Friendly Fire
Dread
Join Date: 2002-07-24 Member: 993Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Does NS need one?</div> There are some problems and advantages to friendly fire, especially many disadvantages in such a teamwork oriented game as natural selection. However I feel that ff might have a room even in NS. Lets brake it down:
<b>Advantages in NS</b>
Currently in NS a marine can go sit in the Siege/Grenade launcher fire and gain complete invincibility against melee aliens. Not only is this annoying but also a serious themebreaker. Marines taking cover in their own artillery fire? Some sort of ff-system would stop this kind of behaviour and add tactics/counter tactics and more immersive gameplay.
<b>Disadvantages</b>
Friendly fire is usually a bad bad thing in teambased games, especially if the team is supposed to act together. And if you are not playing against bots. It just usually makes people angry and divides the team.
<b>Kharaa ff</b>
Aliens are mostly melee based or they have a large splash damage and you often hit your teammates in frenzy of the battle. Adding ff for Kharaa wouldn't actually add or solve anything, hence I mostly concentrate on the marine side. <i>However you are more than welcome to work something out for Kharaa too <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo--></i>
<b>Solutions?</b>
One potential solution would be to add counter-ff. Friendly fire that would actually deal damage to the player who hurts other player in the same team. While this may sound counter intuitive, slightly tweaked it might just work:
<b>Only Marines would have friendly fire. When marine A shoots at marine B, 10% of the damage is dealt to B and 20% to A.</b> As always, numbers are subject to change.
<i>Backstory: Nanite field around marines can only protect so much and always lets some damage through. However - as a punishment system for renegade, field shocked or just plain dumb marines - TSA introduced electro-shock device planted in Frontiersmen armors. This system gives marines electric shocks according to the amount of friendly damage marine deals. Of course TSA doesn't want to kill their marines but after one deals enough damage to other friendly marine, he will probably die of electric shocks.</i>
This system isn't flawless but in paper it works pretty well. Teamkillers die 2 times for every friendly marine they kill. Teamkilling doesn't encourage vengeance because you hurt yourself two times more than you hurt the other guy. It also gives some punishment for blind spraying or chunking grenades among other marines. Players won't run in to each others lines of fires because they get hurt themselves. It's not completely llama-proof but it will turn away most of them. If this system makes marines cover each other less because they are afraid of getting hurt themselves, we can make this rule apply only to GL, Siege(as in you get damaged a bit by it) and the maybe-soon-to-come flamethrower.
Discuss.
<b>Advantages in NS</b>
Currently in NS a marine can go sit in the Siege/Grenade launcher fire and gain complete invincibility against melee aliens. Not only is this annoying but also a serious themebreaker. Marines taking cover in their own artillery fire? Some sort of ff-system would stop this kind of behaviour and add tactics/counter tactics and more immersive gameplay.
<b>Disadvantages</b>
Friendly fire is usually a bad bad thing in teambased games, especially if the team is supposed to act together. And if you are not playing against bots. It just usually makes people angry and divides the team.
<b>Kharaa ff</b>
Aliens are mostly melee based or they have a large splash damage and you often hit your teammates in frenzy of the battle. Adding ff for Kharaa wouldn't actually add or solve anything, hence I mostly concentrate on the marine side. <i>However you are more than welcome to work something out for Kharaa too <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo--></i>
<b>Solutions?</b>
One potential solution would be to add counter-ff. Friendly fire that would actually deal damage to the player who hurts other player in the same team. While this may sound counter intuitive, slightly tweaked it might just work:
<b>Only Marines would have friendly fire. When marine A shoots at marine B, 10% of the damage is dealt to B and 20% to A.</b> As always, numbers are subject to change.
<i>Backstory: Nanite field around marines can only protect so much and always lets some damage through. However - as a punishment system for renegade, field shocked or just plain dumb marines - TSA introduced electro-shock device planted in Frontiersmen armors. This system gives marines electric shocks according to the amount of friendly damage marine deals. Of course TSA doesn't want to kill their marines but after one deals enough damage to other friendly marine, he will probably die of electric shocks.</i>
This system isn't flawless but in paper it works pretty well. Teamkillers die 2 times for every friendly marine they kill. Teamkilling doesn't encourage vengeance because you hurt yourself two times more than you hurt the other guy. It also gives some punishment for blind spraying or chunking grenades among other marines. Players won't run in to each others lines of fires because they get hurt themselves. It's not completely llama-proof but it will turn away most of them. If this system makes marines cover each other less because they are afraid of getting hurt themselves, we can make this rule apply only to GL, Siege(as in you get damaged a bit by it) and the maybe-soon-to-come flamethrower.
