Grenadgun?

[Amdoro]

Grenadgun is faster then before, why Admin?Been so for 2 days now.

Mvh/ Amdoro

[adminless]

to make it more competitive.

[A .]

Dear Adminless,
this is utterly terrible and anybody I ask says it is terrible. and this is coming from somebody who likes to do his fair share of grens spamming.

It just makes everything more random. Its your server, you can do what you want, but imo this is not making regulars on the server happy at all.

[adminless]

well that depends on who you ask. if you ask some seasoned cpma/ql veterans they are probably going to tell you something along the lines of "the q3 gl is a uselss piece of junk and it's a insult to the community that a top server like the UnFreeZe one runs such noobish settings", I mean, that's at least the kind of feedback I receive from those guys and to be honest, I think that they are right. during the first/second seaon there was a time when it was discussed to introduce cpm settings here however such idea was soon discarded, as can be seen, for obvious reasons. those settings don't really do much good and they don't even appeal to the majority of the people here. however that being said I think that believe that all that cpm did was absolutely rigth it would be as bad as believe the opposite, that absolutely everything cpm did was wrong and there's absolutely anything else beside q3 rulesets. cpm has some (probably many) bad things as well as it also has some good interesting things then as I was reviewing the servers code and stats for this season I came to some good old fashioned cpm rulesets and after dig it I came to the conclusion that the gl balance there is superior so I finally blended some cpm elements to the mod, just like I blended several other elements btw, to give it a superior finish.

but well anyways, whatever the case is, everyone will have their opinion however there's one thing I want to make clear here, the gl timing changes weren't introduced "because it looked like the admin likes to spam nades". these changes were introduced to satisfy the demands of the cpm/ql players that frequent the server, those guys need those settings just as much as the insta guys need the unlagged code, and because after crossing data and dig the code I objetively beleive they provide a better weapon balance. just for the record know that beyond testing/debugging (obviously), randomnized trials and some casual game here and there I'm not even allowed to join the server whats-o-ever, not even once. I mean, I couldn't, that would immediately biase me and invalidate me to make any calls here, right away, so make absolutely sure that is not happening.

as I see it, I think that it's a possitive change and a improvement of the gameplay. the problem looks more to me that, as you're even admiting yourself, people overuse the gl for no good reason and that issue gets specially magnified by the recent changes rather than what the changes actually do themselves. I mean, people join the server, specially the randoms and they see some unsual and new gl and start spamming it all over the place and that creates a snowball that attract even more attention and more spam (hey look a new gl let's try etc etc). I would expect that in the long run as the "new" thing wears off and people understand that although the gl improved it doesn't stand a chance anyways and they are just wasting everyones time and being a pain, they should start falling back to more normal weapon patterns.

anyways, thanks for the feedback, make sure I'll take it into account for future balance revisions.

[A .]

cpm settings, you mean the faster movement? not sure what else cpm changes. anyway I agree it dont make sense on this server which is primarily supposed to be fun. but also you want to be able to do a little with skill. otherwise we can play one of them noobish tactic shooters that are so numerous nowadays

so erm i also dont get what GL has to do with cpm settings. is it faster firing in cpm?

I dont really care that much as I'm trying to play less and less but I played a little last couple days and remember a game on dm14 in particular where again and again you saw both teams spam the narrow entry with loads and loads of grens. I actually laughed out loud at the utter ridiculousness of this situation.

anyway no hard feeling from my side. If I was to take this actually serious I will go back into duelling which is the only pure quake form imo.

[adminless]

yes, those gl timings are taken from cpm as is, it's not that I came here one day with a crazy idea and decided to act on it, it was a well planned and thought change based on feedback as well as code/ruleset analisys. well cpm changes quite a lot of things beyond just the well know infamous air control player movement physics, like for example the whole weapon balance is different, the armor system is different, crazy knockbacks, crazy switchtimes, crazy movement just to name a few (there's plenty of more, virtually almost everything). cpm is pretty much a almost completely different game, now whether that game is better is worse it would be a matter of taste (though I even have statistical data that points out that is not that good on various aspects), but once thing is clear, it's not the goal of this to become something else besides just some good old fasioned Quake III Arena server however at the same time it's also important to add revisions to the game so it stays fresh and relevant. anyways, that all is not really the subject of the discussion, I'm just saying.

as for dm14 well yes I know but that also happened before, it's nothing really new, people usually spam nades at corridor corners and/or to defend areas, to some extend that's a legit nade use. I don't think these changes break the balance and when I look at the rank sites, in fact, they seem fairly balanced.

