[QUOTE=tokamak;501300]
And then there’s also the difference between pub and competitive. For public matches, a large standard deviation is fun. It adds a lot of diversity to the game. That’s what made W:ET and ETQW so great. The same maps always felt different because they always got stalled at different points. [/QUOTE]
i totally agree
That’s also absolutely my opinion. It’s a giant difference if you got two teams, that know their classes, know how to select them, according to the objective and the classes that are already picked by the rest of the team, and a pub match with 3 clan guys on one side and all random dudes on the other.
Though I still think, that giving the attackers an advantage, making it easier for them to at least be able to complete the first main objective, is absolutely mandatory, to make this game fun for everyone. BUT(!) there could be a “competitive switch” in the game(or just special comp servers), that would keep spawn times and every other gameplay snsitive number on a more competetive level.
I’m not of the same opinion.
Since different target audiences have different expectations then there should be different game settings for public and competitive matches.
I remember that in Blacklight Retribution (as part of their monetisation model) you cant rent a server and you have many settings/variables you can set for the type of game you want running in that server.
That could solve this ‘problem’ for BD. Making it so that in public servers the game would adjust itself to the match and that for competitive matches the teams could choose for it not to.
So, for public servers (which has a pool of players with very different skill levels) the game would automatically adjust itself to the ongoing match, with the goal of favouring steady progression in the map. If the progression was too quick it would readjust so that it would slow a bit; and vice versa.
I can only speak for myself but I don’t find it fun neither when there is no progression in the map nor when the map is done too quickly (no matter the side I’m playing for).
On competitive matches it would be a different matter, since it is about putting skills to the test then the game/server would not adjust itself during gameplay. Teams would agree beforehand on the server rules/settings.
There is no reason to **** up ‘stopwatch’ with unsavory adaptive algorithms, to please the ‘mass market!’ Not only would it wrong the spirit of what ‘stopwatch’ always has been about (epic grinding skill matches,) but it would also be a waste of time, since you can use the ‘objective’ mode/game settings instead. That is meant for pub play, while ‘stopwatch’ is meant for comp play, and will not be used much, if any, on pubs when the game goes live.
In ‘objective’ you don’t get stuck (for long) on a map, since if you don’t progress within a limited time, the map ends and rotates, and teams are shuffled. If you do progress, extra time is added to the timer.