That game early today was awesome. We lost point A, but defended point B until about 30-45 seconds left (in that map with the three capture points, fuck I can't remember names). Then, our defense dies and they manage to rush 5 people onto the control point when we're so close. I come up from C, shoot the second I'm around the corner and I get to see:
1) My rocket is a crit rocket.
2) They're all standing right at or near the top of the ramp I went up.
3-4 of them died with one rocket, and we swept them off the point to win by defending!
Also, shooting randomly in one direction to try and get hits on guys that jump around corners, having your rocket be a crit rocket, and having it instead impact an invisible cloaked spy halfway to its destination, killing him instantly is glorious.
Goose!That's me, honeyShow me the way home, honeyRegistered Userregular
edited October 2007
Can someone explain the significance of the thread subtitle being FLIPPY_D besides it, I think, being the name of one of the players/posters around here.
Can someone explain the significance of the thread subtitle being FLIPPY_D besides it, I think, being the name of one of the players/posters around here.
Work has me on a swing shift for the next couple of weeks... great for sleeping in, but when I finally get home most of the PA servers are emptying out
MistaCreepy on
PS3: MistaCreepy::Steam: MistaCreepy::360: Dead and I don't feel like paying to fix it.
0
Goose!That's me, honeyShow me the way home, honeyRegistered Userregular
Can someone explain the significance of the thread subtitle being FLIPPY_D besides it, I think, being the name of one of the players/posters around here.
The significance is that he is more dangerous than a train.
Some might call him a...bullet train.
Oh my god, I'm the cleverest girl in the land.
Houk the Namebringer on
0
Goose!That's me, honeyShow me the way home, honeyRegistered Userregular
edited October 2007
I hate being out of the loot (or even out of the loop, he edited with dismay). I need my job to pay me faster so that I may finish my computer and continue enjoying being blown to bits.
I really don't get you guys who roll WSAD when EDSF is so much better. Your hand never leaves home keys, which is only a bonus if you touch type, and you add about 7 more keys to bind stuff to.
I really don't get you guys who roll WSAD when EDSF is so much better. Your hand never leaves home keys, which is only a bonus if you touch type, and you add about 7 more keys to bind stuff to.
Small games are fun, but not to the same extent as I find large ones. JonXP's server has very few people on it tonight, and the 2 on 2 was fairly enjoyable but it got worse with 3 on 3 and 4 on 4. Maybe just because we were getting slaughtered, and the horrible lack of coordination didn't help.
Just curious, what character do you choose when you start a game? I mean, why do you pick your character? For instance, I do like pyros, but my main mindset is 'how do I help the team?', so I'll be a medic or an engineer if the team doesn't have one and hold points, set up teleports, heal people who ask, etc. Sometimes I'll pick a sniper, spy or demoman if I see a troublesome sentry gun so I can try and take it down for the team, but I guess my main role is usually pyro rushing into the fray to push back anyone who decides to rush towards us, plus take out any other pyros on the other team as, as a pyro fire damage isn't too much of a bother, so I'll chase down other pyros with my shotgun.
It's also hard being a shitty player when you're in a smaller team. I make no claims to being any good, but at least you can contribute something in 8 vs 8 or more. In smaller games you're almost a useful as a tumor.
Small games are fun, but not to the same extent as I find large ones. JonXP's server has very few people on it tonight, and the 2 on 2 was fairly enjoyable but it got worse with 3 on 3 and 4 on 4. Maybe just because we were getting slaughtered, and the horrible lack of coordination didn't help.
The 2v2 was enjoyable for you because you kept smoking us.
I'm a better team player than otherwise, I guess. Placed last in the later games, but the scores were all fairly even. (I was Enkidu)
I really don't get you guys who roll WSAD when EDSF is so much better. Your hand never leaves home keys, which is only a bonus if you touch type, and you add about 7 more keys to bind stuff to.
Seriously, what the hell guys?
Because it's less comfortable to rest with your pinky on shift? Plus it's less work to set up for every FPS and you still have about a kajillion keys easily accessible? I've really never understood the whole "ESDF is obviously the best ever" thing. It's like the Ron Paul of keyboard setups.
Side note: Firefox suggested spelling corrections of "bazillions" and "gazillions."
RandomEngy on
Profile -> Signature Settings -> Hide signatures always. Then you don't have to read this worthless text anymore.
