[quote=narcogen][quote=N1NJ4]
[quote=frankie]...But we do appreciate the frustration this causes and we are looking into it. As many have noted, the alternative, host advantage, is not preferable.[/quote]

So, either they came up with something to eliminate (at least to some extent) host advantage (perhaps timestamping?), or frankie is full of it... heh.[/quote]

Not necessarily... [/quote]

Ok, timestamping was just the first thing that came to mind. My main point was that Frankie seems to be implying that they somehow found a way around giving the host advantage, at least in situations where the lag is somewhat low. My guess is that many of the calculations change depending on client ping. What do you think he meant?

[quote=VVV]
Not waiting around for another Halo 1 at all. Yes the idea in any business is to make money. I've said it before and I'll say it again that making the game more competitive and fixing glaring game play mechanic problems would do just this.[/quote]

All I can say here is that I am continually amazed at the number of people who think that because certain gameplay issues are evident (or apparently evident) to them that means these issues are glaring, especially when there are players who might not even admit that they exist.

At the same time, those same people usually assert that no matter how popular or successful the game in question already is, that addressing the things they identify as issues, in the manner they suggest, would only make the game even more popular and successful.

I think this line of reasoning has two flaws. One, I think that in the case of Halo, each game has progressively sold more copies than the last (we probably have to let Halo 3 sell for awhile longer before that comes to pass, but certainly the initial results indicate this will eventually happen). In addition, in terms of unit sales compared to the installed base of compatible hardware (first the Xbox and then the Xbox 360) each Halo game has been about as popular as a game can be, in terms of the percentage of console owners who buy it. About the only way to get a higher ratio of games sold to consoles sold is to bundle the game with the console.

In short, I think there is extremely little room for the Halo series to be more popular or more successful, at least in purely economic terms.

Secondly, I think it's naive to assume that the changes suggested could only have a positive effect. This is another problem with the arguments that have as their central point the idea that Halo 3 (and before it Halo 2) rewarded unskilful play. The majority of players are unskilled. The game has quite obviously been designed to try and give players an enjoyable experience regardless of skill level. Part of that is the matchmaking system, trying to assign ratings to players and then match them with players of equal ranking. However, since a single monolithic number cannot realistically describe all the nuances of any player's style, it will never be completely perfect no matter how many games you play, and no matter how accurate it gets, the game will not ever be, nor do I think it is trying to be, nor do I think it should be trying to be, solely a mechanism for measuring a player's skill.

To wit, if you think that given Player A with skill level Z, and Player B with skill level Y, where Z > X, that all other things being equal with no overt mistakes made by either player, that A should beat B in every match, and in every encounter-- you are never going to get this result. Partially it is because the game does allow random things to happen sometimes. It is become some weapons, and some situations, require more skill than others. It is because some encounters are decided by factors that players may not consider based purely on skill.

Over time it is probably fair to say that A will beat B in most encounters, and in most matches. If that fails to happen, the ratings of the two players will adjust themselves to reflect how often it happens.

When going over these same concepts in the "Halo2sucks" discussions, I phrased those complaints as boiling down to an impression by certain players that Halo 2 failed to sufficiently reward demonstrated player skill. The complaints about Halo 3 seem to be crystallizing around the same grain of sand.

As a response, I think I would say:

Halo is neither purely, nor merely, a device for measuring your skill at playing Halo.

There are a small group of people who, were this the case, would no doubt be singing the game's praises to the sky instead of grumbling about minutiae. I think there might also be a rather large segment of players on the other side of the skill range who would quickly wander away to other games.

[quote=VVV]I find it ever amazing that I can be considered a "fanboy" by some here. Considering I don't hold Halo 1 up to the light as the greatest game ever or even close. I am all to aware of it's faults and downfalls.

A fanboy is not someone like me. He/she is someone who will defend something with NO admittance of faults or imperfections. I see these people existing in the Halo community just as you do.

[quote=Anonymous]Hell if I'm reading the entirity of this crap.

The MELEE system is retardedly overpowered. VVV isn't saying that the only skillful way to kill someone is with range weapons. He's saying that the game is far too prone and prodded toward close combat. For two reasons.

