Home » MODDING HQ 1.13 » v1.13 Multiplayer Development & Bug Reports » Balancing Suggestion
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Re: Balancing Suggestion[message #242648] |
Wed, 27 January 2010 18:28   | |
| the scorpion
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Messages:1841
Registered:September 2004
Location: CH |
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To me it sounds like this "report" would have to be automatically generated by popularity.
1) I think so.
2) regulating it through price? Don't you think if all "popular" items become more expensive, hosts would simply increase starting money so they can get their favourite items?
what about Mercs? make cheat-mercs like shadow more expensive the more often he's picked?
3. Can't comment on that, don't know.
4. IMHO, people playing unmodified 1.13 MP should develop balancing they like and use it in their mp_sync_directory when they host the game. Might be enough if 2-3 players develop such individual balancings and then spread it through file transfer etc.
Also IMHO, if you look at mods like Wildfire/ AIM or FFF-MP, they sometimes have rather detailed merc loadouts that come without having to scroll bobby rays for a long time. Admitteldy, 1.13 default loadouts are horrible. So a good custom loadout for both OIV and NIV might drasticly reduce some issues at bobby ray's, for example you could get enough good items through fewer orders.
One issue that seems striking to me is that weapons without attachments, even if fired by a good marksman, just don't hit a damn thing. 1.13 massivly nerved weapons without atatchments because of the overpoweed attachments it introduced. That's a thing to adress IMHO
Another things is the level differences between mercs in PvP. I mean you can effectivly use only a few mercs especially when playing with small squads. I think merc balancing should be redone for MP as well. Again, hosts could have a custom prof.dat in their mp_sync directory.
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Re: Balancing Suggestion[message #242706] |
Thu, 28 January 2010 15:09 | |
| redgun
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Messages:190
Registered:March 2007
Location: Austria |
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I don't see how you can get 1500 weapons balanced manually. That would literally require years of testing. Sure you can make pros and cons but that doesn't solve your problem how they compare against each other.
Take this simple example:
Pistol: + APs to Draw, + APs to fire, - Range, -Damage
Sniper: + Range, + Damage, - APs to Draw, - APs to Fire
So they both have 2 cons and 2 pros, but still the pistol is (more or less) worthless and the sniper rifle is an extremely effective weapon. So obviously we can't use pro and cons to bring all weapons to the same level of usefulness (unless we rewrite all the stats and throw realism completely out of the window). That brings us to the conclusion, that somehow we have to find a way to evaluate the efficiency of each weapon and item and change the price accordingly (we could also change the weapons efficiency, but i don't think that is a good idea).
If somebody thinks they can get a good, playable and fair balance by changing the XMLs manually please feel free to step forward and present them. I will gladly help to test 
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Re: Balancing Suggestion[message #242707] |
Thu, 28 January 2010 15:26 | |
| the scorpion
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Messages:1841
Registered:September 2004
Location: CH |
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You don't need to test 1500 weapons in the game. You test maybe 15-20 "prototypes" for a specific function and derive the others from there
also if you only look at PVP, you can completely ignore pistols, shotguns and smg's.
that leaves you to compare 1-5 assault rifle types, a battle rifle type, 2-5 machine gun types and 5-10 sniper rifles (and a few heavy weaposn stuff)
after these 2-3 weekeends of testing are through, you can derive the values for other item relative to these prototypes and the classes and the check again.
Btw, Pistols make only sense as sidearms. Reasonable balancing doesn't make Pistols as useful as Sniper rifles and machine guns, Ja2 isn' a first person shooter, it's a tacticl game that includes knowing for what purpose an item is useful and for what purpose it isn't.
for RR, we balanced 400 weapons, we added hundreds of maps, rewrote the story, recorded dozens of npcs and rpcs, redesigned dozens of intertwined quests, remade dozens of tilesets and added a few completely new tilesets... not to forget keeping u with 1.13's frequent changes at that time.
balancing most guns is certainly doable for somebody with a bit of commitment beyond the "somebody else gonna do it through magicks code" consumerism.
You have to think of the fact that the devs are already fighting on various fronts to improve MP. I'm not so sure whether we can, in fact, burden them with doing detailed balancing as well.
I mean starwalker, hate him or loathe him, has done quite a thorough job to make balancing consistent. So this means for rebalancing that there is a starting point. And if it just so happens that you find certain types of weapons to be well balanced by default, then you can derive the fixes for poorly balanced other items from that reference point.
[Updated on: Thu, 28 January 2010 16:02] by Moderator |
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Re: Balancing Suggestion[message #242737] |
Thu, 28 January 2010 19:29 | |
| the scorpion
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Messages:1841
Registered:September 2004
Location: CH |
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the scorpion
balancing most guns is certainly doable for somebody with a bit of commitment beyond the "somebody else gonna do it through magicks code" consumerism.
You have to think of the fact that the devs are already fighting on various fronts to improve MP. I'm not so sure whether we can, in fact, burden them with doing detailed balancing as well.
This wasn't intended to imply, by any means, that i don't value the tremendous efforts you put in for the testing, improvement and development of ja2's MP. Ja2 MP might have been dead without your efforts. And the players would be very bad off without your advice.
what i meant is that you shouldn't discourage people from balancing the mod by saying it can't be done. Poor balancing isn't a god given fact and with a bit of patience and the xml editor, every player can achieve quite a lot in terms of improving the balance of his game and using file transfer and server sync features, can share it with other players.
We didn't even have a really working xml editor back when working on RR, so it's actually cooler and more accesible now than it was then.
(I mean i have applied a few balancing specialities for FFF-MP, not that much, just a few details, but i think when you play FFF-MP with us, you probably notice a bit of a difference, not always in a convenient way, but "different".)
So maybe we have to talk about "different" balances first and then players have to find a way to deice which one they prefer. On the very extremes, you can have arcade-ish balancing, extremely tactical one, tacti-cool ones and quite a selection of in-between concepts.
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