People who are running leagues have decided that they want to change the way gameplay goes in lower divisions. EQL admins have a policy that any player can join any clan he wants. It all started in EQL2 with the batfink and marvel case. After public dehonestation those two guys left the clan and went to play somewhere else. In NQR. Another example is CCS and there are some others.
It's not fair to "blame" players for doing this anymore because Ake Vader, who is an EQL admin and a div2 player joined a clan that plays in the lowest NQR division. I see that as a clear message "admins do this so it's considered normal and fair now". We have to take that as a new thing in QW.
I remember former smackdowm admin saying they didn't approve such things happening in their league. However I don't play QW for that long to remember if this was really true in there, so I welcome anyone give more info on this topic here. But now for the feature proposition...

In current clients, if you are playing 4on4 game against players with skins x_ab, x_cd, x_ef, x_gh, you can go to your qw/skins directory and copy/rename some skins to x_ab.pcx, x_cd.pcx, then go back to the client, turn enemyskins off, type /skins and you will get different skin for each enemy. But if enemies use the same (even empty) skin settings, you can't get different skins for them.

With the feature I'm proposing you would be able to always recoginze which enemy player you see in the game. You could for example create files enemy1.pcx, enemy2.pcx, enemy3.pcx, enemy4.pcx in your skins dir and when playing 4on4, client would assign those skins to enemy players for you.

As you can see, this feature makes sense for the first scenario - when enemies have different skins set. It would just save you the time to go to your qw/skins dir, copy/rename files in there, etc. It wouldn't bring any new functionality except saving some manual work. Also it will always use some well defined algorithm for skins assignment so all your teammates will get same settings so you can communicate better (example: your team skin pack contains green enemy2.pcx so you could use messages like "attack green player"

But because of the reasons explained in the first paragraph, it seems like there might be a good reason to get the functionality even if enemies don't use different skins.

If there is one strong player in the enemy team, you have 25% probability that the player you are attacking now is a guy with skill two or three divisions higher then you are so going in direct fight with him will most probably end with you dying. What will you do? You can guess "It's the-one, I will play defensively" or "It's not him, let's have a fight."

Without knowing that it's him, with 75% probability guess was wrong (not always, you can make your guess better based on the game situation). So with 75% probability you will either play defensively for no reason or you will get owned easily by him. Both scenarios pretty much boring for you or anyone watching the game. That's not the way QuakeWorld should move.

So on client side we can do following:
A) completely disable the possibility to recognize who is who in enemy team
B) make the soft version described above that will only save you manual work but will not bring anything new, you will only be able to recognize who is who if the enemy players allowed this by using different skins
C) give possibility to always recognize who is who in enemy team

Which one would you prefer and why?

I'm looking forward to see some debate with interesting thoughts. So I do not run a poll, also spare us with those "I fully agree with what ABC said!!!!11oneone" posts, makes no sense. Also don't whine here with the usual "WTF, burn in hell, don't change my QuakeWorld". QuakeWorld 2007 is already completely different from QuakeWorld 1996, players have already decided that they want the game to evolve.
Thanks for your opinions.

well the C option will make some games get harder like in football you know who is better then who and so the team against them will try to make more pressure on the good player . I think tactics will change a bit on 4on4 but for the best

Dont mix up eql with nqr!!!


There were no divs in smackdown.. all teams were mixed in 1 big bowl


For the actual question:

Its bad to see your enemys, if I see "dikis rocket killed smalagreger" I know diki got an RL and will follow his skin (skin green or what ever) and therefor it will be much harder for him to get pass the massive "bröst" (charge) that we have on them..

Or another scenario with the same aspect:

If u know Gamer has RL and they are defending at RA (dm3) its eazy for you to shoot at the green because thats gamer and not aim for the rest.. again another bad example of this!

There are probably plenty of more scenarios I could write down and they will all look like this..

imo, to not know who you fight vs is a very good thing and a very tactical one!


think I have explained it good enough..

edit: I vote for: A) completely disable the possibility to recognize who is who in enemy team

ps. its like using scr_autoid 1 during games

i disagree with sassa on this one.
imo it's a good idea, but i'm to tired now to explain why

i think it is a good idea personally, because it would add a whole new dimension to teamgames. Knowing a certain player is strong and employing tactics to suit will be another thing clans can perfect and learn and be beaten by.

Other games have similar features and adds a new depth so I dont see why we cannot have the same.

Maybe make it up to admins or even individual clans before matches to decide whether to have it enabled/disabled and have some kind of f_check for it.

In all honesty, this is just stupid.

Distinguishing guys with weapons from guys with only sg is a skill and this feature would basically ruin the gameplay totally in the higher divisions, let alone for the teams not using MM3.

Besides, I don´t really get the point of this feature in the lower divisions, could it be that hard to distinguish a div2 player from a div6 player as in Åkes case? Don´t get me wrong on this, I´m all for making the game more friendly for the lower divisions, but this way with all the new features is not the way to do it, ever thought about the higher divisions for once? How exploited a feature like this would be?

And it would make ezquakers gain even more advantage over the fuhquake users.

