Time for some pub changes

[mtine]

How do you know this game is dead?

When LaSenza makes a post on the forum.

[LaSenza]

Being as most of you guys are talking about the flag room and other things I'll not bother getting into (Fr area warp is unhealthy, and the reason I do not play in the base anymore) because I almost never go to the base in pub itself. I thought I'd take the time to bring up another issue I've had with pub. The duel arenas. Ever consider linking those arenas to TWEL? Also, why are the duels only to 5, there should be an option to increase it to 10, considering 10 is a standard option in the official dueling arena. Personally, I think they're poorly designed in the first place. I'm sure I'm not the only one turned off by 20-30 asteroids blocking my radar at any given point in a duel.

[Rab]

Levis just totally ruined some really good rounds. lolnope must be removed, there's no two ways about it.

[Rab]

30s on the brick is too short too. it's proper hax when you get a few weasels buying max bricks.

[Leland]

Qan, thanks for your valuable time in posting your detailed explanation on your thought process concerning public!

[Rab]

Shield
Should be fixed; now works as intended, lasting 60 seconds. But at 30 seconds remaining, will reduce all damage by half, at 15 seconds remaining, will reduce all damage by 25%, etc.

This is much better, a guy just tried to flag rush flag with it, and I killed him just before he got the flag.

[Rab]

2cool
Made a special edit just for you on that one, Rab, heh.

<3

There's another one it would be good to have a command to get rid of:
TW-PubSystem> For tutorial, type !tutorial Command help: ::!help Zone feedback: !comment <msg>

Maybe it could be an arena message instead?

or maybe a ::!shutup command to opt out of PMs from the bot (unless they're responses to a command).

[Dierienow]

Which is a good thing especially when your team doesn't have one. However you can't really argue that the ship's identity is based on transportation not killing, the fact that it has any killing potential, let alone 3 potential OHKs on spawn, is pretty crazy. My idea is simply to shift the scales a bit where it is less rewarding to be a suicidal terr, not to remove the fun of that entirely, but to turn it into a decision that must be considered rationally, rather than the high value of dying, killing 2-3 people, then doing it again. Which only seems to be a problem at certain populations anyway where the terrs are spawning in mid base. And that's assuming the community doesn't already police itself and make lamers feel bad. Personally if 4 terrs want to try to burst me I already see it as a win but other people see it as a balance problem, and maybe they're right. Not really sure but if it is a balance problem that is just my idea to fix it a bit without changing the entire game.

The X's and sharks and other stuff are probably the bigger issues but also the most difficult to solve. I don't really have anything for those. I agree it should somehow be more difficult for x's to reach the flag, and that currently it is TOO easy to break flag control.

[BIET]

You wouldn't want to discourage players to play terrier, but it shouldn't become an annoyance for everyone else. The burst spam in midbase is already bad enough, if multiple terriers get into the FR and clear it just solely because they spawn with bursts it defeats the point of trying to stay alive. I think it's bad to award players, terriers in particular, that die a lot and therefor get more items/min. Especially if the item in question gives you 3 bouncing bullets that one-hit-kill you and doesn't require much skill.

Maybe I'm just so focused on bursts because every time I use a burst I hardly kill a single person D:

[Rab]

The game actually gives terrs extra money to try and get people to terr.

[Dierienow]

I think it's a good summary and I like your point about removing rep leaving sharks (and levs) as the only ship able to clear mines.

A simple solution for terrs running into base and spamming bursts is to change the incentives. I think if people want to spam burst and die and it's fun for them they should do it.. but it should be for the fun of it not because it's a good strategy or rewarding. You can make it so that getting a kill in terr is simply less rewarding then it is in other ships. Bursts are powerful but also lazy.. if you get a kill with them you should earn less $ than a typical kill. The reward for skillfully using bursts is basically less pressure and less enemies to deal with and easier time holding the FR. Killing a terr should be much more rewarding than a terr killing you since it's fast, has a warp, and is dangerous apparently.

