What is Freon?

Freon is a gametype which combines Team Deathmatch and Last Man Standing.

In Freon, there are 2 teams. The first team to reach 10 points is the winner. To win a round, a team must eliminate all opponents. If you die, you are not permanently killed for that round but instead are frozen. You will slowly thaw (from 1% to 100%) and when fully thawed you can resume playing. If a teammate stands near you, you thaw faster. The more players standing close to you to thaw you, the quicker you will thaw.

When the round timer reaches zero, players lose an amount of HP and Armour every 5 seconds until a victor is decided.

All players spawn with the same amount of HP and Armour. If "challenge mode" is configured (we don't have it on at the moment) then in the first round but in subsequent rounds, the winning team spawns with less HP and Armour than the losing team depending on the score difference.

All players spawn with all weapons, excluding the super weapons and weapons found in Onslaught. Players may have all the weapons but each weapon has a limited amount of ammo and there are no pickups in the game to replenish the ammo. You get a small amount of ammo for the gun you're holding for each 100 health you thaw someone.

The radar blobs

How to find teammates

In the top left of the screen there is a list of player names. Each player name has a coloured or grey blob beside it, with a white dot moving round it and a blue dot inside it moving up and down.

The blob colour shows the player health. Green is high health, red is low, grey is frozen
The white dot shows the direction you need to head to get to them relative to where you are. If it’s at the left of the blob they are to your left, if to the right of the blob they are to your right. If at the top of the blob they are in front of you….
The blue dot tells you the height they are relative to you. If it’s at the top of the blob they’re above you, if it’s at the bottom of the blob they’re below you.

In this case, Proz_Lee is behind and to my left, beneath me on the map as I am looking.

Hit F7 to choose your radar style

F7 brings up the radar style picker

Default Height Style

Plus Style

Old Style

Another method for tracking down frozen teammates is to hit either ‘N’ or ‘M’ on a map (must be bot-pathed) and follow the magical fairy glitter to find the nearest frozen teammate.

Hit F7 for Tweaks

Bring up the 3SPN Config box for additional game and player settings

This is where you set up Brightskins which is one of the first things you should do as it makes a huge difference to your teammates’ and enemies’ visibility. A popular choice is to set enemies to always show as one colour and your own team as another.

You can also change the indication of height from the blue blob style to a “+/-” where a “+” tells you that the player is above you and a “-” tells you that a player is below you. This setting is useful if you find the blobs too small as those don’t scale properly and the +/- scales much better.

Slayer is frozen, above me behind and to the left:

I’m frozen. What now?

Just chill

You can spectate your team or return to where you are frozen by pressing mouse buttons. You can do this until you’re thawed or the next round starts. It would be helpful for your team to know if you are being camped. If you are nearly thawed and your team is down to a single player, let them know you are at 90% as they may find a way to avoid enemies for a few seconds to give you time to thaw.

My teammate is frozen?

Ok – time to be useful

There are 4 ways you can thaw a teammate:

Stand close to them. The closer the better. It takes about 5.5 seconds (admin configurable) from 0% thawed with one player. If more of you stand near a frozen temmate then they’ll thaw faster.
Watch them slowly defrost in the distance. This will take 90 seconds (admin configurable) and won’t win you any friends.
Use the “Necro Combo” (Resurrect). Movement keys “back back forward forward” with 100 adrenaline will do an instant thaw, as will a key bind of “usenecro”.
As long as they don’t have a red skull icon next to the health bar above their heads (see below), push them in lava to instantly thaw them.

All kinds of frozen

It’s not always an easy thaw

Players who kill themselves thaw slower. Players who freeze themselves and land in lava (or are immediately pushed in) lose thaw protection and die there.

Beside the teammates head you will see an icon:

a very small red skull and crossbones when they killed themself. If you see this then being pushed into lava means death:

a very small suicide prevention ribbon. They get this a few seconds after they killed themself. If you see this it’s OK to push them into lava and thaw

otherwise the normal icon

A little bit more

Pickups

There are three types of pickups, and they all look the same:

Health.
Armour.
Adrenaline. You can pick these up even after the last enemy is dead

To goop or not to goop?

That is the question!

Your goop will damage live enemies but speed up the thaw of frozen enemies.

If you see a red coloured splash then you've just sped up the enemy thaw!

Netcode

Whilst we can't do anything about the speed of light, or you being a way from the server, we can improve things with enhanced netcode.

From the F7 menu (or by running `Menu3SPN` from the console) you can turn on enhanced netcode from the `Miscellaneous` tab. This code is intended to limit the aim differences between various pings. Players using Enhanced Netcode should be able to fire directly at targets, regardless of their ping, and not have to aim ahead of them.

