My New Player Q&A

[LondonHyena]

Made this on the steam forum and figured I'd post it here too, seems to be well received.

My Q&A for New Players
I have to admit, it takes a lot for a game to actually impress me despite having several big issues. RO2 takes a lot that had been missed from the FPS genre and then again takes some away that have been taken for granted for far too long.

I wanted to write this not as a bile drenched rant or drooling poem of lust and admiration, but a little piece a potential player can read to answer a few questions that should be asked.

Is this game fun and easy to play?

Fun, yes, depending on what you classify as fun. If you are an FPS junkie who has spent the last few months dosing up on Battlefield or Call of Duty then you need to be prepared for a whole different style of playing. This is a more 'intelligent' FPS (and no, that for once is not a put-down to COD players), in the sense that it does not reward you for being blase with your tactics and storming around shooting everyone in the face. It requires a stronger sense of tactical awareness and a reasoning of 'I am not an SAS-Ultramarine Combat God'. This is a game that will force you to learn it through a period of suffering at the hands of people more seasoned, but once you get the hang of it its a very rewarding experience.

Can I play solo well or is it more team based?

You can play solo yes, a lot of the public servers are nothing but gaggles of random people taking shots each other. The problem with playing in this manner is eventually you're going to be playing on a public server and run into a group of clanmates playing on one side. That's all amazing if they are on your side, but generally (of course there are exceptions) you're going to end up steamrollered unless that clan in particular spreads their numbers out. Also RO2 is a pseudo-realist shooter, the advantage of having voice communication with a group of players actually working as a squad cohesively is overwhelming. So by all means play solo, but remember that all the roles in RO2 are designed for the most part to compliment and support each other, rewarding good communication and teamwork.

I chose a commander role, and everyone's angry with me!

The commander role is something very specific and if you don't know what you are doing then you're going to be in trouble. Commanders are there for calling in artillery strikes, forcing respawns and generally overseeing the battlefield as a whole (especially in more competitive, teamwork orientated matches). For a start, Commanders shouldn't be at the front line, they rely on the Radio's dotted around the map to call in strikes from off-map. If you are very new to the game and select this role, its probably best to relent it until you have a real grasp of the game and the various maps. While it may seem like that's unfair, believe me you will appreciate a more experienced commander in the role raining death and spotting targets for you to assault. Once you feel confident, read up on the role first, the various commands and use of binoculars and give it a go. Provided you are a little experienced and are prepared, you could probably do a good job!

People keep shooting me in the face, and I never see them!

The chances are you are not using cover correctly. While at first its tempting to stand in front of a window high up, thinking that elevation and a 2x4' window is going to keep you safe, it really isn't. After a while playing with single action rifles, it becomes almost second nature in RO and RO2 to spot movement rather then an obvious target. Even something as subtle as the movement of your rifle through the window is going to draw attention, and you're likely to end up dead. This also includes being shot through walls. People probably aren't cheating, but simply predicting where about you are standing and taking a chance at a pot shot. You need to be creative, standing back from the window and hiding in the shadows, creeping forward a little to pop your head up and have a quick look around. Remember, one bullet will kill you, and sadly a lot of games recently have installed a false confidence into people. Play like you want to actually survive, not just kills, be cautious.

I just unloaded from the hip into someone and they shot me once and killed me!

Accuracy. Yes a PPSh or a MP40 is impressive, but if you are not aiming down your sights you have little hope of hitting the target first time. Your barrel will climb and as you move the mouse you're arms move in an oddly detached way that you may not be used to (as you're moving the weapon itself, not your viewpoint). You can get used to it, but even in the heat of the moment try and aim with your weapon properly, because the other guy will probably be doing the same (unless he has a machinegun at he hip).

Is camping frowned upon in this game?

