How do people feel about ADADA and bullet travel

The typical engagement range of PS2 is closer, but anyone who isn't burst-firing in maybe 60% of their fights (depending on the engagement range) is going to do pretty badly.

PS2 gun play is loose in a way which increases game depth. Of course "headshot = instant death" is tighter gameplay; it's basically the tightest feedback loop you can create in a game! But it's also objectively shallower than a game with looser controls where manipulating those loose controls in a way which generates consistent kills is harder.

Nobody's asking for competitive maps because of the reasons I just covered: the game's entire design is about massive, sweeping warfare, and that's completely at odds with the small short sessions that make for a good competitive game. But because of PS2's design you get a completely unique experience which is deeply rewarding of player skill, in spite of the lack of competitive focus. (Or...well...they put some effort into competitive play but imo it's just a dead end.)

And other would argue it adds more luck to it, We will never agree cause we see it differently.

You see being able to change direction instantly and causing a perfect shot to miss as a good thing. I see it as a bad thing. You can't trust low rate of fire when and depend on well aimed shots.

Try aiming for a head shot with a semi auto sniper rifle while a good player ADADADA dances with a 0.75 gun. You are just praying you hit and can't use good aim to make the shot cause they could be anywhere when the bullet gets there even at closer ranges.

So you take a hose instead.

I don't really understand, how come you're arguing about this stuff when you have exactly zero experience with Counter-Strike? The topic isn't about CS anyway, it's about the strafing and holding M1 down which essentially is what PS2's gunplay is. Everyone does it along with crouch spam, there's no special skill to it, you just mash your strafe keys and hope that your opponent is worse than you at shooting if it's a straight up 1 on 1, which is quite likely considering how bad the average player is. I haven't seen a single instance of player stopping and shooting in this game yet when in 1v1, even at longer range duels people just strafe constantly while shooting. How is that skillful in any way? You're just mashing two buttons with no thought.

I'm not overly fond of luck, but the critical piece that makes PS2's CoFs work (and makes 99.999% of battles come down to skill) is that the CoF is tight enough and controllable enough that the randomness is almost never a factor. The weapons where this is an exception (stuff like Bursters and Phalanx AA with wide, inaccurate CoFs) should certainly be changed (or at least provide a tight firing mode.)

You can't "change direction instantly" in PS2 because there is smoothing. But clearly it's a more interesting game if many types of skill are rewarded (and rewarded deeply) and I see much more of that in PS2 than CS.

If you think you're "praying you can hit" in PS2, you aren't a particularly skilled player. Skilled players are very consistent.

And again, You are talking about 600+ round per min guns(hoses). A gun like a semi auto sniper where your life 100% depends on getting 2 or 3 head shots is another story (you aren't living long enough to get 5 body shots in face to face combat). The area where your targets head could be is much larger then the actual target so you are taking a best guess and hopeing they land.

The reliability of these weapons just becomes too low to use competitively so whole weapon style become obsolete at any sort of high skill level

Things that matter:

• Games where bullets have a speed (rather than instant hit) are deeper because of the dynamic way they reward skill (the correct lead varies by distance and by the target's heading and speed, which the victim can vary to become harder to hit.)

Things that don't matter:

• The fact that you're apparently criticizing 600 SPM weapons as "hoses" when the AK-47 in Counterstrike has 600 RPM!
• Semiauto weapon balance. Some are good, a few key ones are bad and should be improved. So what? Doesn't really factor into the core point all that much

The details of PS2's weapon types don't really change the core point that bullet travel time makes game way deeper than instant hitscan games. The only way a hitscan game could be deep is if all of the depth is in other parts of the game (and it could be achieved that way, but CS doesn't achieve it.)

There are NO slow firing weapons you would use in a competitive setting. They are punished too heavily in PS2 system.

It is the point.....The whole point. Guns that shoot ropes are way better then guns shooting controlled accurate shots to the head because you can't rely on being able to hit important targets when you life depends on it because you shots are based on luck. You are simply better off with a full auto because they are more reliable in this environment.
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What happens when you shoot an AK-47 in CS at full speed??? If you are going to say the a AK-47 shoots ropes like a PS2 weapon......I don't even know what to say at this point I don't even think you have played counter strike if you are going to compare them like that.

