Suggestion: Implement a minimum distance for calculating ranged friendly fire

This has been a problem since the launch of Vermintide 1. Basically when you shoot or throw a ranged weapon the projectile doesn’t actually leave the barrel of your gun, it sort of spawns in your forehead and moves directly forward. This eliminates the problem of parallax and allows you to accurately shoot through small gaps in the terrain and around obstacles as long as you can see the target. The problem with this system is that if you try to shoot while standing inside a teammate your shot will hit their hitbox and deal damage, possibly explode.

This isn’t necessarily your fault because player hitboxes extend forward enough that you can hit a teammate this way without being able to actually see them. This is related to a very similar issue where enemies that get too close because of knockback or animations turn invisible and you can’t see them. Generally speaking players are smart enough not to stand in front of players wielding ranged weapons, but this reflex doesn’t always work. You probably wouldn’t think twice about running through Saltz wielding a rapier, which may get you shot in the back. Bardin’s throwing axes also look a lot like Bardin wielding a 1h axe and I’ve noticed that people don’t recognize the danger very much.

So it would be helpful if ranged weapons ignored friendly hitboxes for a short distance, one or two feet would suffice so that unless you can actually SEE some part of your teammate in front of you the weapon will not hurt them. This would eliminate the vast majority of accidental team damage.

This would also greatly improve the performance of AI bots because bots don’t care a single whit about suddenly standing in front of you or clipping into you from behind, which they do constantly.

11 Likes

But running through a BH just to get an instant ult in the back is hilarious!
Especially when the team wipes right after he FF killed me. :smile:

Okay, this is a proposition about nerfing friendly fire that I could get behind. It would keep FF as dangerous (or not) as it is, but would still reduce the most frustrating instances - namely, the ones that neither side can really help avoid.

The minimum distance shouldn’t be too big, though - just enough that when characters are “stacked”, they get saved. So… About the distance of one’s hitbox depth?

4 Likes

Yeah it wouldn’t have to be very long.

Standing directly on top of you = Safe
Standing 6 inches to1 foot in front of you = Safe (because they are still invisible)

Any further than that and they would get hit, which makes sense because at that distance some part of them would be in front of your weapon’s barrel when you take a shot.

3 Likes

An excellent idea!

I like having FF in the game, but moments like these when neither party is at fault or can reasonably prevent it… can be very frustrating. Especially with hard-hitting ranged attacks!

1 Like

Bots enjoy staying so far up my butt that I can’t not shoot them in the face.

Imgur

3 Likes

would like this to be implemented asap

FF is fine but when everyone is squished up, FF shouldn’t really be a thing especially when
the character or characters go invis

I haven’t really noticed but it probably is a thing,
if another player has invis ability, does FF still trigger too.
Haven’t really noticed or payed much attention to that, but FF shouldn’t work there either

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