This is a tricky one. If you are defending a point, say for example a building that's currently flagged as a control point then of course you would be warranted in finding a quiet corner or staircase in which to try and pick people off and stay hidden. It's annoying granted, but its also a viable tactic, you do not want the baddies in your zone. A machine gunner or sniper is also not camping, despite remaining stationary. They are controlling an area, denying it to the enemy forces and doing what they are supposed to be doing. What could be classed as 'bad' camping though, is taking a rifleman and sitting far back from the front lines just taking shots at a single row of windows waiting for targets, or finding a way to overlook the enemy spawn and shooting them as they come out. The question you need to ask is 'Is this useful to my team?', if the answer is no and you're just racking up points for yourself its probably bad camping. If however you are helping your team advance and are moving with them (granted in more set up locations) then its probably fine.

Whats a good way to rank up fast? Just shooting people?

This game has a very good scoring system. It doesn't reward you a great deal for kills, but rewards you for killing people in objective area's or from them. You are encouraged to actually try to take points as opposed to just sitting (like mentioned above) waiting for a target to present itself. Not only do you get a good chunk of points for capturing or defending an objective, but you also gain extra points for enemies defeated within that area. Therefore, if you want to rank up fast, then play as part of your team and actually get stuck in there doing what you're supposed to be doing!

Is a Squad Leader as in depth as commander?

No, thankfully, a squad leader is a role that's far less complicated but does introduce to you a few more advanced concepts. First of all, you can use your binoculars to spot targets for your commander (with a right click when zoomed in) to send a few artillery rounds too. Of course its entirely up to them if they do or not, but as a spotter its a good way to help your team. On top of this you have one of the most precious things in the game, smoke grenades. Use these whenever you are about to charge or flank an enemy position. Unlike older games where smoke was a pathetic little puff, the smoke in RO2 is a very useful and viable source of cover. Use it. Use it so much your throwing arm starts to ache, and remember that you are also a spawn point for your squad. Your buddies in that squad can spawn on you from the respawn menu, so remember to take good care of yourself lest you all want to walk further.

I shot a tank with an AT rifle and it did bugger all!

The AT rifle is a weird battle tool. It doesn't actually directly damage the tank, but damages subsystems of it. Remember that unlike more arcade like situations, the tank does not have hit points. It has an engine, a gun, and a magazine. Lots of little components are in there. The rifle is for picking at these specific points, for example shooting the tracks to immobilize it or shooting the engine to stop it. Sometimes you get lucky and get a good hit on the magazine and blow the whole tank sky high, but just remember that you need to aim for a specific area/system on the metal beast to have any impact.

Whats better? Assault or Rifleman?

The good news is, neither of them are better. Yes you will hear people complaining that the SMG's are laser accurate, or the rifles can shoot people inside out from a map away but they both serve different but similar purposes. The assault class is designed to be the first into an occupied building, with a short weapon great for cornering rooms and clearing them out with automatic fire. On top of that, if you like grenades then be assault, since usually you will be the first one in then you should be safe to toss them in without too much fear of friendly fire. Once you have cleared out a building, you can simply wait for the clock to tick then take the next one. By that time, the rifleman should have also moved into the building and already be setting up a defense of the building, ready to repel anyone from the windows or doors that tries to retake it. Therefore, assault are free to move onto the next objective and capture it, while the rifles defend the first taken one. At least that is the way I see it. Assaults go in hard and fast to take a point, and the riflemen with their longer range and powerful rifles are far better equipped to deal with aggressors trying to get in. Therefore, both are excellent choices all around, its a matter of personal preference. Oh and Rifles can stab people with bayonets, which is a bonus.

How comes the language is different on each side?

This is a common question, leaves the new player a bit confused but its a really simply answer. When you are on one side, the opposing team speak in their native language as opposed to a translated version. Its certainly a lot more intimidating hearing the enemy sounding like they should do rather then the typical dubbed English and it certainly makes for a more interesting game instead of hearing 'Achtung! A communist is in ze building wiz me! Vere are his paperz?!" etc.

I keep getting killed as a Machine Gunner, how can I set up in a safe place?

