The TBC Problem (Turn Based Chat)

[Blitz]

I wanted to make this thread in order to gauge how everyone else felt about the subject and as a personal means of complaint towards it, from a lack of a better place to put it.
What I would like to briefly touch upon is the way the chat is now implemented during TBC (Turn Based Combat). As of right now, the minute you are put into a TBC scenario, whatever message or action you take will be put in a queue and sent a few turns later. While that may seem great on paper and fair / in tune with how you would perceive TBC to be executed, it does not work great in practice.

During TBC, you have around 6 seconds at your turn to maneuver your character around, attack a target and speak or perform an action. After a certain amount of time though, you will lose your Action Points, so if you spent too much time idling before moving - you will not be able to attack for example. Therefore, most of the time during your turn will be spent in a S2K like manner - getting into an advantageous position and attacking.

Now, while you can speak and perform out of your turn to queue up what you wish, so that you may focus on the S2K aspect, it quickly becomes either useless or more dangerous, as the delayed message will be sent only after the actions of those in front of you.
In truth, you have no real means of communication or relaying any kind of consecutive message, as there is no way to tell what your queued message or action will respond to - but there is no way to cancel it either once queued, if you realise that the situation has dramatically changed from when you wrote it to when your turn will be. And realistically waiting for your own turn to act is not feasible as you only have mere 6 seconds.

*Please* remove the restrictions so that a coherent scenario may be played out during TBC again or just remove TBC completely as it now just plays out completely as a slowed down, clunky version of S2K.

 

[M3ntal]

I have no opinion of this but I will say that TBC is not gonna go anywhere, it's been established already that it will not be removed, so just letting you know.

 

[Kappatalist]

I think increasing the action points, especially with more players would help. I love the idea of TBC, but it's so brutally slow.

 

[Vulpes Callida]

My personal opinion as someone who has yet to try combat in this server. So, taking it from what I've read/seen

TBC/S2K do not really allow for much roleplay, which IMO is the point of... roleplay based games and gamemodes. Now, I understand not wanting to spend 1-2 hours roleplaying what is ICly considered to be 5 minutes when it involves like 5+ people. But... I don't know. Doesn't the magic kinda fly away when you can't shoot an extinguisher and make it explode, or, shoot a nearby gas pipe, or, use an empty magazine as a fake grenade bait?

I've read through the TBC rules and with what Blitz is saying it kind of raises an interesting point. Should all combat situations be reduced to simply walking and shooting? I know it is a game, and I know there's little talking in the heat of the moment, but carving out strategy and communication over stat-checking pew-pews... Fairly boring.

Not to add the new PK rules I've read also don't favour this either. While death can be instant and non-chalant, if anything it could also be so in RP, no? Rather than your body just eventually ragdolling due to having more bullets than a colander, and, boom, story over.

Maybe a few changes could favour the TBC system? Increase the timer to perhaps 30 seconds? For people to be able to type, or try more funky shit outside of just walking into someone's line of sight firing and retreating. Maybe deaths in S2K/TBC could put the characters in a knockout/injured state, so when the combat is over they can roleplay their death more elegantly, be patched up, or captured for interrogation, or left alive...

IDK, I suck.

 

[Blitz]

I have no opinion of this but I will say that TBC is not gonna go anywhere, it's been established already that it will not be removed, so just letting you know.

I don't want TBC to be abolished. I want the chat restrictions lifted - for clarity
But if TBC continues to be in its current state, with the restrictions - I'd rather have it removed

 

[Blitz]

My personal opinion as someone who has yet to try combat in this server. So, taking it from what I've read/seen

TBC/S2K do not really allow for much roleplay, which IMO is the point of... roleplay based games and gamemodes. Now, I understand not wanting to spend 1-2 hours roleplaying what is ICly considered to be 5 minutes when it involves like 5+ people. But... I don't know. Doesn't the magic kinda fly away when you can't shoot an extinguisher and make it explode, or, shoot a nearby gas pipe, or, use an empty magazine as a fake grenade bait?

I've read through the TBC rules and with what Blitz is saying it kind of raises an interesting point. Should all combat situations be reduced to simply walking and shooting? I know it is a game, and I know there's little talking in the heat of the moment, but carving out strategy and communication over stat-checking pew-pews... Fairly boring.

Not to add the new PK rules I've read also don't favour this either. While death can be instant and non-chalant, if anything it could also be so in RP, no? Rather than your body just eventually ragdolling due to having more bullets than a colander, and, boom, story over.

Maybe a few changes could favour the TBC system? Increase the timer to perhaps 30 seconds? For people to be able to type, or try more funky shit outside of just walking into someone's line of sight firing and retreating. Maybe deaths in S2K/TBC could put the characters in a knockout/injured state, so when the combat is over they can roleplay their death more elegantly, be patched up, or captured for interrogation, or left alive...

IDK, I suck.

I believe you are already knocked out by default upon death, but I otherwise agree with your sentiment on more RP and the ragdoll death leaving no gratification for the players involved

 

[RedHotGinger]

when you can't shoot an extinguisher and make it explode, or, shoot a nearby gas pipe, or, use an empty magazine as a fake grenade bait?

In a perfect world, this wouldn't matter. Problem is the fact that most combat RP devolves into a playground shit-fest of LOOC arguments over the exact, specific, pseudo-scientific details of whatever action was taken.

I suppose to allow talking, something you could do is code in a system in TBC where anytime someone opens the chat box their turn timer stops, and they are allowed to type in brief commands. Something short enough that you could feasibly shout it/say it in the midst of combat.

