Ok that's it, I've had enough Valve! And sod off too Sierra

The BBQ Pit
1

For a rather long time I’ve been a devoted player of both Halflife and Counter-strike and all of the other assorted mod-goodness that has been made.

I’ve put up with lousy netcode, lag out my ears and all of the assorted coding errors only professional and aspiring programmers can make.

Some games have had physics that make no sense… Grenades that bounce off walls, gaining speed. I’ve been killed be having a grenade bounce off my head. Played with weapons that shoot through walls, sniper rifles with homing rounds.

I’ve see player models with 89 billion polygons, 2 polygons and everything inbetween. Let us not mention the mods where the models for both teams are different shades of green.

Spammers, lamers, llama, racists, bigots, the strange, wierd, freak, silent, cheaters, hackers, bug exploiters, map exploiters and the players who are actually better than me. Don’t forget the utter newbie, the guy who doesn’t understand how to mouse look. I’ve played with you all.

I’ve played maps where the concept of playtesting was foreign, other maps where the concept of level design was non-existant. And I’ve played a deathmatch game on a staircase. Yes a staircase, it was narrow and very very very long. The guy in the middle was totally screwed, and god help you if you fell off.

Valve, I gave you guys the benifit of a doubt when you added the voice system to HL. I thought it was a good idea, you could talk with players to coordinate your efforts. Unfortunatly everyone who uses it is either 6 or from texas, both groups make no sense over ultralow bandwidth. But thankfully you included a mute function, so I wasn’t forced to listen to every little hitler to be rant about the Jews, or the Gays…

So I eagerly await the new patch. And guess what… Comeon…

IT TOTALLY FUCKED MY COMPUTER!

Now not only will HL crash out and require a reboot to work again, but it corrupted 4 files, none of which are important but they were kinda nice. My decal file… now I have to redownload 80billion individual decals… And my server file, you know how long it takes to filter out 40,000 servers!!!
The other two files didn’t bother me, I had backups.

But what really really pissed me off… YOU GOT RID OF THE MUTE OPTION! Now I have to keep listening to these asshates babble away on their microphones! Because if I do mute them, I also mute their typing. Its a good feature, when I can use it to totally silence an annoying player. BUT DAMNIT I DO STILL NEED TO COMMUNICATE WITH MY TEAM EVEN IF I DON"T WANT TO LISTEN TO THEIR PREPUBESCENT WHINING ABOUT THEIR LACK OF A GF!

Counter-Strike… Goose and company, you guys made a great mod. I hope to hell you guys are getting backend deals for CS-CZ you deserve a share in the money Sierra/Valve make.

But for FUCKS SAKE! Stop fucking with things that work so well!

I put up with beta 3 and beta 5 for christsake! Stop fucking with features I like!

The glock… it used to be a light damage handgun with a large clip but very very accurate. Back in the early beta days, it was the only weapon you could get a headshot with. Now its like throwing bullets at people. 19 times, 19 fucking times I shot that asshole with my glock, and he DIDN"T DIE. He had time to reload his PARA! Yes, he reloaded a machine gun, ran up to me and cut me in half.
On the plus side, you’ve taken the USP from a piece of shit secondary weapon that was totally inaccurate and turned it into the poorman’s sniper rifle.
The colt… I miss the colt, back when it was zoomable, ohh it was a nice weapon.
The CT semiauto sniper rifle… WTF IS UP WITH THAT? You guys already had one semiauto sniper rifle, why the hell do we need two??? You could have added another submachinegun or something…

Over time you guys fixed a lot of things, some of which was your own bad programing, some of which was problems Valve made. You guys fixed the super accuracy in midair, you guys limited jumping so you don’t have people pounding the jump key with shotguns. Which is nice, nolonger are the black clad CTs doing the flying nun impression with full auto weapons.
But for god’s sake, did you really have to make it so you walked for a second after you land a jump? Couldn’t you guys just add a 2 or 3 second delay between jumps?!

You finally made the heatshot table larger, so you can get headshots… like when you actually shoot someone in the head. BUT YOU NEVER FIXED THE FREAKING GRENADES!
The grenades, you must love the CS grenades. They bounce, they fly, they soar, and god help you if you throw one between two boxes… not even god know’s where its going.