Small games are fun, but not to the same extent as I find large ones. JonXP's server has very few people on it tonight, and the 2 on 2 was fairly enjoyable but it got worse with 3 on 3 and 4 on 4. Maybe just because we were getting slaughtered, and the horrible lack of coordination didn't help.
The 2v2 was enjoyable for you because you kept smoking us.
I'm a better team player than otherwise, I guess. Placed last in the later games, but the scores were all fairly even. (I was Enkidu)
That was mostly the c1 guys doing. He has a higher score at the end of every match, and him and his buddy started slaughtering us when I swapped teams to compensate for whatshisface leaving. But yeah, I'm pretty much with you. I've got no problems losing, but it's a lot more fun to lose if the match isn't horribly one sided.
I really don't get you guys who roll WSAD when EDSF is so much better. Your hand never leaves home keys, which is only a bonus if you touch type, and you add about 7 more keys to bind stuff to.
Seriously, what the hell guys?
Because it's less comfortable to rest with your pinky on shift? Plus it's less work to set up for every FPS and you still have about a kajillion keys easily accessible? I've really never understood the whole "ESDF is obviously the best ever" thing. It's like the Ron Paul of keyboard setups.
Side note: Firefox suggested spelling corrections of "bazillions" and "gazillions."
I use RDFG, which is obviously the best ever (for real)
Just curious, what character do you choose when you start a game? I mean, why do you pick your character? For instance, I do like pyros, but my main mindset is 'how do I help the team?', so I'll be a medic or an engineer if the team doesn't have one and hold points, set up teleports, heal people who ask, etc. Sometimes I'll pick a sniper, spy or demoman if I see a troublesome sentry gun so I can try and take it down for the team, but I guess my main role is usually pyro rushing into the fray to push back anyone who decides to rush towards us, plus take out any other pyros on the other team as, as a pyro fire damage isn't too much of a bother, so I'll chase down other pyros with my shotgun.
I really don't get you guys who roll WSAD when EDSF is so much better. Your hand never leaves home keys, which is only a bonus if you touch type, and you add about 7 more keys to bind stuff to.
Seriously, what the hell guys?
Tab, Caps (well... I guess I've never bound this to anything else), and Shift (I don't use it in TF2; but, CS...) are 'meatier' keys. I don't have to be as precise. There is benefit to this.
But, now... I'm re-thinking the whole Caps Lock situation.
They could balance it. Remove kill cam (snapshot of exactly what the enemy is doing, where they killed them from, what disguise they have now and what health they have) any spectating at all (you can ride on a friends shoulder while dead and watch his back for him) and just make the game fade to black when you die. It's what they do for CS in important games, for the teams that use ventrillo. Once you die, your screen goes black until the round ends. In this case, 20-30 seconds.
As for your first statement RandomEngy, I disagree. It's not a flawed one from a design standpoint at all.
The games are based around the idea of tactics and strategy. You aren't supposed to look at another guys cards when playing poker, but you seem to think its fine to have a friend stand over his shoulder and call out what cards he has. This is against the rules, for obvious reasons, but if we let everyone do that, we could have a new version of poker balanced around everybody having a guy standing over their shoulder. There's no good reason not to have a game type like that, certainly, but its nowhere near as popular as closed poker, because the rules create the strategy of the game: watching peoples faces and bluffing.
It's not just the spy that would be affected by a change like this. Here are just some situations off the top of my head where allowing this would be detrimental to the current gameplay:
Any kind of standoff or psychological causing of hesitation at a corner caused by a chokepoint that now requires the living team members to coordinate while alive and work as a team as they go around the corner. Instead just send one guy around, let him get as far as he can, and use his data after he dies to determine whats around the corner. Then all rush in.
Any kind of attempt to come around behind the enemy and flank them. Instead as soon as the first person dies, the rest of the team is warned and they can turn around to confront the threat in an organised fashion. Routs would be impossible in this situation.
"Rushes" and the strategy behind them are fucked. The first members of the team to die unexpectedly can see the composition of the enemy team and tell their team members to back off if necessary.
It dilutes some of the importance of staying together and working as a team while alive, since you can all run off being a solo hero and warn other solo heros if you die to a large group, letting them come back together into a team where necessary and then after that's done, all split up again because there's plenty of warning when you need it.
Similarly, defending cap points with a much smaller force would be a lot easier. Even if you die to a rocket crit or a sniper while standing on or near the point solo, you can still tell your team mates to turn around while the enemy is still heading to the point, unlike now where they get no warning until the point is actually being capped.
