• TF2 Random Critical Hits: A Fair and Balanced Discussion
    669 replies, posted
There are a bunch of times you guys have turned tail when I ask you things. Like when I ask people to prove those many accusations that they make. Why do I suddenly have to prove things, when no one else is held to that standard? What experience and qualifications do you have? I don't recall making an appeal to authority. If have allegedly shitposted so much, then how come no one can bring up any evidence of it?
Because whether if you are shitposting or not is subjective? I could consider bunch of your posts and arguments as shitpost because they're illogical crap, and post it as evidence but if I do that I'm pretty sure you'd say "thats not shitposting" and then continue to claim that you never shitposted
You guys make vague accusations, and have not pointed out anything in specific. Getting called out for something usually means that you would point out the specific issue. All you guys seem to do is hurl accusations. Do you want to discuss what the accusations you make?
ASIC, did my previous posts perhaps give you the impression I want to enter in any kind of argument with you on, well, anything at all, really? No, I didn't think so.
Let's just say an adept player, who knows how to rocket jump and do some other basic techniques like surfing and strafing, decides to go on a casual server. Of course they may be able to play pretty well, but may run into some problems. Some such as, his team may not play as competently or the enemy team is filled of professionals. While those are technically determined by chance due to how many different combinations of teams can be composed, starting to learn how the team is composed can be key to soon start winning. After some adapting and getting more familiar with the enemy, it can be easier to take care of. However, what can't really be calculated is random critical hits. Now let's say our player is playing Soldier, and he runs into an Engi, Heavy, and Medic. The Engi is carrying his sentry (let's just say level 3 for now), while the Medic started pocketing the Heavy, all of them full health except the Heavy who is slightly overhealed. The Soldier goes to attack the Engi using a rocket jump to get on a higher platform and the Heavy notices and starts to shoot the Soldier. What can happen here is mostly two things: The Engi is killed and sentry destroyed, but now the Soldier may have lower health and has to deal with two other opponents (one fully overhealed now); or The Soldier kills the Medic first and slightly damages the Heavy, while the Engi gets to place down his sentry, while still sustaining damage from the Minigun bullets. From there a whole bunch of things can happen. But now let's take the exact same scenario and apply random critical hits. Soldier attacks Engi first, gets a crit, kills him instantly, and is now able to deal with the Heavy and Medic pair faster now, as before he would have to taken some damage as two rockets would have killed the Engi. Soldier attacks Medic first, gets a crit, kills him instantly and damages the Heavy significantly, and while the Engi is now able to build his sentry, yet the Soldier still has quickly killed an enemy making his job easier. Let's say the Heavy got the crits instead, so once he started shooting the Soldier, then the Soldier automatically loses and puts both him and his team at a disadvantage cause now there's an active Level 3 Sentry about and a Medic and Heavy pair still active. Essentially, random crits made either scenario unfair. No matter how it may seem, there is no way to really justify playing a game of dice in an skill-based FPS while a game of chess could be played instead (ironically enough chess was played with dice in earlier iterations of it). I actually want to take this scenario of randomness winning a game from an old fighting game, Street Fighter 2. In SF2, you could play as a wide range of characters, all of with (mostly) different movesets and attacks to use from. Now in the game exists 'combos' which are basically when you hit an opponent and allowed to hit the opponent again right after, creating a combo. There was also the feature of stun, which basically as you get hit more and more, your character goes into a state of stun where you are unable to move or do anything. A problem with stun at the time was that it was actually random, meaning a single hit that goes into a combo can get you stunned and constantly get combo'd into death. The whole scenario is unfair, as you could have probably gotten the same combo as well, but also not have gotten the stun effect on your opponent. Meaning you could literally win by complete chance. Basically, all actions are fair and balanced, but once a single factor comes into randomly decide whether or not the action should be more strong or weak, it becomes unfair as there is no way to know whether or not it will happen.
Yo I keep making these long-ass posts talking about the ACTUAL POINT OF THE THREAD, and then getting no response. Why are you having these pointless side-conversations about irrelevant crap? This is the "Talk About Random Crits" Thread, not the "ASIC and friends fling shit at each other" Thread.
fun fact: random crits actually disproportionately advantage generalists (soldier, demo, scout, medic melee) and disadvantage specialists (heavy and spy especially, but also engineer and pyro) even from a balance perspective, they make the game worse for non-generalist classes and serve as an unfair disadvantage for already-marginalized players
How would you rebalance them to solve the issue you are talking about (without removing random crits)?
