Battle and Ringslinger

Zipper

:hildaGun:
As you may know, Battle has come a long way since its inception. Presenting a drastically different style of multiplayer compared to vanilla's current Ringslinger, many people believe that Battle captures the spirit of Sonic-styled competition much more successfully. It has made its way to the OLDC as well, having more divisions than the old MP system! (CP, CTF and Arena compared to just Match and CTF)

As it stands, I would love to hear your opinions on what Battle feels like to you, and how it fares compared to the current Ringslinger. It may seem like needlessly competing the two gamemodes, but it should help us get a clearer vision on what to do going forward (mostly with the OLDC, I'm not a dev, ya know!).

-What features or concepts do you prefer in one gametype over the other?

As the two gamemodes are distinct, surely there will be a few factors you enjoy seeing in one that is just missing in another.

-As a mapper, which gametype would you rather make maps for?

This is more on the technical side, but a benefit of Ringslinger is that you can make levels right out of the box, not needing to look up a documentation before you get started. That being said, their layouts may differ drastically as well, and at the end of the day, making Battle maps may be less painful. I haven't made an MP map for 5 years, I wouldn't know!

I may append this thread with more questions as I come up with them, but for now, go nuts!
 
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I like ringslinger. I have very fond memories of playing ringslinger, it was the first thing that taught me how to aim with a mouse. It's got some cute ideas and it's an interesting take on the arena FPS genre.

But maaaaan, Battlemod feels so much better. The same visceral feeling I would get from landing a railsnipe or pointblank scattershot is magnified tenfold when it's fast-paced melee combat, and it feels so much more like SRB2. Most of my irks with the mode come from the fact that 90% of the time we're playing on maps not designed for it! A lot of classic ringslinger structures simply don't work in Battle.

I'm more or less convinced that once balance and bugs are ironed out, and we have a full solid rotation made specifically for Battle, it could easily become the "official" pvp mode.

Going to consolidate OLDC thoughts from the other thread/our discord convo here:
  • Battle and ringslinger should not be lumped into the same division in any scenario. They play too differently, and to truly realize the potential of either mode you need maps designed for that gameplay.
  • I'd hope that ringslinger isn't phased out of the OLDC immediately, though it seems like things are heading that way. It's been a long time since we've seen a ringslinger OLDC - I'd like to see what people come up with. And if it's nothing good, well... at least we can say we tried.
  • If we had separate divisions for CP, Diamond, Battle CTF, ringslinger CTF, Match, and Arena, of course the whole thing would be too diluted. I'd be interested in seeing a selection of these divisions (e.g., Match, Battle CTF, Arena), though the concern then shifts to, e.g., "what about mappers who really wanted to make a map for CP"? Thoughts?
tbh, I think there will be some sort of issue no matter how you slice it. For example, in the current setup, how can one be expected to make a map that plays well in Match, CP, and Diamond? Certainly possible to make a map that functions in all three, but a jack of all trades etc...
 
I personally don't like ringslinger for several reasons. I'm not very good at aiming, but I am good at the basegame. But as a result of poor aim, I can't even begin to compete. You shouldn't have to learn a completely seperate way of controlling your character for a match mode, right? In battle, I don't have to worry about poor aim. Being good at the basegame means you're inherently good at battle due to how it works.

Making maps for battle seems easier as well, due to the fact I can make open maps and not have to worry about being sniped from a random tails 300 miles away.

---------- Post added at 02:45 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:39 PM ----------

I like ringslinger. I have very fond memories of playing ringslinger, it was the first thing that taught me how to aim with a mouse. It's got some cute ideas and it's an interesting take on the arena FPS genre.

But maaaaan, Battlemod feels so much better. The same visceral feeling I would get from landing a railsnipe or pointblank scattershot is magnified tenfold when it's fast-paced melee combat, and it feels so much more like SRB2. Most of my irks with the mode come from the fact that 90% of the time we're playing on maps not designed for it! A lot of classic ringslinger structures simply don't work in Battle.

I'm more or less convinced that once balance and bugs are ironed out, and we have a full solid rotation made specifically for Battle, it could easily become the "official" pvp mode.

