PersianImmortal

This is exactly the type of attitude which really ticks me off I hate to burst your bubble, but trying to get average players on a public server to "fight their way out" doesn't work. If your team is being spawn raped with enemy players camped in extremely hard to hit positions, you have exactly a couple of seconds (if that) to react before they kill you. Sometimes I find I can't even switch to my hand grenade fast enough before I'm dead. You get two, three or four reasonably skilled players surrounding your spawn in hidden or hard to hit locations and shooting right into it and they will rack up at least twice to three times the kills your team will, if not more. They win the match, it's no competition. You might manage to recover after respawning a dozen times, but guess what, a lot of servers now have spawn limits (like the 3 respawn limit on the BDA servers), so you're royally screwed in those cases. Team stacking is also already becoming evident, where the experienced players will all move to the winning side (since the servers don't autobalance by default). So it's next to impossible to "fight your way out" when your team is full of semi-skilled or relatively new players vs. highly experienced players. I'm getting damn tired of being called a whiner, and to be honest I've had a gutful of the attitude the "GRAW community" - namely the like it or lump it thing that keeps coming up. If you're so damn keen to block out new players, then I recommend you password lock your servers. Sadly I won't be able to get a refund on GRAW 2, but I will pay close attention to what GRIN does with this game, and will warn my readers accordingly. Best that more people don't drop money on this game until it becomes clear how much of the game is going to be fixed. I've tried to give constructive feedback on this forum, reporting real problems, bugs and issues which not only affect me, but actually affect many other players. I'm not getting "owned" online, I can hold my own. Yet all I see here are people insisting that everything is perfect, and that I must be a whiner. All games require balance adjustments and improvements, GRAW 2 in particular has physical bugs and gameplay balance issues which need to be patched out, not left up to modders. But I see no sign of GRIN or the community even acknowledging or addressing many of the important issues. No word from GRIN on things like the nonsensical awp-like M99, or the spammy GL with no minimum range. No word on any genuine spawn protect options. No word on making all the objective modes actually reward players for achieving objectives rather than kills. But hey, if all you guys want to do is spawn rape and awp each other then all the best to you. If that's what a tactical shooter is to you, I'm really not patient enough to contribute further suggestions. If the community is not mature enough to let the game evolve and remain balanced, fair and genuinely tactical, then no amount of code or gameplay changes by GRIN will alter the generally poor state of GRAW 2 online. Anyway last post on these forums from me, I'll find better things to do with my time.

Great to hear, let's hope more people pick up on this and implement similar steps to stop the spawn abuse

Yep, if the option is enabled. So far the servers I've played on barely have any spawn protect on, much less this option Just got off yet another server where half the game involved spawn camping and complaints about it. No surprise that the highest kills went to the people who were killing enemy as they respawned...

I agree that a no respawn game with good quality players would be great fun. In fact virtually any online game when played with good, decent players is always a blast. But that's not the case in public servers. Public servers should work on being set up to prevent the lowest common denominator from ruining games. Right now, virtually every TDM game I play in devolves into some form of spawn camping/spawn raping at some point during the match, resulting in a lot of frustration and abuse. I've even argued with teammates over it to try to get them out of the enemy spawn, it doesn't matter. If they can get easy kills by spawn camping, they'll do it. Well known and often very good players will deliberately go into or a few meters from enemy spawn and shoot the enemy as they respawn. That's the reality of the situation. No respawn is an optional step that some players can take on their private servers. Public servers with no respawn will just be a case of whoever can get to key positions on the map first and sit and wait, or whoever can get to the enemy spawn first, and hence win. It's not going to be a long game of chess played among equals. Mandatory spawn protection and steps like not counting kills made in spawn will go much further towards making the game truly tactical than any 'no respawn' nostalgia kicks. I tend to resent the way that many members of the community want to throw the people playing on public servers to the dogs. Once again, when I bought this game it did not say I had to run a server of my own or be part of a clan to play multiplayer. Game balance and respawn issues need to be addressed by the core game and responsible server owners to prevent abuse and the death of this game on pub servers.

