While watching DirtyCups something definitely came to mind about what makes competitive gaming exciting from a spectator perspective, and one of those things is being able to track the flow of the game and understand when the tense moments are about to unfold. The fun parts of watching a match are the sport-like elements: the rules really make the game fun, and in any sport the clock (or frames/innings/lives) is the biggest decider of tension.
Right now it seems a bit unpredictable with the way spawn times change in a tough to follow way, and it can be really frustrating to watch a great play made moot by the fact the airstrike caught a full-team gib with two seconds on their timer. Even as a spectator knowing the enemy has a 5 second spawn coming up, it’s very hard to accurately account for this on the fly for players, especially if no one has died in the last ~30 seconds.
It also seemed to be a reason for the general complaint of the maps where an “okay” push lead to a point capture, just because it happened to be at a high spawn time. It never felt great to me, but it didn’t seem to be as much as a problem in ET and Quake Wars, but DB could use this chance to do something new.
If you take a snapshot of a game the spawn-timer is nearly arbitrary due to the pace of the game. It feels like a particularly weak element overall when you try to explain exactly how spawns work to a interested spectator, who is a non-player. While players managing their own spawn timer is easy to follow and explain, it’s just not the case.
If modding were a thing in video games anymore, this is what I would put together:
Alternative Spawn System
[ul]
[li]Spawn timers visible to both teams.[/li][li]Timers stay at fixed number until a kill.[/li][li]Timer begins countdown at first gib or K-out.[/li][li]After X number of spawns, attack spawntime decreases.[/li][/ul]
I think this would be really fun to try. It would:
-Make the game easier to follow for spectators
-Be easier to balance based on team engagements
-Deepen strategic decisions (who goes in first)
-Give more meaning to picks
-Would make aces’s more exciting, and concrete (if the spawn time is 12s, for example, you know you aced them start to finish in that time, and exactly when they come back, rather than getting a pick on a Fragger who instantly respawns)
What ya think? It might give some of the exciting round-by-round feeling of Execution, while keeping true to Stopwatch.
I know, just get tired of people whining that ‘the game is hard for spectators and we need the game itself to change for them’ before even having nice spectator UI