This is simply hyperbolic. Again, anytime I play modded, FF gets turned off. There are times where I can throw a bomb without worrying about team damage or spam a fireball staff in a hall, but not having to worry about hitting teammates isn’t giving me a massive boost to damage numbers, nor do I simply get to throw out all spatial awareness and positioning.
The majority of the game’s challenge and the player’s ability doesn’t hinge upon whether there is FF or not, even with AOE or spammable weapons.
I would like to again posit that a solution to keep the consequences of FF intact while also not overly punishing occasional FF: a buffer where once every 30 seconds an attack that would cause FF does no team damage.
This way an elf doding into BH’s ult doesn’t get destroyed, and a bit of stray AOE doesn’t down a teammate on 1hp.
This is an interesting suggestion. I think one of the more modern Doom Games had the first 2 or 3 shots that hit from an enemy cause virtually no damage to alert the player before the real fun begins. Something like that might be more agreeable. Spamming inconsiderately would still be a way to attempt to control the reckless players without doing the whole one-shot-accidentally-kills-someone who’s low on HP.
I thought that, elf fired the ult with 2 players in front of her in a tiny room without many enemies, even without the HS sliding into her from behind (You boy!stop sniggering at the back). BUT this kind of reinforces Ensrick’s point. Elves gonna do elf things and firing the ult like a monkey with a hand gun is one of those things many toxic WS elves do irrespective of FF or not.
This better sums up my position I think. The entire game shifts focus and playstyle in QP open lobbies to ranged meta again. Ranged meta AOE without FF would become the norm. This does not sound fun to me.
For me, these “types” of players are few and far between and the majority of vets who have been playing know the difference between an oopsie, malicious intent and a selfish abuser.
I tend to play with buddies and although I prefer Legend, we bump it down to Champ since we just like to shoot the sh!t and have a laugh.
My suggestion is to just leave the game and browse into a new match. I do not think the solution to remove FF is the answer, if that’s the case, there is always Darktide.
I don’t think FF needs a solution. It’s a core part of the game’s mechanics and to remove it does nothing but make the game easier to play and hinder the skill expression/ceiling from others. It will make plays boring IMO.
Making the choice to throw the bomb into enemies knowing you will FF your teammates is a choice, maybe it needs to be done to clear the area, maybe your team is being disabled and this is the fastest solution. This is why we have Temp HP some could say. Understanding how far you need to throw the bomb to avoid hitting your teammates and remove the disabler is something you might never think about if FF is always off. Shooting your range weapon to kill a packmaster without hitting your teammate feels great, it also can teach players to focus the packmaster before he grabs anyone because of the FF threat that is introduced. I am strongly on the side of keeping FF. Friendly fire also helps with immersion, my only suggestion for FF would be to tone down the characters screaming they got hurt by the team, I feel like this type of language can trigger certain responses in a player.
As mentioned you already have mods to play around this mechanic so I don’t see a reason to change the main game.
Creating the angle to spam fireball without causing FF is something I play for. Finding a team who allows the right moments to develop, gets in position for a fight and waits/gives you the floor until the coast is clear is also what makes V2 special.
People keep asserting this, and I keep giving the same answer, with examples, five or six times now: I play without FF in modded and it doesn’t break the game.
As I’ve said, with how strongly the forums have opposed removing it, I went in half expecting it to be awful. If the warnings were right, the balance would fall apart and the experience would be terrible. That’s just not what happened; the game was completely fine.
Here’s my experience:
So when people say removing it would break the balance, or that they never run into negativity around FF, it just doesn’t line up with what me and my friends actually experience. And I don’t think there’s anything new here, we’ve been over all of this already in the thread.
Without FF the game is still challenging. Even on Fireball Battle Wizard or Hagbane elf, I’m not seeing some massive jump in damage dealt. The skill expression in not hitting teammates is, in my opinion, fairly low, and it does little to make anything more or less OP. Players can already exploit level geometry, ledges and the like. Because with minimal coordination you can avoid FF anyway, it’s usually how my games go, but that’s because I actively avoid QP. What I actually see in quick play with randos, even on Cata, is that about half of players will actively block your shots, and about half will take the shot to “encourage” people to move aside. That’s where the toxic exchanges come from. The worst is the one-off accident where someone dodges into your collision radius and loses their last bit of health, and then if the run is lost, often as not people go looking for someone to blame.
People also talk like FF is the only thing stopping players from spamming through allies, but Darktide has been out for a while now and bodies block shots there without anyone taking damage. And if you pair that with a compromise like the one I proposed, a short buffer where accidental hits do no damage every 30 seconds or so, it addresses exactly the concerns you’re raising.
After hearing the same thing over and over, how it reads from my side (and this is about the pattern in this and the previous thread more than you personally): when replies keep restating “my experience is that almost nobody ever is toxic about FF”, it seems to just be an attempt to diminish my experience. I’ll grant you that you may almost never have these experiences, but for me, it’s real. And the claim that “it totally destroys game balance” starts to look performative, like defending the status quo for its own sake, one more voice on the pile rather than something added to the conversation. Maybe that’s not the intent, but that’s the impression it leaves; particularly after having experienced the game without it.
Now, when we play without FF, we aren’t actively trying to exploit it. I’d imagine that turning FF off in official with randos would lead to a lot more exploits and weapon spam. I’ll grant you that, but I think having a simple buffer where once every 30s your damage to allies is either negated for that attack, or vastly reduced to like 20% of what it would be, still keeps the value of FF intact; likewise, just keep it so players still block shots. It shouldn’t be that a Waystalker or Bounty Hunter’s one-off mistake destroys a teammate; in fact, I think shooting a player in the back should probably always 100% block the shot entirely without going through, to discourage the less than polite players from being willing to sacrifice an ally’s health to get a kill.
I hear ya. I have had experiences like that with FF abusers, but I’ll take that experience rather than introducing anything to change FF at its core because I know the bad bits are few and far between.
Sounds like you have already found your solution (a mod without FF).
Now what I would suggest is to find someone to make a mod with your 30 second cooldown idea and see if it sticks in the modded community. Sounds like a better plan than testing it out in un-modded realm when the (assumed) majority of players don’t support the change.
It would be very easy for me to do that. It’s simple LUA logic. Some of my mods have over 8000 lines of code. The thing is, I don’t need to make that mod because I’m perfectly happy playing with no FF among friends.
That idea was posited as a way for official to avoid the issues FF can cause while still keeping it in the game. I’m perfectly happy playing modded with friends when they’re available, but in official my experience is just a little bit worse, and most of my games are in official because my friends in modded are not often playing when I am.