[hurrenson]

Ok, just my 2 Cents regarding the GL: I am also one of the people who don't like the new GL-Settings. Sometimes I am now in a room with 2-3 doors and all of them get spammed with nades. Enemy spams nades, own team spams nades. Really good players who can actually use nades effectively are quite seldom. It's really "great" if you want to actually aim and you are constantly shaken around by goddamn nades. Maybe you can increase RL too. I need more rocket spam. People just blindly spam or shoot ahead into doors and stuff in hopes an enemy will appear and run into it. Which is really cool if you are in front of these idiots and want to hear if someone is coming or you get shot in the back into enemies or shaken around and can't aim. These people are who are using the GL in that spam way too.
At least from my pov it looks like there is a divide between people who actually want to play skillfully and people who are playing like mobile phone games and just press fire and move randomly around.

Sidenote: what's up with the autobalance. i noticed in the last cpl of days a longer wait til autobalance will go into action. had a cpl of games where suddenly it was 8vs6 or more uneven for 1-2 rounds. Other people noticed too, so i am not imagining it -_-

[adminless]

Q. "what is the fuckign reasonming for the slow autona.lance?"

A. mmmm by chance you (as well as that Dr.GreenThumb that according to his own dictionary "slow is the definition of stupid") have you ever considered what happens when someone that has to be changed is engaged on combat? just saying because I obviously did and what happens is that that change has to be consequently delayed. so yeah what do you expect now that the next time you're in the middle of a fight to top the game and get that sweet rail you get re-spawned somewhere else out of nowhere because some randoms left? well, I don't think that I need to elaborate more about it, right? so what happened like I just mentioned on the tar post now, there was two things that attracted most of the criticism one of them was the spawns and the other the team balance so for this season I leveled up both. in short previously both followed a best compromise/balance policy, they aimed at getting acceptable results in a acceptable amount of time (for the case of the auto balance), however over the time that policy turned not good enough in the long run so I changed the policy to best results only which in the case of the team balance, yes, indeed it resulted in some higher latency (from instantaneous/few secs in most cases to yes may be half a minute or more in some cases).

before the auto balance attempted to make optimal decisions but if not possible it still allowed for sub-optimal or even lesser (with some limits obviously) decisions and ultimately it still allowed for some manual correction. unfortunately like I've just said, that was proven not good enough in the long run and although it generally worked there was some games significantly unbalanced and "curiously" enough the source of the worst case ever switch decisions and unbalances wasn't coming from the auto balance itself (as I was even expecting myself), if not from the very few bizarre manual switch chances the system still provided. in reality that small manual correction I willingly still left there was only being exploited by a bunch of team hijackers (the sames that now you recurrently see going to spec for no reason to re-join again to then reconnect and go to spec again etc etc ah and btw for the record the team balance will never place you on spec just saying) to recurrently get on the team with their friends or just a more positive team balance. there was one guy in particular that was typically the top player of his team and that was consistently hijacking the teams on a regular basis and ruining probably the majority of the games he was involved in and what was worst is that the logical thing was believe that such imbalance was coming from the system when it wasn't.

consequently I disabled manual team switching "altogether" (the system will always be exploitable to some extend but there's clear penalties now and the exploiters are clearly exposed) and I had to strengthen the decision making as there's no other form of correction. now I can no longer afford making any sub-optimal switch decisions anymore to cut latency as a single sub-optimal decision can completely break a game (let alone a top player consciously switching to the opposing team to play with his other top player friend) and there's no other form of correction which unfortunately as I explained, yes, it results in higher team balance latency on some instances. so bottom line, as you can see there's no much to do about it, I will obviously still look forward to find some better compromises but there's no much to do besides just continue playing and punishing your opponents and wait for the team balance to fire up, sorry about that. anyways, I hope that cleared the topic at least.

on the upside, the results of the auto balance are excellent now, look these are the raw team balance stats for yesterday:

Code: Select all

red won 49.50% of the games and averaged 8.346 points
blue won 50.49% of the games and averaged 8.712 points
score distribution was:
 - 29.70% of the games scored 19 points
 - 21.78% of the games scored 18 points
 - 16.83% of the games scored 17 points
 - 12.87% of the games scored 16 points
 -  6.93% of the games scored 14 points
 -  5.94% of the games scored 15 points
 -  2.97% of the games scored 13 points
 -  0.99% of the games scored 12 points
 -  0.99% of the games scored 11 points
 -  0.99% of the games scored 10 points

half of the games ended with scores of 10-9 or 10-8 and of the rest only in one of five the losing team had less than 6 points and on top of that the absolute parity between the red team and the blue team is specially remarkable. it doesn't matter how you look at it, if by player, by score or even by color (which is the hardest) those are some solid excellent results so the fully automatic team balance does work.

as for the grenades like I said well I'll look at it but it's also complicated as you can see there's no a clear overall consensus so I'll keep analyzing data. anyways thanks for the feedback.

