Topic: [SUGGESTION] Suggestions about auto-balance and blockers
Hello everyone. My in-game nickname is "DON'T PANIC !!" and I mainly play CTF5 on public servers. Public servers are fun because there is no pressure, however it suffers from players leaving and joining all the time and new players kind of blocking your path (although even very good players block too). Also, sometimes some players don't play the game and just have fun playing hooking battles, even hooking their own team members. Thus I have two suggestions which would maybe improve the fun of public servers.
1) Auto-balance.
I'm talking about number of players per team, not skill balance.
The current auto-balance system is almost useless. It takes too long to happen and quite often, just after a player is moved to the other team, some players disconnect and teams are unbalanced once again. Thus most people ignore the blinking "please balance teams" message.
What I suggest instead is: add a respawn queue for the team which has more player. For instance, if red has 8 players and blue has 6, then blue players respawn normally after death but red cannot have more than 6 players on the field at the same time. In practise, this means that there would be a queue on the red side. If you die as red you have to wait for two other red players to die before being able to respawn.
This would be annoying when waiting, sure. But this would also mean that there would be an incentive for players to balance teams themselves. If would also be more annoying the less players there is, so maybe server admins should activate this option only for servers with a lot of players.
You could think that this would favour good players too much, but in my experience good players die almost as often as new players. Indeed, good players tend to jump right into action very fast. Also, you could say that if no player die for a long time (say 15 seconds), it would be really annoying. But in practise this really happens almost, like, never. Just look at the kill messages on the top right of the screen. If this really is a problem then a timeout could be coded to ensure players won't wait for more than, say, 5 seconds. This would mean that teams would not be as balanced as possible but it would still be better.
I think it's really worth considering as it would ensure continuous balance of number of players per team, while not annoying players too much unless teams are really unbalanced, in which case it's still better than no balance at all anyway.
2) Team blockers and hookers.
My suggestion is to add a server option for no friendly block. It would be similar to the no friendly fire option, which prevents player from harming other players of their own team with weapons. The no friendly block option would prevent players from blocking or hooking their teammates. You could walk and hook right through your teammates without them noticing.
This option should be discussed carefully, however. Indeed, disabling team blocking and hooking would change game balance a lot. With the current settings, in a battle when your are outnumbered, you at least know that your enemies will interfere each others. Also, some paths are more risky. For instance, if you carry the flag on CTF5 through the bottom of the map, you fear not only the other team, but also your own, as if you hook them on the way you can fall and kill yourself (although with practise it almost never happens).
However, there are several examples where it would prevent some frustration.
- In CTF5 you can go from the flag platform to the upper platform with a hook technique. But without momentum you need the end of the platform with the grenade launcher to be clear. Sometimes players of your team stay there and spam grenades, so you can't do the trick, and it's annoying. In high level games you could decide which is more important (spamming or tricking up the platform) or even communicate by voice but in public servers you cannot.
- Losing your momentum because of players of your own team is just annoying. I don't think it would change balance too much. And there is no fun in that unless you are a player which deliberately wants to harass your own team.
- Same remark about teammates hooking you by mistake (or worse: intentionaly).
I'm not as convinced about this suggestion as the first one; but I would definitely give it a shot on public servers.
So, what do you think? Has these settings already been tried before without success?