Going to consolidate OLDC thoughts from the other thread/our discord convo here:
  • Battle and ringslinger should not be lumped into the same division in any scenario. They play too differently, and to truly realize the potential of either mode you need maps designed for that gameplay.
  • I'd hope that ringslinger isn't phased out of the OLDC immediately, though it seems like things are heading that way. It's been a long time since we've seen a ringslinger OLDC - I'd like to see what people come up with. And if it's nothing good, well... at least we can say we tried.
  • If we had separate divisions for CP, Diamond, Battle CTF, ringslinger CTF, Match, and Arena, of course the whole thing would be too diluted. I'd be interested in seeing a selection of these divisions (e.g., Match, Battle CTF, Arena), though the concern then shifts to, e.g., "what about mappers who really wanted to make a map for CP"? Thoughts?
tbh, I think there will be some sort of issue no matter how you slice it. For example, in the current setup, how can one be expected to make a map that plays well in Match, CP, and Diamond? Certainly possible to make a map that functions in all three, but a jack of all trades etc...

You could very easily combine BattleCTF and CP for sure, so Match, Arena, BattleCTF/CP and CTF would be the best, but possibly too much at the same time.
 
Well in my view, I don't like Battle. You just hit each players like billiard balls and I think some people don't like that. But honestly, it can be technically a good gametype for the new players because of the features, and the abilities each characters got. I think the old players won't like that because they basically miss ringslinger alot...

Ringslinger is better because it's always the best to shot rivals with weapons. Heck I thought that in 2.2 I would see new weapons too... The features like using weapons ammo twice when you don't have rings is also fine, that can make it blasting so there isn't any struggle on it... expect the wind shield will never help when the flag is within you
 
Ringslinger is "What if getting hit a single time without armor in Quake 3 caused you to lose all but one point of your health and all of your ammo and weapons? And your opponent could just take them all?"

In an Arena Shooter, where gathering resources is important to the gameplay, having all of those be lost from one projectile hit is ridiculous. The moment you get hit, you just gotta scramble for some lose rings and you can either try to hit the guy who just hit you (unless they already ran away), or disengage and start all over again. It's an agrivating process. It also has little to do with Vanilla's core gameplay of platforming. Sure, you still run fast, but the objective is to launch rings out of your eyeballs to hit other people shooting rings out of their eyeballs. We even have a character that uses a gun, but said gun, how you use it, and what its capable of are nothing like how a thrown ring works! It's a novel idea, but its the kind of thing that would be a mod if it was made today, not a core part of the base game.

Battle... I have no real opinion on because I have yet to play it. I should get on that, but at least it revolves around people running and jumping AT eachother. You may not use special abilities at the cost of rings in the main game, but neither could you in Adventure 2 Battle, and its not an issue there either. I'll give it a go one of these days.
 
I find battle mod to be a bit slightly more fun than ringslinger. Not to mention, it is absolute chaos with so many players in one netgame. Characters having their own way of attacking others, whenever its physical move or a disruptive move, its very unique. And their twist on the base game's ringslinger gametypes are great alternatives for it.

What I like to see in battle mod is how the emeralds would do in the gametypes. Of course, getting them all with result in invincibility and speed sneakers like how it is now. But what I would like to see in battle mod if emeralds go come in is an indicator to show up when someone has half of them collected. It gives players a heads up to take the special opportunity away from the player who goes on emerald hunts. And maybe perhaps a double point advantage when you also have all the emeralds that is also on a time limit. Players who have fallen behind would give them an opportunity to catch up on the rankings.

As for ringslingers, its okay but it can be a real pain if you're playing with pros. Rail ring, being the most deadly of all the weapon rings, could have some kind of weakness for them to backfire. Any other weapon rings are okay and I do like the new feature of being able to shoot ammo when you have no rings. It does sound like a pinch at first, but it does give players to still shoo off players if they're on your back. But getting cheeky will result in death.

Same thing on what I said about emeralds in battle mod, adding an indicator to alert people about emerald hunters.
 
I have many fond memories of ringslinger - especially back in the 1.09.4 days when you could combine weapon rings for blatantly overpowered setups (Automatic rails, anyone?). But I always felt like the changes to ringslinger from those days to 2.X were in someways a misstep, from changing to a more traditional weapon system that made it even more punishing, to get hit to adding chaos emeralds which added a rather annoying snowball mechanic (super forms in 2.0 -> the invincibility we have now). The current iteration of ringslinger makes me question why I'm not playing quake or one of the billion other arena shooters like it, whereas the old system at least had a mechanic of its own.

I touched battle mode for a few minutes today and it was apparent that the mode would probably be better off as an official mode compared to current ringslinger modes. While both can exist simultaneously as official modes in the game, I feel like ringslinger needs some sort of changeup if we're looking at multiplayer modes.
 
Battle > Ringslinger

I’m a big fan of a class based system rather then the extremely unbalanced system ringslinger introduces. I’m also not a fan of how ringslinger forces you to play in 1st person if you want to do even remotely well in a match. I recall people calling Sonic OP in ringslinger but that’s just simply because In a First person pvp scenario where the only difference between Playable characters is your stats... of course the fastest character will be the best.

