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Merc Report: How to Have a Blast This Summer

Kittenmittens

Tripwire Interactive Community Team
Staff member
Mercs,

As you prepare to head out to new undisclosed locations to face the unknown, the Horzine Research and Development department has been up to its usual boundary-pushing with visions of how to make surviving and clearing out zed attacks more efficient and more gratifying to keep hard-working mercs happy.

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The lab coats have stated that mercs love shotguns or maybe they just love the devastating damage they do. Either way, we have to agree that sending zeds flying into the deep void with a few well-placed blasts from a shotgun is grotesquely satisfying. To help accomplish more of this, Horzine wants to add the S12 Shockgun to your arsenal.

The S12 Shockgun feels hefty in your hands to reassure users that it is a mighty machine. Its shots confirm its lethality. Fans of the M4 will appreciate this semi-auto beast. Are zeds getting too close for comfort? The Shockgun is equipped with an under-barrel shockwave attachment that will make them think twice before getting in your face. Enforce social distancing with the EMP waves that spread out around you and anyone stupid enough to be in the radius.


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Let’s talk explosions! Funnily enough Horzine lab rats are no strangers to explosions and the recent amount of lab rat bodies being disposed of indicates the HRG team has something new for you to try! Is it safe? The labcoats won’t say but the new HRG Bombardier will soon be your new grenade-lobbing friend.

There are two ways to make excellent use of your new sentry buddy in combat. The default mode tosses grenades at your foes’ chests until it is all out and can toss no more. It’s like playing catch but instead of catching a ball, zeds will get a grenade that explodes on impact. If you are looking for a bigger show, detonate the device yourself and watch the shower of explosions go off within a radius around the initial boom of the device. This impressive blast also occurs when the sentry runs out of its primary grenades. Engineers behind this weapon have left us with a warning to pass along to mercs before using them for the first time. It’s important that if a merc has already deployed one of these sentries (HRG Bombardier or Sentinel) a second one can not be deployed. Something about “interference”, “safety” reasons, and the other blowing up, we didn’t finish reading the fine print.

We will reach out soon with details about the location of your next mission. Armed with these new weapons, we are expecting huge success!

The S12 Shockgun will be added to the Armory Season Pass 2, the Ultimate Edition, and the Ultimate Edition Upgrade. It also can be obtained via direct individual purchases. HRG weapons are available with the update for no additional cost.
 
Since the regulars sentinels wasn't enough to piss off players by raging scrakes or fleshpounds without any control over it; and catering to players that prioritize their kills on the leaderboard than actually cooperating with the team. Let's add an explosive sentinel that will do the exact same thing, but worse. Which will hinder anyone playing a precision perk into fulfilling their roles. Then again it's not out yet so I have to wait and see how it plays out, but so far it's worrying me.
 
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So everyone has sentinels now...hmmm...that's quite a sting to those who bought the original sentinel.

"The S12 Shockgun will be added to the Armory Season Pass 2"

Just to clarify...It says Armory Season Pass 2...not a 3. Since I do have the second Armory Pass, does this mean I don't have to buy anything to get the new DLC weapons this year?
 
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Making some meaningful and interesting balance changes only to add some new ludicrous stuff is classic Killing Floor 2 at that point.

I really like the design of that new shotgun. Is it based on the Saiga 12 ? That would explain the name ! However, having an EMP on demand is a huge no from me. I really hope it's at least less accurate/less powerful than the M4, otherwise, that's a straight upgrade.

The Bombardier on the other hand continues the trend of adding whatever crap you can think of to the demo's arsenal, as long as it's explosive. I can't add anything else to the previous members' output : it's a very bad idea.
So everyone has sentinels now...hmmm...that's quite a sting to those who bought the original sentinel.
How so? It's not the same weapon. The original Sentinel ain't that good of a weapon. And the season pass grants you a dozen of guns. I personally don't feel scammed, and even if I did, it would amount to what... 2-3 bucks?
It would've been nice and less annoying if the HRG for Sentinel was a drone that healed teammates instead of another obstructive weapon that will just add more visual clutter.
And making the Field Medic even more brainless? Hell no. It already has more than enough weapons to make his life easier.

