The New Doom is Depressing.

The perks aren't really worth being called perks. The Rock, Paper Shotgun article I mentioned on the last past (I don't have a link handy) covers how it's not anything approaching "pay to win". You also unlock a bunch of them each time you win a game; they're consumables.

From what I played of the beta, they are most definitely optional. I don't see people really needing to buy them much of the time.

Could this change! Absolutely. But it's good to be informed, instead of kneejerking at "microtransactions" The word in of itself is not a taboo, and we need to stop treating it as one.

Coming from a competitive bias- I dislike anything that deals with paying for an advantage, in any sense. Looks like we'll have to see some heavy restrictions if they ever expect a comp scene.

Similar to how tf2 handles it, with many weapons being banned in sixes, class limits, etc.

Personally i see it like the Black Ops 3 COD points system, yes you can earn crypto keys and divinium from gameplay but you can also be a wallet warrior and spend up big and just buy up as much as you can too.
Personally i don't think it gives much of an advantage there either, it's just another way for a company to pilfer the community for more money.
Especially when you can spend to buy consumables, like buying cod points to waste on divinium which is then used to buy one use gobblegums.
Micro-transactions on one use consumables is just wrong...


(Just so you know i hate CoD's SP and MP modes, most annoying/boring game ever, but i do love the zombie mode, i play zombies quite a lot because it's about the only good thing CoD has to offer...)

And if you can buy these items via real money then ID/Bethesda is literally laughing at you while you waste money on useless one use consumables..
Really it's just ripping people off with the guise that you might be getting something worth your money when your not.

Well now i think about it, maybe it's not so bad a thing too.
I mean i spent $250 on PA because i like the company that produced it and i like the title being produced.
I guess maybe it's just another way to "Donate" to a company for your appreciation for their work.

A donation which effects gameplay balance in any way imo is just wrong. Think about the potential of selling cosmetics in this new Doom- why go the route of game impacting bits? In a full priced game no less?

It's sad to me, so many small negative changes add up to make a big ball of.. Not good.

It's not about classes, death streaks rewarding had players with wall hacks, micro transactions with little worth potentially scamming prople, or a leveling system rewarding players for merely existing. It's how it all adds up...

Taking a binary stance on any issue in gaming is usually a bit harsh, in my opinion. You first have to argue how much it impacts gameplay before we actually get anywhere, "close to zero" is far less damning than ruling "anything touching gameplay with money is bad".

"how it all adds up" . . . there's a ceiling here. It doesn't snowball infinitely. You have three slots for consumables; it can't go any higher. You can exhaust them over the course of a full match.

Could it be bad? Sure.

Is it definitely bad just because money is involved? No. See: TF2.

It's not done by id though but by the guys who made the halo and cod multiplayer appearantly

I thought it was designed and created by Id and being published by their sister company Bethesda..
Id made the engine, then the game went through supposed dev hell, then Id had some staff restructuring and they rebuilt from the ground up using an even newer revision of the ID Tech 6 engine.
The games still being developed by Id it's just some staff have changed like the inclusion of one of Crytek's dev's.
And maybe the addition of some people who worked on other titles. which includes staff from Certain Affinity (Ex-Bungie Empolyee's).

Edit..
If you consider Certain Affinity to be the company responsible for development then it's more than just Halo staff as the company is compromised of staff from many companies like Midway, Origin, Microsoft, and EA .. Plus more probably.

After doing some researching, it seems that it's a collaboration between Id and Certain Afiinity for the Multiplayer only,
Id are responsible for developing the SP mode i'm sure of it..
I would also put my money on it that Id still has final call on what goes in and what gets left out of the game too, it's still thier Franchise/IP

Yes but tf2 gives you drops quite often, and you can actually buy every weapon in the game for very little as weapons are only worth a couple cents or so due to trading. Plus stock is the best other than a few exceptions. Regardless the competitive format for tf2 bans most weapons outside of stock and a couple ones that are deemed balance- Though matchmaking doesn't and well.. That's why I don't play matchmaking.

Overall anything that you can pay to make yourself better, no matter how small the impact, without actually being just the better player skill wise... Is a bad thing. This is something I stand by 100% and I'm sorry but you can't change my stance on it. It's even worse imo if something doesn't make much impact but costs quite a bit of money, because then you're not only allowing money to impact the game, even if in a small way- but you're also essentially ripping off new uninformed players.

