The Mailbag

Your opinions do count, and we certainly recieve a lot of them. Here's a special section of comments and views from our viewers to us, about articles and features up on this site. You have a opinion? You can use the feedback page, or directly by email to webmaster@gamesurge.com. Please make sure Mailbag is in the subject line, as we get flooded with emails on a daily basis. If you wish to add your comments for all our visitors to read, just send a email. Some comments were not included due to shortness or was just repeating a previous submission, but we at GameSurge wish to thank everyone for taking the time to send their comments to us. We read every single email, and there are some fine points made. Please note that we strip the email address and any personal information from the submissions, due to "spam" engines. The Mailbag on Piracy can be found here. The Netcode Article can be found here. The Netcode Rebuttal article can be found here. The Interview with Mr. Bernier can be found here. The Mailbag for the first Netcode article can be found here,page two is here and page three. The Mailbag for the Netcode Rebuttal can be found here, and page two is here. The Mailbag for the Interview can be found here.

Diablo Revealed

Our premium article on the missing portions that was cut from the game has a response from a viewer. Here's a interesting thing...

From Rory Starks
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2000 11:37 AM
Subject: Diablo Information for you

This is in regards to your new feature on the Beta version of Diablo. You mention in one of the photos, the one of the town, that the warrior looks as if he just walked out of the tavern. I went to a site once where a guy used an mpq viewer and actually found the inside of the tavern. What was strange was the tavern screen was not a room, but a picture of a tavern. It seemed that upon entering, the screen changed to a background, similar to the battle stats screens used in WarCraft 2. From there, information that was normally found from Ogden was available. I wish I still had the address of the guy who found this, it really was interesting. I hope this can help.

Sent: Monday, June 26, 2000 9:27 PM
Subject: cs, netcode, aiming and the blues...
Hi there, I'd like to thank you for the very informative article. Although I am an hpb, I am really disspointed at the latest patch and cs beta for the following ressons. Firstly, as I had suspected, your article has pointed out that the weapons have been dramatically redused in accuracy (to cover up the discrepancy between real and predicted positions).

As a player that has been an ardent follower of cs since beta1, I learnt very quickly that a good aimed, tapped burst to the head was the fastest way to dispatch your opponent. Its a skill that I and most of the other decent players developed. It was a problem online at times when paranoia was abound about ppl using aimbot scripts etc., but as many players in our cs community would attest, I could reproduce the performace at a LAN house in Sydney where many prominent players hung out.
With the release of 6.5 (and 6.6) I have since found that aiming accounts for very little with almost any weapon. They (Valve and the cs team) have really undermined any reward one might recieve for developing an ability to aim well and quickly.

Instead of feeling satisfied getting a frag by lining up a good shot (with an mp5 for instance) and knowing that it was due to having spotted, and AIMED, I find that now the only real effective way to score a frag is to hold the finger down, spray in the general direction, pray, and not stop until they have (hopefully dropped). This leaves me feeling more often than not, that I got the frag more due to luck, and putting out volume of fire.

Consequently it takes up to a whoe clip at times (with say the mp5) directed in the general direction of the target, making you feel like your actions (BOTH your good moves, AND your mistakes) have much less impact on the outcome of the game. Secondly, our clan Total Consciousness http://tc.qgl.org (shamless plug:), have been active in the aussie cs scene since beta1 and in cs wars since team scores were introduced in beta2 (our first cs war was 2/9/99). In the last few of months many of our players had gotten cable to 'keep up' with the changing pace of the online gaming world. With the release of beta 6.5, a few of our BEST players are now too dienchanted with cs to continue playing, becuse of the net code, AND due to the unbelievable inaccuracy of the weapons. Losing our best cs players (they havent left TC fortunately, just stopped playing cs and are now organising a TC presence in Q3F) due to beta 6.5 has caused me no end of grief as founder and co-leader of TC.

The trend is wide spread, some of the real cs followers, the core of the community here are feeling very discouraged, not just becuase valve have fucked it, but because they (myself included) have lost THE game that captured the imagination and engrossed them so much more than any other game. Its a feeling like we have lost the essential counterstrike experience that kept us all enthusiastic and comming back. Cosmetic changes, new maps, scenarios, weapons and items are fine, but not at the expence of gameplay, particularly one very important aspect of game play: the suspension of disbelief (which cs is essential to cs, being based on real world scenario's and weapons). Anyway, I never intended this to be a rant, as it has turned out to be.....I was just wondering if there is somthing that can be done about it ?, a petitition or whatever....hhmm.

Cheers, [TC]ArjunA

shiva writes: Excellent points made. By the way, I love rants. :)