Medic and Engineer inf weapons are too powerful

TheDruidXpawX wrote:

You pile an additional weapon speed of 50 on top of that and then run berzerk and it's just flat out unhinged.

Well I would say its not "flat out unhinged" until you add the triple...oh thats fun.

TheDruidXpawX wrote:

Issue 3: The medic's most powerful ability should not be their infinite weapon.
The Monster Master was not even going to be a medic. The addition was to keep your all-to-weak pets alive. I was flat stunned when people wanted to play this class as a support class for everyone else and did not care about having monsters. We added the EXP element to the healing weapons to bolster this team spirit.

The class was never intended to be used as a full out attacking role, but it was also not intended to be in a full support role. Again, the fact that there is tremendous argument on this point indicates that the point of this class is a total failure.

Well UT2004 is a FPS game where you actively shoot things, in invasion mode those things are monsters, take away the infinite medic weapon and the medic loses the ability to directly attack monsters, sure, they have other methods, but watching pets fight for you is boring, at least the engineers get to spawn turrets they can use, WM has DB that increases the effectivness of all weapons, and AM has rod/bolt/beam, medics get no weapon that they can use other than the medic weapon, that is why they use it.

TheDruidXpawX wrote:

Issue 5: The sky is falling. The world is ending.
If anyone regardless of skill can regularly obtain a third of a 10k level during a single 16 wave game, we will be changing it. It's not cheating on your part, but it is unbalanced, and it is unfair to the other players for me to leave it in this state.

I do not see why 3k XP is a bad thing, and to me it seems you are singling out medics,my brother Lemmiwinks is an AM, not a very high level either, only 65, not even high enough to need 10k to lvl up. He gets 2-3k XP per game and usually scores under 300 points, how? well put 20 people on a small map and turn on the damage sphere, with 20 people he can get 1 adren to equal 2 xp (or more...pets count), an AM gets adren very very fast, and 15-30 xp/second is better than any other class (and the adren gained in one wave can net the user 400-500xp). No other class has anything that can do that without any work. Only reason your complaining about AM is because none of them seem to use the spheres much. Also most of the higher level players, regardless of class, get well over 2k xp per game on average, and i don't really see medics passing the 3k mark often. And an example of all of this:

zneer got the most points, TON80_MD, who has 200 levels on zneer, only has 300xp more than zneer, and Lemmiwinks, with the lowest score on the server, has the third highest XP, and he is 300 levels below zneer. (and elite, if your reading this, try that with your AM and see what you can get, i suggest just stop using the triple and use the damage sphere in place of it)

I think this is about average, and while the medics do get a bit more XP, i don't think its too much, if you really want to change something, change the XP earned on things, not the effect/strength of things. People play for points over XP, you are not complaining about AMs with spheres because spheres don't give points, so they are not used, the medic weapon gives XP for everything it hits, and its used because it gives points for hitting monsters.

EDIT:: Damage sphere is even better than i thought

edman007 wrote:

I think this is about average, and while the medics do get a bit more XP, i don't think its too much, if you really want to change something, change the XP earned on things, not the effect/strength of things. People play for points over XP, you are not complaining about AMs with spheres because spheres don't give points, so they are not used, the medic weapon gives XP for everything it hits, and its used because it gives points for hitting monsters.

I think this actually highlights an interesting thing, which is that experience from team-supportive abilities is hard to pin down since it does not have the inherent risk/challenge vs. reward setup that fighting monsters does.

I think it's pretty silly that Lemmiwinks can earn so much experience from running spheres, I saw him doing this the other day myself, but it's also hard for me to say that this is inappropriate -- I'm willing to believe that running damage spheres may have positively contributed to the team effort to that degree. Although if that's true, I'm also not sure that a level 65 AM should be able to assist others that much.

I really wish there were more data breakdown between experience sources. (Talk about greedy, huh? There's finally XP data displayed on the scoreboard and the next thing I want is a breakdown of what sources that XP comes from.) In general, what I'm seeing is that players tend to get between 1.3 and 1.5 times their score in XP. Higher ratios than this almost always indicate a strong team assisting role, but typically the additional experience awarded is not necessarily comparable with the experience gain from killing monsters (implied by a XP/point ratio of 2.6 to 3 or more). Then again, it's hard to say that team assisting/XP earning activities necessarily came at the expense of offensive effectiveness.