I wouldn't. Random crits are fuckin stupid. Any purpose they might have served has long since been overtaken and done better by the introduction of weapons like the Kritzkrieg, Jarate and Buff Banner.
i enjoy random crits in the same way that i enjoy the random bullshit in the mario party games i can understand how people could hate them, but when i played TF2, I wasn't playing it with any degree of seriousness, so crits perfectly suited that end for me
ASIC, FOCUS ON THE GUY THAT'S ACTUALLY MAKING AN ARGUMENT AND STOP TRYING TO ROUNDABOUT TO TRY TO AVOID BEING WRONG Holy shit dude, your head is so far up your own ass that you're essentially a ring at this point. Forget literally EVERYONE else at this point and stop running in circles trying to achieve that gotcha and just focus on the main argument here. That main argument, is this guys post. It sums it up perfectly.
"The entire game is designed so that both players have a reasonable chance to do well." This isn't really going to be affected by random crits. "When you die, the game is fundamentally designed so that you always know how you can improve so that you don't die the same way again." How? The game does not tell you what you did wrong. Why do you consider the first example encounter fair? I don't see how that second encounter is unfair. If you consider it to be unfair/unbalanced because they could not have escaped death by performing better, then consider that there are other cases where you can die without making mistakes or being able to do anything better. Like stickybombs hidden outside your spawn doors. Or a revved up and waiting tomislav-heavy right around the corner. What do you define "fair" as (in the context of games)? So why can't you tack that on? Is that baseball bat scenario fair? It depends: If was something that neither knew about before hand (or only one knew about), that is more like cheating. If the probability to get the bat doesn't work the same for both players, then it is unfair. So is this new type of chess game fair? Well it is unknown if chess is a fair game (or if it is not a fair game), thus it would ALSO be unknown if this new variant of chess would be fair. Now hypothetically speaking: If chess was definitely a fair game*, if the chance to get the aluminium base ball bat worked the same for both players, and if both players knew about that rules change before hand; then the game would be fair. *or if this baseball bat surprise was added to another board game that was definitely fair.
"It is unknown if chess is a fair game" "Both players having a chance to do well isnt necessarily affected by random crits" You know i think we've reached a point where asic's (apparent) intellectual disability has gotten in the way of any further discussion. Baseball chess. Endless, unanswerable questions, hypocritical accusations about accusations, @Hezzy Please, we're begging you to end this unconstructive insanity. All tf2punch has ever wanted to do was to have a meaningful debate about random crits after valve added a vote on them, but instead we're stuck dealing with this madman at every turn.
I can't just ban people for having shit opinions
I understand, but surely the previous pages of this thread demonstrate, at the very least, that ASIC is purposely keeping this thread alive via shitposting and troll posts in order to gain attention to himself. It's also clear that a long time ago he started to ignore the lenghty and argumented posts people offered him as counter-arguments to his opinions (see Mart Twoodle contributions, for instance), opting instead to take some posts at random and ask asinine questions to their authors as a way to shut down their arguments. All of this in order for him to merely appear to to keep up a debate on the thread's topic. Surely the forum's rules cover this kind of behaviour, with the punishments to match
What about uniformed opinions + spam, borderline thread necromancy, flaming, and troll shitposting?
What do you mean by shit opinions? If you are talking about this: Why would they be shit opinions? Let's start off with the chess thing. This thing is actually a fact. This isn't the most rigorous possible proof, but it should do for our purposes. A fair game is basically defined as one that is not biased towards any player.[1] Another way to put it is that a fair game is one where both players have an equal chance to win, when they are playing under the perfect strategy. This definition is functionally the same as the first, but it is usually a bit clearer. Some examples of this to give an idea of what I mean. Tic-Tac-Toe (in the default 3 by 3 board) is a fair game because it is not biased towards the first or second player, under perfect strategy the game always ends in a tie (this means it is also a futile game).[2] Connect 4 is an unfair game, because when played under perfect strategy the first player always wins [3]. Now we go back to chess. One reason we do not know if chess is a fair game or not is because chess is not a solved game[4]. In other words we do not know the perfect strategy for chess. As we do not know what optimum play for chess looks like, we can't tell what the result of playing under optimum strategy looks like. The reason for that is because of the ridiculously large number of possible moves in chess[5]. There are believed to be more possible moves in chess than the number of atoms in the observable universe. An interesting thing to note is that White (the side that goes first in chess) has a higher winrate[6], however this does not necessarily indicate that white would win under perfect strategy. Some chess players think that black has an advantage over white, or that the higher winrate for white is psychological in nature. On to the second thing: This thing is kind of wonky, as the hypothetical scenario was rather vaguely defined. To clarify what I meant here: In a scenario where both players would have a reasonable chance to do well with random crits disabled, they would still have a reasonable chance to do well if random crits were enabled. The mechanics of random crits work the same for every player, but the exact chance changes based on damage done, from 2% to 12%. So lets just bring out a bit of a spherical cow model: Lets assume there are 2 players in this encounter. Both start out with the same chance to win before taking crits into account (50%). Both have the same chance to crit (whatever%). If they crit when they normally would have lost the encounter, they win instead. Now as they both have the same pre crit chance to win and their chance to win is modified in the same way, their final chance to win remains equal to the other player. That is due to basic algebra For any x * y = z and a * b = c. If x =a and b = y, then z = c. Some references: [1]: CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics, Second Edition (page 1010) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futile_game [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect_Four#Mathematical_solution [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess#Winning_percentages
Man its a good thing ASIC got this thread as i cant imagine the normal tf2 thread not getting locked after manifestos like these.
