Why don't we just play Quake 3?

[Lolzy]

In ql the other weapons started to shine.

Lol really? This is completely false, so it goes into my signature.

QW: LG+RL+NG
Q2: RG+RL+SSG
Q3: RG+RL+LG+PG+MG
QL: Basically the same

I too know railers who say that RG rules and other stupid stories. I know a lot of people who spent their entire miserable Q careers running like retards with LG only. So there you go.

And to answer OPs question: We don't come abck to play Q3 because most of us have been there, done that. The scene is beasically done apart from small lanparties or lone servs populated by a bunch of devotees. @lso there are still guys who play Q2 (lots of my friends do) but most of them do it because...they dont know why They just play it b/c they found QL too much of a mixed bag.

QL has castrated physics = no trixjumping, some dificult-to-swallow weapon nerfs and does not allow for extreme modding lie Q3 did. PQL aint CPMA or DEFRAG, try as you may. So may guys simply went back to Q3 that they know tweak and love to death. Just a matter of whether you can swallow QL wholesale or cant get used to it.

Also well tuned Q3 runs better than QL. End of story.

[megaman3]

Lol really? This is completely false, so it goes into my signature.

QW: LG+RL+NG
Q2: RG+RL+SSG
Q3: RG+RL+LG+PG+MG
QL: Basically the same

I too know railers who say that RG rules and other stupid stories. I know a lot of people who spent their entire miserable Q careers running like retards with LG only. So there you go.

Since you are a quake fan you know the quake series started from the most imbalanced to getting more balanced with each release. Problem is this post shows you weren't decent enough in any of those in order to do a good review of them, including QL, because that's not how those were played back in the day and aren't to this day in any skill level.

To be honest I expected more of someone that has any relation with planetquake. Guess that site was ran by noobs, anyway:

Q1 and QW are just 2 weapons: the LG and RL dominate on a level of their own. For people that didn't play those imagine QL's LG doing twice the damage and a cripple effect, and RL doing twice the dps while being twice as effective for spamming.
The NG was way, way, way worse than the LG and RL in Q1/QW. It's no contest and same can be said about all other weapons.

On q2's case, if you are going to name 2 top weapons they have to be the RG and the CG. 1 hit kill from random respawns (RG) and a weapon that has no counters while doing more dps than all the rest (CG).
The RL and SSG are not comparable to those 2 in terms of dominance in decently skilled matches and in noob play too.

Q3: Idea is not picking all the weapons. On general terms the game is vastly more balanced than Q1/QW and Q2, for example the RL and plasma are useful and a solid tool, but just youtube any match and see which ones dominated the most.
Q3 simply wasn't as balanced as QL is.

Q4: lg and rail. No question.

QL: RL and MG were buffed while plasma benefited from netcode changes (especially at lan) and people getting naturally better as times goes by. LG and RG were nerfed.

[Lolzy]

I still think its a matter of personal preference. Depended on where you played and with who.
Fact is: You chose some guns depending on connection you had. There were guys who painfully worked over their lag with overaiming the hitbox @ 160ms or more, me included, but that required to get used to another set of aiming techniques when on a lanparty where ping was merely a blip. Also that meant that you lived in two dimesnion: one where you connected to a server in a close proximity or played a LAN and the other was general Internet with its infant infrastructure.

Problem is this post shows you weren't decent enough in any of those, including QL, because that's not how those were played.

No, the problem is I was extremely decent, also with LG (funny eh?), starting with QW and ending it in 2001 when Q3 was still strong. I met some guys like you, who desperately polished their particular skills, camped a certain weapon spawn on a map and overused the guns they were proficient with while being unable to use the other.

You miss the mark here pal, looking at my profile since now I play Q completely casually. Shame we didnt meet in Q3 back in the day. Would be fun - for me. And some crying - for you But go on, make stories.

You try to sound like you know all, but you dont. I don't blame you; since Q is about using right weapon in the right moment, your theory just shows that either you missed the train in terms of whats important in that game and just settled in a niche or simply get delusional. I could find a lot of guys who would laugh their butts off your weapon guide, and an equal amount of theose who would defend it to the death. You dont get it, do you.

Also look at this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYIPGIiiCK4
Just for nostalgia sake, some guys from my scene, Poland FTW Brings back memories, eh?

[metapsy]

QL: RL and MG were buffed while plasma benefited from netcode changes (especially at lan)

MG is a hitscan weapon, and was nerfed (compared to baseq3) and PG is a projectile weapon, and was buffed (compared to OSP), just like RL (higher projectile velocity for both).

Unless you have a very low ping, your PG won't be better in QL than it would be in Q3, it'll be similar (30-40ms) or a little bit worse (40-50ms), because QL (and CPMA) are actually worse than Q3 (baseq3, OSP, RA3, etc.) when it comes to projectiles, hence why they buff projectile weapons in the first place.

What the devs tried to do with QL is mainly to recreate Q3's weapon balance in an unlagged environment, so they nerfed LG and RG (hitscan weapons, fine with this netcode) and buffed RL and PG (projectile weapons, bad with this netcode).

It's more subtle because a RL buff and a RG nerf were also good ideas and improvments over Q3, on paper, but once again we face the issue caused by Unlagged: a RL on LAN (or with a very low ping) is now ridiculously strong, much more than it is in Q3, whereas at 50ms, it's already crap, it's similar to Q3 if not inferior (which shouldn't be the case because Q3's RL is theoretically inferior).

Anyway, the idea is Q3's weapon balance is better, it's actually QL's model, but you can't import it on QL because QL's current netcode, ironically, is deeply unfair and leads to a massive difference between a low ping player and a 'high' ping player (40ms and more).

