How bout we make the game fun again so people actually want to play a round instead of spectating because of stacking/ bad maps/ badmins/ awful balance updates?
It's not trivial in code but can be done by modifying the chatroom sourcemod plugin that came by recently. I'm not sure this is something we should enforce on all servers. I don't mind people voicechatting in spec in the Empires Vanilla server
The usual spectators are pretty much a constant amount. If they are on, you can expect them to be spectating. The rest depends on how many players there are and how draining the previous round was. It can even reach 30 players after slaughtered or somesuch, but most of them will leave the server or join again after an extended break. However, the fact of the matter is that the actual player count gets inflated quite a bit over the course of early game as people finish their breaks.
all justified hate for specstax aside, i too think this habit doesnt really add to the game, but how to seed servers then?
That's always the issue, the problem is the people who wait in spec for more players but then stay in spec instead of playing. One idea is infantry maps but frankly most of them are one sided and unfun for the average player due to restricted play area or complexed objectives. And frankly low pop is something empires cant ever handle well no matter the map unless you intentionally design weird fun/random maps and reduce the percent needed to rtv and use certain maps as filler but keep them easy to rtv away from once you have enough players, course rtving wont help if they dont play the next map either.
In an ideal world we'd have some interim skirt matches. 3 minute max single flag captures or something
3 mins would be a bit short, but I think glycencity is an ideal infantry map because multiple paths that are spread out, a small range of vehicles and more importantly ticket bleed to avoid dumb ass stalemate and camping, which is why I cant stand district any more because of the removal of ticket bleed (and lvl 2 turrets, rip engineers who don't want to play revive) often leads to one team camping their end of the map instead of aggressively pushing back.
THESE are the kinds of maps we need. Intermission conquest maps that last 10-20 minutes, working for small pop or medium pop, to fill the gaps between "real" maps.
I do believe we have found common ground. But I'm drawing inspiration from things like overwatch skirmish which are just games that are basically unscored pointless games that happen to fill a few minutes between match making which can take a few minutes. Ideally a bit of down time where people can run and gun gives folk time to throw a pizza in the oven, smoke a fag or grab a drink.we'd probably need specific Cs style maze type maps or something but it fills the void for people who want to be entertained and gives others a breather. with both knowing in a few minutes normality resumes
hey look at all the nice comments about my edit of glycen! i will say that there usually 2 reasons why i stay in spectator in small games 1. the res is too damn low and its mentally grueling to actually try if your team is not stacked 2. i never intended to play and just need some explosion sounds on in the background while i do something else
less people would stay on servers if spec was eliminated which in turn would mean less would play. Most specs eventually join a map.
I would agree with Lamer on this point, and I would also like to add: the very early part of most matches are simply boring, and can sometimes be a dice roll, which, in my eye, is another big reason why so many people just sit in spec. You don't want to join up and wait around for 2 minutes and then see that your commander is horribly incompetent or whatever, and, again, the super early game is so standard most maps that some people have no interest in playing it over and over and over again, until one side or the other gets a vf up. Really, I see a lot of people sitting in spec as a sort of "hedging your bets" sort of a play, and that that is the reason why new players don't go spectate often - because they simply haven't played enough to be frustrated by the early game yet.
I usually spec until about 60 seconds after round has started so that I don't end up in the command vehicle. The main reason being that I feel compelled to take it if nobody else does if I'm there and it's empty at start of round. And then if I don't I feel guilty for not having done something that was very much in my power to do.
Pretty much. You'll notice that there's a reason why spec doesn't tend to fill up nearly as much on commanderless maps.
While there can be a lot of vets, there isn't really a lot of vet comms. I don't think that's a reason many use to sit in spec. If I'm not doing what senor is doing, I'm sitting in spec because I want to see how bad teams are balanced wise so I can help the worse off team. And if I don't join up at that point it's either because it's horribly horribly stacked to the point the match is going to end in 5 minutes and I just want the map to end for a possibly better match or I really just don't feel like playing, usually because I hate the map. Those were my reasons for spec at least, I do feel like many just wait for a vf or a forward rax to be built. I don't get the hate for the intro though, honestly it's probably my favorite part of empires, especially with that intro music playing.