Can of worms, ctf

This has been discussed on the old Nexuiz forums I believe. I bring it back up.
Here's my take on it, feel free to either ignore it or maybe discuss it.

CTF as it is, is broken with Xonotic. It's not really a CTF game it's more or less Teamdeathmatch with a flag. There were suggestions to make the flagcarrier slower, possibly make him unable to gain speed by lasering or rocketing. The only speed allowed would be normal walk/run speed, with regular jumping to gain speed allowed.

Currently teamplay is not required. It's the guy who can go the fastest which will dominate a CTF game. I am proposing to make CTF more teamplay depended, that teammates actually have to protect the flagcarrier if a successful cap is wanted.

This is just the gist of it, I could go in more detail but I'll leave it at that as I'm lazy and you get my point. There are a few people who do agree with the general concept. How it is to be implemented, what changes etc is up for debate.

Cheers.

Do you think this is why minsta hook ctf is more popular nowadays? I wish more people appreciated regular ctf :X

I don't play public ctf, there is no regular public ctf basically. I'm thinking mostly of pickup games.

Do you think this is why minsta hook ctf is more popular nowadays? I wish more people appreciated regular ctf :X

I think minsta hook is popular because of the speed and hook which makes you spider man. Its easy to pick up if you can live with being whacked 99% of the time for the first few weeks.

Regular style ctf is played on the vehicle servers although its still who is the fastest but there's more team play.

Do you got any solution in mind which where discussed on Nexuiz forum which you wanna continue debate here, or are you asking for solutions and suggestions how to improve the gameplay in ctf?

At some point in Nexuiz the flag carrier was slower per se, but that was way too hard and got abandoned.

I believe every stand alone attacker can be stopped if you defend well as a team. In today's pickups we did not only win with the big difference, because fast attackers, it was also the brilliant defence.
I would blame the weapon choice of the enemy defenders to be honest. (But I don't share my tricks hue hue)

At the 2nd map both teams had a fast guy, but it felt that our teamplay was much better, i.e. sharing megas and stuff - defending own FC etc.

One reason for this might be that you can't accelerate quickly. Unless the defenders setup traps the flag carrier have already won at the moment he bypasses the enemy flag room.

The root of this problem is that the game's movement mechanics makes it fundamentally incompatible with teamplay-ctf (on a casual level). The solution, imo, is designing a game mode similar to ctf with the movement mechanics we all love in mind. Fortunately this has already been done, its called keyhunt. Unfortunately its not called CTF so no one play or host it. Alternatively there is vehicle CTF which makes lone runner caps far harder; but no serious player can play that, right?

With a less sarcastic and more analytic approach i would say that the game is, regarding questions like this, hampered by its overwhelming weight of veteran players - its no strange or bad thing that ppl who spent tons of time getting good at doing something a certain way feels resentment towards changes that forces a new way of doing things. I'm as guilty as the next sob of this, but trying to look at in from outside the box this hits me as the main (or at least one big) problem.

Good point. Two-team keyhunt has most of the excitement of CTF to offer, but more suited to our movement. I never thought to group them together.

afaik this was div's main goal when designing kh - all of the action from ctf with none of its drawbacks. that said, kh has its own cave's as far as teamplay is concerned; in two-team mode one player of high enough skill can still (perhaps even mode so) "solo". Tough to be honest i haven't played it enough to be a fair judge (as i said, i'm a conservative sob too ; )

Overkill's team spawn system is another example of an attempt to mitigate the impacts of Xonotic's high speed movement w/o directly nerfing it. IMO it is fairly effective at that but far from polished enough and quite possibly rather disorienting for not so experienced overkiller's.

Another game idea on this topic is to have the "base" itself as the point of interest, forcing defense/attack of fixed location/s rather than flee/hunt. This is the idea behind the Conquest mode which i sadly never finished.

I just played CTF overkill on trax. Enemies were respawning 1m of my flag. It's impossible to play def in ctf with spawn system like that.

And tZork words about casuals vs veterans are golden. If we have 6 casuals running and playing and 1 veteran who knows advanced movement connects, casuals go into morgue :p

As i said, its unpolished; flag safe-zones or someit like that would likely make it less spammy. However the spawn rules does not discriminate - if you have a fair number defending the same rules will give your team a major presence in the area. I recall moments in OK when we had flagroom battles ongoing for a good 10+ mins. To some that may be just frustrating; to me its action packed and fun. Anyways, i called it an attempt; not (necessarily) a successful one .)

