Can of worms, ctf

I suggested a similar thing ages ago ai.

From playing Xonotic 0.1 when we played vs BOT in CTF if you remember ai, CTF was actually quite fun but it required us to be co-ordinated and defend a lot of the time as an entire unit when we had incoming players into our base, of course there were the same 'issues' as there was then, now, in regards to players being able to blitz in and out of base. I would say Xonotic CTF is possible to have fun with but it requires a great deal of communication to do so in my experience, so I guess this is as stated why it's not played hardly on publics and the fact that it is very speed orientated..It's unfortunately just how it is, of course it's possible dto o something about it though without the need for drastic change, poVoq's idea for example was quite interesting.

Now you explained how CTF should be played.
Some teams in pickup just quickly ready up without assigning positions in first place. OBVIOUSLY this team is going to fail hardcore, unless it's full of individual class (but that's rarely the case).
Also back in 0.1 almost everyone used Mumble or TeamSpeak, thus far better communication but nowadays the majority lacks text binds already. Communication is the key to succeed.

Vanilla CTF does not get played in publics, because Xonotic lacks players. They rather play OK, Minsta CTF, and Vehicle, whereas the first two are based on similar speed (if not even faster), which means that highspeed ain't a problem, because it IS popular.

I believe communication is the real problem.


If you would introduce such an idea than you need to ban Crylink and Machine Gun from CTF. One shot and complete speed is gone *already* at this very moment. Some players realise it and use it very well for defending, i.e. packer. The reason why I would always pick him in my team instead of a nexwhore.

Thing is.. everyone got the deal with the same physics and they're part of Xonotic. No matter what you change, there will be always people who are faster.
It's just a matter of practise and skill.
And if people want a slow paced CTF... maybe Xonotic is the wrong game in general?

Maybe you could add extra window. After joining game asks:
Attacker?
Middle?
Defense?

Player for example chooses "defense" and from now on his marked on waypoints as "<nick>(defender)".

Obviously, it's not for pros, but for casuals, who don't know yet how to play in team?

I agree with communtication. Not talking about choosing class when starting I meana in the match itself. If no-one knows which direction the FC have gone, then he have alreaddy capped. :/

Making movement harder will only make the gap between speed-demon-capper's and the rest wider. There was a similar issue with the nex gun in ancient nexuiz. It had crazy damage but no aim correction so the few ppl who learnt to hit with it got a major perk, the rest.. died xD

AFAIK there's no artificial speed limit, just friction and acceleration (and you may get a lil more accel outa strafe/circle i guess).

Physics in ctf should be slower (imo) not necessary harder. E.g. one should not be able to strafe turn at speed without slowing even a bit.

And yes, there is an artificial speed limit in vanilla physics, put at 800qu . You can't exceed that speed with non-weapon moves. It is there because vanilla physics are extreemly lenient. Without that speed cap game would be completly broken.

Vanilla CTF does not get played in publics, because Xonotic lacks players. They rather play OK, Minsta CTF, and Vehicle, whereas the first two are based on similar speed (if not even faster), which means that highspeed ain't a problem, because it IS popular.

I believe communication is the real problem.

Well, vanilla CTF was played in public for like a year, with many regulars, but then died. I don't see how this could be a communication issue. Also speed in OK and Minsta is countered by (almost)insta-kill and to some extent by the spawn system in OK. You don't have any of these in vanilla.

Some lesson could also be drawn from warsow. With their speed/dashing (wall jumpin, dash-turning) ctf was broken and unpolular, despite significant player base. And ultimetly they acknowledged need for changes in game mechanics (i.e. stun - no wall jumpin for a while after you've been hit).

Because communication belongs into pickup, where the "problem" of too fast people occurs (Pickup is the reason for this thread).
Public is and always will be dominated by individual class anyway.

Actually - SO MUCH stuff happenend in Nexuiz/Xonotic to slower down the fast CTF players (anyone remember real rocket flying ), but they still remain faster than the other players. It's so pointless if others don't improve. Physics will change soon so.. yeah, we'll see.

"Xonotic is a free, open source (GPL) ultra-fast, first-person shooter" © top of the forums

I see this as a matter of maintainable speed vs weapon output, not as a matter of differences in speed between players (so harder physics ain't bad, if you ask me). If you can maintain huge speed and tank hits then defending team really has just one chance. Either there is somone with this MG in proper place or its lost case. There is litte room for correcting mishaps or adjusting to what currently happens on the map. That doesn't encourage team play.

That doesn't encourage team play.

I doubt that is ever possible in publics!

Mantaining speed beyond a certain limit isn't that easy at all and it has a lot of drawbacks (it consumes *lots* of health, one have poor control over the movement, almost impossible to fight back). I can be really fast when alone on the map, but in real games, I'd rather sacrifice some speed in favor of evasion that consumes lots of health either.

The only cause I see for people to complain is their own wrong positions for defending and failures.
For example, almost each time I capped on apace (in game that Mirio mentioned) I was able to take the flag without even being slowed down as defenders weren't even looking at the site I came from.
No one ever tried to intecept me (which I personally do a lot when at defence - if flag is taken, I'm taking the shortest path to the center of the map to make an another attempt to kill/slow fc and to notify my teammates of his position) and I was able to leave the enemy base with just about 20HP.

