How do people feel about ADADA and bullet travel

You had me at rocket jumping.

Doesn't seem broken if bad players can't land shots.

PS2 isn't a Feel-Good Hug Simulator (it was redesigned in early alpha.)

It's a competitive game involving skill. The less skill is involved, the more it becomes like all the other play-for-a-day-then-throwaway shooters on the market. We shouldn't be rewarding devs who churn out shallow games, but those who produce deep experiences that reward long-term skill development.

I remember looking into the acceleration on infantry turning a while ago, and I think it came out to something like 17-20 g's every time you A/D. So really it should be something closer to A-D-A-pass out.

And that's not counting when the motion prediction gets out of sync and players just magically warp 2m to the left.

Because affecting basic FPS engagements simply by spazzing movement keys is the epitome of 'fast' gameplay?

Hey it's not a "Simulation", lets put gravity at 33% while we're at it.

Yes exploiting latency, and randomly smashing buttons, is "skill".

Tracking your target is.

With the speed and lack of penalties to ADAD, I would say that owning a high ROF weapon with general tracking abilities is more important to this game than having higher precision accuracy.

I would also argue this requires less skill over things such as action-to-action planning, teamwork, and precision accuracy and places too high an emphasis on the shallow, yolo-solo run-and-gun rate of fire, which is also why semi-automatics and slower firing, medium damage weapons on the side are not really a thing in Planetside 2.

I am particularly amused and somewhat saddened by the fact that I can dodge the average player's or groups of player's bullets matrix-style.

Don't get me wrong, I do like the gameplay of Arcade shooters, which is what a lot of Planetside 2 Infantry play is "mobility is power". However, in a large scale, combined arms setting where teamwork is the emphasis, I would rather see more modern shooter mechanics and depth where "planning is critical".

This, ladies and gents, is what we now have for a playerbase here. 'Get gud' and overcome the bad netcode exploit.

I made it 100BRs without relying on this, but everyone is doing it, so I guess to remain competitive I need to as well. Only it wont help me because I don't play HA and every ADADADADer I encounter is not just a Heavy Assault, but using the directive weapon, meaning they've farmed thousands of people as HA and continue doing so

I

only run into this problem going up against smgs, and then it's usually an "OH S****! *Dead* type moment, or an "OH S****! *sliver of health remaining* type moment.

although yes it is annoying at the time I see it as being a skill some players have and don't have a problem with it.

Let me try to remind people of something...

Skill vs Discipline

Any monkey playing can learn discipline.

Any monkey can spam ADAD.
When learning pro-level game play on any game, you're first ascension into attempted god hood (rather it be MLG, CWG, StarLeague; w/e... I tried the pro-scene in SCBW so...) is to master discipline.

Every one always thinks that to be godly, you have to have this APM of 300 - 350.

That's... just.... wrong. Coming from experience here.
Every would-be "Skill Player" feels amazing about themselves when they've learned discipline and mechanics; such as memorizing the hot keys, executing certain functions (like auto reloading after every engagement) or knowing how to aim for the head. Most of the mechanics are simply mental memory and muscle memory and is NOT skill.

SKILL, is actually the CHOICES you make, and how efficient you are WITH those choices in regards to your discipline.

So I learned, for example; how to beat people in l33t leagues on SCBW while attempting WCG status with a mere 150 apm compared to most of theme spazzing at 280+. I made every click count if possible and I spent more time winning due to fore thought and planning than "OMIGERD SPAM MAH MAREEEEN STUTTER STHEPPZ!" ...

At one time, I WAS ONE OF THOSE *****. I had a spike for a few months of 300 APM and I felt like a God. Yet I'd still die. Lose. Get my *** handed to me. Especially by my coach.

