Shorter time of rounds

[Thunderon]

Hi, I am just wondering if it will be possible to make time of the round shorter or make flags spawn earlier not at the end when there are 3 players left. You know a lot of games have some other goal than just "kill them all"(in cs bomb for example) and I think in WB battle should be flags. It will be much funnier to play and it will deal the problem with guys who camping or hidding around and not actually fighting. I know that it will be big change but play big maps like FBTR is so looong and boring.
btw. dont tell me to play siege, to much nabs there

[AZAN]

I have a little server side mod that I completed a while back which does this and more if IG were interested. The changes are:

Fast Flag Spawns
Flags spawn after 30 seconds (allowing maximum number of players to spawn and reduce any advantages an early spawner would have).

Longer Capture Times
Flags take 2 minutes to capture (instead of the roughly 50 seconds now). This reduces the rush for the flag and lets teams concentrate more on the periphery of the flag area.

Flag Locking
Flags are 'locked' after 30 seconds of a team dominating it without being contested. This lock means your team continues to raise the flag even if your players leave the flag area. As soon as the other team contests the flag the lock is broken. This means you don't have to leave someone stuck on the flag for the full 2 minutes.

Non-Random Flag Spawns
Non-random flag spawns, flags spawn in order based on which team wins or loses a round. There are up to 5 flag locations (entry point numbers 67-71), the flag will by default spawn on EP 69, if entry points for the flags aren't included, the flags will not spawn there, allowing maps to vary the number of flag spawn locations between 1 and 5. If team A wins, the flag location would increase by one (to EP70 for example). If team B wins the flag location will decrease by one (EP68).

All existing maps will still work even if the entry point numbers don't change, but the numbering may not be fair or make sense.

Examples of different flag setups:

A chain of 5 flags running from one teams spawn to the other. The central flag spawns first, if team A wins, the flag moves one spawn towards team B and vice versa.

Three flags all with neutral locations, winning or losing changes the location but does not significantly help or hinder either team.

Two flags, one in each teams spawn, one team starts as the defender, if they win the flag remains in their spawn and they play as defender again, if they lose the other team becomes the defender.

In all there are a lot of different scenarios that can play out giving more flexibility to map designers to expand gameplay and scenarios.

[Triari]

I haven't spoken to anyone else in IG yet so the following is just my opinion.

The thing is that comeptitive matches are always about flags. You basically search for a strategic position and place your troops there. You make sure they are covered and supported by your own cavalry and archers and the whole team is able to defend themselves and hold their position in case of an early attack by the opponents. Most of the time nobody is willing to take any chances of killing someone before the flag spawns just because it's too risky.
You don't train for those official matches by playing on public servers - you do it with other teams.
That's at least the impression I have.

Public gaming on a public servers is different from the competitive scene. The only purpose flags have here are to make sure that you can win a round even though the last opponent is hiding somewhere/running away. What you actually do on these servers is killing others and your main goal is to be on top of the scoreboard (or at least at a high position). I've never met anyone who really cared about his team. It doesn't matter when everyone else is getting killed somewhere at the other side of the map as long as you can get some free-kills or archers at spawn or anywhere else. Some players might have a different view but the majority is thinking exactly this way. That's how battle used to be the past few years and a change to the rules might be a kind of fresh start but most people won't really accept it and play on different servers.

Your mod looks like you had to put a lot of work and ideas into it and it sounds really good but the thing is that this too much changing for our server and I think we would lose many regular players. It's not meant offensive in any way but I just think that public battle is about getting most of the kills and competitive battle about winning as a team. The way we play battle in public seems to be the best to me.

About the shorter round times: I'm not sure whether this is really needed or not. I believe it's rather annoying than helpful if half of your team is still alive and only two opponents but the round suddenly ends and you have to accept that it's a draw in the end even though you would have easily won.
The real problem are more the maps we have in our rotation sometimes. They are well made and it's funny and entertaining to play there but sometimes you need 20 to 30 minutes or even more to have one team reaching the 5 points needed for a map change. Best example right now is probably Field by the River. A lot of cavalry forces archers to either camp the forest or the ruins. Going there as a cavalry or even as one of the few infantrys is most of the time suicide. So you can wait for some of them to die, go from behind (running a minute over the entire map) or wait for flags. On these maps flags spawn indeed quite often but in that case there are not more than 5 players still alive. Everyone else has to wait.

