On Fairness

So,  I want to preface this by saying that I think Teeworlds is actually a fantastic game and I am delighted to have recently discovered it, and it's extremely clear why this game has lasted apparently over a decade now.

However, I think the fairness in this game is fundamentally broken, and badly in need of fixing.  As evidence of this, I invite everybody to look at the current active server list: an average of 10-30 active servers, with maybe 1-4 hosting vanilla gameplay and the rest hosting mods- because the physics of the gameplay itself, the actual grappling-hook-and-rocket-jumps part, is so fun that despite the broken gameplay in vanilla, people are still happy to play that.

What's this you say? What does this broken vanilla gameplay look like, maybe you've been playing for years and insist it's not broken?  Well, I invite you to Chiller Dragon's CTF5 server- probably the only vanilla gameplay server you'll be able to find with active players at the time of this feb 2020 writing.  Watch for a little while and you'll see a pattern: most players can navigate just fine, hit the things they're shooting at some of the time, and manage to get armor and health and a few kills or scores in a game; all well and good, as intended.  You'll probably see a few noobs, who never aim around the map as they run around, and who mostly miss their shots with both guns and grappling hooks, and consequently have trouble with basic map navigation. And then an advanced player joins, who has honed their reflexes in this game literally for over a decade, and who can hop across the map with rockets and grappling swings at a speed that can't practically be played against; they'll dance around the noobs, frequently switching to less powerful weapons to nerf themselves down, gleefully dodge everybody's rockets, lasers, and shotgun blasts, and then kill everybody with a hammer before hopping across the map in 3 rocket jumps to score before hopping back for more, in ctf5, or running off to check all the spawn points to keep playing in a deathmatch.

If these advanced players are nice, they'll switch down to pistols or hammers for the rest of the match; if they aren't, or even if they are nice but are tired of bending over backwards, they won't.  This will drive the less advanced players, who basically stop being able to play because they die before they can reasonably respond to anything, to ragequit, or the advanced players who aren't being challenged to do another thing I call a "borequit", and seek out something more challenging.

I contend that this game is of sufficient quality that we should expect better than this of its' developers.

And, I have a proposal to modestly change the gameplay with a balancing mechanism to change the max HP and armor values, based on in-game score streaks and perhaps a few other data points that can be gotten live from the in-game information without needing registration or accounts or anything of that sort. I think the most practical way to do this is with kill streak average, the average number of kills per life being the number of max hearts that the default is reduced by- so if you are averaging 2 kills per life, that would be 8/8 as your max- and in a 1 v 1 match, that guy who just died twice without a kill? he's coming for you with 12/12 when he gears up- so you better be ready to bring it a third time.  The intent is to make as few adjustments of this sort as possible, so maybe some minimum threshold of "the scores have spreadover X threshold" is the way to bring this up.  At the bottom of the range, for a player on an un-ending kill streak? their health and armor can max out at 5/5.  for a noob? to completely armor them up, I think they start being a bit tank-like at 15/15, but have thought seriously about suggesting 20/20 values for somebody that just keeps dying.

In terms of game math, I think a single variable per player/tee, a "average killstreak" or "average score streak" variable calculated at every kill and score as a triggered event is the way to do this. Pretty light mathematically. For CTF, this can be adjusted to score streaks- I'm not sure how this should be coded but the player scoring should have each score treated like their kill streak average going up by 1, is my basic thought here, mostly because the sort of player that can cross the ctf5 map in 8 seconds or less, does not need to have advantages beyond that over players that can't- myself included.

Ideally? this should be invisible or only minimally visible, it should not change the interaction of the players with the world, etc. I've suggested a range of health that still allows a serious number of rocket jumps in succession, so it's not robbing this gameplay mechanic from the advanced players actually capable of using it. I don't think there's a real way to stop the really advanced players from winning in spite of this- but I don't want to. I want this to be a more-evenly-challenging system so that it's more fun to play, for myself and for new people and for old timers alike.  My ideal use-case of this, even trying to break it, would be to be able to set up a lan party with my kids and some adult friends all playing, and for all of us to be able to physically switch computers and have the game balance itself from that. and I
think my score-based proposal here is a way to do that.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.  TLDR, "I think the fairness in teeworlds is broken and needs to be fixed, and adjusting the HP of players based on their in-game scores is the most fair and sensible approach to this".