What's everyones opinion on Doom Online?

I remember playing some matches via ZDaemon, Zandronum, and Odamex not long ago. Even at like 100 ping the matches were extremely smooth, especially in comparison to most of the TF2 servers I play on (even though my ping is usually 40-50 on those servers)

14 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

Deathmatch 2.0 (items and weapons respawn) is, unfortunately, awful. Weapons are gone for a full 30 seconds, and since there’s a frag every 10 seconds in any respectable deathmatch, that means a lot of “two people firing the pea shooter helplessly at one another”. I understand what the logic was when they came up with it of course - but in practice it’s just awful.

 

Even DM 3.0, which refers to weapons staying while items respawn, is still completely unbalanced, even in well balanced maps. It’s HELL for a newbie especially. The more experienced player eventually runs out of ammo in “old deathmatch”, so even the newbie scores a mercy kill here or there..

 

In DM 3.0 the more skilled player can keep track of 30 seconds in their head and be a complete item whore, zipping from medikit to medikit and ammo stash to ammo stash.

Yeah, id did it progressively better with each Quake, up to Quake 3 Arena where the weapons respawn very quickly (and have their ammo bonus severely capped to avoid hoarding) and powerups very rarely (and with sound announcement). I guess the classic Doom implementation could be improved in mods similarly...

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Bah.. the Doom monsters have yet to come up with a new tactic. Just zig zag and fireball, zig zag and fireball, rinse and repeat.. An opponent that can think and strategise, one who can see the tactics I go for and change theirs accordingly - now that is a fun challenge!

 

As for the maps being small/repetitive - well, a DM shouldn’t last more than 5 minutes generally speaking, so if you load up a DM Megawad, that’s 30 individual 5 minute sessions before you have to ever play in the same arena twice. And most DM arenas made after 1995 tend to look anywhere between decent and incredible (if you play the top tier stuff).

I'd love to see a free-for-all deathmatch game where monsters are an active, deliberate part (and not just the byproduct of map's single-player support). Something where you can unleash monsters as a "weapon" against other players, or where they can work as neutral "guardians" of highly prized powerups. Or even more, where you practically need to temporarily ally yourself with other players to get rid of monsters, before you start fragging each other again.

I would love to see thoughtful use of monsters in DM just as you describe, that sounds really fun. As far as mods, something that makes how often an item respawns be directly linked to how “valuable” it is would actually be incredible - I can imagine guns having a 10 second respawn, regular items having 30, larger ammo boxes taking a minute, and “uber” powerups taking 90 seconds or even 2 minutes. That would be much more fair, I wager!

DBAB and AeonDM both utilized boss monsters (beefed up Korax and some strife boss, can't remember the name) as quasi hidden weapons to unleash against other players. Was good for last man standing games for sure but also very chaotic. PVP is usually centralized around balance and predictability, and monsters tend to throw that out the window, even if temporarily. Monsters, in general, are not a good idea in PVP. Good for a gimmick but beyond that, no thanks.

As for respawning weapons/other weapon balance issues, Progressive duel and eon weapons gave a pretty good reinterpretation of the weapon balancing, the SG and CG are much more reliable at getting frags and can stand up the SSG easily. Eon weapons in particular does a ton to make mapsets that have more SG emphasis so much funner, I cannot recommend that enough. Neon DM (and Aeon/DBAB) centralized around eon weapons as well, so if you want to experience something like Doom + which is not super SSG dominated, give it a run, pretty sure Doomshack has a server up.

/shilling. But seriously, these kinds of things have been the topic for debate for so long in the PVP scene and mappers within the PVP scene, it kind of shows how insulated it is when people who haven't done more than dip their toes in the waters of popular wads that do nothing to address these issues (dwango, brit, green war). It's also worth keeping in mind that those wads were made when block map was not removed in typical play (usually servers have it turned off, at least in zandronum) which greatly fucked up the weapon balanced. Though having it off also greatly increased the power the SSG, further tearing the balance apart. There is no real solution to the balancing, it really comes down to preference. A lot of actual competitive players, rather than people occasionally playing here, will tell you a map with no or less SSG action is worthless.

Every time I look on ZDaemon I can only find survival and coop, which is fine and all, but when I see all the deathmatch servers i get a indescribable feeling of nostalgia that puts a tear in my eye. I still get that blood thirst for frags from time to time. 

2 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Bah.. the Doom monsters have yet to come up with a new tactic. Just zig zag and fireball, zig zag and fireball, rinse and repeat.. An opponent that can think and strategise, one who can see the tactics I go for and change theirs accordingly - now that is a fun challenge!

in theory, yes. but in practice it is good old "swim, swim, hungry". movement patterns are even less interesting than monsters' ones, and when you see somebody's running, you can easily predict where they're running, because map control graph is quite small, and you can learn opponents preferences quite quick too. basically, it is a "meat bot" (and sometimes good bots are more interesting!).