The same applies to the second game Mirio mentioned (on Abyss). I believe our skills as ctf atackers are nearly the same level, but our team defence was much worse and that is what decided the outcome of the game.

* hotdog crawls back to his can

You are right Mirio about weapon choice, me and criboZai both used Machinegun mainly when defending when we played those game's and it works wonders! If not just to slow down the enemy initially then swap to a nex shot or other weapon. With the crylink negative pull to slow people down, people can't really complain that much.

Perhaps, it's education that's needed about defending in Xonotic in CTF rather then changes to the game..something I'm working on for TDM at the moment, some small videos.

I think it's communication that Mirio says, all pick up ctf games ive played had have different roles to players, and have had 2 (and in one game ive played 3) defenders. The problem is that, there needs also be a mid-fielder, but how can he know which direction the FC will come from? Almost impossible. Text-binds are good, I'll probably take time and try set up so I can start use them too, but VoIP feels kinda crucial for a CTF match to be played "properly".

Speaking of tdm, 4v4 is a pure chaos there. For the biggest part, it consists of shotgun fighting and slapping, rushing rooms and steal stuff from opponents (not mentioning the spamfest here). 2v2 is actually nicely playable as it is not as random as 4v4 is.

But, back to ctf: One has to be quite skilled to defend properly against a super fast rusher who really knows how to speed up and take the flag... Without a teammate who is *always* around the opponent will sooner or later be lucky enough to get away with the flag.

As Subzero said, public CTF was played a lot once upon a time. It died down. Not sure why, maybe people are just stupid and like their hooks. Personally I wish hook never was introduced into Nexuiz/Xonotic hate that thing wish it could go and hang itself that shitty thing shit... anyway... Nowadays you rarely see anyone playing normal CTF. And I do want to think that some players (especially new players) will easily get discouraged from playing regular CTF just because of those blitz speed cappers.

It's not a matter of communication as only 1 person can easily get in and out of an enemy base with the flag, as you barely even have any chance of noticing he's there let alone hitting him with whatever weapon with his insane speed. Personally I have a hard time hitting anything that has a huge speed. Not necessarily because of bad aim (yes sometimes that's just it) but also because of lag/hitbox issues.

Also another thing, I do not want to play CTF where you constantly have to communicate with people, sure it helps a lot yes. But like in the old days I could easily have fun and play good CTF games without any communication. I'm more of a casual player than a hardcore CTF nut. I don't like the idea of always having to talk to people.
In the end I guess what people will say is that, then Xonotic CTF isn't for people like me. Who just want a casual good game. Without the rage from feeling like such a sucky loser. And instead of trying to make CTF appealing to a broader audience they say "go play another game", which just is a bad attitude to have and alienates new potential players (and some regulars).

Non-vanilla CTF is very fast as well but still popular. There is nothing wrong with the speed..
In fact you can populate a server quite quickly by idling around some minutes, because the common player just joins a server with some players (especially in Xonotic >: D).

Well, if you don't want to use communucation (binds?!) how are you suppossed to win a competitive match vs an organised team anyway?

Regular stuff, with no binds and sh*t = Public

And I am not saying that people should play another game, but they should try to get fast too instead of blaming fast people. Xonotic is advertised to be a very fast game, soooo ..

After all CTF is still a team game and you won't win any pickup match without a proper defence. No matter who is attacking.

I've been trying to get fast for a long time, with very little success. There just are people which never get fast even with practice. Or people who don't care about being fast but want to actually play the game causally instead of always giving 110% in every game, which for me is not relaxing but more like work and less fun.

Oh well, I've said mine. You guys know where I stand. It's up to you people how you want CTF to work, if you want new players to pick up CTF or keep the existing system to make yourselves feel like god when playing and alienating new players. There's not much more I can add to the conversation which hasn't been said already.

... They rather play OK, Minsta CTF, and Vehicle, whereas the first two are based on similar speed (if not even faster), which means that highspeed ain't a problem, because it IS popular.

I believe communication is the real problem.

Interesting point, however i don't see an excessive amount of coordination or communication in casual overkill games. Key difference with minsta/ok could be that with one good shot you can actually stop a FC (most of the time).

And yes, there is an artificial speed limit in vanilla physics, put at 800qu . You can't exceed that speed with non-weapon moves. It is there because vanilla physics are extreemly lenient. Without that speed cap game would be completly broken.

What i mean there's no "hardcoded" limit, this is just the point where friction and acceleration balance out (unless i completely forgot how that code works).

I like the no-fc-guns idea, and yes should be rather easy to code.

What i mean there's no "hardcoded" limit, this is just the point where friction and acceleration balance out (unless i completely forgot how that code works).

