I've fallen in love with this game, but at times it can make you really mad about some basic concepts of it. So hopefully are the prayers heard here. Team Balancing I don't know if it's just my personal impression, but it seems like Icemen are favored by the game when it comes to the question which team should get the newest player that joined the match when both teams are even in playercount. And in all cases, where I payed attention to it, Icemen got the new player. So there should rather be a check to determine which team is more in need of the new player to guarantee an even match. By priority, such a check could be: Money Ball health Kill/Death ratio of one team much higher than the others Total income of one team much higher than the others Number of bots on both teams Another problem is the auto-team switching when players on one team raged again because they are afraid of losing a game for some reason. The current system is just frustrating: It kicks in way too late: Only when you manage to kill an enemy, which is even harder when your team just lost a player due to rage, which usually means that the other players are very strong already. So it may happen that you sit several minutes with 3 vs 5 players and the team balancer never gets a chance to kick in because you don't manage to kill an enemy. Being the first to die is quite a bad criteria to select the player to be switched. You may have contributed a lot to your team's advantage and almost won the round, but because you are always on offense, you are prone to die first and thus all your effort suddenly turns into a disaster for your new team. So the system should at first be timer-based. When the teams differ by more than one player, announce with a message that the teams have become uneven and that auto-balancing will commence soon. That gives players the chance to prepare themselves in some way. Then wait 15 seconds and then switch the player. Unless the money ball shields are down, of course, but if they go up again, the timer should start as well. The most fair way to select the player to be switched would be the one who was the last to join the server because he probably has contributed for the least time to the match. Overtime The new overtime setting (instant-win, if money ball is damaged) is very good and fair, but if both balls are at the same health at the end of the match, it still turns out to be an annoying juice run (and causes players to save money for the end of the match instead of putting it to use to potentially win it before overtime). So instead of lowering the money ball shields completely, how about another mode: Money balls stay shielded but lose health over time. The amount of health that is lost per second is influenced by the number of Jackbots on the field and their progress on the route to the enemy money ball. The further a Jackbot gets to the enemy money ball, the more health does the ball lose per second. And the more Jackbots you have That way you could avoid the lame overtime runs and change the focus of the players. They can still decide if they rather attack the enemy Jackbots or defend their own ones. Or pin the enemy down right in his base. Or head for the Annihilator, as it becomes really valuable then (but on the Funland map can you also spend your money on more Jackbots). Maybe buff the overtime Jackbots a bit. Discuss! :mrgreen:
Welcome to the forums. Don't feed the trolls. Late joins I agree that late joins shouldn't always go to icemen... but I never payed attention so I don't know if you're just unlucky or not. Star rating is supposed to be a gauge of player worth(not perfect but no system is, and it gets tweaked for the better regularly), I think just joining the team with lower stars total would be easier to implement. Also, your ordering of priorities is skewed. $>K/D Autobalance As far as auto switching goes. While the current criteria may seem unfair, switching someone who hasn't died would SUCK for the player that got switched. No matter how fair it may seem for the losing team indirectly, getting yanked out of gameplay does not lead to a fluid experience. A minute of a little extra work is less aggravating and feels more fluid then just being pulled out of gameplay into the enemy spawn. Having the first person to die get switched just speeds things up. OT Overtime is meant to just end the game. While juice rushes may seem lame, they are the fastest way to do just that. If overtime comes it's time for a new map. Rushing just gets it done faster. With how OT works now when it happens you deserve the coin toss overtime. Not to mention your suggested method would be a bitch to program. I can see where you are coming from, but I disagree with your points.