First because of the whole melee being OVERFUCKINGPOWERED thing. And because there is WAAAY too many shotguns on maps. Guardian is a lamefest for corner camping. It's hard to actually get into an AIM oriented face off in this game. Anyone that thinks the AR beat-down isn't insane at 6 shots + melee, I pity you, and what it says about your methods.

Look through the records sometime hip-cats. There ARE far too many contests decided by beat-downs. It's a matter of what's effective, hence what's encouraged. That's tantamount to IDIOT-FRIENDLY. Which this game is.

-HZQI[/quote]

QFT. Thanks my good friend.

[/quote]

"Far too many" is a pretty subjective thing, I think. Frankly I think there's some logic to it. Once two spartans get close enough to each other for a melee strike, frankly I think the encounter should end there. The idea of two ponderous, yet graceful and terribly beweaponed killing machines coming within arm's reach of one another with neither one able to finish the other off seems a mite anti-climactic to me. I can see encounters failing to end one way or the other when ranged weapons are in use, and I can see the unrealistic aspects of a melee strike being such an apparently dominant weapon.

I think this is just a statistical anomaly, and does not represent the relative strength of the melee strike compared to other weapons so much as it does the play style of the majority of players.

Is the melee strike a good counter to a sniper rifle from across the map? No, not really.

Is it effective against a rocket launcher? Nope, not really.

How close do I have to get to an opponent before I can make a successful melee lunge-- and how many BR or AR shots can an opponent put into me before I reach it?

The number of melee kills compared to other weapons is actually no measure of the power of the melee strike compared to other weapons, or compared to Halo 2. It is an indication of the number of encounters that end when opponents close within melee range. If you don't want your encounters decided by melee strikes one way or the other, do not close to melee range. Do not allow opponents to get that close. Do not rush towards opponents looking for that melee strike.

It seems to me that if someone is rushing towards you, and you are backing away, the opponent will never land an unfair melee strike, and if you have better aim and/or a better ranged weapon, that your opponent will either die or be forced to break off the encounter.

Please note that I am not saying anything whatsoever about the relative skill of the players involved, or stating that the strategies people are using are wrong, or that that way of playing is better than what people are doing. Bungie has said they are looking into the complaints regarding melee encounters, so perhaps it is possible that something is not working as intended-- I don't know.

However, I still would say that 1) it makes sense for an encounter to be decided, one way or another, once two opponents close within melee range, and that 2) the way Bungie has stated the system decides simultaneous melee strikes-- most health wins-- seems fair to me in principle. Since the player with the most health at that point would be, logically, the one who took the least damage from the ranged weapon portion of the encounter prior to the melee strike, I fail to see how it is not evidence of superior playing skill, all other things being equal.

Most of the melee complaints seem to revolve around collections of anecdotal complaints that usually are variations on the theme of me and my opponent meleed around the same time (perhaps one slightly before or slightly after) and although I think, for reasons X, Y and Z that I should have won, the opposite happened sprinkled liberally with a few examples of my opponent should have won, but instead I did in order to lend an air of credibility to the complaint.

I've yet to see a collection of references or game films that demonstrate flaws in the melee system that cannot be explained by simple consequences of lag, most of which are unavoidable, as unpleasant as they are. That does not mean such evidence does not exist-- simply that the party in the best position to review such evidence is probably Bungie, looking at the data generated by all the games, rather than individual players or groups of players who have their own perspective on how the game should work.

Or, if you want to be a tad bit more pessimistic (but no less accurate), look at it this way: 1) most people are idiots. 2) All halo players are people. 3) ergo, most Halo players are idiots. 4) winning is fun, 5) losing is not fun, 7) people tend to do things when they at least have a chance at having fun some of the time, 8) ergo, in order to remain popular with most of its players, most of its players need to have at least a chance for enough success to keep them playing, most of the time, all other things being equal.

You call that "idiot-friendly". I call it good design.

I think I've fixed the attribution.

[quote=Anonymous]
Point taken then. Perhaps you did consider that altering design will alter behaviour and simply doubted it. In a lot of cases I think you'd be correct, for the larger pattern of the herd, I think you'd be mistaken. There are people out there who never get take the hint the universe is stabbing in their forehead. Even if it took three clips and ten beat-downs, it'd be pretty redundant to pilfer oxygen questioning their methods. The general wilderbeast population tends to react to a heads up.[/quote]

I don't think I'd go so far as to say design cannot or does not alter behavior. I would probably say that there is a limit to how much it can be altered, and that to some extent the prevalence of melee as the dominant "tool of destruction" attests to this limit.