It's always the CHOICES we make. That is one of the challenges of game designing. If you want a game to be an experience, you need to give the player real choices, force Fore-Thought and strategic thinking. Players drive their experience and the game embraces that experience.
If you don't you'll get a rather shallow game. CS does well because it is still objectively based and the engine used is very simple. But it's mainly persisted as a Cult Classic. It's not hard to master the mechanics on CS.
PS2 has a higher learning curve; there are more mechanics to master. Ironically, the choices are just as limited as CS though despite the game being so large and the opportunity of each fight to turn into a lopsided affair in terms of population - making it dull - making your choices never count.

Simply running into the fray and spamming ADAD, isn't skill at all. It's just mechanics - and it's shallow mechanics at that as the choice to do ADAD has no down side... So it adds no depth.

Get it?

It's not random. It's deterministic. Characters are only ever moving exactly where their players tell them to move.

Skill is decision-making and execution. (And this is true of skill at anything really.) Skill in different things can involve differing amounts of these traits (chess is almost purely decision-making) but in the case of strafe-dodging in PS2 clearly by executing the decision to strafe-dodge in the situations where it's beneficial, a player is going to be objectively more successful.

There's really no sane way to claim dodging isn't skill. It would be like saying aiming in a FPS is just "clicking randomly", which of course is utter foolishness.

You could claim that certain forms of skill aren't fun. For example I don't find it fun the way that PS2's clientside netcode provides significant advantage by being the guy tearing around the corner, and would prefer it was more balanced. But using that trait of the engine to your advantage is inarguably skill. It's something you can do to be successful more often, and there's no way to argue against that.

• An unskilled Chess player is seeking the path of least resistance. How can he become more successful, ideally with as little effort as possible? He takes it to the chess forums...
• Unskilled Player: "They should remove all the ridiculous non-pawn pieces. Everything should be a pawn except the king."*
• Skilled Player: "No, that would make the game shallow. Instead, you should simply learn to use the tools available to you."
• Unskilled Player: " ^ This poster is exactly what's wrong with the Chess community. 'Get gud' bravado at its finest."

Like any given piece in chess, strafing isn't some universal trump card that wins the game singlehandedly. It's a single tool, and a very situational one at that.

(*To be fair, the more accurate analogy would be if the unskilled player only had a problem with Knights and only wanted them to be pawns. The point remains though.)

At no point in any game should it be a requirement to find things wrong with the game engine (or, in this case, physical limitations of multiplayer gaming) and exploit them to be skillful/succeed.

The argument you're making is a godawful one for two reasons:
1) It forces players into cookie-cutter play-styles that cater only to the lowest common denominator of skill and drives meta in a way the is negative for the game as a whole.
When players find anything about a game that is so far above and beyond other options that it becomes almost stupid not to do something, they will. ADAD spamming w/high mobility weapons, PPA proliferation/spawn camping and redeploy abuse are perfect examples of this. Sure, you can choose not to use these things, but you're putting yourself at a pretty severe disadvantage for not doing so. Why position yourself when you can just charge forward and instantly start strafing side to side like a metronome? Why let enemies out of their spawn when it's easier to ensure they are unable to be a threat at all? Why bother loading up a galaxy when it's quicker, safer and cheaper to just redeploy down the lattice?
As soon as such things are recognized as wholly superior to the alternatives, the way people play shifts toward those behaviors. Without an actual counter or negative aspect, everyone has to fall in line or risk constantly fighting an uphill battle. That's toxic to the community; driving out players who would otherwise diversify the game play in favor of some half-***** "survival of the fittest." mentality.

2) It lies on a very slippery slope that borders allowing/celebrating/requiring cheating.
At what point does understanding/exploiting oversights/limitations of the game engine become cheating? Sure, as you said, knowing that the damage you take is determined by what your enemies sees gives you an advantage; but what if I "forget" that I'm downloading a few terabytes before each session? Am I cheating? Should my opponents just "get gud" and deal with my half-second+ immunity as I put a few bullets through their noggins? After all, all I'm doing is using "my knowledge of the game engine" to give me "more skill" than other players who haven't figured out the same "strategy."