Not at all. You can measure the progress along the path by measuring the distance between two PathNodes for the bots, which are in a sorted array, ascending from the spawn to the money ball. You are obviously between the path nodes that have the lowest distance to you. The entire path length is the sum of the distances between all nodes in the array. Divide the progress by the entire path length and you get a progress value between 0 and 1 for a single Jackbot. Multiply that value by whatever feels balanced to not drain the money ball too fast but also not too slow and subtract it on every Tick (multiplied by DeltaTime) or every second from the money ball's health and you are fine. That is easily done in less than 15 minutes. EDIT: About the auto-switcher: I was just thinking of how it's done in other games. Besides that MNC depends a lot on keeping the players happy because ragequitters are ruining it for everyone. So pulling out one player (there could be some further conditions like "not damaged in the last 10 seconds" or "not on a killing spree", "current juice will be carried over to the other team") might get him a bit frustrated, but he probably had a lot of fun until now while his opponents where frustrated all the time and are even more likely to leave altogether if the game doesn't get balanced soon. That's why I also had the 15 seconds delay. If someone gets killed in that time, the problem is basically solved. But there should be some failsafe against very strong teams at last.
I am not a professional programmer. I've delved through game coding from time to time and added various parameters to make things run smoother and changed values to fit my preferences, but nothing too extreme. I still highly doubt the ease of this systems implementation. Not knowing how the moneyball or the bot lanes work are my primary concerns, the fact that any time you add a mechanic you add bugs as well is another. On top of that, I never minded the juice rushing in OT. OT is supposed to just be a quick and dirty resolution to a game that didn't already have one. Hell, it used to GIVE you juice so that you could rush the ball easier. As I said if the game hasn't been decided yet then you deserve the coin flip resolution. Difficulty of implementation isn't the main reason I disagree, it's the fact that I don't like how it would work. Best solution I could see is making it a mod when tools come out. A similar solution to OT has been brought up before so I'm sure others would enjoy a server like that... Before that can happen though we need the engine shift, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
No it is not. If I already got the ball down and I'm now pretty much locked up in my base because my team got pushed back I should lose the game. Thanks to the new OT I don't, which is stupid. You wrote it yourself "intant-win" and "very good and fair" are not things that should be in the same sentence. What else am I supposed to spend my money on? Turrets? No point. Skills? No point. That is completely horrible and pointless thanks to annihilators and juice. It also means that classes who are not good at killing bots feel insignificant which should never happen.
If you manage to keep your ball protected while the other team did not, you deserve the victory because it means you were better in that match than the opponent. Only because a team happens to be in front of the enemy ball when overtime starts should not be a criteria because you can get there quite easily, especially as assassin. You can spend the money on juice during the normal match time to take turrets down and push your bots forward instead of saving it for the end juice. You can still buff the overtime Jackbots to have more resistance against annihilators or disable the annihilator completely in overtime. It should not be a match winner but a small addition. Maybe increase the cost of the annihilator based on the number of Jackbots that are on the field at the moment. There are enough ways to balance it. There are classes which are better at taking down Jackbots than others. So what? There are also classes which are useless for taking down turrets while others are not and there are also classes which can easily make a run to the enemy money ball (assassin) when it's shield are down and get past all the turrets. Besides that every class has some way to efficiently take Jackbots down. All endorsements are on gold in overtime, that means a gunner can take it quickly down with pure firepower. An assault has it's mine, which deals on the third level quite a lot damage to Jackbots if attached to them. Snipers can aim for the head or grapple it. Sins can grapple it even better. Supports can use air strikes or hacked turrets. Tanks also use pure firepower or stun the Jackbot lane with it's grenade, since the progress on the path matters. And if you think a class is bad at killing Jackbots, you can still go and prevent the enemy classes from doing so or defend the annihilator. The mechanic that would be added is nothing but server side implementations. A simple Timer/Tick with an iterator for the bots, the dealing of damage to the money ball (same as normal gunfire, just without a real instigator) and some most basic vector math for which are already matching functions provided by the Unreal Engine. If they produced a bug there, I would severely facepalm. (I mean they are not the developers of AA3 ) The bot lanes look very likely like they would use oldschool PathNodes which are placed at junctions and the bots travel from one to the next. If they are already prioritized in some list, then things will be even easier, otherwise they probably need one more Actor (some addition to the MapInfo) to manually store the order of the PathNodes (would require to update the map files, so potentially a slightly bigger download with the update) or they can pull off some reliable algorithm to figure out the order at runtime (based on the distance and FastTraces between the nodes) and thus don't need to update the map files at all. Well, maybe they can consider it and make the overtime mode a server-side option that can set by the admin after their own liking. There are quite some servers already that have juice buying disabled and I appreciate that for overtime, but it also takes out the firepower that you may need to destroy the enemy turrets. I guess with this overtime mode that I suggested, some of these servers would allow juice buying again.
