Babel Maps

Ace of Spades
15

No not at all if you know color theory. Red is one of the easiest to recognize colors due to its intensity and is not matched by any other color in its impact on the human brain. Plus the red used is a neutral gray when desaturated which means it shows up well in both light fog and on dark blocks. The blue is perceived to be much darker and blue is the color that the atmosphere blends to as it fades out of our eyesight, so it is harder for us to detect. Fun fact: dark navy blue blends in better at night than solid black in real life!

I could go on for a few other reasons, but frankly I doubt you’d be interested.

EDIT: Oops argued the wrong way for colors, but it still applies, just for different reasons.

16

As said by one of my thread i made about poll usefullness, Polls are not representative of the entire AoS community which is why we shouldn’t rely too much on polls. there is a big part of the players playing on aloha that doesn’t even know there is a furom. Admins are thinking about this part of the community.

17

How else do we choose what maps to keep and what maps to remove? Unless you just want the staff to do it.

18

Have maps that take longer to play on automatically get selected less on a shuffle based system. Shorter maps get selected more often.

19

Here’s an even better solution :smiley:
Add a timer, say 45 mins, to the Babel server, that way the maps aren’t too long, but we have sufficient time to finish most of the maps on Babel.

20

Who am i to know. Everything that i got told in poll usefullness was that since aloha furom users weren’t the entire community. The Polls aren’t completly useless since they voice opinion of a part of the community. But we still need to consider the other part just like FF said :

21

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

22

When a map is longer than an hour I don’t think anyone is having much fun, that timer was a guess, maybe a 60 min timer would be better

23

Probably, that’s actually pretty rare now for the maps on rotation

24

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.

25

I thought about this too, it might be easier and less intensive to just auto build some decent stairs leading up to the platform

26

Or just lower the babel platform after 30 minutes by one block every 5 minutes or something.

27

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?

28

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!

29

this is an interesting idea. but should only be considered if players can DO something to make it happen - or not happen (reverse the fall?)

for example, capturing the intel resets the platform back to the top

30

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

31

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.

32

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?

33

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)

34

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.