Back in time to get the facts. Pt .Phosphorus Etc.. Merc/Spy

[Farley4Fan]

Tsk tsk, elitist garbage.  Lmao at Agent. "Like sure great if you have an idea"  :D :D :D  You know how many ideas are going into PS?  All balance suggestions ARE ideas agent.

[SITHDUKE]

I'd agree poisons will rarely ever kill a spy by itself. The merc has to have delt some damage or places proxies to back them up.

[Tidenburg]

Sorry just found this on a pic site and thought of you agent...

;D
If people wanna play DM, let them play DM. Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean no-one does besides are you so ar'tarded that you can't see if you don't put DM in people will start playing it anyway in gametypes like story?

[frvge]

*deep sigh*
C'mon, bit more new-user-friendly please.

[Tidenburg]

^
Heh, I was waiting for that post ;)

[Farley4Fan]

K, I can't tell if that's real or not, but I don't want to look/concentrate hard enough to figure it out.

DM has been discussed bazillions of times.  I don't feel like talking about it really, anyone else?

[Gawain]

there's not much to talk about dm right now. i think we all agree that dm sucks and all we gotta do is find a way to keep the dm players from joining story mode servers; our best solution so far is to provide a dm game mode. unless somebody  can come up with a better solution, there's no need to discuss dm again.

[VaNilla]

There are really three uses for mines.

a) The slow down mine: This mine is in place to cause the spy to waste time disabling. Whether it's a slow approach to a proxy, or firing a chaff to take out a poison mine. The mine slows you down.
b) The surprise mine: This is typically a laser or proxy that happens to be waiting for you in a place you'd rarely expect. You round a corner and boom. Dead. It's only likely to kill careless spies who move too fast, but it can work. 
c) The defense mine: This is a mine that is used to supplement a merc protecting a room. Usually against aggro spies. A poison mine placed at chest level would do this. The spy has to either duck to get under it (slowing him down) or get poisoned. In any case, the spy must choose between tripping the mine or giving the merc some free shots. In some cases it does the same as the slow down mine, but in this case the slow down purpose isn't to slow stealthy spies entering a room your'e not protecting but rather to deter aggro spies from closing with you.

This pretty much sums up all that needs to be said at the moment, there as so many people who play or have played SvM, and we all have our own ways of handling a game, our own stratergy. It's important to have as much choice as possible for a player but not so much that you completely remove peoples consideration for other gadgets.

I do agree the poison should be removed though, how could you possibly in your right mind really want to use it. It's a weak Laser Mine, the laser mine, you run through the laser and BAM your dead and the Mercs are at an advantage. The Poison mine is exactly the same! Only it sets off a little puff of gas and give you an extra 10 second to live! Best part is you can still survive by healing yourself... it's fucking retarded, just use a laser and he's dead straight away, that's all there is to it.

I would also scrap the Spy Detector shitty gadget in CT (The Plantable Radar) because that seriously is fucking useless, nobody would choose that over a spy trap in their right mind. Reason is the plantable radar, if you set it off, it only sends a signal from it's position, spy trap has all the same properties except it plants the radar on YOU, the only upside with a plantable radar is you can't remove it from your friend, but you can just remove it from where it has been placed and once it has been set off, that is blatantly obvious.

But as for staying on topic, those timings are helpful and in my opinion the Phosophone Grenade would be brilliant, if implented correctly. I can't see how they could be though. When you shoot a grenade at a player it's because you know he's there, shooting a phosophone wastes time when you could shoot a frag and kill him or shoot him to death. You already know he's there, no need to clarify it. If you shooting it randomly, unless some retarded spy has impaired hearing he'll always know the cloud is there, even in thermal vision, and when not in that you can easily see it's lovely extremely obvious green cloud of smoke.

[Tidenburg]

there's not much to talk about dm right now. i think we all agree that dm sucks and all we gotta do is find a way to keep the dm players from joining story mode servers; our best solution so far is to provide a dm game mode. unless somebody  can come up with a better solution, there's no need to discuss dm again.

