My problem with WhoDunIt

[Svperstar]

I've been playing WhoDunIt off and on for 2 years and probably have around 100 matches I have done

It is a fun mod and all and hugely popular. However if you play you notice the same 2 or 3 people get the shotgun/handgun/carbine pretty much every single map

As it is now WhoDunIt requires you to play the game solo in your own server just to figure out where the guns even spawn. Despite doing 100 games I have never even seen a shotgun on the ground.

I think it would be a much more fun game if the item spawns were randomized. The guns shouldnt spawn in the same place over and over.

[Riclo]

But part of the Whodunit way is rushing all the guns as soon as the map starts

I believe the problem here is that it's always the same maps being played. After playing the same maps over and over you tend to memorize all the gun and key spawns, even though in some maps the key spawns are randomized (Which are usually needed to obtain the guns)

I don't see this being changed anytime soon though. You'd have to get permission from the map authors themselves to change the map (Which I haven't seen most of them in a long time) implying they even grant you permission to do that. I think this is just a general problem with Whodunit. Even if they did change the gun spawns and randomize more people would just learn those spawns too. As for new maps, I only know maybe one or two people who are still actively mapping for Whodunit.

I can't really think of any useful suggestions for you though. :/

[Svperstar]

I think it would be better if they just spawned in random locations.

[ibm5155]

and they're lol...

Plus, for me the only problem actually is the gang tkers, like today ,somehow I got a shotgun and other dud too, one guy randomly came and tried to kill that shotgun dud, we both tried to make it stop, but he killed the shotgun dud, and then I killed him and then another guy killed me and then ... the result: murder kills:1, paranoia kills: 9

I think it should have a kind of paranoia limit, a counter by cvar, so if the player made like 10 paranoias on a week, he wouldn't be able to play the next week...
plus, is that thread on the right place? :s

[Svperstar]

and they're lol...

Not sure what you mean by this. I was on today for quite a while playing as OMG DUDE WTF. Yes TKs are annoying I change my name in Zandronum pretty frequently

[Deadon]

Yeah TKing is a HUGE WDI problem. But if you want in my maps i could add some random spawners for all the shovels, guns and crossbows

[Svperstar]

Yeah TKing is a HUGE WDI problem. But if you want in my maps i could add some random spawners for all the shovels, guns and crossbows

This would be great if there was a mod that would make this work on all maps. Then it wouldn't be the same couple people grabbing the guns every time. I have never even seen the shotgun because it is picked up so quick.

Random spawns would make the maps have more replay value and give everyone a chance to get a gun.

[ForrestMarkX]

Yeah TKing is a HUGE WDI problem. But if you want in my maps i could add some random spawners for all the shovels, guns and crossbows

This would be great if there was a mod that would make this work on all maps. Then it wouldn't be the same couple people grabbing the guns every time. I have never even seen the shotgun because it is picked up so quick.

Random spawns would make the maps have more replay value and give everyone a chance to get a gun.

A easy way to do this without editing maps would be to replace every pickup with a RandomSpawner and just make a addon pk3 but that's not really a good way to do it

[Conflagrated]

There are several ways to fix this:

• Utilize randomspawners and tweak the frequency of weapon spawns.
• Implement a script on a per-map basis that sets coordinate zones and spawns more powerful weapons within those parameters.
            ° ... or just use more mapspots and spawn something on OPEN.
• Tweak the maps themselves, tastefully adding more barriers to weapons.
            ° Locked doors w/ random keys, lethal hazards, puzzles with no guaranteed prize, ect.

As far as teamkilling goes; The inventory pinball that handles everything would need a signifigant rewrite so that the core mechanics of the game remain intact, but are fair to players who are attacked unjustly. More importantly: Deciding on what would fairly decide that a player can defend themselves without penalty.

Of course the more in-depth solutions would require the original developers to stop being selfish jerks and drop whatever they're doing to come back and work on WDI again.

But that's not gonna happen. Right?

[Cruduxy]

The guns being in the same place is kinda ok as it gives the murder a chance to interrupt getting them or steal them. Tbh I think the way to fix them is to have keys require people to help each other to reach the key -kinda like the key on a box that needs an ally to crouch-.

