The "pro-pub" sweet-spot, and the tools required.

(acutepuppy) #1

Throughout my gaming experience there have been particular times when I get everything I want out of a PC gaming session. It comes down to my “home server”. It hits a sweet spot of competition and casual play. This was true from hosting Rainbow Six sessions with a strong buddy list and a Roger Wilco server, Counter-Strike servers with excellent admin-mod integration, Tribes servers with IRC backing, and plenty others. I was kind-of into Counter-Strike back in the 5.3 beta area, until I was invited to play at a server that became my gaming community for 3 years.

I see the developers and the community talk a lot about casual vs competitive play, and it’s morphed into a larger argument of e-sports vs useless fragging. The “lol no team play in pubs” mindset runs rampant, and it almost gets no hope or help. Tribes: Ascend fell really flat on creating the sweet-spot environment, because it can’t be forced, it has to happen from ground-up game development and strong back-end feature rich server support. If you want a check list to how to completely blow mid-high level gaming, that’s how to do it.

Some of you here may be familiar with TheXclamation! ET:QW server, and there was certainly something very special about it. New players were welcome to ask questions, skilled players took leadership, votes to shuffle were often passed when needed, and I kept the server panel running 24/7 so I could track any problem reported in the forums. The server hosted many folks who created clans for scrims or high-level play. Taking part from the beta to the death-gasps, I think that integrated voice communication was absolutely vital to the development of the community. Oddly enough, that and colored names. I think voice-chat is totally a throw away if not implemented well, but when it functions beyond the capabilities of mumble (showing which player is talking on the side bar, and/or on the HUD/Minimap) it absolutely changes the game in terms of finding the most rewarding experience (to me, and many others involved). Quake Wars had late VOIP integration, and it absolutely had a major positive impact on community development. We ended up running two servers, one for scrims and “events” like Hog racing, and the DogF!ght tournament.

I’ve seen dev after dev dismiss integrated voice chat, citing players either do not want voice communication, or will use external programs. This is true, except for players who know the game really well, and enjoy taking public leadership roles. It’s amazing how many people actually find to see they enjoy voice chat after someone who is very good at the game, but not focused, skilled, or interested enough for e-sports stuff.

TL;DR
I like to run servers, and I like to take charge in pubs and give players the full experience of team-play. I’ve converted fraggers to friendly scrimmers, and helped fit hot-shot players with a clan who needs a hand. I want the tools to make a strong community. External admin panels, feature-rich VOIP, user name color/flare, a strong map/player vote system are tools that have all proven vital. My best “class” in ET:QW was server admin and game instructor.

By providing a good public/match balance, the “home server” will thrive for anyone lucky enough to join theirs.

I want to run streams, forums, etc… for my server, and I want new players to be able to join in on the fun without having to do more than bind a key to join the conversation.

(Nail) #2

I was thinking about pub/comp incompatibilities earlier, from what I can see, there will be dedicated servers available, as xp/points/coins are involved, I can see the Game Servers supplied (not always bad) rather than own box. Probably required actually, for dlc control etc. What I would propose is a “separate” set of server files that could be run on one’s own server without any xp/points/coins and give a simple admin tool to set maps, limits, classes, loadouts, etc, like we could with W:ETPro and comp can duel it out like madmen and generate enough youtube interest to suck the planet in, or at least a couple guys

(Verticae) #3

But !'s server was a ranked, official-only server. A system similar to it could work for DB.

That said, there were also the public ETQWpro servers - most notably Seanza’s, but I’m going to include our #law.qw server here as well because I can. They provided an easy peek into competitive style play, but were leaning far more towards the ‘pro’ scene than eXclamation ever did - no offense. I guess these servers were a step between organized public and full-on competitive play, however, the necessity of ETQWpro meant that the difference between public and competitive play was pretty darn vast. If Dirty Bomb can close that gap to where a repeated, high-quality pub experience can lead players into competitive play easily… Now there’s a dream.

(sunshinefats) #4

^^That actually sounds like a good compromise Nail. I would be totally ok with not getting any xp, coins, or whatever as long as I could host my own server.
to be honest, I am not interested in status “rewards” in the slightest. I just want to be able to have an even playing field.
Let’s be honest…when this game releases there WILL be cheaters. And they WILL find ways to avoid detection(for a while at least-I realize they typically eventually get caught). On my own server, when I see them I can ban them. Right then. Right there. No reporting and hoping someone else did too so it gets consideration, then hoping the SD guys see what I saw, then hoping they get banned. That’s weeks of dealing with BS that I shouldn’t have to when on my own server I can simply ban them on the spot. That’s how I build a good community around my servers. I make sure they’re free of cheats and exploits because I just HATE that. And that is why being able to run a server(even for no points or xp) is so important to me.
Allow me to give you a recent example with black ops 2(please note I’m not comparing DB to black ops, I’m just using black ops as an exmaple to illustrate what I dislike in this genre). Cheaters are ALL OVER this game. It makes sense with the level of popularity it has and they do what they can, but they can only do so much so the cheaters and glitchers prevail. And because 3arc controls the matchmaking code(which is an atrocity btw-terrible matchmaking) there isn’t much that can be done other than file a report then a day later file another and so on and nothing really ever seems to come of it. Over a short time it begins to ruin your game experience. Here in the US on the PC there is at least 1 cheater in every 2 games I play. And despite their wonderful matchmaking system, I regularly get matched with players WAAAAAAYYYY more skiilled than mem and others that have pins over 500 (<–not even making that apart up). So what can I do but go back out and waut another 40 minutes for a match equally bad…and now the silver lining…none of this exists if you give us our own servers. They dont’t even have to be official. We’ll take them. I’ll take them. For my friends…for my clan,for my pride, For thr GGGGGGGDDDDDDDDDDDFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!! <ahem> sorry got a ilttle carried away but youget the point :slight_smile:

(acutepuppy) #5

Great point. I believe a great way to go about this, is simply a vanilla experience with tweakable values.

Spawn times, Friendly Fire, Auto-balance, VOIP on/off, etc… allow users to create different server experiences that veteran players able to discern, but do not confuse new players. Take a sport like basketball. There are many rule variants across the world, from size of the ball, what happens when the ball goes out of play unconventionally, and even where players are allowed to position themselves on the court, The free-to-play model isn’t to kind to mods, but if we can hit the sweet spot, they may not be necessary.

I believe it’s very important to not over invest in matchmaking for pubs, but instead use the existing community to manage servers. I would be absolutely happy to administrate a public USWest server, and I’m sure many others are too. This is one of the reasons I’m hoping the Reddit community will take off in Open Beta.

Yes! We were the pub-oriented side of it, but I felt many players migrated to other lower population, but more experienced players. And ultimately the most intense public games possible.

You nailed exactly what I am going for in this discussion! Let’s build a community to welcome the launch of Dirty Bomb, rather than throw everyone in the mix a server list like:

PUBLIC US-CENTRAL 002 OBJ
PUBLIC US-CENTRAL 014 SW
PUBLIC US-EAST 054 OBJ
PUBLIC US-EAST 099 SW
PUBLIC US-WEST 004 OBJ

and have something like:

#Team Huggernaught Expert Server - A pro-pub proving ground | Competetive Ruleset | FF ON
DBForums Casual Central - A high intesntity ruleset | Fast spawn | FF OFF
Training Grounds West | Sportsmanship ruleset, balanced for veterans and newcomers | VoiP encouraged

And on and on.

(BTMPL) #6

[QUOTE=Nail;440215]from what I can see, there will be dedicated servers available, as xp/points/coins are involved, I can see the Game Servers supplied (not always bad) rather than own box. [/QUOTE] From what I understand, you’d rather see servers that you can rent from SD or SD certified partners than runn your own in fear of people messing around with the XP / points / coins system?

If so, then I agree with your second way of doing things - make the server public so you can run it on your own machine, but instead of there beeing 2 set of binaries make it that in order to register in the official server list and earn XP/points/coins you need to keep a given set of cvars with default values. If you change those, the server will be dropped from the list.

(Dragonji) #7

Sounds much better than a possibility for GS to steal our money.

(Nail) #8

[QUOTE=BTMPL;440248]From what I understand, you’d rather see servers that you can rent from SD or SD certified partners than runn your own in fear of people messing around with the XP / points / coins system?

If so, then I agree with your second way of doing things - make the server public so you can run it on your own machine, but instead of there beeing 2 set of binaries make it that in order to register in the official server list and earn XP/points/coins you need to keep a given set of cvars with default values. If you change those, the server will be dropped from the list.[/QUOTE]

nope, not at all. Because there are points/coins that are permanent, there will be official ranked severs for pub play, I don’t give a fig about my points
For comp players, I suggest a non ranked server that doesn’t generate any of those things but can be set with whatever levels you want, set classes, loadouts etc. just like we could with ETPro

(BTMPL) #9

[QUOTE=Nail;440291]nope, not at all. Because there are points/coins that are permanent, there will be official ranked severs for pub play, I don’t give a fig about my points
For comp players, I suggest a non ranked server that doesn’t generate any of those things but can be set with whatever levels you want, set classes, loadouts etc. just like we could with ETPro[/QUOTE]
See, problem is that F2P mentality is all about getting most points / gold / XP / whatever so I’m guessing people would only play on 3 types of server:

  • official, ranked pubs,
  • competetive (with custom restrictions and aimed at skill play),
  • moded into oblivion (surf and other custom maps)

This will make “vanilla” pub servers, that aren’t official server non-existant and will be an obsticle in building server communities, which are a big thing in this type of games I believe.

(Nail) #10

I doubt there will be modding, custom maps are only a far off maybe

There will be servers, where everyone plays and scrim servers for ladders and such, same gameset, different implementation

(nailzor) #11

Most important thing in this post to me is that there needs to be the ability to host our own servers. (Oh and colored names haha)

I would imagine that licensing to companies the server hosting capability would be profitable, and would help for those that like to LAN the game too.