^Agreed

[Gawain]

stonecoldkilla: presence detectors have their use: they are hard to see and can't be removed after giving alarm. you also think wrong about the proper use of ph nades: they don't work like nades, like fake nades at best. you gotta use them differently: cut away fleeing routes with it, place dust on bottlenecks, slow down aggro spies, etc. you will hardly get a kill with frags against good players (using eax) anyways unless you make long distance shots or bounce them trickly. frags are rather a tool to make the spy gtfo and give you a time window to shoot him or have your mate arrive in time.

[Cyntrox]

I do agree the poison should be removed though, how could you possibly in your right mind really want to use it. It's a weak Laser Mine, the laser mine, you run through the laser and BAM your dead and the Mercs are at an advantage. The Poison mine is exactly the same! Only it sets off a little puff of gas and give you an extra 10 second to live! Best part is you can still survive by healing yourself... it's fucking retarded, just use a laser and he's dead straight away, that's all there is to it.

The poison mine has a much better range. It can be balanced by adjusting the range/damage.

I would also scrap the Spy Detector shitty gadget in CT (The Plantable Radar) because that seriously is fucking useless, nobody would choose that over a spy trap in their right mind. Reason is the plantable radar, if you set it off, it only sends a signal from it's position, spy trap has all the same properties except it plants the radar on YOU, the only upside with a plantable radar is you can't remove it from your friend, but you can just remove it from where it has been placed and once it has been set off, that is blatantly obvious.

You need to pass an exact location in order to trigger a spy trap. Presence detectors can cover a larger area, and are harder to see. Balance variables: range and visibility(size).

[Gawain]

The poison mine has a much better range. It can be balanced by adjusting the range/damage.

which makes it come way closer to spytraps.

[Westfall]

The poison mine has a much better range. It can be balanced by adjusting the range/damage.

which makes it come way closer to spytraps.

No it doesn't. Spy traps keep the location of the spy. Poison mines take away life and possibly kill the spy. Poison mines also make the spy act frantic and careless. A change in range wouldn't result in the poison mines making a transition to spy traps....that doesn't make sense.

@Stone: go ahead and plant a laser mine and watch how fast some1 can go through it without getting killed. Thats something that will be fixed for PS...the delay from triggering the laser to the actual explosion.

[frvge]

There's a clear distinction between laser mines (insta-explosion), poison mines (large range) and trackers (location) and Proximity Detectors (passive security)

[VaNilla]

I agree Westfall, but for PS when we can balance these things I haven't got a clue what a poison mine is going to do. You touched on the laser mine point already, I know it can be used for killing a mercanary and such but in general a tripping a laser mine results in death, regardless of its delay, which will be fixed in PS anyway. As for Cyntrox, you can talk about "But it has a longer range in CT"... but are we not discussing what we should implent to PS here? Or are we discussing CT? PS is the focus here.

I didn't realise you couldn't remove presence detectors by the way sorry, but either way, they are much less useful in my opinion, and that's all im stating, my opinion, based with the facts that to my knowledge are true. As for your argument about Phoso grenades Rambo... BS to be honest, they are two grenades, one kills, one marks, whichever you want to take is fine by me but taking a Phosophone grenade is completely and utterly useless.

As for the better range thing, again your right, I really havent played CT in ages sorry :P. But again we are talking about PS and the main thing we are trying to adress here, is what we include and what we don't include, and if I were to take everything into consideration in a enviroment we can change what we want to change, improve range, improve damage, you name it, I would scrap the posion mine, the Phoso grenade, and the Spy Detector without a shadow of a doubt.

Again Rambo, Phosophones really are no use :P. If I wanted to cut off a spy, and all of the other things you have mentioned, I would be much happier at having a chance of killing him in the process, sure you can place dust on bottlenecks, but again if he's an aggro spy, he doesnt care about being seen, and I can't say being a stealthy spy myself, that I would ever after trying so hard to be stealthy not notice a big flourescent cloud of gas around a corner :P.

Plus you don't generally shoot Phoso's at bottlenecks anyway, because if you have a mine like you usually do on bottlenecks, you don't want to shy the Spy away from that point now do you? Plus you should never rely on using something to hold off a spy until a mate arrives, he's got better things to do like guard where you aren't guarding, with the exception of each spy being in your presence. Why hold a spy off with a cloud of dust when you want him to come into view so you can shoot him in the fucking head :P.