community feedback thread for TBC vs S2K

[jhenderson]

hi
a lot of the community took part in a play test on 2/11/2022 on the dev server, both S2K and TBC were tried out independently, i think largely the players think that TBC does not work for groups larger than 8 players - or that it's extremely unfun and slow, ive composed a list of suggestions or thought processes that should be taken into consideration

TBC currently is painfully slow and annoying, yes combine are badly unbalanced in S2K, but when they're incredibly outnumbered it's actually a fair fight. TBC for small fights, S2K for large.

suggestions​

time-to-kill (TTK) should be kept extremely low, it should take a lot of time to actually kill another player. this helps reduce irritation or frustration on the player's part, increases roleplay-ability for their character, and slows down fights in a way that is more meaningful rather an annoyingly slow. low time to kill actually creates a ton of friction. i had a lot of "Oh fuck I got fucking shot run away!" moments during S2K.

1. consider decreasing damage done to players who are crouched (?) (speculative suggestion tbh), currently you can still freely crouch or duck in TBC. this was actually exploited by an OTA player earlier, he ducked constantly to change his hitbox in TBC so I wouldn't easily kill him at mid-range. probably reduced damage too. im not salty and i really dont care, but this is an issue. anyway, players who crouch, use cover and realistic tactics to avoid being shot should be rewarded. crouching on your turn should consume action points and while we're on the notion of crouching - ota and cps have an advantage over citizen player models automatically. their hitboxes are significantly smaller when they crouch, au contraire, citizen and rebel player models stick up like a sore thumb, also it looks really retarded ​
2. introduce a sprinting mechanic. this might already technically be in, but like in XCOM, you should be able to move significant distances if you opt to not aim and shoot. this makes flanking more viable like it is in S2K.

3. more staff interventions in TBC - staff should be able to manually kick out individual players who are stuck in TBC due to bugs. staff should be able to manually create and designate TBC groups during large engagements to split up the action. it's more fun that way but honestly just use S2K in 8+ player encounters. use organized squad or platoon elements during planned TBC fights to designate different attack points or objectives so that several different TBC fights are occuring simultaneously independently of one another, that might sound very CombineControl of me to say but it's more fun for everyone if combat in general is more organized on both ends and at the end of the day it has to be driven by staff, the average player is simply too unreliable to launch more elaborate coordination than yelling at each other over discord voice chat.

Getting Shot (or shot at)​

1. Getting shot at in S2K is really fucking intense currently but it desperately needs the extra "oompf" to it to make it a little more crazy. Consider taking it to ARMA 3 milsim larper levels of insanity. Maybe add a screen shake, heartbeat racing, aim accuracy reducing style effect when players are shot at by automatic fire. Kinda like Rising Storm 2. This makes suppressing fire more useful in S2K.​
2. The bleed-out system is neat, but there's a real paradigm on whether or not it should be more arcade, more intense, or more realistic and these are all not necessarily mutually exclusive. On Site 86 whenever players died they actually respawned immediately on their corpses, but were ragdolled and told to wait for the fight to end, when fights ended the player's injuries were assigned by an automatic system ingame, though some of it was staff intervention. Staff could assign gunshot wounds to various spots on the character's body and they were left to either by captured, executed, suicide, or medical RPed on. Sometimes the spawn on death broke or was turned off to avoid exploitation, so players were just teleported back to injury RP.​

consider all of my suggestions independently of each other, tbh i feel like i put this thread in the wrogn place, move it if it is.

 

[The Milkman]

i think the TBC during the test was so awful was because someone went around stunsticking people and putting them in the waitlist

 

[jhenderson]

i think the TBC during the test was so awful was because someone went around stunsticking people and putting them in the waitlist

we should kick his fucking ass

 

[swagile]

15 people tbc

i take nap and wake up still 4th in turn

 

[The Milkman]

15 people tbc

i take nap and wake up still 4th in turn

Start in: 3 rounds

 

[jhenderson]

15 people tbc

i take nap and wake up still 4th in turn

just be thankful TBC isnt /me directed and has timers so you dont have to filter through player's 5 paragraph purple prose essays about dodging getting knocked out and counter-attacking with a roundhouse kick.

 

[slick]

TBC is an incredibly unpolished system, which shouldn't have been put into place until it was 100 percent ready to be used. Rushing out a system that is so, so important is undoubtedly hurting the server. Engagements right now come down to who has the highest speed skill (completely blocks the others turn), and who has the most numbers. It employs no tactics bar RUSH RUSH RUSH, there is no cover mechanic, there is no miss chance, etc.

For now, I'd opt to S2K for most things. In any event I run, I opt for S2RP w/ rolls for players, or S2K with NPCs. It helps with the flow and engagement of players. Until TBC is adequate, it needs to be disabled.

 

[jhenderson]

TBC is an incredibly unpolished system, which shouldn't have been put into place until it was 100 percent ready to be used. Rushing out a system that is so, so important is undoubtedly hurting the server. Engagements right now come down to who has the highest speed skill (completely blocks the others turn), and who has the most numbers. It employs no tactics bar RUSH RUSH RUSH, there is no cover mechanic, there is no miss chance, etc.