Hard question. You see, the problem with a machine gunner is its very easy to assume the best place for you is going to be in a window somewhere, mowing down hordes of infantry and cackling like a maniac as you do. However, in effect as some of you have come to realise you just get your head blown open as soon as you open up. A key point to make, is that the machine gun is an area denial weapon, perhaps even more so then an offensive weapon. If you know there is a popular doorway thats going to funnel attackers through in a building you are protecting, then set yourself up in a way that you can overlook it from inside the building. Sit on stairs, hide behind a corner and rake people with lead by surprise. On the offensive, the Machine gun is a squad support weapon. It does not take you long to set up, so move with your squad, only stay in one place for few seconds laying down a few heavy bursts of gunfire before moving on. You may not kill as many people, but you can suppress them far far easier then any other class making them essentially stay in one place while your attacking friends flank them.

What exactly is this suppression thing? (aka Why does my screen go weird?!)

Fairly straightforward answer is this is your character crapping themselves. Lets be honest, if you are in a building and suddenly you have artillery raining down around you, gunfire bouncing off the walls and grenades taking off your comrades bits and bobs, then you are going to suffer. The strange dizzy like effect, the blurring, is a replication of this feeling. It will effect your aim, make things harder to see until you get away from the source of it. Either get indoors during an artillery strike and stay away from the windows, or move back away from whatever is suppressing you. Remember, you can try shooting whatever is causing it, but your chances of succeeding are greatly reduced. Suppression is the games way of saying 'You are in real big trouble.' and you should take it as the alarm bell it is.

[Truth_]

Exciting.

[Taipan]

Thanks good post, I held off on beta until the release, so this is useful.

[ROII4Me]

Nicely done.

You mention displacing for the MG, as in moving up with the squad.

But you might add a specific section for How Do I Keep From Dying So Often?

Displacing, as in moving locations once you have exposed yourself by firing on the enemy is likely the #1 way to stay alive while remaining a worthwhile contributor to your team - be you an MG, Sniper, Rifleman or whatever.

Once you start shooting and hitting enemy, their team is going to find out where you are fast. Changing your position after some shots, even slightly, will help your longevity.

If you are in Location A and pick off some advancing enemy, they will zero in on that location. So, if you move to a Location B where you can get a good bead on anyone advancing or firing on Location A you can get even more kills and frustrate the enemy further. If they become absorbed in taking you out as you move from point to point, you are further helping your team by making the enemy waste time and resources on you rather than capping.

Plus it is fun to see them try and try again to ferret you out, while you second guess them and shoot them in the back. : o >

[KarmakazeNZ]

Originally Posted by LondonHyena

It requires a stronger sense of tactical awareness and a reasoning of 'I am not an SAS-Ultramarine Combat God'.

The SAS would never be caught dead doing the kinds of things most players do. Actually, that's the ONLY way they would be caught doing it.

This is a game that will force you to learn it through a period of suffering at the hands of people more seasoned, but once you get the hang of it its a very rewarding experience.

It's a great simulation of the FNG/Veteran dynamic actually. In Vietnam (and most wars), new replacements were often ostracised or even bullied, because FNG's got veterans killed. There was no point where you became a veteran, you just had to prove yourself in combat to the satisfaction of the men whose life depended on it.

So being thoroughly owned when you first start playing games like this is not only to be expected, it's actually part of the fun. You're feeling like that new green recruit arriving at the front line in a platoon full of hardened veterans and just like real FNG's you get them and you killed. So they don't like you much. That fades as your skills improves. Soon people will be calling you a hacker when you play Battlefield or CoD, too :P

Can I play solo well or is it more team based?

One point. If a team is fully working together properly, you will NEED some lone wolf players. They will be the people who do distraction and shock tactics. Their job is not necessarily to attack the objective, but to stop the defenders from realising which objective you are attacking and to disrupt their attempt to organise a defence.

If you are good at that kind of play on THIS kind of game, then your team needs you, IF they are working together properly. You need run and gun lone wolves as much as you need the long range suppressing campers. The problem is, lone wolfing on RO2 is a LOT harder than lone wolfing on CoD. CoD is made specially to help lone wolves. This game is biased against them, just like real life.

I chose a commander role, and everyone's angry with me!

You'll be better off looking for relaxed realism servers as you learn the role, too. On those servers people are less likely to be so team oriented and will tolerate a commander that screws up more often than not. But don;t take the role unless you are actually trying to play it the way it is intended. That would be like taking the machine gunner role, but throwing it away every time you spawn.