These are just examples of how it changes the dynamic of the game, negating a lot of the current mechanics and creating a new kind of meta strategy based around dealing with people who can warn from beyond the grave. In effect it would be like fighting people who are psychic, and that's not fun.
The number one reason I don't buy your argument or lend it any credence is that for a long time now you haven't been able to text to people when you are dead in most team based shooters. Why is voice immune to this? Because its so convenient? Why weren't you up in arms over not being able to talk with text as well? Your original complaint was all about voice, you didn't mention text at all or use a term which indicated you were thinking of both. That came later after I started arguing with you. Why didn't you complain in other team based shooters where you can't talk from the dead? Why is no voice chat so irking? Personally, I think if you like to chat so much with the people you play with, there's plenty of other options to talk with them that doesn't require gutting so much of what makes this game so surprisingly deep. Alternatively, you could be patient for 30 seconds and not simply suggest a sweeping game mechanic change out of anger. I promise it wont kill you to do that(hah!).
When voice chatting over ventrillo and teamspeak became more popular, some of these games released server side options to limit the intelligence you could impart while dead, such as the fade to black example I gave at the top of the post, because it was recognised that this ability to communicate fucks with game balance in a detrimental way. And this is in a game where everyone can get similar weapons and have the same life.
I'm completely disregarding your from the next room and lan cafe arguments. It doesn't constitute the majority of the game playing population, or games would be designed so it wouldn't work. In addition, a couple of people in a room are not as advantageous as the entire 12 man team. It's also a pretty weak justification. Of course you get exemptions and ways around rules. It doesn't mean you should just abolish the rule.
First off, blacking out the screen does not negate the advantages of using ventrillo for organized play. It still gives a significant advantage to teams who are not cut off from each other at random points. Anyway I don't think removing the kill cam is the right way to go.
The last big team-based shooter I played was Natural Selection. You were encouraged to run with teammates and it had a significant respawn time and you could talk while dead. It didn't have a negative impact at all. Skulks could still ambush and chew up a few marines before getting killed or running off. Communicating while you're dead isn't really a huge disadvantage because they can watch the kill list and listen anyway, so stopping you from talking was just added annoyance. Anyway most of the ambushes (in both cases) happen too fast for communication to be very successful at preventing them.
It works fine for NS. You seem to be comparing this to CS instead, a much different (and therefore worse) game for comparison.
And no my beef wasn't just with voice chat, it was with text chat as well. I didn't mention text chat because I don't use it.
As for your list of things, I don't think they're very plausible. Sending someone forward to die at the first enemy and report back? That's stupid. You'll never get an assault done that way because you need your whole squad. You just need a tiny bit of caution, like not rocket-jumping into a room that commonly has sentries.
Telling the composition of the enemy team? Isn't that possible while you're still alive? And so what if you do decide to "back off"? How is that advantageous in any fashion? You're still not completing your objective and you still have to wait for the next wave of people to respawn to counter it.
Diluting the importance of staying together? The idea that everyone would just run off in random directions ramboing if they can communicate while dead is just idiotic. Medics don't magically disappear, and objectives in TF maps are incredibly concentrated, with only two active at a time and sometimes just one. Splitting up doesn't really get you anything except the opportunity to get killed by medic-supported squads.
As for defending cap points with a smaller force, isn't that possible now? Just run back if you see the defenders die. Or have them yell when the see people incoming. It's not an advantage that talking while dead would bring.
Based on the examples you brought up, I think you are vastly overestimating the gameplay impact that speaking while dead would have. It could be easily balanced around.
It does reduce it. If they get sniped from afar, or taken out by the lead guy before their friends come around the corner, or killed from behind, etc. Situations where they don't have time to determine while alive the composition of the enemy because they died so fast, but can easily do so in the calm after death without it. There's no surefire solution to this problem. There's no surefire solutions to most game design problems. There's only "lesser of evils". Let that one sink in, because I don't want to have to repeat that every time you give a black and white reponse to my grey area discussions.
I used CS because it satisfies that of a control condition, or as close as I can think of. Everybody has the same health and access to nearly the same weapons. And yet intermittent voice communication had such a huge effect that they had to do something, even an imperfect solution such as fade to black. And you want to throw it into a game that has been heavily tweaked to balance completely different classes and see no problem here?
