The question that has been brought up a few times. Should RL direct hit damage be 100+random*20, 110 or do you even care?

This is one of the hidden tests we have checked, it was enabled for ~3 months on all of my servers and only one guy msgd me about it, and other one noticed it on the server so that I was witnessing it.

This change affects direct hits ONLY, so splash damage is not affected. According to my testing with Qqshka and few others, the 100+random*20 seems to produce average of 110 points of damage per direct hit with almost 100% certainty, so static damage of 110 points could be used and the average damage would still be the same.

There are certain things that need to be considered here, I'll list the few I see important.

1) With static dh of 110, quaded rocket will never do more than 440 points of damage, so someone with RA and two megas will survive direct hit from quaded rocket, if he has 441 points of hp total.

2) With the random on dh, the chance of dealing 450 points of damage with Q-dh is 37,5%, which is more than every third rocket, but less than every second rocket.

3) Randomness-1: If you score 3 dhs to an enemy on dm2 big for example, you have no way of knowing if you did 300 points of damage or if it was 360 points of damage. The most likely damage dealt is probably ~330 but you can't be sure, so choosing the next attack (rl or ssg or whatever) can be hard.

4) Randomness-2: If you are truly lucky son of a bitch, you will always do more damage than your unlucky opponent, or the vice-versa

5) Original Quake and QW have had it 100+random*20 for 12 or so years now, is it really worth going to change this?

6) DH ratio to rockets that hit is probably around 10%, someone might want to check this too, so the overall chance won't affect that many things.

7) Perfect splash damage can do up to 110 points of damage (tested), perhaps 111 with extreme luck, so having random on DH can be "unfair" or "truly unlucky" if you score onle 100 with DH. DH is after all, a better hit than splash.


Now, it is important that people post their opinions and scenarios, and argument properly. What I want is at least 100 votes and really good explanations why and why not, so I can discuss and think about it more with certain people (and you players). If you do not have anything other to say than "no" or "don't change it" or "it's been like this the past 12 years", don't post at all, just vote. The majority of votes has to be "yes" for this change to be in KTX, otherwise it won't make it. Also if someone wants, I can re-enable static 110 damage on all of my servers so people can test it.

I won't be participating in the voting, both ways are fine for me, as playing with static 110 dhs didn't really feel different at all for me. Both ways have their pros and cons and I can live with it either way, they are pretty much the same to me.


EDIT: 5.2.2009
The case is closed, after a while not getting new votes and falling a bit short of 100, the result was:



The code has been approved to KTX and the next release (KTX 1.36, in the near future) will be with direct hit damage of 110.

I don't really see how anyone can object to the change without saying "anything different is bad". The quad rocket scenario is the only one that I find interesting, and that is FAR less likely to occur (How often have you seen someone quad DH a guy who has full h and taken ra and two megas within 10 seconds of each other before his h dropped below 441?) than someone suffering a bad beat to a couple of high-damage direct hits in normal play.

It doesn't change the way you play qw in any way. All it does is introduce consistency; It stops people losing important fights to an uncontrollable, random factor.

There have been subtle improvements to the way qw works for years without changing the gameplay at all, and this is simply one more imho.

I voted for static 110. I think competetive play will benefit from it. Any random element increase luck factor and decrease skill factor. Maybe it's also time to 'fix' gl?

There's nothing to fix. GL damage is always radius based, even if you score a direct hit. The max damage of 120 is achievable only by hitting an enemy to the center of the model, and this can only happen when he comes out of the tele (read: materializes around the nade). If you always hit enemy directly at the same spot as always, you will get consistent damage that will not vary.

Imo stupid test (i wouldn't even call it a test), its not that you as a player running around checking what directhits hurts you. You simply trust the "luckfactor" since it have been there always. Should be the same if you turned on the "luckfactor" for nails none with a life would notice that if you didn't tell anyone. Probably someone playing dmm4 that noticed this test.

The test was to check if anyone notices difference, and only a single person asked about it, perhaps noone else cared even if they noticed.


Nope.

I'm not really surprised that so few people noticed. Especially when you are switching from random to non-random. The other way around ppl might start wondering about new damage values from hits they are used to taking and getting the same damage every time. Also direct hits are relatively rare in situations where you survive and if you don't have damage taken indicator enabled, you wouldn't notice this either.

