Pub Timed Matches

[Rudy]

Settings discussion aside, I'm quite satisfied with how the time system works now. Once a point reward system is added, it should solve the problem of teams becoming disinterested in flag due to the longetivity of rounds. I say having long rounds is beneficial because, if for instance a jackpot reward is at stake, the longer it goes, the greater the jackpot (assuming the same setup as I mentioned in an earlier post), and who wouldn't want a fat 100,000 prized for an hours worth of basing?
If this does become the case though, it would be wise for the bot to lock teams with 30 seconds remaining to prevent hopping. And then should the flag be stolen, the timer is reset anyway so can unlock until the next 30 second warning. It won't kill speccers to wait a couple of seconds to see if one team wins or doesn't.

[Spiderman]

i love it.

it makes the game more purposeful rather than just aimless shootings etc.. :P

[hogo]

did I miss something here?????

[PH]

Good idea, bad execution. I practically begged my team to switch to spiders for an hour, but they insisted on keeping their javelins. This Band-Aid isn't going to cover the wound for long.

[Theif of Time]

restrict javs to highest 2 or 3 scoring players.

[Suh]

restrict javs to highest 2 or 3 scoring players.

what if they dont wanna be the yellow ship?

restirct it to 2

restrict it to first come first serve and if they get "cheater called" then some1s else is switched into the jav, better to have 1 tking jav switched by a <ZH>/<ER>/moddy than 7

there will be no perfect system

[Theif of Time]

if they don't wanna, then the next highest scorer who wants to, gets to be jav. So someone with a higher score can 'kick' a newb out of jav by becoming jav.

The same principle that NW used in ?go octabase

[JeBu]

still think time race would be better. and set x-radar for lanc and spider or atleast lanc those cloakers who keep suiciding for flag touch ruins the fun.

scoreboard would be nice

and spawns changed to left and right safezone would be good. example if i want to go get some drink and get spawned to safe zone it would be much easier. and next to safe zone could be some tip how players can attach to terrier. and some trancparency line could lead to base.

btw now there is that !warp command why can't it be automatic? and now it tele middle of fr would be ebtter if it would be like in ?go base and other places to ears

[Kolar]

If the NW is brought back (or if the weasel lost multi and was made bigger again) then we won't have problems with Flag Time and maybe more people will switch over to the spider from cloakers and javs. The whole idea of the flag timer is to not restrict publics so once the update is done to pubbots then we'll see how well things go for TKing. When the bots are updated for granting points then I think more people will decide to use the spider but limiting it to 2-3 javs won't solve anything.

[Theif of Time]

!warp does to random place in flagroom, i think its fine.
Javs are a big problem, as are weasels. Weasels can only really be combated by 1 or more people becoming dedicated sharks, or mining flag, which can lead to tks in competitive games. I like how the prize (bty) encourages long games (and thus use of weasels. just make them a couple pixels radius bigger and problem pretty much solved.) but it is not very permanent and a few times I've got 600 odd bty and then been killed (or tkd) by a jav bomb hitting a teammate. The bounty doesn't last, points would be more permanent.

If you want javs to be less annoying, Remove their rocket. Theres nothing worse than a lagging rocket jav. Any reasonable arguments for rocket to stay, anyone?
I'm not sure why weasel would need to lose multi, its not so much the killing of people thats the problem with it IMO... its the flag stealing. If your team is in base, and you rush up to flag in weasel, I don't see a problem.
But If your team is getting owned, and you sneak in and steal it with 20 seconds left, then you're only increasing the bty prize for the dominant team. and Annoying Them With Weasel (TM).

Oh i see so its a waiting game to see how things turn out once its all done?
Might I ask when that will be? (hmm, this seems a little rude... I'm not meaning to sound rude or sarcastic)


Weirdly enough, being lanc i got prized with a rocket, which I could use, but the rocket was useless.

[Lallafa]

Hey Thief, and all.
I've greatly enjoyed the new basing in the pure pubs.

Here are my opinions:

The flagholding time is just about right at 3 minutes when it's reset on touch. It gives a great thrill to games when you can never be sure of success, with those cloakers.
I wouldn't mind having a 10 minute cumulative time game in pub2 or pub3.

!warp should be automatic if it's to be used.

Arena size same. People will always be fooling around, and there are only the 2 basing arenas.
Team balancing would be great, naturally.

Weasels should stay small. That's what the holes are for. My proposal for a countermeasure is to give the lancaster (greened) x-radar. It already hits them easily, and kills with one hit. It could in exchange lose a slight amount of regen or such.

No javelin limits thanks. People would be whining about evey TK the javelins make to get to be one themselves.
I've never been too bothered about TKers. Most are accidental and when it's on purpose they get bored soon. The best thing would be to enable a fast voting system when someone TKs too much. This could put him into spec or change the ship, I don't know.

If the nightwasp is to be added it should replace the leviathan, or be a ninth ship. And it should be the non-attachable version (latest one), or a new version since its "role" is a little shady (to me). The best it can do is stall packs with the EMP, but maybe the drain should be longer so it's worth it on single targets.
The weasel is an exellent ship with many uses, that keeps terrs from being bored and can weaken defences nicely by killing main defenders and pulling attention, or drive the terr into a javelin bomb. It should stay. ..small.

As Thief said currently you can defend the flag best with weasels, and by mining the flag when there's more than one weasel coming at it.
Remember when people whined that the nightwasp was overpowered when it had cloak but couldn't even kill easily by surprise? Things could change as people learn to defend so that weasels wont get through.

[genocidal]

What?

How would it cause "a great drop in population"?