2 hours ago, Doomkid said:

And most DM arenas made after 1995 tend to look anywhere between decent and incredible (if you play the top tier stuff).

yet you have no time to stop and look around (or wander around), so all that work is wasted. ok, not wasted, it can be used to make great screenshots. ;-)

2 hours ago, Doomkid said:

As for the maps being small/repetitive - well, a DM shouldn’t last more than 5 minutes generally speaking, so if you load up a DM Megawad, that’s 30 individual 5 minute sessions before you have to ever play in the same arena twice. And most DM arenas made after 1995 tend to look anywhere between decent and incredible (if you play the top tier stuff).

except if you play duels sometimes i see matches that last for 20 minutes if people play too defensively

at this point i feel like i have d_runnin, d5m1 and bye bye american pie engraved into my brain

1 hour ago, omalefico32x said:

at this point i feel like i have d_runnin, d5m1 and bye bye american pie engraved into my brain

Pretty sure any competitive player has had music off since forever. And for casual play, unless you turn off the game music and turn on your own, you are fucking up. There are very few wads worth turning on in-game music for.

23 minutes ago, Decay said:

Pretty sure any competitive player has had music off since forever. And for casual play, unless you turn off the game music and turn on your own, you are fucking up. There are very few wads worth turning on in-game music for.

yea i know but when i tried to play without music i got worse results

im way more productive when im listening too music dunno if thats related to adhd but i leave it on because of that (also i find it kinda boring to play without music)

im not complaning btw i love all of the musics i mentioned above

Zandronum co op with a crew is so much fun. I like mods like Master of Puppets and Shotgun Frenzy but mostly play vanilla. It's a great way to run through WADs

11 hours ago, ketmar said:

in theory, yes. but in practice it is good old "swim, swim, hungry". movement patterns are even less interesting than monsters' ones, and when you see somebody's running, you can easily predict where they're running, because map control graph is quite small, and you can learn opponents preferences quite quick too. basically, it is a "meat bot" (and sometimes good bots are more interesting!). 

Doom marines in the hands of a human are capable of being the most dangerous opponent in Doom, and it's not even close.  They're not following an A.I. that was designed to be "tough but beatable", they have access to the same tools and game mechanics you do and want to kill you as badly as you want to kill them.  There is definitely a skill gap between a newbie and a good player that will allow the good player to win 99% of the time.

Bots are no substitute because frankly there's a bit of a sophistication gap of the available Doom bots compared with the glut of bots available for a game like Quake.  Even still, I've never really played a CPU player (and I don't mean the A.I. of a PvE monster) in any game, ever, that was an acceptable substitute for a human opponent.

6 hours ago, ketmar said:

basically, it is a "meat bot"

If you are describing multiplayer deathmatch as "meat bots", you have never played deathmatch against actual opponents (no, a 5 year old sibling who has never touched the game before does not count).

18 hours ago, Obsidian Plague said:

literally all of the servers on doomseeker are either MM8BDM or "Complex Brutal Gigafart per gigashit Clusterfuck Doom Co-Op" and anything that isn't is just "overpowered team that can only use melee vs team that has access to guns" like hot damn i just want to shoot some dudes not play the hidden source(tm) why are you people making it this complicated to find a normal goddamn server where i can just frag some dudes

Odamex usually has lots of vanilla servers available. You should try that port :)

I personally enjoy playing deathmatch. I used to use Zandronum, but all of the servers were bogged down with tons of mods, so I went to Odamex. So far, all of the Doomers I've played with online have been nice people, and I always have a good time.

@ketmar I don’t want you to think I’m piling on since Alex and Edward have replied as well, the last thing I want to do is drill you over a simple disagreement between Doomers ;) but I have yet to meet a Doomer who doesn’t have their own unique way of moving around to throw opponents off, their own ideas about which way to go at intersections, and their own approach to attacking the player in general.

Watching a demo a lot of the subtle decisions each player makes is lost, but anyone who just runs full-pelt in a predictable loop around the map just stinks as a player and is going to get trounced. Even newbies try to shake up their movement when their approach is clearly failing, they’ll double back halfway through a lap to trip up the opponents ability to track them, they’ll make awkward and eclectic movements to throw off your ability to keep them in your sights, and they might even stutter their weapon firing rhythm intentionally to surprise the opponent with damage when they weren’t expecting it.

People also shake up their offense - sometimes SSG charging, sometimes sniping with the Chaingun or SG, and sometimes playing more defensive with predictive plasma and rockets. There’s just so many subtle variations on how players can choose to attack and defend and all of those micro-decisions have to be made so quickly due to how Doom works.. that constant stress and constant need to shake up your approach really sells it for me personally.

