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Overwatch, improving and learning in gaming

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@54674341 mrcool37 writes…
For a few short minutes you feel like part of a team and for someone in that team to bring you down makes me feel terrible, especially with the games mentioned where most of the time you can clearly see your own errors/misjudgements, which are then subconsciously ‘backed up’ by the incoming attacks.

I think you are wrong in the assessment. People do not learn like that.

Given the propensity of people to make errors/misjudgements this is not the case, and people simply do not learn or think about their gameplay beyond “I’m playing a game”. Players typically learn by doing things, making mistakes then correcting mistakes – however for the vast majority of gamers this is not a conscious process. Players need to do things many times incorrectly before it becomes an ingrained idea to not do this. When you add on the number of permutations of “bad things” you can do in a game like ow (in relation to yourself, your team mates, the enemy team, both teams comps, the map in relation to all of the following points) it becomes extremely hit and miss for players to actually improve. The same applies to improving:

This is further compounded by “how to learn”. Using ow as an example at lower tiers a mechanically gifted player can climb reasonbly well simply by aiming well. A player who placed silver after their initial 25 quickplay matches does not know how to play the game but their playstyle will be influenced by their ability to aim well. This will allow them to progress, lets say to mid-plat, relatively quickly because lets face it, the aim ability in this game is pretty garbage at lower levels. They can no longer progress, or they progress much more slowly than before, primarily when they have days where their aim is super on. Because of how they play they do not take notice, or are very slow to take notice, of why they die, how they die and what they are “doing wrong”.

They have had positive reinforcement of bad habits because of their aiming ability. This is also interesting because positive reinforcement probably “sinks in” faster than negative.

Lets have some more overwatch examples. We have a teammate playing s76:

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The enemy has a pharah who continually harasses the team from mid – long range.
1) Our teams 76 tries to shoot the pharah consistently but overall is ineffective. This is reasonable to a degree (maybe should swap off) but the player is making the judgement to do the correct thing.
2) Our teams 76 completely ignores the pharah the entire game.

No need to weigh in on the validity of 76 as a pharah counter, the point here is the 76 is ignoring a target they should at least be trying to shoot. Not trying to shoot it is detrimental to the team.

Our 76 player is getting ult nice and quick. Well played!
1) Decides to continually solo flank to use ult and gets wrecked every time
2) Stays with the team and ults at appropriate openings.

This example could be extended to non-ults as well and just attempted aggressive plays that result in 5v6 often.

Where the player is failing in both examples is not really related to aim/failing mechanically. They are simply not doing something, yet pointing out they should be, or pointing out the pharah is being a pain will result in butthurt from many 76 players. Both these examples are reasonable to point out.

There comes a point in a players progression where they can no longer play dps effectively. This will be where they cap out unless they look long and hard at how they are playing beyond aiming, which is the first place people will look when actively trying to improve.
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Taking this further from my experience – I played an off meta support character that was severely vulnerable to dive with unlimited weapon range. So genji/winston were a pain if they played correctly. However I climbed easily to masters+ in soloq and rarely ran into a genji or the like that even bothered to try to kill me. I am not overly mechanically gifted so this is not the case of me brute forcing their faces whenever they tried to jump me. They just did not. Sure this is a very narrow sample yet it once again highlights that players don’t actually know what they are doing.

Approaching any of this from a negative direction is not going to result in good outcomes (see:you feeling sad) and because of how ow skill rating works players should not really be throwing stones in glass houses.. but still. If you were to die out of position four times in a row how do you expect people to respond? First time, ok.. well he will learn. The fourth time? We have played most of this round 5v6 anon can you stop being a total retard.

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Brine shrimp in Australia

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The problem of providing live food for their fish beset aquarists until about 1947. It was then discovered in the USA that brine shrimp eggs will remain viable (alive) for at least 10 years when stored in a dry and fairly cool place and will hatch in salty water. This discovery led to the brine shrimp eggs being collected in quantity in their natural environment and marketed on a commercial basis throughout the world as a source of constant live food for aquarium fishes. The eggs cannot be used as fish food because fish cannot digest the tough shells. However the newly hatched shrimp, which the fish relish, do not have a firm shell and can be readily torn to bits by almost all small fish. Live shrimp are caught in San Francisco Bay salt ponts and frozen for shipment to pet shops all over North America.

Brine shrimp are custraceans of the genus Artemia, subclass Branchiopoda, and order Anostraca. They occur throughout the world, living and reproducing only in water of high salinity in natural salt lakes and also ponds where sea water is evaporated to obtain salt. Although they may have descended from ancient fresh-water form, they cannot live long in fresh water.

Species
The Taxonomic status of Artemia has long been controversial, especially in Europe where Artima varies more than it does in the United States. The present consensus is that there is a single world wide species – Artima salina, which has many varieties.

In the United States brine shrimp are best know from the Great Salt Lake, Utah, where the salanity of the water in 1950 was about 25 percent, and in San Francisco Bay, California, primarily in the salt-evaporation ponds. Sometimes these brineshrimp congregate to form ribbon like patterns on the surface of the Great Salt lake nearly half a mile wide and extending for miles out into the lake. They are often so abundant that the water looks red.