Again you say deeper.....I say adds more luck. Making some types of weapon total unreliable and worthless at a high level of play.


If you think only have one style of weapon is good....I guess that is ok. But competitive players don't like that and it's why PS2 doesn't have any.

eh, what?
The game doesn't "predict" anything. As you tell it, you would see people warping all over the place. Whenever they instantly switch which side they strafe to they would move to the wrong side a moment and then teleport the other way. I've only seen that during disconnects or when people have bad internet connections/my internet connection has trouble.
So you can repeat that it gives an immense advantage, but the advantage is non-existant. What you might see is information packets being lost, or being delayed and reaching your PC together with the new package. During package loss or a disconnect to the Server the game keeps running fine, but all the players start walking from that point and move through walls etc on your PC, and all damage you deal is delayed until your packages reach the enemy.
There are "good" players that utilize software to take advantage of this. When they activate it, it stops or slows their outgoing internet momentarily. This means packages containing their whereabouts reach other PC's much later... while packages of your own whereabouts reach him fine. So he can turn a corner and blow your face off while for you he's still standing behind the corner. During strafing it would mean that you keep seeing him a little somewhere else. If this would cause warping, I don't know. It could though if you intermittently speed up and slow down your outgoing internet.

People who crouch, on my screen, just duck down and get up. No "snapping to standing position".
Here's 30 minutes of gameplay I randomly picked, in the first 15 minutes I didn't find any "snapping" or any warping during strafing. Please tell me anywhere where you can see this snapping to position.

eww no thx.

That would mean getting hit once while crossing a fire lane would basically = death.

As is, you can sprint across, and take the 1-3 bullets and make it to the other side. If slowed down? You'd never be able to cross even a hallway.

How about momentum, so going back to the left after strafing to the right has a delay? That would ONLY nerf ADAD.

Worked against ZOE (honestly, they did too much to it. Nerfing the ADAD crap, and max sprint speed to normal was prolly enough.)

Do you have any sense of the context of our discussion? It's CS vs. PS2 depth. The rate of fire of weapons has no relevance to the discussion.

If you think landing consistent, rapid killing blows on players in PS2 is "based on luck", you're crazy. It's all based on the direct actions of the two participants, and luck is almost a complete non-factor.

AK-47s become inaccurate when used full-auto. It's valuable at close range. It's useless at range. You burst or you lose.
PS2 weapons become inaccurate when used full-auto. It's valuable at close range. It's useless at range. You burst or you lose.

If you want to prove these games are different from one another, you're going to have to actually discuss ways they are different. A typical burst involving more bullets in PS2 actually provides a greater degree of control over just how controlled you want to aim at someone, and the slower TTK means that the winner of the exchange actually was the more skilled player (not just a newbie with a random lucky shot.)

Same reason Basketball matches aren't played to "first basket wins": they're played over a period of time to allow single lucky shots to be averaged out, because multiple accurate shots are required to win the match.

I don't have time to watch a 30 minute video to win an internet argument; especially when you provide enough examples for me to disprove your statements already. Side note: If recording actually worked for me, I'd post my own examples.

That thing right there. That's called extrapolation (definition: to use known data to predict data outside the known). It's an incredibly common technique used in real-time multiplayer games to smooth remote players' movement so they don't appear to warp/skip around. If games didn't do this, everyone's movement would look like a low-FPS slideshow (this is game development 101; a quick google search for "extrapolation games" would probably give a far better/deeper explanation; I'm just assuming you're keeping up).
Also, as you noted, games using UDP-based protocols (like most real-time multiplayer games not named Minecraft), where packet loss means an actual loss of data, can compound this issue. A lost position packet means the prediction has to run longer; which, in turn, means that any drastic correction is that much worse.

Whenever prediction is involved with player movement, the goal (and general effect) is that the movement is more smooth. Everything is fine(-ish) right up until players are provided with a mechanism to rapidly and repeatedly change their velocity. In such cases (as in ADAD spamming), the game engine's prediction actually makes the situation worse: The player was predicted to be moving left for ~200ms, but they actually only moved left for 50ms, then went right for 200ms. Games like Subspace and, likely, PS2 then try to use interpolation to smooth out the correction to the correction of the player's position; but it's not always possible or reasonable. Animations end up skipped/screwed up (crouching), and movement becomes faster or slower than normally possible.