In any decent Megawad there’s variety in what each map favours and what each map “tends to punish” so it just has an exponential effect on that need to think quick - the strat that let you slam a player on a flat map with little cover may be your undoing on a map with a lot of vertical combat, or a map with a lot of cover, or depending on the size of the map - not to mention factors like what weapons and items are or aren’t given!

@Obsidian Plague check out the DOEL'S vanilla gameplay servers with Doomseeker 🤓 as vanilla as possible co-op on Zandronum with custom WADs. send an email to for requests too

7 hours ago, AlexMax said:

Bots are no substitute because frankly there's a bit of a sophistication gap of the available Doom bots compared with the glut of bots available for a game like Quake.

i am slowly working on it (very slowly). but the final goal is to make bots that can finish at least vanilla maps without any human help, and without any predefined waypoints.

3 hours ago, Doomkid said:

I don’t want you to think I’m piling on since Alex and Edward have replied as well, the last thing I want to do is drill you over a simple disagreement between Doomers ;)

eh, we just talking here, no hard feelings. everybody have their own way enjoying Doom, and we can talk about that. ;-)

3 hours ago, Doomkid said:

I have yet to meet a Doomer who doesn’t have their own unique way of moving around to throw opponents off, their own ideas about which way to go at intersections, and their own approach to attacking the player in general.

sure, personal patterns are there. yet they are still patterns, and they are easy to learn. i mostly played Q2 deathmatches, but it doesn't matter much, the core tactics is still the same: learn map control graph, take some time to learn opponent patterns, and then you can easily predict their actions. i don't have good enough reflexes to win close combat, tho, and the opponents learnt it too. so after some time it all coverges to boring oscillations.

3 hours ago, Doomkid said:

but anyone who just runs full-pelt in a predictable loop around the map just stinks as a player and is going to get trounced

i'm not talking about predictable loops, i'm talking about pathfinding on graphs. if you will imagine the map as a graph that connects "points of interest", you can dynamically assign weights to those points, and when you see somebody's running in some direction, you can more-or-less predict to which PoI they're heading. and then the more you're playing with somebody, the more you know about their patterns and preferences, and your predictions become better.

3 hours ago, Doomkid said:

There’s just so many subtle variations on how players can choose to attack and defend and all of those micro-decisions have to be made so quickly due to how Doom works

...and that's why they are predictable. the less time you have to think, the more predictable you are. even "sudden tactics change" is predictable after some time. exactly because you don't have time to think, and have to rely on your trained patterns. it is just how human brain works. simple neural network can learn this, and have right predictions rate around 60%-80% (depending of implementation). and humans are much better than neural networks at noticing patterns.

but i think we are really moving into offtopic territory here. i'm not thinking that people who love DMing are dumb or something, of course, it's just not my cup of tea. i explained a little why it is boring for me, but others can have different opinions on that. ;-)

also, i simply don't like the idea of defeating others to win; for me, cooperation is much more interesting. ;-)

Played Doom online via Zandronum. Due to poor internet connection (Well... not exactly. I was just like super far away from all active servers so my ping was in the 200s ) everything lagged all the time and it made my already poor Dooming skills 10x worse but it was still playable and it was still fun. I would still play it but my internet has gotten worse over the years and now the lag makes it unplayable. I hope to play it again someday when I have better internet and less lag.

Would recommend.

14 hours ago, ketmar said:

i mostly played Q2 deathmatches, but it doesn't matter much, the core tactics is still the same: learn map control graph, take some time to learn opponent patterns, and then you can easily predict their actions.

Okay, yeah, this explains your takes.  I don't blame you for not having a high opinion of PvP gameplay if the majority of your past experience was playing a standard arena shooter like Quake 2.

Doom is not like this.  Anybody with a Super Shotgun can kill you no matter how big your stack is (if not in one shot, then in few enough shots to not make you safe), and the "attrition" in Doom is frags on the board, not how big of a stack you have.  There's a lot less traversing a map control graph to the correct item to contest and more in-the-moment playing of SSG chicken in whatever part of the map you finally met your opponent, which requires a lot more navigation finesse.  Duel has no re-spawning items to control, only a limited amount to ration out.  Although FFA is generally played with respawning items these days, you're probably going to randomly die to some idiot spamming rockets anyway, so you have to account for that in your overall strategy.  And that's not even getting into CTF.

If you're simply not a fan of PvP gameplay, that's understandable, but drawing on Quake for comparison isn't terribly helpful since they're two different games.  Doom PvP is chaos where movement is fast, everybody is dangerous, and life is cheap.

it good

As an European, it has grown increasingly hard to get vanilla (or, to be exact, without gameplay mods, I don't mind full 3D arenas) deatchmatching...

Servers rarely pop up (except for Megaman of course), and when they do its the americans playing at 3 am GMT.

And I heard people saying : you need to boot up the servers yourself, but... I don't really want to bother that much with dmflags ans stuff...

And my connection is really not that good.

So I need to rely on bigger DM communities that rally people up.