I see exactly where you're going with it, but it removes an aspect of the game while adding another. I'm not sure that tradeoff is worth it. Ambushing behind teleporters is something that's been in this game forever. I'd have to play around with it to verify what I'm saying, but it feels like this change would lessen that in favor of more speedier games. That might be fine in FFA and such, but in slower, teamplay games, ambushing can often be the key to victory.


Ah, yes. Forgot that there had been earlier changes. Would have to play around with this more to give sensible feedback on the subject.


Mm, maybe. It still smells like your GA is gonna run out before your health, which means you can replenish armor before dying. Before, when winning against an 200R/100H opponent, you might have 40h/20a left. Now you'd instead have 60h/0a. A much better scenario. See where I'm getting at? It might be a small enough change to go unnoticed though. *shrug*


Heh, I didn't know that. Cool.


I think fairpacks is the better choice. It disables nothing other than the weaponscript, and enforces people to actually learn a new "skill" (there's gonna be alot of people running around shooting boomsticks at walls, that's for sure). Personally I've never found the existence of weaponscripts to be much more than an annoyance at best. But sure, if you wanna fix it, then go for fairpacks rather than unfairpacks.


Any sort of safety could be exploited by the ingenious player. Someone waiting for RL on DM3 would stand on the spawn, for example, to avoid company. If there was a 2.6 second safety, he'd count to 2, move off the spawn, and move back again. Rinse, repeat.

I think you're viewing this in the wrong light. While the 200/200 quad telefrag is tragic, it should be a lesson, not an annoyance. The proper quadrunner doesn't loose his head, and he avoids that spawn. The better player doesn't get telefragged. Unless, of course, it's bad luck (such as getting shot onto a spawn right as someone spawns). But I'm ok with those instances too. We can't eliminate luck completely. I think we need it to make the game more interesting.


Sure, man, you're welcome. I might take a peek at that later.

For now, I will enable fairpacks (drop last fired weapon) in all game modes. Any objections on this?

Fairpacks? isnt this just more unfair for the people like me that dont use weapon change scripts? Scripters just add a +attack boomstick and its all good? or am i missing something here.

niclas:

With fairpacks, everyone (independent if they have weaponscripts) must now fire SG every time they don't want to drop their RL since it's "drop last fired weapon". It's a new routine to learn, but it would make weapon scripts redundant. If you add an +attack boomstick after every attack, wouldn't you loose alot of important switching time on that which you could have without scripts?

I use this kind of stuff for firing:
alias +rl "weapon 7 3 2 1; +attack"
alias -rl "-attack"

Combined with:
cl_weaponpreselect "1"

So the last weapon I used stays in hand. Why? Because I play with PL and the game misses weapon switches quite often so I don't end up using sg in a situation I'd like to fire a rocket. If I wouldn't have PL, I'd use also:
cl_weaponhide "1"

So this "fairpacks" balances a bit line between non-PL and PL players.

EDIT:
Note to myself. I think I'll try to switch to stuff like..
bind SHIFT "weapon 8 3 2 1"
bind MOUSE1 "+attack"
cl_weaponpreselect "0" // not sure of this yet, it's pretty nice to spawn in dm6 and run over RA-RL and already have selected RL to be one firing. Or select a weapon like shaft to be used in povdmm4 so mouse1 always shoots a shaft.

I bet the script kiddis will find ways around that Just ban weapon scripts!

We used to play with fairpacks in the UK a few years ago, I got into the habit of firing my SG after RL and still do it most times I'm real low on health... kinda makes sense to me, I don't like the weaponscript kiddies having an advantage and if you don't want to give away your RL then you should put some effort in...

Actually, you won't find a convenient way around it, since there will be situations where you will want to fire SG right after and situations where you don't want to fire it right after since you're just about to pause your RL shooting a few 100 ms.

Not using RL when you're low on health is effort enough imo. Fair packs only increases the time-window in which the killed player would drop RL. I think the scripted time-window is of desirable length. There is enough packs in qw-4on4 anyways.