The killcam has to go because otherwise a spy can't do anything for up to 3-4 seconds to make sure the enemy can't report to his friends exactly what he is doing. Imagine every time you managed to backstab someone, you have to sit there for 4 seconds or else double back a lot. Now imagine another guy walks around the corner 7 seconds later. If you hadn't had to wait 4 whole seconds, you'd be disguised and away by now. But now you are dead. You can't have everything, so choose which evil you hate least.
The skulks in ns move at 290 speed. That's beyond reaction speed, of course it doesn't make that much difference. Of course if they get close they can take out 4 close packed guys quickly, they can do it before they can even react. Spy's only run at 100. Half the classes run that fast, the other half run slightly slower and one runs twice that speed. Nowhere near the orders of magnitude speed difference of a Skulk. Your comparison is lessvalid than that of CS, because there are too many confounding variables to make a clear analysis of how voice chat alone can affect a team based game.
They've balanced the advantage of the beyond the dead voice communication in NS by making enemies nightmare difficult to react to in time, and giving them maps that allow them to use their roof climbing ability to good advantage, and including the rts style elements for upgrades and so on. It works because there's so much complicaton in the game that even with talking while dead there's still too many things to talk about.
Spies rely on confusing and redirecting attention. Their primary defense is confusion, deceit and attentional redirection, not speed.
You are seriously overestimating human mental abilities every time you say its possible in game now, but its a common mistake a lot of people make. Here's some information for you.
Humans do not process everything they see, although we like to have fun little folktales and urban myths about the subconscious seeing everything and shit like that. It's not true. We have some capability to pick up information subliminally, but it rarely becomes available to our consciousness, and the effect it has is rarely significant.
Just like when you sometimes don't hear someone talking to you, visual information is subject to attentional limitations. We have to pay attention to things to register them visually. It's called inattentional blindness, this failure to see visual information because our attention is focused elsewhere. The classic study is participants watching a video of a group of people in white shirts passing a basketball that is overlaid with another video of people in black shirts passing a basketball. The two videos were partially transparent. Participants were asked to watch the video and indicate when the saw one of them passing the ball to their respective side (black to black, white to white) by pressing a key.
Thirty seconds into the video, a woman carrying an umbrella clearly walks through the scene for four seconds. 44% of participants failed to see her, and she walked straight across their retina in plain sight.
Furthermore, 73% of subjects failed to see the man in the gorilla suit who walked across the scene a little later.
When they were told that the woman or the man in the suit was there and told to watch it again, almost every participant saw them.
Our ability to clearly and quickly notice changes in visual information is completely dependent on wether we are paying attention and wether we expect it.
However, our ability to differentiate and detect stimuli in conjunction with an auditory cue ramps up to phenomenal level. If you play the woman's footsteps as she passed through the picture, a greater percentage of people see it. This doesn't seem to make sense, after all its innattentional blindness right? The reason why is due to how our brains process visual and auditory information. They use different parts of the brain, and if a stimulis in one sense (vision) is accompanied by an audio stimulus it increases the likelihood of detecting both stimuli. This is why audio cues exist. "Medic!"
When it comes to human voices, we are extremely adept at picking it out even amongst other sounds, much more so than symbols mixed with other visual information. We can also process it a lot faster.
The part of the brain that handles sound has specialised cells dedicated to recognising voice. So not only is a sound more efficient at directing your attention to an accompanying visual stimulus, but a voice increases that to near impossible to miss territory.
The game has not been designed with this speed and efficiency in mind when someone has died. It has been only designed around it being used while you are alive.
So...protecting the cp alone while relying on death notifcations and possibly after text macros to warn your team mates...not very effective, especially if the team mates are underfire or otherwise attentionally occupied.
Your death notification in conjunction with you screaming in their ear afterwards? Very noticeable, grabs their attention.
I call shenanigans on the hating death text as much as you do voice, for reasons I will outline. In your own words, you barely use it. Why do you think voice chat is so effective? Why do you think you like it so much? Because you love the sound of their sexy young voices? Shit no, it's because its really really effective and effortless and you want that applied to warning your team while dead. We prefer human voice chat, and it satisfies needs for social contact much better than text. In addition, losing the ability to talk to someone, even briefly, can cause distress if we have something to say. No I'm not sayig your an emo fuck, it happens to everybody. Even if you hate someone, if you wanted to say something to them and suddenly can't, it does and will distress you, even if only briefly.
It isn't as strong with text though. Even though it is language, it's still just symbols on a screen, and doesn't have the emotional effect of suddenly removed voice chat.
There's basically no way you would have come up with this level of complaint if voice chat wasn't in this game, only death text was, it just wouldn't have been as aggravating. Annoying yes, but not as aggravating as you are making it out to be.