Also available from that tab is an option to change the reporting rate. If you set "Improved logic" you can use the slider below to tell the server more information about your movement so that it can more accurately compute whether or not shots at you should be determined as a hit or miss. The less information the server has the more likely it is that it (and all other players) will believe you are in a slightly different place to where you see yourself in the game. At lower reporting rates your client will combine all your movement since the last update it sent into a single vector to report. The slider is used to select one of three frequencies for reporting to the server:

Left position: Send the server minimal data. Unstable, and will feel odd. Not recommended
Middle Position: Send your position data to the server at a rate equal to half your FPS.
Right position: Send the server your position data at your FPS rate.

Freon Hints & Tips

You can use your shield gun primary to move frozen players together and thaw more than one at a time. The more players that do the thawing the quicker the thaw is. The more there are the bigger target they make! Thawing makes you a more easy to hit target and liable to get hit by splash damage.
Players with the red or yellow icons beside them will thaw more slowly by teammate (configurable at 60% normal speed). It’s to give you a reason to think twice about suicide.
You can use sheild gun primary to move a frozen player somewhere safer to thaw.
If you use speed adrenaline combo you will thaw much faster. It’s sometimes more effective to use this than necro combo…but you rarely see it done.
If you push a frozen player into a triggered trap/killzone they will die. Do it 4 times and you will lose adrenaline and be called names by the server.
If you push a frozen player into Lava they thaw immediately with full health. On other servers you can abuse this by using a rocket jump or flak jump to freeze yourself and land+thaw in lava with full health. Here you can’t. If you try it you thaw with 1 health and the lava kills you dead. If you land near lava after having killed yourself this way and get pushed in before the red skull icon changes to a yellow ribbon the same thing will happen. As soon as you see the yellow ribbon it’s fine…push them in and they should have enough time of spawn protection to get out as long as they don’t shoot a gun.
The team that thaws best often wins. Thawing gives you ammo for the gun you’re holding at the time, points and adrenaline. It helps your team win more than trying to take on the entire enemy team rambo-style. If you use a shield as you thaw, you get some protection from being shot but don’t get ammo. You need to assess the risk of not using shield!
If you are high health, being near a low health teammate increases their health. If you are low health, being near a higher health teammate increases your health. It does make a bigger target!
You have limited ammo – so use it wisely. Thaw to get more
There is limited friendly fire and reverse friendly fire. Try not to hit teammates as it hurts both you and them. If you do manage to hit or freeze them it’s only polite to try and help them as soon as possible.
You can bind “teamsay” keys in user.ini with the following things that can be useful in telling your team your status:

%A – Displays your current Adrenaline amount.
%S – Displays your current Shield strength.
%H – Displays your current Health amount (or percentage thawed)
%W – Displays your current weapon.
%% – Displays a % symbol.

If a round goes on for a long time overtime starts and you slowly lose health and then die (not freeze). You may want to suicide/shoot the ground to freeze yourself when you get very low health. You’ll lose some adrenaline.
If you stay in the same place for too long you will be called a camper and receive increasingly painful penalties.
Unlike on some other servers, you’re not camping if you’re actively thawing.
You are able to be thawed by your new team when you switch (or are switched) to a new team (bug fix from original code)
On this version there is no need to move out of range and back again on thawing to thaw/heal nearby players, however if you thaw in thawing range then you don’t have spawn protection.
I’ve fixed the bug that could be used to telefrag frozen players. This should also prevent the random telefrags you see on other servers. Just in case someone wants to allow this…I’ve left it configurable from the webadmin!
There are two systems for rewarding thawers:
1. The one we’re not currently using counts and rewards every time you are present at the thawing of a player. This isn’t really fair as the player that thaws to 99% and then has to leave (or is fragged thawing) gets no reward, and the player that turned up at 99% gets everything.
2. The one we’re using counts every little bit of partial thaws and rewards the thawer every 50 health thawed.
A reward is adrenaline and ammo for the gun they’re holding. If that gun is full then it rewards with ammo for the most empty gun. You can use this logic to reload an entirely empty gun.
There are random pickups. If you can’t use a pickup you get a low “duh” sound, and a message in the bottom of your screen telling you that you can’t pick up more health/shield/adren – or tells you that it’s the end of the round so you can’t pick it up. You can pick up adrenaline pickups at round end so it’ worth trying!
The players you will find on Freon servers are likely to be much more skilled at aiming and movement than players on ONS servers. They may appear to be so much better that you think they are cheating. They probably aren’t 🙂