Brink TV Spawn Time Experiment - +10 D Respawn = Awesome

(GreasedScotsman) #1

Definitely jump to the +10 results. It’s good stuff.

Hey Brink fans. I need a hand. I’d like to record videos of some tests this weekend regarding spawn time adjustments. I need (hopefully similarly matched) teams to volunteer to play a few rounds where we manually adjust the spawn times for the defense.

What?? Who?!

I want to try to figure out sweet spot timings for certain objectives. Until we get actual spawn time adjustments by SD, we’ll have to play rounds with an honor system-based delay… essentially, when you respawn on D, pick your nose for 5 seconds, then deploy.

Why?

I did this in a few fun tests with friends and found the games to be pretty enjoyable when the D scratched their butts for about 5 seconds before heading back into the fray. We found the defense actually had to work to hold and retake the objective area, rather than it being handed to them on a silver platter every single round.

How?

Join the Brink TV Testing Group!

Announcements/Events will be made before each test to give folks a heads up.

(hly) #2

30 seconds spawn time for defense. No spawn buffer. Aqua is currently 17.5 - 20 seconds for the defense.
Increase the offensive spawn time to 20 seconds. Make it more strategy and less pubbing.

(prophett) #3

[QUOTE=hly;332583]30 seconds spawn time for defense. No spawn buffer. Aqua is currently 17.5 - 20 seconds for the defense.
Increase the offensive spawn time to 20 seconds. Make it more strategy and less pubbing.[/QUOTE]

Agree. The defense neess a 30s spawn on every stage of every map for there to be a slight bias toward the attacking side, whihc is what SW is all about.

Although this was written as an Enemy Territory guidline for competitive map, I believe it’s more stopwatch specific than game specific, so it also applies to Brink.

Taken from Kendle’s Thread in the Enemy Territory Editing Forums (http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7378)

[b]Spawn Rule

If the time taken for Defenders to get to the objective from spawn PLUS the difference in spawn cycle is LESS than the time taken for Attackers to get to the objective from their spawn, then it’s a DEFENSIVE map. If it’s MORE then it’s OFFENSIVE.

i.e. If a player from each team both die near the objective, which one is more likely to get back there first?[/b]

On most maps, the defense can respawn and get back to the objective much faster than the attackers, sometimes by as much as 10s, making it very hard to set a time/complete an objective.

I don’t think a mere 5s increase would tip the scales enough in favor of the offense, so I feel it should be raised to 30s for every stage of every map to help balance the map and allow for a (potential) faster cap.

(GreasedScotsman) #4

That’s the whole point of the test… we’re testing times. Five seconds seems to be a common baseline that people have requested so now I want to actually test it.

Just because it may feel like 30 seconds (+10) is needed, we won’t know for sure until it has been tested.

I hope to do +5 seconds tonight/tomorrow and, if things are still really D-heavy, try +10.

Scientific method > gut feelings. Always. Please assist! We’re trying to set the first test up right now, in fact.

(Matuka) #5

This sounds like the most reasonable thing to do, the vanilla spawn timers seem really off to start with and having a group of fine people such as yourself test this is a great idea! :slight_smile:

(tangoliber) #6

At least part of the defensive spawns on Container City is now 30 seconds. I’m not sure why they didn’t mention it among the other details of the netvar update.

(GreasedScotsman) #7

Observations

Tonight was just 5v5 but pub-style… no team vs team. We’ll put that together tomorrow night, I hope.

Initial tests were on Shipyard and Aquarium. Plus 5 seconds for D respawn allowed teams to get past the Crane objective even when we agreed that Security was the slightly weaker team skillwise.

On Aquarium, there were at least 3 clear opportunities to plant. More importantly, we noticed a few seconds of downtime in which the attacking team would have a chance to rebuff after taking the room (and certainly would have had time to plant).

It “felt” pretty good… the reward for clearing the objective was there, the D wasn’t immediately back on the objective after a clear, and it didn’t feel like the D was handed some severe disadvantage.

No results can really be drawn here… but everyone noticed enough of a difference where they felt the offense wasn’t an immediate write-off.

Again, we’ll be doing further experiments tomorrow, including testing a +10 sec respawn delay for the defense and hoping to get 5v5 team contenders rather than the PuG of awesomeness we ran tonight. If you’d like to participate, just join the Steam Group linked in the first post.

Thanks everyone who helped out tonight!

(wolfnemesis75) #8

Interesting experiments. I will return to see what more observations you can gather.

(GreasedScotsman) #9

About to run another Brink respawn timing test… +5 and +10. Hop in Group’s Chat to Participate! http://bit.ly/j2A9G7

(GreasedScotsman) #10

Thank you everyone who participated in the +10 second D respawn test tonight. Not only were the games a blast, but times were consistently set. Round holds only happened if teams were uneven (and a subsequent quick roll occurred on the next round).

In other words, the game played like it “should” play. While this is hardly a perfect test since normally the D won’t be waiting around for a full 10 seconds if they die, it was enough to know for sure that +10 doesn’t instantly break the ability for the D to recover an objective once lost.

The key is the 10 second buffer between the O and D’s respawn times. Perhaps rather than just +10 seconds added to the D, a more appropriate change might be -5 seconds for Offense and +5 seconds for Defense. And, of course, we’ll tweak timings as needed once we get more games under our belts with these changes in place.

