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Lack of Friendly Fire Servers - For the love of frag

gusone

Grizzled Veteran
May 2, 2009
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My FF server was a little quiet being a Saturday night since most of the motley crew on the server are younger folk with lives so I thought I'd find another FF server. Couldnt believe there were so few. Out of boredom I ended up scrolling down the 1600 odd servers searching in vain. Lots of servers with "Hardcore", "Real men" "no noobs" , "So hard", "Incredibly difficult Suicidal" blah blah etc in their macho server titles but all with a FF scale of 0% - so not that hard after all really. I do laugh at the 'No noobs" when they dont even have FF on. Its rather pathetic. Anyway I think I managed to favourite about 15 FF servers most were still empty.

So come on. Keep it real with FF. Face it you cant all run around with Rockets shooting next to each other in real life and isnt that rather boring to do it in a game knowing you will not kill your team members or yourself?

If any of you want a challenge after 2 weeks of easy play check out our server. FF for life and you'll see what you've all been missing. And if you manage to kill the patiarch, congrats.
 
The problem is that a few things (Shotgun penetration, failzerkers, insane medics, Firebug class in general) make Friendly Fire a nightmare to work with most of the time. Yeah, it can be fun with teamwork and a nice change of pace, but for the most part, I like to kill my zombies without worrying about lighting half my team on fire, or my shotgun guy shredding me when he shoots that crawler off my back.

Friendly fire is WAY more tactical, though. I'd say 90% of folks out there would teamkill within a few waves with friendly fire on, myself included!
 
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If you were playing with clan members or skilled friends, FF is a very good way to make it more intense.

I've played Left 4 Dead, Expert Co-Op for quite a while and i know how annoying it is when someone randomly blows your head off because he twitched you or shot at a zombie and couldn't see you behind it. In those circumstances its a 1 hit incap. But guess what, you get picked back up and into the action, so unless your playing with REALLY bad players its not much of a problem.

But on this theres no direction. L4D is a progression to the safe room, you know where the frontline and backline are. Public players on Public servers where you mill around each other isn't a good place for FF. It'd be far too frustrating. Which is probably why there aren't many of em.
 
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In my expirience it's too easy for someone to start greifing/fighting with eachother with FF on: We have a hard enough time with the 7 waves of specimens and the patriarch, I don't want to die because user A accidentally killed user B, and user B isn't grown up enough to deal with it so he kills user A, but the shotgun penetration ends up killing user C setting the whole server into a giant brawl on respawn...

It's fine when you have friends, but it can be abused too easily with public players...
 
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So come on. Keep it real with FF. Face it you cant all run around with Rockets shooting next to each other in real life and isnt that rather boring to do it in a game knowing you will not kill your team members or yourself?

If any of you want a challenge after 2 weeks of easy play check out our server. FF for life and you'll see what you've all been missing. And if you manage to kill the patiarch, congrats.
Yah cause I own a rocket launcher in real life and plan on just firing away at some stuff.


If I want to join a server filled with kids that will kill me for asking them to do something, or feel like speccing for half the game due to people unable to aim or go on a team kill frenzy, I'll join your server.

Thanks.
 
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I had to experiment a little with the FF scale. I found 100% scale too much when a few puggers would also join (though for the Clan 100% is fine). So I kept lowering it until I got a good balance and its now 30%. So you still get a jolly good FF tickle if hit but crucially you're not 1 shotted (unless you're on very low health when it happens). Actually what's surprised me more is how the puggers are well behaved and how they make an effort to not hit team mates.
 
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You really think that FF on a public server would work?

Unless you are with friends its completely pointless. I wanna kill zombies and not sit in the spectating area because someone went crazy with teh shottie.

This pretty much sums up my views. When I play with clan mates I could trust they're not going to shove a grenade up my *** to "help me out" if I'm on a FF server. Or fill my face with shotgun spray. Luckily with the screen blur when I'm hit by a friendly I know just how often I'd get FF'ed by randoms. (It's quite a lot).


(And it's usually a shotgun).
 
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Since there is no FF only mode by default combined with the lack of FF servers is part of the problem. People get too accustomed to the fact they can blast the living **** out of everything that has lifesigns regardless if it's a player or not, and when they do the same thing on FF it gets disastrous.

Another thing that easily makes FF servers nightmare is lack of communication and coordination. I haven't seen player who was actually willing to communicate in the first place other than "lol noob team" or "omfg noob player ****ing noob" and revenging teamkills, making it look like fight between few retards. Is it really that hard try to act to a common interest or does it need to be forced as in L4D (Smoker, Hunter etc) ?

What is the point of playing more teamwork based game without actually working as one (or atleast trying to) but instead shoot everything that moves around? There's far more beter games for that.
 
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I had to experiment a little with the FF scale. I found 100% scale too much when a few puggers would also join (though for the Clan 100% is fine). So I kept lowering it until I got a good balance and its now 30%. So you still get a jolly good FF tickle if hit but crucially you're not 1 shotted (unless you're on very low health when it happens). Actually what's surprised me more is how the puggers are well behaved and how they make an effort to not hit team mates.

You got lucky. Conduct that experiment repeatadly and the number of people who can't aim or repeatadly hit teammates would be higher than those who can't.

The other problem is... people not even knowing FF is on until its too late. Unless you plaster it everywhere.
 
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You guys got to stop with them negative waves. I have not seen a bad egg all weekend yet. There are a lot of good people out there who just a good challenge in the game. So much so I'm seriously thinking of notching FF up a little more. Sure you get the odd "Ah sh!t. FF? Sorry" but after that people get with the program and I'm all for plastering FF everywhere.
 
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FF on is hardly a challenge with pubs, it's more of a I SHOT HERE FIRST U RAN INFRONT OF ME LOLLOLOLLOLOL UR DED NOW

If you want a challenge try on Suicidal Rampage when a few of the admin's are on. They will make the game FF on with 1 pistol shot death and set it to suicidal.

no we wont

untill pubs can consistantly wave 7+ suicidal I dont see the point of making it harder for them with FF
 
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I've thought a lot about FF. I spent the better part of the weekend thinking about it as I played. As much as I like the idea I don't think 100% FF would work very well for the general public. Over time one might find a core group of players that would frequent the server, but that would take a while. In the meantime, it would more than likely be pretty unpleasant experience for those wanting to enjoy a FF on server.

Having said that, one of the perks of being a server admin is that we get to put up servers that we like to play on. More often than not, there are others that enjoy the same. I'd agree that some tweaking of the FF scale would be in order. Sadly, because this game is one life per level, a forgive system (like the one found in Red Orchestra) wouldn't work. I don't think they'll spend the time on it, but the ability to alter the FF damage scale for each weapon would be nice. For example, in Red Orchestra damage from FF explosives (grenades, satchels, etc.) are typically set at 0.5 (50%) and bullets 1.0 (100%). We could then tone down flamethrower FF damage (I kill myself more with that damn thing than I do specimens :eek:), grenades, etc.

Noob specimen killer that I am, I've been surprised at how full my [Hard] server is staying. I may just have to join gusone's bandwagon and give a FF server a try.

Floyd
 
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