Hello people!

When preparing for the new EQL season it suddenly struck my mind that we probably have quite a few things to decide upon when it comes to the rules as ezQuake development, among other things, have introduced new features for players to use. I'll go through them one by one below and express my thoughts on the matter. Feel free to post your own thoughts on these matters.


Radar
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I'm not sure if this feature was intended to use when actually playing competitively as i consider it to be merely a spectator feature. When you think about it though, it would probably have the same kind of impact on the gameplay as the team overlay in a way when you can see your mates. I have never tried to play with this on so i don't know if enemies gets turned off automatically when you play a 4on4 game, but i assume they do? I'm not a very big fan of features like this in competitive Quakeworld though, so this one gets a no-no from me.


Team overlay
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The team overlay is kind of like the radar, just with more info and not as visual. The inspiration came from the team overlay in Quake 3 Arena and shows the exact same things as far as i know. There has been some testing/debate on whether this feature is ok or not. Some people consider it to be too easy to recognise friend or foe, while some people says it's not that big of a difference. I say it heavily decreases the pressure put on teammates to continously report where they are, which isn't good. I'm not a big fan of this feature either and can't see it being enabled in the regular EQL divisions - but maybe in the newbie division?


New(?) movement script
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I recently discovered that i, for the last months (years? :S), have used a movement script that affects you when you walk. Usually when you move in QW, when you don't use this script, you stop when pressing strafeleft and straferight at the same time. With this script you don't though - you just continue strafing to the direction for the key you last pressed. It's a poor explanation from me, but this can be quite an advantage when dodging and walking. The script looks like this:


The question is whether we should allow this or not. It would be interesting to know how many players actually know about this script? I know a few more than me who also were surprised to hear about it just a week ago, so this can't be too well known. Also, is it default in the nQuake install etc?


cl_fakeshaft ("Truelightning"
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Another Quake 3 Arena feature implemented in ezQuake. Most of you are familiar with the command, but for those of you who don't know i can tell you that this makes the shaft behave less sloppy than the original shaft as it actually sticks to the crosshair. My view on this is that it is highly individual how much it affects a players shaft performance. I don't really mind it, but i understand if other players do.

The problem with this command would be that it is possible to use the HUD features to make your own little straight shaft graphic, so a ban is kind of useless.


Qizmo colours
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Qizmo has a feature that makes it possible to set different skins for each individual player on the opposing team. This can be a significant advantage as you now know who to chase when an enemy with RL is low on health for example. This very same effect is possible to reach if the opposing teams are using individual teamplay skins. Just look up what names they are using on their skins (by using ASE for example, or in QW) and place skins in your qw/skins/ directory with the same names. This is probably the reason why whole koff team have skin "324987556234" for example. :p

Links: Tutorial: How to get Qizmo colours to work | Forum discussion on this feature | Forum discussion on this and possible similar features


Is there any other feature i should have brought up here? I know it's a kinda brief post, but it's just here to start the discussion. If you have any other thoughts on the EQL rules then please say so. Maybe you experienced some weird situation the last season and want that fixed before this new season kicks off? I want to catch as many holes as possible to avoid fishy situations later on.

Thanks in advance for your input!

No Rules Plz!

Main post edited: the line that said that Ownage allowed fakeshaft last season has been removed as it wasn't true. Thanks vio! <3

my opinion:
no radar
no overlay
sure movement script
sure fakeshaft

shouldn't we discuss map pool, or is that already settled? gj Ã…ke btw.

Just some short words what i think about it.

Radar:
No i dont like it.

Team overlay:
Used team overlay in Q3, Q4, and the UT series. I like it and doesnt know why it shouldnt be allowed.

Movement:
It change the gameplay, so no!

Truelightning:
Standard settings in Q3 the lightning is like cl_fakeshaft 1 but the majority of the Q3 players using cl_fakeshaft 0 stylish LG. No idea why but it feels like using cl_fakeshaft 1 isnt increasing the performence. I think its individual from player to player.

my opinion:
yes radar
yes overlay (be shure to see that in the newbie devision and should be another vote for newbies at that)
of cours movement script
yes fakeshaft

I think we'll run a poll as usual on what maps to use in the divisions, but you can of course give suggestions on what maps to be able to vote for.

Maybe we get our Rookie teams set up, so i'll say my opinion here to

Radar: Definetly not!
Overlay: No, i dont think so!
Movement Script: No need for this, imho -> No!
Fakeshaft: Definetly should be allowed.

my opinion overlay = yes
Almost anything that can reduce the amount of console spam is good.

could make radar and overlay update only when players press 'report'. (if it's really that interesting skill to press the 'report' button... duh.)

