To help newbies into QW, handicap is a good way to not make newcomers feel absolutley worthless at the game... I was thinking that maybe we could have a gameplaymode where the player with the least amount of frags would get a boost of some sort... maybe respawn with extra health or do extra damage? As the fragdifference increases, the newbie would get more and more power, eventually he would respawn with maybe 250 health and make damage equal to quad.

This could work for teamplay aswell, would be fun to see a div3-clan almost beat LA...

What do you think?

your post touches me. it is not often people think about pektopah, and how hard to be a pektopah! i send your letter to quakepresident to help and sovle this matter.

Uhm, no thanks. Newbies should play with/against newbies. Newbies shouldn't even try to take on old players (or "good" before they've been some time in the game.

And no, div3 clan usually has played long enough to be skilled. They need to play more to be more skilled that they could take on LA (it takes years to get in DIV3 so you really don't want to go against DIV1 with handicap). Besides all this, we already have a handicap adjustments if someone wants to play with it.

i like the idea

this already exists in games like mariokart where the player who's the last gets better items, so that he will catch up. this makes the game more exciting for everyone, cause you can never be certain that you will win.

however, it should be a setting, and it should default to OFF. it can be used in games where noobs and pros play together in say a 2on2 mix, or ffa. i doubt it would be very successful in 1on1 and 4on4 mixes, or in any game that is not a mix

it would make it easier for newbies to find games, and as they get better, they will have a harder time keeping their frags since the "handicap" gets lowered as their frag count increases.

very nice idea indeed.

Yes Empezar is right.. it should be a setting like midair or dmm4 (any ktx-admin who would like to implement this?) mainly for mixed games where the skill-gap is huge. And btw Renzo, even when two newbies are playing each other the gap can be like 40-(-1). It is for those games that I think this mode would be most successful. I am really anxious to see what this setting would do to the game, it should make it more newbie-friendly and fun. Maybe the frags/death-ratio would be a good variable to calculate what boosts the übernewbie recieves?

I can think of many ways to boost a players inventory/power, example: respawn with armor, weapons, ammo, more health.. make more damage.. respawn with biosuit or lavasuit, reduced damage from yourself, reduced falldamage. Respawn with pentagram and/or quad for a couple of seconds. In a 1on1-game the player that is lagging behind would get more powers and respawn with better weapons each time he dies... and lose his powers each time he kills.

Maybe it could work for 2on2/4on4 and ffa aswell, but I think that would be very hard to balance...

i think it would be best to make the noob more powerful offensive than defensive, that way he gets his handicap, but the good player can still beat the crap out of him

that way the noob will learn to pick up weapons, health packs, armors etc, instead of just becoming a solid rock that never dies and never has to pick up anything to be competitive.

I generally like ideas that make it easier for people to start playing qw, but this idea doesn't fly. Why?

In the current handicap system, you, setting the handicap know how much you are giving away and what it means in terms of using weapons etc.

If the handicap was dynamic, how would the non-handicapped player ever know what he's going up against and how to deal with the opponent? This would be hard enough 1on1, but imagine 4on4 where one player has been doing shield duty for 10mins with really bad stats. Does he start spawning with 200h and 130% damage? One of the skills in qw is to know / determine what you are up against and that is made pretty hard if your spawning oppositions qualities are changing all the time. How would you determine how many good rockets or grenades or shaft ownage you need against an opponent? This affects tactical decisions very heavily.

If you have good suggestions to circumvent these problems, please tell me

so basically you're telling me that the good player will have a hard time

this is exactly what handicap is all about

It's not a question of hard, but inconsistent gameplay that messes around with fundamental issues and choices during the game. Maybe it should be kinda like in golf The noob gets a small multiplier for every frag - so that depending on handicap you could get 1.33 frags per kill. Personally I think the handicap system in golf is only good for rating players, not for making games more even. If you hit 69 on 9 holes, that's your score and that's it - there should be no "handicap score" which allows you to beat the better handicapped guy who shot 58.

Yeah, handicap is for the weak, fight like a man, or die!

Seriously, maybe it's better to give really bad players some more hp and some ga on respawn, so they no longer will be one hit victims of rl spawn raping.