[quote=Anonymous]You know, we actually found two things we agree on. I too, think that Halo 2 and 3's jump is drastically overdoing it. And game-flow that aids reduction in vulture kills are handy. I don't think vulture is a burnable sin, but a legitimate tactic, but it's best when things don't totally play to it.[/quote]

The vulture style of play, as well as camping, I think are both completely legitimate. The jumping I've always found objectionable for a couple of reasons. One, is that from an aesthetic perspective, it often just looks ridiculous. When a character makes an individual large jump to reach another location, or at a dramatic moment, it can seem appealing, but so far no one seems to have bothered to put in a design limitation that prevents that single Herculean leap from turning into bunny hopping. I'd love to see a game put in an increasing refractory period after consecutive jumps, or perhaps diminishing the length of consecutive jumps to limit the usefulness of this as a tactic.

I'm certainly no stickler for realism, but along with strafing, bunny-hopping always just struck me as wrong. I can't imagine real people in a real firefight bounding across the battlefield like that. I know everything doesn't have to be realistic, but for me, the jumping just goes too far. I enjoy the ability to set gravity much, much higher in custom games.

[quote=Anonymous]You were crafty in pointing out moments where you thought I was making your point for you. Well, right back at you. You keep recommending that players steer clear of close range combat if it's such a problem. Well, that's generally what I do. My kills by BR are four times that of my melee kills. Even though I was often agressive in this range in Halo 1 and 2. It's not because I can't scrap. It's because the whole process has been stripped palid. There is far less impression that superior skill can make at that range anymore, so I mostly just don't go there. Firstly, does that not show that I've altered my behaviour based upon design? And, is it right that I'm inspired to not engaged in this aspect of the game anymore, [i]because[/i] it sucks tailpipe?[/quote]

Just because it discourages you does not mean it sucks tailpipe. It means that portion of the game does not play to your strengths in any way. Not every part of the game design has to. There are games of skill, games of luck, and games that involve both elements. In such games players will avoid situations that do not play to their strengths, and if they are overmatched in all areas will roll the dice. In most cases, you have a choice of engaging them in those situations or not. That strikes me as a sufficiently deep design to be both satisfying and accessible. You seem to want a design that is equally deep at all points and minimizes the influence of luck at all points. My essential answer to that is that this is not fun for as many people as you think. Because it is fun for you does not mean it is fun for everyone.

[quote=Anonymous]You seem to have alluded that I've assumed on a few axioms. Again. Right back at you. Slow down? That axiom would be that I'm pro-slow. No. I'm pro-dimension. I'm pro-fun! Can't you just, tell? The problem with juggernaut THWACKS isn't just that they're [i]fast[/i], it's that they're so effective, that they make one attitude of play so effective that it squashes optional mentallity into the periphery. CHARGE-SPRAY-THUD!! Who'da thunk it? Adding four or five bullets to the required amount to engage melee, wouldn't slow down close quarters combat [i]generally[/i]. It would only make [i]that[/i] method take longer, and only [i]fractionally[/i] longer at that. Balance is in the details. Curbing the sharp edge off of that approach makes the greater multitude of close range methods suddenly enticing. Skulking your way into ambush range, and opening up without being seen (one step down from an assasination) is more challenging than blasting up and swinging, without recourse. And that split second you're talking about where players do the quickstep dance of death jive? You make it sound as if they play Rock, Paper, Scissors for five minutes then turn to the judges for a score. It's all over in a snappy rhythm. It just plays out in a much more interesting manner. I've always taken exception to HALO 2's melee, for how easy they were made to land. Now we have easy landing with [i]decisive[/i] low denominators. The infantilisation of close-range combat is complete. Yes, we agree that vulture killing is best at a moderate level, but more stimulating, lateral encounters don't exacerbate that quandry. To readress something. The only reason [i]some[/i] encounters in HALO 2 became so comically drawn-out, isn't because of the melee damage, it's because of a combination of the crappy moon-jump and the lame ass lunge melee. Jump, lunge, miss, Huh! Where the? Jump, turn, turn, jump, lunge, miss, RUN AWAY!!! That's not a power with the basically immaculate power dealt. The thing to fix was the ghastly jumping, and the design of the melee itself so people didn't get lost like blind tourists. Actually, I think I see how this works now. "Maybe if we make the melee the tool of armageddon, it will lessen the occurance of the jumping, humping mating ritual and people won't notice our crap calibrations so much".[/quote]

