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TootsyBowl

Is there any shame in IDDQDing past a part you can't beat?

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8 minutes ago, 40oz said:

I personally dont see any significant gains in skill from replaying already played scenarios vs. playing Doom in a constantly changing environment. The best you can do is remind yourself to allocate resources better and play with greater caution now that the bullshit down the line is now known. But that's not really a "skill" that is useful for future playing.

Resource "allocation" is a skill that is worth learning in any case. That aside, people learn through repetition. This means that, in the picture of becoming generally better at doom, situations you repeat several times so they're more or less muscle memory, can be transitioned to any other map that involves similar scenarios, doubly so when those skills have been refined to a certain degree. Beating the hardest map there is doesn't necessarily help you in the next map that is meant to stomp FDAs, but it sure helps with getting the gist of the map quicker.

 

There's limits to this though, and when you reach that limit, routing and strategy comes in. All the hard maps need to be routed and choreographed, because WASD alone doesn't cut it anymore, so at some point repeating what you can do doesn't do much for you in the bigger scope of things. What I'm saying is that playing one map after another after also doesn't make you a doomgod over time.

 

If you're anything like me, and you consider a map beaten when you have one-shot it, you will need repetition/practice, routing and choreography, and you can't transition your route or choreography to the next map.

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Please make damaging floor in dead end pits even if you used a voodoo barrel to kill the player! It is extremely annoying to try multiplayer and wonder why a lot of shit suddenly doesn't work. 

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1 hour ago, rehelekretep said:

i think the question youd have to ask yourself in your scenario is 'why continue playing this map?' - not 'should i cheat or not?'

i think your argument supports saving and loading rather than cheating

Certainly, but the conditions in the OP mentioned "bad saves" which I'm understanding to mean "I haven't saved after 30 minutes of generally normal paced gameplay and this mod has taken an unexpected turn and now I'm stuck dealing with this situation I otherwise had no reason to predict" Do I have that right OP?

 

The reason to continue playing the map is to see the rest of it of course!

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17 minutes ago, 40oz said:

Certainly, but the conditions in the OP mentioned "bad saves" which I'm understanding to mean "I haven't saved after 30 minutes of generally normal paced gameplay and this mod has taken an unexpected turn and now I'm stuck dealing with this situation I otherwise had no reason to predict" Do I have that right OP?

 

The reason to continue playing the map is to see the rest of it of course!

By "bad saves", I mean when when even if you have saves to fall back on, you heave low amounts of health and ammo due to you squandering it in earlier parts of the level. For example, you spammed about 150 cells worth of plasma at some faraway revenants for a moment before deciding it was a better idea to use the chaingun. You save after this point. After that, you get in a fight where you keep running out of cells and getting killed. Your choice then is to either restart from an earlier save which can set you back a long way, or keep trying again and again, or IDDQD your way through.

 

EDIT: a few typos

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19 minutes ago, Rosh Fragger said:

Hardcore players don't cheat!

YES! They just SUCK IT DOWN and stay down the inescapable pit until their computer crashes or (in the days of CRT screens) they melt into a goo of radioactive protoplasm!!! YEAH!!!!

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Honestly I've cheated when I felt that something got a little unfair. Though I'd say as long as you're not cheating to beat other players over multi, it's fine to get a little godmod and maybe sv_infiniteammo to get through a level.

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12 hours ago, Maes said:

YES! They just SUCK IT DOWN and stay down the inescapable pit until their computer crashes or (in the days of CRT screens) they melt into a goo of radioactive protoplasm!!! YEAH!!!!

I only play multiplayer now, which doesn't allow cheating past an area. Just sayin'.

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I feel shame and defeat when I cheat... I feel shame and defeat when I cheat... I feel shame and defeat when I cheat.  This is my mantra. 

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18 minutes ago, Rosh Fragger said:

I only play multiplayer now, which doesn't allow cheating past an area. Just sayin'.

Yeah, it can be loads of fun when you lock all your buddies behind a barrier that was designed for single-player only, amirite?

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13 minutes ago, cacomonkey said:

I feel shame and defeat when I cheat... I feel shame and defeat when I cheat... I feel shame and defeat when I cheat.  This is my mantra. 

"I cheat because I suck! I suck because I cheat! *sobs*"

 

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14 minutes ago, Maes said:

Yeah, it can be loads of fun when you lock all your buddies behind a barrier that was designed for single-player only, amirite?

Every hexen pwad under the sun :(

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Depends.

Given it's a non-joke (and non-slaughter by genre) pWAD with an at least 3,5 stars of rating of at least 50 people otherwise neutral to the author, and you're starting it on UV because you're so hardcore, then you have to resort to cheating because you know, errors happened to your estimations like that'd occur from time to time - blame's on you, kiddo.

Spoiler

Sometimes even on HNTR I suck so bad that I cheat, like, everytime.
Hey, not everybody is born a demo recorder, stop giving me those nasty looks.

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10 minutes ago, Pegg said:

Every hexen pwad under the sun :(

It's also what makes the chaos device such a headache when designing maps.

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15 hours ago, Maes said:

Yeah, it can be loads of fun when you lock all your buddies behind a barrier that was designed for single-player only, amirite?

