[SUGGESTION] Turning LMS and CA into mutators

Last Man Standing and Clan Arena are two okay game types, even if barely played or exciting. I was however tempted by the idea of turning them into options / mutators instead, where I think they would be better as they would be useable for all game modes.

LMS: The Last Man Standing mutator would work for both team and non-team games. When enabled, all players have a limited number of lives. If they die that many times, they are forced into spectator mode. LMS has no impact on the scoring... but if only one player (non-team games) or one team are left alive, they automatically win the match... or alternatively, the match just ends earlier and the best player is the winner.

CA: The Clan Arena mutator would only work for team games. When enabled, all players in all teams are re-spawned the moment one team is left standing, and the members of all other teams are dead. The team that eliminated the other team is given some extra score points, although this shouldn't affect the rules by which the game is won. The only gametype in which this mutator would be unusable is Freezetag, since it has its own rules by which teams are reset.

For CA this might be a little tricky... but I really support doing this for LMS at least... since limited lives makes more sense as an option rather than as a game type in my opinion. If both ideas are accepted, my suggestion is making both separate mutators... since limited lives per player combined with resetting all players once one team is left standing should work out. What are your thoughts?

MODERATOR NOTICE:

I needed to split the thread so we can have a decent discussion on the topic. Can we please stay civil?

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I think this is not really thought through. Enabling LMS/CA for CTF? What if the flag carrier kills the last enemy - he won't be able to score anymore, because everybody respawns? Wouldn't it be rather bogus in CTF if the enemy team would leave the weakest player of a team alive to cap cap cap cap cap cap cap... same applies to domination...

I like them better as game types.

Last Man Standing and Clan Arena are two okay game types, even if barely played or exciting.

Clan Arena is played on pickup channel quite regularly.
There aren't many public CA servers though, that's probably why you think it's "barely played".

I still play LMS(its played not that frequenly on SMB USA) but it does not appears on xonstat when played so i agree with Antibody

EVERYBODY AGREES WITH ANTIBODY! :-D

From a logical POV those are clearly mutations of existing game modes and would thus be excellent candidates for mutators. The question of how good/bad/exciting etc they are does not even enter into it. Obviously such conversion should be done in such a way that current functionality would remain 100% intact.

The real question is who would/can do it well enough and if there are not larger issues to tackle first. Personally i would say its of to small benefit to the game as a whole to spend the energy on ATM, however if such a patch was made i see no reason whatsoever not to include it as long as the code is sane.

I like them better as game types.

CA should be the default game.

I think it would make more sense to see these turned into mutators.

I still can't see what the benefit would be to make this a mutator - if I get this right, a mutator is something that modifies the gameplay for existing game types. That means we could "enable" CA and LMS gameplay for the existing game types. Why would we want to do that? I fail to see how a game mode like CTF or Domination for example would ever work right with these mutators - a team that manages to cut down the other significantly would be automatically totally in advantage (think of domination game mode!) and lead to suicides becoming necessary in order to restore balance. Not to mention the differences in the scoring system - should a team extinction count as a flag capture in CTF? That would make flag capturing a side effect that's not worth the effort, since it is easier to frag people than to capture the flag. How should you deal with that scoring in domination game mode?

The longer I think about this idea, the more problems I see - and I have yet to find out the benefit in the first place. CA and LMS are imho standalone game types that are barely compatible with other game types.

...or do you just want to convert CA into a mutator for TDM, and LMS into a mutator for DM? In that case, it would make sense from a logical POV as tZork mentioned, but I STILL fail to see the benefit for this...?

That's a good point, Halogene. Plus, we don't want to have LMS minsta hook ctf. The last three is already more extravagant than enough

You can already totally fuck up any given mode just using settings with a bit of effort, nothing new there

Its not about what bad things you could do with it (and personally i think LMS Dom, for example, could actually be a interesting thing). The things is that a) done well, you can mix and match and cope up with interesting combinations with zero code changes and b) making code more uniform makes it easier to maintain in the long run.

tZork: fair enough. Although I think currently gamemodes are considered "vanilla" only if no mutator is used (except perhaps some non-game-changing ones like footsteps?). Perhaps that should be reconsidered if LMS or CA become mutators.