Great Salt Lake is the remains of a fresh water lake called lake Bonneville which trained into the Pacific Ocean by way of the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Beause of decreased rainfall and a drop in level, its outflow stopped. Evaporation by the sun then became greater than inflow of freshwater from the Jordan River and the Bear River, and Salt concentration increased. In recent times the lake area has varied according to fluctuations in the lake level, ranging from 2200 square miles in 1873 to 1500 square miles in 1940.

The ancestors of the Great Salt Lake brine shrimp may have lieved in Lake Benneville when it was fresh water and gradually adapted to the increasing saltiness of the lake.

Brineshrimp life history

Adult brine shrimp are about one third of an inch long. The males are smaller, but stronger and more active than females. They have 112 pairs of swimming legs and 2 stalked compound eyes. Disclike gills occur about midway down the legs. The brine shrimps variation in color from pale yellow-green to blood red is caused by the chemical nature of the salts in solution in ponds and lakes where they live.

The adult brine shrimp in Great Salt Lake and in San Francisco Bay die when the water temperature falls below 6C

Brine shrimp eat the free floating algae and other microscopic organisms that occur in brine ponds and salt lakes.

Brine shrimp reach sexual maturity within 18 to 21 days after hatching and reproduce in two ways. If no males are present the females have embryos that develop from an unfertilized eggs. This phenomenon is called parthenogenesis. When mature females and males are present, the male fertilizes the eggs within the reproductive tract of the female. The eggs remain within the body of the female until a touch shell has formed around each one. Then the eggs, which resemble fine brown sand, are deposited in the water where they will hatch if conditions are favorable. If the female deposits her eggs in seawater which has a specific gravity of 1.09 or higher, they will float on the surface and will not hatch but may be blown by the wind or be carried by water currents to beaches – where they remain until it rains and they are washed back into the water. Rain tends to dilute the surface of the water – and when the eggs come into contact with it they hatch because the specific gravity is less than 1.09 and the temperature is higher than 9C.
In many instances the eggs hatch within the ovisac of the female, and the embryos develop to nauplii (larvae) before they are born. Movements of the muscles surrounding the ovisca keep the young brine shrimp in motion. Just before birth occurs, some nauplii are suddenly released from the others and moved towards a funnel shaped aperture ni the ovisac. After a few convulsive movements of the funnel muscles the aperture opens and the nauplii are forcefully ejected into the water.

The natural environment determines whether a female will bear living young or lay eggs. Some shrimp along the coast are washed into a tidepool and left as the tide retreats. If the pool is above the normal high tide line, several weeks may elapse before the sea again reaches the pool. Meanwhile the water in the pool evaporates, and the salinity increases. The brine shrimp at this time bear living young. Evaporation may continue, and the salt percentage rise. More shrimp and less water mean less food and the population may start to decline. Responding to this changed enviroment, the females stop bearing living young and begin laying eggs. When the tide reaches the place where the tidepool was, the eggs are washed out to sea. Though they had lain on the shore for weeks, they now hatch.

The young

The eggs, which are not harmed by low temperatures, hatch in nature in great numbers in the spring. Baby shrimp are born with a single eye and one main set of legs. During growth, they acquire a shell which they shed a number of times during their life time. Changes occur in the body at each molt until, in the adult, there are 2 eyes and 11 pairs of legs and in the case of males, 12 penises.

There are several kinds of fresh water fairy shrimp are closely related to brine shrimp. Water fleas are more distant relatives.

The brine shrimp main enemy in nature are salt water fly larvae, birds and human collectors. So far as known, brine shrimp do not have harmful parasites. An abundance of brine shrimp in some areas may result from a lack of enemies.

How to use brine shrimp

Brine shrimp are valuable. They are excellent as zoological teaching material for classroom laboratories, for the development from egg to larva may be obseved under a microscope in a short period of time.

Brine shrimp are superior for testing insecticides. This crustacean demonstrates a high sensitivity against a broad range of compounds.

Baby brine shrimp have become in recent years one of the standard foodsfor young tropical aquarium fishes, after the fiches have passed the stage where they need microscopic organisms as food. Adult brine shrimp also form an excellent food for larger fish.

Fish hatcheries also use brine shrimp for feeding fish. The Utah Fish and Game Department collected brine shrimp in the Great Salt Lake for use as an experimental trout food. The Department found that growth and mortality of newly hatched rainbow trout fed brine shrimp diet were approximately the same as when the trout were fed a turkeyblood and live diet or dry feed, Kokanee salmon fed brine shrimp made excellent growth, while those fed blood and liver or dry food lost weight.

Brine shrimp also aid salt production. They precipitate insoluble calcium carbonate and calcium sulfate impurities from ponds. The shrimp strain these impurities out of the water along with their microscopic food. The calcium carbonate and calcium sulfate particles are not absorbed in the intestine but become incorporated in the fecal pellets which drop to the bottom of the pools. This precipitation occurs before the salt is crystallized in the final stage of solar production.