Oh guys, everynow and then a great map gets made, one that is both well made and popular. Then, then you guys make piece of shit maps like cs_mansion or de_chateu (I can’t spell it so don’t even bother). Then there are maps like cs_siege. A good solid, fun to play map. YET EVERY OTHER FREAKING PATCH ITS DIFFERENT.

First it’s day light. Then night, then there is a hole in the road. Then there is an APC (we all agree now that was dumb, especially since the parking garage is too small for the apc to fit in). Then the hole in the bridge is gone… then its daylight again.

STOP CHANGING THE DAMN MAP.

Pick one and KEEP IT.

De_torn. Sure it looks nice, real nice. BUT FUCK ME WITH A BUCKET, when you use that many hires textures for a map EXPECT EVERYONE TO BITCH!
I was on a 500mhz comp that couldn’t play that goddamn map.

Sure its fine now, but I’m on a 2ghz machine now!

The AS map series… Yes the idea of protecting the VIP sounds cool. And limiting the weapons makes it easier for the VIP to stay alive… BUT WTF! The terrorists get a AWM… one shot one kill gun and the CTs get an AUG… Gee that’s fun after 6 rounds when all 8 terrorists have AWM’s and only 1 CT can afford a rifle with a scope!

Let us not even talk about the Escape maps. You forgot about them, and the players are ignoring that they exist. It is better for all that way.
In short: Valve, Sierra, the Counter-strike guys.

FIX MY HALFLIFE! STOP MAKING IT CRASH FOR 3 FUCKING MONTHS WHILE I FIGURE OUT HOW TO FIX YOUR SHITTY SHITTY PATCHES!

2

For the voice thing I usually just turn the sound for it down to 0.

3

Hey, I’ll be meeting with Sierra in two weeks at E3. Wanna boil that down to one or two sentences?

4

Sure think Jonathan Chance tell them to make sure the bloody patches work! Each patch they make requires me to remove halflife, reinstall it and then rerun the patch.

If they fix that, I’ll be happier.

Oh yeah and add a configure command to mute only the voice channel

5

Sigh I read this and all I was thinking was “How much I miss CS” Sure, I sucked (I considered a 1 kill to 3 killed ratio a good outing). The people whom the OP is complaining about bothered me too, but the game was fun. I gave it up because of all the cheaters (not that you needed to cheat to beat me). I really don’t have time to play, and I’ve got better things to do than try to sort out useful information from insults made by holier-than-thou assholes whose sole claim to fame is that they are better at a video game than I am. [Actually, I encountered more neutral players than assholes, but fewer helpful ones. Just that assholes, by their nature, drown out everyone else]

6

Actually, what I’m really bitching about is how every single goddamn patch totally fucks up my computer, requiring hours to get it working right again… And yet I still play the damn game for more hours each week than I spend being productive in the lab.

7

I installed 1.4 this weekend and promptly bought the autoshotgun, my preferred weapon for the close confines of cs_italy as the LAN party started.

Milson dashed around a corner, didn’t see me, I unloaded five rounds into his back in a second and a half, and … he turned and killed me.

Shooting someone five times with a shotgun used to result in them dying. Not in 1.4.

Enh, I say. Enh.

8

I wish people would adopt a policy similar to the Spoiler policy - warn people that a thread is about gaming, so we don’t waste valuable “waiting for thread to load” time.

(I may be a little cranky - we just got three freakin’ feet of snow here, with another two or so in the forecast.)

9

Well, that pretty much sums up what I don’t like about just about every FPS shoot-em-up out there. But then, I’m looking more for an infantry sim, and there hasn’t been a serious attempt at that yet (Flashpoint’s developers stated quite clearly that they were not making a sim, and nobody is going to convince me that Ghost Recon is an infantry sim…). Oh well, maybe some day…

Though really, if you smack someone in the head with a ~1-pound grenade, it’d at least hurt a little. Maybe not if they had a helmet on (I’m surprised how much a good helmet can absorb a blow!), but nail 'em in the face and you’ll probably break their nose at least. But then, for a hitpoint-based system, there isn’t much you can hope for…

10

Seeing as Sierra and Valve are both game producing companies, it seems like the title was pretty clear…

11

I’ve played religiously since CS 1.1 came out, with some sporadic play before that. My main complaint about CS 1.4 is the damn jumping. For the love of God, it wasn’t the end of the world to have people jumping around like idiots! The weapon aim also seems kinda screwed, especially since I’m on dialup. First person spectator mode kinda owns, though.