First:
The people that would leave, why would you want them around? Seriously, think about it. If they're such dedicated LT's that they would leave the zone and never return, then aren't those the very people that aren't public basing and such that you want rid of and are forcing these changes to begin with?

Second:
Where are they going to go exactly? Do you have so little faith in the entire rest of the zone that you just expect players to all go "this place sucks" and leave? It sounds a whole lot like an excuse, to me.


First impressions count for a lot, and when a player enters TW for the very first time and is dropped into a public arena, he should see what the game is. He/she should see people basing, and have these same people say "this is how you do this game". Not LevTerring, if that's the first thing you learn, that's what you're going to do.

No. Levi is the best ship pubs have and LTing is most fun thing in pub.

[Pressure Drop]

yeah timed pubgames are a good idea but having played them there are serious problems

1)they really promote x's and roofing.

i was in a 3mins in a row game which went on for about 20-30 mins with our freq really dominating but the other freq had so many x's that one would get flag. Then loads off our team went to roof to try and kill the terr which was brining the x's, which ment a big roof fight involving about 10 ppl total.The other freq weren't trying to get in and hold the flag themselves but to just nip in and touch it. The end result was very messy and nothing like basing over the flag like it should be.

2) gives freq hoppers another incentive to freq hop.

Over all i think it is a good idea, i'd like to see it with either a larger X or the nightwasp replacing ship 6 to stop the problems in 1) arising.

Also to those who say limit javs to 2 per freq etc, can you imagine the amount of bitching that would cuase!! You'd get ppl who wanted the jav slot bitching and calling whoever was in jav noob and to gtfo so they could pro jav the other team, it be 10x worse than in the hosted base games with restricted javs. If it was highest points gets jav , this would lead to a few ppl hogging jav as well as the bitching.

[Troll King]

That first problem isn't actually a problem. It's a perfectly viable strategy. You may not like it, but if your complaint is rooted in cloakers sneaking into the flag room for a touch of the flag, then I'm sorry, but that's part of the game. The mistake you're making, and it's a mistake that many others make in order to "improve" pub, is by trying to make it like TWLB which should not be the overall goal.

[qan]

Thanks for all the comments, guys. Your feedback is important, and it's basically the main thing guiding the development of this game. As you know, it's hard to strike the right balance, so as this is developed, it's undergoing a number of changes. Not going to be perfect, but I'd like to think that it's an improvement. Of course, some people are bound to disagree with that statement, and I don't have a problem with that; after all, you can't please all of the people all of the time. It'll stay to one pub anyhow. For the ones that do enjoy it, I hope we can develop this into something really worthwhile. :]


So anyway, here are two BIG DILEMNAS...

1) Consecutive flag time, or traditional time or points race?
I implemented the bot with consecutive flag time to try something different, not necessarily better. It creates a different kind of atmosphere, and it's a game you can't find anywhere else. Also, it makes it really easy to see exactly how much time is needed -- it's by far the most simple way to do things in my opinion. Time race is probably more professional, and it does avoid the problems of having weasels sneak in. But then again, it doesn't create massive tension in the last minute or so of time left, or at least not to the degree that requiring a consecutive hold on the flag does.

One idea is to require someone to touch the flag for several seconds to claim it. This could throw the bot off a little though -- with the flag being out of sync with the bot (unless it was just the graphic of a flag). Also, flag claimed packets are much more reliable than player position packets, so using a player's position instead of the actual flag could be buggy.

2) Open-style pub matches, or regulated base-style games?
Originally this bot was designed with one balanced purpose in mind: make pub more interesting, objective-oriented and fun to play, without getting in the way of the freedom that pub offers. This means free ship changes, no regulation of teams or freq switchers (who might switch at the last moment for a win bounty/point award/special prize), no automatic warping, and basically not interfering with the general goings-on of pub. This way, people can choose to play flag time, or just plain ignore it. !warp (which is now sticky between rounds) allows people to choose to warp into the FR at the start of the round, so that players who don't want to play with the flag time mode aren't warped. Seems like a good compromise.

The other side of the coin is: earwarping people as done in a Base, TWBD or TWLB match; auto-regulating and evening frequencies; restricting ships such as weasel and jav to certain numbers or completely restricting; possibly locking the arena and requiring PM to the bot with ship# to get in (preventing freq hopping); MVP-style stats that become possible with keeping a certain ship & freq; and a lot more. Many things could be done with this, but to me it sounds like an alternate mode of ?go base (base3 maybe?). It could turn into something like an open ?go base. But many comments I've heard from people suggest that if this is done, it should be a subarena, and I agree there.

So unless there's an overwhelming agreement to make these changes in pub, and sort of force people to play flag time mode, we're stuck with freqhoppers, bad javs, and weasels stealing the flag -- which like TK said, can just be another challenge, another strategy you have to defend against. Being good at flag time isn't the same as being good at ?go base, and perhaps that's the best part about it. You have to compensate for serious team deficiencies and irregularities, just like in a normal pub, making due with what you have. Certainly gives a LOT of variety. I like it this way.


Other issues I can think of:

- If we end up offering points, what prevents freq hoppers? We'd have to award a small enough amount that their sneaky ways would not be that beneficial.

- What do you think of the time required? 3 minutes seems to be too short, while 4 minutes sometimes goes on too long. We could do 3:30, but that's also kind of an odd time. I guess 3 is a good thing to settle for in the meantime. (BTW, any other smods or highmods reading this, 15 and 20 minutes are both bad times for flag time... even 5 is too much!)


Want to thank the community again for the support and feedback! Any other ideas you have are very welcome. I also want to thank the dissenters for putting up with all this. :> Promise we won't take over.