Gametype / gamemode & amount of players in wars / matches

[apske]

Dear reader,

seeing you read this you are probably interested in bringing this game back to live in competitive sense.

After having voted on the poll related to gametypes and gamemodes...
e.g. territory classic, territory realism, countdown classic, countdown realism.

The next question is, what will be the standard player amount on matches?

For example;

1.

Realism is a faster mode than classic. If you want a low player amount in matches such as 5v5, 6v6, 7v7, 8v8 (standard in CoD / CS) it would be better to play realism and this with gamemode countdown. Countdown because each player of a team can focus on one target thereby bringing the intensity to one part of the map (the target) & in combination with fastness of realism, this comes most close to Search and Destroy in Call of Duty / Counter Strike.

There should be 2 or 3 waves of reinforcements but this should be finalized after having played some matches and wars so we can talk from experience what is best and why.



2.

Classic is a slower mode than realism (though a lot of people in classic also would like for stamina to be upgraded a little, more towards the fastness of realism, on bigger maps you are too often too early exhausted when you are still 60-90meteres away from target.

This should be played in matches 12v12 & everything above.

Each team should be able to pick a map (the map of their likes and on which they think their best at and can defeat the opponent).

Each map is played 2 times so that each team is once the defender and otherwise the attacker.

Say that each round lasts 20 minutes, with a fixed amount of reinforcements on each side, that makes 40 minutes per map, and over 2 maps its 80 minutes for 1 war / match.
If the result is 2-2, there should be a 'knifing' round.
The winner may choose the side they want to play on the map / or choose a map itself (it has to be one of the 2 played maps, not a new / other one) and the loser then may choose side on that new map.

IN SHORT:

LOW PLAYER AMOUNTS 5v5 - 8v8 = REALISM + COUNTDOWN

HIGHER PLAYER AMOUNTS 12v12 - 16v16 or more = CLASSIC + TERRITORY

[Zetsumei]

12vs12+ in my opinion is not that feasible in general for competitive play. With those player amounts combined with the relatively small maps of HOS. The defenders will be able to set up such a good defense that no attacker will be able to win on pretty much all maps.

Add to that that for 12v12+ matches every clan needs to be quite big, which makes it more difficult to start up a new clan. And while playing a match you need a player to be there with actual capability in managing players the method of just playing with a bunch of friends for less competitive clans will quickly become a lot more difficult to manage communications wise without splitting up communicative channels.

[apske]

Originally Posted by Zetsumei

12vs12+ in my opinion is not that feasible in general for competitive play. With those player amounts combined with the relatively small maps of HOS. The defenders will be able to set up such a good defense that no attacker will be able to win on pretty much all maps.

Add to that that for 12v12+ matches every clan needs to be quite big, which makes it more difficult to start up a new clan. And while playing a match you need a player to be there with actual capability in managing players the method of just playing with a bunch of friends for less competitive clans will quickly become a lot more difficult to manage communications wise without splitting up communicative channels.

Thats all true, but then the general problem with HoS maps is that they are too big for 5v5 / 8v8 players, only TE-Apartments is a managable map for that maybe. The maps are not based on 5v5 - 8v8 combat as can be seen on the server list. 32v32 or 16v16 and anything between.

I agree with you and also thought of the point when having 10+ players on TS or ventrilo whatever. It becomes noise, random, unknown because there are too many players and you need to have a darn good oversight and details of the map to understand every spot call.
My solution to this problem was that you have indeed a split of communication channels in which each channel holds up to 8 players (so max of 16v16), and each section holds one captain which is somehow also in a room together with the captain of the other team.

What did the old RO players play? 5v5? 8v8? 12v12?
what mode did the play? countdown or territory? or whatever is similar to most.

I started this thread to make things a bit more practical.

Imo anyways, the devs need to release a new patch first with classic mode updated, the stamina problem.... you all know.
Only then are we fairly able to decide which types of ladders should be opened for competitive play. With a classic mode being introduced only in GOTY edition and thus running in a post-beta mode, still requires to be updated......... ONLY AFTER THAT......

[LFO]

We play Territory Realism with 10 vs. 10 players.

Thats almost the best i think. We have 3 squads/squadleaders.

[Zetsumei]

the default ended up around 6v6 cd and 8v8 te. the more players the easier it gets to defend. in my opinion 9v9 still works ok but after that competitively most maps start getting cramped.

[Harb]

I'm not a massive fan of Countdown as it feels like an awkward combination, however it's the best RO2 game type suited for competitive gaming.

I personally would like a competitive game to have the following

Dynamic, fast and flowing game play. Teams should know exactly what to do and they shouldn't need 20 mins a round. Teams only need 2-4 mins max on something like Countdown. Also not for the game to take all evening, so preferably around 1hr for the full game.

Small team sizes 5v5-8v8 max to allow for greater number of teams. 10v10s and above will seriously limit the number of active teams. Also smaller team sizes allow for greater individual skill to shine in a match as well as team play. A 15v15 on countdown doesn't allow for an individual to win a 1vsX clutch moment as much as a 5v5 would do.