 

[Blitz]

Or just disable the chat restrictions... that's all I want. It wasn't always like this :/

 

[Vulpes Callida]

In a perfect world, this wouldn't matter. Problem is the fact that most combat RP devolves into a playground shit-fest of LOOC arguments over the exact, specific, pseudo-scientific details of whatever action was taken.

I suppose to allow talking something you could do is code in a system in TBC where anytime someone opens the chat box their turn timer stops, and they are allowed to type in brief commands. Something short enough that you could feasibly shout it/say it in the midst of combat.

You are correct, but it seems odd to me that rather than correcting potentially toxic or harmful attitudes in roleplay a whole system is created to circumvent them in their entirety.

That means those attitudes are still there, no?

Even if they don't show as much.

 

[Appetite Ruining Kebab]

rather than correcting potentially toxic or harmful attitudes in roleplay a whole system is created to circumvent them in their entirety.

welcome to willard

 

[Appetite Ruining Kebab]

You are correct, but it seems odd to me that rather than correcting potentially toxic or harmful attitudes in roleplay a whole system is created to circumvent them in their entirety.

That means those attitudes are still there, no?

Even if they don't show as much.

in all seriousness this is 100% true and complicated to fix, i have been in communities where there's much more mutual respect & a sense of fair play around in-character conflict and you can genuinely have some s2rp moments where everyone walks away happy but as far as getting the avg player here to that mindset goes youre shit out of luck

making a system like TBC at the end of the day is a simple alternative to risking losing your playerbase in an attempt to initiate a cultural shift toward more 'maturity' but in the same vein it reinforces the behaviors you outlined because now the people who caused this system to be brought about in the first place have no reason to change for the better

 

[Xushi]

given that it was originally set up like this to prevent people from radioing in help immediately and breaking timescale (afaik), maybe it could still be delayed for only radio commands?

 

[Rabid]

You are correct, but it seems odd to me that rather than correcting potentially toxic or harmful attitudes in roleplay a whole system is created to circumvent them in their entirety.

That means those attitudes are still there, no?

Even if they don't show as much.

Sadly WN isn't the type of place you can very easily correct those attitudes because they're built in to the competetive nature of the gamemode the community is based around. In fact, changing mentalities as a whole in a community on Gmod is gruelling. I've only seen it done semi-successfully once, and even then it wasn't anywhere near perfect because people still got mad and toxic now and again.

The only other time it works routinely is in closed servers with limited people who're all usually friends. I really can't put the blame on the WN staff for that; that's the result of Gmod being what it is.

Ultimately while the community/server collaborative as a whole at the end of the day TBC/S2K are usually situations wherein someone is going to lose their character at the end of it. People have every reason to tryhard and beat the other person out to come out on top.

 

[Gr4Ss]

Might just do this

.given that it was originally set up like this to prevent people from radioing in help immediately and breaking timescale (afaik), maybe it could still be delayed for only radio commands?

Edit; pushed change, will be live as of tomorrow morning. Let's see how that goes.

 

[0xNiklas]

ust remove TBC completely as it now just plays out completely as a slowed down, clunky version of S2K.

mfw deleting the iconic thing about WN

 

[Thood74]

mfw deleting the iconic thing about WN

Besides the fact this isn't being pushed as the only and necessary solution, if something iconic doesn't work, that's not a good thing to be known for.

Regardless of if you view TBC as the second coming of christ whose developers deserve high praise or an overdeveloped mess whose developers deserve to be shunned, or somewhere much more reasonably in between, shouldn't WN strive to be known for high roleplay standards that create enjoyable and immersive scenarios instead?

ignoring that sidetrack, it seems like being able to communicate mid combat was one of the things TBC was advertised for initially off dev-log, and is one of the primary arguments I recieved. Limiting the ability to communicate mid-combat means that S2K is now a legitimately better alternative for text based communication. Even with the change so that it's only radio based, it would now be legitimately more preferable to engage in S2K if I wanted to use my radio mid-combat, regardless of how risky that is.

That's all.

 

[Taliazure]

In a perfect world, this wouldn't matter. Problem is the fact that most combat RP devolves into a playground shit-fest of LOOC arguments over the exact, specific, pseudo-scientific details of whatever action was taken.

I suppose to allow talking, something you could do is code in a system in TBC where anytime someone opens the chat box their turn timer stops, and they are allowed to type in brief commands. Something short enough that you could feasibly shout it/say it in the midst of combat.

That will just be abused.
While I liked the whole you can only talk in your turn thing, in practice it has shown to be rather meh.
An example is when we came into contact with rebels our cp group broke up, I stayed behind trying to keep the citizens on the floor and keep everything behind us calm and the other group fought the rebel, it was incredibly hard to speak to the citizens as I had to wait for the 5 people behind me to end their turns and when it did I had only some seconds to type my sentence before it was queued and I had to wait again.
I think the tbc restrictions should apply to radio and requests not speaking.

 

[Taliazure]

But as G4ss said it will be limited to radio only as of tomorrow, I think this will work way better and it will resolve the issue of you being shot and instantly requesting backup.
With this btoh rebels and Cps will able to perform swift ambushes.

 

[Blitz]

But as G4ss said it will be limited to radio only as of tomorrow, I think this will work way better and it will resolve the issue of you being shot and instantly requesting backup.
With this btoh rebels and Cps will able to perform swift ambushes.

That tomorrow is by the way yesterday