so that if the weapon is not already maxed, it will max and max+1 it in one go, for 400 adrenaline (150+250).

However, no DC players have a max adrenaline of 400. So, for this to work, we would have to implement the bolts slightly differently.
If the bolt of maxing costs 150 adrenaline, then it takes the 150 adrenaline first from the target player, then from the LA. So if the target had 80 adrenaline, it would take that 80 from the player and 70 from the LA. This would allow the max and max+1 to be combined. The LA of course would just get xp for his proportion of the adrenaline used (min 1).

This change might also encourage WMs etc to ask, since they can provide the adrenaline, so will not be disadvantaging the LA.

monsto wrote:

Link beam logic.
choose the beam arti, face the guy, press the key to initiate the beam, release to send the effect. Different colored (or effect) beams for the different beam arti's. I'm not too keen on the "effect on release" part, but it works. If you get the wrong guy, turn away till it unsnaps and then release . . . and nothin gets sent.

Interesting idea. There could be quite a bit of work creating the link beam and getting it to lock. And I am not sure how people will get on with the press-wait-release action. And it will still sometimes get other people dashing into the link beam at the wrong second and getting the effect. And the longer distance ones (triple/invulnerability) could be difficult to aim as the target will be moving. So, it is possible, and would work, but I am not sure.

monsto wrote:

This weap could also be used for dropping adren. Drop a standard adren, lock on to the pill with your adren weapon, and inflate it (visibly and technically) 1:1 from your own adren.

I am not sure we need. You could always just drop a number of 25-adrenaline pills with the DropAdrenaline command.

monsto wrote:

for experience gained, rather than tabling it (10pts for this, 1 for that, 5 for the other) make it something flatter . . . like 0.1 xp per adren pt spent or for the medic, 0.1 xp per pt of healing. this could work on the spheres as well.

The bolts were all worked out at 10% of adrenaline. However, if we set the cost individually for each artifact, then different admins could configure the requirements to match their own servers.

Szlat wrote:

Do we want a
Bolt of Max+1 Cost 250 adr. Sets the modifier of the weapon currently held by the target player to the max+1. Only works if the weapon is already maxed. New weapon not droppable. LA gets 25xp. Will also add +1 to a medic weapon.

I'm not so sure that other players should be able to get max+1s. Dru should probably weigh in on this ...

BotFodder wrote:

I'm not so sure that other players should be able to get max+1s. Dru should probably weigh in on this ...

I'd also like his comment on being able to pick one weapon type to dial up (eg Energy Weapon Maker). I'm against that for balance.

BotFodder wrote:

Szlat wrote:

Do we want a
Bolt of Max+1 Cost 250 adr. Sets the modifier of the weapon currently held by the target player to the max+1. Only works if the weapon is already maxed. New weapon not droppable. LA gets 25xp. Will also add +1 to a medic weapon.

I'm not so sure that other players should be able to get max+1s. Dru should probably weigh in on this ...

I agree it needs Dru's decision, as all things do. The thought of a medic+1 appealled to me.

Moof wrote:

I'd also like his comment on being able to pick one weapon type to dial up (eg Energy Weapon Maker). I'm against that for balance.

Although if medics can pick a weapon to be a medic weapon, why shouldn't LAs choose one to be an energy one? And if the weapons magic types are balanced, then does it really matter? A while ago, the only weapon people wanted was a flak+5. I don't think things are that constrained now. Some want piercing, some energy, some vampire, some infinite. And remember, the LA is giving the weapon to someone else, not themselves.

But the principle is correct. There is only one vote that counts, and that is Dru's. It is his name on the mod, and only things he approves should be in there (unless Shan wants them

). So, none of these bolts will go ahead unless Dru says yes. He may well be against all of them. But that's his call not mine. I just suggest them.

I like this game for team work and for killing things, and anything that helps both of those I will encourage.