The fix list

[Spekkio]

As it is now, it's not the only option: you can shoot him 4 times in the body, use a mine, or blow him up with a frag, use the tazer, or a ton of other shit. The problem is your skill, not the healthbox.

You can't "spam smoke" and have it do anything. There's this thing called a gun, and it shoots far, so instead of chasing the spy around the map while he "spams" his 5 smoke grenades, just find a position from which you can get a clean shot.

[Overstatement]

An interesting post I found on Ubi's forums:

http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/2771048463/m/8841094055?r=1591059655#1591059655

Some ideas are good, others are not.

I like the idea that SS only jams the Merc's gun.

Steath supporters need to play Disk Hunt more.

[Gawain]

As it is now, it's not the only option: you can shoot him 4 times in the body, use a mine, or blow him up with a frag, use the tazer, or a ton of other shit. The problem is your skill, not the healthbox.

You can't "spam smoke" and have it do anything. There's this thing called a gun, and it shoots far, so instead of chasing the spy around the map while he "spams" his 5 smoke grenades, just find a position from which you can get a clean shot.

You forgot to compare the time it takes to shoot the spy 4 times and the time he needs to heal himself. At lest on an average server hit 'n run/running in circle tactics work quite well on certain maps like club and muse. If we keep the damage the uzi does and reduce the lagg to a minimum, these tactics could indeed be crippled without the need of headshots.

Long range shots might work on club, polar or factory, but you will have to walk through smoke on maps like orph and muse.

[Spekkio]

You forgot to compare the time it takes to shoot the spy 4 times and the time he needs to heal himself. At lest on an average server hit 'n run/running in circle tactics work quite well on certain maps like club and muse.

The healthboxes are nowhere near the objectives in Museum. If the spy gets to them as you are shooting at him, it's your fault. In club, yes they are near the Garden objectives but that's where mines come in. It's also out in the open so it's pretty easy to anticipate if a spy is going for health and get a headshot.

Long range shots might work on club, polar or factory, but you will have to walk through smoke on maps like orph and muse.

Yea, sometimes. Still, most people don't have a problem with running out of mask.

[Gawain]

It's also out in the open so it's pretty easy to anticipate if a spy is going for health and get a headshot.

i already said that headshot is the only possibility (besides anticipating the spies and already wait at garden)
well, mines kill good players only if they are buggy, or the players are unconcentrated, especially on club where every1 knows every mine spot...

i don't think club is imbalanced, it's just that i hate cheap tactics (compare museum pandora version to ct version).

[Spekkio]

Mines kill plenty of good players, especially while you're shooting at them.

[Kurbutti]

Well, as long as spy is running around back and forth for the precious medikit, he's not accomplishing anything. (Thinking of museum, cafe or storage, where in the latter mines work very well) Merc can hold their own rather easily, most of the times it's the spy who end's up losing, which is good, of course. A different kind of medikit would just cut off the "most" needless running.

However, I don't think it would be fair to say, that "you just have to be good", if you want a chance, because that's also a nice way of widening the gap even more for players of different level of skill. They can't necassarily get headshots as easily, so healing system like the current could be a pain in the ass, especially in the beginning. Of course, if people learn to live with it, (yet we complain, or actually dare to present new ideas) things could be different, but that goes for the new medkit as well.  Can't forget about the lag either... Which just makes this subject of discussion useless at  this point.

[InvisibleMan999]

-Give spies camo that will not make them invisible, but gives them a second where they can walk through lasers without tripping them.
+ invisible to security cams  ;D

Invisibility to cameras would be kind of cool, but I don't support anything that lets you walk through lasers.

Also, I think you should be able to bypass the motion sensors by walking super slow through the room.

I don't think it'd necessarily be bad to let camo hide you from cameras. It'd make the mercs job harder, but certainly not impossible, given that you've got to uncamo to actually shoot or use other gadgets.

Let mercs replenish gas mask at ammo stations.
its kinda lame if a team spams smoke and cams throughout the whole game, because once you have no mask left, you have no more chance in corridors etc. but imo its quite balanced right now, maybe the capacity should be a little bit bigger.

I've thought maybe it might be good to make the gas mask tank smaller, but allow it to be replenished at ammo boxes, though I'm not sure if that would really unbalance things. It would make the ammo box much more important for sure, but that might not be a bad thing, as of right now, the ammo box is pretty trivial.

Also, a side idea for merc weaponry, if we wanted, what if we just had a base automatic gun (with PT rifle stats perhaps) and had sniper scope and shotgun be gadgets you can take? The shotgun attachment could even conceivably replace the taser, since they're both close combat devices. So you're given a base medium range gun, and you can turn it into a short range killer or a sniper rifle, depending on what you choose.

I guess you could also throw in passive gadgets like increased clip size (to get an uzi like clip) as well. But this way, whatever you take, you're also giving something up too, since you lose a gadget. So you're constantly asking yourself is sniping capability is worth losing frags or a backpack.

[Gawain]

Invisibility to cameras would be kind of cool, but I don't support anything that lets you walk through lasers.

avoiding cams like on factory actually needs some skill (but also time), so this truly needs some testing. but atm you can roll through most lasers anyway -.-
imo we should give stealth players more useful gadgets (like the modded camo) that allow diverse tactis as stealth is usually slower than aggro. anyway, who of you use camo regurarly?

