A little while ago, Valve had been quoted as saying that critical hits in Team Fortress 2 are skill dependent. That the chance to get a critical hit increases the better you do. A couple of weeks ago I made up an experiment to test these statements out in game.
First off, I should explain that I wrote a plugin for Team Fortress 2 called TFTrue. This plugin maintains critical chance and damage for server owners wishing to change the default settings. To make the plugin I had to study the take damage function in the game to figure out where the percentages were coming from ( which if you are curious, default you have a 5% chance to crit with weapons and 15% chance to crit with melee ). I thought this statement was weird because after all my searching I never came up with any ‘skill’ variable that increased or decreased the crit chance. I setup my test to work out all the unknown variables in the game code and find out whether or not score has an impact on your crit chance. I will summarize my data here, if you want to refer to the hard data, see the end of this article.
I setup a private server with TFTrue installed and crit chance set to 50%. I made a test map with 1 spawn point and set the respawn time to 0. This made my bots all spawn in the same place with little death delay. I expended 80 rounds of rocket ammo at a wall and observed my critical count. For my control test I ended up with exactly 50% critical chance, so far so good. Next I stepped it up, introducing 7 bots on the opposing team to test the idea that being out numbered helps. After firing all 80 rounds, my crit chance still remained 50%.
Next test involved killing the bots enough to achieve the ‘domination’ status with all of them. With my high score and high skill (according to the game), I fired 80 more rounds at the wall. Still 50% crit chance. What does this mean? It means being consistently better than the other players will not increase your crit chance.
The final test I did was tacked on as a side note when I noticed something interesting while killing the bots. It appeared that I was getting all crits when constantly killing the bots as they spawned right in front of me. So on a hunch I started firing constantly into the crowd of bots and low and behold, 100% crits for all 80 rounds. Upon further investigation I found that after killing 2 players in quick succession increased your crit chance about 4 times. Meaning default crit chance would become 20%. This effect lasted a variable amount of time depending on the weapon type. I timed the demoman’s sticky grenades to last for a bout 20 seconds, however the rockets only lasted about 5. To figure out what specifically influences this behavior we must look back at our code.
Before the Nov. 7th patch, Valve had kept private critical chance variables in the game. Namely, tf_crit_chance, tf_rapid_crit_chance, tf_melee_crit_chance. The first and last variable are pretty much self explanatory, however, what is rapid crit chance I wondered. Back then I decided that it was the chance to crit while firing rapidly. However after reviewing my test results I now believe that maybe this rapid chance is what determines critical chance when killing players rapidly. This is all theory and I have not tested it, but I do think that while playing if you kill a player the game rolls a number to compare to the rapid chance and turns crits on for you if you are lucky. After the Nov. 7 patch the TFTrue plugin treats both those numbers the same, they are both controlled by tftrue_crit_chance. And after further reviewing the code it supports this idea. So if we do work with this theory lets walk through a typical game.
Player Spawns
Player Shoots gun at wall (5% chance to crit)
Player runs to enemy territory
Player kills enemy player (5% chance to start “crit chain,” if the player if lucky he will now shoot crits for X seconds)
Player kills another enemy (5% chance to start “crit chain,” regardless if they are in one or not)
Player shoots (5% crit chance, unless in crit chain, then its 20%)
Player Dies.
I think if you are a hard core tf2 player you can easily identify with this result, just remember that this senerio is purely hypothetical. I have not done any tests modifying rapid crit chance. Like I said earlier however, the code supports this situation.
Now we must turn back to our original hypothesis. Does the critical hit chance get bigger the better you do? In one word, no. However I think we can easily see how Valve would mix up this system with a skill reward. In this system you can be a complete noob and get 1 kill to put you in a crit chain. Your skill as a player has no bearing on the crit chance. How you get more crits in tf2 is to kill more people. The more people you kill, the more shots you have at hitting that 5% chance on the nose.
Test Data:
Test 1: 15 / 40 crits | 24 / 40 crits
Test 2: 18 / 40 crits | 20 / 40 crits
Test 3: 22 / 40 crits | 18 / 40 crits
Test4: 39 / 40 crits | 40 / 40 crits
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thanks for your work!
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“by the way, I am officially out of ideas for things that need to be added tweaking wise. Stopwatch mode is definitely a priority for 1.3 or 1.2.5 release, but other then that I am open for suggestions.”
here are some:
- server cvar to disable sniper scope overlay (default disabled, client should have a cvar to reenable it)
- server cvars to set max healing PERCENTAGE and healing speed of medics
- server cvar to set sniper min and max zoom in charge/scope mode. (i would set the defaults to 30 respectivly 90). the client should be able to set a value within that range.