That's what makes ADAD and crouch spamming a problem. Not the concept; the simple limitations and technical hurdles associated with online gaming. Until the day comes that remote clients receive the same update polling rate and zero-latency messaging as the local player, things like this will be problematic and abused.

Gonna add my thougts here:

1) amount of bullets needed to kill. Beyond 10m, the Carv takes 8 bullets to kill.
I don't think you'll find many people running about at full effectiveness after taking 7 hits from a light machinegun, even wearing bulletresistant vests. Now, fast forward into the future, maayybe armor has advanced more than infantry weaponry, ok.
But: I'd be fine with reducing effectiveness at say, 60% health. (300 health remaining); slower movement speed, starting of greying out. Another option is to double the 'flinch' effect if the bullet drops health instead of shields for example.
Also, basically, the damage drop-off is 'wrong' in that there is a tier drop at 10m for most weapons.

2)Adding a delay for ADAD strafe: okay for me. IMO: also a delay for sprinting then. Ever tried to sprint 100m and then just _stop_?
Doesn't work.

3) Accuracy comes in tiers, following the bullet damage tiers:
143 bullets: 0.1 accuracy (ads standing still)
167: 0.03
200: 0

Snipers: well, there own system; semi-auto scout rifle is 0.1 (soo.. the semi-auto weapon, no-one thought about how to make a bullet that deals over twice the damage of a 143 bullet more accurate?)
Rest is pretty much 0 accuracy.

--> The GD-22S, Anchor, TMG-50, Ursa, Flare are all more accurate at single fire than a semi-auto weapon for the infiltrator? Really?
I could accept that if there'd be bipods or tripods maybe..

The above dmg-tier linked to accuracy tier creates issues for 'long range' 143 dmg weapons.
The horizontal recoil on non-NC weapons doesn't help.

4) Most weapons don't have a burst fire option. Manual burst fire is great, but you'd think we'd maintain the ability to have fire selection modes onto rifles more.

5) Most important I think:
insanely low speed bullets, low speed tank shells, low speed missiles, and yes, low speed aircraft.
Add to that ADAD, and yeah, 'My name is NEO!', you can dodge at range. Until the enemy gets lucky and you just melt.
Increase projectile velocity, and lead and bulletdrop decrease. Leading would still play a role, but you don't shoot in front of an enemy head at 25m, and then hope he'll continue moving into the bullet path.
We don't need 1700m. Look at the railjack, 850m/s.
A moderate velocity increase of 25-50% for bullets and 50-100% for tank shells would fix a lot of issues, and mean one hell of a difference in gameplay; you'd be able to use LMG's effectively further out.
Then, we make different weapons have different starting accuracy, regardless of damage tier; meaning a Gaus Saw S is more accurate at single fire than say, the Anchor. And the Polaris and Rhino too.

From the perspective of someone who wants the game to better reflect reality, these ideas probably all sound great.

From the perspective of someone who wants the game to be balanced and deep, they're disastrous.

In the Venn diagram of "Changes good for Realism" and "Changes good for balance/gameplay", there is overlap. But it's really tiny, and most of the changes suggested fall on one side or the other (and proponents of game depth will hate the realism changes, while proponents of realism will hate the changes that make a game play better.)

Realism does have its own skill set, it's just not the skill set you're used to. There's a reason that RL infantry have to go through 12 weeks of training (9 weeks of general-purpose skills and 3 weeks of MOS-specific skills, though some MOSes are longer... much longer) before we even think about handing them a rifle and putting them on a plane.

Positioning, planning, coordination, communication, fire discipline, all of these have to be honed to a much higher degree when you can die in one hit at any time and the 100lbs of gear you're carrying makes it hard to sprint more than a few seconds.

Of course we wouldn't want to make a game *too* skill intensive, I imagine a video game that requires 12 weeks of intense training before you can even start playing wouldn't be very popular, unless it came with steady pay, a full ride through college, and free food/housing/healthcare.

Seriously?

How about the fact in CS I've shot at someones foot and killed em with a headshot?

I can't STAND that effing game. Worst deviation in any game ever.