Also, I think you should be able to bypass the motion sensors by walking super slow through the room.

yeah, maybe the detection could be depend on the distance, too.

Also, a side idea for merc weaponry, if we wanted, what if we just had a base automatic gun (with PT rifle stats perhaps) and had sniper scope and shotgun be gadgets you can take? The shotgun attachment could even conceivably replace the taser, since they're both close combat devices. So you're given a base medium range gun, and you can turn it into a short range killer or a sniper rifle, depending on what you choose.

I guess you could also throw in passive gadgets like increased clip size (to get an uzi like clip) as well. But this way, whatever you take, you're also giving something up too, since you lose a gadget. So you're constantly asking yourself is sniping capability is worth losing frags or a backpack.

i fell in love with this idea ;)

[InvisibleMan999]

avoiding cams like on factory actually needs some skill (but also time), so this truly needs some testing.
but atm you can roll through most lasers anyway -.-

Well right, I figure it wouldn't be bad to allow camo to let you bypass cameras faster. As far as lasers go, rolling though them produces sound (well unless you use that weird glitch to try to negate the sound - which should probably be fixed anyway). Also it's possible to make maps where you can't roll through the lasers.

Moving super slow to bypass motion sensors would probably require a bit of testing to see if it's indeed balanced, since there's a lot of problematic areas that I suppose someone could access if you didn't disable this. A map like Vertigo plaza would be almost impossible to patrol if you could sneak past the proximity sensors without shooting them out. Of course, we could just mod those and turn them into lasers, so I guess it's just not that big of a deal.

I've always thought lasers should be the only kind of defense that you must disable to bypass.

[Spekkio]

avoiding cams like on factory actually needs some skill (but also time), so this truly needs some testing. but atm you can roll through most lasers anyway -.-

Not really. Go to visit a map and practice it like 4 times and you'll be able to do it. You can run through all 3 corridors and it takes about 5 seconds max if you get unlucky and the cameras are in the wrong position.

The toughest route is main hall through B to machine without shooting a cam.

Using camo to automatically bypass passive defenses would be imbalanced. Even though you can pass a lot of them now without tripping them, it generally takes more time than activate camo ---> walk to where you have to go for 10 seconds.

As for lasers, you can roll through most of them, but they're also very easy to trap up to prevent such a thing (like the poison everyone puts in greek room on aqua). It would be doubly so if the mercs got 5 spy traps again. The lasers on hospital can't be rolled through, nor can the ones on orphanage or any of zedblade's maps. Aqua is already a merc map, they don't need to "fix" the lasers on it, and factory has a lot of security too so that's fine. I personally don't like the triple lasers all over the place because it forces me to take chaff, but I understand that it's there for balance purposes so I'm not saying it should be removed.

However, I don't think it would be fair to say, that "you just have to be good", if you want a chance, because that's also a nice way of widening the gap even more for players of different level of skill. They can't necassarily get headshots as easily, so healing system like the current could be a pain in the ass, especially in the beginning. Of course, if people learn to live with it, (yet we complain, or actually dare to present new ideas) things could be different, but that goes for the new medkit as well.  Can't forget about the lag either... Which just makes this subject of discussion useless at  this point.

Well, if the spies are that much better than the mercs they deserve to win, don't they? There's no reason to change healthpacks because some people are incapable of aiming.

Lag is lag. You can't balance the game for laggy play; you have to balance it for optimal play. If it's that bad, find another server or host your own. But I'm also assuming that PS will fix the massive packet loss that occurs in this game.

@Invisible,

I personally really like your gun idea (although I don't think that the sniper or shotgun attachment should take up a gadget slot). Unfortunately, it's probably too radical for what they're trying to do on the first installment.

[Gawain]

The thing about gameplay balancing is to make underused gadgets more attractive. I'm curios how much people would take camo if it didn't make this ridiculous loud sound, but i like it to have more than one use like some other gadgets (cam, chaff, etc). Getting invisible to cams wouldn't change anything at least with the current map design, and going through laser would be unbalanced, too. But maybe we  can change the map design so that the balancing changes. Furthermore, mercs would have to rely more on emf and less on mt whoring (if we fix the ghosting, emf will get very underused). It's better to add to the gameplay, than to take elements away...

[Gawain]

btw i'm kinda uninformed about earlier attempts and the technical aspects, but could it be possible to get the stuff from ubi that would allow us to create a community patch in which we could test the gameplay with all the changes from spekkio's fix list? scct is pretty old, so there's no risk for ubi and they could profit from the vets fixing their baby ;D
It was the only solution to cnc generals zero hour cw.cc, and it worked out quite well...

I'm really not looking forward to playing scct in it's current state for two more years -.-

[Overstatement]

You can't just release an SDK. Just creating a package to download takes times. They also got to rewrite their code (which could be very hard if they didn't design with an SDK in mind) so that they don't expose the Unreal2 engine and violate their licence. Also, it would probably make sense if their agreement with Epic said no SDKs at all.

[Gawain]

this sux. did anyone try to ask ubi in a decent way?