Hence there's a good reason to not play such maps in multiplayer.

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17 minutes ago, Rosh Fragger said:

Hence there's a good reason to not play such maps in multiplayer.

Tell that to random ZDaemon admins.

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9 hours ago, 40oz said:

If we look at death in Doom completely objectively, its just a reset button for the map that you control by avoiding things that subtract from your health. Now using IDDQD and passively plugging away at monsters while standing there and taking heat with no intention of playing better would certainly fit your model. But lets consider some more likely circumstances that the player might want to use cheat codes; like a very long map with all wimpy sniping hitscan enemies and a few shitty archvile encounters. The player used up all the scarce stimpacks and still only has 15% health for the next encounter. And then a surprise chaingunner squad trap in the dark at the very end saps any chance of survival in the given circumstance.

 

Under these conditions, the punishment for dying is being directed to replay everything that precedes it, but the issue wasn't necessarily that the player needs to retrain himself on all the annoying bullshit before, its that the player had no reason to assume that that unlikely scenario was going to come up and rob him/her of their progress.

 

I personally dont see any significant gains in skill from replaying already played scenarios vs. playing Doom in a constantly changing environment. The best you can do is remind yourself to allocate resources better and play with greater caution now that the bullshit down the line is now known. But that's not really a "skill" that is useful for future playing.

 

Lets also consider that mapping has no rules and can be as humiliatingly unfair as they choose to be. Instant death traps, unavoidable crushers, inescapable lava pits, softlocking doors that inhibit any possibility of moving forward etc. These types of scenarios dont really enable a learned skill when played with or without cheats.

I do indeed reckon there's enough variety in gameplay design possible in Doom--even with just the base game and base engine, at that--to allow for enough crazy, sudden difficulty spikes or viciously idiosyncratic design patterns (such as maps designed to make themselves physically unfinishable without ever communicating this to the player, as per your example) that no model or 'code of conduct' or whatever we might wish to call it could ever truly have a prescriptive answer for all possible situations. Speaking practically, though, these types of outliers are and have been vanishingly rare in community history, with only a small handful of creators every generation or so making it their conspicuous mission to be 'transgressive' for the sake of it (and most of these have very small/short careers, even those who against odds eventually end up being embraced by a wider audience). Again, this is particularly true for that type of map you used in example above, where the level geometry/machinery itself is designed to render reaching an exit all but impossible (though these are not entirely unheard of, for sure).

 

That being said, the vast majority of actual real-world comments/complaints about "unfairness" or "imbalance" or, more colloquially, "bullshit" in design are made about maps that fall much more readily somewhere within the realm of relative normalcy, provided we agree that the 20+ year old game at this point naturally has a somewhat broader spectrum of 'normalcy' than most, at any rate. For most types of maps made throughout the community's history--from whimsical 90s dungeons to histrionically overtuned 201x gauntlet maps, and almost everything in between--I think the general rule of thumb that falling back on cheat codes as a matter of habit will markedly stunt your growth (and thus, your capacity to participate fully in some greater or lesser portion of the community's output) holds true, whether the particular stumbling block in any given case pertains to fire and movement, resource management and meta-management (i.e. learning to break yourself of toxic/self-impeding save habits, to mention another specific example appearing in the thread thus far), navigational sense, puzzle-solving, or any combination of the above.

 

To another point, I don't agree that there is no value in repetition, that being killed once near the end of a map (even if we take it as granted that the thing that killed us was 'objectively' bullshit and completely unforeseeable) and thus having to replay from some earlier point completely devalues all game content that has to be retraversed in order to reach the point of death. Knowing on an intellectual/strategic level how to solve a given scenario is not the same thing as physically being able to actually reliably pull off the necessary maneuvers for victory, and by the same token, possessing more than an adequate level of dexterity/skill in controlling the game needed to defeat a given scenario is not the same thing as having the situational awareness or analytical ability needed to properly 'read' said scenario and consequently arrive at a workable plan for victory (and this is also why I conclude that you either don't learn or at least learn less when you opt to cheat, to whit). Of course, when we talk about highly seasoned players, simply for the sake of argument/investigation we will naturally tend to think about how they might reasonably act in some of these interesting outlying hypothetical scenarios, where neither twitch skill nor analytical ability are necessarily good metrics for likelihood of success outside of the grossest sort of trial-and-error investigation. But, bearing in mind that we're talking about players who feel like they have no choice but to cheat in order to make progress as a periodic matter of habit, I think it's a reasonable surmise that we are likely talking about players who could benefit from tighter movement control, sharper aiming and dodging ability, better overall situational awareness, and the like. These are abilities gained through practice, pure and simple; whether that practice is undertaken in the context of a somewhat known scenario (i.e. replaying a map that you just died at the end of) or in some hypothetical new scenario that you're instantly shunted off towards as soon as you've failed the previous one is largely irrelevant to the point, I think, but I reckon both have value in that regard.

