Ok, this suggestion is going to take some explaining. Problem: Before the sudden death timer kicks off, a decent team will eliminate ALL the spawns on it's team, and heck, the other team may even do the same, and the tickets will be stuck on 1:0 or 5:0 or something like that, negating the Sudden Death feature entirely. This is the same situation as BEFORE the timer was implemented, only now it happens slightly quicker, and slightly less (because you need a semi-intelligent commander to circumvent the system.) So a good solution, sudden death, is ignored. Take, for example, the last game I played on a map that I, admittedly, hate: emp_money. The tickets dropped from 30:0, down to 1:0, over a looooooooooooooooooong ass time. It took forever, and we didn't even hit sudden death, one team rushed for the win. So the problem, as I see it, is that sudden death can be somewhat circumvented, and the resulting long-ass match is boring and rather un-epic. Solution: The best thing that I can come up with is to somehow negate the 'kill all the spawns' trick that prevents sudden death from occurring. I'm not sure how the best way to do it would be, but all I can think of is making some sort of artificial spawn when the conditions are met, thus preventing the commander from eliminating ALL the spawns. I have to stress that this is the only solution I can think of. If you have a better one, go for it, I'd love to hear it. So, the only thing I can think of is this: WHEN there are NO SPAWNS left for your team whatsoever, AND your team only has ONE ticket left, the command vehicle can somehow act as a spawn point. This effectively removes the spawn trick, and forces the game to proceed into sudden death because any jackass can spawn. Con: Any jackass can spawn. I hear what you veterans are saying: "Oh great, another dumb-ass newb is going to end our game." But think of it this way: Sudden Death was made to END that end-game grind. Sudden death is a chance for the LOSING team with the FEWER tickets to get lucky and still win. Sudden Death, in my opinion, is good, and has led to epic comebacks. Pro: Speed up that painful end game torture. This is a rather cheap way to speed the game up, yes, but it will be FAR less frustrating for new players who dont want to sit around waiting forever. Waiting to spawn=pissed off player=one less person in the playerbase, gone forever. Con: Games get shortened, making epic long games even LESS frequent. Rebuttal: This is the BAD part of the game, the grind part that NEEDS shortening. In my opinion, the short games don't become short because the end-game scenario is too short, the short games end quickly because one team too easily overpowers the enemy in the very very beginning. Thus, if we can prolong the early game, when people are first establishing the front lines, and even the middle game, when both teams are struggling to gain an advantage over the other, it won't matter if the end game pain is faster. But again, if you have a better solution, please say so. EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT: I like this better then my solution.
Or the sudden death timer could activate once one team hits 0, there's no real problem because it's like 90 seconds, and if one team is going straight down and is getting owned 60:0 then they'll just get steamrolled before it hits 0.
damn empty that was fast, let me finish editing first hmm.... as is, my god, no way whatsoever. The losing team could set up one person, and INTENTIONALLY just lose all it's tickets and ninja the enemy cv whenever it wanted. HOWEVER, if you mean that only the LOSING team's CV would enter 'sudden death' mode, then I can SORT of see that as an option. It would certainly speed up the games, and succeed in ending that grind. So in that respect, it would work fine. However, this can also be bypassed by recycling the spawns again, and now the losing team has even less chance of a comeback because there's no way the enemy team can be brought to their level--now, the losing cv just gets screwed even more. So, I can see it as a possibility but personally I don't like it at all.
I had a great canyon match go down to 10:0 tickets. My team kept spawning, so I recycled all the spawns and locked vf and built all the vehicles for my team, and forced them to either revive or work as a squad to get squad points to squad revive. The other team was very skilled, or my team just sucked, because we were getting pushed back even though we had the advantage all game. It took nuke tanks to finally end it because there were so many walls. That was a couple nights ago on the training server. Remember it lobster? you were helping someone and they disconnected
that's my point, metal smith-- a good commander knows what to do, but preventing this mode will only piss off newbies and please the veterans. And the veterans are already hooked on the game, we need to ease the learning curve for those newcomers. Sure, sometimes a team will learn to work together, but most times they'll just get pissed and leave. And I assume you lost--- via nuke tanks. Yuch. ultimately sudden death mode was implemented by krenzo for a reason, and a clever commander can keep the solution to the problem from taking place. Good for commander, good for veterans, bad for game as a whole.
actually....... that's not a half bad idea!!!! After all, they have more tickets, so they SHOULD be able to win. THIS solution starts up sudden death, forces each team to push, and still gives the winning team the better chance!!! You could even use the bleed INSTEAD of the 300 second timer... but that's not necessary... maybe a bit much. Yeah, I like this idea better then mine. edit: lol ohhhh, jephir, empty sneaks in his suggestion first ftw. STOLE!
