Time To Kill Too Quick

I was talking about following some people in games and this game more importantly.

During beta I joined a few hundred squads and played with most of the testers on the TR side and I seen that some people were just out for themselves. Others were great leaders and it was fun to play in those squads, I even went to look to join those squads again night after night.

Leadership is Leadership, doesnt matter if its in a game or in real life. If you have the charismatic skillset of a rock, then your not going to amount to a hill of beans when leading anything in a game or out.

Its funny but you say it wouldnt be fun being a single unit in Starcraft, which is vaguely based on Warhammer 40k, but in Warhammer 40k Inquisitor you can do just that, and it is fun.

Unfortunately, as this thread proves, you can never make all the people happy all of the time.

You essentially seem to be saying its no fun to lead, and its no fun to follow. Well I dont know what to tell you - dont play?

So, the game wont be fun for you in every scenario..either change the role you are playing, change where you are playing - or stop playing for a while altogether.

If people are not having fun, they can stop. They do not need to come to the forums to post long winded treatises on why they think they stopped playing.

Because lets face it, even once you give these people something - lets say a longer TTK - they just come back after they die the next time with some new complaint.

Stop complaining and start learning, you might even have fun - shocking, I know.

We're not complaining about dying to this. Its unfulfilling to kill someone in an instant with no difficulty in it. You keep assuming we're complaining about because we're on the receiving end, but actually most of us are complaining about giving it out to people.

You know having a such a short TTK is much like having a hockey, tennis match or boxing, be decided by 1 point or punch. Sure there would be different skills involved and such but ultimately the longer the match, the more data presented, the more clear who the better team/player is. Imagine tennis being a 1 point game and whoever served first has this huge advantage, how is that fun for either player if one point decides everything.

Then unfortunately this thread would be filled with people complaining that they're losing by too many points, and it's not fair for there to be such a huge gap in competitive skill.

I think this topic is fine, and will evolve over time, as most things in an online based game will.

I would hope that people would like some strong sense of competition in a game where you face off against others.

What? I never said it wasn't fun to lead. I said that the complexity of this game lies with the leadership, which only a few people can occupy at any one time, leaving the shooting aspect as the meat of the game.

To me the shooting aspect has no depth due to its short TTK. The entire reasoning, skill and strategy that you can find in other shooters is completely absent, because there is no time to think, just react.

Often times I find myself benefiting more from exploiting the lousy hit detection by jumping around like a monkey, than actually using any kind of technique/strategy.

The rest of your post is just arrogant garbage.

I'm in favor of higher TTK. But simply making TTK higher is too radical of a change, can go wrong easily(flawed implementation) and the game seems to have been designed around lower TTK already.

I never said anything about the game mechanics of placing shots on your target. I was pointing out TTK only.

PS2 does reward spraying, and in my opinion it's a direct effect of inaccurate weapons that do insane damage up close and very little at range. Combine all that with the typical low FPS and it gets bad. Oh, and I swear it seems like low server FPS to, in the 10-20 FPS range; it's just interpolated so much it's unnoticeable.

Anyway, I played Counter-Strike since beta 1. I still have beta 2 up till like beta 6. CS was done for me at 1.0. I played it a year straight way too many hours. Quake 3 wasn't even out at that point. Quake 1, 2, 3 and Half-Life were the golden ages of FPS gaming. Every one required skill, and a TON of fantastic games spun off from those games. Practically every modern FPS game is somewhat based on the Quake engine (in architecture) -- it's still referenced in game development schools. Unreal spun off from Quake giving us the now ubiquitous UDK-based games. Team Fortress was a Quake 1 mod, and the same guy still develops TF2.

I wasn't being combative sorry.

Just saying....
the internet shall forever floweth over with complainery.

The real reason some people want the low TTK right here.

they dont want to have to actually play better than their opponent, they would rather revel in their lucky triumphs.

After playing for a while, I prefer a quick TTK.

I'm not a fantastic shot. I'm a mature gamer and my reflexes aren't great. However, I am an intelligent gamer and the majority of the time when I kill someone, it's because I outmaneuvered them or had the situational awareness to know where they will be so I can get the jump on them.

That's why this game suits my style of play. Work as a team and play intelligently and it makes up for a lack of reflexes. Except heavy assualts and their active shield. That's the worst thing ever to go up against.

Steel as a material for plate armour only became popular after longbows proved so deadly against iron armour. We're talking quite a difference in time-span here - your armour was 15th Century but plate armour started being used extensively two hundred years before that, and carried on being used for a couple of hundred after that.