- server cvar to configure sentry tracking delay (default 0.3sec for example min 0, max 1sec, while facing at you already)
- separate server cvars for each weapon. if you think this is a bad idea, maybe just change the damage of following weapons:
* pipe launcher (slightly down)
* gren launcher (slightly up)
* rocket launcher (sligly down)
* scout shotgun (at short range) (down)- server cvar to make pistol shots EXACT or MORE exact in long distance (engineer, scout weapons)
- server cvar to disable falling damage
- server cvar for bunnyhopping: 0 = no, 1 = when you jump “down” somewhere you get some speed but soon lose it, 2 = you can speed up by hopping and straving. if you think latter (2) is a bad idea, stick with 1. its really annoying that you jump down a ramp and get NO POINT faster at all, it just FEELS wrong
.- add grens (normal, conc, flash; maybe like this:
scout: 1 flash, 2 conc
soldier: 2 normal
sniper: 2 normal
demoman: 2 normal
heavy guy: 2 normal
engineer: 1 normal, 1 flash
spy: 1 normal, 1 conc
medic: 1 normal, 1 conc
pyro: 2 normalkeep up the good job. currently I do only think that we
latter will be a hard job, to do and to ballance. radius should be RATHER REALLY SMALL, throw distance depending on throw angle, player movement speed. but if you really run out of ideas, this is one
. conc grens should spin your view cause I guess thats easier to implement than players pushing around like stupid .currently I think there is only need for scopeless sniper and if crits are disabled for lower medic power (though the medic gun should do some more damage then and should be more exact, still “ballistic” (thus skillish) but more exact. afaik it is already a very hard damage doing weapon)
the other ideas are nice to have. especially grens would be a real challange and more a kind of experiment as you do not know how i will affect gameplay, gren damage should not be too high, the pushback should be high, the radius of its effect very tiny. (just my opinion to care about spam), they should NEVER crit
have fun
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ah and another friendly fire option would be great that is “more pub” friendly.
the moment you shoot at a teammate you will recieve the same or half of the damage done (or double of the damage done) yourself (i dont know whats best, but this itself helps imho to establish ff on any kind of public server, if one wants to)
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This is a very interesting theory although your final statements are a bit contradictory (and inflammatory, in a way). If what you say is true, anyone can indeed get a kill and happen to get put into “the zone” as it were–in order to get more crits in TF2, you need to kill more people without dying, as you say. However, doesn’t the ability to kill multiple people without dying imply some level of skill a “complete noob” would not possess?
What you’ve done, essentially, is prove Valve’s idea to the dot: Crits reward skillful play; that is, staying alive longer and killing people for longer periods of time. Being consistently better than other people DOES make a difference on your crit rate, as you’ll be killing more people per life and thus getting more chances to crit.
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Andrew:
Not necessarily. While killing a few people can be impressive, getting rewarded for it is another thing, especially to the point where you can pretty much become untouchable (no one will kill a soldier that has a giant crit chance with a medic standing behind them. No one. Disregard the obvious sniper and spy solutions).
Crits were a terrible idea to be put in this game anyway, but Robin Walker is arrogant.
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Killing multiple people in rapid succession happens rarely.
Critical hits are purely luck the majority of the time and should be taken out (with the exeption of sniper headshots and spy backstabs). -
I think you might be looking at this the wrong way. Its been stated that the more damage you do, the more chance you have to crit. They way the calculate this is how much dmg you have done in a recent amount of time. I don’t remember the amount of time, but the scale goes if you do 0 dmg you crit is at 5% if you do 800 its at 20%. The crit is probably caped and it wont let you go above 50%. Or at least the rule only bring it up to 20%, not add 20% to your crit percentage.
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Nick and Andrew:
I have to agree with Andrew, you need to really be able to survive long enough for these critical hit chains.
Nick:
I am not sure about what you mean about“Not necessarily. While killing a few people can be impressive, getting rewarded for it is another thing, especially to the point where you can pretty much become untouchable (no one will kill a soldier that has a giant crit chance with a medic standing behind them. No one…”
I don’t understand what you were trying to get at first of all. Second the no one will kill a soldier with a giant crit chance? I don’t know what game you play but it doesnt have a sign like an uber saying hey this guy has a huge crit chance.. sure you can use TAB, but scores cannot be truely distinguished, if your a medic, capturing points, or dying inbetween. And I would totally take down the guy who is in the lead…knock him down a peg..
“Crits were a terrible idea to be put in this game anyway,”
Um. I don’t know if its a TERRIBLE idea.. I think its neutral because you can turn the tide with a crit….but only in a short battle.
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