Ringslinger Discussion

Tried to play vanilla CTF recently to compare it to Battle now that that's out and now I have a pretty strong opinion on it.

That opinion is that I hate Ringslinger now more than ever.

I can't even pin it on anything specific without straight up rambling. The base mechanics all compounded together create something uniquely frustrating. Match is absolute thok-spamming garbage and CTF, while slightly better, is still terrible. I used to like it more in the past but now I just can't be bothered with it. It gets old really fast and the weaker maps in vanilla rotation do not help.

Only Sonic and Tails seem to offer anything. Most rings are unreliable except for rail and rail just feels cheap to get hit by while lacking any of the satisfaction of a railgun. Getting hit puts you out of the game for way too long and sometimes I'd just rather keep getting hit until I get a pity shield so at least 1/3 of my priorities are taken care of already. And god forbid anyone on the map picks up an attraction shield.

I'm just gonna cross my fingers that future dedicated Battle servers will start hosting community maps, I don't need to touch Ringslinger ever again in my life and I would feel nothing if it was deleted.
 
Alright, now that I've played match recently, I actually have some constructive criticisms to share and ways to improve the game.

In no particular order because it's 6 AM:

-Emeralds/super are not and have not been a consistent threat, you would not be blamed in a netgame for forgetting that they exist. Even when they were supposedly powerful enough to incur a heavy nerf, nobody in any server I've hosted has ever really gone out of their way to collect them as a primary objective. This is because having all 7 in your posession at any given time depends on a lot of different factors and you absolutely NEED all 7 for them to be useful. When someone DID collect all of them, it was situational on whether they could even use them because most people have a shield at the time and use that to flaunt it in others' faces like "you better not shoot me~ I have all 7 emeralds and enough rings to fuel it for like 50 seconds". Their importance varies and is super situational regarding whether you were able to use them or not that it negated any threat that they even posed. I've always hosted with a time limit of 8 minutes to keep maps rotating at a decent pace but never have I had someone last super for more than a minute, let alone the entire match. That being said, you could bump up their significance and the amount of fighting over emeralds during a match by reimplementing super, making super players easier to kill than they were (different weapons do different amounts of damage, explosions doing massive damage like 25-30 per hit, lesser rings doing 5-10), buff its acceleration to make it more challenging to get the precise angles needed to gather rings (in both singleplayer and multiplayer iterations), but add an emerald radar to the bottom of the screen, along with announcements of who to target because they're grabbing emeralds.

-I prefer the older mine behavior of the grenades way more than the grenade behavior, I feel like it's a crapshoot if I'm able to hit anyone with a grenade, but it's always certain to hit SOMEBODY with a mine. Perhaps you could increase the weapondelay on them and make it so the time inbetween beeps gets increasingly shorter as you get closer to one and they're about to explode?

-Item respawn times should be reduced to like 10 seconds from the current 30 across all gametypes, perhaps this should also scale depending on how many people are present because a lot of people tend to just collect everything in match and co-op/race and leave beginners with nothing.

-All weapon rings should have reduced weapondelay across the board, red rings should be firable almost as quickly as you can spam the button.

-All non-hitscan projectiles should have a buffed travel speed. it feels like it takes too long to hit anybody at anything other than close range.

-I've never found a use for bounce rings, I think they could easily be replaced by rings with a weak homing effect (stops targeting after a second or two) or a ring turret, I could also see bounce being better used as an effect that's applied to whatever ring you're currently using.

-Match isn't really fun when only 2-5 players are playing, especially on the more open maps, some more closed-off types of maps would be good for creating mayhem with more people and creating interest for those times when players are scarce.

-Maps should be updated not only to include slopes, but everything else that's been implemented as of 2.2, horizontal springs, speed boosters, TNT, etc.
-The speed at which rings fly should be relative to the speed you threw them at, a ring thrown by a player that has just thokked should be treated as such.

-Speaking of, the thok kinda kills match for me, having an experienced Sonic player running circles around a beginner is not fun for ANYBODY except the bully doing so and it detracts from the other characters significantly. I don't want to see a repeat of what happened with circuit.

-You can also literally run through these maps as if they were circuit maps and that's not a bad thing, it's part of what makes this game easier than your typical FPS game, but I'd like to see more cover and platforming implemented outside of Orbital Pit Zone.