Nothing new I guess but I just believe that those large maps are more a problem than the round times. What do you even mean with lowering those time limits? To like 3 minutes? Well, let's take Field by the River as an example again: As a player I need some time to actually spawn and then walk somewhere. Let's say I'm playing archer and I'm going to the ruins. I'm probably attacked by a cavarly on my way or have to hold my shield up to block incoming arrows. The thing is, once I reach the ruins and found a suitable position to shoot someone, the flag is about to spawn. Camping somewhere is nearly useless so what I have to do is walking again to join the fight at the flag. This fight is sometimes even won/lost when I reach it. So what I did the whole round was walking across the map and maybe fireing once or twice and not even hitting/killing anyone. That's not what I call "fun".

I hope I could explain my own opinion in this large text above. Basically I don't think we need to change the round time limit or install a mod to have flag fights all day. We should rather focus on the maps, make them smaller/remove the large ones and make sure that there's no way to delay rounds ending every time. A map should take something around 10 to 20 minutes (even with scores like 5 - 3) and something like 30 minutes is definitely too long.

[Oliveran]

I haven't spoken to anyone else in IG yet so the following is just my opinion (copy-paste of Triari ).

Imagine the rounds that goes down to 1 minute. By that time it'd been over, and people would be alive. This would cause people to go for the timer more than the victory. I could see a lot of people, especially trolls joining as a group, go hide and say something like "We just want to save equipment". I think it's more easy to abuse, unless we'd go with AZAN's new thing. But then, I agree with Triari - it's too much of a change. Unless real matches changes to this system, I don't think we will.

[AZAN]

Real matches also use 4 minute rounds though, and on IG most rounds are pretty much over before the flag even spawns. I would say that almost half the time the server is running there are only 10% of players left alive. Flags only ever come up when there are a bare handful of people left and usually only when there has been time wasting.

[Triari]

Real matches also use 4 minute rounds though

They do and 4 minutes are enough for an 8 vs. 8 game.
Still a public server is not a comparison to a "real match" and for 25 vs. 25 you need more time.

[...] and on IG most rounds are pretty much over before the flag even spawns.
Flags only ever come up when there are a bare handful of people left and usually only when there has been time wasting.

That's exactly how we want it to be I guess.
I never had the impression that the purpose of playing in battle mode is fighting for flags or similar things.

I would say that almost half the time the server is running there are only 10% of players left alive.

I don't think that's true.
Sure, some (especially new players) are getting killed right in the beginning and have to wait like 3 minutes every time to actually respawn, but that's nothing we can change. On every map it's possible to avoid the enemy's main infantry forces with simply going somewhere else. Or you can follow your own main group. There is no reason to die in the beginning. There is a reason why those 10% of players survive.


Lowering the round time limit would lead to many undecided rounds. So you can let your team die somewhere and survive yourself. As Oli said "This would cause people to go for the timer more than the victory." and that's not really our intention. I think a battle shouldn't be decided by a time limit but rather by one team actually winning.

[Marek]

I would be up for 4:30 rather than 5:30, as a main fight is mostly over around 3:00 and then if there is player, who doesn't want to die, you have to either try to catch him and kill him or wait 1 minute until a flag is spawned and then raise the flag and as a result, there is 1 minute and 50 seconds time waste for everyone who died "normally" or survived and tried to kill last player.

[Chaingun]

Azan's mod sounds interesting, but spawning immediately after 30 s sounds a bit rushy even with other mechanic changes in mind. Or rather, it would turn whole game into a battle for flags, and it would be nice to have a 50-50% distribution between flag/non-flag endings for variety. At the moment, the actual distribution is such that real flag fights are rather rare on most maps, at any rate. If keeping base mechanics, from that perspective, one could cut down slightly on round times.

What it sounds nice about Azan's mod is if the flag raising time is increased - right now you don't have time to fight for the flag properly but must rush it with very little margin.

[AZAN]

I think the lack of a focus to battle is exactly what's wrong with it though, the game mode makes the naive assumption that players on both sides will actively try and kill each other. In practice though, players often just set themselves up in the most defensive position they can and turtle, expecting the other team to take all the risks. This pays off in public because unlike clan matches, a public team doesn't have the patience or coordination to be able to wait the several minutes for the flag, which is the correct response to the act of playing extremely defensive.

At first glance spawning the flags immediately sounds like you would just get a massive scrum on the flag but I don't believe this will be the case in actuality. The long flag raise time combined with the locking mechanism frees up players to engage in the area surrounding or on the way to the flag. Which actually covers quite significant portions of the maps.

Sure you will have some players simply run in and sit on the flags. However I would expect all the archers and cavalry to not bother holding the flag, and more sensible infantry will focus more on engaging the archers than sitting there.

The flag spawning mechanic which makes it non-random can also be used to balance the game to some degree, especially if the flags are set up to give more advantages to the losers.