shootthebandit said:
so i was thinking in most games more so with shoot em ups theres always that weapon or class that is described as the noob class. take for instance modern warfare II when you could have a noob tube with explosive splash damage (cant remember perk name) and one man army (which replenished ammo on all your gear) so you could basically be a human artillery spam cannon. Another set of perks is marathon (unlimited sprint), lightweight (faster sprint) and commando (increased knife range) this made it possible to sprint round the map like the flash and just knife everyone
my question is do you think these perk and weapon combinations are cheating or do you think its merely making the most of what the developer has put in the game?
personally my opinion is that if its fun then do it, in shoot em ups in not there to get a good K/D im there to have fun and sprinting round a map like usain bolt on amphetamines is alot of fun. if it pisses someone of then they have to deal with it and if they take a game that seriously that they cant have fun unless they are MVP every game then its their loss
I tend to see this kind of thing as exploiting (as opposed to cheating) and that's not a good thing, even if the developers build in the exploits. The guys doing things like this in many cases do it specifically to annoy other players through min-maxing their set up in a way designed to pretty much harass anyone not doing the same kind of things.
The game/developers deserve blame, but so do the people using it.
I'll also be blunt in saying most "noobs" of this sort aren't actually "noobs" they are usually pretty experience gamers, which is how they figured out how to play the system with those combos. It's using these kind of cheap tactics combined with a degree of experience that tends to make them fairly overwhelming.
Most games have this kind of thing, and I've read some stuff talking about how developers do it intentionaally to make it easier for new players to get involved without getting wrecked. I believe the devs admitted this with Noob Toobing at one point, which is in part how the term got started. Of course such unbalanced tactics are a paticular problem when you consider that there is no way to make it so only a real noob can use them as a balancing factor.
I'll also say that while not a big shooter fan, I think the true hope for multiplayer in the genere is going to be them getting rid of pre-made maps (even if there is a lot of money to be made from them) and going entirely with random generation. While a lot can be said for playtested maps, 99% of the problems seem to come from people developing tactics based on familiarity with both the weapons and location. Not knowing the layout is also the noob's biggest weakness to an extent as well.
Random maps (and only random maps) would force people to choose more general loadouts, and improvise, as opposed to being able to load up with game breaking, situational loads that have an advantage in a specific map or based on familiarity.
Your superman-knifer for example only gets away with that crap because they know exactly where they are going, and can blaze around. If you had to figure out the map as you played it (with it always being unique) far less people are going to want to rely entirely on a knife because they aren't guaranteed to be able to instantly figure out how to get to the people they want to kill, and get away.
Such are my thoughts, while it would enrage some people, removing all premade maps from multiplayer would solve a ton of problems, it would introduce more, but I think the new problems would probably be less annoying.