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What are the most common abuses of DoomRL?

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Styro:
I do not consider gift dropping to be an exploit anymore. When Barons would go out of their way to pick up worthless items like pistols then it was an exploit. Now they can use everything they pickup.

And not allowing enemies to use armor and Medpacks would be lame. I like the occasional surprise of finding a hard to kill Former Human because it found some Red Armor. And although I hate it when a nearly dead Baron uses a Large Medpack, it adds challenge to the game.

I think the gift dropping is balanced by the benefit that the enemies get.

The biggest meta-game exploit IMO is the moving to the center of the map issue mentioned by Fanta Hege. It means if I know the layout of the map I almost always know where the enemies have ended up.

Along those same lines, knowing what doors have opened on the unseen portion of the map is also a huge help. It lets you know where the enemies are wandering and I believe that most advanced players (especially on Nightmare) are in the habit of closing doors behind them so they can see where enemies are moving.

IMO, Ammochain and Intuition are not abuses since they are "working as designed". Discussions of how they should or should not be nerfed are probably better in other threads so they do not clog up this one. I personally believe they are fine as-is because of their cost and the limitations on what traits are excluded.

I also do not consider shooting around corners to be an abuse or exploit. People do it all the time IRL. It is like shooting from cover. I just wish that the shotguns would be consistent in all directions as has been mentioned by others. If anything needs to be changed about it, you could drop the accuracy of the shot as though shooting beyond sight range. When to use this could be determined by calculating LOS both ways (shooter to target and target to shooter). If only one is clear then apply the "shooting from cover" or "shooting around a corner" penalty. There should be a warning of some kind to the shooter though. Ammo can be precious and I would hate to unload a volley from a Plasma Rifle at 50% (or less) accuracy without knowing it.

Game Hunter:

--- Quote from: Styro on September 08, 2010, 08:10 ---I also do not consider shooting around corners to be an abuse or exploit. People do it all the time IRL. It is like shooting from cover. I just wish that the shotguns would be consistent in all directions as has been mentioned by others. If anything needs to be changed about it, you could drop the accuracy of the shot as though shooting beyond sight range. When to use this could be determined by calculating LOS both ways (shooter to target and target to shooter). If only one is clear then apply the "shooting from cover" or "shooting around a corner" penalty. There should be a warning of some kind to the shooter though. Ammo can be precious and I would hate to unload a volley from a Plasma Rifle at 50% (or less) accuracy without knowing it.
--- End quote ---

Firstly, shooting beyond your vision does impart a 50% accuracy penalty (at least according to the wiki), which is very obviously noticeable when you use a chaingun to corner-shoot HKs or Cacos down a hallway. I have no problem with that, and forcing ANOTHER 50% accuracy penalty just because the enemy can't see you is too much.

What I DO have a problem with is that combat shotguns can effectively make use of corner-shooting by not having any accuracy at all, thereby eliminating the accuracy penalty.  Adding a damage penalty would bring it to par with other weapons, while a range penalty would act similarly in that trying to blinding fire a shotgun down a narrow hallway simply won't hit anything but wall after a certain distance.

I could take your point further, however, and argue that corner-shooting should still entail some risk. Mind you, shooting from cover in practical cases decreases your CHANCE of being hit: it doesn't reduce the odds of retaliation to zero. What players seem to be able to do (ala visualization of the situation) is overextend their arms and fire the weapon without allowing any other parts of their body to leave the wall/cover. This is unrealistic to do with a 20kg weapon as it rattles from each shot. Firing from cover would be shooting at a diagonal from the wall such that CAN see each other, but the enemy is going to miss a lot because you're able to hide a good portion of your body while firing.

However, I wouldn't say no to a corner-shooting "mode" that lets you view around corners and shoot accordingly, at the cost of a reduced but non-zero chance to get hit (which would depend on the weapon you're wielding).

thelaptop:
Beating a dead horse, but lemme do it anyway.