Hitscan is also dumbtarded.

PS2 COF bloom is FAR more reasonable. Still causes misses when you full auto, but the bullets at least fall into a reasonable pattern and CoF, not 25 degrees or more out of the barrel.

CS also has that abhorable slowed down when hit mechanic, which would be god awful game breaking in PS2.


The ADADAD issue can be solved quite simply, and they already have the mechanic for it. Momentum. Make it take an extra half secod to second when changing strafe directions, or ANY direction, by going in opposite direction.

Circular movement (AWDSAWDS) could avoid the moemntum nerf... but would be just as slow and predictable in direction changing anyways, so a non issue IMO,

Everything would feel more natural then.

I would LOVE to play that game...

Oh wait, I did.....

The pay sucked, the food was miserable, the money for college wasn't enough for more than community, and I lost count of the number of times I was filthy, wet, and cold.... or filthy, sweaty, and hot to the point of heat exhaustion and dehydration....

10/10 would do again

I personally hate ADAD dancing, when in combat i expect the enemy to move in a trained fashion. Crouching to stabilize fire, slicing a corner to minimize bodily exposure, using low cover to minimize their exposure and show the smallest piece of a target while still having the ability to shoot back, but nawp, sprint all the time, and when you get into combat you suddenly become a riverdance master. if i could, i would definitely add a penalty to player momentum when strafing rapidly, causing the player to slow down if they suddenly switch sides. Inb4 Vanu complaint.

As for bullet travel, i really wish that the devs would increase all bullet velocities across the board. looking at how slow the rounds travel down range, i've come to the conclusion that after 200+ years of war (lore wise), the human race cannot create a weapon platform that has improved past the effectiveness of a modern AK-47. For example: the AK-47's muzzle velocity is 725 m/s (2,350 ft/s), but the majority of PS2 weapons fire at 400+ m/s (1,312 ft/s). It's absurd. X_ X

Thing is, realism-focused games typically only provide a subset of the skills required by gameplay-focused games, and no realism-only skills.

Location, cover, ambush, etc, are all still very valuable in gameplay-focused shooters, for example, but it's in addition to the other types of skill that gameplay-focused shooters involve. So more skill overall is required and rewarded, even though if you fixated on just the ambush part you could certainly say it's less important as a percentage of what skills are required -- but the actual magnitude of ambush skill which is rewarded is still very high (and the sum total of magnitude of skill which is rewarded in a game is essentially the measure of that game's depth.)

Personally I have no qualms about extreme upper limits on skills value in games -- deep games are always preferable to shallower games, in my eyes. The only place I draw the line is if that depth isn't fun too, because not all depth is automatically fun.

In terms of game depth:
1)is there really a functional difference in game depth if at 9.5m I kill you with 6 shots, but at 10.5 it takes 7?
You can argue that there is but:
a) this has nothing to do with reality; this is not how we instinctively think of guns.
b) this has nothing to do with 'skill'; you don't not open fire until you're within 10m. No-one goes into outfit speak 'okay fella's. Just like the 1800's.. don't open fire till you see the white of their eyes. Forwaaard march!'.
c) it creates a series of balance issues; because of looking at time to kill, and viewing the game in 'damage tiers':
c1 : high damage weapons suffer more absolute damage degradation (ex 200-167> 143-125. Yet both only dropped one 'tier'.
c2: related to the above, a 167 600rpm weapon suffers more in actual in game TTK from the 10m boundary than a 143 750 rpm one. The 600 rpm one needs more time for the extra bullet, still suffers more from any misses, and now needs an equal amount of headshots as a 143 750 rpm weapon.
c3: to 'balance' some of the above, the 167 weapons have higher starting accuracy ads still than 143 weapons. As mentioned, this also means the 143dmg 652 rpm weapons are IMO 'conflicted'.


In several other games there are things like greying out of vision etc when you take heavy damage. Why would that be so wrong? Is it really gamedepth that you stand just outside of lethal range of a tankshell's blast and repair your vehicle at full effectiveness?

2) Adding a delay to changing direction does add game depth; you need to think ahead.
This is not quake, unreal tournament etc; this game should feel more 'real'. Futuristic, sure, but 'science fiction', as opposed to science fantasy.
Peaking around a corner at sprinting speed would mean you're gonna spend some time in view of the enemy.