-I dunno what you guys did to fix that mouse capture thing in 2.2.1 but I think it screwed up aiming, aiming feels too stiff because when I move my mouse normally it doesn't feel like it's turning enough but when I inch it, it feels like it's moving 5 pixels at a time, I've tried messing with my sensitivity settings but going back to 2.1 they're the same values as they've always been. This janky control weirdness also scales with resolution making it super awkward because I now have to adjust my mouse sensitivity based on how high resolution the game is at the time.

-Fang should have corks as his primary weapon instead of throwing red rings, with the projectiles travelling at the same speed as a red ring and having no auto aim, he should also be the only one to be able to hit monitors from afar using this ability adding to his uniqueness. He should still be able to shoot weapon rings for his other attacks or you could give him different variations on his corks.

-Amy should be able to attack with her hammer. End of story.

-I'd like to see more monitors strewn and scattered about the maps. They're all in corners and I have to stop and hug up against a wall for them, breaking flow entirely, and I have to go out of my way to find enough rings to sustain my weapons, let alone find a stray shield monitor. Rarely if ever can I find an invincibility monitor, but speed shoes are all over the place. I'd like to find a nicer balance of everything and more of them.

-I don't know what you did to 2.2.1 but multiplayer's the most unstable it's been since it got fixed in 2.1, could you figure out why and revert it back to being good again? (Sorry, I know this one's not as constructive as everything else but I'm tired and it's now 6:30)

-I like the changes katmint made with her shield mod, I got a lot of use out of the force shield's momentum halt and redirection in particular for messing with people. The ash shield is also a nice idea for the armageddon shield.

-Either get rid of the AGZ lookin' level because nobody likes it, or make the terrain big enough to stand on without getting shot off the edges into the abyss.

-Rail rings are perfectly fine and balanced in my opinion because they're supposed to be a sniper rifle, keep those as is but increase firing rate a tad.

As little as I play match and don't care for it as much as other gametypes, I'd hate to see yet another gametype gutted from the game due to lack of interest from players and the dev team. I think these changes could breathe much needed life into the gametype.
 
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Competitive aiming-based gametypes are not and will not be viable in this game so long as the ridiculous amount of control lag persists. It's a problem unique to SRB2 that really drags down the multiplayer aspects, especially ringslinger modes.
 
I would like to see the Homing Ring return to Ringslinger. However, I realize that the Homing Ring was indeed overpowered, so I have come up with a compromise: make the homing ring so slow that the opponent would have to practically try to get hit. I recommend a speed of maybe 20*FRACUNIT. I also think on top of all this, the Homing Ring should stop chasing the player after about 10 seconds, from which point it will continue its travel in a straight line. This would make the ring about as threatening as the Bull's-eye Bill is in Super Mario Maker; sure, it does chase Mario, but he is able to outrun the Bull's-eye Bill easily, thus making it not very threatening. The same can be said for this rendition of the Homing Ring, because the ring is designed in such a way that every character is fast enough to outrun the ring (max running speed is 36*FRACUNIT, for those who don't know). That way, if the player gets hit, it's their fault, and they have no one to blame but themselves.

Before you say anything, yes, I am aware that Mario can jump on a Bull's-eye Bill to "kill" it, and Sonic obviously would not be able to. Yes, I am also aware that everything I have said doesn't completely account for the complexity of a 3D space, or even the fact that Super Mario Maker was not a Multiplayer Shooter that just so happens to be built off of a 3D Platformer, but rather a 2D Platformer.

TL/DR

I would like to see the devs add the Homing Ring back, but make it work like this:
L69aABt.gif
 
Just so you know, the homing rings of 1.x were already slower than the bullet bills in that animation.
 
Just so you know, the homing rings of 1.x were already slower than the bullet bills in that animation.

Oh. Well, problem solved in that reguard. The reason I didn't know that is because I was 5 during the time homing rings existed, and I didn't know that multiplayer was a thing, nor was I interesded in it.
All that needs to be done now is that they need to stop chasing the player after 10 seconds, much like the bullet bills in the gif shown in my post.

EDIT: forgot to mention that they should slowly turn towards the player, as opposed to perfectly tracing their movements. Again, take a look at the gif, notice how the bullets move in a distinctive arc. The intent is to make it so that the player is at fault if they get hit, and there is no way the player could blame the game. We don't want to make the player feel like they are playing the Green Demon Challenge in SM64, especially in a competitive multiplayer setting.
 
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IIRC it was never about homing rings being overpowered - they just kept crashing the game and weren't all that interesting. The bounce ring, and grenade in a different sense, serve the same area denial purpose the homing ring did.
 

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