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According to Square Enix, ever PC gamer is automatically a scumbag thieving pirate and people only buy games because DRM like Denuvo is somehow preventing piracy:

“Thanks to you for the incredible service your team provide – it’s great to partner with you! It’s thanks to you guys that people have to buy the game.”

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/square-eni...anks-to-you-people-have-to-buy-the-game/

Do any of you find this more than mildly insulting?  I know some of you have over 700 games on Steam.  I know every game on my machines is paid for and legitimate.  Yet, it's not us, the gamers, that are thanked for making these companies millions of dollars, it's the freaking copy protection police they thank!  I'm glad I don't seem to own any of their games if this is their attitude, but besides myself who doesn't have one of their games?  I have no love for game pirates, but with Denovo being cracked in 5-10 days, this is either a completely ignorant position for Square Enix to hold, or a deliberate slap in the face for gamers.  I know one thing.  The pirates and crackers are going to read this and say "challenge accepted".  When this is all done with I really hope that gamers can one day look back at Square Enix having shot their mouths off as being the catalyst that caused Denuvo to go belly-up.  I really hope that one day publishers will understand that DRM does not stop pirates.  All it does is punish legit players, and we're getting a bit fed up with being treated like criminals all the time when we're the ones that keep them in business.

Is it wrong for me to find this unintentionally hysterical? 

That's the one thing I don't get is why the netcode is behaving badly.  Quake 3 has absolutely fantastic netcode.  I was able to play Quake 3 at the end of my dialup days when Quake 2 was not even allowing me to move due to my seriously crappy connection at the time.  It's sounding to me like they've ditched every single optimization inherent in Q3 and are just trying to rely on bandwidth to try to make up for it.

Some things I've learn about network optimization while working on Gen:

Some things can be run parallel on server and client.  Math is math, and as long as you have a place to start and run identical math then you can make some very complex stuff happen.  Example:  Arena BFG.  All of the projectile physics are simulated in parallel.  The BFG blast is triggered by a single event which contains an origin point vector (3 floats), integer (8 bit) that indicates which client owns the projectile, and a seed integer value (16 bit I think) to generate the random pseudo-random explosion pattern.  That's the ONLY network data sent to spawn the explosion.  If a BFG particle hits a player on the server the server sends an impact event to the client pointing out which particle number got hit, spawns an explosion at that point, and the client stops drawing that particle number.  It's extremely efficient.  I could blow up 50 Arena BFG projectiles and it would take up no more network data than 50 machinegun impacts despite rendering over 10,000 BFG particles, and each BFG particle would only send data if it hit something and exploded.  So how does this relate to a modern game?  Physics is physics.  If a crate gets knocked by an impact then all the client would need to know is enough information to start the object moving.  Until it is acted upon again by some other physics object the math can be extrapolated on the client.  If there's concerns about synchronization, then the server could send periodic updates on objects.  With an Arena shooter though... why would this even be needed?  Unless you're going to allow the player to break the scenery with weapons fire how much physics do you need?

Selective entity updating:  Was there a change to the entity that the client needs to know about?  If not, let it keep doing what it's doing client-side.  Don't send data if nothing changed.  A missile flying in a straight line just needs to tell the client "I've spawned here flying this fast" or "I hit something" or "I've timed out and got removed".  The server doesn't need to update the entity data every frame to the client.

Variable precision:  Is a float needed when an int will do?  Does this data need to be a 16-bit int or will 8 bits do?

Selective data structure updating:  Do I really need to send the ENTIRE data structure, or just what's changed?  If a rocket is spawned do I need to send every possible part of the data structure that an entity can have, or just the origin, the time it spawned, the fact that it's a rocket, who owns it, and its velocity (direction is derived from this vector) since that's all someone really needs to draw a rocket in flight?

Server framerate:  How often does the server need to update a client on what's going on in the world?  If there's 250 entities on a map, and I update it 60 times a second to 5 clients, that's a maximum theoretical of 75,000 entries being sent by the server.  If I update 100 times a second   125,000.  If I only need to update it 20 times a second that's 25,000.  Now, throw in optimizations.  Say only 5 entities need constant updating - players.  Now add in 20 entities - gunshots and rockets.  Run the server at 20 FPS.  That reduced the server overhead to a theoretical max of 2,000 updates in that second.  Say those 20 other entities don't need constant updating.  Say they were one-shot events.  That drops it to 600 updates: (5 players * 20 single events) + (5 players * 5 players * 20 snapshots ) = 600.  If we run at 60 FPS that would translate to 1600 since only the snapshot number in the second half of the equation would change.

That's not even adding in other optimizations such as area portals that exclude clients from receiving updates about events that they're not anywhere near.  With all the testing I've done in Gen, and what you guys have done, I've gotten a really good education on how to optimize stuff to not break network efficiency.  I can't think of any valid excuse for an arena shooter to have bad netcode.  I can think of plenty of bad ones - laziness, sloppy programming, incompetence, poorly integrated game logic - but no good ones.

I've been playing since the second (?) week of the closed beta. I think it is generally a decent game. The aesthetics are mostly on point, and I love all of the callbacks to Quake 1 over, say, Quake 2 or even Quake 3. I actually wish they'd go further in that regard and supplant the machine guns entirely with nailguns. The less hit scan weapons the better as far as I'm concerned.