(Although I guess it would make the battle medics at least somewhat competent at healing)
 
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Well I was thinking about suggesting to add a option to turn off or on the weapon sharing feature when we create a room, similar to the option to turn on or off seasonal zeds skins that was added recently because sometimes I would like to play a multiplayer game without seeing multiple people using Sentinel or Thermite Bore just because I am sharing those weapons but then Tripwire decides to add a free Sentinel that everyone can use, so now adding a option to turn off or on the weapon sharing feature doesnt seem as useful.
 
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And making the Field Medic even more brainless? Hell no. It already has more than enough weapons to make his life easier.

(Although I guess it would make the battle medics at least somewhat competent at healing)
That's exactly the reasoning behind my post. It's the lesser of two evils. Do you want a drone that annoys precision perks even more and rages all the large zeds or a drone that auto-heals teammates? Obviously both of these aren't good, but I think some of us already saw an HRG drone as inevitable once we saw the HRG mine reconstructor a few months ago.
 
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That's exactly the reasoning behind my post. It's the lesser of two evils. Do you want a drone that annoys precision perks even more and rages all the large zeds or a drone that auto-heals teammates? Obviously both of these aren't good, but I think some of us already saw an HRG drone as inevitable once we saw the HRG mine reconstructor a few months ago.
Nah. I understand where you're coming from, but I absolutely won't agree with it on principle. Fixing bad actors in the game won't be helped by giving them a weapon that technically lets them do their job while also still not really doing their job in the long run.

If anything, that would be tacit acceptance of "Hey, it's OK to play Combat Medic, really; you can throw this stupid thing out and it will heal your teammates sometimes/occasionally/maybe while you go around spamming the Incision and grenades on anything that moves!" That's practically a green light to budding combat medics on the edge, as well as anyone who was already griefing their team with all right-side skills.

If it won't be enforced by mechanics, it needs to be enforced by booting bad actors from the server.
 
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Any way to remove the 2 votekicks limit on servers?

There are a couple of ways. The number 2 is hardcoded in the ServerStartVoteKick function of the kfvotecollector class inside the kfgame package. You can make a mod that alters this behavior. Which, if you follow the officially supported steps, will derank your games. You can also look at the existing mods that modify the vote collector behavior, such as


There's a MaxKicks option you can alter.

Another way is to run your own servers and kicking them using the Web Console, or using admin kick, which are unlimited.
 
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I've kicked commandos, survivalists, supports, zerks out of games because they were using the first drone. Starting this summer, I'll also kick demos. Any way to remove the 2 votekicks limit on servers?
I still really hope you try to reason with them beforehand, otherwise that's kind of a dickmove.

(Although, considering I've played a lot of MvM on TF2 recently where people are so adamant to tell you "**** you, I play how I want", I wouldn't be surprised if people INSISTED on using the drone even when nicely told that it benefits no one)
 
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Congratulations, you found the one perk on which a drone can do more damage... to players.
Let's all joyfully await the HRG extra toxic griefer drone. Now with 1000.0% more nukes.
'cause that's much more useful than actually FIXING the stupid things to stop them attacking big Zeds.

Please note the massive sarcasm and utter furious disappointment.
I didn't think you could disappoint me any more, but you absolutely outdid yourself. At this point I wonder whether you actively try to sabotage players.
 
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I still really hope you try to reason with them beforehand, otherwise that's kind of a dickmove.

(Although, considering I've played a lot of MvM on TF2 recently where people are so adamant to tell you "**** you, I play how I want", I wouldn't be surprised if people INSISTED on using the drone even when nicely told that it benefits no one)
I recently had a game where I and other players asked someone to stop using the Gravity Imploder because it was messing up the hitscanners' laning (and the hitscanners were most of the team, if you can believe that), wherein GE Dude told us (in much actual ruder terms) that anything is fine in vanilla HoE and told us to bug off to another server if we wanted to be elitist.

We didn't vote to kick because the team was doing *okay* despite that, but yeah...don't expect the best from anyone, unfortunately.
 
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