Brine shrimp buy online are not commonly used for human food because they are too small. However they were so numerous at times in the past that indians inhabiting the Great Salt Lake region dried them for use as food.

Collecting and processing brine shrimp eggs

Brine shrimp eggs in their natural enviroment are found floating on the top of the water or on the shore where wind deposits them. They are netted from shallow water or scooped from the shore, along with mud and sand and placed in buckets.

Processing the eggs without damaging the tender embryos or starting them to hatch is an exacting technique. The mud is washed using a high-pressure spray through a fine screen. This separates out the dead shrimp, parts of dead sigh and birds and other large impurities. Eggs and water then pass through a sluice box which picks up sand. Since wet, fertile brine shrimp eggs since in fresh water, the overflow removes dead eggs, shells and dust, leaving behind the viable eggs and lettle else.

The eggs are then spread out on a thin layer to dry in the guy. When dried they are cleaned once more in a blower, which removes dust left over from the water and any lighters, dead, eggs.

A small sample of the eggs is weighted and then allowed to hatch. The larvae are weighed to assure a high quality yield when the eggs each the aquarist. The eggs are vacuum packed in cans for shipment to dealers, labs and schools as well as commercial fish hatcheries.

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Does C4 take skill or is it just stupid in BF3?

@36617305 Toto writes…
[“Lots of weapons get moaned about. C4 is one that people moan about being a noob weapon (yet it is amazing how often you get killed placing C4, but the moaners always forget that).”]

Yeah no. Actually maybe – people might moan about being killed by C4 and players trying to C4 others are killed frequently. Toto was trying to imply that C4 takes skill because many players die while trying to C4, this does not mean that C4ing takes “skill”, in fact the complete opposite is true. More often than not players just make horrible choices when C4ing.

Why do players die when C4ing?

  • They don’t care. This is fair enough, some people think that trading lives and having 1:1 KDR is acceptable. Trading in the case of a tank is probably ok regardless of the situation. From an overall game perspective trading like this is not good or bad as neither side really gets ahead. However because these players are more likely to die than trade we end up with negative tickets to their own team.
  • They do care but they C4 anyway. This is simply careless and leads to negative tickets more often than not because they will die. They probably realise
  • They trade for a tank + crew. This is the good play, the sensible play. Not teamplay but it benefits your team.

People die C4ing because they play without looking, without using situational awareness, without thinking. There is no brain. There is no skill. They don’t die because of the massive amount of skill required, they die because they are not very good.

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Battlefield 3 hit detection, netcode and network smoothing

Volatile writes here

After some research it looks like its because dice are using client server instead of a server client.. so one person with a ping of 100+ can stuff it up for everyone it is their way of leveling it out..

Client side should have better hit detection for your client. It doesn’t go:

Client: I hit that dude!
Server: No you diddn’t!
Client: Oh ok, sorry about that.

Its more like

Client: I hit that dude! *plays death animation*
Server: Sweet, lets kill him now then.
Other client: *Dies*

To highlight this you can die ducking behind walls to a player with a higher ping. The server would not have allowed you to kill them if it was verifying anything. The problem is not client side or server side hit detection, its just crappy hit detection, hit markers when you don;t deal damage and average netcode.

Also one person with high ping does not degrade server quality like many people seem to think. This isn’t 1998 anymore and I am really surprised people still think this can occur. Yes shooting at that HPB might be different and encounters may play out slightly differently because of client side hit detection, but the server does not degrade everyone because of one bad connection. I think we are somewhat past that.

What is the difference between high and low ping then in relation to client side hit detection?

First up latency, lag or ping represents the round trip of a packet to a server. Gaming pings on scoreboards have never been overly accurate and do not represent the ping you would get if you pinged the server from a DOS box. But they are something to work with and are handy because they give an indication that your connection is screwed without having to alt tab. Beyond that they are pretty useless.

Think of your world view as a combination of half your ping + half theirs. Why half? Because ping is typically a round trip measurement. They send their data to the server and then it is sent to you. This means if you both have a 20ms ping you should be seeing where they were around 20ms ago. If they have 200 and you have 20 you would be seeing their location around 110ms ago. And so on.

This may sound like you have a disadvantage because you are seeing where they are in the past but it works both ways – you see them before they see you when they step around a corner. You can die when you are behind cover because they are shooting at you in the past. Overall the lower ping player (if there is a large difference) still has the advatage. They can see, react to and kill you faster than you can kill them. You may be “behind” but if they kill you soon enough after seeing you and let the server know you will sill be dead.

However it is possible to abuse very high ping – 500+ on international servers. I think this is a major flaw of the BF3 engine. You should not be able to wield your latency like a weapon and step out from behind cover without any repercussions. Remember, with a 500 ping the other player is seeing you with your 50 pin (on average) around 275ms in the past. However because everything is client side they can step out and kill you before you are even seeing them. Why? Because even though they are seeing “the past” they can still shoot and kill “the past” before you can do anything about it. With Battlefiled 3 TTK weapons 250ms is more than enough.