Not stupid, just bad idea, however in some cases u can distinguishing guys by skins alredy, think about "strange" koff skins...


Btw fuhquake gives advantage over qwcl 2.33 and what? That not ezquake fault what fuhquake is dead. And this dead project slowdown things, and software quake slowdown things even more ;E That just stupid, without honesty

actually, this would be cool to try, see how it goes after a few games

If i recall correctly, q3 used to show enemy nick if u focus on him with crosshair on the other hand it is possible to see enemy weapon there, so a comparision is not really possible.

Anyways currently alot of players are deploying a tactic where they trick their enemies into beliving they do not have any weapon. This skill would become a lot less important.
ezquake already reduced the value of this skill by notifying about the killing streaks etc.. as it's easier to keep track if an enemy RL dies. I dont mind this tho, as quake shouldnt be about who can read most text while firing rockets. I rather say, force same skin on all enemies, but make the deathmessages simpler.


Talking about skins.
What i'd like to see is support for using png images as skins. like if i've done 'enable_png_skins 1' it would use adde.png instead of adde.pcx

fully agree

ouu yes yes, i fully agree with willgurht and valla.

and yes, i think its time to switch from .pcx skins to .png type? huh?

how can u agree with will and valla when they said the opposite thing?

Will was for option B/C

Valla was for option A

switching to png would be lovely btw

actualy i was for option A.

Who told you that? If you check the Smackdown site then you can tell that there was probably more (or atleast bigger) blowouts back then, than there is now as all kinds of teams was mixed up in a group system which later on led to playoff. It could still be true that they didn't allow the worst teams to have "starplayers" though, that's true.

Your suggestion regarding this probably wouldn't work in the lower divisions if that starplayers cares enough to get 999999999 frags every game as he will chase you down anyway. It would only cause disturbance in the higher divisions as the Koff flood would get even more effective.

I am sorry if i have ruined your NQR experience so far Johnny_cz. As you have said yourself though, this is a game we play for fun. I wanted to share and introduce it to my friends and so we joined NQR. If you think that's not a good thing even if i try to keep a low profile in the games then fine. In the end we've just tried to play all our games in NQR but if it's such an agony to play against us then wtf, why bother.

Ake: No, I'm now getting used to it. But my mates are very pissed about it, I tried to calm them down a bit - it's their first competition they are experiencing this - but it in the end I was pissed a bit too and had the stupid comments in mid-game. Sorry for that. I hope that from the post I wrote it's clear I take it as a fact now. Thanks for adding the clarification on smackdown thing.

I understood from your opinions why the C option seems rather unrealistic.
But I wonder how many ppl realize that by setting some "skin" setting they reveal themselves to other players. Other player can do
1) /whoskin
2) go to qw/skins, create appropriate .pcx files
3) back in qw /enemyskin "" (or /enemyskin off in older clients)
4) /skins
And now he can recognize you in the game by the skin. I wonder if people realize this.

BTW to implement the A option, looks like server/mod change is needed because doing it client-side only would limit only ezQuake players.

This sounds very fresh and good!

i do like the psychological game of trying to make your enemies believe you don't have RL, so i gotta vote against this

agreed with valla bg

I´m fully aware of this and there was even a rumor that TVS used to do this, but as stated, just a rumor...

That´s also one of the reasons I don´t use skins, but honestly, who would even bother to put time into renaming skins every game? And if a clan uses no certain skins for players and everyone uses skin base it makes this whole thing useless, except for the new feature you talking about which would be a serious threat to competitive gaming in the higher divisions.

You can force each player a different color with Qizmo. So, technically we've had this for years. What JohnNy_cz suggests is just a better implementation of the same idea.

I think this feature and a new ruleset should be created in the next ezQuake build. And the feature would be avaible only in this specific ruleset. Than we could run some games and maybe tournaments, and see if the gameplay change is for good or worse. Theoretical debate without a true experience has no meaning!

tks!

Kalma: Are you sure about what you said? I thought current QW is "either both teammates and enemies can recognize me or none of them does." Can you tell how can you do the Qizmo thing?

Turn off color forcing in ezQuake. Go to Qizmo menu Teamplay help/Enemy color, and enter 'x'. It's not very good, you get similar/same colors and its random (by playerid). Better implementation of this would be nice...

Wow, works. Nice to discover smth new after using Qizmo for so many years Thanks.

I hadnt thought about this. Time to change ktx I guess. Faking sg vs wounded rls is the shit.

I guess all was said in this topic so i'll just add my 3 eurocents: I'd opt for A, because "this would change the gameplay of QW as it is now. Changing the QW gameplay should be banned and the person with the idea should be crucified and then burned on a stack as like all heretics".

I'd go for C or just q3-like point to see who it is :>

I guess you guys kind of missed that this is hardcore part of QW as long as Qizmo is allowed. You can't prevent it server-side, you can only restrict it in new clients and disallow anyone use old clients.

No need to hack KTX. The 'A' can be implemented on mvdsv-side. But even if mvdsv dont send skin-infos hacked client may use custom skins for players (hello bigfoot).

So i dont think 'A' is reasonable. It may be good for 'skill-ideology', but dont think it will work in real. So i vote for C