Orbfare
Dear Sirs,
Although this has been said more than a few times, I would like to take another opportunity to request a removal or effectiveness reduction for the orb in Warfare. Draco, Unhappy Meal and S8nsKeep and I have repeatedly requested and justified these changes, but I wanted to mention the change again. As Onslaught was the second most played game-type in 2004, improvements to Warfare are likely to reflect in improvements in number of people buying and playing the game.
Even though there will be a dozen or more who reply to this thread that the like orbs, I would point out that only a small portion of the people who bought UT3 with the intention of playing actually play, and that few even bought the game relative to previous releases, so only if you want to discard the interest and play time of 99% of purchasers in favor of the very few remaining players who are left who know little enough about the game to not realize how game-destroying the orb is would you want to ignore this problem. I think the orb idea was introduced without consideration for the knowledge of the normal, casual online player and clearly not tested under public conditions. Having played Warfare for a hundred or so online PUGs now, I would suggest to Epic/Midway the following modifications to the orb in Warfare:
Increased Spawn Times: Please have the orb respawn only every after a long delay, similar to redeemers and power-ups. I have, in almost every game, been able to just take back a node, defend off 3 or 4 remaining defenders, start the node and bang, in comes the orb again. Most folks playing online have never clued into the fact that Warfare differs from deathmatch, so if there are only one or two people building the node like normal, it is too difficult to dodge, charge the node and shoot the orb carrier every ten seconds, which makes it impossible to take or hold a node. I can’t even give my team enough time to regroup for a moment before the node is lost again. I have seen servers (Gamers Coalition, for instance) that have mods to do this. Those servers are far more playable than the delivered game, please incorporate that code into the default game on the next patch. The orb idea makes the game unplayable under normal online server conditions of 10 players jumping around deathmatching anywhere and one or two players knowing to play the nodes.
Reduced Efficacy: Please have the orb either take down an enemy node or rebuild it. Doing both instantly is far too much to hope to defend against. The redeemer would take down a node only in Onslaught and was quickly (within months) removed from the game by all but a few servers. There seems to be no intelligent argument for providing an even more effective device. If you look at Onslaught as a marketing study for what players wanted, which is exactly the recommendation of product development strategies, then the orb would be contraindicated. If the node is down to 25% already and the orb takes it down and rebuilds it to 75%, that would also be a great improvement.
Protection Timeout or No-Protection: Please have the orb timeout and vanish after a short period (suggest 30 seconds) or to remove the feature of making a node invulnerable all together. All of the delivered maps included with Warfare have protected nodes for primaries, not open as for instance with Onslaught/Torlan. That makes for a condition, which I have encountered in around half of the games I’ve played, where the primary node is protected by an orb which can’t be gotten at in any way, so there is no way to re-enter the game once the primary is so protected. As an example, I have on several occasions run into a protecting primary on Torlan where the orb carrier can’t be shot from a distance by sniper, the node can’t be shot to prevent respawns at the primary, so any amount of death matching only respawns the enemy back at the node with full health and ammo, and due to the high concentration of enemy players fast attacks such as with a manta are never effective, there are simply too many people to kill. There is no way to effect a comeback once the primary becomes protected.
Change of Default: As a quick fix to the current orb marketing failure, the default mode for Warfare could be changed to having no orbs in the game, and a mutator available to turn them on, opposite to the current provision.
All of the games I played in Onslaught where players chat “very good game” at the end were longer, hard fought games where teams are nearly balanced and hard death-matching is required to slowly move a front. The standard game for Warfare is very fast, and if it involves movement, the movement is due to orb deliveries where most players are left out of the action. I myself always seem to be travelling to the foremost vulnerable node only to find that the moment I get there it has become locked, so that the whole game isn’t so much hard fought as driving around hoping to find a place to play. It is far from interesting, and a great reduction in game-play from Onslaught. If the idea of adding an orb to Onslaught is to improve stalemates, then it should be tweaked to become a defensive weapon, not the sole game focus as is the case with CTF. Maps with multiple primary nodes, as with Dawn in Onslaught, never really showed the stalemate problem, so rather than an orb as an anti-stalemate change, providing only multiple primary, web connected maps such as Dusk would actually work.
Having played around a hundred Warfare games now, I have yet to play a good game, due in all cases to the orb. Please remove it or tweak it in the default game setup.
