Sneak Peek: Clans and Tournaments Update for Brink

(RT1) #21

And (for what it’s worth) I’m a highly skilled player not involved in the “comp” scene. I’m not disagreeing that there are some maps that aren’t optimized for competition play (Security Tower anyone?) but I’m suggesting that any advantage by one team can easily be overcome by switching sides. They do it in professional tennis, baseball, basketball and volleyball – all competitive sports – so why not Brink? In fact, I’ll go on to say that you won’t have an accurate measurement of a team’s capability if you don’t switch sides and play an equal number of games on either side.

(gooey79) #22

Full holds aren’t fun when it’s full hold after full hold after full hold.

Try watching your favourite sport and always seeing the game being a draw. Forever. Fun, no?

:slight_smile:

(eMatiC) #23

Yeah… It look like very nice!

(RT1) #24

Those are the consequences of pitting two teams together bearing humans who reside in the top 0.01 percentile of humanity in terms of skill. There will be far more close call matches than not. When that happens, you have to fashion another means of measuring skill by tossing in a variable to test consistency.

For sports teams, how well they do at home versus all the variables of road travel, foreign facilities, etc. Those are things that enter into the equation as well. Sport is a test of mental toughness as well as conditioning, etc.

To compare, I happen to be one of the world’s best Wipeout Pure/Pulse/HD players (PSN ID: Flashback_Jack). At the very top of the ladder there are players that are often so close in terms of track laptimes, that you’d have to add another decimal place on the clock – even two – to separate them. That’s just the way it is. At that point you have to add variety to test not just one’s ability, because that’s a given, but consistency as well. And it’s consistency that wins contests. Mix 'er up by switching sides; you sort of have to. It’s about the closest thing to a scientific measurement of a team’s ability as it gets.

(INF3RN0) #25

Technically anything is fair if you enable the same conditions for both sides, but that is not the issue. Competitive maps are meant to be consistent and encourage the map to be played at it’s fullest. Full-holds will happen whenever there is a drastic skill gap between teams, but when you see two teams of equal skill hold up in the same spot with a lot of ease, it’s usually a design fault. The bad Brink maps tend to never make it past the 1st objective and tend to be very bias, which leads to incredibly boring matches and discourages motivation towards participation, and then you have to use really lame tie breaker rules on top of that. People would like the offensive/defensive design to be equal throughout a match, instead of both teams playing a heavily favored side in separate rounds. What your saying is a very simplistic method of overlooking the actual issue at hand.

(RT1) #26

So be it. Assume another means of measuring who wins then – total XP? You can’t use emotional factors or some nebulous half-fact like map design to drive your decision making process. It should and must be objective.

(tangoliber) #27

[QUOTE=RT1;385381]Those are the consequences of pitting two teams together bearing humans who reside in the top 0.01 percentile of humanity in terms of skill. There will be far more close call matches than not. When that happens, you have to fashion another means of measuring skill by tossing in a variable to test consistency.

For sports teams, how well they do at home versus all the variables of road travel, foreign facilities, etc. Those are things that enter into the equation as well. Sport is a test of mental toughness as well as conditioning, etc.

To compare, I happen to be one of the world’s best Wipeout Pure/Pulse/HD players (PSN ID: Flashback_Jack). At the very top of the ladder there are players that are often so close in terms of track laptimes, that you’d have to add another decimal place on the clock – even two – to separate them. That’s just the way it is. At that point you have to add variety to test not just one’s ability, because that’s a given, but consistency as well. And it’s consistency that wins contests. Mix 'er up by switching sides; you sort of have to. It’s about the closest thing to a scientific measurement of a team’s ability as it gets.[/QUOTE]

A good comp map is one where times are set. Matches may be close, but it should usually be a team managing to beat the other team’s time by 10 seconds rather than a full hold. Full holds would be fun if they were hard to do. I personally love it in American football when you have a game between great teams where no are touchdowns scored (Like the Alabama LSU game this year). But if it happened all the time, then it wouldn’t be cool.

That said, I think Container City and Security Tower get a bad rep. With good teams, the first and only possible hold spot on CC is the courier objective. In the first few weeks we thought the bot objectives were hard, but they are the easiest objectives in the game now, thanks to 1) people learning the right way to do them, and 2) Some tweaks from SD.
The first gate objective is problematic with uneven teams. But with even teams, the offense would have to have a horrible start to get held. (Which has certainly happened to me before. And the same thing can happen on Resort…which is why it is so important to practice the hell out of that first push.)
As for Sec Tower, the courier objective is a possible hold spot. With even teams, the escort objective is doable as long as 1) the courier objective was completed quickly enough that there is enough time, and 2) the team knows how to do it (suicidal medics with lazarus moving the escort a few feett at a time and using the cover at that tricky gate section.) Even without enough time, the escort objective is good since you can win on progress. However, Sec Tower is probably not quite as good as CC because the courier objective comes earlier and can be a hold.
These maps were not played because of initial impressions and technical issues. I truly believe that if the competitive community had stayed with Brink, that the general opinion torwards those maps would have changed.

I wouldn’t say that Refuel or Shipyard are good competitive maps…but things can change over time. I have a lot of ideas of how to consistently win the difficult parts of those maps, but not much opportunity to test them anymore. I personally never thought Terminal or Reactor were very good for competition because of the hack objectives came first. I like Resort until the hack objective.

