The year is 199X. Political unrest sprouts all over the AoS webring. A visionary, optimistic player by the name of [Vital]RenéLévesque tries to bring AoS into the modern age by lowering the respawn time of the most popular AoS server around, “aloha.pk tower of babel”. Such a venture was considered doomed to failure by most of his contemporaries. After all, why fix something that isn’t broken? [Vital]RenéLévesque’s dream unfortunately never came to fruition: he eventually stopped playing AoS once he bought a better pc.
I want all of us to take part in a little thought experiment. Nothing more. Picture yourself back in 199X. Young, naive, still unaware of the many security issues of pyspades. You’re chilling on your college campus. Someone hands you a flyer: they are a low respawn-time activist. They strike a conversation with you and ask: What respawn time do you believe would be best for “aloha.pk tower of babel”?
Sometimes I think about a world with longer respawn times. Careful play incentivised; bigger pay off for wiping out the enemy; leaving spawn in larger waves encourages cooperation; more time to sip tea.
Honestly? I’m a bit torn on the respawn time thing.
One one hand, as said by others, it would incentivise careful play and a less run and gun style, but on the other hand, when you’re left staring at spectator mode for 30 seconds, the chance of quitting out of frustration increases. Especially if you’d only just spawned and it was a bullshit death from a tower sniper.
Maybe meet in the middle and compromise? Instead of 30 seconds, increase it slightly? Idk, I think there’s good arguments both for and against it.
a lot of time for spawn could be preferred by older players, for game strategies. but would a long time of spawn attract new players or become tedious? I think 12 seconds might be enough to take a sip of coffee/tea and watch the allies :3
30 seconds in babel is waay to much time to wait while your tower is being torn down. Especially when you spawn into a circle of spawncampers who then immediately kill you again (looking at you TMB and Micro).
Make this change, and I am most likely to disappear forever. There are enough features and tweaks that have been requested and ignored for years (vote(no)build anyone?). There are enough issues with missing active team re-balancing. Do not add this crap to the pile.
It might be interesting to have time-dependent (or even behavior-dependent) respawn times. For Babel, here’s what that could look like:
Time-dependent
Spawn time continually increases or decreases as a function of intel captures, or is hard-coded to occur in regular intervals (e.g. +/- 3 seconds every 5 minutes)
Increasing case: The game starts with high activity, incentivizes faster and riskier plays. As a team gets closer to winning, the ability for the opposing side to do anything about it decreases. Long spawn time during late-game creates a magnifying effect that causes games to be shorter overall
Decreasing case: The game starts with slow, risk-averse play. Builders are more protected. As a team gets closer to winning, the decreased spawn time would allow the opposing team to advance and destroy the tower. This would be a sort of feedback loop that increases the risks the closer a team is to winning. This would be a slow activity paradigm punctuated by increased activity during late-game. Games would last longer
Behavior-dependent
Spawn time increases or decreases based on performance, either hard-coded to kill-death ratio (e.g. +/- 3 seconds for each +0.25 increment in ratio) or through active monitoring (e.g. +/- 5 seconds for every death without a change in kill count, or without having laid 40 blocks)
Increasing case: If a player racks up a lot of kills between spawns, increased times would have an equilibrating effect: good players are incentivized to be more cautious, since dying is more costly, while normal players are incentivized to be more active, since the risk of dying while trying to stop a good player comes with a higher relative reward. Instead, increasing spawn time whenever a player performs badly (i.e. dies without getting a kill) incentivizes cautious play among normal players
Decreasing case: If a player racks up a lot of kills between spawns, decreased times would have a magnifying effect: good players are incentivized to be more active, since dying is less costly, while normal players are incentivized to be more cautious, since the risk of dying while trying to stop a good player comes with a high cost; this would lead to longer games. Alternately, decreasing spawn time whenever a player performs badly (i.e. dies without getting a kill) reduces the risk of one team dominating another and provides a control loop that prevents unilateral outcomes, also leading to longer games
Time-dependent is server wide and could be interesting to toy with. Behavior-dependent is a more powerful tool for affecting gameplay since it works on an individual level, but would be harder to implement and fine-tune. Either way, if done correctly, changing spawn times would probably make gameplay more fun and interesting!