[Dr.GreenThumb]

Apologies for that comment, it was in a haze of a few beers but I know, that is no excuse. As I certainly couldn't write a better autobalance, I will keep my mouth shut in the future. To my defense, I said that because for the first time ever I played a game where teams were 6vs9 for definitely not a few seconds (most likely because of the adjustments you mentioned above). I am sure it is impossible it is to create a balance algorithm that pleases everyone, so I won't even attempt to argue with anything above as you have already explained about autobalance and its difficulties in another thread. 6vs9 I found just a bit too much for autobalance to ignore for as long as it did, but yes, you are right, I never thought about -not- moving the medium level players who would make sense to be moved -during their fight- good point. Perhaps this was the case this time as well - I have not seen it happen since during my playtime.

To be honest, I am going to stop bashing the autobalance, as it is not the real cause of the problem. Recently I am refocusing my hate towards those players who quit the team mid-game. Sure, some disconnections occur, but those who leave because they rage quit, don't care finishing or just don't want to be in the losing team (and quit round 9) is a whole lot more infuriating than anything the autobalance does to try to correct the same.

Also, I realize now (after reading the chats) that a portion of the players here are children who have zero care to quit the game at any point and leave their team to be destroyed due to being outnumbered, or by simply the fact that they are messing up the (auto)balanced state. Few rounds of that, and the damage for that map is irreversible regardless of what autobalance tries to do at that point. So, for me, I just don't look at balance anymore. It is what it is, I can't help it, and I agree that the biggest issue here is human made by the players themselves.

As far as GL goes, since everyone gave their opinions, I am going to give mine as well. I may be the only one but I actually like the new setting. First of all, faster granade release will make the usual spammers get rid of all their granades quicker, so the unavoidable round-starting spamming hell period lasts a shorter time. Once they are empty, no more (granade) spamming, which I passionately hate so that is good in my eyes. Second, just because one -is able- shoot granades faster, don't have to, you can still keep a stack and just throw one or two here and there for those who follow you. And third, I've been in situations where being able to throw granades faster allowed to freeze an opponent without giving them a chance to escape, which was easier when the launcher was slower. So hate me, but I don't mind the new setting, and anything that increases randomness I think is good, giving us not that skilled players a chance of luck to make a difference in the game.

[aimer]

Regarding the grenades spam, i have also noticed the behaviour mentioned above. Would it be worth capping the number of grens to 10 to limit (in time) the amount of spam if (players would run out of them faster)?

[...jutuli...]

Mostly I dont feel autobalance at all, only when this feature play ping-pong with me... Sometimes happened that I was changed (ping-ponged) between teams few times per game, but I have no problem with that.

GL is rather Grenade Sprayer now, sometimes very irritating - i.e. DM14 every small room constantly sprayed with grenades, no chance go thru or escape when retreat, not possible to aim when I am shaking by friendly grenades and so on. Unfortunately it is addictive and I found myself spraying grenades as well...so sometimes it is also fun.

For me - still relatively fun, the changes dont ruin the game so far.

[adminless]

@Dr.GreenThumb it's ok, it's not possible for us to know it all about everything therefor we all will make mistakes, there's nothing wrong with that, that's part of life. I quoted you as I could have quoted plenty of other guys, you just happened to pop up at the logs I was working with. yes, pretty much you seem to finally fully realize the situation with the team balance, I don't have much to add to that. I know like I said the current policy has bad latency under some situations which may delay it for half a minute or even more, I'm currently actively working to alleviate that.

@aimer1 yes it may be possible, it's not a bad suggestion, but as can be seen it's a delicate subject that must be treated with care. the grenades currently come with the lowest ammo already (just 20) and going bellow that could be overkill and render them pretty much useless again which was at the end the reason of why they got boosted in the first place. it's not the intention that they become a main weapon but also not to kill them altogether as they also add up and take a part in the game.

@...jutuli... ye as you can see some of the issues with the grenades is that at the end of the day virtually everybody end up doing its fair share of nade spamming regardless of the skill, it's not just only about some random noobs running around the map. also think that this is a support forum so what you see here are the complains but there's various other people that appreciated the change just like Dr.GreenThumb did for example. so bottom line like I said, I'll take this in consideration and when I come to something I'll try to make some adjustments to produce a better balance and game experience.

