Wirehead Studios

Well, what's your opinion on this gun?

hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate

I'd rather face Arena BFG than Doom BFG.  At least Arena BFG takes some skill to aim it with ;)

The Arena BFG is NOT a bfg.

I prefer the HUNT mod's Arena BFG rather than a rapid fire rocketlauncher with high splash damage.

Incredibly lopsided. No class fully-loaded can take that thing on. Requires minimal skill to get a frag with under normal circumstances. Usually as effective as a quadded slipgater RL or quadded doom CG. It's one weapon that Generations could do without.

The Arena BFG seems more like an afterthought filler gun than something that was put into serious consideration for gameplay. Consider the complexity (and awesomeness) of the BFG9000 and the BFG10K. Then look at the Q3 BFG. It's just not cool.

*thumbs down*

You're joking I hope...
(please excuse the double-post)

The Arena BFG is ultimate spam cannon. It's the only gun newbs would complain about if you changed it. Why? A rapid fireing rocket launcher with very high missle speed and high splash damage is hardly a strategic weapon, and many like it when you don't have to think to use a weapon wisely. <_<

Hmm, I figured it was newbs that complained about it.
I would complain if you changed anything about the Arena class, from reducing the BFG to putting the Gauntlet on steroids to make it more comparable to the chainsaw.  To put all this work into making each class as true to itself as possible and then change something about the class that should be the simplest to implement (by leaving it alone) doesn't make sense to me.  Apparently some people must feel that the other classes can't stand up to the Arena class.

The Q3 Gauntlet is already more powerful than the Doom chainsaw. 2 lovetaps from it will force most anything to respawn soon afterwards. (Doubt me? I'll show you on a server - just ask)

It's not fun to play against something which is near-impossible to counter, even if the user of that something is inept. It's even worse in the hands of someone proficent. This is why many Q3 servers have the BFG filtered out or don't play maps/mods with the BFG in it.

The Doom BFG has its counter - don't be in the line of sight of the user or kill them before they get the shot off. The Q2 BFG has a counter as well - kill user before it goes off or run away; the charging time for the BFG10K is longer than the BFG9000, and the shot is slower. This is why Q2dm8 got a lot of playing time on Q2 servers (aside from it being a really fun map in iteself) - because the BFG10K was acceptably balanced with the other Q2 weapons.

The Q3 BFG is like an automatic Q1 RL. Not fun. I'd like to see a fun, properly-themed replacement for it in Gen because imo it doesn't even belong in Q3.

I don't mind one way or another, but I do agree that the Arena BFG isn't a weapon that particularly involves a great deal of thought when putting it to use.  Rather than just slowing it down or nixing it entirely though, I'd like to see what ideas the WHS team can come up with.

Each has their ups and downs, but the guantlet does 50 damage per slap, while the saw has a slightly longer range and 'sticks'. I'd put them about equal in strength.

The BFG is much more prevalent in Gen than in standard Q3. EVERY map has the potential to have a BFG, if the earth guy drops dual gats.

Their charge up times are the same, but the rest is true. Both weapons, while fully capable of clearing a room, require a bit of finesse. There are a LOT of people who simply cannot use the Doom BFG to good effect. The Q2 BFG is slightly easier to use, but it is also much easier to avoid. It's nearly impossible to be 'sneaky' with the q2BFG, unlike  the Doom BFG.

We've resisted changes to the Arena class in the past. However, in 99d, we have recieved only two major complaints: The q1 RL is far too strong, and the q3BFG ruins the fun. Take a map like Dead Simple, which is a long-standing favorite in Doom, and is probably the single most-remade map out there. This map includes a BFG. I usually sit out in this map if there's ANYONE playing as arena.

Why? Because the q3BFG just pisses me off. I hate it. There's no way to avoid it. If someone's halfway skilled, you die. If they're not, you'll still likely die. I can at least duck out of the way of the BFG9000 or hide from the BFG10k from Q2. And I've heard lots of complaints about this from other players as well...

In short, the q3BFG is cheap, spamtastic, and nearly impossible to avoid.

We have a pretty nifty effect in the works.

Yupp arena BFG is terrible..still it's a q3 gun but i don't mind nerfing it down abit, or at least make its firerate slower, and reduce the ammo.

The arena "BFG" I'll hesitantly call it, is NOT going to be nerfed, it's going to be changed from a spamcannon to something not-lame.

