Scout Rifle Balancing

Broccoli's idea of super enchanced binoculars scouting would give the scout a true scouting role.

 

I agree with everything here. The last one might not be used very often, but could still be good for surprise attacks.

Definately. :D

Everyone keeps saying that the scout is for surveillence, so why not give them the ability to build pixerduhduhs and radars instead of the engineer?

 

that would be awesome :D
on district: "Someone go scout!" lol

 

Making the Scout spot a building and keep it spotted would be great. But maybe have a counter to it like, getting killed by another scout would make them disappear. There should also be an increase in the limit of spotted object destroyed gets you a skill point. If I'm not mistaken it's one right now. It would be better if you could spot more things and get points for them, and also some indication that it is spotted for possibly being awarded a point.

 

Quit jerking it to your scout fantasies. This is all I'm going to do for now:

RC14
-Added: scout rifles no longer automatically unzoom when fired; they'll stay zoomed until the fire button is released
-Added: another zoom level to the scout binoculars for a total of three zoom levels (unzoomed at 90 FOV, zoomed at 20 FOV, zoomed at 4 FOV)
-Added: turrets can be sabotaged by a scout like any other building; the turret will refuse to target and fire when sabotaged
-Modified: scout conc grenades will disable turrets for up to a maximum of 12 seconds (was 5 seconds) and emit purple smoke while disabled

 

i likey

 

Oh, and scouts can spot multiple targets with their binocs for 120 seconds of spotting time instead of just one, but they only get points for the last one they spotted.

 

yay disabling turrets! I swear this is going to be useful.

 

I think people are going to get in trouble on district with their lvl 3 turrets :p.

 

I like those changes, can't wait for RC14! Let's get some sabotagey goodness on those turret farms!

 

Nice one krenzo! you rock!

the amount of times i have to say that, i must sound like an old record...

 

For the record, the afternoon PUG today (June 29 2007 7:00 PM GMT) had VERY few scouts playing, and in my opinion, justified any such changes to the scout.

Of course, everyone played Scout in the jeep racing before the PUG. But that's not the focus of the game, only a side effect.

On the flag capture maps, very few scouts were played, especially on Glycencity, where I saw one person on NF scouting (with the scout rifle) and i don't know how long he actually played scout. I tried to mess around with scout, but with the inability to hit tanks, no buildings to take care of (thanks to Dubee's greninja skills), and a rather poor arsenal, I soon switched to rifleman, where I was far more effective.

Urbanchaos was rather short, so it was difficult for me to see who played what class. However, I played BE, and on my team very few, if any, people played scout, the majority being Engineers and Riflemen, I believe. I certainly don't remember seeing ANY NF with the scout rifle, nor do I remember de-cloaking anyone or seeing more then a handful of smoke grenades. Maybe this had to do with the fact that I was able to wall off the majority of the side-passages leading into our territory, reducing the Scout's sneaking usefulness. I don't know, I only know what I saw.

I didn't play duststorm, someone please analyze that.

Isle was a very competitive match with intense battles, and no one was just trying to "mess around." This is notable because NO ONE on NF played scout, not once through the entire game. The ONE person who DID play a scout on BE was actually asked to change to a more useful class like engineer. (I encouraged him to scout b/c I was on NF and losing at the time. Aha, I'm tricky, aren't I, Sandbag!? :p )

If I play the night PUG, I'll keep an eye on this sort of thing, then, as well. But the evidence above speaks for itself, and the changes made to the scout can only be beneficial.

 

Temporary limitation or by design? If the latter, could you explain?

 

Because I don't want to spend time on this stuff. I'm not happy about changing gameplay right now. We're at RC13. I'm readying to release if RC14 is good enough. Changing gameplay will continue to require more releases to test things.

 

I added a parameter to weapon scripts to define how much damage falloff they experience due to range and eliminated damage falloff from scout rifles. If Beerdude wants, he could apply this to rifles and SMGs to make SMGs weak at longer ranges compared to rifles.

 

I just hope I haven't opened Pandora's Box with this thread.

 

Eh, it's was looming anyway. The scout's still an odd fish.

 

That would be nice, yes, but it'll require a long period of testing and tbh the current settings do the trick :p

Although it would be nice to have two different settings for firing while standing, one while standing still and another while moving, because currently it doesn't matter if you're sprinting at top speed or carefully tracking your target while standing still, your accuracy will still remain the same.

Because of this, firing [while using ironsights] while standing still is incredibly inaccurate.

Code:

	//Increment spread by this amount for every shot fired to maximum of moving at full speed spread
	"JumpingSpreadIncrement"	"0.01"
	[U][B]"StandingSpreadIncrement"	"0.005"[/B] // Add a 'standing still' version of this[/U]
	"DuckingSpreadIncrement"	"0.005"

(Underlined variable)

Just try and kill an engineer on glycencity up close with the current settings, you're bound to lose :p

 

Double post, but this time ON-TOPIC:

How about making the scout binoculars auto-tag any enemies it sees? (except hidden scouts, of course) I know that this has already been proposed, but what I mean is this (but with binocs :p):



The guy on the left would roughly represent how it could look like, the guy on the right would be an ally. Class, weapon and health (!) of the enemy target is shown, information that is very, very valuable to your teammates. This would make the scout that more useful during full-blown combat or skirmishes. He would know what class would be approachng, what weapon they'd be carrying and their health status. Combine this with the proposed 'stay on radar for a minute or two' and the scout just got a whole lot better.

 

Yes please Maybe not fullscreen autotag, and have a range on it. You could still zoom in though, which would increase said range more, but there would be a limit on how far you would see. Oh, and you have to have the binoculars out for autotag, but it could still show up if your crosshair is on them.