[T:V] A Concern Regarding Skill

I also know that if you made a game with jetpacks, skiing, and disk launchers that wasn't called Tribes: Something, people would be equally incensed

Careful... Perhaps you should qualify.

Legends is still out there somewhere.

legends was free and was publicly announced to be a tribes clone. I also think the fact that it was made by members of the community added to the ease of production :shrug:

Exactly the need for qualification.

Though I'm sure others got his point :p

I actually forgot legends existed :shrug:

I will say this: I am GLAD the minedisc has died.

It's only a skillful operation if you use it that way. The utter majority of minediscs are used in areas where they cannot help but connect. In other words, where they are cheap. Hitting a fast moving object with a splash the size of a mortars isn't extremely difficult. Especially as you know where to aim. Why have a HoF when all you need do is have a light somewhere near the flag scanning for cappers, and obliterating them when they hit the flag?

Personally, I feel that the exclusion of the minedisc will make for a more skillful game.I agree that most of the time MDs are used when they are easy shots. I guess the whole idea is that it makes sense that people can pack a much bigger punch at close range. I think some of this comes from the (comparatively) large splash damage of both the mine and disc in T2... I agree that might be a bit much.

However, a lof is far from a substitute for a hof. A hof is generally harder to get past for a capper and generally harder to remove as well. I'm not saying it's easier to kill a lof, just easier to prevent him from stopping cappers since a few nades or a mortar is often enough to chase him far enough away. Additionally, hitting a MD on a fast capper you don't have much warning for when there are distractions and all sorts of fire hitting the stand quickly gets extremely hard. Furthermore, a good capper can often beat a MD all by himself with well aimed nade spam or a disc immediatly before depending on the stand and the situation... most cappers that constantly get stopped by this just haven't figured out how to deal with flag d and aren't good cappers.

The repair kit was left out (provisionally) because it created a vicious cycle between vets and nubs. The nubs would die without using thier kits, the vets would grow stronger, ultimately some nubs would quit out of frustration. The current repair pack covers the "heal the HoF" portion, adding repair kits back in would make the HoF almost unkillable (think repair packer/farmer nearby, a "repair spike" turret nearby, everyone and thier mother tossing rks to him AND him wearing a shield/repair pack? owch...). The Repair Pack adds in what skill was lost when "tossing around repair kits" was taken out. Not to mention the repair patch drop that KP is/was testing.
I don't really have feelings one way or the other about the rep kits being removed, but that wouldn't come anywhere near making a hof invincible. The shield pack as it seems to be now can only be active for less than half of the time and that time has to be all at once. IMO, if it stays like that it looks to me like hofing (as we know it anyway) is going to be far harder. Besides, in the past you can only really be an effective hof when you have shields on, without them getting shot disrupts you too much.

i've read that so far, the dev team has gotten rid of health kits, pack activation, and mine disking. (by pack activation, i'm referring to having to turn your pack on and off to manage energy manually - unless i misread that).

i don't think that these features *define* tribes, but i think they're valuable to the game as skills to master.

the health kit gives an added dimension of knowing when to use it, scavenging enemies to stay alive longer, and even passing it off to an injured teammate (like lights tossing rep kits on the HoF).

i like pack activiation because everyone can still use the pack regularly, but good players will gain benefits from micromanagement of clicking it on and off (not even huge benefits, but a slight edge from taking the time to learn how to do it properly).

i'm not sure if the minedisk was taken out for balance reasons or for newb-friendly reasons (or both?), but to me, the MD, along with skiing, is one of the talents people have worked hard at perfecting over their tribes careers. i like it because it's not hard to hit an easy one, but it takes a lot of skill and timing to hit one on a fast moving target with a lot of action going on around you. i've never felt that it was imbalanced in previous tribes games, but maybe with the armor strengths in T:V, it's not feasible.

Unfortunately the only one I agree with is the repair kit, and to be honest, I don't even know how useful it really was. It was more of a comfort feeling than anything, knowing that if you got hit you could always use the kit.

Pack activation, in my opinion, more a result of simply not having great packs than anything. The most used pack in the game, the E-Pack, had no activation at all. The repair pack could only repair things one at a time, and as a result activation was necessary or the pack would be next to useless. The shield pack was much the same. We need to remember that the way the packs are set up now, activation simply might not be necessary.. and in fact could make the packs unbalanced in some sense.

The mine-disc is something else entirely. I thought it was very unbalanced.. it's just another unbalanced portion of the game tended to make it less obvious. HO just became too powerful, with the speed at which they could get to your base and the firepower they could lay down.. mine-discing just wasn't obviously unbalanced to a lot of people, because it was a good counter for the HO. I'd be really disappointed if T:V had that kind of glaring balance issue that they needed to keep mine-discing (like it was in Tribes) in the game.

Perhaps I was a bit over the top with the repair kit-HoF bit, however, it would add to the difficulty of getting rid of the fatty.

I haven't played much lately, but I have never seen a LoF minediscing, and a HoF used at the same time, always an either/or situation. I've seen people switch off mid map, which throws the cappers off, and I've seen LO snipe D switch immediately to LoF when the HoF goes down.

My main beef with the MD was/is the short range, nearly unmissable shots giving people a weapon that rivaled the power of the mortar in a tiny package. The light was never meant to have that kind of power backing it's shots, and the heavy was limited to 10 shots of the mortar. With the minedisc, a light has the equivilent of 3 short range mortar shots and the heavy has 13. From what I know of it, it originally was a bug in T1, and was added into classic to try to offset some of the defense's advantages.

Not sure if it worked though.

They weren't removed. They were never part of the game. Mine disking is not in the new Leasure Suit Larry game either, but you wouldn't say it was "removed". It's a new game. new. The only features we took from T1 and T2 were skiing, the jetpack, and the disk. Everything else was added. We never sat around and said, what should we remove from tribes. Get over the "it was in T1 so it should be in T:V" mentality, becuase I'm not even going to go there any more. If it's in T:V it's in. If it's not, then you'll all get over it. Life goes on.
1) i understand the concept of new game, thx

2) at some point, i'm sure the dev team was tossing around what to include in T:V that was in previous tribes games. for instance, they didn't just spontaneously invent light, med, and heavy armor and they didn't invent energy and shield packs.

obviously these have been modified (again, new game), but they were parts of previous tribes games. at some point, the question must have come up, "do we include the mine-disk or not?" and they decided not to include it. while "not including" isn't the same as "removing", i meant it in terms of "removing mine-disking from the list of things we're carrying over from previous tribes games."

3) i'm absolutely ready and excited for a new tribes-esque game. i understand that it will be different from previous tribes games and at no point have i expressed a desire that it would be T1 or T2 with upgraded graphics or something similar.

4) the talk about "NEW GAME NEW GAME" is extremely reminiscent of Dave G's interviews. while i have infinitely more faith in KP and the rest of the dev team, the "it's new it's new" card feels like it's being played in order to dismiss any disagreements people have with the direction the game is taking instead of responding to them directly.

either way, we'll see how it plays out when the beta is released. i trust KP to put out a quality product.