Not sure what you mean by "crap calibrations" here exactly, unless you mean the damage model itself. Sounds to me as if you think this sort of happened by accident somehow and was not an intentional design decision. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. It strikes me as increasing verisimilitude and flattening the learning curve slightly to have required skill to execute damage scale inversely with distance. This shifts the balance in some parts of the game, some of the time, towards positional advantage and away from the execution of weapons fire. This is hardly the end of the world.

[quote=Anonymous]Back onto the jumping I fail to see how the technique of leaping around people to evade and attack them is a point of contention though. Especially if the jump were made reasonable. HALO 3 is an odd beast. It goes from one acknowledgement of momentum to the other. Weight and momentum were accounted for when you melee in HALO 2, yet grenades flew the same way regardless of it. Now that they've added depth to the nade toss in 3, they've squandered the deepening by flattening the melee.[/quote]

Again I think it's just verisimilitude. It makes sense to me that a moving object imparts more momentum than a standing object (within a given frame of reference). Why a leaping object should impart more I really can't imagine. Especially since I don't think Halo 2 make a distinction between objects leaping up, which from the moment of takeoff should be decelerating due to gravity, and objects falling from the apex of the leap, which should be accelerating due to gravity. Maybe it did, I never did any experiments on that to find out. It seems reasonable to me that perhaps making that distinction makes things unnecessarily complex and that flattening the melee damage model is an acceptable alternative.

With grenades it's an easier thing-- of course it should affect the toss, and now it does, which I find gratifying, even if it does bother me that such a basic mechanic changed so much in each game. To some extent I miss the ease with which it was possible to make some truly long-distance sticks in Halo 1.

[quote=Anonymous]Speed? Forget that repurcussion. 6 bullets from AR? Takes how long? You think 4 more is going to be like "Dull and Dulled Down Action", the directors cut? All design and all balance are trades, some of them miniscule. That micron will expand incentives. There's also the performance factor. Because it's only six bullets, it really compresses the hit-miss demands. "Oh well, I missed three of my nine bullets. Thwack!". Make it ten bullets and it exponentially (or at least incrimentally) increases the likelyhood that they'll screw up. Nine bullets, three miss = success. Thirteen bullets, only three miss = far less likely. Expand the laws of probability on it, and someone who misses 3 in 9 (missing are a third of total execution) is going to need not 9, but 15 bullets (a third of total execution) to be successful, thoroughly, and rightly deadening the chances of rough aim. 6 additional bullets to 9. Yet, the guy with the perfectly tight AR goes from just 6 bullets to 10. There's the other ways that it's become linear, but another way is that reduced demand, makes squat window for error.[/quote]

There is a limit to how broad and how deep the game should need to be. All you are arguing here for is the creation of more scenarios to evaluate (which can be, but is not necessarily, a better thing) and more opportunities to measure the player's skill. You're suggesting that this is necessarily better to measure this more often.

If this is all you consider, you can justify increasing these requirements to almost any arbitrary level. If requiring six shots before death is bad and ten shots is good, then twenty shots would be even better and thirty better still. If that makes the game too slow, just increase the weapon's rate of fire. If that makes it too easy, increase the player's movement speed. If that makes things too easy, then narrow the weapon's spread.

You'll end up with a game where very fast players fire a rapid-fire weapon that deals an awful lot of damage very quickly. The game has become one-dimensional. It is about aiming and pulling the trigger. You might as well play Duck Hunt at this point.

This is an exaggeration, of course-- but all I'm saying is that there should be a point of diminishing returns on certain skills. Increasing the value of pinpoint weapon accuracy at ranges of less than a meter makes no sense to me.

In a broader sense, I would suggest that increasing the resolution of the skill measuring system in this way is not necessarily always superior design, because the ultimate point of Halo is not, as I said, to measure one's ability to play Halo in general or the ability to aim a reticle in specific. These are only some out of many factors. If they were the only factors, I don't believe Halo would not be as popular a game as it is. There is a portion of the upper range of players who simply either don't believe or accept this, or deny that it should ever be considered in the game's design.