(INF3RN0) #28

Uh lol. Just read tangos post for more detail. Xp would be hilariously bad, but usually it’s determined by objective completion %. It is not a half-fact that map design influences outcomes… the horrible spawn times played a big part in most of the problems, but some of the map layouts are horrendously biased towards the defense. So biased in fact that it plays a huge role in perpetuating endless ties where there should be none. I don’t expect you to understand, but perhaps you will experience it sometime.

(Apoc) #29

The way i see it in my head…which may not make sense to anyone else but ill try and explain it.

If team skill level is measure on a scale of 1 - 5.

Good objectives will be the ones where if there is a difference in skill of say 1 or smaller either way then the superior team will get the objective. So a team whose skill level is 3 will get the objective against a team at skill level 2. Etc etc etc.

Problem with brink, is alot of the objectives are very defensive based, where a difference of 2 or 3 is required to overcome an objective. So only if the defending team was say a 2 and the attacking were 4’s would the objective be lost. Problem with that is, a matching of two teams of say 3 and 4 skill level will result in a full hold either way on that objective. Because its required for the attackers to be considerably better in order to take it.

Thats as simplified as it gets. But i feel it sorta explains what i mean. Objectives should be even, its ok giving defenders a shorter distance to travel, but then dont give them superior positioning and cover and then give the attackers really poor attack roots with bottlenecks. Too many disadvantages for attackers means you wont get anywhere regardless of skill.

So yea, a very large number of competitive players and clans have looked at all the maps and ruled out the ones with extreamly bad balance issues. I dont see why we should ignore the opinions of hundreds of experienced people.

(wolfnemesis75) #30

I still feel Security Tower and Container City should be the competitive maps.

(INF3RN0) #31

#1 ST is too long. #2 both maps have been played by actual competitive teams and it was rare to see anything progress past the first objectives.

So why do you think they are competitively applicable? Pub? Instinct? There needs to be some reasoning/evidence behind a statement for it to make sense. Edit in the details in your post please.

(Apoc) #32

CC is better than ST, but stilll not great. ST is just horrific.

(wolfnemesis75) #33

[QUOTE=Apoc;385402]CC is better than ST, but stilll not great. ST is just horrific.[/QUOTE]Terminal is horrific. CC and ST would play better than that one. Large maps = more room, and more definitive progress. That’s what I think.

(sachewan) #34

I’ve posted this idea before, but its very simple:

Stopwatch mode should by default have an offensive bias to ensure that times are set and full holds are a rarity. It would be so easy to do, just make it so when the map switches to stopwatch, certain objectives become easier to complete (ie: the time it takes to hack an obj is halved, or defense gets 5 seconds added to their spawn timer ever X minutes) and all the problems are solved for EVERY map.

Asymmetrical maps require stopwatch mode for competition, and competition requires times to be set so every game isn’t full hold after full hold. It’s a no-brainer.

(VG_JUNKY) #35

[QUOTE=sachewan;385417]I’ve posted this idea before, but its very simple:

Stopwatch mode should by default have an offensive bias to ensure that times are set and full holds are a rarity. It would be so easy to do, just make it so when the map switches to stopwatch, certain objectives become easier to complete (ie: the time it takes to hack an obj is halved, or defense gets 5 seconds added to their spawn timer ever X minutes) and all the problems are solved for EVERY map.

Asymmetrical maps require stopwatch mode for competition, and competition requires times to be set so every game isn’t full hold after full hold. It’s a no-brainer.[/QUOTE]

That is an interesting idea :slight_smile: although it wouldn’t fix map balance ( obviously ) it would make stopwatch a much more competitive mode :cool:

(INF3RN0) #36

Dynamic spawn timers were present in ETQW I think, but to be perfectly honest the overall style of map design in Brink takes a lot away. It’s been discussed at length before, but if your familiar with other game titles in SD games, the objectives were always more accessible and the implementation of forward spawns motivated the entire map to be used. In Brink the best method is to turn the 2 main one-person enterances into crossfire death traps. A smart offense would never leave the typical high-ground/bottle necks of the objective room to utilize the other 75% of the map because there’s absolutely no reason to. A huge reason why I’ve been all for bringing back the forward spawn…

(VG_JUNKY) #37

Im a little concerned… If we dont get huge waves of gamers ( ps3 ) after this update, will we be able to issue challenges for 2v2s or 3v3s? 5v5 is ideal, but I haven’t seen #s like that for a long time :frowning: ( its even rare for a 5v5 in the pubs )

(nephandys) #38

@RT1 yeah everyone is playing Stopwatch in comp and therefore switching sides as you suggest. It results in full holds (neither team completes the entire map) because some of the maps are not balanced. For many people this is not a satisfying outcome to a competition. Therefore quite a few maps are not suitable for comp play.

(Darksider) #39

Ok so what happened to the Clan stuff?!?! Also been playing for the past 4/5 days in online servers with other people notice the stat site is not recording anything whatsoever, Clan progress etc will be useless if you can’t figure why the stats still don’t record at all.:rolleyes:

(badman) #40

We’re expecting it to complete Bethesda’s final testing pass soon (Thanksgiving ate into that a bit over in the US, among other things).

We’re also aware of the stats site issue and that’s getting addressed.