Balance; An Explanation

[Fortelian]

There is minimal feedback for most actions in the game like damage, in a lot of skill based/competitive games that expect players to improve feedback is incredibly important, but in CM its difficult to get any kind of immediate feedback so a new player can adjust. The result of this is that only players who play for years really know how anything works with memorizing maps, enemy health, abilities, damage, etc. of each gun and thus there will always be a minimal amount of skilled players on each side as old players quit and new players play, but don't stay for the years required to learn the game or are unwilling to sift through information externally from the game.

The general consensus in the community seems to be that you can't increase the general skill level of players and that balance has to be based on that, but just increasing feedback by adding multiple damage sprites, a health bar, numbers above a sprite's head showing damage, etc. you will increase general player skill by allowing players to collect and process feedback faster and more clearly.

You could also lower the hard skill floor of some things by just doing things like including full maps with areas labeled for convenient reference ingame so that commanding players can expect every player to have an idea of where to go when they tell everyone to go to a location and a rough idea of where things are in comms.

Of course numbers and healthbars would be incredibly immersion breaking, but with the style of faster rounds more focused on deathmatch combined with a dwindling RP contingent on server it might be the way to go since it would allow devs to have a more even skill level to work with.

If someone doesn't know where to go they can follow their leader. Health sprites are a thing and give you positive feedback for shooting stuff. This is a roleplaying server, and removing roleplay to increase round speed is something no one wants. People don't want faster rounds, but they don't want to die and miss out on a long round.