Intentional suicides

(Szakalot) #41

This!!!

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to PixelTwitch again.

The times itself will probably have to be adjusted, but great idea otherwise. Think about what it will do to the game:

  • full attacking team would have no reason to wait for some arbitrary time-point
  • full defence team could try and knockout one player to make a 5v4 for the next 15seconds. However, this opens them up to counterattack wherein the 4 attackers can kamikaze themselves into the 5 players, die within the 15 seconds; and quickly gib 2-3 people, making a 5v2-3, before defence spawns again - now the remaining 2-3 defence players can try to counter the counter and charge the attackers to slow them down & /kill
  • promotes going in all at once, rather than ‘chipping away’ at the enemy -> more posturing -> MAPS WILL FEEL LESS TDM
  • promotes executing a coordinated strike that kills multiple enemies quickly.

would LOVE to see this tried out!

EDIT:
a mode like this would require a clear indication who spawns when, MOBA style

(PixelTwitch) #42

Thanks too everyone that has/is showing support to either 1 of the 2 systems I have suggested in the past :slight_smile:

I would just like to quickly chime in on the people that are saying “fix the maps”
Yes, the maps are far from ideal right now, each has a very strong defender bias.

However, to simply lengthen the distance from spawn to try and balance it out, has so many negatives with it…

1, These would likely end up like White Chapel’s last objective defender spawn with a single lane designed to add time, this encourages spawn camping. (think bridge)
2, The extra distance is just that… Distance with where nothing interesting can happen. (again think bridge first objective)
3, Adding that extra space to the map would require additional computer power to render for very little gains (just time/distance)
4, This overall is much, much, MUCH more hard work to implement and would have to be done for all maps + future maps.
5, Once you do add distance, you better hope you never want to change that distance again.

So yes, you can fix the maps when it comes to distance from spawn.
It’s just simply the wrong thing to do in my opinion.

EDIT: This has been happening for some time actually… Most recently Train Yards final objective had the defenders spawn moved 5 seconds further away. Underground had first attackers spawn move 5 seconds closer and white chapel added 6 seconds to the final objective for defenders. Yet, each of these maps are maps where people seem to complain about the spawns at these very objectives.

(Glottis-3D) #43

when i said fix the maps i only meant fix the maps, nothing less, nothing more. Every single map has its flaws and most of them have too many.

But that doesnt mean i am against suggested system. We Do already have 2 almost similar modes (SW and OBJ), and one can be easily used to try this system.
Though this system can be abused with premature suicide.
Start your respawn wave by /kill. then all 4 guys push and kill as much as they can when 3-4 seconds left. And then they insta resp as full team, while other team has only halftime respawn.
i do not see this anything different from spawn-waves system abuse. just another sort of abuse.

my personal preference is still spawnwaves. with proper times corresponding to travel times. because i like catching ppl ‘on full’ and i get angry at myself when get caught.

(BAMFana) #44

This is relatively easy to solve, just prevent self-kills from starting the spawn wave timer (instead, it starts an individual full spawn timer).

(Glottis-3D) #45

i mostly mean. even if the suggested system will work. maps will still be so badly thought with horrible chokes and spawnrapes, and no deep strategy like forward spawns, good side objs, team-doors etc. IT WILL STILL be very boring to play them.

(Glottis-3D) #46

this will not remove the abuse, but it will make it look much more bad-gameplay-design-ish.
-FFon teamkill
-go full retard knife attack on enemy
etc.

(Szakalot) #47

[QUOTE=Glottis-3D;527454]this will not remove the abuse, but it will make it look much more bad-gameplay-design-ish.
-FFon teamkill
-go full retard knife attack on enemy
etc.[/QUOTE]

I don’t think it would be as effective as you say.

The key element here is the fact that both teams can see each other’s spawntimes. If one team tries to pull this trick off, the defence can fall back for the 3-4 seconds and counter-attack the full retard attack, wiping the team and making them lose 2 spawnwaves worth of attacks. Each play I can envision that tries to abuse this system is open to counter-abuse by the other team.

(BalloO) #48

Dont want to offend anyone here but i feel like a lot of you simply dont understand what the core gameplay of stopwatch is.
I’m so frustrated my english doesnt allow me to argue on this …
I’ll just react on some stuff :
Casual player on pub server doesnt give a **** about spawn times, and im pretty sure most of them dont even know that they are the same on stopwatch.
Spawn times needs to be different, that allows a lot of tactical play that just doesnt exists right now.
Spawnwawes need to be fixed, Force Tapout and no delay. Then you have to be accurate with your suicides and your actions around spawntimes (your and the one of your opponent).
There is no need of a second timer, if you know that on a certain map defenders spawn every 30s you’ll know exactly when they are spawning after 1 or 2 minutes. (Every player of a low team on ET was able to figure it out).