So no, these things aren't simply 'doable while alive' with any degree of consistency. There are a lot of attentional pressures while alive, but when you are dead these are all gone. You have nothing to do, so you can give a good, clear, well presented report to your team mates.
A good example. Why would they "back off" combined with "why the hell would you let one guy die to get intel?" It seems obvious to me. Let's elaborate on my example.
Let's say the blue team is sitting on well at the central cap point. A couple of red enemy scouts run around from the right and harrass, dodging in and out, so everybodies attention is on the right. The blue scout runs down the left side corridor thinking to flank more red team members as they come up the right corridor, and unexpectedly meets 5 pyros coming the other way. He gets burninated instantly because they hit him face on, and will be too busy with this to say much more than "shit" before dying. In addition, he didn't expect to get flanked himself, so I can say with absolute certainty he wont be mentioning shit.
The kill notification will show he died to a pyro, but not that there are 5 of them, or the two medics behind them. His snapshot and the time he has to think after dying will allow him to verify that easily, so he hits voice while dead.
"5 pyros with medics flanking from left corridor, watch out!"
With the warning, which he has ample time to give now that he is dead, and the use of voice to ensure they pay attention and heed it clearly, his team, who just killed that last scout, all turn and ready themselves for an onslaught to the left. The heavys start spinning his gun and moves away from the crates on the left. The soldiers rocket jump to the top of the crates overlooking the left side. The medic backs over as far as he can to the right side, and tries to keep some people into overheal. The sniper overhead switches to the left and starts his zoom timer already, and the spy ducks into the little alcove under the ledge and disguises as a pyro.
This all takes just a second or two after getting the warning, ample time before the pyros finish running down the corridor. When they do, they meet annihilation, because pyros do not work if you are expecting them. They eat rockets as they come out from the corridor, straight into a heavies chaingun, while their medic gets backstabbed from behind and Flippy_D takes out the remaining medic just before he reacts and hits uber. He didn't activate it first, cos he didn't expect them to react that quickly and he wanted to save it to make sure they get maximum kills.
That one players death defended that point from an attempted ambush, but he wouldn't have gotten the warning out without death voice chat. Not text chat, which could be easily missed, but voice chat.
If you'd thought about the concepts behind the situations I was giving, this particular scenario should have immediately sprung to mind. And no, it doesn't stop there. Don't just reply and go well if they're all pyro do x so there I disproved your whole argument nyer nyer plus you didn't give other examples so I still disproved them. Think about all the goddam combinations, and address the tactical concept I gave you. I don't want to sit here all day spelling it all out, there's a lot of freaking combinations and you can think for yourself.
Some hintsies: Snipers in particular who know exactly where the enemy are coming from get to hit the first guy around the corner with 190 damage. That one shots everybody but a soldier or a heavy with a body hit. That's ridiculous, and doesn't take that long to charge, just a bit of forewarning.
Pyros can not run around the corner as the first enemy goes past but wait for the medics at the back he knows are coming. Spys can do similar, only they can save their cloak and use it with pinpoint timing.
Scouts are beyond speedy, if they know the force is going one side, they can and will get around to their other side before they even come through the door, with the advantage of if they do die, they still get to give a warning.
If you can't think of situations fluidly like that, and don't know how human mental abilities work, don't even dream of trying to make game balance suggestions. I would, instead, suggest that you listen to me when I tell you your anger is getting the best of you and learn some patience.
I'm not sure why this is firing me up so much, but I always saw you as a well read and clearheaded person and this whole conversation is disappointing me. So this is the last thing I'm gonna say on the matter, think whatever you like if you disagree.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
I really don't get you guys who roll WSAD when EDSF is so much better. Your hand never leaves home keys, which is only a bonus if you touch type, and you add about 7 more keys to bind stuff to.
I really don't get you guys who roll WSAD when EDSF is so much better. Your hand never leaves home keys, which is only a bonus if you touch type, and you add about 7 more keys to bind stuff to.
Seriously, what the hell guys?
i use the arrow keys.
omg, I'll kill myself if you ever whack me again.
Malkor on
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
I mentioned you in there, somewhere. *waves vaguely at essay*
I should really try out esdf see if I like the extra hotkeys. The angle feels slightly lopsided but I've never really considered it before. It does give you a lot of neat extra hotkeys.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Small games are fun, but not to the same extent as I find large ones. JonXP's server has very few people on it tonight, and the 2 on 2 was fairly enjoyable but it got worse with 3 on 3 and 4 on 4. Maybe just because we were getting slaughtered, and the horrible lack of coordination didn't help.