Yes, we have been hashing ideas around about how to change this evil thing, and we've come up with what I think is a good one in theory.  The basic idea is to create a more balanced weapon that has its drawbacks like any other BFG, can still do a one-shot area kill, has a nifty effect, and differs in some dramatic way from the other two BFG's.  I won't spill it here because we want to playtest it first.  No point in having people whine or applaud something that's only theoretical at this point.  

For the "purists" there will be a server cvar that will keep the old Arena BFG exactly as it has been if the server admin so chooses.  Part of the reason we put this poll up was to see what people's feelings are and if they matched what the team has been thinking, which for the most part we're almost all in agreement that the Q3 BFG SUCKS.

I'm going to be locked away in a meat factory for this but I don't think the Q3 BFG is that bad.

Consider how rare BFG's are in the first place.  Very few maps contain them.

Furthermore, the other classes have somewhat of an advantage over Q3, seeing how Q3's BFG runs on only BFG ammo.  Doom and Strogg can find cells at a pretty good rate, and the "BFG" of Earth and Slipgate uses some common material as well.

Once a player HAS a Q3BFG, I admit things get pretty wild, but you only get 20 shots with that thing unless you find more ammo, and by then you could be blown up, railed, sniped, guned down, or evaporated.  It does make you pretty unstopable for those 20 shots, but once your out, its back to some fairly normal play.

Don't NERF it.  Tweek it.  Maybe give it 10 shots to start with, or lower its rate of fire, like someone else said.  Perhaps lower some of its splash radius?  Not a complete overhaul.  Just a little balancing.

EDIT:  Just read the "purists" idea Phoenix posted.  Good idea :)  Above there is just my opinion.  If the majority wishes to change it, I don't care.  Just stating what I think, y'know.

That IS nerfing.

I'm not saying make the arena bfg weaker, the q2 bfg was arguably more powerful than the doom bfg. I think the bfg should be brought into line so that we can call it a bfg, and be proud of it. While I'm sure everyone has ideas, I know I'm not alone on this, I think I'll just wait and see what pho cooks up for us. But make no mistake, we'll do that line of weapons proud :D

I love it when its in my hands , hate it when anyone else has it exept me :(
and in most cases its part 2 so I will vote on "HATE "

How would you implement this then?  I guess if you guys are going to make a completely new Arena BFG with area effect and all, I would vote that you have to replace the model as well.  I mean , if you are going to make a new BFG, make a new BFG.    Something more in tune with the BFG line of models, you know?  The Arena BFG never looked like it came from that class of weapon.  
Also, would it then run off of plasma cells like Doom and Q2 BFG?  Cause Arena BFG ammo is not very plentifull.  The one advantage it had was for those 20 shots, it was one hell of a gun.  If you take away the power it has and then strangle it for ammo (I can't think of one map remake that includes BFG ammo while they all have Doom and Q2 energy cells), that really hobbles the class I think.  Not for nerfing the BFG, but for even restricting the use of the new Wirehead BFG due to ammo consumption.    All Doom or Grunt has to do is get a few more cells, but Arena guy really has to work to get his ammo, you know?
Something else: perhaps then you could make the id Arena BFG a super weapon available to all classes?  And give it back the rarity that everyone thinks it deserves?  But  unbalances no one class, just gives the guy who has it the power regardless of class. (yeah, fat chance of that, I know - just tossing out ideas  :P)

IMO..i think it should be left as is..why change it? sure ppl are against it..but then ppl would complain that  it wouldnt be the same

Omega - this was decided before Pho ever posted the poll.  No point in arguing.

From the votes I see so far it's 9 hate, 3 annoyed, 3 don't care, and 2 kind of ok.  Glad to see nobody likes it enough to camp it, at least, that's responded yet.  That's a 6 to 1 dislike ratio we have for it so far.

I see no real need to change the model physically.  The new effect will not interfere with the model, and besides, keeping a cvar means that server admins could have the original enabled so what's the point of that?  I'd end up having to cvar-swap weapon models around, and that's not a fun thing to try to code.  What we could do, on the other hand, would be to tweak a shader on it, perhaps remap the glow shader from blue to green when it's in the alternate BFG mode.  That way you know just by looking at it how it's going to function instead of waiting until you pop off a round to find out.