Basically my idea to reduce the amount of burst spam:
- Kills in terr worth much less than in other ships.. say if a terr kills you it's worth 1/4 - 2/3 of what it would be worth to kill them.

Might be like that already who knows. But nobody gains/loses features, everything is basically the same, only there's a slight nudge to change behaviour of the players. If you are good with bursts (say you could somehow hit all 3 bursts every time) there is essentially no penalty to you and you make those dolla bills. But if your goal is to run into every base on every spawn and spam bursts.. now you need to make a decision is the fun of that worth not making as much money as I could by trying to stay alive. Just throwing my idea out for terrs.

[Rab]

Good points, my thoughts:

Burst
- Is overpowered when multiple terrs get a prize green
- Can the probability of a burst green be reduced?
- Buying bursts is location limited, and restricted to 1 minute. The locations are:
TW-PubSystem> To buy an item, you must be in one of these areas: in Mid Base around Flagroom around Flagroom Not yet spotted in Flagroom Cram in Lower Base in Buyzone
- I tested a few areas where you can buy bursts and send them into the flag room. IMO this means the areas aren't strict enough.
- I think buying bursts may as well be removed, by the time it's balanced properly it's just easier to ship change to get a new burst, that also has the advantage of making you sacrifice your port.

Rocket
- Definitely needs a time limit so you can't buy infinite rockets, even if it's only 1 minute.

Weasel
- Yes if I had to choose between removing the Rep or the Rocket I would also choose the Rocket.
- However this would be my third choice, after: 1. bigger weasel. 2. remove both rep and rocket

[BIET]

This thread grabbed my attention and since I play a lot of pub I just had to reply.


For me personally items are the biggest offender of making the game unfun and almost brainless. Combine the midbase spawning with this and it just gets even more ridiculous. The items in question are the burst, rocket and stealth (I just really hate the fact that when combined with cloak it just totally renders 6 out of the 8 ships defenseless).


Bursts are fine when you can expect about one every minute, but the fact a team can have multiple terriers that spawn with a burst each, and can even get more through the green sharing, is just downright stupid. What happens is: they spawn, fly up to base and use burst. This is acceptable when there is only one terrier on a team, but I've seen teams with 4 or more terriers. Dodging 12 "random" bouncing bullets in a confined space is almost impossible AND they can do it every 10-15 seconds because they spawn right outside the FR again. Sometimes they even get back into base and their previous burst is still there.


Rockets are also annoying when you can just rocket at someone, suicide into them, respawn and do it again. This gives javs a way to fly into the FR and rockets into the flag. This causes a couple of problems, but the most annoying one is that it is just very laggy for everyone other that the jav itself. Bombs, mines and bullets just get blocked by a phantom ship most of the time. At the end it comes down to it happening every 10-15 seconds from one single jav.


Stealth is mostly a problem in situations where there are only a few players and most likely no teammates with X-radar to help you out. There are a lot of weasels around right now that only target specific players. I'm not against hunting specific players, but when the targeted player has no other way to defend himself other than changing to a ship with X-radar or speccing, I would say it's gone too far. Spawning in midbase makes it more noticable aswell.


Buyables are a tough subject. Personally I don't use any of the buyable items, but I like the fact that it gives people a chance to kill a player with the items they would otherwise not have been able to kill. Thors might be a bit too powerful, but they are expensive enough to counter their power and limit their appearance. The celebratory items (fireworks) shouldn't obscure your vision as much and not at all while dueling. The cooldown on some of the items, if there is any, is too short aswell. Javs can buy infinite rockets one after the other. There should atleast be some cooldown for that.


How to solve those problems


To limit the way rockets and bursts affect the basing game while spawing in midbase I would suggest prizing those items after a certain amount of time. Maybe the time it normally takes for those ships to reach the midbase from the normal spawn. Players using those items can average about 1 kill each death mostly due to those items. I don't know if this would be to much for the bot to handle, but it should only take effect during small games and only for a few ships. An other solution would be to decrease the duration of the items.