The idea of playing different "champions" never bothered me as a concept, since Generations is already sort of that. I don't think Champions pulls it off very well though. The vast discrepancies between health and armor hinder more than they help. Certain characters have such infinitely superior physics that it's almost laughable, and almost all of the active powers feel watered down to pointlessness. I almost feel as if they should have made each champion more unique for team based game modes, while stripping the powers away entirely for things like DM and Duel.

All of that being said, I haven't played in a few weeks. Not because I feel as if it's a bad game, because it's not. It's not all that different than Quake 3, which was vastly different than Quake 2, which was vastly different than Quake 1. No, it's because the game takes FOREVER to actually play. You wait through menu after menu after menu, after loading screen after loading screen after loading screen. Not to mention the lengthy wait just to find a match and queue up. There also doesn't seem to be any way to directly duel people on my friends list. I need to be able to start the game and get in a few quick matches with minimal effort. As it is, I spend more time staring out loading screens than actually playing.

Then once you get into a match? Prepare for lag! It will say that your ping is great, but it's quite clearly a lie. Not only will you see opponents bounce around and phase through corners, but well-aimed shots will simply pass right through them. This is on top of the already infuriating delay that so many of the weapons have. It often times feels like a fast-paced game, but once the shooting starts it becomes so imprecise that it's hard to stay enthusiastic. They need to get their netcode straightened out pronto... like yesterday! Without a smooth online experience this game is nothing, regardless of whatever else they do.

Edit: Apparently there are Private Matches now? Maybe I'll take another look this weekend, especially since Blazkowicz is in now. Though it never really seemed in doubt that BJ and Doom would be added eventually, given that both series have current incarnations to promote. Now we just need Commander Keen and Dangerous Dave as champions, along with some love for RAGE.

Someone leaked some design docs which confirm the addition of Keel, Doom, a death knight, a demon, a female marine, and some other characters:

http://imgur.com/a/XoY7h

BJ Blazkoicz was also added to the beta this week for E3. In lieu of the grenade launcher they added this "tri bolt" weapon which fires 3 rounds in a burst for 40dmg each, sticks instead of ricocheting, and only has a ~0.5 second fuse or so. It's a poor substitute if you ask me.

Overall I'm still underwhelmed with the game. The devs have stuck to their guns on bad ideas like health rounding and zoom damage, they haven't improved the weak Super Nailgun, and the netcode is still bad. On the upside, they have removed a few of the LG spawns and added a couple more maps.

At this point I'm not going to touch it for a few months and will consider playing again later down the line if any of the issues are improved at all.

Regarding the new starter weapons, I think it was a good idea executed poorly. It could have been a great nod back to the diverse arsenals of Q1 and Q2, but the MG does so much damage, there's just no reason to use the single-barrel shotgun or starter nailgun. I also would have loved to have seen a blaster option, as well as the ability to throw grenade ammo, but they can't even seem to fix the 2 extra weapons they have now.

Yeah, they "cheat" a little bit because the devs couldn't get them to rocket jump reliably. Instead they have a special "turbo jump" they do at rocket jumping spots just to get them up to the crucial items. They have some extra nav files designed for the stock maps so they navigate a lot better there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwFekHKRrgA

At the very least, they're harder to hit than the vanilla bots.

They sure do hop around a lot.  It's kind of like trying to fight the Spawns from Quake 1 but they have guns, and instead of jumping at you they're jumping God-knows-where.  I've seen them make some absolutely impossible jumps.  On Grim Dungeons, I saw Grunt jump from the lower ground near the red armor across and up to the red armor.  They don't move more realistically, but I'd say a lot more unpredictably.

Definitely worth a look! 

Yeah I ran into Entity Plus just recently and found it intriguing. Overall it looks to make it much easier for mappers to build singleplayer campaigns without having to do a ton of side programming themselves.

That being said, I really hope the configurability of it improves in the future. For example, right now the mod scales enemy damage and health up and down as the difficulty level is changed. Ideally the person creating the campaign would want to have control over those values, but currently the mapper has no control over how difficulty settings change their monsters.

It would also be nice to be able control what weapons the player starts with on your level, tweak weapon stats, and implement custom weapons if you have the assets ready.

It also currently doesn't support co-op as far as I can tell, which would be really nice to have.

Still, it's a really promising project.

This was actually released in 2011/2012, but I managed to miss it at the time, and really wish I hadn't:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake3-hopper

These are new and improved bots that can be plugged into any other mod, including Gen Arena. Basically you get this new Q3 executable, drop it in your main Q3 folder, open it, and load anything you want from the mod menu, and it runs just like the normal exe but with better AI.

For years I've solely been playing CPMA offline because it includes improved spiterbots, and I felt the vanilla bots were just too unrealistic (zero movement and 100% aim). CPMA bots had much better movement, but some strange behavior...occasionally seeming to randomly not notice you anymore until suddenly hitting you with psychic blind direct rockets from around the corner. They felt buggy and also a big cpu hog, even in a modern rig I would get framerate drops when running them on particularly resource intensive maps.

Hopper Engine overcomes all those problems. The bots strafe-jump similarly to spiterbots, with similar item control, but with more consistent polished behavior and no cpu strain. Best of all, you can run them in Gen or any other mod you want.

Of course you can't have everything, and the downside is that they're not optimized for Gen movement. Since they were designed around Q3 movement, they play the Arena class best, and aren't quite as adept at moving with Strogg/Earth/Doom classes. Slipgate movement in particular trips them up the most, though they still do much better at it than regular Q3 bots.

Obviously nothing replaces real humans, but with the Q3 communities being as small as they are now, having better bots to mess around with really breaths new life into the game.