On 14/08/2012 22:40, Nomaan Ahmad wrote:
Some servers ops will know how to make it balanced... class limiting is one of them.
No they don't. Class limiting is a flawed approach. It suggests that if you assign forced roles that the game will be good. It won't be. It just means the 2 or 3 engineers you have will be halfwits and the one guy that can play engineer has to watch these halfwits in frustration. The only time highlander and class limits works is when you have organised teams and matches and then you can say "Bill, you be the medic...John, you play engineer" and so on.
Yes it sucks if you have 5 spies and 5 snipers on a team, but the truth is, forcing these guys to play a different class won't help. It's far better to let people play what class they want and use that data to see they are all buffoons. They'll see it when they lose and you'll see it when you join so you can, if you want, just hit 'change server' and find a round that will be better.
Of course, from a server admin point of view the idea the best way to find a good round is to hit 'change server' isn't that appealing, hence the flawed attempts to try and mess things around instead.
You can't turn a buffoon into a good player by making him play a different class, nor a team of buffoons into a good team using the same method.
As I said in another post, generally speaking, increasing the number of players, reducing the number of shots you need to kill or removing the penalty for death are all designed to hide differences in skill between players and teams.
Or in other words, people play on 32 man, instant spawn servers (and Robin runs around with his OP rocket launcher or people pay saigns for silly weapons and abilities) because it helps hide the fact they suck.
With 12v12 with respawn timers (and things like nocrit) you will see which players on the server can play better than the others and which team is better - especially if both teams are motivated towards the objective.
Their skill will be more evident (although as the comp players will tell you, 6v6 is better than 12v12 for that) But, unfortunately, it will generally result in average and below players spending a lot of time spectating and losing rounds.
Which obviously for them is a worse experience than having a 3 hour round that no one wins (or that one team can trivially win because there are some trivial ways to win with instant spawn, especially when you have weapons like the dead ringer)
It's a lot easier to configure a server badly than it is to get better at playing it too. So it's no real surprise there's a player base happy to play on servers configured this way.
-- Dan _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
