Brink Competition Round-up: The Right Rules and More

[Kalbuth]

Awww! Point taken
The cvar thing is true, though

[deems]

And both easy to counter, just put a few more bullets into them. It’s called “gibbing” and has been part of this style of game since RTCW. I’ve never yet been killed by downed fire or a medic who revived himself.

Exactamundo.

[Shadowcat]

[QUOTE=Kalbuth;339761]Awww! Point taken
The cvar thing is true, though[/QUOTE]

I didnt mean to disagree with you on that point, getting as many options as possible with CVARs is always a good thing for Pservers. Just that, in this case, it isn’t the cause of the rules.

[Apples]

[QUOTE=Apoc;339453]Until you have played a competitive match as part of a clan vrs another clan of a reasonable level, i really dont think people should be telling the comp scene what it should or shouldnt have.

It seems that at least 90% of teams in the esl cup are happy with the restrictions, yet 90% of public players arent.

Please get in a clan and try playing for yourself. If you dont want to get in a clan and play competitively then why even post your thoughts on the issue as it doesnt affect you.[/QUOTE]

The point is that if you alter too much the game, comp scene wont live long IMO, but I understand that for now, as you cant tweak the cvar, stuffs have to be removed. I just hope that in the future some mod or stuff will be there to define the rules a bit finer.

Peace

[Anti]

The point is that if you alter too much the game, comp scene wont live long

Took the words out of my mouth. It’s alright telling people “try our rules, you might like them” but most people already playing a game don’t want to join a clan to try something different, they want to join a clan to play the game they play.

The Comp scene definitely has to be more considerate of that than it has been in the last 5 years or so and there are good examples why. The most competitive games and communities on PC right now, things like SC2, HoN and LoL, don’t deviate from the core rules much if at all. Something to think about.

[Humate]

[QUOTE=Anti;339780]Took the words out of my mouth. It’s alright telling people “try our rules, you might like them” but most people already playing a game don’t want to join a clan to try something different, they want to join a clan to play the game they play.

The Comp scene definitely has to be more considerate of that than it has been in the last 5 years or so and there are good examples why. The most competitive games and communities on PC right now, things like SC2, HoN and LoL, don’t deviate from the core rules much if at all. Something to think about.[/QUOTE]

Then create a game that doesnt warrant any alterations.

Something to think about.

[light_sh4v0r]

Can’t speak for the other 2, but LoL has a banning round before champion select, where a total of 4 champions are banned before the game starts. That way most OP champions are taken out of the game as well. That’s not much different than what’s happening here.

[Shadowcat]

[QUOTE=Humate;339798]Then create a game that doesnt warrant any alterations.

Something to think about.[/QUOTE]

Nearly impossible. Devs need to design and balance games for the masses. Pub balance and Comp balance almost never overlap. Thats a big reason why you see most of the weapons in pub games but only a handful in comp; comp players will almost always grab the gun with the highest skill ceiling, which in this case is a light player with Sea Eagle/Ritchie and the CARB-9 which most agree is overpowered.

So the Comp rules attempt to balance the game for their needs with the tools available, which is fair enough, but I don’t think banning a third of the skills is the best way.

[Humate]

Exactly my point, shadowcat.
Pub and comp have different needs, so the notion of having a vanilla ruleset is somewhat of a joke.

[Shadowcat]

[QUOTE=Humate;339803]Exactly my point, shadowcat.
Pub and comp have different needs, so the notion of having a vanilla ruleset is somewhat of a joke.[/QUOTE]

For Stopwatch, the ideal balance is one in which the Defensive team is pretty much guaranteed to lose, but has enough leverage to make it take 10-15 minutes. This balance obviously doesnt work in pub play.

[wolfnemesis75]

[QUOTE=Thundermuffin;339621]Downed fire and self resurrection are both extremely cheap in competitive play; once you kill someone that should be the end of it unless a medic comes to pick them up. They shouldn’t be able to influence the battle from a state of incapacitation. That’s why self revives and downed fire are always hated in games. It isn’t fair for them to be given a second chance unless another medic takes the risk to revive them.

To me that just isn’t fair; I can’t think of a multiplayer game that had something like that ever. If it came down to that, that would only highlight the failure that is BRINK’s balance and you’d lose what little amount of teams you had probably. Removing abilities is a way better way to fix the game, because at least then the game isn’t a stationary thing since you can at least swap classes every now and then and try a different way of pushing.

It wouldn’t solve full-holds, because then you’d only have 1 objective person. Also causing people to not be able to switch teams is a bad idea because it forces people to run 1 or 2 strats and never try anything different because they don’t have the ability to run 2 or 3 engineers or medics.

