Would anyone slit their wrists if sniper shots were made visible?

[Forboding Angel]

At the moment, unless you know what is happening, you can lose a lot and not know what is going on. This is a huge noobtrap and frankly it is a detriment to gameplay. That said, will there be sackcloth and ashes + gnashing of teeth if the sniper shot is made visible?

Asking for a friend.

Also, completely unrelated teaser:

[azaremoth]

As I am only playing BA rarely, I feel totally included in the noob group. Seeing the bullets would help a lot. => I like!

[PicassoCT]

I would add a slight impulse to the hit unit.. that way you can tell.. but that is taste i gues

[dansan]

I would suggest a different approach: The problem is not that the player doesn't know where the bullet came from - that is actually kind of realistic. The problem is that the player doesn't know what happend at all.

To change that, I suggest to add a sign, that tells him only that his unit was sniped - not from where. There is no need to tell the player where the sniper is - to locate it is part of the game. It would also steal players that micro their units the edge+fun.

So for example make an arrow/bullet/crosshair/symbol hover for x seconds over the shot unit/wreck/ground. 'x' should be configurable: 0 disables it, abs(int(everything else)) means "seconds the symbol will be shown". I suggest a default between 5 and 10.

[Forboding Angel]

The sniper projectile was visible originally. What you suggest is complicated and visually confusing, tbh.

[MasterBel2]

So, my piece:

I remember games upon games where I had armies that would just disintegrate to invisible marksmen; I rather thought my units were spontaneously combusting or something. It was only a hundred games later that I finally worked out what was shooting at me - snipers.

Nowadays snipers are one of my favorite units to build. It's probably one of their largest advantages that it can take another player quite a while to realise what's hit them. However, I rarely, if ever, use their stealth capability, either because I have far too many for it to be worth it, or because there's only one front that I have - forwards.

Quite the opposite, somewhat recently I was playing a game where an inexperienced ally had cloaked snipers strategically placed on the north middle mountain (Koom Valley). I remember that it was a fair degree annoying for the opponent that the snipers weren't actually positioned behind either of the armies that were converging on them.

However, there is the noobtrap nature of it. While personally I'd hate for there to be extra projectiles on the screen (I hate it when waves of fighters come over for the number of missiles) I think that, from experience, it would be a good idea.

On the more nuts-and-bolts side of things, I was of the understanding that the sniper didn't actually fire a projectile and that it was an immediate hit. Was I of the wrong understanding, and will that have to change to make this possible? Just a couple of curious questions.

[Forboding Angel]

Without actually looking, I'm 99.99999999% sure that it's an invisible laser with an ungodly velocity. It would be kinda dumb to use any other weapon type.

Edit: Wow. Why... Just why?

Code: Select all

 weapontype = "Cannon",
                impactOnly = true, 

Well no worries, easy to fix.

[Floris]

It was changed to cannon so snipers wouldn't kill eachother... is what the changelog tells

[Forboding Angel]

I having trouble thinking of a single situation where that "fix" is the correct one.

Edit: Weapon switched out. In function and practicality, it's the exact same weapon.

[Forboding Angel]

More completely unrelated goodies:

[jamerlan]

Previously "Riffle" was used as a sniper weapon. And "Riffle" is outdated and not supported weapon. Engine devs told me to get rid of Riffle and to replace it with the Cannon. And they refused to fix Riffle related bugs

[Forboding Angel]

That's because rifle is a weapontype that shouldn't even exist. Using a cannon isn't a good idea too because what you wanted was essentially a hitscan weapon. The closest thing we have to hitscan weapons are lightning and super fast lasers. Lightning isn't very flexible. Cannons are ballistic. Emg should be a laser cannon too for that matter. It's easy to adjust the sprite so that it looks the same. LaserCannon is the most reliable weapontype in the engine, so that's why it's use is encouraged so much.

Basically, when in doubt, LaserCannon.

Understandable now. I'm guessing that this happened many years ago. If that's the case then I understand.

[qray]

I wouldn't make the shot visible. To me it's part of the gameplay that you have to find them before attacking them. And with a bit experience it's fairly easy to find them and counter them - given you have the right units at hand, but's that's true for many attack options.
The only thing that would probably be good to change is to give them a unique and well hearable sound so you know it's snipers currently attacking (the traditional BA "plop" has too low volume to hear it when sth. else is going on).

