The big XPM / competitive gaming thread

Also heres a pro for  having the waypoints. They will make "low skill" games alot more even and would pretty much teach players how to respond and react and make teamplay "work itself out"
If they are just jumping around ignoring stuff anyway then i really doubt it would make any difference..

This is a great point, I think it is useful to look at the success of design elements in modern competitive shooters like Apex Legends and Battlefield that guide players into making competitive choices and adopting competitive strategies naturally. Of course in the case of the games I mentioned, they are team games, and so the systems to encourage players to play competitively all center around encouraging teamwork and communication but it is easy to abstract the essence of these quality of life additions into a general context. In Apex Legends things like being able to ping items so they show up on teammates screen, automatic call outs from characters when they see an enemy so that players don't have to actively be voice chatting the entire time  (which is a different ask in a battle royale game someone is grinding ranks in than a competitive arena shooter with short intense rounds) help elevate the general competitiveness of gameplay immensely. In Battlefield when someone goes down the game gives visual indications and encouragement for people playing the medic class to go heal their teammates. Battlefield doesn't rely on medic players just having the ultimate game sense to realize their teammate needs healing (though one could argue that is part of the "skill" of being a medic *sigh*), it prompts players to do what is best for themselves through UI and game elements and as a result raises the quality of competition for everybody.

Now of course, I am not arguing Xonotic should be more like those games, Xonotic is it's own beautiful weird beast and so are arena shooters. I am simply pointing out that there is wisdom to be found in how these games experienced long term success in large part by putting important competitive information front and center to new players. People focus way too much on how **difficult** a game's learning curve is and not enough on how natural and intuitive it is for players to take each step along the way to becoming a competitive player.

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Maybe a compromise could be that as soon as a player makes line of sight contact with an important item spawn location that has been taken, the game starts a timer that assumes the enemy player took that item only a moment ago and begins counting down towards when the item should spawn again based on that assumption. The timer visually indicates this is an approximation with a less-than-symbol and a question mark so something like "<20? seconds" on the timer.

The only information that would have to be "unfairly" revealed with this system is if:

1. player 1 passes by an item spawn that has been taken by player 2 

2. player 1's item timer starts

3. the item respawns again

4. player 2 takes that item *again* before player 1 gets LOS to see the item has respawned

I think it is reasonable though to simply make it public information (when in LOS) how many times an item has been taken (but not when), and the game could automatically reset player 1's timer when they get LOS with the item spawner in the above example (the game repeating the assumption that this second instance of player 2 taking the item happened just a moment ago), indicating to player 1 that the item has been taken before they saw it spawn again. I don't think this is a big compromise for competitive players opposed to item timers to make, if a player is letting up the pressure enough that they lose track of how many times another player has taken an important item like a megahealth, they aren't going to win anyways.

One could argue this timer solution would just be confusing, but I think it could potentially nudge players in the direction of trying to get rid of the question marks on their UI. When a player is moving slowly and not covering much of the map like a new player might (who is inclined to play the game like call of duty or something), their item timers will count down past the full time it takes for the items to respawn and then just become blank question marks. As a player learns to circulate quickly around the map they could visually see how their timers for important items were updating more frequently (and they weren't getting any timeouts into question marks from not passing by items soon enough). Arguably I think this would lead to newer players naturally gravitating towards efficiently updating their item clocks so they didn't have blank question marks on their HUD, which naturally leads players into focusing on the importance of getting those items, which naturally leads to newer players moving up the intimidating learning curve of arena shooters like Xonotic faster.

Personally, I don't think having to memorize things is fun. I don't think having to try to act like a human egg timer is fun. You can argue for the merits of any particular element of a game being considered fun or not in a competitive way and while it is always going to be subjective I think it can be said that for the majority of people these kinds of skills are not *fun* to master in recreational contexts, and are at best a minor annoyance along the way to developing a competitive playstyle. No judgement if *you* in particular find it fun, seriously be into whatever kind of game mechanics you want!!....but I find it very hard to believe that the majority of people find it fun (in this niche of gaming or in general).

It would also give an interesting perspective to quantify how good players are at item coverage as the difference between a player's item timers and the game's actual item timers could be calculated over the length of the match. For higher level players who don't contest an item spawn because they know the other player already has it locked down, there could be a hotkey for players to manually reset an item timer when they think the enemy player is taking the item they can't see (and this would be taken into account for the above "item timer accuracy" calculations).