I was thinking about what would be ideal for CTF clan vs clan matches and I came up with this idea. Let me know what you think.

Pro CTF

The assignment of a "captain" for each team. That captain doesn't play, but has the ability to spectate their own team and communicate to their own team, or to individual players of their team directly.

- So if it were a 5 v 5 match, there would be a 6th person acting as captain of each team.

- This would be similar to popular sports which have a coach on the sidelines helping the players know what to do and what is going on. The "captain" could help facilitate strategy changes and improve communication.

- The captain could not be in fly mode. As soon as the match starts, they would be spectating one of the players.

- The captain could have three chat modes. 1. chatting with everybody. 2. chatting with their team. 3. Chatting directly with an individual player (whichever player they are currently spectating). So a new message mode would have to be created.

- There could be a .cfg file setup for special binds for the captain. So someone would only have to type exec ctf_captain.cfg in the console to get those binds. Those binds would have some essential message binds setup, and someone could customize their as needed.

- One of the binds could be to assign numbers 1 - 6 (on the top row of the keyboard) to spectate individual players (since the captain won't need weapon binds). That would allow them to quickly change who they are spectating without having to left click through the whole team.

- For message binds, there could be a variable for [current_spectated_player], and other variables specific to Pro CTF mode. So the captain could be spectating the player who has the flag and then he/she could say "[current_player] has the flag near [location] with [current_health] health and [current_armor] armor", which would display the information for the player being spectated.

That is all I have worked out so far, but let's go through some scenarios of how this might work.

- Assblaster2000 grabs the blue flag.
- He is being assisted by his fellow player, JoeNutsack
- Someone attacks the flag carrier.
- JoeNutsack defends him and gets killed
- The captain switches through the other players and sees who is closest to the flag carrier's path.
- The captain sees that Mr Hemorrhoid is ahead of Assblaster2000
- The captain switches to spectate Mr Hemorrhoid and presses the "chat_current" bind and says to him, "The flag carrier is behind you. Turn around and assist"
- "No, the other way. He's around the corner."
- Captain then switches to VoteRuPaul08, who is currently defending the base, and sees that he is being attacked by two enemy players.
- Captain switches back to Assblaster2000 and says "base is not secure. head to the left wing outside the base and hang out near the health and armor"
- Captain then checks to see where JoeNutsack respawned and he instructs him to go to the base to help clear it out.
- The captain could also help to keep a mental note of when the strength respawns (if that is enabled).

There are other considerations for a "pro ctf" mod, but I think this is a good start.

Thoughts?
Ideas?
Money?

/me hands doku 5 cents.

Good idea, but I don't know how that would be programmed easily...

desu

I don't know about the Pro CTF idea but I love the handles!
JoeNutsack , Assblaster2000, Mr Hemorrhoid , Awesome!!!!

nexbender wrote:Doku, you know how much I love this game, but seriously, you're thinking of ways around hurdles that have already been crossed by other games a few years ago.

Ssssss...o?

Why does it have to be one or the other? Voice or text? Why not use binds as well as voice? The binds can provide instant information relative to the location and status of the players. It could also set the "here" waypoints for the location of the player being spectated. You also didn't make any comment about the spectating aspect, which I thikn is the more interesting part. As far as communication, there should be options.

Believe it or not, some people prefer not to use voice, or prefer not to waste the bandwidth on it, or they feel it's distracting to listen to someone talk while they are playing. Listening to someone talk reduces the ability to listen to environmental sounds within the game.

Nexuiz could certainly integrate something like mumble and that would be excellent. But there's no reason why you should completely drop the concept of message binds because of voice chatting. Could the voice chat be directed at one individual only (between captain and player 3?) If so, that would be awesome. But I imagine that would be complicated. I would think that setting up the text messaging would be simpler to implement for now.

Also, it doesn't have to be "marching orders". That was just one example. A team could use the captain role in any way they wanted. He could just be there to provide information for the group instead of giving orders.

Glad you liked the names

What you suggested is something I would consider to be "lame", as this is exactly what makes out the team skills (beside the individual skills of the players like aiming). All members of a "good" team do automatically know what to do, know how to fall back to another pathway, or whatever is required in the different situations like losing backup for the flag carrier. Thanks to the small flag carrier sprite that is visible on everyone's screen the teamm8s know where their flagcarrier is all the time anyway.

This is also the difficulty for teams to get really good, because besides playing an action-based game they also have to think about tactics, timing, etc. The skill comes because the team finds out how to react smartly by themselves, not by someone else who is not actively playing and thus could manage to judge the situation and give orders easily.

Also such a system that makes you typing is way too slow, because typing is too slow. I know this, because in some situations I encountered during 3v3 CTF even voice communication happened to be too slow/delayed in order to get the advices to my teammates. And from what I heard the more you played together the less communication whatsoever was required between the teammates, because they already know each other

That's very close minded of you GreEn`. Your first paragraph is working off the assumption that every 'good team' is perfect. Do you think football teams win the Super Bowl merely because they are good players / a good team? Hell no, they have an outside perspective on the situation.

