looting "makes it alot more of a balance nightmare"

[Rbstr]

Originally Posted by Coyote

Grenades should not do immense amounts of damage, I'm quite happy with them now. Do you see how much armor we are wearing? Like really. Rexo's and MAXs are essentially futuristic EOD suits . Unless you're in your PJ's you are in enough armor to save you from most damage, and the Agile even has decent enough plating that shrap shouldn't really kill you

This is a nonsence argument. Really, future armor is good?
How about future grenades? They've stagnated since the 21st century?
Grenades should do immense damage they're like mini-nukes now, ect.
You get what I mean?

In fact...armor has nearly always lagged behind our ability to destroy it.

I do agree with other things, I think knives and melee in general are often way more powerful than they should be in many, many games...But they've got a certain romance to them, which is why we see them.

I'm more of a fan of the pistol whip that pushes or stuns, rather than killing them.

[CutterJohn]

Originally Posted by 2coolforu

The idea is that the one grenade can probably give you a kill far more easily than the rifle as you can throw it at the vague area in which the defense are an get a kill. Same with CoD you can blindly chuck 'nades here there and everywhere and get a kill, Planetsides 'nades actually filled their purpose effectively without the cheap instadeath.

Looking at bad company 2 leader boards..

1. 103k grenades thrown, 32k grenades hit, 4k grenade kills. 295k kills total
2. 56k thrown, 32k hit, 4.6k kills. 219k kills total.
3. 2k thrown, 1.5k hit, 550 kills. 72k kills total.
4. 125k thrown, 44k hit, 8k kills. 215k kills total.
5. 21k thrown, 8k hit, 2k kills. 244k kills total.
6. 82k thrown, 26k hit, 6k kills. 228k kills total
7. 52k thrown, 16k hit, 3.6k kills. 182k kills total.
8. 141k thrown, 51k hit, 7.4k kills. 169k kills total.
9. 10k thrown, 2.7k hit, 500 kills. 164k kills total.
10. 61k thrown, 20k hit, 5.4k kills. 186k kills total.


Should be a decently representative sample of the biggest killwhores in the game, who know all the tricks to maximize k/d and gain a huge score.

In total, they threw 653 thousand cheap instakill grenades. Of those, 233 thousand hit somebody. Of those, 42 thousand produced a kill. For simplicity, and lack of any other stats, we'll just assume 1 kill = 1 grenade.

35% of cheap, overpowered, instakill grenades thrown resulted in a hit.
18% of cheap, overpowered, instakill grenades that hit resulted in kills.
6% of cheap, overpowered, instakill grenades thrown resulted in kills.
2% of the top ten players kill counts are from cheap, overpowered, instakill grenades

Yes, PS2 is not Bad company 2. But PS2 is not PS1 either. And grenades can, as has been shown, be powerful, even instakill, and still do not even come close to resulting in a kill with every throw. Far from it. Those 150 players with 1 grenade each will, according to these stats, result in roughly 9 kills.

[Bags]

Instakill grenade + red alert = what the fuck am I playing.

[2coolforu]

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

Looking at bad company 2 leader boards..

1. 103k grenades thrown, 32k grenades hit, 4k grenade kills. 295k kills total
2. 56k thrown, 32k hit, 4.6k kills. 219k kills total.
3. 2k thrown, 1.5k hit, 550 kills. 72k kills total.
4. 125k thrown, 44k hit, 8k kills. 215k kills total.
5. 21k thrown, 8k hit, 2k kills. 244k kills total.
6. 82k thrown, 26k hit, 6k kills. 228k kills total
7. 52k thrown, 16k hit, 3.6k kills. 182k kills total.
8. 141k thrown, 51k hit, 7.4k kills. 169k kills total.
9. 10k thrown, 2.7k hit, 500 kills. 164k kills total.
10. 61k thrown, 20k hit, 5.4k kills. 186k kills total.


Should be a decently representative sample of the biggest killwhores in the game, who know all the tricks to maximize k/d and gain a huge score.

In total, they threw 653 thousand cheap instakill grenades. Of those, 233 thousand hit somebody. Of those, 42 thousand produced a kill. For simplicity, and lack of any other stats, we'll just assume 1 kill = 1 grenade.

35% of cheap, overpowered, instakill grenades thrown resulted in a hit.
18% of cheap, overpowered, instakill grenades that hit resulted in kills.
6% of cheap, overpowered, instakill grenades thrown resulted in kills.
2% of the top ten players kill counts are from cheap, overpowered, instakill grenades

Yes, PS2 is not Bad company 2. But PS2 is not PS1 either. And grenades can, as has been shown, be powerful, even instakill, and still do not even come close to resulting in a kill with every throw.

Right, but no map on Bad Company comes close to representing the close quarters of a base fight or the numbers of a Planetside battle. On consoles there are 18 (?) people on a relatively huge and open map, on PC there are 32 on a relatively huge and open map. On Planetside we have possibly 1000 in a close and very cramped environment, play a game of CoD 4 and imagine that level of grenadewhoring in a Planetside environment.