As we discussed in some other thread... Almost anyone can agree that reading mm2 spam is a skill. When to report, when not to.

But can you honestly say this is teamplay? teamsays with %h and %l etc.. is very primitive and i guess it's the way we always played this game. Then everyone started to use mm3 and more advanced pointscripts. The next step is obviously some kind of filter. Like the team overlay. And then the radar.

Reduce the spam and bring in the teamplay! Just look at the evolution of air fighters, before they got handed their target cordinates written in text. Now they can have a picture on their heads-up display pointing out the location.

/willg

What about broken ankle? I think this one needs a serious revamp if it's gonna be in EQL, since it's too retarded to play with.
Why is it retarded? Because let's say you land and break your leg, and press +jump:

1 ms before you break it -> You lose all speed.
1 ms after you break it -> You keep all your speed.

Skill? Not a human one. This also makes script-kiddies do just fine while you as a pro can _never_ learn this as a real skill. My proposal is something I had planned to implement in jawnmode: Instead of setting the speed to 0 it checks how long you pressed +jump before breaking the leg and scaling down the speed depending on it just like it would be scaled down if you had pressed +jump after breaking the leg with the same delay. I also thought about doing a check that if you press it within a 50 ms range (for example) you'd keep all your speed, and after that it would be capped away more and more the longer delay you have.

The basical idea is that you should have a human capable chance to keep your speed, I don't mind added skill just as long as it's not an impossible skill.

This was hastily written, is this understandable for you? It may be a compromise between fallbunny and non-fallbunny, what do you think?

The common reasoning among the players who are against the team overlay is that it removes one way of communication. For example, players on your team no longer need to report when they are coming through the RA/Tunnel on DM3 as you can just keep an eye on the team overlay all the time. You get pretty much all the necessary information on the team overlay - which renders team messages quite useless. It pretty much removes one aspect of 4on4 deathmatch.

Edit: This is like "auto took" of items, but like 100 times "worse" - and we banned that.

radar/team overlay seems interesting to me.
it's an improvement to team communication.
better knowlage of teammates positions may imo increase the overall performance of teamplay which is good.

i'd say lets poll about it if it should be allowed this season.

i assume of corse, that both radar/team overlay does not show enemy position.

> I'm not a big fan of this feature either and can't see it being enabled in the regular EQL divisions - but maybe in the newbie division?

i doubt any newbie clan could get any use of it and give answers if this feature is "OK"

The purpose wouldn't be to look for answers - but rather ease the big hurdle that QW4on4 can be for new players. Instead of supplying their teammates with information and decide what to do with information from their teammates, they wouldn't have to care about the first task with the team overlay.

i don't know if you play any team play in games like Quake3 but i do. And i see a big need MOSTLY when i play on a random team for the overlay so i know that instead of rockets i would use a rail gun on the arena for not doing many dmg on my mate. There is another way like team speak. But it is for mostly Clans not newbies. So if we can get our selfs more exitment in the newbie devi. it should be ok to let us rookies use that future in EQL
thx

Regarding team overlay, I'd be ok if you have an overlay that only updates when people report their status to it. You could have a status list, a list of "areas safe" and "areas lost" etc... whatever you want, just as long as the info there only gets there when someone reports it by pressing a key.
Why does it have to look and be exactly like Q3 like it is now?

Allow team overlay for newbies. For fucks sake don't allow it in lower divs let those who cant read mm2 or report suffer!

also people with shitty computers or just too leet for gl and/or high resolution cant use the radar(what is it? never heard of it) or team overlay, so this would be giving a disadvantage to these people. even though i realize they are a very small minority and thus cant be used as an argument.

im all for allowing easier teamplay for the fresh players so they can learn the basics faster, but im all against this evolution shit which makes the game easier and easier. by which of course i mean automizing teamplaying

so no for the two first and a dont care for the two latter

Allowing it only for Rookies is imho bad. If you get used to it, its harder to get used to Teammessages. If you start with Teammessages from the beginning (i did this, at least in 2on2.. havent played much 4on4 so far) its not so hard actually.

well most of you are talking about "team overlay" like you didn't even see that in you life. Locks arent that good becous team msg get a really big spam in showing the possition of you like cccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc and spam goes around. I resume that the rookie based teams dont have any skills in using it so we should allow that and if 50% of them will get a use and advance to div5 or higher there is the place they should learn to use it.