Battle is fun and extremely engaging. I love the guard/parry mechanic a lot. I also am a fan of the priority system as well as the health system. It’s very unique and fun to play.
 
I'm gonna try and sing battle's praises while ignoring the obvious - yes, it's easy to play on a controller and feels more like a sonic game, but there's a lot more that makes Battle so great.

To those who haven't played battle yet - get on it ASAP. I'm sure you'll be pleasantly surprised - the mechanics are actually pretty deep despite being easy to pick up and play. There are a few frustrating aspects that are shared with ringslinger (namely, it can be extremely difficult to land a hit sometimes,) but I think the addition of character-specific abilities adds a whole new dimension of team play that was never really in ringslinger. All 6 of the vanilla characters are an absolute blast to play, and they're surprisingly well balanced too while keeping their abilities very faithful to their character. Battle is built to last - pulling off a successful parry punish or bouncing off multiple opponents in one jump or thokking someone off the side of nimbus ruins will never get old. Sniping people with rail rings got old, like, a decade ago. There's no video game like BattleMod - it's truly unique and very addicting.

Unfortunately, the vanilla map rotation has no slopes (except, funnily enough, some ceiling slopes in Dual Fortress Zone) but Battle thrives on slopes for its combat design - since the angle of collision between two players is so important, the slopes become part of the combat in a way ringslinger could never accomplish.

As a mapper, I have no interest in making anything for ringslinger. It's not complete trash, and I know it has fans, but there simply isn't enough an audience for that kind of game. Not only that, but nobody else seems excited to develop anything ringslinger related.
 
i have a lot of thoughts on this, but i need to think on em before posting something more in-depth.

i will say, though: "ringslinger is less fun because i cant aim" doesn't feel like a legitimate reason to phase it out. the game should be beginner-friendly, but modes should not be outright removed just because they have a higher skill floor.

battle is *okay*, but on it's own it's not nearly as engaging. it's too reductive of a PvP experience compared to ringslinger, imo.

i think the 2.0 changes were the beginning of the end of RS's popularity, due to its implementation being pretty terrible (like D00D said, it's like losing all of your weapons, ammo, and all but 1 of your health on a single hit in a Quake-like). imo the perfect solution is a combination of both, with the ability to toggle weapons. but i don't think it's this simple, either.

more later.
 
Gape in my ass until i split in half ya coop motherfuckers

Yes, uhm, what the hell???

Anyway, while I personally prefer to not play pvp in this game- and still haven't tried battle enough yet due to a semi-busted keyboard (I'm using another one for typing).
I will say that I majorly preferred it to Ringslinger for one thing; it's more fitting and less punishing than an arena shooter in a game where getting hit basically means starting over every time. It says something that the most fun I ever had with it was flying above large stages and dropping those mine rings around until I hit someone, before I started getting sniped repeatedly and targeted down, at which point I just stopped having fun due to the immense amount of perfect-accuracy point-&-click Sonics running around sniping everything that so much as breathes within two miles of them, to the point I'd often find more fun just running around and playing keep-away with the emeralds while trying to avoid the ringfire.
I've never enjoyed Ringslinger as a game-mode for how it was intended, which may say something about me or how the gametype works, since I'm not against FPS or arena shooters at all- I usually enjoy them a lot. But it just doesn't feel good in a Sonic-style like this IMO, especially because things boil down fast to 'Hah, I'm finally doing somethi- ah crud now I have to run away and get more ammo and rings before I die from this guy tracking me down' in my experiences.
 
not nearly as engaging. it's too reductive of a PvP experience compared to ringslinger, imo.

I'd love to hear you elaborate on this, because I just don't understand what makes battle reductive. It trades the entire arsenal of weapons in favor of giving each character a couple unique abilities, sure, but the arsenal of weapons in ringslinger isn't very strategically deep in my opinion. Many of the weapons just feel like different flavors of spam (auto, bounce, nade, infinity.) In ringslinger, I often feel like I'm not actually in control over combat because the projectiles move so slowly and players move so quickly. It seems wrong to simply write off battle as reductive or unengaging when ringslinger isn't anywhere close to the standard of modern shooters or classic arena shooters. Why play ringslinger when so many others do the same thing better? Battle is an experience only srb2 can provide.
 
Ringslinger will always have a special place in my heart, as someone who grew up playing Quake and various other FPS deathmatch games, plus putting a good amount of time into Ringslinger during Final Demo days. I think the anachronism is to its benefit. Combining old-school Deathmatches with Sonic mechanics is intriguing and fun.