Discuss.
Comments
For you nubs who dont know what this console command does, It sets tournament mode on, for clan play. This enables FF. FF has been in NS since 1.0, you just dont see it on many pub servers.
Its a good idea and would make the game more realistic and tatical, I just dont see it working...
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Well, with what was suggested above... the person would die after doing 50% damage to his "target", so he would then have to hunt down the same guy and unload the other 50% to kill them...
Also, it would be VERY easy to k/b lamers who play this lame style...
As an added idea (I know.. I know... wrong forum) I thought that once the other player has Tk'd himself, then all players affected by his tk'ing would regenerate the health lost...
I don't know.. but it's a suggestion...
The way I see it the only real problem with marines and FF all spawn from area affect weapons, the gernade launcher, mines and the siege. Instead of worrying about complicated ff percents, who gets delt damage (although that is an intresting idea) just do it so that ALL area affect wepons do 30% dmage to friendlies. With that number a single mine wouldent kill a marine but, using a mine field to make your self invincible to skulks would. The GL would require 2-3 near misses to kill you which means no more having you pal bouce nades off your head onto the floor to make you impossible to melee kill. And most importanly a marine wouldent be able to knife a hive while 2 sieges are blasting it (a serios pet peeve of mine since ns1)
I think khaara should be immune to ff. After all most of there ranged attacks are just spewing the acids and bacteria that there made up off onto mariens. FF bite damage is more of an artifact of the game (its hard to tell exactly were the "bitegun" is going to hit when 3 skulks are eating a resnode)
Not necessarily. I have played on many public servers with tournament mode on and never had a real problem with it. If it is a solid server with an admin on it you will be fine.
Not so careful marines who are used to spraying when they see an alien could ruin it. Gler's who attack the alien near someone else could ruin it....
If you accidently shoot a teammate you get kicked. So why not just turn off FF??
When I quit DoD, it was because (and I'm not exaggerating this) every server I joined for over a week had a teamkilling idiot on, ruining the game for everyone. I don't want to see that happen to NS.
Here's why:
-it's a VERY crowded game sometimes: lot of marines moving through very small corridors. It's hard enough getting a shot off at the enemy without your teamates strafing in front of you without having to worry about killing them as well. And it just doesn't work to only have the marines in front fire: skulks and lerks can move right through and over a group of marines, endangering everyone. If you don't have a bead on a skulk and the gun blaring when it starts jumping over the heads of the guys in front, it's already too late.
-Pubs have a lot more more people with bad pings. These people can't help but have lousy aim.
-Pubs have a lot of people that don't know the game itself well enough, let alone can worry about learning the game AND avoiding FF
-Pubs have fewer people interacting via voice-chat, so it's MUCH harder to get through to people about how they should stategize to make sure that they aren't hitting each other.
Noob kills Marine1 teammate
Marine1 "Why'd you kill me?"
Noob kills Marine1 teammate
Admin kickban Noob.
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As you can see, it's a good idea because not a single person here has pointed out any of it's flaws, which it appears to have none.
However, there IS a way for your system to still suffer abuse:
Marine's who want to be a$$'s can just run into his teammate's fire, thus screwing them over. While this is obviously easy to counter(just stop firing), it is just a possible situation I'd thought you should know about.
Anyhow, your suggestion is great dread, and I think it <b>deserves</b> to be put in NS.
if a gorgey drops a OC in marine base a siege can destory thr whole marine base.. very quickly..
Not necessarily. I have played on many public servers with tournament mode on and never had a real problem with it. If it is a solid server with an admin on it you will be fine. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Then you get a guy with the tag [champions] joining and we shall see how much fun that server is with out being able to survive a teammate.
Doing this effectively removes the frustration of marines abusing the splash of these two weapons against aliens WHILE allowing easy concentration of fire in the heat of battle.
(for story, say something like armor designed to recognize and absorb tsa bullets with no damage, however, such a system cannot prevent damage from a grenade blast or the shockwave/gravity-thingy-a-ma-bobby thing that the siege cannon does)
BTW ff is obviously more **** for the marines then aliens. they only really have to worry about it when fades come and unless your fade is a complete moron you will be fine.