Four years ago, I posted this in an effort to help Splash Damage ensure that ETQW and their future games would not need vast community modding before they are playable in a competition setting. The TDLR of it is to make map scripts and objectives specific to stopwatch mode that ensure a offensive bias, that way times are always set and full holds are a rarity instead of commonplace. Sadly, they didn’t listen.
It’s clear to me now that all of the above is irrelevant when your game has no Public/Non- competitive base. Both scenes feed off of eachother, and separating them both as if only one would appreciate a balanced game is foolish. Brink is a clear example of public server players abandoning it in droves (15,000 average prime time to 500 in a matter of 3-4 weeks) because the base gameplay on a public server simply wasn’t fun. Why was that?
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THIS IS NOT FUN FOR EITHER TEAM
You should recognize what you see in those screenshots above, because the situation is very common. So common, in fact, that I just joined a few (of the last remaining) active servers randomly and was able to take them almost immediately. What you are seeing is the attacking team (or in some rare cases, the defending team) pushed back into their spawn by the opposition and being kept there with merciless gunfire, explosives, deployables, etc.
This is not fun. Not for the attackers, not for the defenders, and certainly not for any new player trying out your game. The attackers are literally stuck in a purgatory of dying over and over, blaming themselves, their teammates, the maps, and the game balance while they catch bullets repeatedly. The defenders might enjoy themselves for a few minutes until they realize that they are shooting down the same alleyway for 20 minutes just running down the clock.
The good news it that there is a solution. I don’t know if you have given up on Brink or working on another game, but either way I think these ideas would help your products immensely.
The Fix
The main draw for any multiplayer FPS is the public server experience. That is it’s bread and butter. That is what 99% of its playerbase will play and decide whether its worth investing time in or not. So that is what we will focus on. While the fix might at first sound extreme, I implore you to keep reading so I can explain my reasoning. Anyway, here it is: Get rid of Objective mode.
I know you guys cut your teeth on ET and Objective / Campaign mode was it’s main draw in the public setting. However, ET also had the problems that plagued ETQW and even still Brink today. A few organized people could jump on a public server of 20+ people and push the attackers all the way to spawn and basically ruin any fun for the rest of the people on that server. This is what happens in Brink all the time, although it doesn’t take an organized group of people, just slightly imbalanced teams.
The struggles you guys go through to keep this game balanced can be sidestepped completely. Look at the various map criticisms you’ll find on these forums and around the internet. You’ll find hate and praise for every single map in the game, because everyone is basing their impressions upon their own experiences. And every map has the capability to end up with the attackers in their spawn fighting to make it 10 feet out.
The mapping conundrum
It doesn’t matter how well you comb over your map trying to finely tune every individual hallway to ensure balance. It’s a lost cause. You will NEVER perfectly balance an ASYMMETTRICAL map. Nothing will ever be 50/50 on a map where both sides are completely different. 9 times out of 10, it’ll end up in favor of the defense, them having a natural positional advantage by virtue of being defenders and not having to travel far to the objective.
There is a reason that only 1 out of your 6 Stock maps for Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory maintained continued use in the competitive scene (Radar). The reason is that the competitive scene values offensively biased maps. But why would competition players want imbalance? The answer is because of the beautiful mode called Stopwatch.
Objective mode is predicated on the false assumption that both sides will have an equal chance to win. This is a fallacy. As I said above, no asymmetrical map, no matter how well made, will be perfectly even for both teams. Stopwatch sidesteps all of this. Stopwatch means both teams play the attacking phase, one sets a completion time and the other tries to beat that time. But Stopwatch also has its own requirements, such as offensively biased maps to ensure that times ARE set, and there is rarely a full hold. That is why Radar was the only one to see continued use in the competition stopwatch scene, while all the others (that you tried to balance for 50/50 objective / campaign) were dropped as soon as more offensively biased alternatives appeared.
But how does this help the public server scene?
This helps the public server scene because times being set is far more exciting and enjoyable than full holds and being spawn camped for 20 minutes, for both sides. This is an area where something born of the competition scene would help improve the public server scene greatly. It’s an impossible job you guys have trying to balance your maps for a 50/50 rate, but it would be very easy to explicitly balance maps for offensive bias. In fact, most of the work could probably be done with spawn timers alone. You could use a dynamic spawn timer system that constantly changes in favor of the offense as the map timer counts on, first starting with 20/30 and every 5 minutes or so reducing the attackers by 5 OR increasing the defense. Ideally, your maps should so greatly favor the offense that a full hold is something rarely seen, so rare in fact that it happening should automatically trigger a team shuffle because the team balance is obviously stacked.
My proposed ‘Pub Mode’ is simple: Stopwatch Standard, Extremely Offensively biased maps. It’s important for a game’s public scene that even though every match will have winners and losers, the losers are still able have some fun. That is why bigger games like Battlefield and Counter-Strike maintain strong public scenes to this day. Even on a losing team, you can still have fun. In Brink right now, the losing team rarely has fun because it ends in frustration. Sometimes you are pinned in your spawn, other times you are the only person trying to do the objective and cursing your teammates for not covering you while you try to repair the crane. The end result is people dropping from the game because they play games to have fun and there are funner alternatives. However, if ‘Pub Mode’ was standard, everyone would get that feeling of doing something critical and being part of a team, because every match would have a team winning or getting close to winning. Not hitting a wall and being stuck in a stalemate as it happens now.
I think I can predict what the opposition to this idea would be from the Splash Damage crew. The main fear would be that Stopwatch is ‘too complicated’ for some average joe new player who just installs your game. Which is probably the thought process that leads Stopwatch to be the ‘secondary’ mode as it is, only used on a small percentage of servers and in competition. However I think you guys have seen just how much you can be punished for assuming your playerbase is dumber than it actually is. Look at the massive backlash to things in Brink that were put in for a ‘dumbed down’ audience (one button does everything). Don’t underestimate your customers. It would literally take a 10 second video to explain the mechanics of Stopwatch to a laymen (Set a time, Hold the time -> Hold as long as you can, Beat the enemy’s time). Another plus of this ‘Pub Mode’ is that if teams are greatly unbalanced, the rounds will go quick instead of lasting a full 20 minutes as player after player drops from the match because it isn’t fun anymore. This will keep people in the game since a new round is right around the corner, and thus a new chance for victory. It would also help to have some ‘protections’, like say if a 2:00 minute or less time is set, automatic team shuffle. Or if a full hold is accomplished, automatic team shuffle.
I can’t stress enough how critical it is to the ‘Pub Mode’ that the maps are extremely offensively biased. It shouldn’t be in question if a team is going to make it to the end of the map, it should be a given. Games will be so much more intense when the defense is constantly on the backfoot, always scrambling to setup a defense while the offense marches on towards the goal. And then the teams swap and they get to have their revenge and take it to the line as well.
So there’s my idea. I really hope you listen as I think these changes can greatly improve the public server experience in this game and your future ones (assuming they are similar to ET gameplay). Thanks for reading this far.