What about network smoothing in battlefield 3

The final piece of the puzzle is network smoothing. Think of pushlatency or ex_interp for those that remember Quake or Counter Strike. This setting can improve rendering of players by interpolating their animations/position when there is missing packets/player data. Why would there be missing data? Games use UDP which has no error checking, so a packet that is missing will never turn up. This is not really relevant for gaming as the player position in the packet data in the past is completely useless even if the client gets it down the road.

People talk about network smoothing in BF3 adding 150ms to ping. I assume the game simply renders everything in the past by 150ms. This way if there are any gaps it can easily fill them in. This assumption may be completely wrong but I am not sure how else they would achieve this.

Posted on

Battlefield 3 M16 is overpowered! More M16A3 tears

More M16 complaining over at whirlpool this morning!

No one is asking it to be nerfed into oblivion, and i doubt Dice will flap that up again. Just make it’s reload speed consistent with other rifles at least, atm it’s like infinite ext mags, OR maybe add .1 to left recoil.

Powerslave118 writes here

Reload time is fine.

trial by power writes here

I don’t know if reload time is fine, but I think the shooty characteristics of the gun are what make it good and reload is a bonus.

I think trying to have a “do everything” weapon is a bad idea, it either ends up being useless or too useful. It also becomes the go-to gun for the competitive better people, even if it is not amazingly awesome. This exacerbates the problem (real or imagined) by the general community because they are being killed by the gun in question regularly. However because it is being used by a subset of the player base that would kill them anyway it appears to be overpowered, OP or whatever you want to call it.

Personally I don’t really care – However I question the existance of the M416 when the M16A3 is available. Both seem to be trying to be all rounders, yet the M16A3 is “better”. I think the easiest solution would be to change one of them to be completely different, possibly useless and either nerf the M16 into the M416 or keep the M416.

The M416 is a ncie all around weapon but the lower rate of fire makes it slightly less beasty.

I would much rather see someone die by my AN-94 than the ‘typical OP M16A3’.

Powerslave118 writes here

To give context. The M16 (Specifically the M16A3) is considered by some to be overpowered (OP), mainly because it performs well at all ranges where other weapons available to assault, or other classes in general. The M16 is meant to be a jack of all trades type weapon and it is not far off. However some think that it is way too good at working electrical, plumbing and carpentry.

Now that was have some context for the whole overpowered thing, I need to vent over the Battlefield 3 guns. Specifically; why are there so many? The weapons are all essentially the same, yet there are thirteen variants of AR for assault to pick from. Weapon mechanics for all are identical; differences being recoil/spread, drop off, ROF and bullet velocity. While these came make weapons fairly different I highly doubt there needs to be thirteen to select from. The exception is of course the AN-94 with its double shot ability, but even then we are not comparing rocket launchers with plasma guns, more plasma guns with ever so slightly different plasma guns.

This is part of the problem.

Back to the jack of all trades itself, the M16

Someone posted on symthic. Short | Medium | Long
M16AA3 7/10 | 8/10 | 7/10
AEK-971 10/10 | 6/10 | 4/10
AN-94 4/10 | 6/10 | 10/10

The numbers are not exactly what they used, but you get the idea. The M16 is rather good at everything, and while it may be beaten in specific circumstances it is without a doubt good enough for most people at all ranges.

This is with attachments of course. Heavy barrel across the board these days is the norm and sights are whatever you want them to be.

Who uses the M16?

A large part of the problem is that the better players use the M16A3. Looking at the table above it is easy to see that the AEK is a little better at close range and the AN-94 is a little better at long range. If you factor player skill into this the better, more experienced gamers selecting the M16 are going to win anyway, because they are better to begin with. Middle of the road bob who picks the AN-94 because it is different and a bit gimmicky is going to get mowed by better players, even at range. Why is that? Because the weapons are really not different enough to matter, he is still an inferior player.

The weapons need to be compared in a vacuum. If you are playing against an identical player then the above table is true. However just because you are using what should be a better weapon at the correct range does not mean you are going to win. The BF3 guns are not different enough for that. The better player will still win the majority of encounters with the M16 at long and medium range over the AN-94.

So I think that at least part of the problem comes down to better players wanting a more reliable, all trades weapon, picking the M16 and then all the slightly less players see M16A3s in their kill feed.

Its not just the M16A3

The same applies the the engineer M4A1, it is basically the best engineer weapon. Because engineer is not played quite as much, especially in a competitive environment this is not as obvious. Plus it is outclassed by the M16 so not as obvious.

The M16 is good at most ranges and the players selecting have superior aim. Battlefield 3 encounters are really short, and locating and putting fire on a target counts a long way towards killing another player. In light of this more experienced players have better situational awareness and will locate, shoot and take down lesser players (using non-M16) before they even have a chance to shoot. Combined with the non-M16 players being less careful with their movement and we end up with a fish-in-a-barrel situation.