Players -- especially the highly competitive ones -- will do anything they powers-that-be allow to give them an advantage. Hell, some even go far beyond that to eek out a few extra kills. The closer you get to straight-up cheating, the worst the gameplay is for everyone else. Are you old enough to remember what happened to Diablo 1 and 2 after "trainers" became common place? If you didn't have one, you were ******. Playing online required cheats and counter-cheats. No joke. It got to that point because this style of behavior was slowly justified, one, seemingly small, step at a time.

Holy crap. That turned out longer than I expected.
TL;DR: Read it anyway, jerk.

Seriously????

Someone is actually trying to make the absurd claim that hitscan > bullet travel?

LMFAO

Wow. Go back to CS and/or CoD then. FFS.

Bullets actually have to travel to target. There's mass, resistance, gravity.

I love it when games IMPROVE and people complain because they're not as sterile as games of old with fewer variables

In this scenario, the whiner is more or less ******** about the amount of CHOICES available (inability to handle depth). They'd want everything to be PAWNS so that the game is more predictable and there is less fore thought as to the counters, compositions and tactical exploits. What the whiner is failing to assume is that every TOOL has a Weakness or an obvious down side that balances to the strengths. The Whiner cannot handle this amount of Depth and thus wants everything reduced to being the same; because they misinterpret "Skill" with "Mechanics".

The reason I find ADAD to have little, if any, skill is because it's universal, just like having every piece being a Pawn.
It's not a deliberate tool, just an unregulated and unpolished exploitation of the Chess Board.
Every infantry player can do it and all it takes is habitual muscle memory to accomplish.

Orginizing a 12 man squad to position themselves on the roof of a building over looking a spawn point and carefully holding it using communicated called out, co-ordinated shots (to kill multiple targets within a close time spawn for Shock and Awe) and supporting fellow team mate by deciding when to pull away and heal/repair/resupply is "Skill" due to utilizing the Tools one has in the form of meaningful choices - not habitual exploitation that can be easily accomplished using a Macro Program...

An exploit is not skill. A more appropriate chess analogy would be if someone could somehow bend the rules to allow their pawns to move before their opponent could strike, and when they complain say: Learn some STRATEGY!

Whether or not ADAD spam is something to be removed for realism or whatever isn't really the question, it's an exploit simply because of the already shaky netcode. If they fix that, then maybe it can be a real tactic but until then it's just a hit detection shield.

1. There is nothing cookie-cutter about strafing. It's situational, and often not the best tactic to employ.

Ironically it would make the game much more cookie-cutter to remove strafing, since then every combat situation would be handled the same instead of this dynamic tactic sometimes being worth it and sometimes not.

2. An exploit is a game bug that can be used to gain an advantage. Strafing is pretty obviously an intentional feature, so calling it an exploit is nonsense. The only way it'd be an exploit would be if there were bugs specifically associated with strafing and collision volumes (hits not registering because the collision volumes don't match the visuals) but I haven't seen that personally. (I have seen the issue where hits won't register in general, but that affects vehicles and infantry alike and isn't related to strafing at all.)

Calling strafing "cheating" is even more preposterous. There is a fairly obvious distinction between using an intentional game feature (strafing) and going into your Diablo 1 character file to change it and cheat.

If you strafed in literally every fight, you would do extremely badly. It's a technique useful in a handful of fights which comes at a distinct, noticeable cost of accuracy. Personally I only use it in a very narrow range of infantry encounters. Most of the time I'm remaining stationary and aiming down sights to kill enemies as rapidly as possible.

Everyone seems to strangely be arguing as though you should strafe in literally every infantry fight you have. I can only imagine players get this impression because the other 80% of the time that expert player kills them, the expert was crouch-ADSing and tore through them before they could react, and it's only the 20% of the time that they were facing the expert that the expert bothered strafing -- which naturally causes players to rage at the strafing, even though it's a niche technique.

Another reason why I feel that low RoF weapons in the game are gimped. Because they all have lower bullet velocity compaired to the high RoF weapons that have higher bullet velocity.