The 2v2 was enjoyable for you because you kept smoking us.
I'm a better team player than otherwise, I guess. Placed last in the later games, but the scores were all fairly even. (I was Enkidu)
That was mostly the c1 guys doing. He has a higher score at the end of every match, and him and his buddy started slaughtering us when I swapped teams to compensate for whatshisface leaving. But yeah, I'm pretty much with you. I've got no problems losing, but it's a lot more fun to lose if the match isn't horribly one sided.
Yeah, I don't really like small games. I'm sure that I was in the games you all were talking about. I've had TF2 for all of three days, and I really drag down small teams. Also, I was getting tired of being repeatedly destroyed by those c1 guys, and they didn't really seem to be into having fun. They just wanted to win, I suppose.
Anyhow, I kicked ass as a medic tonight on Job's server. Of course, my client crashed and someone took my spot immediately thereafter. What the fuck is up with TF2 anyhow? It has always crashed on me at about an hour and a half in. It is getting obnoxious. Also, I can't use my USB mic with it.
The c1 guys were fine. There were two others who seemed to think everyone else was doing squat though, which is largely because the coordination was so poor. Everyone was kinda doing their own thing.
I mentioned you in there, somewhere. *waves vaguely at essay*
I should really try out esdf see if I like the extra hotkeys. The angle feels slightly lopsided but I've never really considered it before. It does give you a lot of neat extra hotkeys.
But what do you need the extra extra ones for? So you can bind "Build a dispenser here" to a button?
Beginning to think I need to start binding buttons. I keep seeing all these spies do crazy shit like slap a sapper on a turret then take out their knife to backstab the engineer in under a second, and they may have a good system of key binding going on. The number keys aren't very useful for that.
Posts
Yeah, I was witness to this. Limbs everywhere.
no. soldiers are the snipers worst enemy
he kills people occasionally
That usually subtitles are witty or funny. Prove it, sir.
Some might call him a...bullet train.
Oh my god, I'm the cleverest girl in the land.
you can't melee a rocket
Seriously, what the hell guys?
...
Burn this witch!
The 2v2 was enjoyable for you because you kept smoking us.
I'm a better team player than otherwise, I guess. Placed last in the later games, but the scores were all fairly even. (I was Enkidu)
MKDS Friend Code: 476-802-986-689
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Because it's less comfortable to rest with your pinky on shift? Plus it's less work to set up for every FPS and you still have about a kajillion keys easily accessible? I've really never understood the whole "ESDF is obviously the best ever" thing. It's like the Ron Paul of keyboard setups.
Side note: Firefox suggested spelling corrections of "bazillions" and "gazillions."
I got owned many times:
I vowed revenge (and I promised myself I would use the most fitting weapon):
I use RDFG, which is obviously the best ever (for real)
Spy or Soldier.
Tab, Caps (well... I guess I've never bound this to anything else), and Shift (I don't use it in TF2; but, CS...) are 'meatier' keys. I don't have to be as precise. There is benefit to this.
But, now... I'm re-thinking the whole Caps Lock situation.
It does reduce it. If they get sniped from afar, or taken out by the lead guy before their friends come around the corner, or killed from behind, etc. Situations where they don't have time to determine while alive the composition of the enemy because they died so fast, but can easily do so in the calm after death without it. There's no surefire solution to this problem. There's no surefire solutions to most game design problems. There's only "lesser of evils". Let that one sink in, because I don't want to have to repeat that every time you give a black and white reponse to my grey area discussions.
I used CS because it satisfies that of a control condition, or as close as I can think of. Everybody has the same health and access to nearly the same weapons. And yet intermittent voice communication had such a huge effect that they had to do something, even an imperfect solution such as fade to black. And you want to throw it into a game that has been heavily tweaked to balance completely different classes and see no problem here?
The killcam has to go because otherwise a spy can't do anything for up to 3-4 seconds to make sure the enemy can't report to his friends exactly what he is doing. Imagine every time you managed to backstab someone, you have to sit there for 4 seconds or else double back a lot. Now imagine another guy walks around the corner 7 seconds later. If you hadn't had to wait 4 whole seconds, you'd be disguised and away by now. But now you are dead. You can't have everything, so choose which evil you hate least.