The time to kill (TTK) is so short on the BF3 guns that being aware of the other player is such a large advantage, which the better player will have, that the M16 is not the deciding factor here. The better player could be using a pistol (within reason, due to range obviously) and still come out on top.

A few examples.

Moving from corner building to MCOM1 on bazaar. A good player will pick the lesser player out in the market area and be able to shoot them through the stands. If the situations are reversed the lesser player may not even notice the better player approaching.

Covering the market side spawn on bazzar from the tiles spawn behind the blocks/destroyed wall. You can cover that corner with any automatic weapon you want and win, M16 is not needed. It does not matter because the guy peeking from the spawn area is awesome, all you need to do is aim at the corner around head height and unload when they peek. This is what the better player would do.

Coming around a corner into each others faces. The better player is probably aiming the corner, listening for footsteps, ready to shoot. The lesser player is simply walking waiting to react. With the stupidly short TTK on all the weapons the more experienced player is setup ready to kill the other player who is playing 100% on reaction.

So is the M16 Overpowered?

Even with the above I think it is, but it really does not matter. Having choice from 13 assault rifles that may be slightly different to each other adds little to the game over all. Having a gun that everyone uses is good and provides a level playing field. You think it is OP? Fine, go and use it and see how you come out with the above points in mind.

Are you trying to say that the M16 is good being overpowered?!

Sort of. I like the way it provides a baseline for competitive play. While I roll with the AEK more often since it suits my aggressive play style the M16 is good and I can use it if I want.

If you are dying the M16 often it is probably because you are dying to a better player, with better siutational awareness, aim and everything else that goes with being better. You are not dying to the M16 specifically.

More Battlefield 3 posts

Posted on

On site page optimisation

I know very little about website design and SEO. I think I need a firm/SEO guy to optimise my website.

xr5 writes here

The guy got a whole lot of replies about backlinks and fixing page content. I sent him a private message with my opionion for what to start with – on site page optimisation:

I am not associated with any SEO firms – however I am involved in managing a number of sites for my current employer.

The very first thing you should do is on page optimisation. On page is always in your control.

You want your page to have good structure and relevant content. The very first thing I would do for your front page is make sure there is only one set of h1 tags, currently there are two.

Think of the page like this.

title
h1 – relevant to the title
p – introduction
h2 – sub heading relevant to h1
p – body for h2
h2 – sub heading relevant to h1
p – body for h2

and so on.

I would make sure all the h2 headings have some context with the page. If you are aiming the front page at grannyflats/approvals in general then having granny flats, or a spin on it in each heading tag could be beneficial. The FAQ is also h1 – I would change this to h2 and change it to “grannyflat FAQs” or similar.

The set of boxes that contain why us / testimonials / gallery / contact us need some work. The white text are h2 tags, which is ok. However as mentioned in the previous paragraph they are not relevant to anything. The text underneath it in a seperate p. See below.

<h2><a href=”whychooseus.html”>Why Us</a></h2>
<p>Granny Flats<br /> Sydney</p>

To give this heading context for the page title and h1 I would change this snippet to resemble the below.

<h2><a href=”whychooseus.html”>Why Us
<span>Granny Flats<br />
Sydney</span></a></h2>

As you can see the entire h2 becomes a link (not a bad thing) and the “Granny flats Sydney” is included in the h2 tags to add context. You would restyle “granny flats sydney” using the span tag. This can be applied to all four call out boxes. The br is not ideal, however I was not interested in correcting everything, just giving him an idea of where to start.

To follow thing the page should be modified and each call to action should have a paragraph underneath it. Four headings with no content does not make much sense, correct? So make them contextual.

Why Us
Granny Flats Sydney
You should pick us for your granny flat because we are awesome and you deserve to be awesome too!

etc.

Next up – google apparently uses strong/b to decide important words on a page. Please do not go out and add strong to every occurrence of granny flat, however a few times per page would not hurt. To start you have orange text in your two paragraphs on the front page. They are currently rendered using the below.

<font color=”#FF8000″>Granny Flats Sydney</font>

I would suggest changing these to something a little more semantic to give more context to the page.

<strong>Granny Flats Sydney</strong>

You can style these however you like using the strong tags. Personally I am not a fan of the orange with green and would probably just bold them. This can be applied to most pages. If you want more than a few strong elements I would suggest using a span in place of the font tag you currently have. You can style them the same way, google has no idea.

This is not SEO: While we are on the topic of paragraphs and semantic markup, remove the font tags and make both the paragraphs on the front page the same size. Also play with the line-height, for best results it should be between 1.2 and 1.5em.

I posted yesterday about commented out content on the front page – It appears you have removed it. I would have edited it and left it on the page for visitors. It looked relevant.

One of the most important things to understand is that google likes new, unique content. The more you have the better. If you did not read the link in my previous post I urge you to do so.

The first step you should take is to understand that purchasing backlinks is a thing of the past. Create content that people want and it will get linked to. Going down the road of purchasing backlinks can have negative effects. I would recommend simply writing large pages to start with.

