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Spawn system feedback 1.3.4
Clementine Devitt:
I really do have to add my name to the list of dissenters.
I play an engineering class by preference and that moment of breathing time after a hard battle is especially important. Everything is on fire, the engines are toast, balloon failing and hull barely online and you are rushing about to get your poor ship back to working condition.
Now before you even have a chance to get half your systems online your enemy is behind you again. In a recent battle my captain spent almost all our time trying to get to an ally while the exact same junker spawned on our tail over and over again like a boomerang.
Its taken a lot of the skill from the game, captains can run suicidally at players, gunner just have to load up their most powerful shots and get a good burst into their already weak ally. Engineers are reduced to desperately hitting the hull and ignoring all the other components of their vessels. Not to mention ship builds have been limited, nobody can use a sniping ship and larger vessels that require maneuvering time for a good shot will last seconds.
This system really should have been tested before launch. If your devs really feel it needs to stay then please disable it from the game modes we know and add new ones, the tactics and skills the DM and CP modes require is something we have all worked hard to aquire and this isn't helping, in fact it it is limiting everything equally.
Spud Nick:
Not sure if this has been brought up but you can kill your self at the start of the match and pick a spawn right behind the other team.
Richard LeMoon:
Visual aids are fun! So, to add a few of my own to support the regional, semi-random spawn suggestion:
We start with a map that looks somewhat like this. Each dot is a spawn region indicator.
Hovering on a point will give you the full region bounds, ownership (going with bases), as well as spawn times. Clicking on that point will give you a random spawn in the highlighted area. We are Red Team in this set of examples.
Regions come in different shapes based on location.
Moving to a Purple point closer to your enemies' base will start incurring time penalties.
Finally, spawning in what would be considered the lair of the evil Blue Dragon gives you a severe time penalty, as well as not giving you a guarantied good spawn.
awkm:
Any dramatic departure from what is available now will not be in for at least several months (like the above spawn quadrants or sectors, while cool it'll take us a while to get in. We are in fact understaffed at this point in time). The best we can do right now is, again:
1) Real initial spawns, ones that don't exist once you spawn at them when matches start. This way your team fleet of ships can start close together in any part of the map, mostly closer to the center or wherever combat is deemed to take place.
2) Readjusting available spawns to emphasize bases so you can't spawn on the other side of the map.
@Richard LeMoon
And what do you propose the deployment times be based on? Right now, deployment times are a static 12 seconds which is too short for what we have now. It will likely be boosted up to 20s or even up to 30s depending on further testing.
Also, using Richard LeMoon's images as reference for what I'm doing now.
Blue and red team will spawn close to the center purple dot when the match starts (initial spawn). This purple line is the line of scrimmage (there are actually two, a purple line for blue and another for red... so lines of scrimmage). The only time people spawn at the line of scrimmage is during match start.
Once players die, they must spawn in their respective bases (the blue and red spawn points as depicted, there will actually be 4 spawns in each base). All of the base spawns will be before their lines of scrimmage to maintain onside (just like in sports). Spawns will not spawn you offside.
I'm using these rules for DM maps and they mostly hold true. Some spawns in maps that have complex terrain are closer to scrimmage lines, some larger maps may spawn offside but in a corner of a map (Fight over Firnfeld 3v3, lines of scrimmage are on either side of the center choke point. There is an [close to] offside spawn on both south and north, north is blue and south is red).
Now, this is what the very best we can do on such short notice. Again, a lot of time was put into crafting the system to get it working and we still missed a few features. It will also take a non-trivial amount of time to revert it back to the old system. The question is, do you wait an entire month and live with the new system until it can get yanked or accept some improvements on the new system?
My hope is that the new system will solve the problems with the old spawn (yes, there were always complaints about it and improvements have been on the docket for some time now). It's not perfectly executed as you all can see. What I want everyone to do is email keyvias@musegames.com and get registered with Dev App and help us test these improvements. Again, we put changes into Dev App before we release anything. We didn't get much feedback on this system.
More time to test with more players will help us ship features that work. We can all help each other work out the kinks.
Urz:
Spawn delay is something you need to be very careful with. The longer you force players to sit and wait after dying, the higher chance they're going to leave. 30 seconds sounds absolutely horrid and I would much rather deal with random spawns than a half minute wait after every death.
From a gameplay perspective it pretty much guarantees your ally will rarely if ever survive long enough in a 2v1 for you to rejoin them. It seems like this would be an even more significant issue in 3v3/4v4, but I don't really play those modes.
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