If your getting Killed by a G5, then change your tactics, Go for long ranged kills.

I loved playing BW on Rankin. Hurry up Crucible, I am missing the carnage.

The overriding point here is that some see the overpowered weapons as fun while others do not. Let's not forget that most players did not buy the root game for necessarily realistic gaming, and that many of our Ballistic Weapons players like the over the top weapons. I, for one, like both fast and slow paced styles and will change the settings in the mutator menu to suit my needs.

That's where the customization of BW shines. For those who enjoy the tactical gameplay, they can use the custom made balance mods by Kaboodles or Azarael, and for those who enjoy the over the top gameplay, they can install the bonus packs and set the lightning gun and golden gun as a starter weapon. For those who want to have iron-sights on the move, there's even a mutator for that. It's up to the server provider and the player base to choose.

Personally, I think the right choice to please both hip-firers and sight-users would be to include modifiable iron sight speeds as an option in the menu. I'll probably incorporate this in my mod's mutator once it gets out of beta.

Well Put Sgt. Kelly ^^

*pulls out double golden glocks, full auto with super beserk mod on and no reload*
Bwa ha ha!

Mal

P.S I recently found a new favourite set up ^^

The problem with this is that server admins don't really think about this sort of thing. They'll put all of the cheeze weapons right next to the more reasonable ones, and everything becomes a crazy spamfest, where the only way to win is to grab all the heaviest weapons and lay mines literally everywhere.

This is only part of the problem.

Be aware that the majority of people who will post on forums (and frequent them) are people who are so die hard for your mod that they will accept pretty much anything.

Take the AS server I run (the only one left that gets players). We have about 550 unique IDs playing every month. We have about 15 people who frequent the forums, despite our forums being an important resource for the server. However, in terms of people who whine about changes we make to the game, maps we make / fix... We have about 200 of those IDs doing that. Most people who have played your mod, and are dissatisfied with it, won't post here - they won't think it's worth it for a mod that they think sucks, or they don't value the potential enough to post. I've had about 5 players I know join the server I ran when it was BW - none of them were interested beyond the first 5-6 games, because they felt there wasn't enough gameplay in the mod. And these guys were lowskilled to average players, too. :/

In short, I am suggesting that the number of people who have tried this mod, decided it sucks and left without even finding these forums far eclipses the people who post here in support of overpowered and lame setups with pretty much zero gameplay. I make no secret that I hate these kinds of people, and it's because their presence almost certainly dooms any mod they find to balance hell specifically because they are the main types who post on boards and they are more than happy to accept (and mostly support) any change which reduces the impact of skill on the game. The numerical advantage they have compared to the people who are dissatisfied but are actually going to post on the boards then becomes overwhelming, as usual dev attitudes are to please the majority of the players, as they see them.

Obviously, not all of the people who are dissatisfied will suddenly like the mod because you make it playable again. But I would wager that most will, and your official updates draw a hell of a lot more attention than some mod somewhere in a subforum - BOTH to server admins AND to the wider UT2004 community. If I were to try to peddle my quick sighting weapons to server admins, I would have to do a hell of a lot of convincing and probably fail at it - whereas official updates are going to be installed, no matter what, as long as the administrator is active.

So yeah, bottom line: More people than you think would appreciate the default setup being the skilled one. If certain types of players want to mess about offline or whatever, it should require them to f*** around to do it - not the online players. It's the online players who have the most potential to get mods to explode in popularity, not the offline ones - and as previously mentioned, most server admins will run default setups because they just don't know any better. Make the default setup the best it can possibly be in terms of depth of gameplay, and leave the questionable weapons and features out. Make a checkbox for all the dodgy crap like massive damage disparities so that noobs don't cry. If there are (and I'm going to have to be honest here) noobs who want to run servers in DM with the G5 and HAMR in Rankin or whatever, they can do their own configuration for that, and watch the pretty explosions instead of playing the damn game.

EDIT



Ironsights were developed for a really, really good reason - to add depth to the gameplay. The choice between sighting for more accuracy or hipfiring for a quicker attack at the risk of being penalised because of the weapon's spread, in addition to your reaction time and accuracy when sighting if you choose to do the former at close range (because it's harder to sight in close than it is to hipfire in close, but proper aim while sighting yields the best results), in yet more addition to the enabling of proper long-range fire by sighting, and once again the value of accuracy... This is where the skill in "realism shooters" come from. Hip-fire users don't need to be "pleased" by having all the skill in the game stripped away to please their delicate sensibilities and prevent them from having to learn fine motor control. They are quite free to hip-fire if they want, they'll just get owned if they play online - and that is how it should be for anyone who refuses to embrace all aspects of the game. Additionally, it won't even matter to them offline, because bots can't sight anyway... You might argue that CS is a hipfire game... Yes, CS is dated, and it also uses cone-fire - no recoil or chaos system there, just conefire. If ironsights are disabled (and 0.8 seconds at 0.4 walking speed is pretty much disabled when you can't even dodge with sights up) reasonable conefire with accurate crosshairs should be forced on, and indeed I'd argue that it should be implemented even if ironsights are off. Chaos pretty much f****d hipfire over into complete uselessness as well - I wouldn't even play 2.x until I figured out the ironsights.

I have a feeling, though, even if sights are changed, they'll only be increased in speed by such a negligible fraction as to keep hipfiring the name of the game at worst, or at best the increase in sight speed will be to a general 0.25 - 0.35 seconds to raise for all weapons, with no movement bonuses or quicker raise speeds for light weapons, thus making assault rifles and specifically the S-AR 12 (<3) God-Tier compared to pretty much every other weapon.

Looking at these proposed changes that you want Azreal, we'll be alienating the "offline" players then with "competitive" setups.