TBH i dont give a damn what's considered vanilla, strawberry or zombie-brain flavour. I dont know what the implications of not being considers vanilla is, but i assume its something to do with how evil modded server are, and if the "system" is so rigid that it won't even allow its own subsystems to be used in fear of "mods".. well that can't be healthy.

But the actual chances (between the lack of developers and samual aggressively trying to chase off the one that did show an interest in this) ever happening is rather slim so i view it more as a philosophical debate then a "real" development one.

I guess i should also make it absolutely clear that this is just my personal opinion on the matter, i no longer have any official role in xonotic.

EDIT:
As for the topic of benefit/s of mutation versus mode:

Lets say you have DM, TDM, Freeze Tag and LMS all as game modes; you have 4 available game modes to play (duh!).
Now, if you turn LMS and FT into mutators you suddenly have 8 possible variations instead. Granted not every one of those will be enjoyable, functional or even make sense (DM LMS FT anyone?) HOWEVER with (roughly) the same amount of code you have more options.

I agree to the logical point, but all I say is that I fail to see the benefit in the combination of CA / LMS with standard game modes from a gameplay perspective. Just generating more options for the sake of diversity does not justify the effort being put into it imho. I'm not specifically against turning CA/LMS into mutators, but... why? You said playing LMS Domination would be interesting - but how would you deal with the problem that once a team is down to 1 player and the other team may have 3 players left they just evade the 1 player and keep all nodes in control that the 1 player left? To me that just doesn't make sense from a gameplay perspective. Not to mention how scoring of LMS would be compatible with Domination scoring (by mutating it).

My idea was mostly to have limited lives in all game types, which also spawned the idea of having teams attack in waves (eg: in ONS). I thought it would be fun if say, in a CTF game, you would still aim to capture the flag in order to win... but with LMS mutator you could also win by killing everyone in the enemy team enough times.

The idea came since I like the progressive style in LMS, where dying too many times gets you out of the game. In team games that would be even more fun, because each team would start balanced but teams that don't defend their self properly would eventually lose members. Similar to getting a red card in football... the team loses a member and must continue with a lower amount of players than the opposite team.

I should highlight the fact that I could add a "limited lives" mutator without removing LMS, for game types other than it of course. But the idea still doesn't seem very popular, so if I'll do so it will probably be for personal use.

Is it only me or MirceaKitsune has too many ideas?

If it does make sense from implementation perspective and makes Xonotic more maintainable, I don't see why not as long as you can play Clan Arena and LMS as usual (i.e. having these particular mutators show up in mode menu, even if they are in fact mutators behind the scenes).

... You said playing LMS Domination would be interesting - but how would you deal with the problem that once a team is down to 1 player and the other team may have 3 players left they just evade the 1 player and keep all nodes in control that the 1 player left? To me that just doesn't make sense from a gameplay perspective. Not to mention how scoring of LMS would be compatible with Domination scoring (by mutating it).

Sure if you play is only as Dom, thats what will happen. By introducing LMS you just gave it more tactical depth; now helping teammates stay alive are equally important as capping points. No more running around headlessly and flipping switches. On the flip coin, decimating the rival team is now a valid strategy, not just frag whoring. The box is a small place to think in

You also open up for other interesting mutators, for example for spicing above scenario, one could relatively easy write a mutator that somehow (be it speed, damage, health... ) empowers the undersized teams player/s.

EDIT:
As for menu visibility; the simple solution is creating the mutators with a new name; eg LMS=LimitedLife than adding a "gamemode wrapper" that turns on LL and DM and call it LMS.