Post by TRUE EB0LA on Sept 12, 2016 9:11:22 GMT -5
ALL CREDIT FOR THIS GUIDE GOES TO u/Pwadigy
On “Ghost Bullets”
With ‘Ghost Bullets’ fresh on the collective mind of this subreddit, I intend to talk about the topic in length before we inevitably get a PR response from the sandbox team quoted by Deej in the next weekly update, telling us in idealistic and technical terms why “Ghost Bullets” are working as intended.
Mainly, I’m making this write-up, because I can also write in idealistic and technical terms everything I know about the mechanic, how it works, why it was chosen by the dev team, and why it needs to go.
Bloom
Obviously, the real name of what we call “ghost bullets” is a mechanic which was dubbed “bloom” in past shooters. Neither of these are the correct term. The first has a sort of glitchy connotation, and I’ll explain why this particular mechanic feels so glitchy in its current form in Destiny. The second term, “bloom,” actually comes from Halo Reach, another Bungie title where the mechanic in question became noticeable to the player.
Accuracy
In reality, bloom is shorthand for two firing mechanics that the sandbox team can change, initial accuracy, and final accuracy. Both can be imagined as cones that splay outward from your gun. They splay from where you aim your center reticle, and the geometric shape of the cone simulates uncertainty. In other words, any trajectory in that cone can be simulated for your bullet. The bigger this cone, the more inaccurate your gun becomes. However, this is not all, the exact shape (compare, for instance, an ice-cream cone to a funnel-head) of that cone will also determine how inaccurate your gun can be at various ranges. This cone is greater when you fire from the hip, and smaller when you ADS. However, it is different in shape and size on different guns.
History of the “Bloom” mechanic
Tactical Shooters
The origin of bloom is in PC games and tactical shooters. It was perhaps the first “solution” (so to speak) to making guns feel diverse in games which were essentially point-and-click.
In a tactical shooter, your guns are very inaccurate. However, if you make tactical decisions, you can overcome the mechanic. For instance, crouching and going prone (like you would in modern-warfare) or performing similar actions can make your gun more accurate. Essentially, you from having to bank on luck to being able to point and click.
However, tactical shooters are very different from what players would expect nowadays. Tactical shooters play at a snails’ pace. Essentially, they were too realistic, and ended up being boring for many players. Console gamers already struggle to hit shots with analog sticks, so the games naturally feel less rewarding and satisfying to play.
Consoles
What’s interesting about the bloom mechanic, is that console games never really had the problem that PC games had. You can’t point and click with an analog stick. Instead, console aiming is characterized by broad, sweeping motions. These motions on one hand are less accurate but at the same time more immersive. Essentially, you feel as if you are spinning to hit a target. Again, you can get a more extensive breakdown of the differences between console and PC aiming above.
The solution to the naturally less accurate analog stick was aim-assist. All shooters have aim-assist. The mechanics of aim-assist are pull, friction, and magnetism. All of this is explained in the thread above, but I’ll skip right to the point:
The Bungie game, and how it took aim-mechanics to the next level
All shooters have some degree of aim-assist, however, it’s mostly a token to make sure that console players can actually hit each other reliably.
Bungie on the other hand, decided to be more ambitious. Guns in Bungie game are completely defined by how the friction and pull of a gun change at different ranges. You know you’re firing a DMR because it feels squishy even from cross-map, and you know you’re firing a Carbine because it loses that gooeyness after mid-long-range, but gets extra gooey in close range.
The same is true in Destiny, a scout rifle feels like your gun is physically grabbing targets at ultra-long range, whereas hand-cannons feel like they smack targets in close-range, but are struggling to touch long-range targets.
Back to the bloom mechanic
In FPS games, bloom took a backseat for the longest time. Mostly, bloom was nominal, meaning that it was so little, that you’d only ever notice it from cross-map on the longest map.
If you point at a target in most FPS shooters, you hit that target.