Many units in BA can be a noobtrap but also they are fun for more experienced players. There's a good chance that if you remove all possible noobtraps all units will get more similar and diversity and special roles are lessened -> takes away fun from experienced players.

[Forboding Angel]

There's a good chance that if you remove all possible noobtraps all units will get more similar and diversity and special roles are lessened -> takes away fun from experienced players.

This is patently untrue. Units don't require "gotchas" to be fun, and if they do, then your gameplay design is bad.

Special roles don't need to be noobtraps, that's just silly. A unit can have a very clear and specific purpose/use while still being non-noobtrap.

If the lack of noobtraps makes your game un-fun for experienced players, then your gameplay design is bad, a.k.a. "ur doin it rong".

[qray]

Special roles don't need to be noobtraps,
...
If the lack of noobtraps makes your game un-fun

Maybe we should clarify what we both mean by "noobtrap"?
IMHO it's a unit that has way to high cost for its usefulness under all circumstances or is utterly useless. So sth. only a noob would waste resources on and any experienced player knows to not use it.
With "possible noobtrap" I mean a unit that you have to know how to counter and that seems(!) overpowered else. That's true for a few units in BA and this learning curve is part of the fun. After > 1000h ingame, sometimes I am still surprised by new tactics / use of units. If I would immediately know the perfect counter for any unit or could counter effectively all units with any other unit / tactic, this would make it more unfun for me.
If you consider as "noobtrap" any unit which you can only be countered by specific other units / tactics, then to get rid of this type of "noobtrap" there's a good chance that units become more equal and special roles will be watered out. IMHO, less long term fun of the game.


Snipers being hard to spot is part of their role. But still they are fairly easy to counter if you know how and scout - if you don't scout, you have a good chance of loosing anyway and snipers are not your worst problem.
If players are half experienced, snipers are hard to use effectively as it is already. If you haven't spotted them before by scouting: you hear the plop (repeat: which IMHO should be louder), you scout, you take a few cheap fast(!) units -of which you will loose some- or aircrafts and destroy them.
If shots would be visible, then you could easily kill them with any long range without even scouting (Sniper=very slow unit and not much health -> good chance if you just shoot at position of last sniper shot origin).

So I stay with my opinion: make the sound more obvious, leave shots invisible.

[Forboding Angel]

You are talking about only one specific type of noobtrap. The noobtrap in question here is the trap that your base will start randomly blowing up, and you'll have no idea why. Making the sound louder only helps experienced players and those that already know how to deal with snipers.

If you are newbie - average player, if your base just starts blowing up and you're already fighting a battle, you aren't going to have any time to think about what is happening.

This is what a noobtrap is in the broad sense of the term. Something that happens and a newbie would be hapless to know why it is happening. The severity of a noobtrap can vary. In this case, the sniper does 2500 damage to everything every 10 seconds, meaning that a few of them can clean up bases pretty quickly provided that there is energy to support them.

But it's not that the sniper isn't balanced. The sniper is slow and shit, expensive and costs a fortune to move while cloaked. The problem is not the unit, the problem is that for the player on the receiving end, there is no input to determine what is happening, and that, is a serious issue.

Edit: Additionally, a firing sound in many cases can sound more or less the same as an explosion, as a result "Make the sound louder" provides even less input for the receiving end to process.

[MasterBel2]

After what qray said, it brings to mind that one of the advantages of the sniper is that even a skilled player may take some time to notice that he's been/being hit. That being said, I wouldn't mind too much if it was made slightly more obvious that a unit had been hit by something. I often find that the "I'm damaged" sounds don't seem to come through. But that may be just me.

If people watched replays, this would not be an issue - they'd be able to see what was blowing up their base easily. But most people don't. The other thingis that most online games are multiplayer, meaning that a more experienced player would be able to help them. But that also doesn't feel like a satisfactory solution.

Maybe put it behind a modoption so it can be tried out one time, so we can see what impact it really has on gameplay?

[very_bad_soldier]

Snipers being a noobtrap because they shoot from cover? Really? Cmon... Where do you got that from?

[PicassoCT]

I solved it with a teleportation unit, that upon beeing shot transports the shooter to the opposite side

[Ares]

offensive title, why?