Shotbow

Some of you may have seen me on the Gun Game servers (have you tried Gun Game yet?) fiddling around. The beauty of our weapon system is that each gun is fine tuned by over 30 variables. This allows me to tweak things to get very specific results, and also do it on the fly. Gun Game is a fantastic way for me to test balance changes, as I can immediately see how weapons do and get feedback from the users. Here are the changes I made:

• All rifles/machine guns had their damages lowered. For example, the SCAR-H used to do 16 damage, now it does 8. For the SCAR-H, this means at close range a headshot is still a one shot kill (unless you are wearing body armor), however at long ranges it may not one shot kill you due to its effective range. Additionally, it will take more body shots to kill someone. I felt this made combat more tactical, meaning the person spraying doesn't necessarily win out against someone carefully firing shots. There will always be that lucky shot though.
• Increased the damage of the AA-12. It didn't feel right that it was harder to get a close range kill with the AA-12 than the shotgun. It should be very powerful now, but you'll still eat through your precious ammo.
• Increased effective range of the Mosin to be unlimited to compensate for its damage drop. The Mosin now does 10 damage (highest in the game) and has no damage drop off. However, body shots are no longer one shot kills. This means that a well placed headshot from afar will always kill someone, but you'll need to be a little more skillful up close. For the record, the Mosin has no natural spread when you are crouched.
• Dramatically increased the spread on the M249/M240/PKP when you are not crouched. This means you'll need to be a sitting duck if you want to maintain accuracy. I may tweak this further, but overall this should give rifles a chance at longer ranges than the machine guns. Along with the overall damage decreases to all weapons, this really balanced machine guns. If you spray long enough you are eventually going to kill someone, but you are going to use a LOT more ammo than you did before. This will also nerf people with jetpacks a bit, as the spread will be substantial when you are in the air.
• Fine tuned fly hack detection. I didn't realize people were getting away with it. I personally banned about 20 people last night, and about 100 have been autobanned. To ensure these are good bans, I personally reviewed about 15 of them last night by looking at the banned user's last location, violation level, and inventory. In all cases the users were on top of buildings that they could not get on top of or in another hard to reach places with no grapple hook or jet pack. So, these are good bans. I hope this fixes some of the concerns with hacking as of late.

Let me know what you think. This update will be live on the Wasted servers on their next reboot.

Greetings, Shotbow wielders!

Shotbow Games came as a surprise to many because it is

1) Not made exclusively by us.
2) Very similar to another server network's gamemode.

This was a project that libraryaddict created for any server to host. He lists his reasons in his devbukkit page here: http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/hunger-games/ so I won't go over those. The ultimate goal of pushing this project in its current form by libraryaddict was to send a message: It's not fun getting ripped off. We pride ourselves on being original and innovative, and I apologize for any confusion caused by our opening up the SBG servers in a clearly unoriginal state. Over the next while I will be working tirelessly to differentiate ourselves from the original project so that Shotbow Games can actually be a Shotbow worthy gamemode. Feel free to submit ideas and suggestions here on the forums and especially to provide feedback on changes as they happen. This update focused on bringing some familiar Shotbow game mechanics to SBG, as well as introducing some new ones

Without further adieu, here is the first changelog for Shotbow Games:

• Added DoubleJumper kit.
• Added Mole kit.
• Added Grappler kit.
• Added Scout kit, line of sight check is 10 blocks instead of 20 like on Wasted.
• Added Jedi kit.
• Added Sociopath kit.
• Added a new crafting recipe: a red mushroom + a brown mushroom + an empty bottle = a splash health 1 (Thanks Zombry for the suggestion)

(Enter "IHaveReadTheChangelog" in the xp code section of the xp shop for 200xp- expires Saturday)

As many of you can tell, we have rolled a new map to Wasted. It has the same number of cities but is much smaller from a land mass perspective. The goals were this:

• Move average city-to-city car travel time to 1 minute. Move average city-to-city sprint travel time to 2 minutes. Sometimes this is accomplished through distance, sometimes through obstacles (making a jet pack / spec ops a faster direct path).
• More diverse terrain so that it is actually interesting to explore.
• Condense the map so that more than just a handful of people can reach an objective.

I know this speeds things up a bit, but I feel the travel time now matches the pace of the other game elements. You will run into people more often, but I think this is okay. There is still plenty of map work to be done, as we plan to add more easter eggs and also plan to have random rare chests/locations around the map.
Some other fixes:

• Team restrictions were removed due to complaints.
• UMP45 had its reload time lowered to match that of the MP5
• Fixed a bug where Tetraporc could play the game.
• Added the new wasted map with shop locations to the MAP tab of the website.