The skulks in ns move at 290 speed. That's beyond reaction speed, of course it doesn't make that much difference. Of course if they get close they can take out 4 close packed guys quickly, they can do it before they can even react. Spy's only run at 100. Half the classes run that fast, the other half run slightly slower and one runs twice that speed. Nowhere near the orders of magnitude speed difference of a Skulk. Your comparison is lessvalid than that of CS, because there are too many confounding variables to make a clear analysis of how voice chat alone can affect a team based game.
They've balanced the advantage of the beyond the dead voice communication in NS by making enemies nightmare difficult to react to in time, and giving them maps that allow them to use their roof climbing ability to good advantage, and including the rts style elements for upgrades and so on. It works because there's so much complicaton in the game that even with talking while dead there's still too many things to talk about.
Spies rely on confusing and redirecting attention. Their primary defense is confusion, deceit and attentional redirection, not speed.
You are seriously overestimating human mental abilities every time you say its possible in game now, but its a common mistake a lot of people make. Here's some information for you.
Humans do not process everything they see, although we like to have fun little folktales and urban myths about the subconscious seeing everything and shit like that. It's not true. We have some capability to pick up information subliminally, but it rarely becomes available to our consciousness, and the effect it has is rarely significant.
Just like when you sometimes don't hear someone talking to you, visual information is subject to attentional limitations. We have to pay attention to things to register them visually. It's called inattentional blindness, this failure to see visual information because our attention is focused elsewhere. The classic study is participants watching a video of a group of people in white shirts passing a basketball that is overlaid with another video of people in black shirts passing a basketball. The two videos were partially transparent. Participants were asked to watch the video and indicate when the saw one of them passing the ball to their respective side (black to black, white to white) by pressing a key.
Thirty seconds into the video, a woman carrying an umbrella clearly walks through the scene for four seconds. 44% of participants failed to see her, and she walked straight across their retina in plain sight.
Furthermore, 73% of subjects failed to see the man in the gorilla suit who walked across the scene a little later.
When they were told that the woman or the man in the suit was there and told to watch it again, almost every participant saw them.
Our ability to clearly and quickly notice changes in visual information is completely dependent on wether we are paying attention and wether we expect it.
However, our ability to differentiate and detect stimuli in conjunction with an auditory cue ramps up to phenomenal level. If you play the woman's footsteps as she passed through the picture, a greater percentage of people see it. This doesn't seem to make sense, after all its innattentional blindness right? The reason why is due to how our brains process visual and auditory information. They use different parts of the brain, and if a stimulis in one sense (vision) is accompanied by an audio stimulus it increases the likelihood of detecting both stimuli. This is why audio cues exist. "Medic!"
When it comes to human voices, we are extremely adept at picking it out even amongst other sounds, much more so than symbols mixed with other visual information. We can also process it a lot faster.
The part of the brain that handles sound has specialised cells dedicated to recognising voice. So not only is a sound more efficient at directing your attention to an accompanying visual stimulus, but a voice increases that to near impossible to miss territory.
The game has not been designed with this speed and efficiency in mind when someone has died. It has been only designed around it being used while you are alive.
So...protecting the cp alone while relying on death notifcations and possibly after text macros to warn your team mates...not very effective, especially if the team mates are underfire or otherwise attentionally occupied.
Your death notification in conjunction with you screaming in their ear afterwards? Very noticeable, grabs their attention.
I call shenanigans on the hating death text as much as you do voice, for reasons I will outline. In your own words, you barely use it. Why do you think voice chat is so effective? Why do you think you like it so much? Because you love the sound of their sexy young voices? Shit no, it's because its really really effective and effortless and you want that applied to warning your team while dead. We prefer human voice chat, and it satisfies needs for social contact much better than text. In addition, losing the ability to talk to someone, even briefly, can cause distress if we have something to say. No I'm not sayig your an emo fuck, it happens to everybody. Even if you hate someone, if you wanted to say something to them and suddenly can't, it does and will distress you, even if only briefly.
It isn't as strong with text though. Even though it is language, it's still just symbols on a screen, and doesn't have the emotional effect of suddenly removed voice chat.
There's basically no way you would have come up with this level of complaint if voice chat wasn't in this game, only death text was, it just wouldn't have been as aggravating. Annoying yes, but not as aggravating as you are making it out to be.
So no, these things aren't simply 'doable while alive' with any degree of consistency. There are a lot of attentional pressures while alive, but when you are dead these are all gone. You have nothing to do, so you can give a good, clear, well presented report to your team mates.