@all thanks for feedback

[adminless]

ok, I just finished adding now some zero latency auto bot balance to cover up the amount of time the optimal human auto team balance takes to fire up and if it doesn't glitch like this morning (sorry about that guys) that should make the system converge and work preventing those eventual seconds (+30) where the game can get largely uneven. I believe that this should now finally settle the auto balance thing at least for this season so let me know how it worked.

as for the grenades thing, well, I don't really know what you want me to say, I looked at it and I don't really see that much of a deal. I mean, the only real legit complain I see here is that of hurrenson, the rest just seem the usual neutral/improvement feedback and even some positive reception.

the guy that started the thread is like one of the top UnFreeZe grenade spammers himself with a average grenade output of more than a hundred grenades per game that hardly resulted in a average of two grenade kills per game and the guy who followed currently holds the award for best grenade killer at the FreeFUn (a.k.a. the UnFreeZe:27961) server himself at a grenade accuracy hardly any above five percent and goes saying non-sense shit like "i hear grens allready when i see the thumb of dm14" even time before the introduction of these settings and "this gren thing is bad i overuse grens and as a result my other weps skill decrease the sad part is those grens can be quite effective in the rigth situation" afterwards and at the same time thinks that "sometimes you actually have competitive games on like the other server" and that that "server is so much more fun )" of a server that has the same exact settings. I just don't know what you want me to do about this? may be I should just start by banning these two guys? it looks like that will definitively cut a lot of grenade spam, not that I'm gonna do, I'm just saying. those are no valid complains, that's just random non-sense.

anyways what I can do to improve the situation about the grenades and the overall game experience is publish now a grenade fix with magenta colored grenades for better visibility like as it seemed a popular feature of some UnFreeZe modded versions. you can get it here (the file is zzz-grenade.pk3) to install it just put that file on your baseq3 folder inside your UnFreeZe installment folder. I'll obviously make sure to add that (as well as other things) for the new upcoming UnFreeZe client version but for that there's still some time left (I was working on it but as you could see I got caught by server issues) so by now you can just use that file. it won't still have clean status for today though as I didn't have time to add it yet to the database and test it but it should just tomorrow then check it out and let me know.

[Dr.GreenThumb]

Fantastic work adminless, thanks very much!

[adminless]

in case someone cares here you have the top of the shame about this grenade spam thing as of today (30 of October of 2019) as it came out from scrambling the database (I'm not gonna add that to the rank sites for obvious reasons thought you can just calculate it yourself at your profile):

Code: Select all

+----+---------------+-------+-------+-----------+
| #  | player        | shots | games | spam rate |
+----+---------------+-------+-------+-----------+
|  1 | Niko          | 11773 |    76 |    154.91 |
|  2 | IDDQD         |  3221 |    22 |    146.41 |
|  3 | barunz!       |  1975 |    14 |    141.07 |
|  4 | OneT          |  8642 |    68 |    127.09 |
|  5 | mohawk        |  7214 |    59 |    122.27 |
|  6 | Dvinci        |  6113 |    54 |    113.20 |
|  7 | nina          |  1789 |    16 |    111.81 |
|  8 | A.            |  2324 |    22 |    105.64 |
|  9 | POORCOIDDIOOO |  4477 |    44 |    101.75 |
| 10 | {BLACK}Dii    |  7624 |    75 |    101.65 |
| 11 | Amdoro        | 16049 |   160 |    100.31 |
| 12 | :>            |  1673 |    17 |     98.41 |
| 13 | Leonid63RUS   | 17542 |   184 |     95.34 |
| 14 | Easy frag     |  4862 |    51 |     95.33 |
| 15 | Pizdukas      |  8008 |    88 |     91.00 |
| 16 | nk            |  1538 |    18 |     85.44 |
| 17 | PacMan        |  4557 |    56 |     81.38 |
| 18 | me            |  6573 |    81 |     81.15 |
| 19 | BananaBrain   |  3877 |    48 |     80.77 |
| 20 | *BurN*        |  7639 |    97 |     78.75 |
+----+---------------+-------+-------+-----------+

so what a coincidence that mister reporter comes no other than top 11 and his super follower top 8 nonetheless then perhaps next time instead of come here complaining about the settings you should start considering about stop spamming nades yourselves first that may be of greater help, thank you. and is very interesting that as can be seen nearly no noobs came on top contrary to what precisely the guys that reported typically say that always put the blame on the noobs for the spam when it was precisely themselves/other known players causing it most of the time in fact. most "spam" noobs just empty the gl and quit when bored/killed badly, that was all about the noob nade spam issue, not even close. the typical average nade output is between 40/50 nades per game so I think that up to two, two and a half that value more or less might be acceptable values. the top three for example looks worth of a temp ban at least in my opinion considering the circumstances. anyways just saying.