Lastly you have a PDF with some information:
http://grannyflatapprovals.com.au/mind_map.pdf

I would recommend turning this into a page somehow and expanding as much as possible on each point. For instance “Carry out site survey”. How long/how much/why/when/etcetcetc.

Pad it out and tell a story that will help people understand.

The final thing to understand is that each page stands on its own merits. In googles eyes The front page is no more important than the second page. While having contextual links between pages is beneficial, and linking from content that is similar is important, overall it does not matter all that much. You could build an internal page that has higher page rank than the front page if you wanted to. So give all your pages the love they deserve, not just the front page.

Also if you have not, read this:
http://www.seo-theory.com/2012/03/20/long-tail-content-strategy-for-people-who-dont-understand-the-long-tail/

Posted on

Should I use a foregrip BF3, Battlefield 3 gun mechanics and its too difficult to get unlocks

Thoughts from end of July/early August.
If you are looking for a definitive yes/no on the foregrip here it is: Use it on the AEK but none of the other popular assault rifles. That is basically it. If you run it on your M16 or M416 you are making yourself less effective as they lack horizontal recoil and the foregrip adds spread.

Update for June Patch / DLC. Some quick patch note comments.
Reduced the inaccuracy added when in suppression. There is still an enhanced suppression compared to the initial state in the game, but the effect is now less than it was in the last patch

  • Slightly decreased the foregrip aimed accuracy penalty on the M4A1 to bring it in line with other guns.
  • Slightly increased the foregrip aimed accuracy penalty on the SCAR-H to bring it in line with other guns.

I was not aware of specific “buggy” numbers so these changes are interesting. This means that currently (before the june patch / DLC) foregrips may have been useful on the SACR-H and M4A1!

  • F2000 foregrip accuracy penalty reduced and recoil reduction bonus increased.
  • AEK971 foregrip recoil reduction bonus increased.
  • SG553 foregrip recoil reduction bonus increased.
  • FAMAS foregrip recoil reduction bonus increased.

Pre-patch the AEK is the only assault weapon possibly worth using the foregrip on. I feel that these changes will make the AEK good with the foregrip, rather than just sitting the fence. Keeping in mind the foregrip mechanics of -horizontal recoil +spread, the other weapons listed above will still be less than spectacular. This is conjecture at this point as the patch is not yet available, however based on the fact that the current FAMAS/F2000 +spread is much larger than the recoil reduction, it is probably safe to assume that the reduction buff will not be large enough to offset this. However for the FAMAS it hinges on..

  • Reduced some of the vertical recoil and zoomed accuracy penalties added to the FAMAS in the previous update.

Depending on this change, the foregrip may become useful on the FAMAS once more.

Sir_Redrum writes… Sorry I did not note the post on Whirlpool.

Seems like you need close to 100 kills with a weapon before you have enough decent attachments to become a little bit more competitive.

No. I run AEK with bipod (just to fill the slot, not because I use it often), iron sights and flash suppressor. Flash suppressor could be replaced with heavy barrel or a silencer without many issues. You unlock heavy barrel at a whopping 20 kills. My basic setup would be working happily after 20 kills, as I mentioned before the bipod is not required and I only take it because I can, it is occasionally useful. So 20-40 kills if you want a sight.


If you hate ironsights and would rather run a scope you get a low zoom very early and either the US/RU red dot depending on the gun shortly after. If you need a very specific sight to perform well I look at how you play and why it works and see if you can translate this to other sights.

Before the patch I would have said that 100ish is correct because foregrip was pro and comes later.

Which leads to an important question: Should I use the foregrip after the most recent Battlefield 3 patch?

To which would be a resounding no. At least for assault and engineer weapons. You should also learn how to aim and fix the Battlefield 3 mouse acceleration.

Sure there are other sites that will give you numbers and back these up with statistics up with spread and recoil. They will then go to say it could be beneficial to use a foregrip on a few weapons – offset with other attachments. They will then leave selection in the readers court. By not forcing a view on readers I assume the authors of these articles are trying to be PC, or at the very least covering their asses in case their math is wrong, or that the trade offs leave the gun similar to the unmodified version.

Foregrip Before the Patch

Before the last patch the foregrip had a global flat horizontal recoil percentage reduction. This was good because for some guns it removed a good % of nothing recoil and for others it removed a good percentage of a lot, but not all recoil. The answer to should I use a foregrip was easy. The answer was yes unless you wanted to run a bipod on an LMG, but even then the global reduction was quite good and probably worth using over a bipod. Plus before the patch the bipod was not quite as useful as it is now. The pre-patch foregrip turned some of the weapons into freaking laser beams, and made me question if Dice had implemented their.. vision, for lack of a better word, correctly. At the time I did not know that the foregrip was a global reduction, just that it was awesome and that you should use it!

Why is a flat global reduction bad? Because some of the weapons were balanced to be used without a foregrip – adding one reduced the horizontal recoil to the point it was non-existent. For others it decreased it enough that the weapon became usable.

