Hacker News Reader

Comment by clarry | Hacker News Reader

It is now considered a feature, and there are entire maps & games built with a focus on trick jumping. It's a fun thing to learn and it really opens up new possibilities, even in maps that weren't specifically designed with trick jumping in mind. For most games, it increases the skill cap, thus adding depth...

I am so used to bunny hopping that I feel handicapped in any FPS that doesn't let me do it. If I ever get my FPS project going, it'll sure as heck have this feature.

View on HN

I really wish people perceived the bar to be higher than "well, it doesn't totally break the game, and it adds to the skill cap, so ship it!" for keeping any bug/feature in.

Literally anything that can impair you adds to the skill cap because it's another thing you have to learn to use/avoid.

We must also answer questions like "Is it credibility-destroyingly stupid to have players flying around at high speed in a semi-realistic military shooter" and "is this even fun" and "what effect does this have on the intended balance & map design". I don't know the answers for CS but in general I often see criticism of the status quo in games met with with knee-jerk "this increases the skill cap, learn to play" responses.

Realistic military shooters are niche. The average player wants fun, not believable. I personally attribute most of Counter-Strike's success to its completely unrealistic movement/weapon handling, creating a game that is arcade-y: you can replicate movements with almost 100% accuracy which means with enough practice you can master the game in incredible ways. This means the replay value is almost infinite: see for example, how the 1.6 competitive scene has used the same 15 original bomb defuse maps for more than a decade without it getting stale.

I would assume however that mainstream gamers (who would be "average" by definition, in terms of skill level) have no appreciation for non-obvious game mechanics that give highly skilled players an "unfair" advantage. In fact anything that increases the skill cap works against the "merely average" players on public servers. So there is an incentive for the companies behind big online shooters to strip their games of such features. It follows that modern shooters do not come with bunny hopping, and the players who've been primarily exposed to this new generation of games would find such tricks game-breaking and unfair.

So I guess bunny hopping and such will remain a thing for old timers who stick to the old classics. And boy do they have a ton of fun :) Although it would be nice to see some new players. Old players get old and tired...

To vehementi: bunny hopping and all the other stuff you can master to become better at a game really is a ton of fun. I don't think breaking balance is as big of an issue as some here make it out to be, though it obviously depends on the map and mode. But in general, if your foe can bunny hop, so can you. Sometimes they start in a position where it's way more advantageous to them. But in my experience it's just not very common. And thankfully, with the good games, we are not tied to the stock maps put out by the company behind the game.. instead there's a community of gamers and mappers, and the community will adapt.

Many stock maps suck anyway, whether you have bunny hopping or not. For example, many of the stock Q3A maps are regarded as crap, and aren't really played at all in competitive matches. Bunny hopping however is a core mechanic in these games and iD was well aware of it.

Not exactly true, valve "fixed" the phoon style bunnyhopping after the vide on in the article surfaced (even though it had been in the game for years). There still exists a version of bunnyhopping in the game but using it for speed gain on longer distances is very difficult.

You think bunnyhopping like phoon was is a feature? That was completely game breaking. Valve multiplayer games are built on balance and CS is all about balancing the timing of who gets where first. Being able to move that fast completely broke the mechanics of the maps (which is the whole point of the video). It allowed the guy to get in places people are expected to be but at speeds that completely ruin the balance.

These kinds of exploits don't increase the skill cap because you can't figure out how to do it while you're playing the guy whose exploiting. If some guy found a new spot to bounce nades off of, or a new place to peak, you can learn and reason about that and react after a few rounds. There's literally nothing you can do here unless you magically discover how to exploit a bug to move faster.

Bunny hopping was removed from competitive play with zblock, and later on made to be disabled by the server. CS has a whole other side to it where people don't even play on normal maps, and bunny hopping is part of it or the main challenge.

Continuing my point, during the development of Quake 2, bunny hopping was "fixed" but players complained, and it eventually got added back in. It remains a central part of Quake gameplay. Action Quake 2, a mod for Quake 2, had bunny hopping in it like Quake 2. The mod developers then moved on and made Counter Strike. CS featured bhoping prominently up until version 1.3.

These games have always lived and breathed bunny hopping, it has been a huge part of the game, and has influenced the creation of many games (CPMA, Warsow, DeFRaG, etc), and even started a new genre of game that requires of focuses on skilled movement.

It should probably be noted that CS 1.3 was released in 2001. So CS has not featured bunny hopping for 14 of it 16 years of life.

Citation, https://joliesjunk.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/the-history-of-c...

CS 1.3 had uncapped speeds, meaning you could accelerate to enormous speeds with bhopping. The speed was mostly capped in the next release, but bhopping was not eliminated, it's used to overcome surface friction, maintaining momentum. There's an entire community built around it: http://xtreme-jumps.eu/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com