Note that due to recency bias I will likely be forgetting many ideas posted weeks ago. Another caveat is that I am a human and will be representing this discussion from my point of view - so in some places I may not be adequately characterizing other community members' perspectives. Please follow up this post with any thoughts that I did not capture.
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The issue of the length of ladle was raised. Potential solutions:
- reduce score limit/more points earned per round
- include a round limit
- include a hard time limit (for a round) via deathzone
- include a soft time limit (for a round)
Solution #4 has many possible realizations. Here are some of the most discussed:
- same player conquerability - this exists to an extent already since in a 3v3 (within zone) the attackers eventually take the zone, so this proposal is to extend this feature of the game to 2v2 scenarios and even potentially 1v1. The exact method is debated. Should there be a specific amount of time until conquering (i.e. if attackers leave zone AT ALL then reset timer) or a tweak in the conquer and refresh rates of the zone? In either case, the concept of same player conq provides a benefit to the attacking team, with some community members agreeing and some disagreeing as to the merits of such a buff to attack. This achieves the goal of shortening the length of matches, but likely would result in no major shift in meta play (teams might send sweepers earlier/later - idk what else would happen). Sine.wav's latest post on this deserves particular attention: "I think the key to setting good conquerability settings should be based on how long it takes a team to reasonably react. For instance, if it's 2v2 in your zone and you are attacking, the zone should not fall before you have a chance to reasonably break off your attack and return to your home zone, maybe even a 60 second window would be enough."
- no rubber refill - the idea here is after a certain amount of time in a round, rubber will stop refilling. This likely shortens matches because defending in its traditional form will not be that feasible. Opponents to this idea do not look at rubber as a modifiable setting, as it will nerf players with worse connection (connection is the #1 skill in tron anyway, sooo.. potatoes)
- dynamic settings based on the count of players alive - this idea is not mutually exclusive to the others, but just captures the interest in possibly changing settings (amount of rubber, expanding zone, anything) based on how many players are alive - for example, implementing zero rubber in 1v1 scenarios
This upcoming weekend, February 20 and February 21 at 17:00 GMT, will be host to a set of experimental matches to test out some of these proposed changes. Further specifics are pending, but I hope many of you can get online for that event!