But it does need work. I'm almost tempted to say it should do away with the classic Sonic ring mechanic and just have HP be its own separate resource like other FPS Deathmatch games. Rings otherwise function as they do now--you pick up rings to use as ammo, and getting hit makes you drop them, in order to keep things tense and unique from other Deathmatch games out there.


As for Battle, I love it and think the team should fully embrace it and include it in SRB2 standard. I see no reason why an updated and improved Ringslinger can't coexist with Battle.
 
I like how Battle emphasizes platforming and movement, which are similar skills (applied differently) to the main single-player experience. Ringslinger is more focused on speed and aiming/leading shots, the latter of which isn't really explored elsewhere in the game, and both of which are much harder to manage with the control delay inherent to SRB2's netcode.

Ringslinger's additional mechanics are fairly smoothly integrated onto the experience - firing rings is the only big mechanical difference to learn - while Battle has a bunch of minor changes and lots of additional mechanics to pick up. I'll admit that this is probably a natural result of Battle being an addon, and might be different if it was a part of the base game.

Both modes have the issue of introducing additional buttons that the rest of the game doesn't use. This is unavoidable, obviously, but as of now this gives ringslinger the slightest advantage since its controls are built into the base game, and thus the default control schemes are set up around them. That said, this also wouldn't be a problem for Battle if it was a base game mode.

Both modes end up being kind of weak in their base PvP modes imo (Match and standard Battle). I prefer CTF modes for both, and the other Battle modes that focus on one or two central objective points at a time, since they focus players on smaller, moving hotspots within the map for more dynamic gameplay. However, Match has more single camping points for resources due to its weapon mechanics than a Battle map on its own map does, so I think Battle has the advantage here.

I haven't touched mapping for either in years, but I'd much rather make maps for Battle gametypes since they're smaller and simpler than the typical ringslinger map has become. I suppose it'd be weird for the OLDC to support addon gametypes and not vanilla gametypes, but I think Battle divisions in the OLDC would be much more fun than ringslinger divisions if one had to go.

I'm not a fan of making the divisions "Match (but also with Battle support)" and "CTF (but also with Battle CTF support)" for reasons people have mentioned already: Battle and ringslinger are too different, and need map designs that are too different, for mappers to be able to make something that works well in both.
 
Personally, I prefer Battle over Ringslinger. Wrecking opponents with your character's abilities is much more fun than shooting shit at people.
 
As it is, there's basically a solid wall between SRB2's campaign and it's competitive modes. Ringslinger is an incredibly high-risk high-reward gametype that usually follows a cycle of everyone clamoring to get the strongest weapons and then whoever fucks up the least wins. It's a first person shooter multiplayer game, and everything that's quintessentially "Sonic" about it tends to make it worse. I don't find it fun.

Battle is better. Besides looking slicker and having more clear objectives (note:capture the flag still really sucks) it doesn't force you into a different control scheme and punish you so hard for taking damage, which I assume was the point. As a controller player, this is real important, because gamepad aiming in ringslinger is nearly impossible.

I cannot in good faith say there's a single thing I get from ringslinger that I couldn't by just going to a better FPS, especially now that Super's gone from multiplayer. But a game where I can punch Fang the Sniper halfway across the map? That's exclusive.

I wholeheartedly and unambiguously support Battle over Ringslinger.
 
I like Ringslinger, it's a sort of fresh and unique mish-mash of First-person shooter with Sonic elements, It feels very rewarding to throw a well timed slow projectile moments before your opponent reaches it and master the environments (shields, weapons, powerup locations) you kind of have to design your levels like typical shooter levels with enclosed areas and corridors so as not to give people with Railrings an unfair advantage.

It's biggest drawback is perhaps the drastic character trait differences but I don't think there's any reason to remove it, It's hidden as neat bonus for people curious enough to check multiplayer modes. just means another neat extra addition that might compel people to stick around and play the game more if they enjoy it or when they get bored of the other modes, if not they can just ignore it.
 
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I admittedly hold a soft spot for ringslinger, especially for its earlier incarnations back in final demo days and such. I think ringslinger captures the "speed" part that people look for in Sonic better than Battle, because almost always constantly moving at full speed dodging things and firing in return.

In Battle, especially with the new Arena and Survival maps, you're not moving as fast all the time, as combat is much more physical and close-ranged, and actually jumping into someone at full speed is pretty difficult, so everyone tends to slow down to be more accurate, which slows the over-all feeling of the mode. This isn't a bad thing. I love the newer, smaller maps with all my heart and soul. They remind me of games like Custom Robo, and that can only be a good thing.

If I had to choose one over the other, I'd pick Battle every time. but only in the Arena/Survival maps.
 

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