Uh, okaaaay then. I guess I will ask other people as well. @Kaiga , did you ever want to give evidence for or discuss your accusations?
i remembered that asic had a viper icon https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/208625/35590934-4313-403f-84b2-678ddb562638/image.png
I guess I will ask you as well @riorio
But see, if in chess on each turn there was, say, a 2% chance that you would just lose a random chess piece, would that be any fun? You see the connection? Randomly dying without a fair fight in TF2 and randomly losing an important chess piece. And Jesus Christ, do NOT tell me anything about "well uh if both players have the same chance its fair", in one game your opponent might just drop all your pieces in a row without doing anything correctly while you can't do anything. Then it just becomes a game about CHANCE and not SKILL.
Those are your beliefs about my intentions, but there is nothing to support them. It is not really feasible for me to respond to every single post in the thread. I believe I mentioned this (or something similar to this) near the beginning of the thread. I responded to the post of "Mart Twoodle", before you even made this post. Look at the post that is 3 posts above yours.
Translation: I asked a bunch of asinine questions instead of forming a counterargument. I'll even spell it out for you since you have trouble with simple comprehension: Missing the point Question Question "I don't understand" "Being ambushed is unfair" Question Hypothetical that misses the point Acknowledging the unfairness in said hypothetical. This is a pretty good allegory to how random crits don't work the same for all classes but it goes straight over your own head. Questions about the hypothetical. You've not once responded to a well-formulated post with a post of equal merit. You instead introduce some verbal diharrea into the conversation, ask questions to things already answered, and make the discussion about your dumb bullshit instead of forming real counterarguments.
He just said that he doesn't ban for bad opinions, so why mention that again? I posted in this thread after 8 days, because I was not on facepunch for 8 days (Would you like me to prove this?). If I had went on facepunch earlier, then I would have posted earlier. Now what do you other guys think of the other things? Should someone be banned if they spam, shitpost, troll, or flame?
You guys are still trying to argue rationally with someone who thinks shit like this?
Can you explain the issue? Also, a lot of these guys never tried to argue rationally.
im so close at using contra's question mark button rant as a copypasta right now tbh guys
Its funny that youre asking that right now when theres bunch of posts on previous pages explaining why that and the explanations on that post was bad I dont know if you should be saying that since quite alot of the arguments and examples ive seen from you is really flawed or has nothing to do with TF2
He's not wrong there though. A perfectly honest competition doesn't necessarily make a good competitive game. This is why amby had to get nerfed. It made Spy more competitive at high tiers, but it also wasn't fun or mesh with Spy's role (neither has anything to do with raw balance). It had to go. Computer randomness similarly doesn't necessarily hurt competition. It adds uncertainty to a game. Why have more uncertainty? Because solved games aren't interesting to play or watch. The question shouldn't be whether it's needed, but in what form it should be present. If 3 minutes in one team's base randomly gets nuked and the other team wins for no reason, that of course hurts competition. But if you have environmental hazards that randomly enter the map traveling along clearly visible rails and sound a loud horn and bells prior to every approach, that's going to be easy for competitive players to avoid. You want a good middle ground where the random bits are easy to see coming, and possible for both parties to use to their advantage, and gain a massive benefit from if used correctly by one party and ill-answered to by the other. An example would be if a Soldier could somehow see a random crit coming, shot it at a Pyro who also saw it coming, and the Pyro reflected it back at the Soldier, killing him.
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