Yeah they do and as you say, they'd be wrong. Making soldiers who were mounted and wearing full plate dismount (because you'd killed their horses) and trudge across muddy fields to reach you was definitely what helped turn the tide.

But this is all just a nice educational diversion from the real topic of this thread

Yes, some players will gravitate towards higher DPS weapons - but skillful players will be deadly with whatever weapon they are using, whereas a decently designed high DPS weapon will have some payoff that means it is harder to use a high DPS weapon.

Taking Quake 3 as an example (ignoring the BFG and quad-damage powerup), the rocket launcher and railgun were the highest DPS weapons but both had long reload times. The rocketlauncher also had a slow-travel time, whereas the railgun was instant. So both took some skill to use effectively, and if you were a good player then those weapons were lethal. I used to play this game a lot and once you became able to twitch hit people with a railgun your skill with all other weapons had increased, so a personal favourite of mine actually became the bog-standard machine gun. It had fast-travel, fast reload and could shoot across the entire map. I could get into a duel with a rocketlauncher/railgun wielding player (who had less skill) and just rip them apart with a machine gun ... tracking their every movement perfectly as we chased over jump pads and lift pads. It took maybe 4-5 seconds of shooting them with a machine gun to kill them, and in that time they'd maybe had time to fire 2 or 3 shots.
In the hands of an equally good player though I'd be dead with a railgun shot between the eyes.

I can see why new players would be frustrated with long TTK, because every passing second pushes the advantage to the experienced player and, as a new player, getting the drop on an experienced player didn't result in their death just a reduction in their health ... but usually they'd be skilled enough to defeat you even if they were at half-health.

Low TTK means that weapon choice is less important, and getting the jump (i.e. getting behind a distracted player and opening up on full auto) means you will kill them outright. Their shooting skills don't come to bear, which is perfect for new players who would otherwise be ripped apart.

Sigh, people who state 'FACT' at the end of their argument have usually just stated a personal opinion and are confused. You did a good job of carrying on that proud tradition.

You're in a doorway shooting out at my team who are in the process of storming the place. I am a LA and have managed to take a route that places me behind you. I walk up to you, stick my gun in your back and open fire with my carbine. In less than 1 second you are dead. How exactly did my 'better reactions' help me win that fight? Sure, I got the situational awareness drop on you, because you were distracted and engaged in an active firefight elsewhere. But as soon as I opened up on you the fight was as good as over - there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.

Let's flip that around though, and if the TTK was higher then when I started to open up on you you'd actually have had time to deal with this new threat ... you might have been able to run, turn, shoot or take some kind of action. Of course, how successful your actions turned out would depend on your reactions - and if you had better reactions than me then maybe you'd stand a chance of beating me.

So no, low TTK does not mean the person with better reactions wins ... higher TTK rewards those with better reactions.

The problem isn't solely the short TTK in of itself, like people (and me) pointed out.

Its that the short TTK actually inhibits the progress of the game beyond the shooting aspect, it actively denies interesting strategic and tactical maneuvers, diverse and interesting weapons, movement-based objectives and overstates the importance of AOE explosives.

If you want more objectives in the game than "stand near this pole to capture" you will need longer TTK.

Take for example LLUs (http://wiki.planetsidesyndicate.com/index.php?title=LLU), you simply can not have a "capture the flag" objective with current TTKs (on everything, not just infantry) if a Dalton/Zephyr can consistently just annihilate armor in 2-3 shots while render bombing.

Nerf air then.

Seriously, it's silly. Situational awereness is also skill.
Getting in the right position at the right moment compensates for not having godlike aim.
Some might call it luck, but more often than not, I create my own luck.


I'd keep my tactical skill over your twitch reflex skill any day.
As said previously there are plenty of games for twitch skill.
PS demands another kind of twitch skill, adaptability

Nothing changes for you with longer TTK.
Most people will not be able to exploit "the twitch" good enough to actually convert the "tactical awareness"-lose into a twitch-win.

You still keep your first-shot advantage, you keep your positioning advantage, you keep your ambush advantage.
You lose nothing.

This is essentially a win-win situation.

You're entitled to your opinion, but you don't really expect SOE to completely overthrow the character of the gameplay at this time, just because a few people like you can't deal with being ambushed, do you?

I'd suggest you adapt or play something else, because it won't happen.

Thanks for telling me this.
I'm not sure I see the point since this is a discussion about mechanics and not if/when SOE will implement anything, but thanks anyways.

no