The Foregrip after the patch

Now the foregrip applys a different amount of horizontal recoil adjustment based on the weapon it is used on. This number is still decent across the board and if it were the only change then it would probably still be the go-to attachment for its slot, but only because there is little choice here.

The biggest problem with the foregrip and why you should not use it is because it adds spread.

Battlefield 3 gun mechanics 101 and the foregrip

A quick recap on gun mechanics. Till now I have mentioned recoil only. This is easy. You shoot and the weapon kicks. Easy to understand and in game it is easy to see how to control it – if you are spraying you simply aim down slightly to bring the weapon back to where you want it. Bit of interesting info: the first shot kicks more than the consecutive shots, but the first shot goes where you aim it unless the item is heavily affected by spread. This first bullet kick makes bursting less good than other ADS titles.

The second mechanic is spread. This is a completely random addition on top of recoil. Your first shot will go where you point it, provided the weapon does not have an assload of spread. If you are suppressed you receive additional recoil and spread. If you have a high amount of spread the first bullet does not go where you want it! It might appear to leave the gun at a very alarming angle, not at all out the front of the barrel.

Back to the Foregrip after the patch

So should you use it? No, not really. It adds a random, completely uncontrollable aspect to your weapon. Some players say to use a heavy barrel with a foregrip. Ok? The heavy barrel reduces spread when aiming down the sights but adds vertical recoil. The foregrip removes horizontal recoil and adds spread. The heavy barrel does not balance out a foregrip. True one removes spread and the other adds it – cancelling each other out? At the same time one reduces horizontal recoil and the other adds vertical recoil. No cancelling there at all. This is ignoring the other unrelated benefits of heavy barrel.

You should not use the foregrip because it adds randomness to every shot you fire. At least with the heavy barrel you can be selective and only ADS, knowing the hip firing incurs a penalty. The foregrip on the other hand always has a penalty.

To top it off each weapon has a different reduction from the foregrip. The popular M16A3 receives very little in the way of benefit from it while the AEK-971, FAMAS and F2000 receive more. But even here the weapons are all over the place and receive different reductions and just because a weapons sprays more does not guarantee that the foregrip will do anything useful.

So in short – don’t add uncontrollable randomness to your weapons. Learn how to control them instead.

Posted on

Why you must play as engineer. Also old school battlefield players are delusional

Powerslave118 writes… here

Damavand for infantry is pretty good too as there is only limited vehicles and they are not hard to take out.

In the past players on Whirlpool have commented that they need to play engineer in conquest because of vehicles. More specifically because they need to kill vehicles.

These same players are the ones that go on about how the BF series provides a rich, different gaming experience that allows the use of fancy things such as tactics and strategy. Personally I think these guys have no idea what they are talking about because they seem to be the battlefield die-hards – and probably have not dueled or even played TDM in older FPS. My guess is they had their FPS cherry popped by 1942 or Battlefield 2 and have that nice afterglow memory of it.

Tip: Quash that feeling and get on with gaming, 1942 is old now. If you are still gaming and comparing everything to that then you will never really enjoy gaming again.

Letting that tank cap offices on Kharg, waiting 20 seconds till it drives away and then recapping works perfectly well. In fact judging by the general quality of pub players I would say that you are better off doing this, even as engineer. On conquest maps most people play as engineer, so in the following example you will be soloing the tank. If you had a squad mate, or team mate at the point they would probably be engineer that you could support as another class.

How can you support engineer as another class? If the tank is good and has a repairer you can kill flank and kill this player while leaving a med pack for your team mate.

Anyway back to the average pub player. You can’t solo a tank. So being engineer, assault or recon does not matter because you won’t be doing anything productive. You will die.

StiffNipples writes… Here

1942/BF2 (even BC2) you used to fight between one flag and another, break the line and go cap the flag

He is sad that flags are grouped together and most of the combat occurs around the flag rather than in between them.

From a design perspective this seems a step up. By forcing play around the objective they are defining the play area. Rather than it being the entire gap between flags it becomes the area around the flags.

Is this bad? I find most firefights occur across the flag area, from the attackers side to the defenders side. Like a front, except instead of breaking through then capping the fight continues until the flag is taken.

There are a few points that are distant to the action. Antenna on capcicum and army base (the one up the hill) on kharg come to mind. There is no “front” to break through on these. I usually approach the flag, draw some fire from a distance to locate the defenders, if there are any, and go the long way around to kill them.

I see this “front” mentioned fairly often in relation to older battlefield titles.

  • Did it frequently exist? Was it always in effect and not something interesting that sometimes happened, like a good run with a squad. A battlefield moment if you will.
  • Did breaking through really result in capturing the next flag? I find this difficult to swallow because I would have assumed that the dead from the “front” encounter would simply back spawn at the flag.
  • Would the front occur now? 1942 and Battlefield 2 are old titles. In my experience the gamers that dropped their old games to play it were not really top notch and more likely to be the ones that would form a “front” because they enjoyed this type of gaming.

Would it still happen today with the different quality of gamers that play now?

Posted on

Should I give ammo or health when asked or leave it in a central spot?