The problem is that in Seige or Hamburger Hill, the "winner" on the scoreboard is represented by whoever has the highest kills - unlike RvsA for example, where you get points for completing objectives, tagging/detagging etc. and the scoreboard is ranked by points, not kills. So if we want more tactical gameplay especially in the objective modes, rather than people trying to rack up the highest kills, then make Seige and HH use the same scoring system as RvsA. In particular the longer you are inside the zone, the more points you rack up. Making Seige and HH use the same weapons promotion system as RvsA would further encourage people to pursue objectives so they can get their favorite weapons. That way you don't end up with the current situation where you literally have to beg your teammates to help you defend/take the zone since they're too busy racking up kills to care about the obj.

Everything on my system is 100% up to date and optimal. It's not a system issue. No other game crackles through my Audigy 2ZS, whether DirectSound or OpenAL. While Creative sound cards are known to have issues with the PCI bus which can cause crackling, the strongest likelihood in this case is that the issue is specific to GRAW 2, hence it's being pointed out for GRIN to examine and fix if possible. It's not a major issue since we can still use the Generic Hardware option at worst, which isn't bad at all. Yes, this is on XP SP2 fully updated. On Vista EAX should work since GRAW 2 is an OpenAL game; it's only DirectSound games for which hardware-accelerated features like EAX require the Creative ALchemy solution people may be referring to. In any case again it's worth investigating for GRIN, but it's not the highest priority problem at the moment - I'd say the random crashes are far more annoying.

This is a silly argument. On public servers, no respawn = no gameplay. The people who would benefit the most from a no respawn rule would be those who simply pick a hidden spot and wait. That's about as riveting as watching paint dry. Let's not fancy it up or make it sound like it's something honorable. It's not tactics, it's called attrition - you bore your opponent into moving first, then you kill him and win. The reason why camping is universally hated is because it's boring, not because it's hard. There's a clear difference between moving slowly, checking your surroundings, engaging the enemy and winning. That's called skill. Sitting in a bush or secluded spot (which is what most campers do), especially near the enemy's spawn exit points, is not particularly skillful, and would turn TDM into nothing more than TEDIUM. What we really need is for this great option that Cangaroo has pointed out to be enabled, along with a decent amount of spawn protect (e.g. 5-8 seconds). This will force people to actually venture out of their own spawn, and try engaging the enemy in all sorts of different and interesting ways. It also forces people not to take the easy way out and camp around the enemy spawn, getting cheap kills. Note that I've played many years of America's Army, where there is no respawn, but the rounds are limited to around 9-10 minutes. At least that way you're not waiting half an hour for that last entrenched camper to die. Also note that in America's Army despite all the attempts to make it more realistic and tactical, the no respawn idea has not resulted in any real tactical gameplay whatsoever.

Just found a major glitch in single player. In Act 1, one of my new saved games (auto-saved under 1.03) has developed a major problem. One of my squad members is now always aiming upwards, and won't move when commanded (he confirms the command but won't move). He just stands in the same spot with the same pose, and even if you budge him to another position, or give him another command, or he comes under fire, he still aims upwards and won't follow orders. I've reloaded the game and the savedgame several times and the glitch is always the same:

Good job on the patch so far. Just for future reference, I'll list the bugs I've experienced since the patch. This is using GRAW 2 on Windows XP: - Random crashes are still there. The last one I had was in multiplayer. My crashlog.txt file says: - I joined a deathmatch game and found that for the first three rounds I couldn't see all the players on the scoreboard, both at the end of the round and also during the game any time I pressed TAB to view the scoreboard. After 3 rounds this problem seemed to resolve itself. - Using the new 'SoundBlaster Audigy2ZS' audio renderer +EAX results in a lot of crackling during the game. I have no problems with my Audigy2ZS in any other game, all drivers are up to date and the system is rock solid.