Halo Reach
Halo Reach, however, changed that, and the results were disastrous. And not because of how it was implemented. Indeed, Reach bloom was from a lot of respects, the best you could get.
It had near perfect initial accuracy, meaning that if you paced your shots, you would always guarantee a hit. Likewise, you could easily measure and calculate risk.
Also, there were mechanics put in place to curb bloom. Zooming in and crouching would all help to mitigate bloom.
However, players still revolted. The reason this was such was because at its core, Reach just wasn’t meant to have bloom. With the kind of aim-physics that Bungie uses as its trademark in its shooters, How a shot felt would tell you exactly whether it should land or not.
In other words, if you feel like you’re going to get a hit, you’re going to expect a hit. Anything less would feel glitchy, like the game was leading you on.
Bloom in Destiny - Why players instinctively call it a glitch
This pretty much goes back the point of Halo reach, except more exaggerated for the following reasons:
Essentially, the game is telling you “Hey, you’ve lined up the shot.” you feel the enemy’s head before you fire. It’s your first shot in the gunfight. You fire. The game returns a miss or a body shot.
Naturally, you feel like this is a glitch. It isn’t a glitch, but it feels glitchy, jarring, and produces a true WTF moment. And in some ways, that is the same result from the player’s perspective as an actually glitched game.
You can’t pass off gameplay that feels glitchy as fine simply because it’s intended to do a certain thing.
Why Bungie implemented bloom in Destiny
Bloom was essentially an overreaction to two guns in the sandbox. If we remember Year 1 HoW, legendary Hand cannons were fairly balanced compared to the counterparts in other weapon classes. The only real outliar were Auto-rifles, and they needed more damage.
The main problem with hand cannons was that they fundamentally allow players to do things that other guns can’t do.
For some reason, Bungie doesn’t want players doing these things. The hole in the sandbox so to speak was that other primaries were “point and shoot” while hand-cannons were “move and shoot.”
Instead of giving that same “move-and-shoot feel” to the rest of the sandbox, they added RNG to hand cannons and called it a day.
Meanwhile, players clearly decided against Bungie’s intentions and for themselves decided that this game should be played as a move-and-shoot game. There are so many reasons why this game naturally feels better when players move more, and the other thread had more on the topic.
Maybe it’s because Bungie is more comfortable with Halo-style gameplay. But the fact is, there are only so many different way you can create meaningful interactions in an FPS, and Hand cannons in Y1 exponentially increased the number of decisions you could make.
The obvious response would be to share some of that love with the other weapon classes. If players like a thing, then the result should be to see why they like it, and then figure out how to adjust other guns and abilities accordingly.
Instead, the entire hand cannon class got cut down, and all of the top guns in other classes that never really got to shine at the upper level also got cut down.
On Engagement Range and the holes in the current sandbox
Destiny is unique, because there is no way to set engagement range. This is my biggest pet peeve with the accompanying dev-notes to the balancing patches. In Bungie’s mind, they are balancing four distinct weapon with their own distinct ranges. You see it all the time. They adjust “where” a weapon is used more frequently than “how” it is used. Some examples:
These are just two examples. But you get the picture. In Bungie’s eyes, hand cannons were broken because you could hit shots at scout-rifle ranges. When in reality, scout rifles were broken because you couldn’t keep up with common scenarios with a scout-rifle.
For instance, a Bungie dev might look at Triple-wreck’s video and call that distance mid-long range, and say “hey, that mechanic is working as expected”
However, any experienced player knows that the distance in that video could be cleared by a titan with a jugg shield in about 1 second. A blade-dancer could blink into shotgun range. A warlock could slide-and-glide into shotgun-melee range.
So basically, range in Destiny is defined by how fast players can move to make up the distance. Anything outside of immediate burst-motion-range feels exponentially longer the farther you go.