I’m sorry if i look like just another ET player, but there is no point of doing stopwatch while killing 80% of what makes it great.
And sorry for my poor english, hope you at least understood half of what i tried to say.

(BAMFana) #49

Missed this post earlier, commenting now to set the record straight: What you’re suggesting is not what I was advocating at all. My argument was that a player should never want to suicide; rather a player should always want to survive or do as much damage as possible before dying. Clever plays at low HP or against impossible odds are some of the most exciting moments in any FPS game, but the current spawn system and gameplay mechanics act as an incentive against such plays because of the need to time your death to fit with the spawn timer (ie. if you’re 1v5 and there’s 3 seconds left until the clock hits 0, then most of the time you’re better off self-killing than trying to make a play because you might get a fullspawn if you try).

I’m not discounting the value of the current rolling spawn timer / self-kill gameplay, I agree that it does add some depth to the game, but I’m saying that the cons of this system in my opinion outweigh the pros.

(yakcyll) #50

I’m gonna point out one thing if you don’t mind.

That’s on the player for putting himself in such a situation. If you pay attention to the clocks all the time and plan accordingly, tapping out will rarely be forced and fruitless. As with many gameplay mechanics people learned how to make them as useful as possible and this one is no exception.

[QUOTE=BalloO;527469]I’m sorry if i look like just another ET player, but there is no point of doing stopwatch while killing 80% of what makes it great.
And sorry for my poor english, hope you at least understood half of what i tried to say.[/QUOTE]
Times change, games are trying to sell and people feel you gotta cater to the lowest common denominator, which usually gets confused by slightest nuisances, to do that. While this might not be a bad thing by itself, I have to agree with your sentiment here.

(Anti) #51

The main thing I dislike about Pixel’s suggestion is how it’d feel in public Stopwatch, it’d be unlikely the spawn wave ‘trigger’ death would be obvious to the player who becomes it when there are a lot of players potentially present on the server. The trigger would end up seeming very random.

Maybe that would be no big deal, maybe it would. I can think of ways around it (different spawns in pub, Stopwatch moves to ranked only etc) but none of those create a nice route from casual play to competitive play, which I think is pretty important.

Keep this discussion going though, it’s an interesting one with a lot of good points (except for Rex’s hate! :))

(Szakalot) #52

[QUOTE=Anti;527472]The main thing I dislike about Pixel’s suggestion is how it’d feel in public Stopwatch, it’d be unlikely the spawn wave ‘trigger’ death would be obvious to the player who becomes it when there are a lot of players potentially present on the server. The trigger would end up seeming very random.

Maybe that would be no big deal, maybe it would. I can think of ways around it (different spawns in pub, Stopwatch moves to ranked only etc) but none of those create a nice route from casual play to competitive play, which I think is pretty important.

Keep this discussion going though, it’s an interesting one with a lot of good points (except for Rex’s hate! :))[/QUOTE]

It could very well be not fit for ‘casual’ stopwatch, where people play like its OBJ anyways.

The suggestion does not work imo, without a clear timer visible to both teams. Like a streetfighter HP bar that people proposed:

ssf4_ae_smooth_health_bars_by_augh-d4we6sq.jpg1191×670 203 KB

Bars start ‘full’ and as soon as a player dies the timer starts and the bar slowly decreases. Players are spawned when it hits 0, regenerating the bar.

(yakcyll) #53

I personally don’t think suicide or spawn mechanics have to be obvious to everyone from the get-go, they just have to be clearly introduced and the information about the intricacies (e.g. spawn clocks) has to be available to everyone so that there’s no confusion about them. Like you kill a guy, push in and suddenly you face him again; if you are clever enough (COME ON), you’d realize he’s spawning soon, so you’d either set up a trap, make a jump on him or take a different route. It’s a part of the game.

Out of the points against the suicide in the thread currently only the dying mid-fight seems to me like it might truly be irritating for some people since it just strips you of your success. For comp it’s not a problem since you play for time and someone tapping out gives you time to set up for objectives, but in pubs I can understand it can be frustrating to meet players doing that. A solution to it might be something someone already mentioned before, which is to either prevent the tapout during fights (x seconds since last player damage taken) or allow it, but give a penalty of sorts on spawn (less ammo, less health, slower speed, but those don’t exactly work very well since you can always mitigate them somehow and they have to be temporary). Tapping out for class change, resupply or spawn change is in my mind a valid move and should not be constrained.

(BAMFana) #54

[QUOTE=Anti;527472]The main thing I dislike about Pixel’s suggestion is how it’d feel in public Stopwatch, it’d be unlikely the spawn wave ‘trigger’ death would be obvious to the player who becomes it when there are a lot of players potentially present on the server. The trigger would end up seeming very random.