Guess: on a map like DM3 the RA area would be even more important and the water area would be a lot weaker.

It wouldn't necessarily increase the window, you can switch & fire SG just as quickly as a weapon script can switch to SG/Axe to avoid dropping RL...

Well the script does it automaticly, so in reality, it obviously would take longer.


This would make qw more balanced, in the q3 way, decreasing the gap between spawn weapon and high-tier weapon. Would make armors and power-ups more important and weapons less important.

I personally like the unbalanced game play of qw.

OK scripts might be bad and require no skill. But if a script actually improves the game play (and not just your own game, hello kfjump) I think that is a reason to allow it.

I played around with the fairpack setting and it's not that hard a skill to learn really, you just have to get the routine.


I guess you're talking about jawnmode in general here. Well QW is certainly not balanced with jawnmode enabled in the sense that lower tier weapons come closer to higher tier ones. It simply places the weapons in more firm tiers instead of very loosely defined tiers. This is what I mean:
Tier 0: Axe
Tier 1: Shotgun / Nailgun
Tier 2: Super shotgun / Super nailgun
Tier 3: Rocket Launcher / Lightning Gun

Tier 1 and 2 have been tried out on povdmm4 for verification. Not sure yet where to place grenade launcher as it's so dependent on environments.


But I wonder how weapon script improves the game play, if that's what you're saying?

1) Not doing "anything" is never hard. Those who are scripting without fairpacks right now (myself included) have it very, very easy.

2) Fairpacks doesn't fix this. If fairpacks ever becomes common in 4on4 (god, I hope not), most scripters will simply do the following;

alias +qsg "impulse 2;+attack"
alias -qsg "-attack"
bind x +qsg

Now the advantage is still in the hands of the scripters, who only have to push a button, while non-scripters have to switch to sg AND fire, instead of simply pushing a button to switch to sg. Ask any non-scripter what they would prefer.

Fairpacks is a terrible attempt to solve the problem of axe/bs-scripts. It doesn't even affect weaponscripts in general. It does nothing to pre-combat while focusing purely on post-combat. I would say that the biggest benefit of weaponscripts isn't the switch-to-sg part, but that one can fire weapons from several different buttons without switching between them manually.

edit: Also, one should clearly make a distinction between axe/sg-scripts and weaponscripts, as in the eyes of many, they are not one and the same.

Well i think it reduces the amount of RL packs dropped, which for the current TB3 maps is pretty high enough. If fair packs were enabled, people having RL wouldn't be able to play as offensive as we do today -> it would be a weaker weapon.

edit: really forgot to answer the question, I think wp(shotgun)-script works a bit like offside-rule in football. People can use more aggressive and more fun to watch tactics.

I agree that firing that extra sg shot sure requires some skill to do properly. But does it make sense to have people running around firing the wall, just so we can say "we are playing script free quake". I like the fact that getting an RL pack isn't that easy.

I dont buy that offensive/defensive gameplay just because you have a RL script or not, you play defensive because you dont wanna die with an RL not because your afraid of dropping it. But id rather play without fairpacks and other people scripting then adding it just to and an extra element for scripters. Because it does more harm to non-scripters than scripters tbh.

Like Dakoth said, a terrible attempt to solve the problem.

My vote is no.
I absolutely don't like the "fair packs" or changed reload time of weapons (tho, faster nails could be fun some times). I could accept the removed random from sg, sg and gl.
But. I would like to see an option with teleporters that preserves your speed, fair spawns, airstep and fallbunny. Or just all as individual settings. Actually, I would always like to have fallbunny!

Ok, I will remove fairpacks entirely from jawnmode given the response. Both fairpacks and unfairpacks.

The thing is, Fairpacks LST is NOT supposed to be something to make the game fairer for people who do not use a quickfire script. The idea is that it makes any kind of 'weaponhide' script useless irrespective of what their weapon cfg is like. Sure, people with a quickfire sg alias (I've had it on wheeldown since the 1990s due to UK leagues adopting this setting) have a slight advantage, but that is no different from the quickfire advantage they get from ANY weapon.