So, real quickly, I’m going to map out engagement ranges based on how Bungie perceives them, based on evidence in the form of their patch-notes, and the fall-off stats.
anyways, this is fine and dandy, and on paper it looks great, but this is what actually happens in practice:
The reason this is not ideal is because the mid-range is so small. Hand cannons played an important role in deterring gank-strats at the outer edges of where movement speed can overtake Time-to-kill. With massive amounts of bloom on hand cannons, a player is better off either trying to gank another player himself, or equipping a pulse-rifle or a scout-rifle and staying in locations which are guaranteed to keep them out of non-ideal engagement ranges.
This results in a game where players either camp in tunnels if they are playing for the gank, or camp in lanes if they are playing for the long-range. This is best evidenced by widow’s court, which used to be a fairly decent map. Nowadays, you have gankers camping in the various rubble, and hard-aimers camping at the back of lanes.
The reason these two ranges are toxic for the game
Hand cannons - the hole in the sandbox
There is effectively no bridge between the two ranges. Mid-range is farther out than Bungie thinks to be the case, and only hand-cannons can handle the outer-edges of gank-range.
Scout-rifle and pulse-rifle users are heavily discouraged from leaving hard-aim range, because mid-range is so close to where players can gank each other.
In other words, Hand cannons need to be able to comfortably handle true mid-range, and not the neater, linear distances Bungie uses. At this point this could be done by simply removing bloom. Fall-off would keep hand cannons from ultra-long ranges. Likewise, Hand cannons would be most ideal at the edge of gank-range, making them consistent tools to deal with gankers (whereas right now, they are inconsistent at best).
End-result would be a 5m increase in both direction in the mid-range, making a healthy place for players using different primary weapons to all have a reason to actually use them.
SOURCE
On “Ghost Bullets”
With ‘Ghost Bullets’ fresh on the collective mind of this subreddit, I intend to talk about the topic in length before we inevitably get a PR response from the sandbox team quoted by Deej in the next weekly update, telling us in idealistic and technical terms why “Ghost Bullets” are working as intended.
Mainly, I’m making this write-up, because I can also write in idealistic and technical terms everything I know about the mechanic, how it works, why it was chosen by the dev team, and why it needs to go.
Bloom
Obviously, the real name of what we call “ghost bullets” is a mechanic which was dubbed “bloom” in past shooters. Neither of these are the correct term. The first has a sort of glitchy connotation, and I’ll explain why this particular mechanic feels so glitchy in its current form in Destiny. The second term, “bloom,” actually comes from Halo Reach, another Bungie title where the mechanic in question became noticeable to the player.
Accuracy
In reality, bloom is shorthand for two firing mechanics that the sandbox team can change, initial accuracy, and final accuracy. Both can be imagined as cones that splay outward from your gun. They splay from where you aim your center reticle, and the geometric shape of the cone simulates uncertainty. In other words, any trajectory in that cone can be simulated for your bullet. The bigger this cone, the more inaccurate your gun becomes. However, this is not all, the exact shape (compare, for instance, an ice-cream cone to a funnel-head) of that cone will also determine how inaccurate your gun can be at various ranges. This cone is greater when you fire from the hip, and smaller when you ADS. However, it is different in shape and size on different guns.
- Initial accuracy determines the size and shape of a cone when you begin to fire, or after your bloom cone has reset after firing. For the most part, Triplewreck was testing Initial accuracy in his video.
- Final accuracy on the other hand, is how much larger the cone becomes immediately after firing before slowly scaling down to its initial size. This mechanic is to encourage pacing shots to obtain higher degrees of accuracy.
History of the “Bloom” mechanic
Tactical Shooters
The origin of bloom is in PC games and tactical shooters. It was perhaps the first “solution” (so to speak) to making guns feel diverse in games which were essentially point-and-click.
In a tactical shooter, your guns are very inaccurate. However, if you make tactical decisions, you can overcome the mechanic. For instance, crouching and going prone (like you would in modern-warfare) or performing similar actions can make your gun more accurate. Essentially, you from having to bank on luck to being able to point and click.