I'm not having a go at GRIN as I'm sure they are under certain financial or other restraints. However if the first major patch is released a month after the game is out, and the game itself is - let's be honest - only going to last around 12-15 months at the most, this is not something to be overly thankful for. Consumers used to expect games to be quite complete and solid out of the box. For us to start thanking game developers for slowly patching faults out of the game is a bit silly in my opinion; I didn't pay for GRAW 2 on an installment plan, so I don't expect it to be fixed on an installment plan. There should have been more than enough feedback from the beta and the public demo to resolve these issues sooner. Once again, the wonderful advice people have about mods allowing various servers to run different settings to address balance issues is pretty much pointless. There are only literally a handful of populated servers currently available. Ignoring the fact that some of them lag badly (likely due to CPU issues, not ping), several of them already have silly rules, such as the 3 respawn limit, and I've just come from a clan server (SRT server) where they say it's ok to spawn camp (i.e. sit right inside enemy spawn and kill people as they respawn). I mean really, if all the various balance and cheat issues are being left in the hands of server owners and clans, then all the game will do is suit particular server owners/clans. In other words if you're not in a clan which owns a server, you have to accept all sorts of wacky crap that server owners decide is good for you. If they decide to mod out a weapon you like, or create an imbalance to suit their own preferences, tough luck, you have to accept it because there are no other servers to play on. People who know me and who've played with me know that I can play reasonably well, that I don't like cheap tactics, and I don't complain while I'm playing. But this is not what I paid for when I purchased GRAW 2, the box didn't say "Limited online playing opportunities and gameplay may vary significantly on different servers". I've started advising people not to purchase GRAW 2 until it becomes clearer what fixes are coming up. Sorry if that seems "whiney", but a multiplayer game with a few servers, most of which are designed to suit the server owner is not my idea of a fun time online.

I beg to differ, and as you know I raise some of these issues not for myself, but for other players who find it much harder to counter certain tactics and imbalances. Anyway we won't get into details here, I still feel strongly that imbalances such as the M99 and GL require proper fixes, but I won't bog down this thread with a debate on this all over again. I agree, and my main concern is for the patches to keep on coming. If they do, then it won't be a major issue, but given what happened with GRAW 1, and what happens with many other games, where after the initial sales period the patches just stop, I'm hoping it won't happen with GRAW 2.

Thanks for letting us know about the changes. While there are important updates such as crash and bug fixes, it doesn't look like many of the issues discussed on this forum are being incorporated into this patch, such as M99/GL issues, spawn protect issues, anti-cheat issues, etc. This is very unfortunate. I wonder if GRIN can confirm if these other issues will ever be addressed or whether they've decided that they can't do so?

Well we have a range of opinions, that's fine. The point is that if the handful of populated servers start having their own version of what's "best", such as 3 respawn caps in TDM, then all it does is suit a particular group of people. For those of us who wish to play this game without these sorts of restrictions, we have no real choice given the lack of populated servers. Ultimately a range of important issues have been raised, from gameplay balance to cheating to spawn issues. As mentioned, GRIN is working on a patch, so I'll wait to see what they can provide in the way of changes before providing more feedback or considering whether to continue playing this game.

For clan matches or competition, sounds perfectly fine to have very few if any respawns. On a public server it makes for boring matches. I like strategy as much as the next guy, but playing TDM with 3 respawns means the only real strategy which works is picking a spot and staying motionless/dead silent for most of the match. This tends to be most effective for the snipers. It also means that when the enemy team camps/rapes your spawn, you're screwed. You lose one or two of your respawns because spawn protect is not enabled (or possibly set to 1 or 2 seconds) on that same server. A quicker way for GRAW 2 to die there probably isn't. Anyway I didn't mean to take the thread way off topic, again my point was that by relying on "the community" to provide everything, from active servers to anti-cheat policing to modifications to fix gameplay balance problems, GRIN is dooming this game to a tiny niche group of players. Simply put the scenarios I'm seeing now pretty much say that majority rules, and if the majority decides that I am a cheat, apparently I have to abide by it, since I'll be banned from the handful of active servers that are available and there's no way to actually provide solid evidence to counter the claims. Same with server rules and server setup - since there are so few populated servers, majority rules in determining the server setups. So you get things like 3 respawn caps, virtually no spawn protect, and ultimately a recipe for lots of one-sided matches. I like this game and I want to keep playing it, but without balanced, impartial and forward-thinking changes being incorporated into the core game, and not reliance on the particular tastes and desires of particular individuals or clans, GRAW 2 will simply become a game played by a small group of people. While that sounds nice for the hardcore players, it is a bit of a rip off for the rest of us who purchased this game expecting much more from it.