All in all, we had a great 4.5 hour test across every competitive map (Refuel and Security Tower were not tested). I’ll have VODs of today’s test (no live stream for tonight). Tomorrow (Sunday), we’ll be both streaming and recording VODs of team vs team play with these rules in place hopefully starting sometime around 8pm EDT. Tune in!

P.S. blight has shown interest in participating w/ these rules, so connect with them to coordinate if you’d like to participate in tomorrow’s test! (tomorrow technically = today at the time of this edit… 3:30am… groan)

(Redshft) #11

I hope you realize that this is not a true 30 second respawn timer. This is just the normal spawn system while forcing the defense to sit in spawn for 10 seconds.

A true 30 second timer, in certain spawning situations, would still give the offense less than 10 seconds to setup. This would occur because the spawn system would still be a wave based system, which means it is still possible for defense to spawn in less than 10 seconds after death.

Your test does NOT reflect how an actual 30 second wave respawn time would work.

(Mattc0m) #12

[QUOTE=Redshft;333591]I hope you realize that this is not a true 30 second respawn timer. This is just the normal spawn system while forcing the defense to sit in spawn for 10 seconds.

A true 30 second timer, in certain spawning situations, would still give the offense less than 10 seconds to setup. This would occur because the spawn system would still be a wave based system, which means it is still possible for defense to spawn in less than 10 seconds after death.

Your test does NOT reflect how an actual 30 second wave respawn time would work.[/QUOTE]

Another argument could be made it doesn’t accurately reflect it, because ungibbed bodies have to “respawn” 10 seconds earlier, and thus can’t be revived. This is a fairly minor point, since most bodies are instantly gibbed.

That being say, yes, it’s a rough science, but it’s still accurate. It changes the balance of the maps (as intended) to make them more offensive focused (as competition should be). Anyone who played with the spawn timing changes will instantly realize that the maps are far more balanced AND fun.

(wolfnemesis75) #13

Can you tweak settings in a private or custom match with your own spawn times? I still have to watch your experiment vid, but it’d be cool if you could preset the timers in custom if it is possible.

(Thundermuffin) #14

No you can’t do that, otherwise, for this experiment, you wouldn’t have to stand still for 10 seconds inside the defense’s spawn.

(Mattc0m) #15

You cannot.

(wolfnemesis75) #16

Dang. The way you’re doing it works to get a gage anyway. I’ve watched Gears 2 MLG face-offs where they did a similar thing, had the teams count off, killed the spectator character to make it 4v4 then start the match that way. I’ll watch your vids when you get them done!

(GreasedScotsman) #17

No ****. That’s why I wrote: "While this is hardly a perfect test since normally the D won’t be waiting around for a full 10 seconds if they die, it was enough to know for sure that +10 doesn’t instantly break the ability for the D to recover an objective once lost. "

This is a point that I made even more clear in the videos that we recorded last night but it was 3:30am when I wrote my post above and didn’t want to get into the details.

I know that it will be possible for D respawns to happen on a relatively closer “wave” in some cases and that our imposed +10 test doesn’t fit an actual in-game respawn time adjustment.

However, what we did learn was that a hard +10 offset between offense and defense does not instantly break the game – D is still able to recover if they get overrun at some point.

(BioSnark) #18

I’m eager to see Splash Damage open stopwatch spawn changes or even just implement a blanket +10s defense spawn time in stopwatch. -5s offense, +5s d probably works, too, although might also mean more broken up offense pushes and less revive/gib emphasis.

In any case, what’s most important and exciting is that Brink stopwatch is fun when two reasonably balanced teams =/= 40 mins on one objective :slight_smile:

(hly) #19

Prior to brink release I’ve read reviews and watched youtube videos of Paul Leehockey Wedgewood telling me how splash damage privately beta tested the game and made sure it was competitive ready. Why is it almost a month later and still there isn’t a patch to fix a basic things such as adjusting a spawn time?

More and more teams have uninstalled the game and we lost any good chance this game will ever have a good solid competitive community in NA. The only reason they are playing Brink in Europe is because of the 15,000euro tournament. (btw: NA teams are NOT allowed to participate). Most European teams find the game frustrating because of simple fixes that should have been implemented prior to release.

Why is the gaming community the ones that need to figure out the proper settings for spawn adjustments? Why wasn’t this brought up prior to release when the splash damage crew was testing the game?

Greaseman: Thanks for finding supporting data that 30 second defense spawn time is the way to go. I’ve brought this up 6 hours after playing the game on May 10th. What has been done over 25 days ago to fix this? NOTHING.

(GreasedScotsman) #20

We need teams to come out of the woodwork tonight to test this. I know blight is interested in scrimming at 8pm EDT. My hope is to get teams fairly even in skill as that will be the most ideal test.

I’d like to have 2 scrims streamed using the following rules:

+10 respawn for defense
No CP buffs
1 mine per engineer, 1 turret per team
No de-hacking.
No Adrenaline.

Once the patch hits, I’d like to test to see if Adrenaline stacks… if it does not, it may be worth looking at with its reduced duration. I’m also interested in seeing if teams can simply learn how to counter it (again, assuming it does NOT stack) through knockdowns and focus-firing on the support medic.