A good player utilizes all the information they are given and makes split seconds decisions based on their understand of the situation. Outside insight provides more knowledge thus allowing a player to add more detail to the situation the have created in their mind.

Just because you don't THINK you'd benefit from this suggested mod, doesn't mean others wouldn't.

I actually like this idea, however like I said on irc, IMO the captain should be in flymode only, I don't think I'd like idea of someone spec'ing me and telling me exactly what to do every second. While in fly mode, he could talk to the team and give direction on what is going on, keep them up to date, not directly giving orders but helping coordinate on attacks, acting like a "satellite", telling the team what's the situation of the other team. Same for defense, etc.

pro players dont type they use ventrillo or teamspeak , is bether id to provide a voice server like world of warcraft or ascentemu has

maybe we could just add fireteams like in ET:QW or some other games. It tells you your teammate's health, role (in class-based games), etc.

Also if someone wrote a plugin for mumble that put player's voices in the appropriate speaker (I forgot what that's called, it has to do with surround sound though), that would help a lot.

yeh that idea i like with the fireteams , but only when every fireteam has his own spawnplace so that you spawn with your fireteam mates instead of random spawn .... so you can easy catch up your fireteam mates

spawning with your fireteam mates will improve pub playing mabye
but voice is still the king

only thing I need to communicate to my teammates is (Killed flag carrier)

Professional gamers use teamspeak. Wonderful. Can they teamspeak to one individual of the team? Not that I'm aware of. I'm pretty sure when you're teamspeaking, you're doing so with the entire team.

You seem to want to shoot down the idea in its entirety because you don't like text-chatting. What about the idea of the extra person (call them a captain, call them whatever) specating the team members to help improve the team? Is that a bad idea? Even if you don't use this person as a "captain" (giving commands) this person could be used to review the match to see where the team could improve.

"But Doku, they could just watch demos"

No, it's not the same. They would have to watch ALL of the demos of every player and they wouldn't be able to switch between them in real time. However, if there was this spectator player, that person could be the one who records the demo for the whole team.

Do you think (like Green) that a "real" team doesn't need a captain? Then why do professional sports teams use coaches? Certainly those people are advanced players of their chosen games. If professional gamers don't use coaches, maybe it's because professional gaming isn't evolved enough to do so.

And sure you see the direction of the flag carrier, but not the exact location. You also don't know if they are in trouble. Sometimes, the flag carrier themselves don't know that they are in trouble.

What I'm talking about here are options. If you're a badass and you don't need any of this, then more power to you. However, I think a lot of people would use it and it would be something to encourage more CTF team matches.

People here are soooo quick to shoot down ideas. It's disturbing. Why not help to evolve the idea? If you don't like this idea, then what would you do differently to improve CTF team matches? Can you think of any extra features that would be useful? Or do you just want to copy everything that the other FPS's do? Think outside the box, people. It won't hurt you.

Well.. I am not sure if the idea is good... but even if it gets done, it would have to be disabled by default, because certain people would abuse it to annoy people... like, insulting one of the players all the time, but of course nobody else can read it, so he can never get kicked for it.

Dokujisan wrote:Professional gamers use teamspeak. Wonderful. Can they teamspeak to one individual of the team? Not that I'm aware of.

Actually this can be done, but usually isn't done, because it can lead to confusing situations in TeamSpeak, so it's actually easier to just talk to the whole team, while saying something like "sam, go there".

Dokujisan wrote:You seem to want to shoot down the idea in its entirety because you don't like text-chatting.

Calm down. I am not insulting you or your idea, I was just saying out loud a personal thought of mine, which doesn't have to be true or whatever. I may be too close minded to think out of the box as you called it, but I cannot remember any other big game having a community that played CTF (like Q3 or UT) that actually did have such a functionality. With this I don't mean that this is a bad idea, just because it is a new idea, I just mean that almost everything that "works" in this area has already been discovered.

Dokujisan wrote:Do you think (like Green) that a "real" team doesn't need a captain? Then why do professional sports teams use coaches? Certainly those people are advanced players of their chosen games. If professional gamers don't use coaches, maybe it's because professional gaming isn't evolved enough to do so.

Point taken, but what I fear and what I've seen is:
- Ladder activity of 3on3 CTF is ridiculous
- Additional caption means that you need an additional player, which makes it a 4on4, and this makes it much more likely to get less matches

Dokujisan wrote:People here are soooo quick to shoot down ideas. It's disturbing. Why not help to evolve the idea? If you don't like this idea, then what would you do differently to improve CTF team matches?

I am sorry if my urge to keep very down-to-earth and realistic aka pessimistic hurts your feelings, I didn't intend to do so. The next time I will try to not complain if I cannot provide a better idea. I can of course imagine the benefit of this extra player aka coach. But first of all I am not sure whether this could actually work on FFA servers. Let's assume it wouldn't work, what would be left would be the private ladder servers that run with stock Nexuiz features, so you gonna need extra servers. Err.. which servers ?

I don't wanna discourage this , I am just curious whether it actually can work.