For now, I'd opt to S2K for most things. In any event I run, I opt for S2RP w/ rolls for players, or S2K with NPCs. It helps with the flow and engagement of players. Until TBC is adequate, it needs to be disabled.

i like this guy, he's clearly got the guts to call out staff team mistakes. go ahead and skip his trial phase, straight to super admin, promote ahead of peers.

honestly though just scripthook avalon and steal their combat SWEP system. binary doesnt even play and cereal's too busy honking at hipsters in ottawa to do anything about it

S2K is good enough, i cant emphasize enough how much i dig the low TTK, it really captivated the pressure, flank, maneuveur. roleplay was kinda lite tho

 

[The Milkman]

There's also the chance that you get skipped over entirely in TBC. When you're at the 'start in 1 turn' and then gain initiative it puts you 'up' a turn, but since it was your turn next, it fucks up and just ends up skipping your turn entirely

 

[Noh]

No one knows how TBC works tbh, even Devs say its a mystery...

 

[Neonity]

TBC has its moments where it really sucks, but it’s still (unfortunately) better than S2K or S2RP. It just needs a polish and balance pass. One of the things I’d want is the ability to move through other players in TBC, so bodyblocking isn’t a thing anymore.

 

[Silver]

It’d also be cool if folk wouldn’t be able to /act while it ain’t their turn so I couldn’t hit them when they were sat on a roof top

 

[Chico]

I enjoy TBC when its more or less 10 players involved in a CQC fight

I enjoy s2k when its a large scale conflict

 

[captain hoovie]

while i agree that the test has shown how TBC can easily turn into a disaster, i'd like to give my 5 cents on the situation.
i believe this is an extremely important crossroards for Willard, as it is genuinely a one-of-a-kind experience and a change like this could seriously disrupt it and potentially kill it in the long run. i'll try and do my best at summing it up, and i encourage people viewing the thread to read thru my post.

let me get it out of the way and say that s2k is THE optimal way for large-scale (10+ people involved) encounters, i think making it the server-wide default is going to flat-out kill the server.

- let me speak from experience. i've been involved with lemonpunch, and later nebulous.cloud, since 2014, being involved in staff affairs pretty much non stop up until 2020-ish. the reason nebulous, despite its robust playerbase, shriveled up and died the way it did is quite simple - the community, over a long period of time, turned away from prioritizing roleplay and towards more concrete OOC gains and action. the was due to the server relying heavily on S2K, which, over time, created an OOC hierarchy among players. players were forced to rely on their OOC fps skills to determine their characters' abilities and fate at large, which bled into greater IC happenings on the server. eventually this drove away people that were better / more interested in RP due to their inability to compete with the S2Kers, and created a calcified, unhealthy environment on the server. roleplay was largely considered a side-thing for most 'power players', just something to wait through on your way until the next big rush where you curbstomp the enemy and get the cool stuff. really, it quickly turned the server into a series of circlejerk, where you couldn't step out of line because otherwise mr. epic pro gamer would find an excuse to get kill auths on your character and blam you with no hesitation. this is also what's responsible for the infamous nebulous OTA circlejerk. it was a faction comprised llargely of 'counter strike buds'

• - an argument ive heard in my conversations with OTA leads was the following: "Well Willard has a much less toxic mindset and people are more interested in RP, so it won't happen the same way". and while that may be the case now, it also used to be the case on older lemonpunch, and that didnt stop it from getting worse. bad actors can rear their heads at any moment. Willard owes its amazing community mentality largely to the fact that it is a completely immersive experience completely independent of OOC technicalities like staff politicking or, again, individual players' non-rp-related FPS skills. if we leave player's characters at the mercy of their or someone else's OOC circumstances, this is quickly going to destroy this existing good will, and will erode the server's rp potential down to nothing.

so while i've experienced first hand the issues tbc can bring, i think all of these issues could be potentially addressed from the development side (i know @Gr4Ss is busy, but i am willing to cash out some money to see them fixed) and ultimately resolved with a balance between it and s2k, but making the latter the default system will spell doom for Willard in the long run. the server stands out precisely because of its unique balance of roleplay and gameplay elements, and stripping it will ruin the magic of it all

 

[Erkor]

do NOT make s2k the combat default it will ruin the environment within a short time

By balancing the server and its mechanics around shoot-to-kill combat, people's mindsets will inevitably gravitate towards a more competitive playstyle. Yes, at the moment there already is an issue of minmaxing stats from my observations, but that issue will not go away with the advent of S2K-focused gameplay. Instead, it will be largely the same, with an additional caveat: People will begin to focus more on staying alive, thus PVPing, and less and less on the roleplaying part. No amount of constant meta-shifting will ever stop this.

I've witnessed this first-hand in its worst form on another server. People would tout their CSGO skills and bunnyhopping aptitude as, once S2K started, roleplaying would effectively cease until it's over.

