On 14/08/2012 21:48, ics wrote:
It's more of "why only 6 when we had more previously". Same thing went
over when L4D/L4D2 came out. People wanted more than 4player coop.
Thats why some people invented the 10vs10 versus servers with plugins
etc. Just that the game isn't the same anymore after that.
Same thing before anyone had played it? I doubt that.
I can't really see any worthwhile fretting about how many players the
game mode could or should have before it's released, unless it's related
to the real reason server admins want lots of players :)
As some are aware, srcds maxplayer counts are constantly decreasing.
64css, 32 dods, 24 tf2, 4-8 l4d-series, 4 alien swarm, 2 portal2. I
also know that some just love big mayhem, it's fun sometimes but not
always. People are different and want different things for different
reasons.
Well yes, the fewer players, the more shots you need to kill and the
bigger the penalty for death, in general, the bigger the disparity in
skill will be shown between players and teams.
So it's not really a surprise that people who cannot play very well want
a configuration that hides that fact. So, 32 man, instant spawn removes
nearly all the penalty for being killed and has so many players that
skill has little or no bearing. If you factor in the saigns premium
stuff as well, you have a server that you can score over 300 points an
hour on with your monitor switched off.
The only problem I see with games like L4D2 and Dota 2 is they have an
issue where the player numbers are too small and the game design such
that if someone leaves a pub game the game is ruined
for everyone. Some are designed in a such a way that make someone
joining part way through the game not really a realistic prospect either.
L4D2, less so perhaps because it has the bots, but they aren't usually a
substitute, especially on the harder difficulties.
(Although when I played L4D2 we generally joined as 2 player co-op,
killed the bots and went through like that)
But I've not run L4D2 for years. I guess the only reason I might is the
linux client.
All of these games are great for organised matches (clans, pcws, lobbies
and so on) but the people that organise these things will tell you,
often the reason they go for 6v6 is simply the issues you have trying to
get 6 people all available at the same time to commit to playing a game.
This should tell any game designer that a pub or casual game mode that
has the same commitment requirements is badly designed and flawed.
The problem with this is, natural spite and angry, depressed gamers
leads to asinine solutions that try to solve this problem by punishing
people for leaving instead of fixing the game design instead.
I leave TF2 games all the time, for multiple reasons, quite often the
reason is, the game on that server is dull. But often it's something in
real life and often something that I had no reason to foresee when I
joined the server.
If TF2 were designed in such a way that I got punished for leaving a
server I wouldn't have played thousands and thousands of hours of it.
Anyone that really cares about their game being organised and planned,
does comp and has that organisation, the same people playing from start
to finish etc - nothing is lost for them in TF2.
So, that's the potential loss for low player counts - firstly you can't
hide the fact you suck and secondly you can't always come and go in a
casual way.
Vanilla TF2 has enough players that a reasonable churn rate during a
round doesn't really hurt the game too much. Perhaps the most annoying
aspect of that freedom is auto balance. But, imo, it's a lot better than
the converse (and I think the few dumb plugins that really try to
enforce autobalance and stop switching or switch non-dead players
demonstrate that once you try to bully and punish your player base, your
game and server sucks more as a result)
But, we haven't played this yet to see what the 6 players means in terms
of casual or pub play, joining or leaving, or in terms of balance and so
on. Deciding you "don't like 6 players" at this stage cannot have
anything to do with the game.
--
Dan
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