Restricting the abilities is also a horrible choice; everyone should have access to everything, period. That’s one of the great things about the ESL config; everyone has all the abilities they need to have unlocked (both universal and class) right when they start no matter what, which evens the playing field instead of having to specialize in one class.

It seems kind of pointless for people who don’t play competitively, or even on the PC version, to try to tell us how to play competitively. What might work on your 360/PS3 doesn’t work on a PC in a competitive environment.

By the way, whoever said you console players will get us our SDK, that’s hilarious as heck! You aren’t the reason we would get the SDK, we’re the reason we would. Plus, we keep our games going way longer than any console community does, since you know your support for your online titles gets cut after a certain time and ours doesn’t. :)[/QUOTE]

I disagree. I also do not think you should discount console players like you are doing. There is much to be learned, and gained from anyone’s experience playing the game, because we are all essentially playing the same game. This PC mindset that you display, is just not cool, honestly. Not sure where it comes from, or why you think there is a skill gap between the platforms, because frankly there isn’t. Also, what I suggest is closer to the actual core. Although you can not switch class or run more than one class, the game is designed to have the right number for each objective. And keeps the core rules. What’s the point of watching these PC competitions when you are basically running a different game with different rules? I seen many of your arguments, and they typically boil down to: Only PC players know what’s best for Brink competitions. That’s not cool, or very helpful mindset. I just don’t agree with much of the PC vibe on full holds, which maps are balanced, or their idea of proper rules to be quite frank. And I am not alone if you read other comments. Open your mind. We are all playing Brink.

[Humate]

For Stopwatch, the ideal balance is one in which the Defensive team is pretty much guaranteed to lose.

Nope.
The ideal balance, is where skill differential determines who wins.

[Shadowcat]

[QUOTE=Humate;339816]Nope.
The ideal balance, is where skill differential determines who wins.[/QUOTE]

In stopwatch mode, the better team is going to delay the offense longer and beat the defense faster. The best way to compare the two sides in stopwatch is to nearly guarantee that both sides can get a time. In this way, it would still allow the team with the most skill to win, without the difficulty of finding the knife edge for balance where neither side has an advantage with asymmetrical objectives.

Since finding that very fine line is near impossible, its just easier to make offense stronger, as its much easier to quantify the “better team” than when defense is stronger, which is what we have right now and results in full-holds far too easily in the comp scene.

[shirosae]

I seen many of your arguments, and they typically boil down to: Only PC players know what’s best for Brink competitions. That’s not cool, or very helpful mindset. I just don’t agree with much of the PC vibe on full holds, which maps are balanced, or their idea of proper rules to be quite frank. And I am not alone if you read other comments. Open your mind. We are all playing Brink.

No, you’re mistaken: the argument is this: The people who play PC competition know what’s best for PC competition.

There are plenty of casual PC but-non-competition players who think that they know what’s best for competition; they’re also wrong.

For example, I can see why you’d want to change downed fire from the pub settings in 5v5 when the game has one team trying to advance and the other trying to hold things where they are. I can why they have to disable it for the time being because it augments defence more than offence and Brink already struggles with full holds and there’s no SDK to make it comp-friendly and with cvars as they are.

But y’know what? No-one should be paying attention to me, because I don’t play PC comp, and my opinion is based on theorycraft, rather than any PC comp experience. Sometimes, things don’t work the way they do in the fantasy realm in your head. This was a useful lesson for me to learn.

[Smoochy]

[QUOTE=its al bout security;339592]that is the most ignorant thing i have ever heard. i cant afford a 2000$ dollar computer, i got my xbox for free as i did brink. its taken me 3 months to get 3 months of live (25$) im poor and if i spend that much money itll probably be on another gun.

besides what are you trying to prove that you WASTE money for your nerdgasms??

i suggest you dont turn your nose like that as the poorest people are also the most dangerous

like ninjas[/QUOTE]

so, you have loads of guns but obviously no job? maybe sell some guns? are you that scared of everything you need an armoury in your house?

[Kalbuth]

[QUOTE=Humate;339816]Nope.
The ideal balance, is where skill differential determines who wins.[/QUOTE]

Think Stopwatch before going to conclusion. Competition is using Stopwatch, pub play isn’t.

Stopwatch guarantees even field of play because both teams will be in the shoes of the other team at some point, both team will see the exact same challenge, no matter how the game is designed.

But, to be meaningful, there is a need for basis of comparison, ie one team must perform “something” better than the other.
If both team consistently can’t perform anything (read : you have a double full-hold), you can’t compare both result.
So you have to gear the game toward attacking side to have some meaningful result by both team that can be comparable, and in this case, it’s the skill differential that will determine the result.