However, tactical shooters are very different from what players would expect nowadays. Tactical shooters play at a snails’ pace. Essentially, they were too realistic, and ended up being boring for many players. Console gamers already struggle to hit shots with analog sticks, so the games naturally feel less rewarding and satisfying to play.
Consoles
What’s interesting about the bloom mechanic, is that console games never really had the problem that PC games had. You can’t point and click with an analog stick. Instead, console aiming is characterized by broad, sweeping motions. These motions on one hand are less accurate but at the same time more immersive. Essentially, you feel as if you are spinning to hit a target. Again, you can get a more extensive breakdown of the differences between console and PC aiming above.
The solution to the naturally less accurate analog stick was aim-assist. All shooters have aim-assist. The mechanics of aim-assist are pull, friction, and magnetism. All of this is explained in the thread above, but I’ll skip right to the point:
- Console shooters have the advantage of allowing you to feel a target as you aim at it.
- Without any aim-mechanics, even the best console players would struggle to hit a target at all
The Bungie game, and how it took aim-mechanics to the next level
All shooters have some degree of aim-assist, however, it’s mostly a token to make sure that console players can actually hit each other reliably.
Bungie on the other hand, decided to be more ambitious. Guns in Bungie game are completely defined by how the friction and pull of a gun change at different ranges. You know you’re firing a DMR because it feels squishy even from cross-map, and you know you’re firing a Carbine because it loses that gooeyness after mid-long-range, but gets extra gooey in close range.
The same is true in Destiny, a scout rifle feels like your gun is physically grabbing targets at ultra-long range, whereas hand-cannons feel like they smack targets in close-range, but are struggling to touch long-range targets.
Back to the bloom mechanic
In FPS games, bloom took a backseat for the longest time. Mostly, bloom was nominal, meaning that it was so little, that you’d only ever notice it from cross-map on the longest map.
If you point at a target in most FPS shooters, you hit that target.
Halo Reach
Halo Reach, however, changed that, and the results were disastrous. And not because of how it was implemented. Indeed, Reach bloom was from a lot of respects, the best you could get.
It had near perfect initial accuracy, meaning that if you paced your shots, you would always guarantee a hit. Likewise, you could easily measure and calculate risk.
Also, there were mechanics put in place to curb bloom. Zooming in and crouching would all help to mitigate bloom.
However, players still revolted. The reason this was such was because at its core, Reach just wasn’t meant to have bloom. With the kind of aim-physics that Bungie uses as its trademark in its shooters, How a shot felt would tell you exactly whether it should land or not.
In other words, if you feel like you’re going to get a hit, you’re going to expect a hit. Anything less would feel glitchy, like the game was leading you on.
Bloom in Destiny - Why players instinctively call it a glitch
This pretty much goes back the point of Halo reach, except more exaggerated for the following reasons:
- Aim-physics (How the aim-assist mechanics work at various ranges) play an even larger role in Destiny than other shooters
- Bloom is measurably greater on Hand cannons than the Reach DMR
- Bloom is implemented poorly, with low initial accuracy compared to Reach’s near perfect initial accuracy. Meaning that pacing shots won’t guarantee a hit.
Essentially, the game is telling you “Hey, you’ve lined up the shot.” you feel the enemy’s head before you fire. It’s your first shot in the gunfight. You fire. The game returns a miss or a body shot.
Naturally, you feel like this is a glitch. It isn’t a glitch, but it feels glitchy, jarring, and produces a true WTF moment. And in some ways, that is the same result from the player’s perspective as an actually glitched game.
You can’t pass off gameplay that feels glitchy as fine simply because it’s intended to do a certain thing.
Why Bungie implemented bloom in Destiny
Bloom was essentially an overreaction to two guns in the sandbox. If we remember Year 1 HoW, legendary Hand cannons were fairly balanced compared to the counterparts in other weapon classes. The only real outliar were Auto-rifles, and they needed more damage.