Although this has been said more than a few times, I would like to take another opportunity to request a removal or effectiveness reduction for the orb in Warfare. Draco, Unhappy Meal and S8nsKeep and I have repeatedly requested and justified these changes, but I wanted to mention the change again. As Onslaught was the second most played game-type in 2004, improvements to Warfare are likely to reflect in improvements in number of people buying and playing the game.
Even though there will be a dozen or more who reply to this thread that the like orbs, I would point out that only a small portion of the people who bought UT3 with the intention of playing actually play, and that few even bought the game relative to previous releases, so only if you want to discard the interest and play time of 99% of purchasers in favor of the very few remaining players who are left who know little enough about the game to not realize how game-destroying the orb is would you want to ignore this problem. I think the orb idea was introduced without consideration for the knowledge of the normal, casual online player and clearly not tested under public conditions. Having played Warfare for a hundred or so online PUGs now, I would suggest to Epic/Midway the following modifications to the orb in Warfare:
Increased Spawn Times: Please have the orb respawn only every after a long delay, similar to redeemers and power-ups. I have, in almost every game, been able to just take back a node, defend off 3 or 4 remaining defenders, start the node and bang, in comes the orb again. Most folks playing online have never clued into the fact that Warfare differs from deathmatch, so if there are only one or two people building the node like normal, it is too difficult to dodge, charge the node and shoot the orb carrier every ten seconds, which makes it impossible to take or hold a node. I can’t even give my team enough time to regroup for a moment before the node is lost again. I have seen servers (Gamers Coalition, for instance) that have mods to do this. Those servers are far more playable than the delivered game, please incorporate that code into the default game on the next patch. The orb idea makes the game unplayable under normal online server conditions of 10 players jumping around deathmatching anywhere and one or two players knowing to play the nodes.
Reduced Efficacy: Please have the orb either take down an enemy node or rebuild it. Doing both instantly is far too much to hope to defend against. The redeemer would take down a node only in Onslaught and was quickly (within months) removed from the game by all but a few servers. There seems to be no intelligent argument for providing an even more effective device. If you look at Onslaught as a marketing study for what players wanted, which is exactly the recommendation of product development strategies, then the orb would be contraindicated. If the node is down to 25% already and the orb takes it down and rebuilds it to 75%, that would also be a great improvement.
Protection Timeout or No-Protection: Please have the orb timeout and vanish after a short period (suggest 30 seconds) or to remove the feature of making a node invulnerable all together. All of the delivered maps included with Warfare have protected nodes for primaries, not open as for instance with Onslaught/Torlan. That makes for a condition, which I have encountered in around half of the games I’ve played, where the primary node is protected by an orb which can’t be gotten at in any way, so there is no way to re-enter the game once the primary is so protected. As an example, I have on several occasions run into a protecting primary on Torlan where the orb carrier can’t be shot from a distance by sniper, the node can’t be shot to prevent respawns at the primary, so any amount of death matching only respawns the enemy back at the node with full health and ammo, and due to the high concentration of enemy players fast attacks such as with a manta are never effective, there are simply too many people to kill. There is no way to effect a comeback once the primary becomes protected.
Change of Default: As a quick fix to the current orb marketing failure, the default mode for Warfare could be changed to having no orbs in the game, and a mutator available to turn them on, opposite to the current provision.
All of the games I played in Onslaught where players chat “very good game” at the end were longer, hard fought games where teams are nearly balanced and hard death-matching is required to slowly move a front. The standard game for Warfare is very fast, and if it involves movement, the movement is due to orb deliveries where most players are left out of the action. I myself always seem to be travelling to the foremost vulnerable node only to find that the moment I get there it has become locked, so that the whole game isn’t so much hard fought as driving around hoping to find a place to play. It is far from interesting, and a great reduction in game-play from Onslaught. If the idea of adding an orb to Onslaught is to improve stalemates, then it should be tweaked to become a defensive weapon, not the sole game focus as is the case with CTF. Maps with multiple primary nodes, as with Dawn in Onslaught, never really showed the stalemate problem, so rather than an orb as an anti-stalemate change, providing only multiple primary, web connected maps such as Dusk would actually work.
Having played around a hundred Warfare games now, I have yet to play a good game, due in all cases to the orb. Please remove it or tweak it in the default game setup.
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