Some of your changes are planned to be incorporated into the update, but the mod allows the customizations such as what weapons are allowed in, and such.

-Iron Sight times
-Iron sight walking.

Regarding the random damages. This is a sticky issue. Changing all weapons to some default value would require shit-loads of rebalancing. We'll have to see what we can do. This is not some simple "fix".

FYI, the HAMR and G5 are among my favourite weapons. Why would i want them not to be in? Because some admins are too lazy to change the weapons setup? Alot more players are going to want those in than those that are not. Many admins will also be setting up servers with more than just "competitive" play in mind. You're asking that i cater to your needs.

There are certainly valid points that you raise, and some will be addressed. But i can say that so far, all weapons will be in by default.

We'll update you on what is going to be in the new update. By all means let us know what you think are issues, but just understand, that we cannot cater to everyones specific desires for the mod.

So the majority of people think it sucks, but don't say anything?
Why would I put in hundreds of hours of work, making features for people who couldn't be bothered to post and are only going to think it sucks? Furthermore, I should disregard the people who do give feedback?
Luckily we do read the feedback, including yours...

Clearly, you prefer realism and competitive gameplay. BW was not designed to be a realism sim, it was designed primarily with fun in mind. We also wanted it to be possible to tailor it to more realistic gameplay or more crazy mayhem, which is why it can be configured either way. The default setup is meant to provided the simplest path to the typical BW experience and access to the most features with the least amount of messing with settings. Once players have seen what there is, they can decide what they want to change... Some players disable reloading and recoil, some remove the super weapons and increase recoil, we can't put the default setup at any extreme end of the scale.


You don't need to be so pessimistic about this one. They'll change quite a lot.

We are considering removing the grenade timer bar.

We are considering reducing or completely getting rid of random damages.

We will see if there is a cost-effective way of rebalancing the default setup in regards to the big weapons.

Fortunately some of these things were already on the list for this update.

Realism sucks, I think BW is great how it is. BW plus Rankin, some of the best times for me. If they want realism I think they should play Call of Duty games. As for me I am trying my best not to pull my hair out waiting for the standalone Crucible.

I spent a lot of time configuring those random damages. If you remove that feature I hope you at least keep it in the code so all that work doesn't go to waste.

Of course!
We would only be changing the values in the weapon properties.

When BW began, we had random damage because it was more realistic. I changed my thinking on the matter a while back (you'll notice the Crucible doesn't have random damage).

With any luck, we'll also be releasing shots of some of the new weapons in the next few days...

Coolbeans

OK, I've read all the posts after mine.

I should probably be a bit more clear. There's absolutely nothing wrong with anything in 2.1 apart from the gameplay. I have always maintained that everything works in a rock-solid fashion and looks great - which is why it's frustrating to see 2.1's gameplay let down a mod which is in all other aspects quite frankly the best piece of work for UT2004.

Now that you have confirmed you're looking into the various issues, I thank you for reading my particularly inflammatory posts and I hope you understand that I'm not just being antagonistic for the sake of it. I will look forward to the changes - as said before, even with the ironsight fix alone I will play 2.5.

Dude COD is probably the least realistic game I ever played, except for the real weapons it contains most of the things are unrealistic.
And many games have a selective realism if you want to know.
I personally like the guns how they are at most even not completely (I mean those stock functions are a bit useless and might be integrated with weapon pop up and down ...), but yeah for me the ironsighting is the thing that needs to be changed, it's too slow and I reduced the inaccuracy while on move to zero to keep the mod fast paced ...

Well i wouldn't call CoD the least realistic game around I am however quite sick of and bored of the whole "real warfare" setting and theme thats so popular nowadays. If i have to see another "marine", i'll crack

most realism features in games are arbitrary - and can be seen either way.

Agreed I'm also sick of the real warfare setting too, like I was sick of WW2 games, a few years ago, really...
I miss too much those Doom, Quake, Unreal, And Duke Nukem games, and even Deus Ex even though I found Stalker to be a great alternative

The only trend one should stick to in making a game is making it fun!, who cares if it's not realistic, or has a bizarre art style, or crazy stuff you just wouldn't think of liking in a game, if it's fun to play for almost all players, you have succeeded because people will want to play it again and again!...

As the developer you have to think outside of the minds and opinions of any single person, and in the end all you can do is try the best to make your game as fun to play as possible, because the're will always be people who won't like it. And, obviously you won't want to make a game that you yourself don't enjoy, why else would you be an indie developer?...

There is such a fine and unexplainable balance to what makes a game good, and you can't understand this until you've really learnt about the game development field..

BW is fun to play, and any small issues of preference that don't affect the overall quality of gameplay are not worth worrying about, especially when the desired feature can be customized to your liking anyway.. BW is customizable for that reason, if you have a preference, you can change things..

It is well designed to cater for almost everyones needs in a moderate and solid way, and thats not easy to do..

For me the only thing that needs to be arranged is the sighting, that's pretty much what the mod needs otherwise the mod is great.

:D

This is awesome news. Ballistic Weapons is pretty much always on when I play UT2004. The number of weapons included as well as the variety make every match fresh and unpredictable. It's especially fun to play with in Invasion and with custom monsters (my setup uses the Doom 3 and Quake monster packs, will probably add Xenomorphs and Predators the next time I start UT2004 up). Any news on new bonus packs, updates, fixes, etc. brings a smile to my face.

Especially considering I've been dealing with a (figurative) headache after a (very) short stint on Combat Arms. This news really cheered me up a lot.

I look forward to the update. At the same time, I'm in no rush, as I'm sure RuneStorm is also taking their time to make this release as awesome as possible. (:

But yeah, I'm happy and excited. :D