Purg writes… Here

I’m not sure if you realise but when you drop and ammo pack, move on, drop another ammo pack, the previous ammo pack disappears after a couple of seconds..?

I read Milans post as “I drop mine at this flag and someone else drops it at another flag. Now the team has ammo at two points!”. I think this works reasonably well for ammo since it is not required as frequently as health in Battle field 3. On the rare occasion I play support this is what I do. Either at a flag or at a specific point that has lots of combat. For example if we are attacking Gas Station from Hilltop on Caspian I try to leave some in the buildings just before Gas Station so anyone else coming through there can ammo up.

I have players run up to me asking for health frequently in BF3. I drop packs whenever the cool down is up but I move around all the time so the chance of it being where I am is rather low. People get annoyed and unload their weapon at me if I don’t comply instantly with their demands. There is a health pack 10 feet behind me that I just dropped. Of course I drop another when available.. but the 5 seconds wait was too long for them. Says a lot for the mentality of the Battlefield 3 pub player.

I think it goes both ways. Yes people don’t drop health or ammo, but at the same time walking 20m to get ammo is probably going to work better than annoying someone for it given that.. people don’t drop it. Apparently. I tend to see a few medpacks and an ammo box at a flag, so think the problem quite often lies with the recipient rather than the donor.

What to do?

There are really only two options here.

  • Drop ammo at one point on the battlefield and leave it
  • Forever drop when poeple ask/when the cool down is up/when it is needed

Dropping when the cool down is up or when asked/needed seems to be the most obvious way to go. I mainly play assault and it is how I operate the majority of the time. Depending on your play style you need to heal yourself frequently so leaving a health pack lying around somewhere else is not going to be too useful. On the flip side if you have just finished an encounter you do not always need to heal up too 100% straight away. The other classes operate just fine without this crutch, as does assault when you rock an M320 or M26.

Less required by far is ammo. I think most pub players (myself included) are not good enough to run out of ammo on the assault rifles or carbines, execpt in rare situations. Even fairly good players run around a 1-1 KDR, so will usually die before using their ammo, even without ammo specialisation. Players should learn to use the map to find ammo.

If you plan to drop when possible I suggest a little more caution than I have used in the past. I have many deaths from running into firefights, dropping ammo and then dying because I have a health pack in my hands. You have been warned!

Dropping at a specific point that requires ammo or health frequently. This one is much trickier and depends entierly on the map and how the map is being played. Examples of where I would do this almost always is metro and bazaar. If you decide to take this route know that some people will be annoyed at you for not complying with their demands.

You can keep tabs on your ammo pack by watching points gained from resupplies. One problem with this method is the pack can be destroyed while you are on the other side of the map and cannot monitor it. For this method to be effective you have to watch the flow of the battle and points gained from resupplies. If you are playing metro and leave your ammo box somewhere near escalators and your team pushes past, you need to find a new high traffic area and more it accordingly. Keeping your ammo pack back from the front line/behind a wall works well as it protects it and stops it being destroyed by random fire. It may result is less quick points but you will have to babysit it less.

Keeping in mind where grenades/explosives/RPGs can go when dropping your specific point ammo pack is a good idea. The maps and places you want to utilise this method in Battlefield 3 tend to be quite spammy. Not dropping near walls that receive RPGs/M320s frequently is a good idea.

Posted on

Are jets really balanced and do dice have a hardon for them?

JoeKerr writes… here

Jets are supposed to be super-fast, intimidating bits of machinery

…so do you want them to be awesome or not?

I want jets to be balanced. I think part of the balance problem stems from Dice wanting non-infantry equipment to be significantly more durable and intimidating than infantry, whereas I think it should be simply like picking up another weapon.

Jets should be quick and easy to destroy – if your load out suits –  just like it is quick and easy to kill another infantry player. This should be especially true on instant vehicle spawn servers. By the same token Jets should destroy other things quickly, which they apparently already do. Choppers, other jets and even ground targets melt before them.

This is not to say Battlefield 3 jets should be useless, or die when looked at, and a good pilot should be an asset that contributes to the overall game. Much the same way a good infantry player can turn the tide and help out significantly. There should be solid counters that are easily deployed by infantry and not limited to other vehicles or jets.

The current incarnation does not do this, it is extremely difficult to shoot down a jet as a non-jet, non-AA unit. The Whirlpool conversation on this topic continues along the lines that mobile AA and base AA is ok for killing aircraft. Other jets are also ok for killing jets. Infantry are pretty useless for killing jets.

I am not here to offer a balance solution because really, I don’t care and if jets (and even choppers) were removed my game would be relatively unaffected. This post is just here to say that jets should not be awesome and intimidating bits of high-speed machinery. They should be simply another facet of the game, that is balanced and similar to picking up another weapon in a more traditional FPS. Not similar to picking up quad damage plus invulnerability.

 

NussBuster writes… here

Yes, very good, I’ll be happy when they are. As it is they’re _any speed you want_, intimidating bits of machinery.

Sums it up quite well. I think the any speed is a dig at externally binding heavy brake.