Anecdote from this morning. I log in for a quick game on the RBI CTF server and it's Mentalspace. The score is about 200 to 50. Fine, I figure I'll wait for the next game, hopefully it will be better. Then I notice that blue (the leading team) has 2 guys with HUGE scores and the rest very low. The game ends at something like 315 to 72. The winning team had one guy with 167 points and one with 137. Everyone else had like 1 or 2. No, I am not making those numbers up!
Next game starts (Facing Worlds) and again the same two guys are on blue. I ask if they could balance the teams a bit, to which I get a reply from one that "they like being on the same team and don't care about game balance".
That's the problem in a nutshell. It only takes 1 or 2 people with that attitude to ruin the game for everyone.
So I switched to blue and began hindering that guy to slow blue down a bit. It worked, red at least got into the game.
The next game was something like 127-24 when I finally said "screw it" and logged off.
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Now some constructive thoughts. Some that a few people won't like to hear, but that's never stopped me before.
1. esteel's CTF guide is superb and should be required reading for anyone who wants to play CTF. Unfortunately, most people nowadays don't like to read -- they are too lazy. And even worse, most players don't even really care about proper teamplay, they only want to run up their own scores or be on the "winning team".
Don't believe me? How often have you shot a flagholder and been going over to pick up the flag when one of your teammates zips in to grab it out from under you? Happens to me constantly. Why do people change teams when they are losing by a lot?
2. There is too much reward in the game for flag capture and not enough for useful actions taken by defenders and midfielders. This directly encourages everyone to go on the attack rather than playing as a team. It also disproportionately rewards the better players who are able to laserjump across maps quickly, and leads in part to the "run up the score" mentality.
Again, I like to play defence. I usually end up with a low score, and I don't really care, but some people do and they should be rewarded for it.
Consider an example. On Mentalspace, I'm on blue, and a red guy grabs the flag at the same time a blue guy grabs the red flag. Both are dancing around avoiding enemies. I get shot by a red guy and as I'm falling I take my laser and ping the enemy flagholder into the void. He dies so we can score. I get 1 point, and the guy on my team who scores gets 20 or something. Was his contribution to that score really 20 times mine? Why is killing a flagholder worth only 1 point anyway?
3. Laserjumping adds an interesting dimension to Nexuiz, but it also represents the most significant gulf between expert and beginner players. Whenever I am in a lop-sided game, it is nearly always due to a couple of expert players who laserjump around the map and run up high scores.
4. Having a player registry and whatnot would be too complicated, but there are other methods that could be implemented MUCH more easily. Some of these assume that most players WANT to be reasonable and fair (unlike the stooges in my games this morning) and just aren't sure how to do it.
For example:
- Have the server keep track of players from game to game and balance them accordingly. Most people do play more than one game so this should be easy to do.
- Create a skill coding system that people can put in their names, which servers would recognize at game start time and use accordingly. For example, you could put "{B}" at the start of your name for "beginner", "{I}" for "intermediate" or "{A}" for advanced. Or use a numeric system of some sort. Yes, it's voluntary, but I think most people would at least try to be reasonable.
- Make the server care more about relative score and not just numbers. When the score is 125-10 for blue, the next player should go to red even if red has 5 players and blue has 4.
5. Perhaps a better solution to all of this is more segregation of the really advanced players from the newcomers and the intermediates. Right now everyone is always trying to get into 1 or 2 CTF servers. Nil set up a beginner's CTF server, in part due to my request (thanks Nil!) but he took it down once and seems to be away so I can't confirm that it is going to be a permanent fixture. Even so, we can't get people on it.
The problem with CTF is that you need at least 6-8 people for it to work well, and you end up with the chicken and egg where nobody joins a server because nobody else is joining it. There could be features added to the "Join" function to make this easier to deal with for players looking for a game.
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Nexuiz is a great game, but some work is needed to allow it to live up to its potential. I honestly think that the impediments to allowing newer and less experienced players a fun, balanced game experience are the #1 reason why the playerbase is, right now, fairly stagnant.
As another piece of evidence -- I initially found Nexuiz because two of my sons wanted to play it. They were very excited at first but rarely play any more because they don't enjoy being made into swiss cheese every time they log in.
No, again... I'm not sure that's really true.