Or in other words like you say, we shouldn't confuse the two arguments too much. I can accept that some people think quickfire scripts should be banned totally but if that doesn't happen then there needs to be debate around Fairpacks.

Personally I have got used to playing without fairpacks now ever since I started clanning with players from continental europe, so I'm not that bothered either way. I enabled a sg script around 6 years ago due to this even though I'd been playing with quickfire scripts for years prior to that (I'd recommend disabling sg/ax script if you ever have to play with fairpacks, as it gives you a good reminded that you need to shoot another weapon).

edit: one more thing. There used to be a bug in kteams whereby FP last was counting weapons fired in prewar. So if you don't shoot after spawning (telefrag maybe) then you could drop an rl pack! I got RXR to fix this for ktpro but from what I've read KTX is derived from kteams branch not ktpro so it might be worth looking at if any one is going to use this setting.

I urge those who has commented here to also test to play a game with this mode, try to use the lower tier weapons more, jump through teleporters, watch how the opponent gets damaged (non-random), focus on how GA protects differently, count the time it takes to respawn, and at the match end think about how you spawned (should be more balanced and not 80% of them at mega on dm4).
For the sake of the current discussion, you might enable fairpacks too and see how it feels.

I'm currently developing two different spawn systems:

Model #1 will check if the spawn you're about to spawn at is occupied by another player. If so, it will spawn next to that player. You always spawn without having to wait for players to move their arses, but spawntelefragging will be a thing of the past.

Model #2 will check if the spawn you're about to spawn at is occupied by another player. If so, it will start a timer (maybe 0.5 seconds or so) and wait until either the spawn is free or until the timer has run out. Spawntelefragging will still be possible, but in special scenarios which are less of a surprise.

Which one would you prefer, if any? If you prefer none of them, why?

Spawnkills are part of the game. They are fun and I love some randomness.

Model #2 slows down the game a bit and model #1 just gives your opponent some cases free spawn frag instead of getting lucky telefrag, which could nicely turn the tides with some tight matches.

#1: Depends on the algorithm. Let's say I'm running over the spawnpoint, 99% of my body is away from the spawn point and the system decides to spawn the player in front of me - I get blocked. BTW, what if the whole area around the spawnpoint is covered by, say, 7 other players? Will it do some sort of breadth-first search?
#2: I think I prefer this one, it's also more "compromise" solution between those who don't want spawntelefrags at all and those who want to keep them. Choose the time constant like this: how much time it is needed to pass a spawn point with speed 320 at the longest way (that is thru it's diagonal) + some "one frame inaccuracies" (that is add 13 ms).

I love spawnfrags too, please don't remove them. People should be aware of the danger of spawnpoints, heh.

I dunno what breadth-first is, this is more of a "spiral" solution. It will basically check spots in an outwards 2D spiral until it finds a free one. But this could have problems, perhaps some sort of 3D solution is better.


Sounds like you're into model #2 then?

Breadth-first is the opposite of depth-first in a tree. For example, we have a spawn-tree where p1 is the root. p1 points to p2 and p3. p2 then points to p4. In a breadth-first search for a spawn, one would first pick p1, then p2, then p3. In a depth-first search, one would first pick p1, then p2, then p4, then go back up and pick p3. Basically, breadth-first searches all the children before going for the grandchildren, in opposition to depth-first which goes for one child and all the children of that child (and keeps going deeper and deeper, before going wider) before going back up to search the siblings of the initial child.

"weaponscript kiddies having an advantage"? What the fuck, have you been living under a rock or something? Haven't like 80% of the players had +rl bound to mouse1 for the past 8 years? (for all I know, I may be exaggerating -- or I may not)

You could as well talk about how +mlook gives ppl an unfair advantage.

I really can't see how my method resembles a binary tree in any way?

In this discussion, we refer to "weaponscripts" as the automatic switching to AXE/SG after firing any weapon.

oh, I thought that was called sg scripts

There seems to be no real dictionary about this stuff