TWLB Basing Changes -- My initial impressions

[Rab]

Hey Rab,
As long as you know your team's time is always on the left or right, that should be fine for colorblind persons, no?
If it's consistent it shouldn't be an issue.

That's one way of doing it.
A way of doing it whilst preserving the freq0 vs freq1 layout would just to be to indicate in some other way which team you're on, e.g. 12:00 - 13:00

[ogron]

Qan,
A lot of the changes have been implemented and coded in already (very nice job, btw, thanks again for the work), and the results have been mostly positive. Returning greens, removing the terrier effects, and the set greening of terrs has worked well.

The two biggest things I think we should test while we still have time to experiment before TWL are:

1) Updating the UI to reflect these changes

2) Testing out possible cram fixes. I've been mulling and toying with a cram fix for years, and I really think just a full reset would work best. There's too many structural advantages in holding cram. Even when you break, you're at a huge disadvantage typically in the FR and in a bad position and your sharks aren't set, and you're usually stuck in a losing position that is hard to get out of. There's wayyyy too much momentum built up, and the game becomes all about momentum and maintaining a constant cram, and when it breaks, maintaining your superior FR position, and the cram-breaking terr has often depleted their resources to break... also they don't have a port in the FR because they just barely got in and had to run to the side/bottom corner, and can't set an escape port to switch to the other side of the flag room... it's a very bleak situation.

At the same time, people have spent years developing skills and knowledge in breaking and holding crams, and it would be a huge waste to just change the map and throw all that knowledge away. Cram breaking and cram holding are the mark of veteran players, and there is a lot of satisfaction in that.

To my mind, the only solution then is NOT altering the map in any way.

It is to simply set a maximum time value of a tek and a cram. I prefer 3 minutes, but the more you value cramming and cram breaking, the higher you could go. You could have it set at 3 minutes for TWBD, 4 minutes for TWDT-B, and 5 minutes for TWLB. Something like that. I think 3 or 4 is around the ideal. It's definitely debatable.

If you successfully get a tek and hold cram for several minutes, that's a huge victory and you've been appropriately compensated with somewhere between 2-3 minutes, typically, and the position resets to the one on go (with everyone being warped to the safe and back to the ear resetting mines/ports and greening the terr and sharks with ports/burst/rep) and resetting the flag game to a 50/50 position, in the same way scoring a goal in hockey leads to resetting the game to a 50/50 position with a puck drop at centre ice.

If you play well and get a great cram break, you get back in under 3 minutes, great, if not, reset the flag game and cap the reward for the initial tek. 3 minutes for a Tek is fair, IMO. 5 teks and 5 successful cram holds wins the game, although in practice this would be close to 4 teks and 4 cram holds given flag time gained in the FR battles.

We should at least test it and see how players like it.

How I would envision the UI:

[Rab]

You could have it set at 3 minutes for TWBD, 4 minutes for TWDT-B, and 5 minutes for TWLB.

I'm not against the idea of resetting, but please keep all basing arenas the same!

I'm struggling to keep track of what changes have been made and to which arena. Can we make the decision to consolidate all the arena types so base/twbd/twlb are always the same (except the game length in base is shorter - if we even want to keep that) and we can just have a single conversation? Atm I think we're making changes and not tracking it well, we might get into a mess.

[Rab]

An important question is whether these custom UI elements can be different for different people.
If they have to be the same for everyone then the green/red/underline/bold/left/right thing doesn't work, but I think the rest of it would be OK.