- dan91bauer
- |
- Elder Legendary Member
Posted by: BerserkerBarage
Dan says that is fair because the pro was in control of his destiny and he chose to go for better accuracy and he just lost because the other guy "got lucky". He sees Halo 3 as a wrong however when the exact same scenario happens. That's the point.
In a situation in SR where two players have SMGs, one is a pro, the other is a scrub, and the scrub decides to just spray for his life, and the pro does all things that he knows are correct, skillful, within his skill range, within his intelligence, tactical thinking, etc....and that scrub manages to pop a bullet onto the pro's head because that's all that was needed....yes, that's okay. Why is that okay? It happens .5% of the time in Shadowrun. It happens .5% of the time in CS. You said yourself that you went online with SR a while back and easily got kills, well good for you, but how do you know who you were playing against? Perhaps you were playing against scrubs? Maybe you were better than them?
I played a lot of CPMA over the summer, it's a Quake 3 mod on the PC, modded for competition and balance, in otherwords it's a complete overhaul of Quake 3's stock settings. Anyway, I go into a pub and play against my friend in a 1v1 duel. We trade kills back and forth, sometimes get a string of 4-5 kills in a row, still...we trade kills. Now he's of better skill than me in Quake because he has more Quake exp than me, but I'm still able to hold my own with him because of my skill and the mistakes he makes, not the game giving me anything at all. There are acts of randomness but they're player-controlled not controlled by the game.
Some random guy rolls into our pub and waits to play the winner of myself and my friend, my friend ends up winning and goes on to play this new guy who just came into the server. My friend gets 2 kills on the guy the entire MATCH! The match was 10 mins long, whoever has the most kills wins. The final score of the match was 64 frags to my friends -5. I repeat -5. Even though my friend got 2 kills positive on the guy somewhere during the game, he still manage to go -5 as the end result. Now...this game is completely balanced, and the reason it is is because my friend hasn't ever played CPMA...he just played reg Quake 3 and then Quake 2 before that. This random guy who comes in has probably been playing CPMA for quite some time, and here's the ticker, that's freaking SKILL when you can win 64 to -5. Now my friend wasn't that great against this guy, but that's besides the point.
Now if the game had some intentional random factor that allowed my friend...the scrub compared to this other guy, get some freebie kills or perhaps some random damage generator on the rockets, or perhaps some other act of intentional randomness put on by the game where my friend could get kills regardless of his lack of skills...would that have been good for the game? No, it would not have.
Facts are though, in Halo 3 because of the BR spread, a player's raw talent no matter how good he is, he will never be able to completely dominate consistently like he should be able to because scrubs will always have the crutch to fall back on because the game gives it to them. I would rather the BR not have ANY randomness at all, and if it needs a .15 degree spread, then so be it...but make it the same exact shot pattern each time that it's fired, that way a skillful player can practice and earn his kills by way of having better talent than the little guy who needs to NOT be playing people way above his skill level. Isn't that what skill-based matchmaking is suppose to do? Would you enjoy going out on the basketball court with NBA pros knowing that you would never stand a chance? So why should better players get shafted out of the deal? When it's pro versus pro in MLG...I see so many pros get robbed of their kills due to BR spread on LAN...on LAN!!!! That isn't right at all. Players cannot control the spread...it's impossible to predict what the spread will be on the BR, it's completely random.
However in SR, players can control their bloom and recieve better shots over a scrub that will probably just spray his heart out and have a .5% chance of actually doing anything remotely good by doing that. Ever play Street Fighter 2? The difference between pros and scrubs on that game is that scrubs just mash buttons, and sure...they'll get some hits in, they might even win a round, but the pro will always dominate 99% of the time. There aren't any crutches for scrubs in SF2, yet you can still play that game casually amongst friends and have just as much fun as pros do playing other pros.
