Huh what a flip. Remember though that getting targets of main missions to pick them up is harder though, as most are no guards. I think the micro taser is picked up when the impact is heard. 
Still not an issue for me. But thanks for the heads up.
Somehow, I think I owe @Dribbleondo and @47saso47 a huge apology. Not necessarily for being right, but for giving them such unnecessary grief.
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If only guards pick up tasers, how is this not an issue for you?
You can’t take out the game’s regular targets with the tasers. Unless you’re using water. You won’t be able to give a taser to a target, seen or unseen, illegal move or not.
I’m just so confused by where we’ve gone with all this.
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I typically used the phone in contracts and, in rare cases, escalations. I didn’t normally use it in the main campaign because I had my methods down for story reasons. So I’ll use this in cases where guards are my target. I’ll have to limit its usage, of course, in that respect, but at least I can do it. Since the phone never came in and I didn’t know how tasers worked properly, I’ve been stuck with car batteries and tampered wires for any electrocution in H3. This widens the net a bit.
Ah. That clarifies things a bit. Word.
This is what I/we meant by “There are suitable alternatives.” 
Still, not THE same, but for any situation… There’s usually a workaround.
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Never understood how the ICA Electrocution Phone was any different than the player option to choose Casual difficulty (at least in regard to the singleplayer experience); if a player wants to cheese their way through, let them cheese their way through.
Yet another anti-player decision by IOI, but I can at least understand how it fundamentally “broke” leaderboards and elusive targets; though, I hate both of those and believe neither should exist to begin with. The WoA trilogy should’ve primarily been an offline singleplayer experience.
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They need to make it so if you dial a phone a target picked up, he or she will just hand it over to a nearby NPC if one is around and tell them “You! Find out who that and if they’re selling anything tell them I’m not interested.”
And it is. All levels, missions, a good bunch of escalations, only the contracts that are featured and almost all unlockables are in Hitman 3.
Why remove items people had to grind countless hours to achieve.
Assumingly because it was unbalanced and removing it was easier than nerfing it.
And I can use the phone in Hitman 2, what if I wanted to use it on the Berlin level? No excuse.
Hitman 2 did not promise you to use the phone on an unannounced map.
I also miss the second Breaching Charge from H2016. But because I as a single player are not the main focus of the developers, I realize I can not conclude some kind of demand about it. Only to express my disappointment.
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I think making it a ko accident item would have been way better.
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Again, no it wouldn’t. Why do you guys keep going to the electrocution phone? I said taser duck, not electrocution duck. Use it in a water or oil puddle like the mini-taser in Freelancer. Make it proximity, so it only goes off as someone gets close to it, and if like other duckies it breaks upon activation, nobody has anything to pick up. Anyone who sees it goes to pick it up, it activates and breaks, they can’t pick it up and zap themselves, so unless they’re in some kind of puddle, it doesn’t work.
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Because it’s a remote control device that attracts targets and electrocutes them? That’s not an inadequate comparison.
Tasers tend not to have attracting properties because of how abusive they can be further down the skill-chain of players you go. The regular taser makes the target fetch a guard, and the micro remote taser is invisible to all NPC’s, which requires timing on your part to activate it. A duck taser that goes off by proximity once placed, while immediately more balanced than the E-phone as it only works in water puddles, still has the coin-like suspicion that draws the target to you, which feels very cheese-y.
Part of the reason why the Ephone was so damn popular was because of how easy the kills to setup were; they were literally attracted by the ringer – that’s not dissimilar to what you’re suggesting. And even coin-related accident kills requires more setup (I.E place near a cliff and chain coin distractions, and hope you attract the right person each time) despite being just as easy on the surface.
I’ll even argue that placing the micro remote taser in a puddle still feels a little cheese-y IMO.
If a game can be boiled down to “place item in puddle, let it attract target, rewarded with insta-accident-kill”, then it’s not all that balanced.
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Omfg, that damned word again. “Balanced.” Nobody has ever made any damned sense when applying that word to the usage of such devices, but you know what? Fuck the balance, then.
The game can be boiled down to point and shoot. It’s already got easy kills. For the ten millionth time, with electrocution phone, and now with the idea of a proximity taser ducky, it is not a free kill, because it is not a sure thing. Several things can go wrong when using such devices. Everyone who argues against them always seems to conveniently ignore that fact.
Whatever. It’s probably just gonna be another plain exploding ducky again.
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No, we don’t, and please stop putting us all into one group. “We” are quite aware there is still some risk involved. “Free kill” does not mean “no risk”, it means “minimal risk and effort”. In the case of your proposed idea of a taser ducky or the E-phone, the risk does not feel in line with the outcome and player reward.
Balance is not just about tweaking numbers or listening to your userbase; the risk/reward paradigm absolutely plays a part in all this too. If the risk of an item is trivial to take into account (I.E, the wrong person being killed…which can be solved by restarting) and the reward is too easy to accomplish (accident kill that adheres to Silent Assassin conduct), then it’s not balanced, now is it?
This is the reason IO have never released a lethal dart gun or lethal poison ducky; because it would make accident kills far too easy and would trivialise the game on lower skill levels. At least with the Kalmer and Sieker, those fit specific niches and do serve multiple purposes, even if I also think they are too OP for the own good.
That is the issue. If something feels too easy to do, then it’ll be abused, and the easier it is to do on lower skill levels, then it makes the game easier, and in a very bad way.
