Is Brink competition ready?

(Shadowcat) #41

[QUOTE=Apples;269837]The thing is that games nowadays are also more complex, thus harder to balance, didnt really played comp in Q3 but there wasnt that much changes IIRC because well, grab your rocket launcher , strafe jump and pewpew!

Now in Brink you have permanent abilities, 3 bodytypes, lots of different objectives, etc etc, if you dont do some restrictions (mostly because of the comp team format / size, as its usually hard to fill a 8 men’s team), you can end up with unstoppable teams with unique combination of abilities / weapon / bodytype. Well its never really unstoppable, but 4 rocket launcher or 4 hyperblasters etc in a 4v4 on qw indoor can be pretty much devastating (assuming both team = skills), and its not really fun because there is almost nothing you can do against it.

The point is to “rebalance” the game as it’ll probably be played with less player than the pub games, its not about cutting everything comp players dont like, its about reducing luck (hear spam) to a minimum so the most dominant factors are the teamplay (coordination) / the strategies / the players individual skills (in that order if possible).

Well thats my 2 cents, peace[/QUOTE]

Couldnt this be achieved with simple restrictions, rather than modding the game to take away certain things or hard-code rules in? I mean, a simple rule that “No more than 2 rocket launchers in 4v4 can be used by one team at the same time” should suffice.

Or in Brink, no more than 2 AGL’s can be used by one 5v5 at the same time, or maybe you could have a more elegant solution that no team can be over 60% heavies. That would allow up to 3 out of 5 in 5v5, which wouldn’t affect most teams while preventing a team that’s just trying to spam the bodytype to win.

Seems much less intrusive than creating a mod that gets in the way of unexpected and creative strategies.

(Cankor) #42

Add Unlocks and shoot while leaning to the list, but I agree ETQW comp isn’t that far off from ETQW vanilla, certainly it’s not as drastic as DarkAngel made it out to be. And it’s not like there’s some official mod where all this stuff was enforced anyway, with only a couple exceptions they were all cvars, so leagues could set their own rules the way they wanted, the mod just gave them the freedom to do that. So it’s really not correct to say the mod took things away, the comp rulesets that the league organizers agreed on did.

To Darkangel’s point: It seems there’s 2 kinds of “comp” people, those who realize you have to play the game before you can even talk about modifying it, and those who automatically assume there’s going to need to be lots of changes and are busy speculating away on what those will be.

In the first camp, most of these guys just want to see things like spectate with spec lock, demo, pause, etc. In addition, most think it’s prudent to be able to have cvars which will limit weapons and abilities; with so many of these chances are one or more could be unbalanced. These guys aren’t foolish enough to speculate on what those unbalances might be if there even are any.

Add to this list I guess the ability to change spawn timers or some other way to help add an offensive bias to maps so they work better in stopwatch mode vs regular objective mode. Anyway, many of these guys are optimistic that these items will be in the feature set from day one and no “comp mod” will even be needed.

The second camp you just ignore. Seriously, you want to see these guys in all their glory go visit the Bethesda forums and look up a simillar thread and you will see they are making up stuff, not only before they’ve played the game, but obviously most haven’t even played a SD game before because they are talking about things like limiting class make-ups or the even the ability to change from one class to another during a match. You just can’t take this kind of thing seriously.

(INF3RN0) #43

[QUOTE=BMXer;270025]anything more than 6v6 would be a nightmare at a LAN. Tournament organizers trying to round up that many players would be a pain not to mention all the PCs needed.
…and before anyone says something… no legit teams are going to want to play 8v8 comp year round online if big LAN tourneys are 5v5 or 6v6.

There can always be niche leagues and tourneys but the mainstream competitive team size should be whatever is played at LAN events IMO. If that happens to be 8v8, cool, I just dont see that being realistic. 5v5 or 6v6 seems reasonable for LAN IMO.[/QUOTE]

Yea for a LAN event that’s very true. I was just implying via interwebs tourneys, but yes I completely agree even 6v6 cuts it close.

(Bridger) #44

Back when I was cutting my teeth in clans for QuakeWorld: Team Fortress, the standard team size was 8v8, and we were happy! Then in the dark times of TFC team size increased to 9v9, and we did it! Hmmm! and we walked to the match, 12 miles, in the snow! With no shoes if you should know!

But seriously, I think 7v7 is a great number for this game. 5v5 sounds like the maps would be too empty and may dilute some of the strategy that could be possible with a few extra players.

(Virus047) #45

I honestly think every game has the “perfect” team size for competition based on several factors including map size, classes/weapons/vehicles available, time limit’s (if controllable it isn’t as much of a factor) and phases (how many objectives… old school ET players will know how long one round could take on old school oasis/goldrush/fueldump matches! 6 hours of ET in a single setting between two good equal teams full-holding one another was a pain).

I’ve been quietly playing BC2 in comp the last year or so and 4v4 for squad rush is the best pure setting for that game if you don’t wanna play with vehicles. However if you want to play with vehicles you def need 8v8 or higher to actually have some form of balance. It’s what ET:QW had to do to “survive” in comp when it went to 6v6 format so early on with limits/restrictions on weapons/vehicles. Yes it was changing the core values of the game but it was necessary to make competition work for those who were playing it. RTCW I 100% recall playing in a 7v7 match where BOTH teams played 7v7 with panzers/flamers and venoms only. It was a nightmare but at the time it was the only strategy that worked (fail).

No one here will know what the exact format will be until we actually get the game out of the box, stick it in our disk drive of our PC’s or Consoles (shutter) and play the game. Should be fun though regardless of what format is selected by the powers that be.