The main problem with hand cannons was that they fundamentally allow players to do things that other guns can’t do.
For some reason, Bungie doesn’t want players doing these things. The hole in the sandbox so to speak was that other primaries were “point and shoot” while hand-cannons were “move and shoot.”
Instead of giving that same “move-and-shoot feel” to the rest of the sandbox, they added RNG to hand cannons and called it a day.
Meanwhile, players clearly decided against Bungie’s intentions and for themselves decided that this game should be played as a move-and-shoot game. There are so many reasons why this game naturally feels better when players move more, and the other thread had more on the topic.
Maybe it’s because Bungie is more comfortable with Halo-style gameplay. But the fact is, there are only so many different way you can create meaningful interactions in an FPS, and Hand cannons in Y1 exponentially increased the number of decisions you could make.
The obvious response would be to share some of that love with the other weapon classes. If players like a thing, then the result should be to see why they like it, and then figure out how to adjust other guns and abilities accordingly.
Instead, the entire hand cannon class got cut down, and all of the top guns in other classes that never really got to shine at the upper level also got cut down.
On Engagement Range and the holes in the current sandbox
Destiny is unique, because there is no way to set engagement range. This is my biggest pet peeve with the accompanying dev-notes to the balancing patches. In Bungie’s mind, they are balancing four distinct weapon with their own distinct ranges. You see it all the time. They adjust “where” a weapon is used more frequently than “how” it is used. Some examples:
- To fix snipers, they increased scope zoom, because snipers fit in a neat little box in their minds at a certain meter-range (Probably 60-70). What they didn’t realize, is that that range is effectively a useless range in Destiny for dynamic play. Meanwhile, sweaty players were using snipers to slid around corners and punish players who stayed in one place long enough. The end result of this change was that snipers hard-scoped harder, and had an easier time going for body-shot swaps.
- To fix shotguns, they nerfed their range a total of 4 times, and players would still run around the map with their secondary weapons out. In bungie’s mind, shotguns were a close-range weapon that were somehow getting way more kills than you’d expect. So they naturally lowered the range. It wasn’t until Bungie finally focused on the draw-speed, and the fact that players would combine shotguns with fast-motion, artificially extending shotgun range. If Bungie had realized this sooner, they wouldn’t have needed 4 range-nerfs (which did little more than make shotguns feel less consistent), and they would have gotten to the heart of the issue faster.
These are just two examples. But you get the picture. In Bungie’s eyes, hand cannons were broken because you could hit shots at scout-rifle ranges. When in reality, scout rifles were broken because you couldn’t keep up with common scenarios with a scout-rifle.
For instance, a Bungie dev might look at Triple-wreck’s video and call that distance mid-long range, and say “hey, that mechanic is working as expected”
However, any experienced player knows that the distance in that video could be cleared by a titan with a jugg shield in about 1 second. A blade-dancer could blink into shotgun range. A warlock could slide-and-glide into shotgun-melee range.
So basically, range in Destiny is defined by how fast players can move to make up the distance. Anything outside of immediate burst-motion-range feels exponentially longer the farther you go.
So, real quickly, I’m going to map out engagement ranges based on how Bungie perceives them, based on evidence in the form of their patch-notes, and the fall-off stats.
- 1-5m Point-blank, any point at which a shotgun can kill you easily and consistently
- 5m-15m, short-range. Where shotguns, hand cannons, and auto-rifles share real-estate
- 15m-30m, short-mid range. Where Hand cannons lose effectiveness hard due to RNG, and pulse-rifles take over. Scouts start feeling comfortable at this range.
- 30m-50m where pulses start losing effectiveness, and scouts take over.