A good example. Why would they "back off" combined with "why the hell would you let one guy die to get intel?" It seems obvious to me. Let's elaborate on my example.
Let's say the blue team is sitting on well at the central cap point. A couple of red enemy scouts run around from the right and harrass, dodging in and out, so everybodies attention is on the right. The blue scout runs down the left side corridor thinking to flank more red team members as they come up the right corridor, and unexpectedly meets 5 pyros coming the other way. He gets burninated instantly because they hit him face on, and will be too busy with this to say much more than "shit" before dying. In addition, he didn't expect to get flanked himself, so I can say with absolute certainty he wont be mentioning shit.
The kill notification will show he died to a pyro, but not that there are 5 of them, or the two medics behind them. His snapshot and the time he has to think after dying will allow him to verify that easily, so he hits voice while dead.
"5 pyros with medics flanking from left corridor, watch out!"
With the warning, which he has ample time to give now that he is dead, and the use of voice to ensure they pay attention and heed it clearly, his team, who just killed that last scout, all turn and ready themselves for an onslaught to the left. The heavys start spinning his gun and moves away from the crates on the left. The soldiers rocket jump to the top of the crates overlooking the left side. The medic backs over as far as he can to the right side, and tries to keep some people into overheal. The sniper overhead switches to the left and starts his zoom timer already, and the spy ducks into the little alcove under the ledge and disguises as a pyro.
This all takes just a second or two after getting the warning, ample time before the pyros finish running down the corridor. When they do, they meet annihilation, because pyros do not work if you are expecting them. They eat rockets as they come out from the corridor, straight into a heavies chaingun, while their medic gets backstabbed from behind and Flippy_D takes out the remaining medic just before he reacts and hits uber. He didn't activate it first, cos he didn't expect them to react that quickly and he wanted to save it to make sure they get maximum kills.
That one players death defended that point from an attempted ambush, but he wouldn't have gotten the warning out without death voice chat. Not text chat, which could be easily missed, but voice chat.
If you'd thought about the concepts behind the situations I was giving, this particular scenario should have immediately sprung to mind. And no, it doesn't stop there. Don't just reply and go well if they're all pyro do x so there I disproved your whole argument nyer nyer plus you didn't give other examples so I still disproved them. Think about all the goddam combinations, and address the tactical concept I gave you. I don't want to sit here all day spelling it all out, there's a lot of freaking combinations and you can think for yourself.
Some hintsies: Snipers in particular who know exactly where the enemy are coming from get to hit the first guy around the corner with 190 damage. That one shots everybody but a soldier or a heavy with a body hit. That's ridiculous, and doesn't take that long to charge, just a bit of forewarning.
Pyros can not run around the corner as the first enemy goes past but wait for the medics at the back he knows are coming. Spys can do similar, only they can save their cloak and use it with pinpoint timing.
Scouts are beyond speedy, if they know the force is going one side, they can and will get around to their other side before they even come through the door, with the advantage of if they do die, they still get to give a warning.
If you can't think of situations fluidly like that, and don't know how human mental abilities work, don't even dream of trying to make game balance suggestions. I would, instead, suggest that you listen to me when I tell you your anger is getting the best of you and learn some patience.
I'm not sure why this is firing me up so much, but I always saw you as a well read and clearheaded person and this whole conversation is disappointing me. So this is the last thing I'm gonna say on the matter, think whatever you like if you disagree.
i use the arrow keys.
I *AM* actually reading it, though. I'll edit this if I have something to add.
omg, I'll kill myself if you ever whack me again.
I mentioned you in there, somewhere. *waves vaguely at essay*
I should really try out esdf see if I like the extra hotkeys. The angle feels slightly lopsided but I've never really considered it before. It does give you a lot of neat extra hotkeys.
Yeah, I don't really like small games. I'm sure that I was in the games you all were talking about. I've had TF2 for all of three days, and I really drag down small teams. Also, I was getting tired of being repeatedly destroyed by those c1 guys, and they didn't really seem to be into having fun. They just wanted to win, I suppose.
Anyhow, I kicked ass as a medic tonight on Job's server. Of course, my client crashed and someone took my spot immediately thereafter. What the fuck is up with TF2 anyhow? It has always crashed on me at about an hour and a half in. It is getting obnoxious. Also, I can't use my USB mic with it.
But what do you need the extra extra ones for? So you can bind "Build a dispenser here" to a button?
Meh