If you don't actually want to use it, don't take it, even on relaxed servers. Some people want the practice. I'm an old hand at these types of game, but I rarely take it because how you have to play it is not my cup of tea. In fact I only tried it once on a relaxed half empty server when it wasn't in use. I just wanted to figure out a commander's limitations. Knowledge is power.

People keep shooting me in the face, and I never see them!

Also, don't forget that in this game the weapons are accurate at much greater distances. You may really not be able to see him because all he is showing is a head and shoulders 300m away, while you're running upright in the open.

The vast majority of FPS games have totally inaccurate and unrealistic weapons. They are borked because the map sizes or physics calculations make them too powerful if they are realistic, or too complex for the game engine. You machine will probably get lower frame rates for the same visual quality in RO2 than in other games because RO2 is doing SO much more behind the scenes than those games.

I just unloaded from the hip into someone and they shot me once and killed me!

To summarise: one aimed shot will always beat ten unaimed shots, no matter what the weapon.

Is camping frowned upon in this game?

Camping the way you think of it, should be frowned upon in every game, not because you are not helping your team, but because you are directly helping the enemy to fix you in place and kill you. Suppressive fire is about fixing the enemy in place. Why would you willingly fix yourself in place?

A machine gunner or sniper is also not camping, despite remaining stationary.

I disagree here, but this is a much higher level of argument than a Noob FAQ. Basically, no one should ever be static on the battlefield. It's a survival tactic. If you want to stay alive for long against people who are using sound small unit tactics, you need to use them too.

Whats a good way to rank up fast? Just shooting people?

I'm going to tell you something you probably don't want to hear. It doesn't matter. If you are having trouble with the noob weapons, then you are still going to have trouble with higher ranks, because the game doesn't give you unrealistic "perks". At best you get slightly more stamina or a slightly steadier aim, and neither of those will actually make much difference. It's not hard to shoot people and kill them in this game. What is hard is to stay alive long enough to do it to enough of them.

Nothing the game does can help you there. It's too realistic in intention if not execution.

Is a Squad Leader as in depth as commander?

No, thankfully, a squad leader is a role that's far less complicated

I have to stop you there. That is totally wrong. That is the problem in the game at the moment, people don't understand how important the squad is as a UNIT. The squad leader makes ALL the decisions. HE is the brain. The gunner is the feet. He is the support for the rest of the body. The riflemen are the torso, they are the hinge for all the rest. The assault troops are the arms. They deliver the punches or block the blows.

None of it works if the head is off in the clouds.

To me, it is a LOT harder to be an effective squad leader than a commander. The commander has time to think, but if the squad leader hesitates or runs off on his won, he can get his entire squad killed unless they essentially lone wolf.

I shot a tank with an AT rifle and it did bugger all!

Look at your team's tank. Have a look at the size of the gun on it. Watch as most of it's shots fail to penetrate or bounce off altogether. Are you really surprised that peashooter you have isn't doing much?

Whats better? Assault or Rifleman?

Seeing as this is a Noob FAQ, I'd say assault is better. Over all, someone not used to a realism game will have more luck with an SMG than a rifle. But really, for the FNG, possibly the elite rifleman is better. The weapon has the power to stop, but the ability to keep firing for the guy who is less accurate with it.

As for the tactical employment of them, I have to say I disagree pretty much across the board, but the noob is still trying to hit what he is aiming at, and isn't so concerned about the correct way to assault a building, for example. Start small. Learn to survive before you learn to fight. Stay alive and follow your squad leader, who should know what he's doing. Kill any enemy you see. If you're not sure, leave him for the guys who are. It may be a friend.

Those should be your tactics when you start out. "Do as you're told" and the veterans will teach you by osmosis. You'll learn the best way to do things by helping others to do them, and you'll learn how best you fit into those tactics, assault, or rifleman or whatever.

I keep getting killed as a Machine Gunner, how can I set up in a safe place?