In pub, you only have one round of each map, the attacker will never be the defender, and the result is depending on the map design and obviously for each map, you’ll find elements favoring attack and defend, and you will simply not be able to have perfect even field, unless you work with completely symmetric map design and objective, which is not suitable for Brink Attack/Defense scheme (the very fact that one team attacks and the other defends makes the whole setup asymmetric)
If you want a statistical 50/50 win/loss ratio for attacker in pub, you’ll have to gear the map more toward defenders than in the Stopwatch case, because you don’t need the attacker to achieve something, in fact, you need him to achieve only half the time.

So yes, the ideal balance in public normal mode is different than in competitive stopwatch mode, this is inevitable to guarantee even field of play, and what you seek : skill determining the winner.
which means, you can’t avoid specific rules for Comp play

[wolfnemesis75]

[QUOTE=Thundermuffin;339443]
The competitive scene is nothing but fullholds without ESL rules in place; even with these rules in place you still get way too many fullholds compared to ET:QW and W:ET. The maps are so defensive sided that one bad push can waste you minutes because you have to wait for everyone to respawn (they may be on different waves because you can’t /kill and there’s no timer to know when to make a bumrush to suicide and try to take some with you), get health/kevlar/weapon buffs out to everyone, and then try to get a pick or two again so you can move in.

Really, no matter how you play BRINK it just isn’t as fun as SD’s previous games by any means. Pubbing is too spam-filled and you rarely win on offense, unless you just steamroll the other team. Steamrolls are fun maybe one or two times every now and then, but it isn’t fun for it to be the only way teams win. Competitive play isn’t fun either because it’s dominated by buffing and that slows the pace of the game down to a crawl because the offense has to sit and wait and waste the precious time they have.[/QUOTE]

Again, I just 100% disagree. You speak as if concrete fact and sound defeated before you try. Fullholds? Come on. I have not seen footage of an actual competitive match of Brink where this happened every single time with the complete rules out of the box. It just seems like we are being told that this happened as if “set in stone”. This will happen no matter what. I just don’t agree.

Please provide a link where 50 matches were played and they were all full holds.(With gamers who are experienced playing Brink) Keep in mind that I want to see video with Brink rules, not ESL rules. Also, this is not COD or a standard FPS, which these ESL rules try to turn Brink into. It just doesn’t seem like the rule committee get it, or the game, to be brutally honest. And staying stuck in the old ET:QW days won’t help either: Brink is a different game. :mad:

Ultimately, I just don’t think the game was played correctly and well enough with the proper rules to determine the best competitive representation of Brink. Thats harsh, but I feel is closer to the truth. I’ve watched all of the BrinkTV videos, and most of the teams just didn’t seem to understand how to play Brink. They looked like they understood other kinds of FPS games, but their tactics were running and gunning without teamwork. For example: The Operative has more to offer if used properly, and if all of his abilities were not nerfed. These rules are kind of lame, to be again, brutally honest. Just my two cents. :infiltrator:

[Kalbuth]

The fact that the IGL finals has seen opponents forced to artificially skip the first objective on second map, to get directly to a second objective that can have a directly measurable difference (hostage rescue mission), instead of being forced into a second double full-hold in a raw, is telling enough for me.
All players nearly instantly agreed on the objective skip, which was decided on the fly during the match because they were tired of constant double full-hold they had seen during the tournamement.

It’s visible enough on pub that this game is easier on defense side.

[wolfnemesis75]

[QUOTE=shirosae;339820]No, you’re mistaken: the argument is this: The people who play PC competition know what’s best for PC competition.

There are plenty of casual PC but-non-competition players who think that they know what’s best for competition; they’re also wrong.

For example, I can see why you’d want to change downed fire from the pub settings in 5v5 when the game has one team trying to advance and the other trying to hold things where they are. I can why they have to disable it for the time being because it augments defence more than offence and Brink already struggles with full holds and there’s no SDK to make it comp-friendly and with cvars as they are.

But y’know what? No-one should be paying attention to me, because I don’t play PC comp, and my opinion is based on theorycraft, rather than any PC comp experience. Sometimes, things don’t work the way they do in the fantasy realm in your head. This was a useful lesson for me to learn.[/QUOTE]
Really? I am not so sure about that. If you look at a game from a purely design standpoint, you can come up with a balanced competitive rule set regardless of platform. Yes, PC players will be in these comps, but the point I was trying to make was that there are other platforms playing Brink that could offer some constructive ideas on how to improve the comps. Lets be real here: Those ESL rules stripped the game down beyond all recognition. I mean, seriously. Its possible that the PC community is so used to a certain kind of game, that they are trying to essentially jam a round peg (Brink) into a square hole.

It would make far more sense to set the teams up with Standard Class Postions rather than remove rules from the game. Not sure why this is so out of question.

[Humate]

Kalbuth - thanks for your wonderful insight champ.
No wonder SD lowered the entry level.