On 05/02/2014 23:52, Fletcher Dunn wrote:
QUESTIONS?
Will we be able to blacklist by these new accounts too?
I like the idea you can see the map etc (although, for the
example of capture the flag, I think you'd be better simply
developing some better maps and dropping the ones
that suck in the meantime. The ratio of good maps is
low. Even the ratio of maps people vote to play on is low to the total.
e.g 2fort and doublecross people play and are pretty good maps.
2fort not being nearly as bad as the reputation it has from its
abuse at the hands of instant spawn, 32 man, never ending
rounds et al.
Turbine people want to play even though it sucks. The rest no one
wants to play and they're rubbish too. Then you've thrown
doomsday onto those servers when it's not even CTF.
It means (if we ignore that voting will skew servers towards
2fort and turbine) picked at random, a CTF server will most likely have
a crap map running that no one wants to play.
If you added turbine pro that'd make 3 maps that people want to play and
that are playable in terms of the objectives.
Really though I select servers on information that isn't available until
after you've joined.
Firstly some technical stuff. Servers that mess with rate either
forcing it low or high.
But, more often things like the time the level has left.
Whether the game has scrambled at 2-0 ( usually pointless joining after
that)
what the class choices are for the teams, what the other
players pings are.
In other words, I leave a server if it's full of 23
people with 250 ping, all playing sniper and spy
after I've joined and / or some subsets of these.
After that, you have to play to see and that's
really the point at which you should join, not before.
For this reason QP doesn't work, because it puts you on a random server
and you need to remember which servers you've checked to
not join them repeatedly.
For sure, this browsing of a subset QP finds may help, but really it
would be better if we could simply see the kind of data
I've suggested above before joining.
(I think the general problem can be shown with an analogy,
If you regularly cycle 200km a week on a road bike, when a colleague who
has a bike
with a basket invites you to ride at the weekend with a group from his
church, you probably don't think
"Yeah, I'll join your ride" - because they aren't going to average the
24mph the guys in your
sunday club runs do. Similarly, if you take your kids to a track to race
you'd expect
them to race against their age range. You wouldn't put your 8 year old
in the adult race.
TF2 lacks the ability to see these different groups except via inference.
e.g one explanation for servers full of snipers and spies with no motor
control, game sense
or clue, would be that there are vast swathes of halfwitted teenagers
and adults in Europe and America.
Which is perhaps what a lot of people do believe. However, the real
explanation is
"it's young kids playing this game because it is free" - The F2P feature
added huge amounts of them, but it didn't add any way of
filtering each other out. IRL we can do that easily - and to be fair
since this is a game, it's not as simple
as parameters like level of fitness or age can do for real sports. But
F2p competitive games
need something. Currently one way to see in TF2 is just to look at the
classes the
teams are playing - 6 engineers all camping together in the intel room
and none of them have more than 5
points each? Kids 7 spies? Kids)
Also, I sometimes pick the map based upon what the next map is
because I'd prefer a full round, from scratch on a good map.
e.g If I, say, like doublecross, and join doublecross servers
on average the round will be half way through. Whereas if I join
2fort servers, I will get part of a round of 2fort and a full round of
doublecross. Aside from the annoying voting feature messing
that up, so knowing what the next map is going to be is often
as important as the current one when selecting a server.
--
Dan
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