When there was that pug a few weeks ago, Vicki disabled everything but auto-assign. So people just looked at the scoreboard to see what team was going to be stacked, and camped the auto-assign button. If they got on the wrong team, they rejoined the server. The only definite fix is to give people the choice to auto-assign the moment they join the server before they have a chance to view the teams or their players, or join spec for the duration of the round. In fact, I can already think of an easy way to circumvent that. And if you try to balance teams by using a ranking system of each player, that's even easier to exploit.
ok, so how's about this. 1. Autojoin team upon connect and/or 2. Disable the scoreboard from spectate. At least that would make it a nuisance to monitor team details and be always reconnecting, plus spec shouldn't be able to see who comm's are anyways. It's currently too easy to abuse the setup and enable staxx. I know there is also server-side spec modes which are easy to change to limit info. , but the scoreboard would have to be coded in. Food for thought. Feedback?
Well spectator is disabled in EPIC server to encourage people to join a team. You also are unable to view the minimap and see where teams are located from unassigned (though can't disable scoreboard). Forced auto-assign would be possible. A problem would be having AFK people forced to join a team. A better idea would be to disable spectator AND have a plugin that kicks you from the server if you don't join a team after X minutes. You can also add a plugin that prevents a player from reconnecting to the server for X seconds after disconnecting. This will discourage people from trying to get into the better team. Without implementing the above suggestions, it will be very difficult to get rid of this "specpires" culture. Many of the veterans and admins treat Empires as a TeamSpeak3 with background view in between games. Unless you want to be known as the "dick admin" and constantly kick influential vets from the server, nothing will change.
spectators are the very groundwork of empires. we seed the playercounts. without us, players would never join specpires will forever live
I think stacking is a community/people problem, not an admin problem or a game problem. For me encouraging people to be better, as hard as it might be, is favourable to enforcing things which will maybe create other issues too. Also it isn't black and white. I think stacks tend to form in an organic fashion when people see a decent commander on one side they gravitate towards that faction - I don't think it is the norm for people to say "right lets all stack BE and roll the noobs", though that does happen from time to time. I'm not saying admins shouldn't deal with stacking, just that you can't blame admins. If you shuffled the teams after most people had actually joined you would just piss people off, kill all the squads, ruin the comm vote and so you create a fail-round for different reasons. Enforced Auto Assign I think does help especially for these kind of passive stacks, but it certainly doesn't stop people stacking at all if thats what they want to do. I honestly think that if more vets who are clearly capable of commanding joined rounds much earlier rather than spending the first 45 seconds in spec alot of these organic / unintentional stacks wouldn't happen, these kind of passive stacks are more common than the intentional/engineered ones. I am also amazed how many people who have played for years never ever command (you are missing half the game out!). As for spec... Well unless the server is full it is still healthier to have specs chatting, seeding the server and joining the odd round. Atleast with people in spec you can encourage them to join up. Empires lends itself to spectating anyway regardless of the culture - its an interesting game to spectate. I don't really have a problem with specstacks unless it is obviously killing the server, in many ways its pretty nice that people should want to talk as well as play together.
the problem is, while you need to spend quite a while in empires to be a somewhat useful commander - even if you only use conservative research and build strategies - by that time you also realized how unimportant the roll of the commander actually is. everything a comm can do to change victory, apart from boom tanking or simply failing with everything, can be done by a field soldier aswell and maybe even better ... no cost research wont change much with that. the better players, and in empires terms this generally means long time players, are suited better on the field. its where you win the game, not as comm. its a dillema. you cant comm as noob but as soon as you are "comm ready" you actually would serve better on the field since you cant archieve jackshit commanding - at least as long as you dont put the game on stake and go boomtaking ...
Commanding is like community service.... It's not quite a boring as prison, because you have stuff to do, but you are still stuck doing stuff that everyone else benefits from. Good commanders should have better situational awareness and can help motivate the team. So its not all bad for commanders (though they need more stuff to do). But, yes. You are right in everything you say - my point is that commanding if you don't really want to is a selfless thing to do, so everyone else can enjoy and keeps the game going & it is something people should consider doing more often than just leaving it to someone else regardless of whether they are more productive on the field or not
Commanding is kind of like Total War, you have to make sure your armies don't route, aka ragequit to spec.
yes, but motivation is something any player could do, thats the whole point. placing buildings and clicking research once in a while simply doesnt cut it for long time motivation. especially if thats the only things you can do ... for example, making the voted player able to access comm mode from anywhere (but what about the cv then?) and youd get more competent players to additionally bear the burdon of commanding. but in the end the job has to be trickier, it has to take some skill and has to have some direct involvement in battle. special comm powers, or even a special comm class for this one player, a powerful one maybe, would make it even more attractive for good players (hey you get a bonus and you are unique). then good players will automatically want to play commander, atm it needs a bit of an altruistic nature - which is very uncommon in the empires community - since as it stands atm you only have to do boring shit and get all the blame. but i know, big change again. well maybe it gets read by someone developing a successor of empires
comm is only boring if your team is failing and you are hanging in there hoping they stop failing till the bitter end, imho. Specpires doesn't seem to be the issue, it really adds more than it takes from the game. Maybe we could just work on a scoreboard inhibitor as the other solutions would likely drive vets away or force them to chat up a storm during the match, which neither is good. As for autoassign on connect it wouldn't force spawn so there is a possible solution there. But it still seems to come down to that dam scoreboard which even i check (who doesn't) before joining. Thing is half the time i join the losing team (less map control generally) to see if i can turn it around. More challenge is fun for me, but i digress.
