Medic’s turn to talk about the removal of the Demoknight Turning Script

I’m sure none of you care any more, unless your name is Craylash or something, but I want to talk about how I, often the victim of the Demoknight (and everyone else of course) feel about the removal of the Demoknight Turning Script.

Now, I am a very fair person. I have a strong sense of justice and I always say what I feel is right or wrong. Well, not always, but in this case, I’m saying so. And I’m going to put it right here: I feel that the Turning Scripts and Charge turning are unfair to their victims. Why is using this script unfair? It boils down to a couple of reasons.

1. Not everyone has a controller. Nor does everyone have the third party program vJoy. vJoy is a program that allows you to use joystick controls without a joystick. If you have a controller with joysticks, you don’t need the program. So why is this unfair? It’s unfair because it requires an external program that doesn’t come with the vanilla game, or it requires that you have a controller. If you don’t have either of these, you can’t use the turning powers of the exploit. There are other versions of charge turning, using console commands only, and these were slightly better as everyone has access to Notepad or the equivalent.

2. Charge turning clearly removes the main downside of the weapon. The whole point of charging is that you are forced to go in a straight line and the downside is a difficulty in turning, but turning scripts allow you to bypass this completely. Now to me, that sounds a bit unfair, especially to normal Demoknights who don’t use the scripts. A while back, the GRU, those silly gloves that speed you up, used to work by draining health when they were equipped. Heavies managed to bypass this by constantly switching weapons, negating the GRU’s downside. This exploit was soon fixed and now GRU users are marked for death, even for a short while after using the weapon. That’s probably why the Escape Plan also leaves users marked after switching weapons. These were all exploits and they were fixed. It seems illogical and hypocritical for turning scripts to not be fixed too.

3. It’s deceiving to the victim. A charging Demoknight is one of the fastest things in the game, but generally in a straight line. When you see a Demoknight, you know you may be able to escape if you can dive out of way, dipping behind a corner or diving behind cover. That’s how a normal Demoknight works. But sometimes, with no warning at all, the Demoknight turns 180 degrees and chops your head off anyway. As the victim, you have NO IDEA whether a Demoknight has the ability to turn more than a couple of degrees or the ability to do 720 degree turns around you. The one item that is supposed to inform other players that a Demoknight can turn, Ali Baba’s Wee Booties, aren’t present.

So those are three reasons why I think the script was unfair. It was an exploit that was going to be fixed and really people should have noticed because there have been previous attempts to limit the turning of a script-using Demoknight. Keep in mind though that I haven’t said that TURNING is unfair. Demoknights should be able to turn a little bit, certainly more than the Booties provide. It can be very easy to dodge a non-exploiting Demoknight, to the point that they just end up as free kills for anyone who isn’t  a Pyro.

After removing the exploit, two things should have happened:

1. The Booties should have been buffed to allow 1000% turning. If you want to be able to do 720 turns at a billion miles an hour, I don’t think you should have a grenade launcher too.

2. Add a new, weaker version of the Grenade Launcher, with an upside that allows you to do a maximum of a 135 degree turn. Or about that. Maybe 180 degrees. But any more than that is just silly. Make it fire cannon calls if you want that medieval feel to it.

If Valve had done the above, or even just made the Booties worth using, then I don’t think Demoknights would have been as angry.

A final note though, I’d much rather you be a normal Demoman. I mean, we already have three pick classes, in the form of Scouts, Spies and Snipers. We don’t need another one.