Defusing Mines: Lower the time needed to defuse

But mines do require skill.
Knowing where the enemy is likely to go. Knowing the good spots. Knowing how many mines per stack will get you a vehicle kill at what point in the game, while taking into account the enemy armor, etc.

Knowing you can channel dropping the mine by holding the lmb, therefore making it easier and safer to drop from height, which nobody apparently knows since it glitches the animation.

 

Experience, not skill.

 

You cant seriously not put a "=/" or a "--->" there.
Besides, you could handwave anything in the game like that.
" Lol you memorised a curved line, gj faggot grenadier", yet I dont see people around saying that.

 

If you think this is cheating and should be fixed, then you should exploit it and make sure as many people are exploiting it as possible.

Do more shit. Make enemies dayglow yellow. Make scouts flash so hiding is less effective.

Then post the necessary files in a folder like I did with Spartacuspires so people can do a clean replace.

Constantly improve it. Are semi-transparent walls possible? Is that a map-based thing? Can you remove smoke?

 

Yes, no and yes. Texture replacement is the most basic cheat in the book.

 

One day I'll get on your level, Candles.

 

How about fuck your shit?
Everytime someone decided to do just that, it resulted in waves of ragequits from the game. It happened when dicks were dropping mines via com view, it happens when someone uses map sploits.

For gods sake, someone please add a func wall around the nf main on cyclopean.

 

The inherent issue with the idea of "Exploit it till they fix it" is that its entire premise is that the developers haven't fixed an exploit because they're lazy, feel like there's more important things to do, use it themselves or that the devs believe it isn't in wide enough use to warrant fixing. This premise ignores the idea that something isn't fixed because the developers don't have the time, they don't have the solution, or the solution is incredibly difficult to implement. Generally speaking, the latter reasons tend to be far more common than the former ones.

Maybe sv_pure does work now, maybe it still doesn't. If it doesn't, then there might be a chance we won't be able to get it to work period. In that case, all you'd be doing is encouraging people to exploit known issues that can't be fixed.

 

No one is so cynical as to think that people are "too lazy" or "don't have time" to fix/do X.

People are not lazy. They do have time. What they don't have are priorities.

Exploits aren't a priority unless they are exploited.

People can live in a dream world and say "some exploits are never exploited" or they can admit that certain people achieve unfair advantages via exploiting.

Granted, the world isn't so black & white. There are tolerances for certain levels of cheating. Typically, one would ask themselves, "how much cheating can I tolerate?"

However, that's the wrong question, or at least the wrong form of it. The better question to ask yourself is, "How much should skill influence winning?" That is the right question.

In a many pubs, harder to fix kinds of cheating tend to be tolerated (or only discouraged) because the winner & loser in a pub don't really matter.

However, in this community, we value the "skill => win" relationship higher than literally anything else. I'm not arguing whether we should or should not value it that high, it's simply a fact in this community. I'm not going to patronize anyone by providing evidence for this fact.

Cheating causes cheaters to win more than their skill levels predict. Since winning & losing is a zero sum game, that means skilled players are losing more than their skill levels predict.

It's pretty clear that we cannot value "skill => win" above everything else and also tolerate cheating. As such, fixing these exploits should be a pretty high priority if we want to avoid hypocrisy.

So since our community morales somehow aren't getting the job done, the next way is to increase the amount of cheating above the tolerated amount.



But I honestly believe that the above argument is irrelevant in this particular scenario for these particular exploits.

If we cared about fixing these particular issues, there are at least two scenarios to fix or mitigate the issues that would cause someone to texture hack.

We could remove jeep roll bars, remove smoke grenades & give gren mine wallhacks to all classes. I realize the wallhack thing requires some code effort, but I suspect it wouldn't be too bad since it already exists for grens.

We could also run pure servers. That would remove the opportunities for texture hacking, right?

 

I pull 19 credits and a 20-hour work week on a double engineering degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. That I have time for anything else is beyond miraculous to me. Most of the time, I literally do not have the time. That it only took 2.5 months for me to fix the major bugs in the port was nothing short of surprising to me.

As Trickster said...

And as I posted...

 

sparticus.... you are badgering the mods savior... you know that you could possibly piss him off enough to say "fuck it" and yet you keep poking. While you are correct about prioritizing your time... there are times when you should know when to drop the subject.

 

Don't worry; it'd take a lot more than a few people's criticism to get me to leave

 

There is player clip around most of it.

 

Unlike what Spartacus think, I am actually hiding bugs so people don't exploit them.

Does that make me a bad boy? :c

also gtfo Candles, your job's finished here, no cake for you.

 

http://researchinprogress.tumblr.co...ocs-tell-me-life-will-be-even-more-busy-after

 

CS:S I outright used texture hacks on. In the end though, I started playing mixes with a friend and couldn't use them there, so I removed them and actually got at least half decent. That kinda changed my mentality. Though I never really used anything outright "cheating" with Empires, I did realise that a lot of the custom things I used were helping me, and wouldn't be available in scrims once we were on Steam, so that's what prompted me to go totally stock.

Pretty much everything you said there (except the flashing scout thing) has been done before. The files used to fly around between people pretty frequently. I made it abundantly clear in EPIC that no-one should use them because sv_pure was coming in and they'd be unable to use them in scrims. I'm not going to go all self-righteous on people because there's no point, people don't respond to that.

As for sv_pure, it's really up to server owners, as I said earlier. I definitely think sv_pure needs to work (for competitive matches), but there isn't a point at which I'll enforce that on EPIC, and I doubt Vicki would enforce it on VIPER. It's just kind of lame to restrict people just because of a few people who choose to cheat. The thing is, I don't really think it happens any more. There used to be a pretty good collection of mods for Empires, such as Star wars models, SMG2 -> SMG3 model replacement, loads of pretty cool sound files, simpler particles for people with shit PCs, Jeeps without the rollbars (back when the NF jeep had way more restrictive vision than now), and other stuff. Some of that probably gave people a small advantage sure, but no-one really did it in the intention of gaining an advantage. Some people took it too far and made an effort to cheat though, which is a real shame. Once we hit Steam, it actually broke most custom content, so that modding scene we had going kind of died, which was a real shame. On the other hand, it also killed that cheating scene, so there's always that.