Nothing is wrong with grenades as they are, they fill their role fine and if anything require a very small amount of fine tuning, perhaps a +/- 10% damage or splash radius.

[Coyote]

Fair enough on the leaderboard from BC2. But how many of their kills are from headshots with sniper rifles

[CutterJohn]

Originally Posted by 2coolforu

Right, but no map on Bad Company comes close to representing the close quarters of a base fight or the numbers of a Planetside battle. On consoles there are 18 (?) people on a relatively huge and open map, on PC there are 32 on a relatively huge and open map. On Planetside we have possibly 1000 in a close and very cramped environment, play a game of CoD 4 and imagine that level of grenadewhoring in a Planetside environment.

Nothing is wrong with grenades as they are, they fill their role fine and if anything require a very small amount of fine tuning, perhaps a +/- 10% damage or splash radius.

And in planetside 2 we have no idea what bases will be like. I'm not saying its a guaranteed good thing. I'm saying it should not be dismissed out of hand just because it would be bad in a game thats not PS2. A game that had some serious... quirks. If grenades are OP they can change two little numbers in a file and make them do half the damage and have twice the ammo count.

Plus they can do all sorts of weird things. Have a damage limit. Does 300 damage, whether theres 1 or 10 people near. If one, they die, if ten, they all lose 30 hp. Or arbitrarily reduce their effectiveness in cramped indoors areas. Call it an explosion dampening field. Leaves them powerful so they can be effective in the wide open outdoors, without being OP when theres a zerg inside a cramped base.

[SKYeXile]

if they increase the games TTK, you will want grandes, or there wont be anyway of busting into a lobby(short of a MAX crash) because you would be getting 2 shot by campers.

[Rbstr]

Oh god, increasing the TTK?

That's dumb enough to be funny.

[2coolforu]

Right, but taking stats from 10 players is a horrendously small sample. Take the whole game at least



The M60 was horrendously overpowered, hence why it has number 1 spot, yet even on the wide open sparsely populated maps of Bad Company the Hand Grenade is the 12th greatest killing weapon, in a game where there are quite a few guns. Interestingly the knife and 40mm grenade are up there which are both arguments against insta-gib grenades and one-hit-kill insta knifes.

Another graph



As you can see, like you said before 'only 2% of the kills are by grenades' therefore they must be balanced and are used a tiny fraction of the time. Well, the M60 only accounts for 7% of total kills! That's a tiny percentage, it must therefore be perfectly balanced. However from the graph you can see that 7% is a HUGE Proportion, even hand grenades are used more commonly than many main weapons like rifles and LMG's

[CutterJohn]

Originally Posted by 2coolforu

As you can see, like you said before 'only 2% of the kills are by grenades' therefore they must be balanced and are used a tiny fraction of the time. Well, the M60 only accounts for 7% of total kills! That's a tiny percentage, it must therefore be perfectly balanced. However from the graph you can see that 7% is a HUGE Proportion, even hand grenades are used more commonly than many main weapons like rifles and LMG's

This graph isn't very useful. Its trying to compare a weapon used by all classes in all kits, vs a weapon used by 1 of 4 classes, and is 1 of 6 weapons used by that class. Obviously this will skew numbers badly.

A rough guesstimate from that graph shows about 64% of the kills by all classes are guns that shoot bullets, while 2% of the kills by all classes are grenades. Hand grenades get 3% of the kills guns do.

[2coolforu]

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

This graph isn't very useful. Its trying to compare a weapon used by all classes in all kits, vs a weapon used by 1 of 4 classes, and is 1 of 6 weapons used by that class.

A valid comparison would be % of Medic kills that are from the M-60 vs the % of medic hand grenade kills while he has the m-60.

But you have to take this into consideration, grenades are available to everyone and they are going to be very proliferate on the battlefield which is why you want a Planetside 1 style grenade that is mainly used for infiltrators or softening up defenders.

[Rbstr]

Your study is highly flawed:

Every class has grenades. Yet, it represents less percentage than the leading single-class weapon in every case.
The most apt comparison of weapons with range is the M1911 which all classes can use as well. Even it manages to kill more than nades, even with competition from other selectable pistols and the immensely useful tracer.
Even more telling is that the knife kills far and away more people, yet has no AOE and no range.

The 40mm, a single class weapon, far out-kills the standard grenade. In fact, half of the assault weapons kill more than a nade.
Your conclusion here holds no water.

[Bags]

Regardless, we can all agree that insta throw insta kill grenades would be broken in current ps.

Let's go back to discussing looting enemy shit.

[2coolforu]

Right and in Planetside we have a Thumper which fires 6 grenades in a similar fashion to the hand grenade. There is a reason that 'nades didn't instagib in Planetside and that's because they were used to soften up defenders and because there were such larger scale and closer combat battles.

We know there are bases in Planetside 2, giving every class a couple of insta-kill frag grenades with even a moderately large blast radius is going to make defense an impossibility. Insta-kill infantry weapons, especially explosives ,have no place in large scale infantry combat, we already die fast enough from thumper weaponry and other infantry arms in Planetside 1 in a base hold.

[Rbstr]

Why does "more powerful" always become insta-kill to you people? Fucking frustrating.