maybe ‘keeping and removing’ are unnecessary in a thread about encouraging creativity and novelty in making babel less monotonous. The thread is about adding maps and encouraging mappers, removing maps makes the gameplay even more monotonous since you’ll be playing less maps even more.
At the moment the rotation is ordered in long-short-long-short alternating (starting with longest and shortest moving towards an average). It’s hard to say for sure, because (surprisingly) a lot of people don’t like short maps and a lot of people like long maps (the inverse is also pretty true though)
We’ve thought about it before, but the round ending prematurely when the game is actually being fun would be really bad. It would have to at least compensate for recent captures or maybe even tower height
How about a “sudden death” plugin? After 30 minutes any block that isn’t water gets one block added above it of the same color as below slowly in waves across the map like the rollback feature works to not lag the server. Eventually by the time it hits the hour time limit the map will be flat at the top with the babel and intel there easily accessed.
this would be interesting as many times there’s a team with little or more often no builders
it gives both teams a fair chance but also has potential for abuse as some people might just wait for the script to fully build the stairs
wont it be better to give something like a half built stairs so players on a team actually put effort into winning?
nothing automated please… it’s online player vs. player… let the players play! if you want to change the map, then help your team win
yes, well said
i like what Danke is saying here.
obviously babel works as is, so let’s not fix what isn’t broken. as frustrating as a long round can be, there’s no denying that seeing through to the end of one can be a super rewarding thrill, typically much more so than a short round, even if you are on the losing side. babel isn’t supposed to be a fast-paced game mode, although it certainly can be. but forcing time restraints can really ruin the mood for players who are having fun, especially if they are heavily invested into a particular round. let them have their fun, and either help them win or make them lose so you can have fun too!
That may be a bit frustrating sometimes but I have a similar idea like yours.
If the blue team captures the Intel, the height of babel tower doesn’t change but when they capture another one (without the red team picking the intel up) , the tower goes up 2-3 levels. The height goes up and up as more captures occur by the blue team without any interference from red. Same penalty applies to red team.
If blue team captures the Intel and then afterwards, the red team picks up the intel, the babel platform height remains the same and the condition resets. Vice versa for blue picking the intel up after red team captures one.
As babel maps can go for an hour and this activates after 30 mins, at most, the babel platform can lower down by 6 floors after an hour. Though this gives motivation to the builders that they can make the staircase and get there quicker
I see what you’re saying Izzy, but sometimes there’s just maps that are so hard to build on a team just doesn’t even bother building the entire map. I do understand that’s part of the game, but when maps have ground level building zone to sky limit babel, it just gets frustrating and tedious. Anytime there’s at least a small hill where the babel could be built or a building or something it definitely helps. Maps like Icecraft where there isn’t a hill take forever and get boring.
For the most part I agree with izzy/danke, even though some rounds extend past an hour, winning them can be extremely rewarding. Getting rid of the longer to complete maps in favour of fast paced maps will eventually get monotonous. It’s kind of along the lines that we’d rather have a few hackers out there then ban an innocent player. Personally i’d rather have a few long and difficult games rather than lose the potential of having a fun/competitive/strategic round.
Though Torch does bring out a good point, there are some maps which inherently take longer because they require you to build from ground level, usually surrounded by flanks (icecraft/turtlesoup/halongbabel), and since it seems the average player cannot be bothered to build a solid tower (or rather cannot comprehend that’s its more efficient to build a solid tower once then rebuild weak stairs x10, nevertheless I digress) on these maps, and thus the map can stretch for hours. For these extreme stalemates I guess a /vote to change map would work?
Agreed. I’m not sure lowering the babel platform would work though, given problems with the platform disappearing already, and the special building rules around where you can build near the platform.
I made a server to test the auto-stair idea here: http://danke.aloha.pk:32886/ ( just on blue team )
It would probably have to be a slower since it’s self-repairing to give attackers a chance. We could even tie it to something like team kills so every time someone gets a kill the stairs grow a block (once we’re past the this-map-is-taking-too-long phase)
Interesting… I like that idea that after 30 minutes (whatever time you choose doesn’t matter) kills could count towards blocks being built. The number of kills needed could be set too. It could be one kill per block or even 10 kills per block. Usually once a team gets their tower destroyed they go and kill anyways, so it might add to the suspense/challenge, so matches aren’t snowballed after a tower gets knocked down.
That’s an interesting idea. Just so old maps aren’t forgotten, you could have once or twice a rotation any of the maps not in the rotation could be picked at random just to keep things fresh.
is there a way to like make a script that calls for a map vote at the end of the game or something? kinda like in cs:go how you can vote from like 4 maps at the end and whichever map gets the most votes is advanced to. the script can choose like 4 random maps and everyone can vote for the one they want to play on next. that way, we won’t have to change the existing map collection and people will hopefully be “more” pleased