First off, the point of the game is to avoid shooting people in the head and making a run for it. the game rewards you for stealth, not gung-ho loud gameplay. Even in freelancer, you are expected to at least keep quiet for the most part. You are perverting my words to fit your narrative, plain and simple.
While I don’t disagree that there are easy kills, they still usually require some level of setup. Even the gas canister/ taser combo requires finding a gas canister, so at least level knowledge is rewarded. Again, even I think that’s a smidge chees-ey too, but not in the same way as electrocution items.
Yes you do, every single one of you who has argued with me on this has always treated it as if you can just walk up to the target, drop the phone, and then it’s done, and every time I’ve pointed out every other necessary step to be taken for a successful outcome it always just gets breezed right past, so yes, you all do.
So what? One person’s usage of it isn’t going to affect another person’s, and the game already has an easy mode that makes the whole game a walk in the park for God’s sake. At this point, beyond self-imposed challenges or hardcore mode on Freelancer, the whole game has become familiar and easy to experienced players, so having fun just up and killing the NPCs in whatever way you wish, even with a “free kill” item, would be a non-issue. I could maybe understand while there was still major content to be released into the game, like new maps and ETs and things, but now that it’s all mostly glorified (but still welcome) rehash, it doesn’t affect anything except the individual player’s preferences. So, to use the old refrain: if you think it’s too easy a tool to use, don’t use it.
Great, and now we’re stuck in a time loop, it’s 2022 again.
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I’m on Team Heisenberg here.
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Losing the fire accident molotov was a damn shame. Can take or leave the e-phone though.
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That seems like an exaggeration, and I for one have not done that. In fact, I’ve been quite careful to say it’s “basically risk-free” or similar epithets. There is still some risk, I’m not going to deny that, and anyone who does is missing the whole picture too. But you are simplifying the issues to make your arguments look better, and have completely ignored my other paragraphs because it does not match up with your line of thinking.
I literally explained the risk and reward of electrocution devices in the previous comment and you seemingly ignored it for the same rhetoric that you always fall back on; appeal to emotion and selfish desires for OP weapons because “it won’t affect other people”, rather than gameplay design logic.
That doesn’t stop it from existing! And people do use these weapons! You can go on Youtube to see for yourself for proof of that! We live in the information age where exploits and easy methods can be learned by anyone by simply looking it up. This is not the be-all, end-all retort that you think it is. You are essentially advocating for no balance at all, and just damning the wider consequences for everyone else. This is amazingly irresponsible thinking when it comes to a balance discussion like this. The game has to keep some semblance of balance and risk/ reward for all skill levels, not just for one core group. You and I are not everyone. There are many camps of players to consider.
Individual player preferences still play a part in a games’ balance and core design, even in single player games. Adding items that just straight up kills someone in an accident with minimal effort on the players’ end is plain bad item design as it discourages interacting with the targets and trivialises much of the gameplay loop. Not to mention the issues that arise in places like Contracts mode or Elusive Targets.
That’s more to do with meta’s and learned information. That’s how a game like this works. The more information and experience the player has, the easier it is on repeated runs. That’s a good thing? If a games’ meta is unhealthy for a game (the emetic weaponry come to mind), then sure, break it up and find ways to resolve the problem that is agreeable for everyone. But that’s not something that always happens.
Also, no, that would not be a non-issue. The issue would still exist for non-experienced players, and now the problem is being shifted to another section of the userbase. You don’t fix problems by ignoring them entirely. You take every part of your userbase into account when balancing a game like this.
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And do you know what the worst part is? You won’t ever listen. Twice now you’ve made “our side” sound like the killjoys or bad guys, as if we want to restrict fun or something. That is not what I want, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I want the game to feel fair to play. If the AI is too powerful or if the player is too powerful, then that is obviously problematic.
You will always appeal to the mindset of “it doesn’t affect you”, which, to repeat, is such a selfish way of dismissing arguments that you cannot respond with other paths of logic. I will not be responding again to you unless you stop stonewalling like this. It ruins any discussion of balance, and it just leads to these kinds of posts where I get annoyed and angry at you. Which, it may surprise people to know, I don’t like being this angry.
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Had they rebalanced it to work like a gas canister (I.E shoot at it when it’s stationary and it’ll explode in an accident), then personally, I’d be fine with that. As it was, the throwing aspect was annoying and finnicky to do (it was save scum: the weapon), so I’m not sad that the other aspects were removed. Even the wall-banging was actually more harmful than helpful (guards tend to lean near walls, and I frequently killed people nearby like this).
I don’t think the current changes to the molly is liked by anyone to be honest, myself included. It literally is just an explosive now, when it could be so much better.
I hear all your arguments above, but I just disagree with your fundamental premise that if a so-called OP item exists in the game it will unavoidably ruin the game for a significant enough number of players such that the item should be removed.
While the following is not a blanket statement that I would apply to absolutely everyone, I trust that there will be a sufficient number of players who can and will be sensible enough to use a so-called OP item in ways that keep the game enjoyable for themselves and their own particular level of skill - all the way from not using the item ever, to using it on every mission.
We simply have fundamentally different views on people’s ability to exercise self-restraint and knowing themselves well enough not to inadvertently ruin the game for themselves. I think it’s an agree to disagree situation.
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