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Originally Posted by Crazycarl
This sets up a binary state of success/failure, which isn't very fun. Here's why. Say a sentry is easy to evade if you know how to do it. Then the sentry is a joke, and only newbies ever get killed by it. Your next impulse might be to make the sentry quicker, or smarter, to give more of a challenge. That just separates players into the super-skilled who don't get killed ever, and everyone else who gets raped all the time. Newbies will have to try again and again, and probably give up while complaining the sentry is OP.
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Well not really. It's not black and white like that. Let's look at two O extremes:
Newbie player: Runs straight at a sentry and dies
Skilled player: conc jumps in at an angle and bunnyhops without missing a beat like some sort of speed demon
I think it's a mistake to try and appeal to simply "run in and not worry about defense" because it takes depth and balance out of the game. When I was learning how to play TFC, I learned quickly that strolling into the cap where the enemy defense was meant death. So what did I do? Did I spend months and months perfecting conc jumps and bunnyhopping obsessively until I had a better chance of evading the sentry? Fuck no. I TRIED OTHER TACTICS. Sentry gun mowing things down? Let's try and fire rockets or snipe it from a distance. Demoman piping everything? Snipe his ass. Sentry concealed too much to attack it from afar? Sneak in as a spy and destroy it. Or slip around the corner, release a mirv, then run away.
My point here is it's not just experts v. newbies. Just someone who's died 2-3 times using the exact same tactic can try something different that might work without having to be an expert by any means. That's how things worked for me in TFC. Things like conc jumping were irrelevant in most AvD maps anyway.
I may get flamed for this, but in my opinion, players SHOULD get punished for running towards the sentry gun with no plan whatsoever. While of course we want new players, FF is still a niche genre, there is some learning curve to it. It doesn't mean you have to be an expert, it means that you should have to think about how you play. A good defense should be outmaneuvered, outwitted, or overpowered in order to get past them, it should be able to be simply ignored or run past by a single above-average player.
You do have a valid point however. I'm sure many players will die 2-3 times and simply QUIT instead of trying something different. If that's the audience FF is really trying to woo in, I'm not sure what to suggest. It works both ways though. Those same players may try to defend their sg over and over and quit as a result, saying it's impossible to keep up. I think I've already seen one or two posts like that already before in the forums.
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I think our goal should be to make the engy and his sentry as powerful and reliable as any other D player. It shouldn't be the linchpin of any defense.
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I think that's fine as a long term goal. But what can't be ignored and HAS been is that the FUNCTION of the engineer can't disappear. And by that, I mean the sentry is a means of keeping the enemy away from the flag. What FF patches did was take that ability away from the engineer, gave boosts to offense, and gave defense NOTHING to work with in its place.
I'm not saying you personally, but decisions like that are what made me question the competency of the FF devs in the first place, since this was such a common-sense issue in my eyes. When a game was close to being balanced, like 1.11 was, taking away abililties from one side, then adding new ones to another is the exact opposite of balancing things. It's taken a very long time for the FF dev team (as a whole) to understand this.