To be honest given that it's next to impossible to find a populated server out of dozens of empty servers, I think the game may well die its death due to lack of attention. Worse still, when you do find a populated server, it's been altered to suit a particular clan. For example the BDA server now has a 3 respawn maximum, even for team deathmatch. That's quite frankly just a recipe for sniper camping, which makes for boring matches. So I think an anti-cheat is probably the least of GRAW 2's worries.

As I've mentioned before, I am totally against community enforcement as the main means of detecting and banning cheaters. For starters this will only detect the obvious cheats. And all it takes is for one "well known" clan or individual to accuse a newcomer, and guess who is going to have their way, whether or not the accusation is true. Just because you're established in the community, doesn't mean you're not a cheater, or that you can spot cheaters with 100% accuracy. By the same token just because you're new, doesn't mean that you are a cheater if you play well. For example there are times when I've had multiple kills in a short space of time because the MP5 is very accurate and has low recoil, and the enemy have grouped together. I'm sure this can look suspicious if someone sees 3 or 4 people being killed within a couple of seconds by the MP5. I've already been accused of cheating by a well-known clan, but fortunately after playing more with them I'm sure they know I'm not a cheater now. In terms of practical solutions, what is really required is the incorporation of a regularly updated anti-cheat software such as PB. Either that, or a commitment by Ubisoft to fund regular updates to GRAW 2's existing anti-cheat with patches. I doubt either will happen. If self-policing is the only option we have left, at least give us deathcam view for players on a server in all game modes. That way several people can spectate from a suspicious team mate. Even then, again it's very hard to capture good cheaters this way.

Sadly there are several games I know where it has been discovered that long-term and highly respected players were actually cheating. Cheaters are not always blatant. Some of them are so incredibly subtle that you will never know, even if you spectate from them. This is why there is a need for a combination of software anti-cheat measures (like PunkBuster), the ability to spectate from a player's point of view, and other proper server-side checks which are constantly updated. There is a culture of cheating which will never be stamped out. Some cheaters actually believe they are "very skilled" because they can cheat with subtlety. I once had a long argument with a cheater in America's Army who was proud of cheating, because he said cheating and not getting caught was even harder than playing normally. Of course this is baloney, since a game is designed to be played within the rules - if you cheat or exploit, you're taking the easy and selfish way out no matter how you want to look at it. So needless to say, you may find that some very unexpected people are actually cheats, and have been for a long time. Reputation alone is not sufficient to weed out cheats.

Well after several rounds of playing extremely well, I just got accused of cheating myself by a member of a known clan. Obviously I wasn't cheating (nor even exploiting or using cheap tactics like spawn camping), I was using my favorite weapon the MP5SD (low recoil, low sound, fantastic weapon), and good tactics like using my ears, and flanking snipers and shooting them from behind or above. But because there is no way to prove someone is or isn't cheating, the accusations of cheating alone are starting to grow and become very annoying. It's not the end of the world, but it would be nice if there was some way of proving you aren't cheating, such as replays or people being able to spectate from your view in TDM for example.

What's really sad is that the relatively few blatant cheaters will quickly cause people to start accusing the genuinely good players of cheating. That's the biggest harm cheating does - it puts suspicion and doubt about everyone in your mind, and accusations, insults and abuse start being thrown around over and over again each round by people who are being beaten by legitimate means. In general the votekicking and anit-cheat measures in GRAW 2 definitely need to be tightened, not to mention the implementation of proper automatic kicking for repeat teamkillers. These things can really allow a couple of immature people to ruin the gameplay on an entire server.

I don't limit myself to local servers. When I say there are only 4 or 5 populated servers, I mean in my entire server list for the world, not just my region. There is only 1 local server, and around 4 international servers which are populated, and I still wind up usually playing on an international server like the BDA one, or the Core server. The rest are completely empty, or are locked, or maybe have 1 player on them. I'm not bothered by playing with a higher ping. GRAW 2 is fine in compensating for pings by making sure that you hit what you see on your screen. Someone with a lower ping does have an advantage in that technically they can see you earlier than you can see them by a fraction of a second (i.e. 400ms ping vs. 50ms ping means he sees me 1/3 of a second earlier than I see him), but tactics can overcome that, plus there's no real fix for something like that anyway, it's just a fact of life when playing an online game. So the issue again returns to the fact that just finding the right server doesn't resolve issues like spawn camping, and various glitches and bugs, since most of the time I don't have any real choice in the server on which I play. As the thread Graw 2 dying? indicates, other people are also finding it hard to find active servers as well, so it's not just me.