[quote=Anonymous]6 bullets? Auto-aim lunge? Hey, BONUS! There's also the Plasma-Rifle factor. Everyone that knows HALO, knows that since the stun was removed, that swiftly raping shields is the domain of the PR. HALO 2 required almost total annihilation of shield for melee, which the PR served efficiently in four shots. It's slow only flesh, so... If the AR does it in six, six high-speed, what more purpose the idiosyncrisy of PR. First it's stun is taken? Now it's shield advantage? It's made to jostle alongside the spiker that has almost identical performance traits (RoF, Projectile Speed) Wraith's are given mannable turrets, Scorpian's turret is made mannable, while losing it's ability to attach passengers (cmon, what's cooler piggybacking on a tank), Brute-Shot is detuned into just a weak rocket launcher, Shotguns multiply like coat-hangers, Ghost and Banshee lose their [i]weak spots[/i], another sword dressed up as a caveman club (with a fabulous feature which is ineffective compare to just clubbing seals with it). Imagine how cool the Grav Hammer would be, if instead of being a second sword, it could be whipped out instantly, and it's actually distinctive feature was emphasised (You know, defecting grenades, rockets and flipping vehicles, bouncing people around. Want to design it well? Ramp up the range of the gravity field, REMOVE the lunge), carbine that was already, just a gun, that gets made even crapper, mass confusion in Bungie as to how best to tune the Magnum, which is apparantly unacceptable at five slow shots when dualled, so it confounds the laws of even internal logic, by inexplicably becoming 7 shots dualled, even though at five, it's significantly slower to kill than other pairs in it's range. What is this? The holocaust of distinction? Is there no end to the design HOMOGENY? If you call this good design, then, sorry, my idea of it seriously questions yours. Their are good design points in this game (Spartan Laser, Missile Pod), but for most beauty spots, there's a dirty great wart.[/quote]

Quickly: riding on tanks was cool but pointless.

Not sure why the Ghost's weak point was removed, I sort of liked it.

The grav hammer is good for the things you mentioned, and the range already seems pretty darn large to me.

I loathe the lunge in nearly all its forms, I wouldn't mind it being completely removed. With the increased strength of the melee attack I don't think the player needs the extra help. It made sense with the weaker melee attacks in the earlier games, but now it doesn't anymore.

Yes, the Magnum is weird. Why dualling it with another weapon is better than dualling with another Magnum is really beyond me. That one does make me scratch my head.

[quote=Anonymous]Point is taken about the way that a crappy close-range system not necessarily encouraging close-range combat. I'll revise. It encourages idiots, and ruins close range combat for everyone else. It's both a lure and a deterrent. This is probably an abberation besides the fact, but I've been in FFA's with players, not won, then looked at the "Weapon of coice" (HAND. Which is a perfect symbol of the result), talked these players in a friendly 1 v 1, smashed the fuck out of them, and further questioned the game. This is just universal, that [i]sometimes[/i] it can be harder for a good player to beat a ordinary player when there's a bunch of really, really crap players running around, than it is to compete with a room of good players, because the tards are constantly, randomly feeding them kills. [/quote]

I'll point again at the parable of the talents and my earlier statements: that the real issue is a perceived insufficient reward for player skill. You say close quarters combat encourages idiots and ruins the game for better players. I say it evens the odds. Halo is not a device for measuring Halo skill. It is a play experience. More often than not, demonstrated skill wins out. It is not the designers job to eliminate all possibilities of any other outcome.

[quote=Anonymous]I'm not anti-melee. I don't mind that a certain degree of encounters are melee-based, I dig it. What I do mind is seeing this players with their little Eagles, checking their stats and seeing melee either as, or near to their primary weapon, and... knowing how those encounters played out. By the way, Bungie's melee hasn't lessened host advantage, it's increased. I've got footage of being AR beat down, after getting off the shotgun. That's how stupid it is. The only reason that would happen in HALO 2 was because the Shotgun always screwed up. Now it's because the AR beat-down is sometimes faster than my lag window. In fact, I guess you're on to something with me. Unless melee numbers are inordinantly high, which they generally are, it's not so much the numbers that bother me, it's the show of reliance on something crap, that bugs me. I maintain my stance the design is affecting behaviour. That's actually worse than my origional position. It's a moron's paradise, and smart man's bermuda triangle.[/quote]