But the thing is, and I know everyone is tired of hearing it, is that the Halo that is played in MM for the most part isn't suppose to be highly "competitive". It's never been that way from the start. It's suppose to give lesser-skilled players a chance against better-skilled opponents.
WHY????? WHY??????? Why should someone be given a chance against better skilled opponents? Why? Why can't it just be scrubs vs scrubs, avg vs avg, and pros vs pros? Since when does it need to be fair for a scrub vs pro in Halo? What business does a scrub have playing against a pro and vice versa unless they're friends and they wanna do that?
By your logic, going back to my Quake 3 CPMA example, my friend should have been given better chances by the GAME to be able to "maybe" defeat the guy who steam rolled him 64 to -5? Thank god CPMA does not do that.
Changing the BR for the entire game would greatly go against that. Players in Halo 2 after the 1.1 patch were forced to use the BR because of how good it is. It simply dominated everything other weapon because of a lot of variables. In Halo 3 players are forced to use the BR because there isn't another option in most cases (since Carbine spawns are rare, as are M6G spawns). Players use the H3 BR not because it's skillful but because they are forced to.
That's actually a subject of flawed game design. See, in Halo CE, I could play a fair game of Pro Team Slayer, which would always be AR/pistol start. This gave balance to the game because whenever I would get killed, I knew that when I respawned I had two tools that would help defend myself from getting spawn killed or spawn camped, that's the AR/Pistol. Also Halo CE used quake-style gameplay mechanics in its weapons on map and powerups on map.
Overshields and Camos typically spawned every 1 mins or 2 mins on a timer....not dictated by who picked it up at a specific time. This gave motivation to always time the powerups and earn them so that you were given an advantage by earning them. It also made it where you couldn't just run around the map dominating with any one weapon, that's why on Prisoner you've got a possible rockets/camo combo on the bottom of the map, with an OS/sniper on the top portion of the map, or just an OS threat in general.
Furthermore, just because you had a pistol/AR start didn't guarantee you anything. If you played chillout against good teams/players, and you didn't bother to get rockets, camo, os, and snipe...you're never going to do any good with just your pistol/AR start. These timers on all these weapons FORCED players to move around the map and control these weapons. I have friends I used to play with that never once let me touch rockets on Chillout...or the OS, and no matter how good my pistol skills were, I was always getting destroyed. Was that imbalanced? Nope, that was fair game. That's not the case though here in Halo 2 or Halo 3.
Halo 2 in a nutshell = duel weilding, and the BR was on accident, patched from that 1.1 patch...it was NEVER suppose to end up the way it did. And yes, if we were to look at H2's core gameplay...the patched BR did ruin the default core of the game which was duel weilding.
Same goes for Halo 3.
Halo 3 = Assault Rifle. There's a tier system in H3 in terms of weapons. When you play default AR starts, your battle is basically to end up with the sniper rifle or the rockets...preferably the sniper rifle because AR spawning scrubs won't be able to do much to you from afar will they? But that's balanced right? Wrong. Bungie basically says that when you pick up a power weapon in Halo 3 you're automatically given the right to a couple of easy freebie kills, and this is due to the fact that players spawn with inadequate protection to defend themselves with.
In Halo CE, just because you had the rockets or the snipe didn't guarantee you were going to be successful with them unless you FORCED the iniative. That is balance. In Halo 3 it's backwards, completely backwards. If I get a sniper rifle on say...Guardian or Construct...depending on where I setup, I will probaby get at least 2-3 freebie kills based purely off the fact that player's spawning with ARs will not be able to do much if anything at all to defend against my long range weapon.
That's what the AR/Pistol did in CE, it defended against close/long-range attacks when players freshly respawned and that was balance.
The days of seeing that kind of gameplay ever again are long gone. It does exist in Shadowrun, but that's only because the same guy who made Halo CE is the one who made Shadowrun. Perhaps Bungie should re-hire that guy for Halo 4? Or wait...they probably wouldn't agree with his decisions of taking out intentional random elements to help out scrubs against pros.