Spawn system feedback 1.3.4

[Captain Smollett]

It seems giving away the enemies general position in order to disallow spawning within a certain proximity of the enemy is worth it. 

General bearings of enemies are almost always known after a fight anyways so telegraphing that intel shouldn't be too detrimental to the team that got the kill.

I'm in favor of a base/bases idea (might be best for teams to have two bases so they can't be camped), implementing slightly longer respawns and only being able to choose spawn points that are a certain distance away from enemy ships.

[awkm]

Time was 12 seconds.  20 seconds seems okay... maybe still fast.  30??!

Initial spawn stuff and bases are ready for the hot patch next week.  At some point this will drop into Dev App for testing.  Will let everyone know when.

[Tropo]

G’day guys I'm not a fan of complaining about stuff and I have never posted a
complaint before and I don't want this to become a trend for me.
So I’m going to start with a story of current game play to best showcase my point of
why the spawn system is bad or worse than it was before

Ok double pyra vs mobula junker

The first pyra dies and teammate fly’s past now I can just spawn behind the mobula
and take him out.

He barely gets a chance to turn around and attack me.


So at this point I should point out that now there’s a slow mobula that won't be able
to make it back in time to help his junker.
and the junker dies...

Now there’s no reason why the ship that dies first should win the game
This puts these ships at a disadvantage
mobula: Slow turning speed, primarily long range.
Spire: Weak to close range, slow speed.
Squid: Speed advantage is lessened.
Makes dual pyramidions a likely thing and dual pyra is never much fun
Case in point I believe that this should be fixed sooner than later.
I can see a lot of people leaving the game before even trying it out e.g.
“omg that ship spawned behind me before i could turn around... or even worse omg
what killed me”
I had a level 4 pilot on my team keep saying they’re always behind me when the
high level clan keeps spawning behind them
Can’t see many new players coming back to the game if they think this is meant to
be a part of the game; also, many high level players as we’ve seen on this thread
are also unhappy with the new system.
I take no pleasure in killing someone from behind unless it was my skill that got me
there.
Clouds have less utility in regard to the new spawning system.
Strategy is a lesser part of the game now, and people have been abusing the
system by delaying the spawn and then spawning behind slow ships.
I am in favor of a new system with some tweaks to spawn location and the respawn
timer.
Something like this

Thanks to everyone that shares the same view, and Naf clanmen for helping out.
Edited by: Castus Crios (English aficionado)

[Piemanlives]

While I appreciate the visual aides, would it have been a bit much to turn off tutorial tips?

[Queso]

Just a suggestion, but if you wanted to have it be impossible to spawn next to an enemy, you could disable spawns near the enemy, and also disable some random spawns. Then all you know is a few locations where you can spawn where they definatly aren't.

[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.

[Richard LeMoon]

Totally understand on the implementation issue. Don't take anything I say as a demand for something "RIGHT NOW!" as you may get from others. Just making suggestions for the (distant) future, and tossing things at the wall to see what sticks. As for the time to deploy thing, those times are just pulled out of thin air, likely completely wrong, and also just tossed at the wall of sticking. The main thought there is to to maybe allow for strategic off-sides spawns, but at a cost that may not be worth it. It encourages own base spawns, but does not demand it. 

I have only been in a few 3v3 matches as captain so far with the new system, and only died once (in a Mobula? Yes, in a Mobula), so can't really say much about it as is.

Sorry for not getting involved in the testing. I'll see what I can do in the future.

[awkm]

@Richard LeMoon

Yes, I know they were ideas and thank you for providing your ideas.  They were very useful.

I just want to paint a clear picture of what can and can't happen in the immediate future.

And for the future, hell this thing may ultimately get pulled but I don't make decisions until each stage has been rolled out.  We have a hot fix coming in a week and will hopefully solve many grievances that were express here and in dev app.  Yes, there were people who did not like this in dev app but it was a very small sample size.  I even had a poll whether about what to do with it but there were only 10 participants when we handed out several hundred keys.  We need more testers!

Voices being heard here is great but I'd even like this to be even bigger and louder.  If more people participate here, publicly, then it's likely that dev app will also get more participants.  That's the real key here.  We need active numbers.

[Richard LeMoon]

As in some other games I have been in, there are a lot of people that never read forums or news, or even ingame chat. If you want to get a lot more feedback, I recommend tossing a nice, hard to miss,  "Test new features before anyone else! Be a part of making the game the best it can be! Try the Dev App now." kind of thing on the main menu of the game itself. In the empty space next to Quick Join and Matches might work. Not sure if you could do this, but if you want even more testing and feedback, think about giving actual achievements for testing things. 'Tinker' achievements, or some such.

[The Djinn]

I know my issue with Dev App testing is the small community: I'm not always available at testing times due to my work schedule, and it's VERY difficult to test things like how Spawning reacts in a real game with just 1-2 people. 

[Thomas]

Right now I think the best course of action is to just split the spawn zones for the teams. I am however, not really stoked about spawning near/at my enemies at the start of the match (if I'm reading this correctly). While it's nifty for ships to spawn in formation and close to each other, it gives certain ships a larger advantage. Namely those with close range high burst damage (brawl builds). I think spawning on their respective sides and needing to approach each other like usual is ok. I know a lot of ships use this initial travel time to form up with their team, and do some last minute planning and give out orders. If you spawn too close to your enemy you don't get this time. This can lead to more time being spent in the lobbies as they have to do more of the planning before they get into the game, and then they don't have time to make any corrections/clarifications. This extra little time is also to give the slow loaders that time to finish loading.