Remove/adjust availability of frag grenades

[kyres1]

Currently, frag grenades are available to several adminspawn event RIGs when equipped and are available to traitors, ERT, and mercenaries. Individually they're fine, but considering how often they're all collectively seen and how amazing they are as a weapon, the suggestion here is to just limit their availability. Remove them from the uplink, hands of ERT, and from most event gear. Leave frags and their respective RIG launchers spawnable in case they're actually needed. Otherwise, you'll always see excessive usage of them. In Sol marine events (at least, the last four) fights devolved into frag-tossing battles to see who could lag into a grenade first. Once you were hit, or stood on a tile that one was on, you were basically dead. On top of that, the sheer amount of collateral and venting they cause is just completely detrimental to these events in the first place. But nobody has any reason not to use them.

[Carver]

Why remove them from the uplink? If they're an issue in their power, simply make them more expensive to buy.

[Kaed]

Nope.  They're not as popular as you make them out to be, and they're always in severely limited stocks even when they are available.  Those events sound like they were pretty tense and exciting - grenades are supposed to be awful in close quarters.  If the admins making events feel that frag grenades will ruin their events, they can just remove them from options during the events.

There is no reason to be changing the uplink options.  It already costs half your starting TC to get a box of 5 of them, and barring lag problems they're not really that hard to avoid if you know what you are doing.  I myself have suicide rushed a skrell HoS with frag grenades as a traitor, I was dead by the third one, and by simply running away, the HoS in question took 0 damage.

[Scheveningen]

I feel like you'll only get killed by a frag grenade if someone cooks the frag grenade for the right amount of time and then hits you with the perfect throw. I've not been killed by a 'perfect throw' for months.

[AmoryBlaine]

The issue is when they're applied in combat scenarios with special task forces. When there's Mercs V. ERT/TCFL or Marines V. ERT/TCFL, it essentially just comes down to chucking grenades knowing that the other guys are gonna be lagging since there's so many of each of them. 

So, remove frags from Marine HARDSUITS- let them keep them on hand, that's fine. Increase the cost on the uplink so Mercs can't main grenadier. ERT has access to one box, so that's fine. TCFL don't even get any as I can tell.

[Kaed]

If you increase the cost of them in up links but any more than it already is, in other words half of your starting crystals, it is going to become prohibitively expensive to use them.

I understand that's what you seem to want, but if you do that, people are still going to buy them it's just going to become the only thing they do is throw a few frag grenades, and that was the sum of their ability to contribute to the ground. That's not fun, just like it's not really fun to buy the overpriced sniper rifle and get one shot.

You shouldn't make something impossible to reliably use just because some people spam it. "Because sometimes it makes the game lag and kills them during the lag" it's also absolutely not a reason to remove something from effective circulation, it's a reason to fix it.

[Scheveningen]

6 hours ago, Kaed said:

I understand that's what you seem to want, but if you do that, people are still going to buy them it's just going to become the only thing they do is throw a few frag grenades, and that was the sum of their ability to contribute to the ground. That's not fun, just like it's not really fun to buy the overpriced sniper rifle and get one shot.

This is probably the fairest point in the entire thread, in all honesty. Nerfing it by increasing its TC cost will make it a 'single-gimmick' item and then that's all the traitor will be able to do in the round.

[Garnascus]

I actually think the collateral damage part is the best part of it. It makes them a lot harder to use effectively than a simple flash bang. Tossing em out willy nilly is a good way to get bwoinked. Though i can definitely see the issue where both a heavily armed merc team and an ERT team start lobbing grenades at each other. Dunno how big of an issue it is or is not since i never see merc rounds anymore. 

Traitors having access to cheap frags is fine imo. The rules already cover general abuse of them and i feel egregious situations are way too niche to warrant nerfing the availability of frags for traitors.