It's less true in Q3, and it's constant, at least (your PG won't magically turn into a useless water gun because you play with 50ms, for example).

[Lolzy]

What the devs tried to do with QL is mainly to recreate Q3's weapon balance in an unlagged environment, so they nerfed LG and RG (hitscan weapons, fine with this netcode) and buffed RL and PG (projectile weapons, bad with this netcode).

This should be hung upon the wall on the forums for all to see.

As Meta said, problem lies in REBALANCING the weapons according to different environment. When Q3 was built it was optimized for lag (well optimized might be too big of a word, but they built the network engine based on what was happening on the Internet then, namely almost nonexistent broadband, and dialup/DSL/ADSL being the main routes for access). What came out was a single undebatable fact: Hitscan guns were extremely problematic to use compared to QL. Since hitscan gun like MG or RG suffers greatly from lag as it is an instant hit weapon, hitting good accuracies with it was more difficult. Some guys say that in QL you get +20-30% more for your overall acc with RG thanks to the unlagged netcode. You wouldnt get that benefit in vq3 for example.

a RL on LAN (or with a very low ping) is now ridiculously strong, much more than it is in Q3, whereas at 50ms, it's already crap, it's similar to Q3 if not inferior (which shouldn't be the case because Q3's RL is theoretically inferior).

What about the case of QL RL projectiles bieng on par in terms of speed with CPMA? I thought the boost to 1000ups should've addressed that a bit? When I play RL on ~50 ms it requires decent overaiming to get a hit just like in q3. I suppose the speed buff was meant to combat the issue, but it feels like lagged q3 RL or sometimes even less responsive in higher ping environment.

Anyways, when I came to QL and survived first nerf, second buff, third nerf and buff and so on, I think I understood guys who just went back to vq3 ot any of its mods. The engine is absolutely not optimized for modern networks and sadly the case is even more ridiculous when we take into consideration that there are still guys in this game who ping over 100. And they have to play like q3 on remote server, only that now the netcode is against them So its like either way you go, its not right.

Seems the only way to go is a complete rewrite of the netcode IMO. They can drop unlagged from the codebase but then they will end up with q3 settings that have their own set of problems.

[quakestreme]

This should be hung upon the wall on the forums for all to see.

ummm... I thought it was also because:

1) As players got better at aiming and got optical mice rather than ball mouse, hugely lowered the sens etc., they could pull off much better LG and RG percentages. Especially the best players, and that matters more in a game that turned out to be so competitive at the top level. You can even see this today where at first it seems like RL is the weapon of choice and LG has no chance against it, then when you get good it tends to get the other way around (highly depending on the situation of course, but for example in FFA).

2) People were playing with all kinds of ridiculous connections back then, many still had 56k. For someone with a medium/high ping (even 70ms) to hit a few RGs and half-decent LG in Q3A was really something. id had to give them SOME reason to use these weapons sometimes over the RL/PG/SG.

Lagged or unlagged, for a good ping they were always too high in Q3A.

[metapsy]

Some guys say that in QL you get +20-30% more for your overall acc with RG thanks to the unlagged netcode.

I do get 'false positives' in each of my games. How much seems to depend on my own latency in that particular game.

With RG (and only RG), 'the higher ping, the better', I'd say. Or, more accurately, when your ping increase, the chances to get a false positive increase drastically too. The netcode become suddenly more 'tolerant'. Everything's easier and hitboxes seems larger.

I get more false positives in Poland (70ms) than in Germany (50ms), and more in Germany than in France (40ms). And judging by the stats and the comments from people who were known for their RG skills in Q3, I'd say that there are no false positives at all if you play QL at a very low ping. 'Zero tolerance' for them, but that's pretty much the only disadvantage they got.

The last time I've played CTF in the US (120ms), I've ended my first game with 60% RG and my second with 53% iirc, but tons of these RG 'hits' were false positives.

I suppose the speed buff was meant to combat the issue, but it feels like lagged q3 RL or sometimes even less responsive in higher ping environment.

Yeah, that's why the alleged superiority of QL's netcode is all relative.

In many cases it's easier to hit in QL, but easier doesn't mean better, as in most accurate one.

Sure, it makes sense to prefer Unlagged when you play with 70ms. You can hit 80% RG without difficulties and fry a stacked player in one second and a half with your overpowered LG, which is hardly possible in OSP, but the thing is, you'd probably struggle to hit more than 48% RG if you had a much lower (and 'less tolerant') ping, and keeping the same LG accuracy with half of this ping would require, paradoxically, a slightly better aim.

That's why a lot of newbs, and even veterans nowadays*, love this netcode I guess, fake high accuracies pretty much proves that the netcode is working great.


* InstaUnlagged's netcode (Q3 mod), the 'ancestor' of QL's netcode, was considered as a joke by the Q3 community a few years ago, though. With good reason I'd say because the goal of the netcode's author (a newb HPB) was to improve your (his) ability to hit on instagib servers located overseas...

[sponge]

* InstaUnlagged's netcode (Q3 mod), the 'ancestor' of QL's netcode, was considered as a joke by the Q3 community a few years ago, though. With good reason I'd say because the goal of the netcode's author (a newb HPB) was to improve your (his) ability to hit on instagib servers located overseas...

The antilag in QL is not based off of any particular implementation, InstaUnlagged included. It implements the same concept as each of them, including CPMA and I believe OSP, which is backward reconciliation.

[metapsy]

CPMA do that, OSP doesn't afaik.

QL's netcode and InstaUnlagged's netcode are two different things, they're nonetheless extremely similar, to say the least, and share obscur cvars that belongs only to them (projectileNudge).

All the issues described in the InstaUnlagged FAQ occurs in QL unfortunately (and only the most obvious ones are listed).
http://www.ra.is/unlagged/faq.html