3) Again, just imagine how different the 'depth' and balance of the game would be if we:
-add a 'prone' or lying down position, with different accuracies, even different recoils etc. Especially for LMG's. This would allow the LMG's to be rebalanced for example. (personal opinion: simply give HA access to assault rifles to compensate. and with access to HA, a slight rebalance of shields is more acceptable).Also: do you think snipers are 100% accurate standing up? Sniping one dude and then sprinting 5m cloaked to avoid the counter-snipe?
-Give different weapons of the same damage tier different accuracies etc. Not 0.03 standing still for all 167 LMG's of all factions.
-Give different damage drop-off zones for different weapons, even if the starting 'tier' is the same.
-add the hidden stats in game for players to see.

4) again, giving more weapons a burst fire option: I don't see that as bad for the game balance or depth.

5)Perhaps 850 m/s bullet velocity is not necessary.
We can already tell the difference between 570m/s and 620m/s. (about 10% difference); and we pick the 620m/s one for long range engagements.
Would the game be disastrously balanced and shallow if assault rifles fired at 750m/s? You'd still have some bulletdrop, you'd still need some leading.. but 'SERPENTINE' won't be a valid strategy. (and I use that myself.. doesn't always work, sure, but dodges way too much). People would have to use cover, and covering fire etc. Or, imagine that, throwing out smoke etc to advance.

Game depth is only about the amount of skill involved. So yeah I probably wouldn't argue that the damage degradation system is adding to game depth. (It adds a trivial amount but not enough that I'd argue about it.)

The purpose of damage degradation isn't game depth, but balance and fun. In a game with large player counts, high-damage extreme-range weapons tend to be very problematic.

As for damage degradation hitting higher caliber weapons harder? I don't have my home spreadsheet in front of me, but:

• SAW 200 dmg @10m 165 dmg @85m
• Rhino 143 dmg @10m 125 dmg @65m
• At 65m for both:
  • Rhino deals 87.4% of max damage
  • SAW deals 87.2% of max damage (note that this isn't the min damage for the SAW and it's doing 174.3 dmg at 65m)
• I forget if this trend continues for all weapons (by class) but I think it does.

Greying out vision seems like it would have only a very slight negative impact on depth (instead of having to play at a high skill level through the entire fight, once you get them to the near-death state they gain significant disadvantages.) So that's mostly a feature that wouldn't get implemented in the name of fun (being crippled and/or nearly blind after a fight doesn't sound very fun.)

Well it adds a little depth while taking a little depth away, since you're basically eliminating one potential choice of action upon confrontation with the enemy. (Now strafing will never be viable, instead of being viable in a handful of battles and therefore being an interesting decision you have to make on the spot during combat.)

The rest are just subjective judgements of what you think the game should be. I disagree with going in that direction, but feels like there's less to discuss since it's just opinions/preferences.

I do enjoy prone in other games and feel it can offer some deep interesting decisions. I suppose I'd even say you're right that it adds depth. But I'm on the fence about the feature overall because of how it interacts with the overall game pacing.

The LMG thing is a soft spot for me though, and obviously a big potential plus of the system since I'd have loved for LMGs to have been more of a support-fire weapon and less of an assault rifle.

I wouldn't mind more accuracy variety more in same-caliber weapons.

I'm also not against standing ADS sniper rifles being perfectly accurate because it provides a way of learning to snipe more skillfully (snipe, cloak, displace). Removing that just makes it really easy to counter-snipe (it's not too difficult already, if you even bother using a sniper rifle to counter-snipe because you can just fly out in an AI nosegun ESF and obliterate the poor bastard.)

Well higher projectile speed definitely makes weapons far easier to land shots with and directly works against the trajectory skill of landing shots reliably. There are already some interesting balanced tradeoffs between weapons' DPS, accuracy, and projectile speed, and while I definitely would love to see even more variety it should be noted that an extreme advantage on one side usually needs an extreme disadvantage somewhere else.

The NS-11C's sustained accuracy comes at the cost of very weak projectile speed and DPS. I don't see why we couldn't also push the boundaries of projectile speed at the cost of weak sustained accuracy and DPS.