This has been suggested before in various ways. And I'll say what I said then: I loathe the current sudden death implementation. It basically turns the game into a coinflip. Anything which makes sudden death happening more likely is a bad thing in my book. Letting comms suddenly die in one hit is a poorly-balanced mechanism that adds no strategy or fun to the game beyond ending stalemates. A team that is basically winning should not suddenly be vulnerable to one-hit kills because we are impatient and want the game to end quickly. If you just want the game to end dammit, have it end in a tie... having the comms suddenly vulnerable to pistols is not fun at all.
well, this was assuming that the sudden death is a good thing. Personally, I like it because we've had big wins AND big losses on my team. But this whole argument hinges on the assumption that the sudden death mode is good. So.... yeah. One sided.
Hmm... Sudden Death in most games is occured though time. To make it come from losing ticket is one sided. Maybe Sudden Death can be a seperate gamemode on specific maps, that has no relation to flag capturing or CVs... Just plain killing and being killed. Good for Veterans to train, and Good for newbies to learn basic firefights. And on sudden death maps, both teams will have bleeding tickets no matter what. Both teams loses 1 ticket per 30 seconds. That would be the basic battlefield style, without flag capturing. And the maps for this mode can be like 2 forts for team fortress. Scoring or maybe capture the flag style? It isn't capturing flag points but taking objective item. CTF can be useful for this because you've got a minimap, and the flags can be shown on that.
I hope you don't take this the wrong way dra6o0n, but you really do make the most off topic, rambling, incoherent posts. I mean, you've edited it within three minutes of posting it, and it still doesn't make the slightest bit of sense and has little to do with the opening post or rest of the thread.
A problem I see with this is that you either A) have a big map which won't work very well with infantry combat, because without flags, you don't get spawns closer to the enemy, then its a total pain in the ass to die and have to walk to the combat again, or B) you have a small map, but IMHO that wont lend itself very well to Empires to have a stupidly small map for this gameplay.
I've actually suggested something similar before here. Basically, anything that depends on tickets reaching a certain number can be exploited. The only good solution I can think of is to start the countdown when the neither sides tickets have moved for X minutes.
This is the only good idea in this thread frankly. All the suggestions about only one team hitting 0 just doesn't makwe sense because the other team worked hard for it, this would enroll even more controversial strategies to how to deal with 0 tickets, just like the one mentioned by the OP. And about OP's suggestion, lets say we did that when the team hits 1:0, what stops them from recycling the barracks when the team hits 2:0, or 3:0 for that matter, or 4:0? You can't stop this, just shift the problem, hoping it either ends up high enough that no commander will be on time to do it, or either not wanting to do it because theres enough tickets left, in which case you don't meat the criteria and it'd be some weird feature that dissallows you to recycle your barracks half way in the game. Let alone what would happen if your last spawn point is a apc, or your last spawnpoint is actually destroyed, or your last spawn point is in the enemy territory and left alive by them. The latter could happen when the enemy manages to take control of an area that was previously your base. Technically a commander can always recycle barracks and deny his troops a respawn, but in the case of sudden death, there are no reinforcements left and your team is unable to spawn no matter what, it's a different scenario and the 0:0 is treated as a stalemate, while recycling barracks can happen at any given moment. Your example sounds like a stalemate where only one team ran out of tickets early, this is not the same scenario and should not be treated the same, most likely if the team that ran out early had no real possibilities to end the game, just managed to stall, this is a general gameplay issue, I doubt any suggestion concerning sudden death could help this, or should actually be used to effectively stop these kind of stalemates because it's not meant for it and just ruins strategic gameplay.
Yeah, the OP pretty much yanked his idea for mine/jephirs, makes sense, so... DO IT FAGGOTS DEVS! [lololol meme.]