Locked. You know what that means right? I can't actually get out of my base without dying. At that point I should lose, but due to the retarded rules I win. This is neither fair, nor good. Who says I'm not already doing that? I end up with a lot of money if OT happens (as does everybody who is not a retard or a support) so I never have to actually save it and buying any other turret (not that I actually buy turrets) but a shaveice is rather pointless in OT because the classes that have the easiest time to deal damage (who also deal a lot of damage) to the ball don't care about rock-its. Problem: A turret does not hurt my ball, a Jackbot does. Never, ever, grapple a Jackbot as a sin unless it's about to bring your ball down. If you grapple a Jackbot in any other situation you are bad. Just sayin'. Airstrikes have a long CD, using hacked turrets to kill it means it deals a ton of damage to the ball. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the current OT. Only the rules that determine if it happens or not are terrible (i.e. they were better before because they made for more interesting matches).
There is no need to get out of your base (besides that is always possible with a decent team, especially with an assassin) if you managed to get the enemy's shield to fall once. If the enemy manages to lock you down but nothing more, then that still doesn't make him better because your defense holds while his didn't. If he manages to get your money ball vulnerable with his lock, then he deserves victory. A turret is the only thing that prevents the enemy from not walking easily into the base and rape the money ball. They are crucial to be taken out first in order to launch an effective attack on the ball. And a Jackbot is easier to kill than a turret in a well defended base because it doesn't have a godlike aim and starts to melee attack if you get close to it. Yeah, right taking it out of the game during the grapple animation, allowing your teammates to safely join the attack on it because it won't strike back at all and taking half of it's health at once is of course something you should never do. If you prefer bringing a Jackbot only down after it got close enough to shoot your turrets from distance and become a bother to your base you are bad. Just sayin'. I was talking about a deployed and hacked turret somewhere in the center of the map, not those at the base. And as I said, if your class isn't suited for such a task, go find another thing to do then or hope for some help from your teammates and use the medigun to drain it a bit with them.
It's funny that you wrote that because that's exactly what's wrong with the rules for OT that you think are very good and fair. Take it from me: Don't play assassin, you obviously don't know how to play it because you make one of the biggest and most infuriating mistakes you can make. An assassin that grapples a Jackbot is a sitting duck and does less damage than just attacking the Jackbot. If an assassin is attacking a Jackbot no other class should even bother joining in (except in the mentioned scenario and hitting it once for the 65$), that's a waste of pros. Never happens. You see the difference?
Never grapple jackbots as an assassin for the reasons Vlane stated. Also, sniper jackbot grapples are superior because you get 2.
And the sniper in general does a lot less damage to the Jakbot, making grapple more viable. However, don't flak and then grapple the jakbot. I've made that mistake way too many times for how stupid it is. Yes, i'm dumb.
I'd argue against grappling him as a sniper outside your base the same as with the assassin. You may not be able kill him easily without grapples, but chances are if you grapple him you're gonna die. Leave jackbots to assassins, tanks, and assaults to a minor degree. Assaults really just steal the kill with a headcrab.
Well, in a team game, you should leave jakbots to Tanks and Sins, yes, but in pubs you can find unprotected jakbots or be the only one trying to bring the jakbot down. Its much easier to bring down the jakbot quickly than drill it with shots until it goes down. Also, i'm pretty sure freeze traps work on jakbots, so you can use those as a delaying tactic too.