For anyone who thinks this weapon is not overbalanced, trust me on this. I tested the weapon with Tekhead 1 vs 1 on Bloodrun - High Octane several weeks ago.  Everyone who plays Gen knows we're both very difficult players to beat and can handle just about any weapon in the game.  No matter which one of us had the Q3 BFG the other guy COULD NOT KILL HIM.  This gun does nearly as much damage as the Q1 rocket launcher but fires four times faster and flies twice as fast.  Just point and spam and you're almost always guaranteed a kill.

As for the ammo concern, keep in mind that most times anyone ends up with a BFG on a non-BFG map is a dualgats drop by Earth.  Sure, this gives Arena 20 shots, but Doom or Strogg get ONE.  If you have a clumsy Earther dualgatting every chance he gets then odds are the guy with the Arena BFG is going to off him and pick up 20 more shots.  I saw this happen on Frag Pipe at last week's forum game.  This is a big part of the reason the weapon is overbalanced.  Since the ammo handling will change, then "sharing" ammo with the plasma gun is a thought.  Every other class that has a big gun shares ammo with another weapon, so we'll take that under consideration.

Hey! I resemble that comment!!!  :angry:

The Arena BFG is annoying to me, somewhat, but doesn't feature much in the games I usually play. At least the projectiles are visible and can thus be dodged a bit, unlike the sliprockets which I shall keep complaining about till the day I die ;]

Ofcourse, turning the BFG into a .. real BFG which forces strategic use and skill, sounds good to me.

flamer al the way boys , ( exept when tabun is boosted up as strogg on armor , health and railgun  , then its time for dualgats with 300 bullets to back you up ..

Though it is overpowered, I enjoy the Q3 BFG.  The best counter to any BFG is a few shots from the railgun(preferably from long range).

Oh yeah, railgun, I'm sure Slippy and Doom will get right on that.

Perhaps I'm breaking the mould as being a NON-newb to say that to put all that effort into something like Gen to get each class as true to the original games as possible only to tamper with the weapon set from VQ3 would, in my opinion, be sacrilege. Don't get me wrong - I hate being on the wrong end of the Arena BFG with a passion, it IS a spam cannon, but it's part of Q3. I say leave it alone, or even have a DM flag to toggle it between VQ3 and something resembling the BFG in CPM.

We've resisted changing anything from q3 in the past for that very reason, but with the prevalance of the BFG in genArena games, a lot of us are fed up.

However, if we change the q3BFG, we will include a CVAR to change it back to its original spamcannon self

So it was you that voted 'call me a BFG camper'!

knew it ;)

Actually, I'd expect Slippy to shoot some spam rockets and Doom to pull out his own BFG.

q3bfg > doombfg.

Anyone who says otherwise has never gone bfg vs bfg with a good arena player.

>So it was you that voted 'call me a BFG camper'!

>>knew it


I never knew the Arena BFG was a problem, as I rarely see others use it.  Doom seems to have the most popular BFG (though I still don't know how to use it)   :huh:

Check the "Demos" thead at the top.  I recorded an instructional demo for the BFG9000.

Lol, since everybody here is better than me, it doesn't matter what weapon they use :P

I have yet to find a map with a BFG, but then I play Slipgater mostly so I guess I would miss them even if they were on a map. But the bots definitely never use a BFG that I've seen so I'm not sure what's up with that.

Slipgaters get a shaft in place of a BFG.

And bots WILL use a BFG if they can get to it.

Try typing /map red2m7 in the console. That'll start up our remake of Doom2 map07 (dead simple)

There's a BFG in a room on the outer edge of the map. You can't miss it.

last time I checked , bots never used bfgs , they rather switched to there melee weapon or something instead of BFGing  eachother .

( checked this on a bfg only map )

well GK is correct, most bots doesnt use the BFG at all. but changing the weight in the bots weapon "weight"  file i think you can "convince" the bot to use them.

Actually I believe it's an ammo handling issue in the bot code.

arena doesnt even use his bfg if that can help .
if you know that in baseq3 they DO use it .

I like this idea.  Do whatever you want with the Q3 BFG.  As long as I have the option to go back to the original, then thats cool.

Yes, we're well aware of this.  Thanks for the reminder.  <_<

no problem  :P

Personally I can't remember ever being on the wrong end of ANY class of BFG in a bot game of Gen. I miss the whole "evasive maneuvres" element, desperately trying to hide from the other guy's line of sight. "Gotcha now, you m- oh shit..."