If stats are a problem area in player-versus-player TBC, then they should be looked at and their role in combat adjusted. The entire system shouldn't be thrown away, even if it is incomplete now, because the immediate whiplash people will endure from the change in combat systems will affect the playerbase. People will, in a way, enjoy S2King more, because it's effectively just a way to have a quick deathmatch session in the middle of what some RPers probably view as "yet another boring day in roleplay land", but they'll start to enjoy it more than the roleplay until the RP is just a thin veneer that exists to justify the game mechanics they're actually invested in.

 

[Goulashnikov]

Been lurking the forums offline for months now but this actually got me to log back in.

I used to help run a server that basically only did S2K, which was Shockcore Gaming back years ago. We had the same issue that's being brought up here today. S2RP (we didn't have TBC obviously) was too slow and tiresome. We switched to S2K and decided to call it a day.
Things immediately spiraled.

All rebel RP that didn't have to do with hoarding items immediately dried up. We once had little safe zones, illegal stores, etc etc. All gone because the meta was no longer to RP but to play CS:GO with extra steps. Shotcopping shot through the roof, MPF relied more and more on just shooting lawbreakers instead of arresting them, and MPF even refused to leave plaza because of how often they'd just be gunned down. OTA usage skyrocketed to the point where every shooting was responded with a JW and OTA flagging up.

And worst of all, the several factions of rebel groups all died off to make way for one group of players with Source FPS skills and insane amounts of high-level equipment. They even killed off the Lambda rebel group for no reason other than to steal their equipment. They did nothing with this monopoly of power. They didn't try to arm other rebels, they didn't try to run the place like a mafia, the only money they made was to purchase better equipment. They did nothing other than provoke MPF patrols or OTA raids for the sheer purpose of shooting them. Even when we made up a BS excuse about how "MPF and OTA weapons are bio-locked so you can't loot them", they still continued to provoke raids, because it was about shooting the place up, not RPing.


I would take a long boring fight over being gunned down because I haven't booted up CS since 2012. Don't make the same mistake SCG did.

 

[Kafe]

Turn based combat is pretty much the only thing that makes me interested in any form of combat.

NPCs have actually given me near death misses, and I'm keen to get more time in engagements with other factions as there are a whole bunch of different ideas and tactics that I'd like to experiment with that regular s2k makes pointless and a waste of time.
I've had a fair share of generic S2K experiences over the past several years, and they are never really any fun, lot of people playing around ping, gmod & gamemode jank, and very frustrating movement habits. It was very unfriendly to RP focused players and those with poor computers or latency, I cannot imagine willingly going back to that approach.

S2K was a toxic environment and I'm glad it's gone here.

 

[swagile]

While thats great and all, we don't have the dev capacity to maintain TBC and its actually starting to DESTROY roleplay, not create or preserve it.

No one can do any hostile actions right now unless they have 50 speed, minimum 20 guns, and 10 other guys with the same stats or else they will get steamrolled by the opposing faction(s). This means no one fights, and conflict is literally the bread and butter of story making. Without conflcit we're just playing VR chat, and that gets stale after a while, because the story NEVER PROGRESSES.

Thats the issue we are facing; S2k is shit if unmodified, TBC doesn't or cannot have proper dev time dedicated to it, S2M (lol), S2RP (even bigger lol).

We've grown as a community too fast and now are facing the issues of the systems that aren't keeping up with the times.

 

[Deleted member 418]

While thats great and all, we don't have the dev capacity to maintain TBC and its actually starting to DESTROY roleplay, not create or preserve it.

No one can do any hostile actions right now unless they have 50 speed, minimum 20 guns, and 10 other guys with the same stats or else they will get steamrolled by the opposing faction(s). This means no one fights, and conflict is literally the bread and butter of story making. Without conflcit we're just playing VR chat, and that gets stale after a while, because the story NEVER PROGRESSES.

Thats the issue we are facing; S2k is shit if unmodified, TBC doesn't or cannot have proper dev time dedicated to it, S2M (lol), S2RP (even bigger lol).

We've grown as a community too fast and now are facing the issues of the systems that aren't keeping up with the times.

Let's not forget the difficulty in fighting NPCs. S2K enables the time, freedom and capacity to solo them properly if required. TBC is more than usually a death sentence.

 

[captain hoovie]

While thats great and all, we don't have the dev capacity to maintain TBC and its actually starting to DESTROY roleplay, not create or preserve it.

No one can do any hostile actions right now unless they have 50 speed, minimum 20 guns, and 10 other guys with the same stats or else they will get steamrolled by the opposing faction(s). This means no one fights, and conflict is literally the bread and butter of story making. Without conflcit we're just playing VR chat, and that gets stale after a while, because the story NEVER PROGRESSES.

Thats the issue we are facing; S2k is shit if unmodified, TBC doesn't or cannot have proper dev time dedicated to it, S2M (lol), S2RP (even bigger lol).

We've grown as a community too fast and now are facing the issues of the systems that aren't keeping up with the times.

i just spoke to grass, the dev behind it. he's willing to work on it if people want to see specific things fixed. i'm posting a new thread at OTA devs request