Spawnraping

(Coolhand) #1

This has been a feature of Wolfie since the early days: someone cries “Teams!”, I look at the player table and find that one side or the other is badly outnumbered. What usually happens in these cases is that the numerically superior side pushes the opposing team back to their spawn, and locks them in there. When this happens, it can get tedious for the side getting raped (meanwhile, the other side has a field day :slight_smile: ). I’ve played enough to be on both sides of this equation, and at the moment at least, with ET, I find it quite entertaining whichever side I’m on because of the unfamiliar maps.

So there I was on Fueldump, watching through my sniper scope as the Allies spawned in their hut. They swarmed out the doors and windows every 20 seconds with little blue icons on their heads indicating that they’re invulnerable. When the vlue icon disappears I go bang! bang! and another one bites the dust.

So… why can I, on the enemy side, see the invulnerability icons? Surely if I couldn’t, that would give the poor enemy a better chance of escaping the spawn to cover (the reason for the invulnerability in the first place).

Just playing with this idea a bit… wouldn’t it be better still to have respawning players “fade in” to the battlefield. By this I mean have it so that immediately after a respawn you’re invulnerable, as now, for a couple of seconds… for the next second have damage taken be 25% normal, then 50% the next, then 75%… you see what I mean? This would be more of a change to the mechanics, but wouldn’t it help with the whole problem of “how to get out of the spawn under fire”?

(Ranstaton) #2

I think it would be a better idea just to make spawns off limits for enemy troops (always have a few exits to spawns and puts them out of reach of the enemy).

And for god’s sake, get the freaking flags out of the spawn! Who the hell thought of putting an objective there? I thought having the enemy go into your spawn was a bad thing to encourage…

(Coolhand) #3

Granted, maps can be crafted to minimise spawn camping. But there are always bottlenecks out of spawns, wherever they are.

(Ragnar_40k) #4

One mod for RtCW (was that bani-mod?) had an autobalancing feature. Some secondes after a warning message players were switch randomly to the weaker side to keep the balance. Maybe Splash Damage can add this feature and makes it default for the public server settings.

(Coolhand) #5

One mod for RtCW (was that bani-mod?) had an autobalancing feature. Some secondes after a warning message players were switch randomly to the weaker side to keep the balance. Maybe Splash Damage can add this feature and makes it default for the public server settings.[/quote]

I wouldn’t be in favour of that. I’ve played on servers set up that way, and it’s a sure-fire teamplay killer, IMO. You just get used to the other players on your team - and, WHAMBO! you’ve got an entirely different set of folks to deal with.

Would screw with the whole idea of a campaign, too :frowning:

(Spacker) #6

Battlefield 1942 has just such an option, and I use it on my DesertCombat server. If it was implemented as a server setting in ET I’d use it. And as an option it could be enabled/disabled by the server admin as they saw fit. It’d certainly keep the teams level while playing - often I’ve seen on my own server games where allies outnumber axis up to 4:1, which ends normally with the axis players either spawn camping or quitting. Doesn’t make for much of a fun game :\

(DG) #7

imo it’s something that should be minimised with good map design and the rest left as is, tryig to change anything else has more disadvantages than advantages - e.g. no blue icon leading to “cheat” accusations after medic revive, and makes it less intuiative for new players.

good mapping, teamforcebalance 1 and decent use of shuffle teams should minimise it. its the players who do the spawnraping, only ones to “blame” (unless is due to map being stupidly unbalanced)

(Emon) #8

Patching the maps to include some kind of teamclip to limit enemies would be difficult, annoying and not very effective.

I think the easiest and best solution would be to remove the invulnerability flags, and add a random amount to the invul time, so you’d stay invulnerable anywhere from say, four to eight seconds.

(Phoenix-D) #9

The objective bit is fine, since you always have at least one spawn that -isn’t- an objective.

Didn’t realize that’s what the icons were…huh. There is a team balance option in ET, but IIRC it only stops new people from joining (or sometimes existing ones from changing class) instead of booting people back and forth.

(GrumpyDog) #10

Yes both of these would help a lot! I can’t stand the number of times this happens to me. I would say at least 1 in 3 or 4 matches they pull this crap. I ruins the game for me when all you do for 25min is shoot out a window and get buttflamed.

Yes to moving the flags, and the original map makers should have put more thought into giving more than just “one little hut” for the whole team to spawn in, should have been like two opposing areas to split up your team some. Some of the maps have very vulnerable spawn points that are easily surround-able. Longer invulnerability(6 + 1-10 seconds or so) would be the quickest fix. Then if they started spawnkilling the spawnees could wipe’em. (I kinda miss the HL-TFC sentry guns in the spawn room).

:beer:

(Smite[TLD]) #11

The invulnerability times are okay. The flags (ooops, global-over the head indicators) must go. Spawn reaping has an additional downside. The dominating team ramps XP up much more quickly and thus dooms the other team way into the next map.

Shuffling team by XP is a real bummer in my book. This is a team-based game, why mess with the teams???

Adjusting the spawn times as a component of each team’s combined XP relative to each other might be a better answer. At least then the “down” team would get better rewarded for making kills and as they recover and advance the spawn times would move back to normal.

(KingJackaL) #12

You CANNOT increase the invulnerability times.

As it is, spawns are often only 3-5 seconds away from the action. If you invrease invulnerability times, then you’ll get players in firefights that can’t get killed.

Example: Railgun. If invincibility time was doubled or something, then Allied players could get all the way to the switch WHILE BEING INVINCIBLE. Axis would never be able to cap…

There’s nothing wrong with flags in spawns. That’s the whole point of TIMING YOUR OFFENSE. Wait until they’ve spawned and disppersed, THEN strike, just before their next spawn ( they’ll all spawn else-where ). Any RTCW clanner knows this - it’s part of the timing and teamwork, telling your teammates when the enemy waves are coming, and striking around those to give you an advantage.

But yeah, invincibility icons being globally visible is a bit lame.

What concerns me more is HOW team-balancing works.

Often I’ll find my team absolutely owning the enemy ( or the other way around ) even though teams are even.

…but the winning team will have 3 or 4 clanner up the top of the scoreboard who are ramboing around, taking out 6-10 enemy per spawn ( easiest as medic on gold rush - I often get 80+/10+ kill/death ratio’s ). Often team NUMBERS aren’t the porblem, but rather team SKILLS ( how good the players are ).

Example: Today I found myself on a team that was owning because me and one other rambo medic were single ( well… double ) handedly basically shutting down the enemy. The enemy team had 1 MORE player than out team though, and because of ‘even-teams’, my repeated attempts to swap teams were disallowed :(.

Perhaps ‘even-teams’ should only police the ‘eveness’ to a certain extent. Sure 4v6 is unfair - but 12v14 players is hardly a huge numbers imbalance. So perhaps the balance should only kick in after a threshold difference - which goes up as overall numbers go up.

Also, as mentioned above, the fact that ‘even-teams’ only stops NEW players, not existing players is annoying. But being forced onto another team is also immensely frustrating ( and often you’ll immediately be the wrong class… ), so that is probably just a regrettable hallmark of teams that are losing ( they’ll have several players disconnect - leaving their team under-manned ).

(frito) #13

/callvote shuffleteamsxp

(Ifurita) #14

shuffle votes mid-game suck. Shuffle votes at the beginning of a map or a stopwatch round work well