In this particular game I believe Dr. Wayno's XP/Point ratio of ~2 almost certainly comes from laying down a lot of heals throughout this game. I know my own XP/Point ratio of ~1.8 is also somewhat due to this reason, as I'm pretty compulsive about trying keep everyone's shields up, and particularly on the waves leading up to our defeat this meant constantly healing people.

I think we should develop the idea of not cutting weapon's ability to inflict damage, but at the same time encouraging players to do things they are supposed to do.
There is a problem, that may appear in the future.Many players (generally low-level) can find themselves on other corner of the map (because of ghost) with no ammo. He will die in this emergence situation, while trying to return to his base/team mates.
I think, that you could leave the infinite attribute, but add a heat meter (graphics can be taken from translocator/scorpion meter).
The idea is that when a player shoots this kind of weapon(engineer/medic), the meter will increase on X%(let's say X=1% for example) per ammo consumed(it is just to make calculations easier and secure, because if we use timer, players could cheat, shooting 1-2 shots and then waiting, so timer wouldn't count that).
When meter reaches certain amount (let's say 50%) the player will be hurt every second because of heat(or every time he shoots and consume ammo), but he still can shoot (it would help in emergency, but because of that players will try to keep their meter at 0%). As for medics you could restrict self-healing while meter above 50%. Then, if meter reaches 100%, the player wouldn't be able to shoot at all until meter cools down to let's say 80%. Meter will cool every second, starting if the player hasn't used his weapon(like health/shield regeneration starts if you haven't inflected any damage). This kind of heat system was in Jets'n'Guns game.
And then the last, encouraging part. When player uses his weapon for right purposes(healing,shielding, linking) his meter will cool down on amount of %% equal amount of good things made per ammo, so meter will keep his position(it won't increase, so player can help for ever, and it won't decrease, to prevent cheating-fast cool by healing/linking).

So, how is the idea? It's a bit complicated and may be difficult to code, but that would prevent people from doing things they are not supposed to do, so aggressive link/medic weapon attack won't be possible, but this will also help in emergence situations.

need a some clarification here what is the primary issue

1 : too much xp per map
I have gotten over 4000 xp with my WM on a single map given the right circumstances and contributed little to none to the team
A huge amount of xp generated with medics can be from monsters and from well placed sentinels for engis
2 : spam heavy on server
Link gun would seem to be the major contributor, which is why I'm asking for medics to be separated from Engis here

and are we looking too closely at certain individuals; of superior skills/very high level and not observing players of lower/mid level, and average skills

err how do i vote ?

yes, clarification would be great. If people are getting to much xp per map, do you mean solely the engineers and medics? or are you looking at the WM and AM as well? Earlier tonight I scored 7000 xp with my lvl 360 WM on UrbanBayRev, is that too much xp?

I think the issue is low level players getting a large amount of xp.
A level 40 player shouldn't be able to get twice as much xp as a level 100+ player.

Roadkill v3.4 wrote:

err how do i vote ?

An option to change and/or vote for multiple options would be good now that the options have changed several times.

I'm still trying to figure out how to vote for the first time.

I like healing people and trying to get xp that way, and I usually get around 2k xp. My score is usually not at the top, but I think it is reasonable to be getting 2k xp per map with a 300+ level char.

Joe, your AM got over 7400 xp on your last high score post. http://www.disastrousconsequences.com/dcforum/posts/list/510/1005.page

I guess I am like you guys, it would help if we defined the primary issue.

Sorry Joe, it was your WM as you said.

I think that if you take away the medics ability to fight then they will only hide out of the way and because they weren't in the fight at all then they will be the only ones left on a wave and will also die from the lack of means to defend themselves.