As Rab pointed out it's too easy to claim the flag with weasel and I agree, but I'm not sure if all the suggestions to balance it are quite helping to address the issue. Getting rid of both the rockets and the repel would make it too hard to pilot. Making it the same size as all the other ships takes away the novelty the X has. I would suggest to get rid of either the repel or the rocket. If I had to choose I would pick the rocket because otherwise only levs and sharks would be able to repel mines.


Stealth I would just get rid of it personally but that would be unfair for the players that actually like that kind of play. They should atleast not start with both and buying it should also cost a bit more. Otherwise it should be made (near) impossible to kill someone with both stealth and cloak on and give the ships without X-radar a brief chance to react. Killing a ship conceiled by cloak by only looking at your radar is hard enough as it is.


Please let me know if you think my suggested solutions are any good and if not, how you would change them.


-BIET

[qan]

When you've fought for control of a base, it's yours, you earnt it, you should get to keep it untill someone takes it from you.

This seems practical from the perspective of rewarding winners, definitely. But the overall health of pub has to be considered. To keep it somewhat competitive, allowing warping at the start of the round is fairly essential (or, so long as there are rounds, which as mentioned, I think are necessary if we're to have anyone interested in fighting over the base). Teams tend to get stacked quite quickly, and losing a match can be pretty discouraging. If they don't even get a shot at taking the FR at the next round start, many of the losing team will just give up. Also, despite the fact that they warp in, you still do have many advantages: usually, you have the numbers advantage, you often have the terr/shark advantage already, an overall skill advantage, and the "engaged player" advantage in terms of which of the players are actively participating in the basing game vs spawning, leving, etc.

It's a pretty bad analogy, but imagine a TWBD game where the team that won the last matchup between the two squads starts with control of the base. It's not going to make for a very interesting game, especially not for the former losers. Same goes for pub rounds.

Forgot to post this earlier but I had an idea where there are 4 small lights in corners of the FR, where if you have them capped (maybe need flag capped also?) they act like truesight allowing you to see stealthed boyos in the FR.

Sounds cool, but yeah, unfortunately not doable.

If you are so concerned about the fun of this game then please where are your suggestions for sharks.

We do actually have a (controversial) command which clears the mines of "bad sharks" ... sharks who purposely try to kill the basing action by mine-blocking the entrance when there are no other sharks on the other team, and nobody is changing ships. (The command is !badshark, for any staff reading this.) It takes a certain kind of masochist to play shark, or a certain sense of fun. To me there are few things more enjoyable in TW than rushing someone's trajectory with a shark and mining ahead of them. But few people will change to shark simply because the other team's shark is mineblocking. Most would rather spec, or settle for killing outside of FR. It's a tough problem. Some have suggested banning sharks under a certain population level, but that seems to upset the fine balance of freedom vs structure TW tries to strike.

I don't have any better ideas for how to prevent mine-blocking sharks from ruining basing games, but if anyone else does, I'm all ears.

[mtine]

If you are so concerned about the fun of this game then please where are your suggestions for sharks. Obviously campers like Rab fucking hate X's.. they're fun and interrupt his Nazi-like hold on the flagroom gained through having at least 1337 camp hours and 1 shark on his freq. His entire strategy consists of a) getting to flag room first b) teaming with other try hards who clearly give too much of a fuck about pub that they're trying to remove any counter to their strategy, and then c) tell everyone gg like you have even a crumb of skill on this game beyond camping in spider.

I have never had a bad experience with x frankly. They've annoyed be but never made be quit, and often make me laugh because the play styles they open up. Meanwhile nobody complains about sharks because it is the sole ship that lets these try hards camp the flag.

- QQ more newbies.

Rab isn't even good lol.