team overlay works in sw too now afaik

It worked for <put in the duration of teamplay script existance> years (5?), didnt it? :>

radar: disallow
overlay: disallow
movement script: dunno
fakeshaft: allow

imo

>The common reasoning among the players who are against the team overlay is that it removes one way of communication

IMO it doesnt remove anything, but *changes* the way players communicate.
Thanks to that you can focus your communication more on "what to do" instead of "where are you guys". You still need a good tp skill to make use of the good knowlage of teammates layout on map.

it's like football for blind ppl - instead of looking around whom to play the ball or when to strike you see bunch of players running around in random directions screamming "i'm here \o/ ! i'm here \o/ i'm here \o/"

you can get much higher skilled TP and thus much more entertaining if players focus on strategy of play - not wasting the time for finding out where the other teammates are.

i would definitly give it a good try

Here we go again This is exactly the same shit I was saying about gameclock.

Everyone can use gameclock now, they can use mm2/mm3 for reporting exact times for items, but still teams miss a lot of quads, rl's, pents etc. That's because no matter how much information you have, the information isn't gonna get things done for you. And even if the whole team was ready to go for item X, the other team might have something to say about that. Even if everyone knew every items' spawn time all the time, it would take skill and coordination to put that information to use. That's the whole point.

Having started to play again in June after a 6 month hiatus, I grew weary of mm2 spam quite quickly. A lot of this can be substituted with mm3 and a hive mind team, but still following that spam at the top just seems pointless for the most part :/

I truly believe that teamoverlay is something that could greatly contribute to the teamplay (instead of spam reading) aspect of 4on4 team deathmatch. I would really like to hear some good arguments on banning teamoverlay, might be hard to find. Good arguments do not really include "because we've played with mm2spam for 10 years" or "because it makes 4on4 so ez it's like noskill plz".

Might I remind you that we are talking about one of the fastest and most intense FPS's ever. So no matter if you got A+ in reading class, you're still gonna miss some of those Coming [RA-Tunnel] messages when Koff is flooding you at RA and you're low on shit The same way you'll miss that info in teamoverlay in a hectic situation. Those ppl that have only tried teamoverlay in 2on2 really don't know what the fuck they're talking about when it comes to actually following all that info in teamoverlay in an intense 4on4 match.

My list:

Radar: Not familiar enough with this, can't comment :/
TeamOverlay: Yes, see above
Movement: Used this at some point, not atm. though - heard that it helps certain (r)jumps quite a bit, wouldn't like that, but would like the more dynamic movement style
Fakeshaft: Absolutely, ever since it was first introduced, I have been supporting this command because there was no unfair advantage, just a little bone for hpb's and ppl coming from other games. I use "0".

Sure, keep your eye locked on that teamoverlay, gameclock, mm2 and listen to mm3 and gamesounds and move around, own some shit, get the quad, aaagh need ammo, teammate can't read cos he shot me in panic... Keep your eye locked on that teamoverlay. C'mon.

Teamoverlay does not remove anything. It simply facilitates playing without so much of _coming, _status, _point, need, have pwup etc, which forms a lot of the spam, basic playerinfo that is spewed to mm2. You still gotta tell where the dangerous, weak, rl, pent, quad, ring enemies are. When the quad / low-rl is spawning. That you need to switch RA to go get some shit, to synchronize attack to quad / ra / tele, sync defense at xxx. You still have a lot of situation dependant TEAM tactics / strats (not playerinfo) stuff to communicate via mm2, mm3 or hivemind.

some good points here niomic.

i always disliked in 4on4 games that 90% of attantion is payed to follow your teammates - what they do, where they are, etc

every feature to solve it is worth a try imo.

Keep that rule. Update clients to enforce it properly.


Radar, no.
Teamoverlay, maybe if it didn't give quite so much information. And if it worked on all servers...


Same rules for all divs.


Set an end date for the playoffs. The way that some seasons have dragged on for weeks on end, just slowly fading out with whine and bikering, is sad and annoying.

It wasn't.


Wasn't this a part of def's qw pack?


*cough*


Qizmo enemy coloring

Is it even possible to use for competitive play? Will it even work? If it works, does it hide enemies? (Forgive me for my lack of knowledge on this matter, i'm yet to try this feature in another enironment than watching demos).


This sounds like a logical explanation as to why i have used it in the first place. I based my QW install on Def's pack a long time ago and you're probably correct here.


Very good point. Feel free to discuss this people and maybe i can do some kind of summary in the main post about this once i get home too - if someone else doesn't feel up for the task in the meanwhile.

radar: no, plz never allow this in games!
overlay: yes, reduce report spamming
movement script: dunno
fakeshaft: yes