Baton unholster animation length (in multiplayer)

[RomekRF]

I wanted to open up a dialogue about the idea of making the baton select time the same or similar to the pistol or AR or any average weapon.

The current state of the baton has a rather long animation when selecting it. When unholstering, it spins and a hand presses a button, making it a bit longer than other weapon animations and more difficult than it should be to use in close combat effectively in multiplayer. If we consider other FPS games, often times the melee can be selected rather quickly, making it an effective and fast weapon when in close combat. I think the baton could be a lot of fun if used in a similar way, making it an effective weapon in multiplayer if you find yourself in a close 1v1, etc.

And the nice thing is we could use the "holster" animation in reverse as the "unholster" animation, since it looks like character is sheathing a blade and it's the same speed as most unholster animations.

Curious your thoughts.

[nickalreadyinuse]

I lean towards this shouldn't be changed for a few reasons:

1. While other games have melee actions (which are sometimes really high dmg or instakill) they often have much shorter TTK than RF and possibly short range distance closers/movement options as well (crouch sliding). To compensate, these games also have better lead-in animations for weapon switches so that players can respond to them properly. While the first-person baton animation is slow, the 3rd person swap is basically already 1 frame in MP (as are other weapons). That could be changed too, but I doubt it would help in this case because if you match it with other weapon's switch speed it's still only going to be a few frames.

2. In those games, melee options are often rather problematic because of latency and corresponding positional differences between clients. This is mitigated to some extent by matching players against others in their own region, but we do not have that luxury in RF most of the time. Positional discrepancies between players with differing pings are often quite large. If a 50ms player and a 150ms player were both moving at 9 m/s, some napkin math tells me that you could expect 1m or more discrepancy between where each player thinks the other is. Most of the time this isn't a big deal, but you can already visually see how bad it is when spectating someone while they are tracking with the AR or something. Often you'll see their crosshair far behind or far ahead of where your client's position of the enemy is. This makes it look like they're aiming at thin air and getting hits, but in actuality the enemy is just in a completely different position for them. Melee is much more sensitive to these differences in close range. If both players were running towards each other, that discrepancy of ~1m would probably double in effect as well.

3. To add to the problem above, if a low ping player collides with a player of a higher ping while they are both "firing" the baton, the low ping player should always "win" because their "shots" will arrive on the server first. This is true of all hitscan weapons as well obviously, but in close quarters positional desync will mean that if you can switch to the baton fast enough with a low ping, your higher ping opponent will likely not have any time to react at all.

4. On a technical level, the baton is quite buggy already. Its fire rate seems dependent on framerate (which needs to be fixed at some point). If you run the client and server at 60fps, the baton will fire at the correct rate and duration on both. If the server is above 60fps, the fire rate of the baton is increased (i.e. 120fps is 2x, 240fps is 4x and so on). Most people run the client above 60fps, which means their baton runs out of ammo on the client before it actually runs out on the server. This is not necessarily a blocker for what you're proposing, but it's an issue that would be a lot more glaring if baton use were a larger part of the game.

5. While it's not often usable in an analogous way to other games, the fact that the baton takes time to prep, and the friction this creates with using it makes actually getting kills with it more rewarding and interesting than other games. In something like CoD or OW melee in close quarters (with the exception of Tracer combos) becomes a reflexive thing you do when someone is close, rather than a planned action. It "solves" the problem of hitscan weapons being awkward to use at extremely close distances, but in doing so arguably mitigates or erases any skill players have acquired using weapons at those distances.

In terms of gameplay, I would not be terribly bothered by the change either way because I don't really think it would really be very effective to switch to it unless your opponent is unaware or can't respond to it for some reason. RF just doesn't have any real distance closers since there's no way to move faster than anyone else at any given time. The most effective way to use it right now is to peek a corner with one weapon as bait, and then switch to it and hold the angle when/if the enemy pushes the corner. I think that would still be the case with this change most of the time. But if it did become something that you could use more reactively in cqc, the largely unsolvable desync issues will become that much more noticeable - especially for high ping players (100ms+).

[RomekRF]

All really great points. Thanks for indulging me.