Doku just got some servers, fyi...

I doubt pro ctf would be public... you need a player with a certain mindset to even try it...

Your idea, Dokujisan, seems very similar to the commanding officer in the Battlefield series, perhaps the command circuit [Tribes 1 & 2] would be less cumbersome than spectating players individually.

If I want tactics, teamplay and all that I play Urban Terror. If I want to run around like an asshat with a railgun, I play Nexuiz. FFS I wish Nexuiz would get ported to the ioquake3 engine.

Why port to ioquake3? It would look much worse... but we already had that.

divVerent wrote:Why port to ioquake3? It would look much worse... but we already had that.

I'll have to take your word for that. I have no idea how to accurately evaluate them for online play. From experience I can say ioquake3 seems to perform well (wrt response and smoothness) with "high" settings on the 'Net - but its "high" graphics render an enemy at 120 feet as 3 blue pixels. Whereas darkplaces is a stuttering nightmare on "high" graphics over the 'Net, but on "low" graphics it works well enough and looks as good as ioquake3 on "high."

To digress, I've been in a kind of funk about Nexuiz since I moved. My latency jumped from ~30ms to ~63ms on the Galt's Gulch servers, and suddenly I've got to crank everything down graphics-wise to get decent response - and it's still acting weird. I know the engine and the game are not anyone's bread-and-butter priority though, and I know you and the others who work on them understand what's involved a lot better than I, so I leave it be. For a free game, this still beats hell out of a lot of stuff, firstly all other free games - and the community beats hell out of them all.

Try playing with cl_netinputpacketlosstolerance and cl_netinputpacketsperserverpacket.

its not so crazy that those slower games perform bether , no jumpads no notting no superfast gameplay, you can even mail the postion of there players. and did you try to play a big open map with x10 speed in ioquake ?

Urbanshenkie wrote:you can even mail the postion of there players

True, true, UrbanTerror movement is slow (haven't played anything else based on ioquake3) and please note what I said, I'm in no position to critique any of it, since 1) I don't code C, 2) I've got a funky setup, and 3) I'm terrible at judging anything objectively.

Div, thank you for the suggestions, I've got a mental note to play with those as time permits.

On second thought, screw PC gaming, I'm getting a Wii. I keed! I keed!

ADDENDUM: Urban Terror is a glitchy piece of shit. Every other fire fight that involves more than two characters in my FOV drops frame rate to the floor, regardless of settings or network conditions. My screen literally blanks out.

I stoped playing those games because of the cheaters.
only played cs on clan servers so i can ban those lamers
Some pro ctf idea

give weapons a weight so , the heavier you are , slower you get
then one only carrier a laser is the fastest , and can evade all rockets and stuff

it will stop people taking all the weapons , and I think it will be interesting game dunno ?

defend and attack 2 classes to choise from , all know what to do then in public servers

defend are slower but the carrier more weapens , attackers more hp and armor only 1 or 2 weapons and the are they fastest

you devide the team in 2. Half are def other half attack or something

Having a teams captain doesn't seem like a very fun position to play in. If the captain had control over certain aspects of the game it would be much more fun like in tactical fps (can't recall any games). The captain for example could at the start of the game distribute spawning health, small modifiers and perks to certain players he/she sees fit. Once in gameplay along with commanding team could control secondary weapons on vehicle. Use team kills as points to buy more bonus such as weapon, health drops and low gravity zone bombs. The Captian would only be able to view as far a the furthest player (or in Onslught only as far as the furthest team node) This would make the captain position much more appealing. But in the meantime I think time would first be better spent recording a players skills in a match in addition to accuracy. Allowing players to view each others skills each map, commenting on how to improve.

Originally posted here: http://dev.alientrap.org/boards/2/topics/show/17

A new method of measuring a players skill level in addition to weapon accuracy. Strategy games measure a players skill with clicks per minute. In a fps game a players skill can be measured many ways such as kills, caps or highest score.

Although I propose a system which measures a players skill based on 3 factors:

Strength - based on the players decision to collect the weapons and ammo and kills, flag carrier kills and saves.

Agility - based on the players to capture the flag time, amount of laser/rl jump, and top speed

Endurance - based on players average health and amount of damage taken without dying
All theses could be disputed on how they are determined but this is just a rough example...

A small bar graph showing a players playing style could be generated showing the true nature of there skill, for examlple.

Player who caps alot

Strength----
Agility----------------------
Endurance------

All rounder

Strength-----------------
Agility------------
Endurance---------

Nex whore/camper

Strength------------
Agility---
Endurance---------------

Player N00b

Strength---
Agility--
Endurance-

This would show you exactly what area the player is focusing on and what needs to be improved. If this is implemented later on this data could be recorded to the players account and skill could be accumulated to make a skill level ect ect.
One problem with Nexuiz, is that it is to hard for someone with little experience with the game to want to continue to play online, if they're just getting pwned non stop by regular high skill players. This means that the community doesn't grow as fast as it should because n00bs are constantly getting bashed away from the game. So this could also be used to measure skill to determine what server they should go to like Quake LIVE.