Corner shooting can be considered vital in a ranged combat-heavy roguelike like DoomRL.  The grid world where everything is based on is extremely Wolfenstein like, which means that if you are playing strictly by the book what one can and cannot see, then the doors into any room become death traps for the player, which in real life is hardly true since you can hide and shoot from there.  As far as I see, corner shooting is a very nice [and important!] feature, not an abuse.

What becomes an abuse from corner shooting is when we have buggy weapons that misbehave.  Ever hit and killed things that hugged so close to the wall on the other side that you ought not be able to hit them given your LOS and the firing arc with a double shotty?  Or how about the sweet spot where you can shoot at the enemies without impunity even though you are directly in the LOS of the enemy?

As for the corner-shooting "mode", I think it just complicates things.  If we want to be hyper realistic about things, observe that DoomGuy still moves as fast when wielding his chaingun and carrying nearly 1120 rounds of 10mm bullets, a couple of blue armours, 20+ rockets, a rocket launcher and quite a few med-packs.

That aside here's a suggestion I have.  Rework the calculation for scoring hits.  For straight firing weapons, that's sort of clear how it might work out -- just associate an extra modifier on top of the current ToHit calculations that scales according to whether the target is within the weapon's effective range or not.  For things like shotguns, reduce the arc of fire and introduce the idea of "pellets" ala Doom.  The key observation is that shotgun fire in DoomRL have a much much larger spread than that of Doom, which is why we seem to have all these abuses related to corner firing and the like.

Okay, I'm losing my train of thought from this 6-line edit box, so I shall stop now.

Game Hunter:

--- Quote from: Styro on September 08, 2010, 08:10 ---Along those same lines, knowing what doors have opened on the unseen portion of the map is also a huge help. It lets you know where the enemies are wandering and I believe that most advanced players (especially on Nightmare) are in the habit of closing doors behind them so they can see where enemies are moving.
--- End quote ---

I'd file this under abuse, unless previous memory/Computer Map is really supposed to act like the old Doom map. In that game, you WERE notified when doors opened and closed, noises aside. However, one thing that should certainly be fixed is seeing when ammo/equipment/packs are picked up by enemies: the map memory should remain committed to how you saw it last, until you're in range to see whether or not it's there. Same goes for barrels...if they explode, you shouldn't see them disappear. If liquid fills the room/map, it shouldn't be present on any tile you haven't explored since releasing it.

This might be a little advanced, but I'm wondering if a monster's vision is updated only when it's their turn to act. I ask because this is almost certainly the case with the player (I can't tell you how many times I've tried to enter a room and a sergeant shoots me out before I can see anything in there) and I believe I have managed to abuse this when it comes to explosion knockback. Hard to say, really, because most enemies keep charging anyway after enough damage. I know this will be a concern when zerking, however, because speed is significantly reduced in it duration.

I've been finding that most enemies are extremely predictable after taking enough damage. As a result, I can usually lure them into view by taking into account the whole "same row, then same column" rule and keep myself in relative safety. On the other hand, there are a LOT of times where, were this not the case, I would have no way to attack without taking massive damage. Can't think of an easy work-around, either, aside from a keeping their patterns slightly erratic in addition to lure-resistant. (Frankly, the best AI is probably Revenants/Arch-viles, or at least in their context of playing keep-away, with Imps in second.)

Since I've posted, I may as well add another two cents regarding corner-shooting and one-way shots. In any current case where both enemies can see each other (but the monster doesn't attack), I think there should be a "cover bonus" to dodging/evasion to whoever is hugging the wall, thereby keeping the advantage alive but reducing the abuse heavily. In cases where one can see/fire on the other without vision from the other, I believe that should be fixed entirely. From my understanding, it only works in certain directions, so it's related (somewhat) to the corner problems of shotguns.

Sylph:
I would literally completely give up on playing doomRL if corner-shooting and giftdropping were removed. They allow for 90% of the tactics in the game, and it's not like the game is too easy right now.

To put it another way, these 'abuses' make the game fun. Without it, doomrl would just be a mind-numbing excersice in walking around and pressing the 'f' key, with little thought behind it.

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