CTF Brawl 10 Settings Discussion

[ousous]

You were a top advocate of pushing round win to 8 points. You were not alone though, I'll give you that.

Right, raising score_win was our first attempt to thwart team-suicide (originally Durka's idea in 12/08). It's clear now what the unintended consequences are -- long, boring rounds where teams are more interested in stopping the respawn than capturing flags. But as we've seen in Ladle, making the Brawl a point game instead of a round game removes and incentive for team-suicide, this removing the need for score_win to be higher than score_flag. If there is any change to the game, it needs to be this one.

No one is trying to turn CTF into Fortress; unless by "Fortress" you mean "a game with a highly successful tournament."

I believe it is important to ask some of the " elders' " opinions on this as well. People who are established for a while in CTF.

BTW, I am a CTF elder. And I suggest doing away with round_limit and reducing score_win. But since you are in favor of reducing score_win and you have nothing to say about round_limit, I'll assume you're on board with this.

You are in fact a ctf elder.

Like you said, I agree with reducing score_win as well as round limit, in hopes of streamlining gameplay and getting rid of what has become a game of "capture the round". Hopefully this will open up teams a little more.

In fact, knowing that the only way to win is reaching 100 points will help loosen up gameplay from being so uptight. Players will realize that there's more leeway to take risks because if they die it's only 1 point out of the necessary 100, regardless of rounds left.

Ok gene, that looks like a pretty good start. With the higher point values, a match shouldn't go all 10 rounds anyway, so it's like unlimited rounds.

I'm sure we can all agree to abandon the other ideas like walls_length 300 and no DZ, and focus on tweaking the score and rounds slightly. This seems like the least amount of change for the greatest benefit.

What say you all?

Good post, good discussion.

[PokeMaster]

I'm going to interrupt the srsbsns for a quick moment to make a Marxian suggestion that we disqualify all players with over 100 ping.

[compguygene]

NoNoNoNo. We should sort teams to servers by ping. No player is allowed to play in a server with less than 100 ping.

[sinewav]

BTW, the first to suggest unlimited rounds for CTF was shoebat on 30 Dec 2008. I'm still nervous we're not doing enough, but I'm excited to see how this turns out. Now if I can just get more people convinced 5v5 makes a better game...

[compguygene]

I really think that this new structure will be close to unlimited rounds, while putting an end to low-scoring matches. The only way a team is going to play the full 10 rounds is if very few flags are scored.
For the record, I agree with sine that 5v5 is much more exciting. But, I am fine with going with the flow of opinion here. Personally, I think that this is just the first step of changes. After 3-5 more Brawls have been played, we should have this discussion again. I really think this is enough change for teams to play with it, and see how it goes.

I am hoping to hear back from some of you trying the test server out, and relating your opinions.

[regedit]

May i make a suggestion as to the changes:

The main problem that we are talking about is that people are base camping, and not focusing on the flag.
Flag problem can be fixed by increasing flag points and decreasing round win times but that leads to mass suicides etc...
So how about we add a delayed auto spawn (i am pretty sure that can be done), say 30/20 sec after someone is killed, if the haven't been spawned they get automatically spawned.
This will fix the problem of base camping (atleast prolonged base camping) but still retain the temporary advantage of killing an opponent. It would also make mass suicides slightly harder to co-ordinate.

Just an idea.

[zat]

why not let everything like it is. It makes still fun tho

[INW]

why not let everything like it is. It makes still fun tho

The whole point of this conversation is because the current settings aren't "fun enough"...

[regedit]

I would rather leave everything as it is.
Was just suggesting a solution that would have the desired effect without a major impact.

[Tobe]

@regedit: Mass suicides are already illegal (not sure if it only applies to the beginning of the round or not, though)

@sinewav: Yeah, seems like we should set our priorities now on finding a nice scoring system, and ignore the wall lengths and DZ for now.

@the community: It seems like a good amount of you (especially the "CTF elders") want to bring the Flag part of CTF back. To do so, round win must be set lower and amount of rounds might have to be extended.

As I see it, the scores may be:

SCORE_WIN 2 or 4
SCORE_KILL 2 (can't be a worthless value or insane amounts of holing occurs)
SCORE_FLAG 8 or 10
LIMIT_ROUNDS 8 or 10

This way, players have enough rounds (but not a limitless amount) to get to 100, and capturing a flag greatly extends your lead (even more so if you flag run). In this scoring system, kills from holing will impact your score more effectively, preventing teams from carelessly holing just because kills aren't worth much.

[sinewav]

SCORE_WIN 2 or 4

As I consider these changes, I don't think it's enough to raise the flag score without lowering the win score.

There will still be a lot of base-camping, that's for sure. Teams will want to control the numbers on the grid and make things easier on themselves. But if score_win is the same as score_flag, a team still has no incentive to respawn their enemy in 4v1. Imagine yourself in the following 4v1 situations when you have the advantage:

score_win larger than score_flag (current): Defender dies, you don't bother respawning the enemy because it's more points and less work than getting the flag back home.

score_win same as score_flag: Defender dies. Well so what? We get the same points as a flag anyway.

score_win less than score_flag: Defender dies. Quick! Respawn! We're losing out on points for our hard work.

Not only should score_win be less than a flag, it's should also be higher than score_kill, obviously, to stop a lone player from suiciding to end the round deliberately (like to stop a flag return). This makes me think score_win 4 is the only realistic choice.

[sexy beast]

Ok so it makes sense to lower score win back down to say 4 that would make it smarter to continue to flag run if you can rather than let them all die and take only the 4 points. However score win 4 is also enough to keep teams from mass suicide which is illegal, just hard to prove during rounds. There should be no change of the physics of CTF once you do that you just make a variation of fort and then some players would not want to play and tron would lose variety.

We could also try a delayed auto spawn which would make bc less effective earlier in the game. I think the time for this should be 1/4 of the round time so you get 2-3 auto spawns per game.

However another idea might be to shorten the time but make it so that if enemy touches your spawn the auto spawn time resets so that means the enemy team couldn't effectively bc since you would be auto spawned however they could slow the auto spawn on the way back to capture the flag. This would be a short auto spawn time say 20-30 seconds.

Just my thoughts.

[DDMJ]

edit: fort physics ctf is okay if you make it so that you can't capture the flag while your enemy has yours. currently its poo in my opinion, but fun poo.

Yea, I've been playing around with that for a while now...I think I'm gonna change it back to what you (and many others) have suggested (flag must be home to cap).

[Gaz]

The easiest and most obvious fix:

Play CTF w/ Fort Physics instead!

/thread

+100

[Gaz]

yea but i do agree some changes need to be made and longer tails would be fun