I've mentioned this before, and I will mention it again: when I go to play GRAW 2 in Australia, most of the servers are empty. I don't have the ability to choose from dozens of servers. There are only really 4 or 5 populated servers at the most at any time that I can play on, many of them are often totally full, and only one of them is local (with a decent ping). So I, like many people, can't just simply find a server which has an admin, has specific maps, etc. So please stop suggesting that I can somehow magically find a server out of the handful of ones that are available that somehow resolves all these issues, as in around 3 weeks of playing GRAW 2 I've yet to come across such a server. Once again, the issue is not about finding a server which suits my needs, it's about pointing out and resolving issues in the game which may need developer attention. Finally, the link you provide to the existing thread is a thread that was posted after I started this thread. So technically I can't have possibly put my suggestions in that thread first.

I'm not sure what you mean? If you mean what I wrote in my guide, I don't make my guides a detailed list of the positives and negatives of a game, just my overall impression - and so far overall I'm still quite impressed with GRAW 2 despite it's smaller issues. After all, a guide is about configuring the game, it's not a game review as such. I can't list all the individual bugs in a game, it would take up too much time and space, and also the bugs can vary based on system configurations. If you mean the first post I made in this thread, I wrote that only a couple of days after starting playing GRAW 2, so I hadn't identified all the issues at that point.

I agree that arroyo and nowhere are not good examples of tdm maps, but unfortunately it seems at least 3 of the 5 servers I regularly play on (for lack of choice) have both these maps set up in their 32 player tdm rotation. As you can imagine, things aren't pretty when two teams of 16 players each are on such a small map, it really does become a spawn camping spamfest, and it can also last quite a while. I'd like to second Buffalo-souljah's suggestion as well, that the server listing bug be fixed, as I often find that the first time the servers are listed, I don't see particular servers (yes, I use the scroll bar to scroll up and down the entire list). Only after being refreshed do some of the servers appear. Finally, I'd like to see the scoring system fixed up so that tactics and objectives are visibly rewarded in objective-based game modes, not just kills. For example in Seige there have been several times I've purposely ignored kills to quietly make my way to the zone and capture it. The result is I help my team win, but on the scoreboard my score is quite low due to lack of kills. Now I don't just play for kills, but it would be nice if the person who achieves a particular objective in RvsA or Seige is given visible credit on the screen (e.g. their name is highlighted or shown like the way the winner of deathmatch is named at the end of a round). This will encourage more players to play for the objective in objective-based modes rather than just going for the highest kills. Aside from the spawn issue, none of these suggestions is critical to the game, they're just my wishlist of things I'd like to see.

I've been referring to the server default, not the maximum. Most servers I've played on appear to have only around 3 seconds of spawn protect (if that). Obviously GRIN can't force server owners to use a particular time, but I think a lot of server owners are either not enabling the option or not changing it from its default. Spawn camping/raiding appears to be a fact of life in GRAW 2, since once you kill most of the enemy in TDM for example, the logical thing to do is to advance towards their spawn. However it then becomes quite hard for the enemy to retaliate if they're being shot, sniped or naded moments after they spawn each time. 8 seconds of spawn protect should give a player enough time to spawn, get their bearings, switch to another weapon if necessary, and start running for cover or spot any encamped enemy immediately surrounding them and do something. nowhere and arroyo are particular maps where spawn camping is a common complaint because they're so small and because the enemy can surround and hide around/above the spawn area quite well. Maps like crashsite, lagoon, calavera are relatively easier to break the hold of spawn campers Having 2 or 3 random spawn sites for each side would be better, but in the absence of a major change like that, all I can suggest is upping the default.

Neither of the above from your post are facts, nor particularly constructive. In particular Teamhot did not try to make everyone aware that there is no sway on any weapon, that is your particular agenda to try to discredit the changes we suggested by saying that somehow now all weapons need to be altered, which I then countered with constructive facts explaining that this is not necessary. Particularly since noone has been calling for absolute realism in this thread. However out of the realization of the sheer pointlessness of discussing anything with you, and out of respect for Rocky, I will not post any further in this thread.