Code:

sv_airspeedlimit_nonqw 800

http://git.xonotic.org/?p=xonotic/xonoti...ysicsX.cfg

Code:

maxspd_mod = 1;
....
self.stat_sv_airspeedlimit_nonqw = autocvar_sv_airspeedlimit_nonqw * maxspd_mod;

Code:

if(autocvar_sv_warsowbunny_turnaccel && accelerating && self.movement_y == 0 && self.movement_x != 0)
        PM_AirAccelerate(wishdir, wishspeed);
else
        PM_Accelerate(wishdir, wishspeed, wishspeed0, airaccel, airaccelqw, autocvar_sv_airaccel_qw_stretchfactor, autocvar_sv_airaccel_sideways_friction / maxairspd, self.stat_sv_airspeedlimit_nonqw);

Code:

PM_Accelerate(vector wishdir, float wishspeed, float wishspeed0, float accel, float accelqw, float stretchfactor, float sidefric, float speedlimit)
....
if(speedlimit)
        accelqw = AdjustAirAccelQW(accelqw, (speedlimit - bound(wishspeed, vel_xy_current, speedlimit)) / max(1, speedlimit - wishspeed));

http://git.xonotic.org/?p=xonotic/xonoti...physics.qc

Again, there is an artificial speed limit at 800qu. Yes, it is smoothed, so its presence is not outright annoying. This speed limit is what keeps current physics alive. Because the settings are steered towards forgiving errors, to the point where skilled players could break sound barrier (unless there is cap preventing them from doing so, which there is).

Regarding pickups vs. public games.

There are no public vanilla ctf/tdm games (and even dm for that matter). Given that some months ago there was a public player base for vanilla, you can hardly blame minsta/ok/viehicles for that situation. And many other titles keep playerbase for regular gaming, despite having insta mutators. So apperently there is something to be fixed in the gameplay. Unless you intend "vanilla" Xonotic to be played by a narrow group of oldtimers hiding at #xonotic.pickup (and pretend this is the "proper", "vanilla" gameplay). My perception is that the gameplay is run & gun intermixed with spamfest (when getting crowdy). Damage output is weak, weapons are not tiered, physics is fast and lenient, laser is spawn weapon (on top of air control), and so on.

I also like the Halo idea.

Oh one more thing I wanted to add before I let the conversation take its turn.
Mirio have pointed out a few times that Xonotic is a fast paced game and that it's basically the core. However, my comeback (after thinking about it for a while). There has to be a limit as to how "fast paced" it is compared to gameplay. Blitzing through the game is not fun if you sacrifice actual gameplay. I choose gameplay over insane speed any day. It can still be fast paced, but put a limit to it so gameplay doesn't suffer. Currently, it suffers IMO.

I hope you're not suggesting that I do all the work for experimenting with these ideas. If you want different methods to be tested, code some proof-of-concepts yourselves... I have way too much other stuff going on.

I suggest trying 3 things:

1. Disallow usage of all weapons except for Laser for flag carrier (this is possible via mutator hooks, should be easy.. check out how nix or such does it, but you'll need to keep track of previously existing weapons.... or find another way to limit switching, and not subtract the weapons from the user)
   
2. Implement delays for flag stealing (pickup from base), retrieval (pickup dropped flag from ground), and flag capture similar to freezetag unfreeze delays or such
   
3. Enable close-to-team spawning in CTF mutator automatically (emulating same spawn methods as overkill, essentially)
   

Anything else (such as slowing down the physics) is just absolutely not going to happen, neither is some class based/role based/team commanding system, as no one is going to code that well enough.

I think just blaming bad communication in pubs isn't going to solve the issue :p

Thus I agree with Samual that a "pub_CTF" mutator would be nice.

My suggestion would be:

Every time a flag is picked up, the flag carrier is slowed down to starting speed.

Think of it as "has to stop to grab and pocket the flag"

Not sure if that will really solve the issue, but it is worth a try and should be easy to implement I guess.

Edit: Maybe that is what Samual ment with "delays" above?

Maybe add the Hook to vanilla CTF.

Making the FC loose its speed when picking tje flag sounds like a good idea. BUT, this might only result in harder to get the flag, but when you are able to get it you are super fast again.

After playing around with new physics which allows strafe jumping to gain more speed I think the halo idea would work VERY well.

I hope you're not suggesting that I do all the work for experimenting with these ideas. If you want different methods to be tested, code some proof-of-concepts yourselves... I have way too much other stuff going on.

I suggest trying 3 things:

1. Disallow usage of all weapons except for Laser for flag carrier (this is possible via mutator hooks, should be easy.. check out how nix or such does it, but you'll need to keep track of previously existing weapons.... or find another way to limit switching, and not subtract the weapons from the user)
   
2. Implement delays for flag stealing (pickup from base), retrieval (pickup dropped flag from ground), and flag capture similar to freezetag unfreeze delays or such
   
3. Enable close-to-team spawning in CTF mutator automatically (emulating same spawn methods as overkill, essentially)
   

Anything else (such as slowing down the physics) is just absolutely not going to happen, neither is some class based/role based/team commanding system, as no one is going to code that well enough.

No. Then nothing will really change I think.

Just remember guys, that CTF is not TDM. If players play it as TDM and it makes gameplay lame, it's not CTF gamemode's fault.