A few NS servers have a plugin that auto kick people who don't move for some specific time. That plugin + auto join team should be "ok" although, it won't solve team imbalance due to skill. Add another pluggin that swaps out people who just die and recently joined to the team who has less players helps solve the dwindling team size due to auto-kick. Then you have a "number of players" balanced teams.
Commanders need more RTS aspects. In 2.24, the game was a lot more newb-friendly because you constantly had the guidance of commanders to point you at where you need to go. Though I don't like the idea of putting wallhack targets back in the game, you should make the existing targeting system (move, secure area, attack building, etc.) easier to use and even expand its capability. You could also give commanders more stuff to do. For example, cheaper walls and increase wall limit. You can also make the armories cheaper and easier to build by reducing its total health. All of the commander's great tools are either too expensive or too much of an hassle to build. Look at how Natural Selection makes commanding more appealing (e.g. cheap med/ammo kits, great target system).
To expand on those ideas: * Sandbag walls * Placing down a pad that needs to be built where ammo/health boxes spawn. Not a complete building. Just throwing down ammo/health crate from com view seems a bit op.
Well I was thinking of suggestions that would take very little effort to change, but provide a huge difference. Making cheaper, weaker armories that build a lot faster and more, cheaper walls just require a minute of script changing.
Followed up by months of balancing and fine-tuning. For example, by making armories weaker and cheaper, they're faster to build and faster to e-build. Which makes them quicker and easier to use when it comes to sneaking in as a scout or two and then switching class to Engineer to build a barracks. The solution would be to make two types of armories and make players unable to change their class in the weaker one. But now you need to code, model and skin it. Unless of course you make them look exactly the same, then you just need to code it. But then players won't know which one they can change their class in if the comm is placing both types of armories as a team pushes.
What's wrong with that? It is already easy to sneak outside an enemy base as an engineer in most maps; I do it all the time (e.g. yesteday's pug match on mvalley & canyon). It will take a scout with hide a lot longer, though it would simply be almost guarantee. There is no balancing necessary on that front. It already takes about 40sec to e-build an armory. Make it 15-20sec, half the durability, and cheaper so commanders have an incentive to use them more often.
Add in power turrets that need power and minibarracks and commanderp support powers and take out refs and replace them by flags and add infantry upgrades and then add in a nuclear dawning device that de-rails your thread from the return of an oldie to map rotation issues to commander boardum aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa add spaceships. Call up the Eternal Silence guys. Also put in Pirates and Vikings and the Mason Order (but not the Agathia Knights) and Goredawn Fromin Crow-bar so that he can grabe the nife out of the drunkpost to save the humens even after bin stabed by combinze. spawn backwards.
well more buildings (watchtower?? has ammo but no health) and more abilities would definitely add to the game's enticement and fun factor. you actually have people competing to be the comm, for the first time evah. Think C&C and the coolness of getting to drop your nuke after patiently waiting and timing your 3 front attack....etc...etc. If we could develop some (even one to start) comm ability on a timer system (i'm thinking squad arty but radius would need to be more like 7-10x the area coverage as it is now) then you have a new tool/weapon for the comm to coordinate a win with his team. Cause really the biggy right now is research and placement to a certain degree. Some vocal comms can do a lot in the motivation field but others are silent the entire match so I think its wiser to look at what can be added that won't imbalance the game...this Comm Arty, as it were, would need to be researched otherwise each time would simply repeat their arty/wipe out nme base scenario every X minutes. Its this kind of diversity in research that would add a major alteration to the flow of the game.. AGAIN, in C&C (not sure which one) when u had a match of China VS. Usa it had specific tailored tactics as you knew what to expect from that country (but the point is here that each matchup was unique), now the beauty of this is that Empires could work the same angle in a much less predictable manner so as each match would/could be nearly impossible to predict and completely unique in the comm's methods (we must diversify!) which means you would probly have to code in 'Research Spying' skill for Scout class, to give teams an opportunity to run an intel op. if they want an idea of what's coming.
Armouries don't necessarily need to be cheaper, but I wouldn't mind them building quicker, or even easier, have them start with 40% HP rather than the default 10%, so they can go up in contested zones easier. But if we're going to do this, we're starting to model the armouries into an offensive role, which I'm all for, but the models we have aren't ideal for that, so whilst we can do this, it means they'd go onto the list of things that ideally need to be redone soonish. As for walls, I'm not averse to making them cheaper either.
Research-able Commander powers, perhaps with a res cost (actually scratch that then it would be Comm wasted res I could have used for a tank...) could be fun. Make sure it has a server variable so that if it breaks the game and development stops for a while it doesn't kill empires... I like the watch tower idea. Ways for smart comms to enhance infantry effectiveness on the chokepoint maps would be pretty cool. What about turrets that instead of being built need to be manned? (More effective for drops into active combat zones, but gunner is vulnerable) Could difficult to balance. I like the watchtower idea because it's simple and (aside from HP and its shape & cover) inherits its balance from infantry balance. Might be tricky to script the source ladder to spawn with the Empires drop-able but idk anything about that stuff...