This is all making the assumption a game is attempting to become a competitive game, or be balanced in general. If this new Doom is striving to be a game people just have fun with but don't really improve at, it's succeeded- and that's alright.

And when I was talking about it all adding up I wasn't talking about buying things, I was talking about all the negative changes adding up. Making Doom the exact opposite of competitive. Let me list them...

-Buying consumables that impact gameplay to some degree.
-Classes which get rid of a big part of map control.
-Forgiving movement system (ie: Less punishment for missing a jump.)
-Death streaks which reward players who are dying.
-Leveling system which makes players who've played longer have an advantage over players who are simply better.
-Input lag, specifically in the menus. (Though less so to do with gameplay, just thought I'd mention it.)

These just being the ones I could remember at the moment, sorry if I missed any. Now don't get me wrong the new Doom certainly did some things right too. It at least kept power weapons and the new way koth was shown off is pretty entertaining- It's weapons were also interesting and worked rather different from each other. As well as not caving into the modern movement system entirely with sprinting and etc, nor giving the character regenerating health. There needs to be some more slightly open maps but I'm sure that's coming anyway. You see when I say Doom is a bad game I mean more so it's a bad competitive game. Doom was made well, runs pretty damn nicely, and was fun to play, but it doesn't work as a really all that balanced an competitive shooter- It certainly does more so than the recent CoD games, but definitely not as much as Quake, Halo, CS, UT, W:ET, TF, CoD 2, etc...

Also locked at 60 frames makes me sad. :<

Random note: We may see something like what CoD 4 did way back in the day. A competitive mod called promod. Which made a couple distinct classes, with certain weapons usable. No scope sway. Fullbright/removed fog and etc, and some other changes. Basically if the game's open enough we could see it being changed and set up for a more competitive format.

Point I'm making is that TF2 has an active competitive scene. Heck, you even try and defend TF2.

Doom gives you drops often, and the only thing you seem to be able to purchase directly with money are those consumables. Even given TF2 weapon balance, paying for actual weapon drops is more of an impact on the balance of that game than what you're getting annoyed at happening in Doom.

Valve's algorithms "guarantee" an item drop every several hours of playing. Which means if you don't spend money, you're pretty much locked at that maximum play time to get a single drop (which seems about average for me). That's not being generous. That is not quite often. I shouldn't have to play for six hours a night to get two guaranteed item drops most of which I already have, because to get anything fancy I either need to craft for it or flat-out spend money on their promoted seasonal event (at the moment it's the Tough Break campaign) to even get a chance to get an assignment.

I'm using TF2 because it is a successful game that people seem to like defending.

I'm genuinely confused why Valve repeatedly gets a pass.

I've covered class control and map balance, I never really got an answer there. The movement system can be tweaked, though I'm unsure how "forgiving" it is. If you mean "it's more forgiving than the pixel-perfect jumps required in older Doom games" then fair enough but that's because the original Doom games were a product of their time. Just like Half-Life, and that's why the Half-Life: Source port sucked horribly because it killed players in Xen 99% of the time because the advanced, accurate physics engine couldn't handle the pixel-perfect jumps required to complete the platforming section on Xen.

You seem to dislike things that apparently make the game more "casual", and that's a whole other debate for another time. People are too obsessed with "casual" in that they think it can't beget a "competitive" game, and I'd think that the success of things like Rocket League or League of Legends would've disproved that myth by now. But apparently not!

A levelling system that grants players advantages is worth criticising. Absolutely. But you actually have to recognise valid counterarguments to that criticism, such as "levels are unlocked very easily and the only major thing you get are custom loadout slots". This isn't CoD where most of the decent weapons are gated off behind levels. You get most of the best weapons from the first level.

Also I'm beginning to think that criticising a levelling system for the sake of a levelling system is a kneejerk reaction. People get better at the game over time, this is only natural. It's like complaining that pro players beat less experienced players in a match. That's . . . how games work.

The false equivalence of "this is bad in a competitive environment" is false because in a competitive environment players will be at similar levels. Or at the very least, will have gone past level 3 (which I managed in a single match, or maybe two, during the Closed Beta) which unlocks your first custom loadout.