Beside tking there is two really annoying thingss :
1) The ranking system and stims respawn time :
Every damn round its the same score screen. The murder either dies because they are useless or win because they have a trillion hp and stims respawn very fast compared to sanity decay time -See all those murderers who get A with 20 stims used.
The old ranking system was way more strict but it made the rank deserved.. Just because the murder is ramboing and getting backstabs on walking\escaping people shouldn't give him extra points. Around 12 minutes its always murder vs an innocent in a stimpack race game.

2) The slowing down system :
The wad was more than playable without the need for a way to kill murders\tk people who are good at dodging. The stun is beyond op when 2 people or more manage to even touch the murder -I hit you with poolcue, suck it you lose-. This system also helps TKs do their job much easier most of the time.

This system needs a replacement because in all honesty its just a "I can code this" thing added just for the hell of it. I was there during
testings and it seemed good, but after playing for a long time this is a very annoying system that did the opposite of its purpose -encourage teamwork.. ended encouraging random whacking and sudden murder rapes.

Edit : Maps need gameplay re-evaluation and tossing of bad ones :|

[Spottswoode]

I seem to remember that there were random spawns in the early versions. I remember specifically mentioning they should be random, in fact. Perhaps there should only be fewer spawners, with more drops.

[Conflagrated]

Around 12 minutes its always murder vs an innocent in a stimpack race game.

Due to the nature of WDI, nothing can be done about the murderer and last innocent entering a battle of wits and resource management; It's just the nature of the game mechanics.

However: It can be balanced out by making it so stimpacks don't heal instantly, but instead restore health over a short period of time.

The wad was more than playable without the need for a way to kill murders\tk people who are good at dodging.

During testing it was found that the end of each round boiled down to folks running around the map until they chipped the murderer down, or the game did.
While the former is still possible, the slowdown system and knife speedbonus were added to even things out for the antagonist.

That said: The system could use some tweaking to be less frustrating and return control to players.
Maybe a sprint system that allows you to break any CC? This would still play into the resource management players need to stay on top of while granting them a counter to slowdowns.

Edit : Maps need gameplay re-evaluation and tossing of bad ones :|

Which maps do you take issue with, and what in particular about them needs improvement?

I seem to remember that there were random spawns in the early versions.

There were; I'm not sure what happened. I think everyone was became with the 'gunspawner' items we included.
It's been awhile so I don't remember all that well. :P

I feel WDI overall needs some more paint and polish - starting with the melee system.

[CloudFlash]

I think that melee combat is way too effective in WDI - I mean, just look at shovel! 3 hits and any murd is done. Because of that, when I get the noife, I usually just go and kill myself.
Innocents' close combat needs to be a bit clunky; some weapons need to be breakable, some weapons need to have a tiny chance of being accidentally knocked out of innocent's hands, and, most importantly imo, murd needs to be able to block melee hits (or at least lower the damage taken).

[Cruduxy]

The knife is already superiour to the innocent melee weapons you can kill them in half the time they need to kill you. The shovel is annoying because of how easy it is to use -seriously even pipes are harder to hit with- and missing with the shovel doesn't even have that high of a delay til the next attack.

Breakable weapons and disarming are just frustrating and if my weapon break in last second I'll just leave server :\. Deflection sounds like a poor excuse to not dodge innocent attacks.

[Catastrophe]

Themistercat's map is overdetailed, awful, lags on my recently built computer, and barely has any spawns. Get rid of it along with that gay ass snow map that no one plays because it's waaaay too fucking big. Like, if there is a big map being played, half the time it gets call voted out even on a populated server.

Other than shitty maps, the core gameplay is very good and I wouldn't change that. Perhaps consider adding additional svars for extremely random spawns or something.