Personally I support non-random values for both rocket DH and spawn times. Mainly because then you have something that you can reasonably learn and use (a new skill). With randomness, you can also learn to count certain situations of done damage but there would always be the random factor that could mess it up, screwing up your skill. Same with timing spawn times. If you don't have filtering on, I guess you could learn how to time different spawn times from different frame counts in death animations, but with general settings (gib filter etc.) I see non-randomness as a better option.

I know how grenades works, i was talking about way gl is shooting them xD

I don't understand the motivation for this?
What you are saying basically boils down to "it changes some things but in the end those occurances will be incredibly rare". This looks like a typical "hey, let's change something!" thing.

It is natural that "no-one" noticed it on your servers. You could also change sv_maxspeed by 1 and no-one would notice (well, unless they use some speedmeter, but I guess you understand what I mean).

There was a poll about this at http://qwdrama.com/polls/ but I am sure you saw it.

I don't really care if random or not. I like luck parts in games though when they are as subtle as this one. So I'd say, keep it, there is no reason not to.

No one's saying the occurences are rare. It affects every close rl fight that everyone has, and it affects it negatively. Every time your opponent survives a fight with around 20h or less, who's to say that you shouldn't have won that?

You can't say "luck is good" in a game that everyone here holds up as one of the paragons of fps skill.

Renzo, Herb means the fact that grenades are shot in a random horizontal arc within a few degrees, which is more of a big deal than this imo.

Random grenade yaw is the least defensible luck factor (I can't think of any reason for), followed by random spawn delay (3/5 900ms, 1/5 1100ms, 1/5 1500ms, die with axe=900ms, gibbed=0), then random DH rl damage.

On a bit different topic, changes I think should happen are: prediction of movement through teleporters, and prediction of movement from explosions. Any reason against these?

Yes, the random spread of gl was my other guess but since this thread is about damage, I thought he referred to the gl damage.


You need to start new thread where you explain the stuff accurately, so that people can comment on it.

Use this thread only for the issue mentioned in the first post, and tell your friends to vote or share information.

If hardly anyone notice in the "test", why in hell change this?? Some luckfactor is important to gameplay in my op.

Or mayby we should change spawns also to make it more "proffesional" and non random. Hell, its a chance for the lesser man to beat his better opponent on dm6 etc. Give the better guy ra spawn and you are fucked if he can time, dh damage wont matter one bit. Qw will still be a very random game with the high amount of spawnfrags, much more then most other games, and I sure like it!
Man, i dont like wimpy changes.. (even if i probebly will never notice this it feels like it will help more strange changes in the future gettin voted thru)
And the luckfactor increases atleast my speccing pleasure as it gets somewhat more unpredictable :>

(weapons should be left alone in the style id intended and we love)

Sry for the talk about spawns in this thread, just pointing out that we are not playing a very fair game. Luck is an issue, and should be.

Fair is for fairys

This is something I've thought about for a long time (years) and I'm still not sure what the best way to go is.

-Fixing it at 110 helps to remove the luck element, which is nearly always a good thing for competitive play, as it increases the focus on skill
-Having it random is actually pretty cool because it means that players have to weigh up risk a little more (only a little bit, since we are talking very small margins here). By which I mean, say you are playing E1M2 and you have 78h and 100ga. If rockets had fixed damage of 110, it would be IMPOSSIBLE to be killed by a single (non-quadded) direct rocket hit, as you would take health damage of 70%*110 = 77. That would be a pure fact that you know 100%. Under the current system however, you can get killed in one shot even if you have over 80h so this is always in the back of your mind.

Now obviously in a fast-paced game like QW that isn't something people are going to base major decisions around, I mean if you get left with <5h chances are you might get boomsticked anyway. But by making rockets have fixed damage you would be basically creating various "safe" values of health/armour to have where you know that at least you will have time to get a shot or two off (similar to the quad rocket scenario described in the OP).

Actually now that you mentioned this, there actually already exists such safe value, and with GA it's 85H as long you have enough GA available. Surely it's harder to keep the health above 77H than above 84H but player will know if he can be killed with DH or not. Anyway good info, I'm sure not too many people have thought of this.