Also if it is the amount of projectiles that is slowing down the server at the most of times then you could always make it so that the medic cannot have the link gun as a medic wepon and make it that either just the medic and the engineer or everyone from being able to gain adreneline bonuses from killing sprees while beserking (this is how i think that people get all of their adreneline) and are able to keep up a beserk thus if it changes then it will decreese the amount of projectiles being fired.

Also if you take away the means for a medic (as i am myself) to be able to defend themselves with the medic wepon then if we manage to get onto the server by ourselves then it will make it so that we can only make it to wave 5 (since i think that the bot can only make it to wave 5 without dieiny every wave) on our own unless we have the ability to spawn pets (which most of the lower lvls from around lvl 100 odd or so) dont have meaning that if anyone wishes to create a new medic it will mean thet they have to completely depending on useing ordinary wepons since they will not have any exp healing.

Athough it wont really matter to the engineer's that much since they will just get into a turret/ vehicle and spawn a sentinel somewhere else and still get vertually the same score as before!

Wail wrote:

I think this actually highlights an interesting thing, which is that experience from team-supportive abilities is hard to pin down since it does not have the inherent risk/challenge vs. reward setup that fighting monsters does.

Yes, but when someone runs this, it's not a zero sum game, they gain XP, also everyone else gains XP. I actually care a great deal less about this.

If you can kill more monsters, you earn more XP, everyone else earns less.

But we're wandering far afield here. The issue is really about infinite weapons with berzerk. The problems are primary with the link gun, but they do spill over onto other weapons.

I know we've got a few very vocal people saying nothing should be done. Trust that on the other side I've heard from a number of very vocal people saying this is entirely broken.

RoadKill v3.4 wrote:

I have gotten over 4000 xp with my WM on a single map given the right circumstances and contributed little to none to the team

Anyone can pull it off given the right circumstances. I'm more concerned with how once you know the system, as an engineer or a medic, you can do this pretty much every game even at lower levels.

RoadKill v3.4 wrote:

A huge amount of xp generated with medics can be from monsters and from well placed sentinels for engis

True that, and that's how I'd expect to see the xp gained, however when I look at how people scored that are gaining huge amounts of XP, it's from an infinite link or an infinite RL.

RoadKill v3.4 wrote:

spam heavy on server

I know no one wants to talk about this, but this problem is bigger than you think.

RoadKill v3.4 wrote:

Link gun would seem to be the major contributor, which is why I'm asking for medics to be separated from Engis here

Inf RL is also a problem, just not to the same degree.

RoadKill v3.4 wrote:

are we looking too closely at certain individuals; of superior skills/very high level and not observing players of lower/mid level, and average skills

You may be looking at them, however, I've seen people of high personal skill but low level able to duplicate this same thing.

hey druid.
im not plaining on Questioning every call you make, but, in the last post you wrote

You may be looking at them, however, I've seen people of high personal skill but low level able to duplicate this same thing.

so i was wondering if you could tell us the names of those guys ( i hope to be in the list) so i can think posible solutions and help you to end this problem.. so far i got an idea but i will post it later

Ok, there's two primary issues.

1) The infinite link gun berzerked is too much. It's too much for the server, it does too much damage, it's too much in every way. Infinite RL is also a problem. This is unrelated to any one class.

2) Medics and Engineers were never supposed to be played through their weapons the way they are presently being played by some. <tongue in cheek>We may as well make a new class that comes with an infinite rl and link gun and skip the other skills.</tongue in cheek>

The issues may be slightly different for the medic and the engineer, but on the surface they are the same problem.

The issues for the link/rl may appear slightly differently but on the surface they are the same problem when you spawn with one or can create one almost any-time. For the other classes this is still a problem but to a lesser degree as they probably wont always get one.

Thè-Hättêr wrote:

so i was wondering if you could tell us the names of those guys

Sure, me.

I'll go into the RPG file an engineer that's level 70ish I'll buy only the skills to amp up the link gun and pump all the base attributes. I'll buy ghost and a couple other goodies, but for the most part I'll skip the engineering skills.

I'm fairly out of practice and I'll bet I can earn at least as well as my AM character, with a vorpal, that's twice this level.