So again it's not about you, your play, your kills, or your skill. You feel that your hard-earned, skilfull kills should be worth more than the (usually fewer) kills that players you consider less skilful get by rolling the dice and sometimes getting lucky in the melee sweepstakes. Cry me a river, man. You may be running around insistent that your level X is worth more than another player's level X because they got there with a higher percentage of their kills gotten in a way that you consider less skilful. Whether it is or not isn't really the point. The point is that just because you believe it is so doesn't make it so, and were the game to be changed to address things that you would prefer to operate in a different way does not mean that it would be "fixed" any more than it can now be considered "broken".

I suppose that one word is really why I've bothered to keep with this discussion this long. Because to me, "broken" means "not working as intended". I think the essential problem here is that you believe Halo should be doing something it never intended to do, which is to measure one's ability to execute on a narrow skill set and reward that execution with a number of kills in which each kill is of equal value.

[quote=Anonymous]By the way, a headshot SHOULD be an ace in the hole. What the hell is dimension if not partly risk vs reward? One man chooses to follow up with a headshot, the other gambles on a second melee, but the headshot risk pays off? THAT is interesting. If a player gets the drop, they [i]should[/i] have the advantage. Pay special mind to the word AD-VAN-TAGE. It implies the opportunity for recourse.

By the way, the subtleties of the Rule-of Free produce the required scenarios all the time. Like if someone is facing of the Lockout sniper tower, and you go leaping over the shortcut. They have no position to be moving forward, so your element of surprise give you an upper-hand. Even if they melee back, your momentum is power. At this point they have to make a decision. They obviously can't just trade blows, because they'll lose. Do they have a sniper? No scope? If they keep backing away, they'll give room for another "rule-of-two" melee which will kill them. Should they at this point "press" to restrict their momentum, melee back, and bank on the headshot to save them? Well, because of the deeper design scheme, the "possibility" exists. Narrow or not. Dimension is possibility. HALO 3's wooden mechanics have consigned the possibility side of close-combat to hellfire. I suspect by now I'm rambling.[/quote]

There should, however, with regard to certain skills, be a point of diminishing returns and the opportunities for recourse they represent, or the end result is a flattening rather than a deepening of the game.

If you're good at headshots with rifles at long and medium range, the ability to make a close-up headshot is essentially an offer to play again, double or nothing. If a player approaching you does not have a long or medium range weapon and you do, but somehow manages to get close enough to you and land a melee after doing some damage to you with a weapon, I don't think the target in this question should be left with enough health to offer to play again, "double or nothing" in a contest in which it is already established that he has an advantage in. The target either already had a chance to land those headshots before the player came in range, or else was in a position that did not allow for it, in which case he made a positional error that lead to his death. The ability to land headshots consistently is an important skill but one that, in my opinion, Halo 3 already sufficiently rewards in the situations in which it is appropriate. It is not an appropriate or believable response as a follow-up to a melee attack. Again, I don't consider "realism" the ultimate authority on anything, but in a vision with a bit more realism than Halo, the idea of getting a headshot with a sniper rifle against a guy who is close enough to wrap his hands around your throat is pretty silly. Sure, Halo does not simulate real life to that extent; it doesn't need to and doesn't try to. However, I would say that there is a need to recognize the idea that within a certain range, different skill sets should come into play. Sniping is not a useful skill at less than one meter. It shouldn't be treated as such. At that range, any two players in the game are essentially supposed to be represented by extremely strong and well-trained soldiers, more or less equally dangerous with whatever weapon they happen to be holding, and the one who attacks first wins; all other things being equal, the healthiest wins. This strikes me as a fair representation of what I would imagine would happen in this fictional universe if it were real.

To summarize that wall of text, I'll agree-- the stronger melee flattens the nature of extremely close quarters combat. All I'm suggesting is that within the context of Halo combat, as implemented, it makes sense for melee combat to be flatter in nature than midrange combat.

[quote=Anonymous]Either way, I enjoy intelligent opposition. Debate is interesting and productive in my opinion. You've actually made a far stronger case for your position than I suspected you would. Nice discourse.

-Hzqi

[/quote]

Fun for me also. Thanks. Register an account so the site can stop calling you "anonymous" and I'll stop mixing your argument up with the others' :)