Hehe, I thought someone might post that reply about "safe" values, so I came up with a response Basically I think I phrased it the wrong way, I should have focussed on the fact that it would be a change to values either being '100% safe' or '100% unsafe'

While you currently have "safe" values, you also have uncertainty about slightly lower values. Take 80h. You might die, you might not. It's probably around '70% safe' (that's a guess for the sake of argument but I'm sure it can be calculated). So you can choose whether you want to take a risk or not (this is kind of a skill IMO, say there is only 2mins left in the game, and your team is losing by 20frags, you might be more likely to take a risk than if your team is winning by 20 frags - you need to take that decision!)

If you fix damage, you won't have this uncertainty. You will know that either a value is '100% safe' or '100% unsafe'. You know that with 80h you cannot die from a single shot. So now it is black or white, whereas before there was this grey area in between (71-84h) where you need to weigh up the risk.

In fact, I think in 1on1 this stuff is probably more likely to have an effect. In a manic 4on4 game, there's too many variables, too many players that might shoot you. Very few players probably think right down to this level of detail because it is insignificant in terms of the match as a whole. Whereas in a duel, you only have one opponent. If he fires a rocket, you know that no other attacks can hit you until his RL has reloaded (barring one of those freak rockets to the head resulting in falling damage... are they even caused by direct hits?). So knowing whether he can kill you in one shot is pretty important, as if he can't you might be able to zap him a few times with your shaft. And maybe you know that'll be enough to kill him.

"I know what you're thinking. Will this rocket do 117 damage, or only 105? You know, in all this excitement, I've forgotten myself. Now, seeing as this is a QW Rocket Launcher, the most powerful handgun in the world which can blow your head clean off, the question you've gotta ask yourself is, 'do I feel lucky?' Well do ya, PUNK!"

Oh one more thing. The fact very few people noticed this over a 3 month period does serve to show just how little attention people pay to such things. A little story some might find amusing....

Some years ago, around 2001-2 when rxr was working on ktpro, I uncovered this bug in kteams whereby an enemy player survived a direct quad grenade hit on E1M2. Theoretically I knew that this shouldn't be possible, because the most H+A you can have is 350 (full mega and YA). So I made a little demo from the enemy POV and showed it to rxr.

Turns out that because - as mentioned in this thread - grenades only do splash damage, there was a chance that the person who fired the grenade could take 4x damage and the person it hit, only take 1x damage. It obviously calculated my death (thus ending the quad) before it moved on to applying damage to the enemy.

The point of this little anecdote was that even for something as majorly f'ed up as that, it took around 5 years for anyone to notice/care/get heard enough for the bug to be fixed. Although in part that's probably because nobody else would as crazy as me as to use quad gl in the rl room

heh; that's interesting. Earlier today I was about to post something to the effect off: 'if HT where here, we would surely go for the fixed value because it reduces luck'. Good thing I didn't because it seems like he changed or at least tempered his view somewhat

The reason I would drag him into this in the first place was that we had a discussion some time ago (couldn't have been any later then 2003, I reckon ) about randomness in spawns. I think the issue was getting fragged by a spawning player and whether or not a spawn on top of a player should be outright prohibited or moved around a bit to prevent the frag or something similar. Anyway, I don't quite remember and it's not even important except that the same argument was brought up: luck doesn't belong in a skill game.

But long story short, my opinion if anyone cares, is that luck does indeed have a small part to play. And basically for the reason that HT mentioned: it does provide some extra excitement from time to time when players do take their chances and walk through a spawn spot or sneak around with just a little bit too little health to be safe - in the hopes of getting lucky.

Also, can we look at this from the other side maybe? Which game or sports exactly has managed to exclude any and all luck factors? Except for pure thinking games where time and physics don't really matter (chess or crosswords), I can't think of any. But then again, we shouldn't really be comparing QW to chess but rather to football or golf or tennis or rally, shouldn't we? And as far as I am aware, we don't have full control over (or even understanding of) all factors involved there. There is still the chance of a sudden gust of wind in any outdoor activity. And even on a pool table, there will be dust on random locations or tiny dents or variations in elasticity of the cushions.

And really, if we are going to exclude all luck, where are we going to draw the line? Have all mouses sampling the players movements synched to avoid that anyones shift is detected first, which may just or just not get it to the server in time before the next frame is calculated?
Sure, this is a bit silly and spawns and rocket damage are some orders of magnitude more important, but why stop there? If it hasn't really bothered anyone in the past ten-odd years, why bother changing it now? After all, this one definately is not a bug like HT's example, but it's a feature!