How about adding "slow-down gates" to the maps near the flag? That way no-one could high-speed in and out, while the defending players are left in the dust. Just make them look like team-colored energy fields that slows down anyone that passes to a normal speed.
Good placement of these might be a bit tricky though.

Xonotic's movement, which is clear Quake3 CPMA derivative promotes skill. And tons of ppl, older players, know that movement well. They will dominate casuals no matter what. Best thing would be skill matching, like in Quake Live.

But to make it work, you need, ekhm, much more players than Xonotic has now

How about adding "slow-down gates" to the maps near the flag? That way no-one could high-speed in and out, while the defending players are left in the dust. Just make them look like team-colored energy fields that slows down anyone that passes to a normal speed.
Good placement of these might be a bit tricky though.

+1 I like that idea.

Even if I am a good defender or someone else. Technically if you play against someone who abuses the Xonotic movement (yes there's a difference of actual skill and abuse of physics), you only have ONE chance of killing/stopping him. If you miss your Nex shot, rl, mortar, whatever, you already lost. They go by SO fast you only get 1 shot that is IF you are fast enough to even get to the middle (usually such a place a FC has to cross) before him.

I will never play CTF again as it is today. I learned my lesson last pickup game. And if I feel like this, a veteran (and CTF lover) then just imagine newbies to this game playing on servers where veterans do this. No wonder this community doesn't grow. This is a nightmare for new players. This could also be why hook ctf servers are so popular. It makes it so that newbies have a higher chance of capping, easier to use hook than to learn the complicated physics.

As far as i can tell the games heading more towards esport/"pro" (bad word, but at least everyone gets what i mean) and less towards casual play, so things like slow gates seem rather unlikely to happen. Your best is likely to find some one capable of making a mod implementing your idea/s it and someone willing to host a server running it, and just do it yourself. If its successful enough chances that it or sth similar makes it into master is far higher.

Well, I kinda knew the result even before posting I just wanted to throw it out there. I will very soon have very little time left for anything else but study (can't do anything myself) so it's very unlikely CTF as it is will change. This just means I will never play CTF in Xonotic again.
You guys can still talk amongst yourselves but for me, I'm clocking out.
Cheers!

I play a lot CTF in QuakeLive and EFC who is gone from base after 1s is NOT a problem, as long as you have bind saying teammates where guy is going (up/low/left/right) and team has middle positioned player who intercepts him.

If you have no middle man, your team will lost.

More here:

http://www.quakelive.com/forum/showthrea...y-Grrrdian

True words, ai. I
I'm feeling somehow the same and experience pretty much similar things (abuse of the physics etc) in other game modes, too.

Good luck and see you around sometime again, ai

How many of you guys complaining in this thread have previous experience in Quake-alike games?

Modern shooters have removed movement skill from equation, so if you have no skills/experience with Quake/CPMA, you feel lost in Xonotic - that's why I ask

Majki, that's unrelated. Xonotic focus less on movement than CPMA while having almost as fast pace as it in gameplay.

Now, Samual have previously stated that he is willing to put more skill in the movement in Xonotic. By this, he was meaning putting more focus on strafe jumping since current pysics basically don't encourage strafe jumping although it's there (I've only found circlejumping useful in Xonotic). If strafe jumping becomes a bigger part of the movement, then we maybe can consider slowing the movement speed down a bit? Not completely sure but it sounds to me that this will benefit the current state of CTF.

In fact, Xonotic physics are waaay easier than CPMA. That's why there is an artificial speed limit on non-weapon moves (or you would be hearing sonic booms in the game). And then there is laser for like... free.
In the end, xono ctf is as healthy as warsow's.

My view is that physics could go more towards CPMA (less accell without strafing, no tight turns without speed loss) and laser could have cap on speed gain (like only changing speed direction once you reach certain qus). And of course weapons could deal substantially more damage, to counter opponent speed.

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).

I like morfars idea (similar to what I proposed) which derives from Halo. The guy who takes the flag will be unable to use weapons and THUS unable to boost himself with laser/rl/whatever.

That's a very simple idea and shouldn't perhaps be too hard to code out. And hopefully that's all it takes to make CTF a bit more teamwork dependent and handicap the capper from obtaining that ridiculous speed.

Fun fact: The reason why morfar hates CTF is also because of this speed thing. Were you basically have only 1 shot of killing the FC and if you miss they will cap for sure.

Or people should just practise physics, play as a team and get rid of their nex habit. : D