Valve doesn't get a pass with it's balance, as I said the tf2 competitive community has been very very against many changes Valve brought to the game in broken weapons staying unchanged for years. And most weapons are banned in the 6v6 format for tf2. As well as class number restrictions- 2 scouts, 2 soldiers, a demoman, a medic is the meta and is also set (you cna't have more than two scouts for example) and then it's possible to play with at most 2 snipers, or two spys, but only one engineer, and one heavy. Just recently Valve has given tf2 more focus though.

If you knew how set in stone the 6v6 meta is and how much gets banned or restricted to keep this meta you'd know what I mean. A weapon that increases the speed of the Heavy, the GRU, is banned for example because it'd change the meta, you might see a team run heavy mid or something.

The only weapons not given at the start that are used in comp 6v6 (and are actually useful) are: Kritz-krieg, and very rarely the vaccinator. The Ubersaw, and Crusaders Crossbow for medic. Scout is ran pretty much stock except for the boston basher/three rune blade which deal self damage for building uber with med, and very rarely some scouts use the winger a pistol that lets you jump slightly higher at the cost of ammo and firing speed. Snipers are ran 100% stock, as are heavies, and demomen. Soldier runs stock except for escape plan and gunboats. Occasionally using direct-hit, but for some reason not often. Pyro runs full stock after the nerfs one the Degreaser. Spy is stock except for Ambassador, which allows you to headshot. And engineer runs full stock. Keep in mind though Pyro, Spy, Heavy, and Engineer and to a much lesser degree sniper are very rarely used in 6v6. As they are slow and don't keep up with the speed based meta of 6v6 CP maps.

The only other time I've ever talked competitive TF2 with someone (an Aussie) his argument revolved around non-standard weapons generally being inferior to the original set (with a few exceptions). Hence the basis of my understanding there.

Class restrictions are an obvious one in TF2, of course - but again, there isn't really a comparison here (in Doom), I feel, because depending on your preferred weapon style a team with ten Super Shotguns could do as well as a team with ten Rocket Launchers.

at the very least being able to pick up others weapons should be a thing
personaly don´t mind insta melee if they ballance the damage across all weapons to make each loadout viable
i for one am not a rocketlauncher player i rather go with shoties nadelaunchers and plasmarifles cause i suck at aiming .. so yea give me something for spray and pray with the appropiate dmg tradeoff i don´t care, neither do i mind the loadoutsystem perse ..
also i kinda dig the idea of having a bit of a risk on meleekills as in you may not neccesarily want to do it when another teammember is close or risk being killed by him while in the frames of the killanimation .. it´s a similar thing imo with smnc grabs


regarding buyable hacks .... yea not a fan of it but considering you get some anyway after a match i don´t mind too much if it´s all ballanced ..

By this logic, anything a game does is fine as long as the comp scene has the ability to ban. Which is every game that allows for matches with friends or direct connect.

On that note, I think that reinforcing a stale meta through bans that aren't made by looking at actual balance is dumb.

Well of course, any game that can be made competitive through weapon bans and etc can be made competitive... But it deeeefinitely isn't any game that allows you to host your own server. It'd need these options either in a custom game settings or allowing mods. Which not all games let you do, particularly triple A titles it seems.

I'm not going to argue on forcing a meta being a bad thing. Im really on the fence about it. On one hand the tf2 comp meta is pretty much the most skill-based and fast-paced format. But on the other it could potentially be fun to have the other classes. Heavy having a lot of randomness in his minigun, the Pyro flamethrower being arguably unskilled, engineer having aim hacks- basically. Stuff like that. Though I would love to see Pyro in comp 6v6 if the powerjack was unbanned, a new flamethrower focused on reflecting was added, and you basically used shotgun as primary- switching to flamethrower to reflect. (Reflecting is an air blast the flamethrower can use to reflect non hitscan projectiles, the most skill based part of pyro.

But some weapon bans aren't only there to keep the meta the same, crita-cola for example which gives you critz at the cost of no pistol... 100% worth it. Which is pretty OP. =P

As long as you can make online friend only games you're good. You don't need to actually host or mod. That's how Splatoon does it.

I guess so. But you'd have a pretty dead comp community if there was no way to reliably enforce these rules in a pug match. Weapon bans are coded into custom tf2 servers, it's not gentleman's rules.

Heck cod 4 made a whole mod for it. As I mentioned earlier.

If people don't abide by gentleman's rules, you don't play with them. It's worked for handheld and tabletop games for decades, and it works online just fine.