I’d recommend you disable voice entirely. Cuts down on the lag.

12

llamas?

Haj

13

Unfortunately, those of us not interested in the gaming world have no idea what or who Valve and Sierra are, which kinda proves my point, I think. Anyway, my previous post was just sort of a bad-natured kneejerk response from me; please feel free to ignore me.

14

Actually, I thought it might be about engine problems in an SUV…
:smiley:

15

Man, I must be damn lucky in my choice of servers, because I haven’t even noticed half of the problems mentioned in the OP. I’ve never been hit with a grenade, I’ve never had more than two or three people using the voice chat option in a game (and I can’t remember any time when they weren’t discussing tactics), I haven’t noticed any major changes with the Glock or the USP (pistol matches… I love 'em), and I’ve never seen a server that doesn’t allow both sides to buy an AW/M.

And complaining about rifles shooting through walls? Uh… if a wall is thin enough, a real-life gun WILL shoot through it. Just don’t hide behind flimsy boxes.

And, personally, I’ve found that people who exploit map bugs just make themselves into REALLY easy targets. You ever seen people “sky walk” in de_dust? It NEVER occurs to them that they have *NO COVER when they’re floating forty feet above the ground.

16

Sierra.
Can.
Die.

I realize this is somewhat off-topic, but it only recently happened, and I’m still bitter.

Last weekend me and my roommate held a LAN party in which we played Counterstrike. Since I didn’t have the game installed, I dropped it on my computer. It installed Sierra Utilities along with it; sort of annoying, especially when I’m not given a choice, but I can live with it.

I find out quickly I don’t like Counterstrike very much, and since it was sucking up a gig of space on my hard-drive, I went ahead and uninstalled it. I uninstalled Sierra Utilities as well. And then discovered the Utter Evil That Is Sierra Utilities.

Normally, I install games to C:\Games<game>. It’s a habit, instead of letting the game pick for me. Most Sierra games install to something like C:\Program Files\Sierra Productions<game>. So the uninstall for Sierra Utilities, apparently miffed that I would get rid of this beautiful piece of software, deletes everything in the root folder the game is in. Normally, this is \Sierra Productions. No big deal.

It deleted every single file and folder in my Games directory. All my games, as well as my Mu* clients. (For the uninitiated, Mus are text chat/roleplaying games.) Despite immediately using a data recovery program, I lost 15 months or so worth of Mu logs. They weren’t exactly necessary, but as an archive they were extremely valuable to me. And Sierra Utilities murdered them without a second thought.

Sierra can go fuck themselves for such a severe oversight in the programming. And hopefully people who weren’t aware of this time bomb now know the dangers they face.

I’m just glad I didn’t install to C:\Half-Life…

17

How about the REAL reason why Sierra and Valve can fuck off–where in the FUCK is Team Fortress 2? This has only been in development since, oh, 1998? Earlier maybe? And what about Half-Life 2? That hasn’t even been officially ANNOUNCED. The best computer game ever has the worst ENDING ever and there’s no sign of a sequel anywhere in sight.

18

If your loading time is so precious, why are you opening a Pit thread whose title doesn’t mean anything to you?

19

Only lamers use Autoshotgun - you n00b (someone had to say it)

Ah well, count me down as one of the lucky ones. The upgrade to 1.4 worked fine for me, and I’m really happy to see the end of constantly pogo’ing ct’s.

20

Heh. Gary, I tried using the Autoshotgun several times, but kept getting killed. I said “Hell with this”, and went back to my MP5 and M4.

The only thing that consistently pisses me off in CS is the abuse of the AW/M. When I get in a map and hear four AW/M blasts in the space of six seconds, I disconnect in a hurry. I mean, I understand the whole “One shot one kill” thing (the gun IS powerful as hell), but shouldn’t they apply that to the rest of the game? I mean, I’ve seen people take five or six pistol shots to the torso, unarmored, and keep running around like it was nothing… when in reality it should have put them down, at least with a little bit of shock.

If things are going to be so skewed away from reality (they kept a little bit of game-ness in it), then shouldn’t that apply to the AW/M, as well? I’ve seen people get shot in the fucking foot and die from it… other times, I’ve seen people get head-shot with the AW/M and not get killed. A little consistency, please?!?