 

The extension of this idea is, naturally, that one carries forward experiential gains through time and draws from them in meeting future challenges, i.e. you ideally apply what you learned in the map you played yesterday to the new, different map you're playing today. This is of course anything but a neat and tidy 1:1 'curricular' process, given the wide variety of scenarios possible in Doom, but if one adopts a general program of meeting the vast variety of challenges possible in the game with an eye towards flexibility, adaptability, and perhaps the occasional spot of lateral thinking, over time these accrued experiences will naturally tend to crystallize into play habits or skills making it more likely that a given player will able to engage with a wider variety of mapping styles without having to endure the experience of feeling utterly befuddled and alienated without any idea of how to proceed or acclimate to what they're presented with. Again, there's always a limit to what a loose code like this can grant you--the most demanding maps (those within the realm of relative normalcy, I mean) tend to require at least some measure of practice from even the very best players, for instance--but for the vast majority of players looking for some sort of long-term engagement with the game, I think it still holds true, even to some degree as regards the kind of outlier maps touched upon above. We tend to think of these as very hard to read, but to at least some extent this is probably because we've seen so few of them, yeah? Make something like that a proper (sub)-genre with enough iteration on its core design tropes, and eventually I guarantee you it will develop some following, some subset of players who can navigate new iterations on it with markedly less trouble than many of the rest of us precisely because they have paid their dues, gotten in their practice, and internalized some significant part of the design logic of the particular style.

 

Truly extreme outlier scenarios that fully repel/defeat this analysis in pretty much every way are still quite possible within the confines of the basic engine, I'd freely admit--I'm imagining something like a vast, visually featureless concrete room mined with a chaotic morass of invisible linedefs that immediately/permanently seal the exit at the opposite end of the space as soon as you cross one, something like that--but, while perhaps interesting from some sort of 'art vs. game' or human psychology standpoints, these are nebulous enough to not really be applicable to a discourse about why/how 99.99999% of us enjoy and choose to engage with the game, I reckon, or why most players who habitually cheat choose to do so.

Edited by Demon of the Well

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^ More like Demon of the Wall (of text)

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I want to continue to argue with you but I'm swooned by your beautiful vocabulary and sentence structure. I cant help but love everything I'm reading.

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10 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

If you're anything like me, and you consider a map beaten when you have one-shot it, you will need repetition/practice, routing and choreography, and you can't transition your route or choreography to the next map.

Not the route itself, but the ability to plan routes will transfer from one map to the next.

 

(Play Hell Revealed if you want to get good at this.)

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9 minutes ago, Cynical said:

Not the route itself, but the ability to plan routes will transfer from one map to the next

I partially agree, though the one issue I have here is that most people don't "route" maps past a certain point. More often than not, people look at where the secrets are to make sure they're in a good spot for when the more difficult fights happen, but that's about it. If a player has no incentive/motivation to look past this bare minimum of what a map is made of, routing skills won't improve much, if at all.

 

To echo what demon of the well said, this thread aims more at people with no interest in refining their play/routes to a speedrunning degree, and rather is about people who feel like they have to cheat to get past difficult spots.

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It matters what you desire to get out of your playing experience in doom. If you wish to refine yourself as a player, then don't do that. If you don't care and are just playing to kill things and have a care free time, go for it.

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Personally I avoid using god mode. If there's a bit of a map I'm having serious trouble with, I usually just IDFA (and heal myself a bit if my health is really low) since at least that way I still get to test my shooting and dodging skills. Sometimes I'll use IDFA on a familiar map as a fun way of blowing off steam.

 

I will admit this does mean that I'm not too crazy about maps that are really stingy with the ammunition. As long as I have the firepower I can happily deal with some of the usual doom map features that would otherwise be annoying; constant monster closets, demonic assault squads that teleport in whenever the player grabs a skull key, that kind of thing.

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I tend to find iddqding or any form of cheating past a part I can't beat to be fairly shameful, if I'm honest. What I'll do instead is put a save before the dangerous bit (in safety, and if I'm at good health. If I'm not in good shape, I'll revert to an earlier one and try that part again). I'd really rather just learn how to crack that portion of the map rather than just throw my hands up and give up. I'll do things like scope out the area with nomonsters if I need to get an idea of where everything is. I try as hard as possible to avoid savescumming difficult portions, trying to force the most favorable outcome, and I really haven't even when up against some of the hardest maps I had played in the past (stuff like btsx e1 map19 and plutonia's map32).

 

If I can't crack the map this way, I'll go seek out demos, and see how they handled a tough portion. Its sometimes hard to find a demo I can actually replicate, but they've proven useful in many occasions for me, especially with Plutonia.

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Don't think there is any shame in saving to skip long parts to save time before a hard fight. Especially if said parts are boring\hard themselves.

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Why? Same as IDDQD, BUDDHA also keeps you weak.

 

You can of course cheat if you're playing by yourself, and Doom automatically disables cheats in any situation that matters (demos, multiplayer), but it's not cool, because you're just avoiding challenges this way.

 

Sadly, we also don't have much time in our lives, and I hate that I have to restart the level when I lose. But I wish there was a more elegant way in Doom to reduce that risk than using cheats or save scumming.

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turns out you don't have to feel shame in cheating because like 80% of this forum feel strongly enough to go out of their way to look down on you for you

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