Remove /bulletpush and make "off" the new default
 

JJ2+ has a lot of commands, perhaps too many. When the three commands /bulletpush, /injuryknockback and /blastknockback got introduced, there was also hope that someday these commands wouldn't be necessary.

It's been a year since and I've had a close look at these settings again. One thing i'm noticing is that basically every server prefers hosting with /bulletpush off. Here's a couple of reasons:

1) Bulletpush is unpredictable. How much it pushes and in what direction might aswell be so precise that it feels completely random and unreliable to human players. So much impact and so much unpredictibility isn't fun in an competiive game.
2) Bulletpush is heavily impacted by latency. It's inherently not great to tie mechanical (dis)advantages to this metric.
3) Bulletpush on disables /injuryknockback completely. This is not intuitive that they don't work or how they work. Without bulletpush, the knockback from injuries is deterministic and gets far more simple to explain.
4) Bulletpush causes players to get moved instead of hit, sometimes moving into bullets they shouldn't be moved in, or moving away from them. So far, I've never heard people positive about this interaction.
5) So far there haven't been any counterarguments to keep /bulletpush on.

Both injuryknockback and blastknockback still have their uses, mainly for race gametypes or ground force, or disabling RF knockback in tests. Having certain knockback strength options makes more sense than /bulletpush which is mostly just invisible, complex but yet impactful.

Links provided just for reference so people don't have to go looking:

Description of the three settings in question
Previous discussion
Another previous discussion I guess
And another maybe

Thanks for these helpful links Violet

Agree with removal
 

I agree with removing /bulletpush. Your reasons about it being unpredictable, latency-dependent, and pushing players around instead of damaging them are spot on, and no one has really given a convincing argument to keep it. The poll also shows that most people prefer having it removed.

I also remember that before /bulletpush was added to Plus, before the game actually started, we could shoot other players and they would get knocked back a little, without taking any damage. I think it felt much better and more natural that way.

And there was someone who made a mutator that solved this issue really well and made things fair for everyone, but now nobody uses it because of /bulletpush. Maybe this feature doesn't need to be built into the game by default, and if someone really wants it, they can just add it through their own mutator for their server.

Please remove this command in the next Plus update so the game feels smoother and more enjoyable.

Bulletpush and knocking are linked with each other, so it's probably tricky to keep the bulletpush behaviour around just for stopped games. I don't vouch to create possible netcode problems or inconsistencies. The whole idea of this is to simplify the options in the game, and by keeping pushing around for stopped games it does the opposite of that. While fun and nostalgic, it doesn't serve a purpose.

If the concern is that at this moment stopped games aren't really communicated, then perhaps an idea is to make bullets and rabbit sprites translucent during stopped games.