I find even many RO1 old hands do not understand the gun properly because they aren't ex-infantry themselves. If you've really carried one as part of a squad, you know that what most people will tell you is wrong.

The problem is that there isn't A machine gun, there are TYPES of machine gun. A K98 is a bolt action rifle issued to all the noobs. It's the basic weapon on the battlefield. Put a scope on it and it becomes a sniper rifle and has a vastly different and specialised role.

What most people do is confuse and combine the various roles into one "MACHINE GUN" role. It's not. Not even close.

In this game if you are Russian, you are issued a light machine gun. This weapon is NOT meant to be used for sustained fire support and as such can not be used for area denial. You fire at 400 or 600 or whatever rounds per minute from 47 round mags. Ten mags is one minute of continuous fire. How long would it take to change the mag ten times? More than a minute? You can't change the barrel, so how long would you have to wait to cool the barrel? There is no tripod or optics, so how are you supposed to get 800m kills?

You simply do not use a squad LMG that way. It's not designed for it. The MG 34 is the same, but in a different way. It is a GPMG so it is designed to do both roles, but only with certain limitations. If it has a tripod, and stays far enough back from the enemy, it can be used for sustained fire support providing both direct and indirect area denial and suppression fire. It is crew served and is basically a rapid firing artillery piece.

That is NOT the variant you are issued. You can not use it that way. It will not work and you'll start blaming the game. It's not the game it's your understanding of it.

The LMG is issued to a squad to act as a force multiplier. He is able to fire as many rounds down range as the rest of the squad combined. He becomes one half of a "combat pair" with the rest of the squad. When he is moving they are firing, when they are firing he is moving. He may have a second gunner with him at all times, to take over or for extra ammo, and in that case the two work as a combat pair. One covers while the other moves, then moves while the other covers.

In this case, the machine gun is simply the same thing as adding 10 riflemen to the squad who always move and fire together like a good fire team should. One man to do the job of ten. That is all.

Anything one squad of riflemen would do to cover another squad of riflemen is what a squad machine gun does. A squad of riflemen is never lined up and told to rapid fire at a field 800m away, and neither would a squad machine gunner. He can do it in a pinch, but he can never do it as well as the gun designed for it, and THAT is what everyone is expecting. They expect MMG performance from an LMG, which is like expecting sniper performance from a rifleman. It can be done, but you have to be damn good.

What exactly is this suppression thing? (aka Why does my screen go weird?!)

The really honest answer? It's an unrealistic feature that has survived the realism cull because so few people understand what I said above. People know machine gun fire from movies or whatever and know that the people being shot at become too terrified to do anything.

What they don't know is that the gun that was used to do it was either a MMG being operated by a support platoon a long way back from the front (preferably out of sniper range - some of them are fitted with the same sights mortars use), or the people who made the movie were making the same mistake.

It does happen, but the gun you carry is not the gun that does it like that. You do it by firing a couple of short bursts and moving about 10m away and doing at again, over and over again. When your gun isn't firing either your squad is or the second gunner is. The gun should never be off on it's own, if the gun needs to move away from the rest of squad a rifleman shoudl go as second gunner to grab the gun if he dies. It's not so important when he can respawn with another one though, but the second gunner also covers the gunner because the rest of the squad are doing something else, so it's still needed sometimes.

The reality is that the "suppression" effect is totally fake and unrealistic, and even misses the only REAL "suppression" effect you feel - deafness from the loud cracking of the supersonic rounds flying by.

It's just that for the weapons to be as accurate as they really are/were and for the gun to be able to fire unrealistically long bursts and still survive, there has to be some other fake way of making the riflemen miss. In reality, all the "suppression" effect does in RO2 is let someone know if you are close to hitting them or missing wildly. That HELPS them. Most of the time, the rifleman that killed you is not the one you were firing the gun at, it's the one 10m away from him that isn't feeling the "suppression" effect. Relying on it only gets you killed.

[LondonHyena]

KarmakazeNZ

Please ask for permission next time you want to take something that someone wrote and reassemble it in your own words. It's a polite common courtesy.

Also, good lord man, go outside.

Cheers.