- 50m-80m, where snipers and scouts are more or less equal.
anyways, this is fine and dandy, and on paper it looks great, but this is what actually happens in practice:
- 0-30m, gank range, where you’re easy pickings to shotguns, shotgun-melees, titan-skates, stickies, fusion rifles, slide-shotguns, and general beat downs. This is due to Destiny’s inherent movement speed. Hand cannons are too inaccurate to guarantee hits at the edge of this engagement range, meaning that by the time Hand cannons are consistent, you’re already going to be ganked. Pulse-rifles and scouts have too much zoom, and not enough flexibility (in the form of hip-fire) to handle fast-moving threats, even in the outer reaches of this range. And this is important, because this range comes up a lot in Destiny. Entire maps are played entirely at this range. cough, Drifter, Vertigo, Thieve’s Den, cough.
- 30-35m. This is the true mid-range, where any player with any primary (except hand cannons) can realistically engage each other with enough skill without worrying about high-speed ganks (with a few exceptions). This is where sweaty snipers due their slide-snipes to make up for the fact that hand cannons can’t do this range. This range barely comes up in standard Destiny play, and is becoming increasingly rarer.
- 35-40m, this is long-range. You’ll notice that it’s only five meters. Again, it’s because of how Destiny movement speed works. In this range, a player can reliably get through the entire kill-time of a pulse-rifle or a scout if they place all of their shots perfectly. However, at this range, you can’t stand around aiming, because a player could turn the engagement to short-range in seconds without looking at the radar.
- 40m+ This is Destiny’s Toxic range, where you’re free to hard-aim, and check your radar every few seconds. You can either do this with a sniper-rifle, or you can stand around with a pulse-rifle. This is the most common range besides gank-range.
The reason this is not ideal is because the mid-range is so small. Hand cannons played an important role in deterring gank-strats at the outer edges of where movement speed can overtake Time-to-kill. With massive amounts of bloom on hand cannons, a player is better off either trying to gank another player himself, or equipping a pulse-rifle or a scout-rifle and staying in locations which are guaranteed to keep them out of non-ideal engagement ranges.
This results in a game where players either camp in tunnels if they are playing for the gank, or camp in lanes if they are playing for the long-range. This is best evidenced by widow’s court, which used to be a fairly decent map. Nowadays, you have gankers camping in the various rubble, and hard-aimers camping at the back of lanes.
The reason these two ranges are toxic for the game
- Put quite simply, gank-range is where engagement don’t have much input from both players at the same time. One player gets the timing right, and wins the gank-off.
- At long-range, only so many things can happen. I can’t jump with a scout rifle, If I run around, I won’t significantly change my angle of engagement. Likewise, adjusting to motion really easy. Long-range combat is literally whoever sees whoever first, with little interference.
- Meanwhile, mid-range suffers and is becoming increasingly tinier. This is the best range to have in Destiny. Players can have high-speed, high-precision gunfights in which their decisions in that gunfight can actually matter. Angular momentum is fast enough that if a player moves, this registers a significant change from the perspective of the other player.
Hand cannons - the hole in the sandbox
There is effectively no bridge between the two ranges. Mid-range is farther out than Bungie thinks to be the case, and only hand-cannons can handle the outer-edges of gank-range.
Scout-rifle and pulse-rifle users are heavily discouraged from leaving hard-aim range, because mid-range is so close to where players can gank each other.
In other words, Hand cannons need to be able to comfortably handle true mid-range, and not the neater, linear distances Bungie uses. At this point this could be done by simply removing bloom. Fall-off would keep hand cannons from ultra-long ranges. Likewise, Hand cannons would be most ideal at the edge of gank-range, making them consistent tools to deal with gankers (whereas right now, they are inconsistent at best).
- Meanwhile, scout-rifles and Pulses would need to be able to truly compete with no-bloom hand cannons without being flat-foot bait to gankers. This could be accomplished by fattening the aim-ballistics (as I described in the other post), or more ideally, reducing zoom, and increasing long-range firing ballistics to make up for it.
End-result would be a 5m increase in both direction in the mid-range, making a healthy place for players using different primary weapons to all have a reason to actually use them.
SOURCE