Maybe that would be no big deal, maybe it would. I can think of ways around it (different spawns in pub, Stopwatch moves to ranked only etc) but none of those create a nice route from casual play to competitive play, which I think is pretty important.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, that’s a valid concern, but in my experience spawn timers are not really a factor (by that I mean that teams/players don’t coordinate their actions depending on the spawn timer) in public play.

Personally I’m partial to a system resembling something Bitey suggested during the alpha, which starts out similar to Pixel’s suggestion in that the first person to die starts the spawn wave, but diverges in that the length of the spawn timer depends on how many players are in the spawn queue. For example, when the first player dies (ie. all other players on his team were alive at the moment of death), it could start a 9s spawn timer. Each successive player to die after that (but before the timer reaches 0) could add another four seconds to the timer, up to a maximum of 25s. This addresses several mechanics I find to be problematic (and which some consider to be an indivisable part of stopwatch gameplay), such as the spawn timer centric nature of the gameplay (ie. basing decisions on the state of the spawn timer), “free” self-killing and instant spawns after dying.

(Anti) #55

[QUOTE=BAMFana;527482]Yeah, that’s a valid concern, but in my experience spawn timers are not really a factor (by that I mean that teams/players don’t coordinate their actions depending on the spawn timer) in public play.

Personally I’m partial to a system resembling something Bitey suggested during the alpha, which starts out similar to Pixel’s suggestion in that the first person to die starts the spawn wave, but diverges in that the length of the spawn timer depends on how many players are in the spawn queue. For example, when the first player dies (ie. all other players on his team were alive at the moment of death), it could start a 9s spawn timer. Each successive player to die after that (but before the timer reaches 0) could add another four seconds to the timer, up to a maximum of 25s. This addresses several mechanics I find to be problematic (and which some consider to be an indivisable part of stopwatch gameplay), such as the spawn timer centric nature of the gameplay (ie. basing decisions on the state of the spawn timer), “free” self-killing and instant spawns after dying.[/QUOTE]

Yup Dystopia Mod used that system and I was a fan of it myself, but mine isn’t the only opinion that counts :smiley:

(Chux) #56

Such stuff should be tested. It’s one thing to predict what would be better on paper compared to gameplay tests. Either way, something should be changed, at least randomize initial time to next spawn wawe when the map starts for each team so it not always the same.

(Zenity) #57

[QUOTE=Anti;527472]The main thing I dislike about Pixel’s suggestion is how it’d feel in public Stopwatch, it’d be unlikely the spawn wave ‘trigger’ death would be obvious to the player who becomes it when there are a lot of players potentially present on the server. The trigger would end up seeming very random.

Maybe that would be no big deal, maybe it would. I can think of ways around it (different spawns in pub, Stopwatch moves to ranked only etc) but none of those create a nice route from casual play to competitive play, which I think is pretty important.
[/QUOTE]

Would it be totally out of the question to have three tiers of matchmaking?

  1. Unranked Casual (Public), always Objective mode (or Execution, etc).

  2. Unranked Competitive (set matches), always (5on5?) Stopwatch mode. This would be the next step up and could still use rough skill based team balancing, just no visible rankings and people of all skills are mixed together.

  3. Ranked Competitive, always 5on5 Stopwatch. This would be the final step, with visible rankings and a matchmaking system which always attempts to bring people of similar rank together. It could also have some stricter rules than unranked, e.g. full friendly fire or harsher penalties for leaving. In the future perhaps advanced features like drafting mode.

This way the bridge between casual and ranked would be gentle enough IMO, and each mode can be used to its strength. It would also provide an option for people who want to play “proper” Stopwatch without worrying about their rank and the trying hard that goes with it. I definitely think that Objective makes most sense for public servers, and Stopwatch makes most sense for organised matches.

I believe this is more or less how Dota2 ranked/unranked works? Only that Dota2 does not have public servers of course (AFAIK).

(ailmanki) #58

They guy which gets the frustration, should get a reward. Like yeah you made the enemy chicken out. Actually everyone which damaged that guy should get a bonus.
Edit: well actually only in pub. Although it could be interesting, if there would be some use ingame for the earned experience - like in et. Not that I like it in et… lol

(Runeforce) #59

[QUOTE=poiuasd;527312]
What are people’s thoughts on this?[/QUOTE]
It ain’t broken, so don’t try and fix it.

(INF3RN0) #60

Tweaking the spawn system is the short term solution to some of the biggest problems with the game. We’ve come too far for the traditional ET system to work properly in the current state of DB, especially since it relies on so many variables that aren’t in the game. I think quite a few of the suggested systems from other games and even those invented by some of the players here would be a suitable replacement. There simply needs to be reward for making well timed pushes instead of this relentless meat grind. Spawn points right next to the main obj and equal timers might be easy to grasp, but it is frustrating and not fun for anyone. I just want to see something happen here sooner than later, even if it is within a limited test environment.