But these are all unavoidable luck factors, and ones that pool table manufacturers, players and stadium designers do their best to negate as much as they can. Random damage is not unavoidable; It's a choice. Getting beaten in a rocket fight where you played better because you had a few low damage hits is completely indefensible. If it's possible to correct this, then it should be done.

The benefits starkly outweigh any of the doubts I've heard expressed, which seem to consist solely of "change is bad" and "luck is good" aside from Renzo and HangTime's excellent points.

When it comes down to it I don't think this will get voted through, solely because people are afraid of any change; The most disheartening reason I can think of.

P.S. It's still possible to get mashed into the ground from an explosion, dealing an additional 5 points of damage, so this makes 78h+ga slightly less safe in a combat situation.

Now that even this was mentioned, what if both players are equally tanked, and fire their last rockets DH and both have ~106 points of health? If the luckfactor is there, other one dies and other one survives. What if this happened at the very end of the round? The victory would have been caused by luck, and not skill. If they both survived, who knows what would have happened (perhaps the other guy was faster/more accure finishing the job with sg or whatever), but if both died it would have gone to overtime.

This is worth considering too.

these things usually end up with a few "elite forum lurkers, server admins and league admins" deciding on the subject anyway

btw, why cant a game be decided by luck?
most stuff we compete in throughout the world can be decided by some luck now and then

or is it skill to hit both post and then the net in football? or maybe some luck was involved?

is it a skill when the puck slips slowly through the pads of the goalie and over the goal line in hockey? luck? it could just as well have stopped 1cm before the goal line?

in golf the ball can tip in after a very long put but it can just as well swirl around the cup and go out. luck/skill?

I think the rocket damage solution is just plain ugly with the randomness. Even if it doesn't matter that much, I'd want to see it fixed. Are there any (popular) servers that wouldn't be possible to update fairly quickly with new software? Sucks to have different settings between servers.

Compared to spawn frags though, which probably is the biggest "flaw" of competitive Quakeworld but just as well adds to the excitement, this isn't that big of an issue.

Btw, when comparing to randomness in real sports with football being a common example i must say noone have mentioned one of the biggest randomness factors; the referee.

true that ake

This is an age old question, and a sensitive one also. Your best bet would be to make it a vote able option for either admins or players with an onscreen command or something illustrating the change.
I prefer a static baseline that is consistent, though, change in Quake can upset people :|

Does anyone know a Competitive 1st Persion Shooter where the damage of a weapon has a random value in it ?

I've created a monster.

Soccer is by far the most popular and conservative sport in the world! And do you know how they decide who will start a game with the ball? Tossing a coin!

Real life is full of randomness! Professional sports in real life are full of randomness and from time to time, a match is decided by pure luck. Does it make real life sports be boring and sucks? No absolutely, this is one of the most exciting things about it! Cause you never knows the final score of a match. Of course that build a solid team, keep regularity among other things, are the characteristics of a champion! None of top competitors will use luck as strategy, none will count with it, but even so, luck (randomness) will affect all of them!

Now why real life randomness is acceptable while virtual randomness isn't?

Do you think the random aspects of QuakeWorld made of it a unfair game? Do you think the game will be better without it? Really?

Well, in my opinion start removing randomness from it and you'll be just removing some of it's fun!

GG!

That's not comparable at all. It's closer to doing a cmd rnd to find out who picks their map first.

They toss a coin because someone has to start the half, but they don't toss a coin to see who starts the second half, do they? They make sure that each team gets to start a half in posession. In addition to that, they make each team switch playing directions to make sure things are PERFECTLY equal.

Professional soccer has always striven to remove uncontrollable factors by many methods, including strictly regulating pitch conditions, standardising balls and playing in stadiums with good protection from the wind.

Neither are.

It didn't seem to affect anyone's fun during the 3 months it was enabled on renzo's servers, did it?

Yes and yes.

I think this wont make the game better or anything. I doubt it will affect the game at all. But if someone thinks 100+rand(20) is a problem, just fix it. To me it is comparable with fixing the non-symmetric quad-model.

In q3 and the case of rail gun, it was important to have 101+ hp. You are more likely to get hit by RL splash dammage anyways in qw.

Only on povdmm4 I actually cared about exact health points. When I have 85hp and there is a backpack somewhere near, I will pick it up.

QW is a random game, even if we had fixed spawns etc.. A lot of decisions are just guesses what the opponent will do.