[Gardevoir]

The only thing I'd like to see in WDI is melee weapons gettings slightly rebalanced or at least that freaking stun effect being nerfed a lot (we had that poolcue in for a reason). And perhaps M1 could stop breaking every 2 shots (aka not breaking at all) or meh, I dunno, remove it or replace it with some other weapon working in a similiar manner. I don't have any problems with firearms spawns because... well, the first beta map for wdi had only one gun and it usually proved to be enough. People should just learn how to slap murd with melee weapons and that's it. Murd items should have a way larger delay on respawn, same for stims. Oh right, also that freaking statistics system reworked again because it gives perfects to pretty much everyone if they win.
I don't have any fps problems (aside from Asylum's portal HOMage that happens randomly and crashes me) but gotta agree with Catastrophe on the snow map, it is way too large. Instead of removing maps however, needs more good maps, even ones that are not MEGA SUPER AWESOME EPIC 1FPS EYECANDY. Perhaps some of the old maps could enjoy fixing some weapon spawns so they are more balanced or anything, I dunno.

P.S. Can we get the beta map back in :D ? I know you guys used it just for testing how everything works and blahblah, but still it played very well. Give it some detailing and it's good to go I suppose.

[Svperstar]

The guns being in the same place is kinda ok as it gives the murder a chance to interrupt getting them or steal them. Tbh I think the way to fix them is to have keys require people to help each other to reach the key -kinda like the key on a box that needs an ally to crouch-.

Here is the problem with the current setup.

The guns require keys, therefore requiring new players to go through every single map finding every single key, then finding what doors they open. Bar / Basement / safe keys are used but the maps do not point out where these places are.

For example in the hospital level I found a "bar safe key".........every single time I play that map I search and search but i have never seen anything that looks like a bar in the hospital nor a safe. I have been playing off and on for two years and I have no clue where this place is

So the logical thing for me to do would be to play WDI single player on my own PC and go to every single map and track everything down........that is really tedious.

Requiring new players to hunt all these places down, then do a mad dash across the map is really unfair and lame in my opinion. Yesterday I saw the same dude with the shotgun every single map for like 5 maps in a row

A simple random spawn mod would alleviate this problem and make it so everyone who plays has a chance of getting a decent gun.

I cant think of any other Doom mod that puts such a high burden on new players to have a chance to compete

Any memebers of the WDI dev team on here can say how difficult it would be to just randomize item spawns for all maps with a mod?

[Conflagrated]

Any memebers of the WDI dev team on here can say how difficult it would be to just randomize item spawns for all maps with a mod?

It would be really simple, actually; But I feel more comfortable editing the maps themselves to include better placements, and more spawns.

Way more spawns.

[Cruduxy]

I know almost all key positions without trying WDI in single player a single time. Found them by asking players where they found them and many of them happily answer it.

Randomizing weapon positions will just mean the player has to memorize more spots so I don't have a clue how that solves that problem -in fact it makes it even worse. It also just means rushing the weapons is now even more luck-based than before. So you just have to mad dash multiple places instead of the same one.

Like its been already suggested it'd be better if unlocking the weapon required special risks or cooperation from the innocents.

P.S. Saying no other wad puts burden on new players has to be a joke.. AOW gives them a hard time, they get stomped over and over in gvh etc.

[Untitled]

AOW is notoriously unfriendly though. Most players at least /know/ they're going to die before inevitably having no idea what they're doing.

Though, as long as you follow advice of other players, AOW gets easier.

GvH is a funny case, because as a beginner I was able to get quite some kills (Including the "Impossibru" Acheivement, heh), the division isn't as obvious there, as even if you're bad and die really fast, rounds tend to last all of two minutes, so even if you get slaughtered, you're not out of the game for very long. This will be important later.

The problem is that the skill gap here is twofold - Blunt memorization as skill mechanic. - optimally, some use of RandomSpawner should be implemented, where a shotgun could potentially be one of several different things, meaning that there doesn't /have/ to be a shotgun in the map, which should discourage rushing - why rush for a weapon that might not even be there? I'd make it like Heretic's Firemace - it can spawn in one of many spots, and only has about a 75% to appear AT ALL.

The other problem is that at higher playercounts, if you die, you could be potentially out of the game for a very long period of time. Ideally, the game should be able to welcome players in - let the beginners play. - being locked out of a game for 15 minutes without anything to do (In Samsarahold, at the least, you can watch the mission in action - often enough it's very visually fulfilling to watch every monster die in spectacular manner, and you can chat with players there as a spectator) is a very demoralizing first experience, as WDI isn't the most exciting thing to watch, IMO.

Both of these could be solved by NERFING THE SHOTGUN, but I have a feeling everyone would complain.

What do?