[Zetsumei]

While in basic principle countdown is clearly the most suitable for competitive gametype. Personally i still prefer territory over countdown.

For the simple reason that countdown only offers a single capzone at a time and generally without a stream of reinforcements to manage.

To break through in TE, you cannot just go and kill the enemies that are there, but you need to make sure you secure your routes to the capzone while blocking off those of the enemy. In CD you can slowly work yourself somewhat to victory, while in TE after an opening has been made you need to take it within a split second as otherwise the enemy reinforcements can be back. Together with knowing that you have to divide your players over the available capzones, and decide on aims and goals very quickly.

Some of the most fun matches in TE have been when everybody always went for the same capzone, and a clan then suddenly find a tactic to go for the other cap first totally nailing your team to the ground.

I like the limited reinforcements of countdown myself as it brings a more constant tension. But don't like the killing off after a cap has been taken and newly respawning with single active caps nature of countdown.

Which is why I would personally prefer a special form of TE, where you play on TE maps but both teams have a limited amount of reinforcements that can be triggered by the commander only. Then teams can decide to push hard at certain sections or slowly to save reinf for other sections.

Dynamics in gameplay is what makes competitive play fun for me. And while countdown got the tension, TE got the dynamics.

[apske]

When I read the Harb and Zetsumei I see some future problems to the rise of activity on the new ladder.

Before opening a ladder we should know whether it's going to be;

classic or realism
countdown or territory


It's good that TripWire is making this initiative (possible), but they and we also know that a lot of the gamers posted in the forums for a 'fixing' of error relating to stamina in classic mode.
You're too early out of breath and it takes a long time to have the stamina meter full again.

Relating this to Harb; a too slow / underdeveloped stamina system will not make dynamic, fast and flowing gameplay possible. (1)

We can't open 8 ladders, and just see which one becomes the most active, because each ladder will have problems, related to Harb and Zetsumei;

Harb mentioned the point that low player amounts and countdown make it possible for an individual player to show his skill (which imo is a very important aspect of competitive gaming, where else do you think all the fragmovies come from?)
SKILL make fragmovies, not just a heap / bunch of kills. (2)

Zetsumei also mentioned the point that countdown is an oké mode but that reinforcements are being cut off when your team captured a goal for example.
This should be structured.
How does a countdown match look like?
How is it played?
What are end results of a war? 2-2 or 14-10 for example? So how do you score points and win a war? (3)

Spawn points should be a set up in such a way that neither team has a clear advantage over the other cause this will ruin the game for sure. (4)

Without a clear set-up / schedule / brainstorm these ladders will not even become live. We need a good preperation if we want this to succeed, which is why is why I am making these comments.

Be critical, ask yourself questions about possible future problems related to the ladders.

[ButchCassidy]

slow down and try not to be so negative..The ladder has not even started its website and your predicting doom, gloom and disaster..lol....

Many clans may want to play in more than one ladder say a TE and a CD ladder..Some will only want to play in one.

Maybe we will not get all the clans we want, maybe we will get more than we expect..
At this moment in time all we can do is engage with the community on these forums and discuss what we would all like to see.
The realities of what we will eventually provide due to various circumstances will need to be looked at as soon as our own site is up and running..Keep the faith..

[BlackLabel]

just dont listen to Zets and do what you think is fun to do.

[LFO]

Hi, i haven`t played in the RO1 Ladder, so i doesn`t know what structure it was.

Here are some Ideas:

Point System -> In Germany we love Soccer. The mayor league is called "Bundesliga". For winning a match they get 3 Points. If they play undecided every Team gets 1 Point. If they loose they get 0 Points.

Player Count -> When a clan doesn`t have enough players for one day it must be possible to play like 8vs8 or 5vs5 and so on. I hope you know what I mean. I´m with you thinking that no clan will have 32 or more players for a match every week.

Yesterday we had a territory war. We play always 2 Maps with one round on each side/nation. We won as germans on Grain Elevator with only having 3 reinforcements at the end. That was crazy, amazing and shocking more harder than a horror movie.

I think it is possible to get out auf spawnkillers. We often had this situation on Barracks defending E and F and on Grain Elevator attacking A. Yesterday we handled it going left to our Squad 3 and Squad 2 and we attacked their spawn routes to B and A that was the key. On Public playing i hate it. You play with 50 on Commissars House and you can´t come out and so on.

I don`t like classic. I know that there are many guys who played RO1 needing this feeling and wanna have this reputation playing like RO1 in the good old days. I accept it.

[[F|H]dutchy]

voted CD - 5vs 5 8 vs 8, ofcourse realism.


Many clans out there to compete as our clan is already competing for a couple of months.

dramaqueens and the forum queens should stop their bs and move on, the players out there love this game and every clanmatch we had till date was awesome.

Only downside to classic is the running, fix that and I do not care about realism or classic.

[Zetsumei]

Originally Posted by LFO

Point System -> In Germany we love Soccer. The mayor league is called "Bundesliga". For winning a match they get 3 Points. If they play undecided every Team gets 1 Point. If they loose they get 0 Points.

That's a standard league point system though, not a ladder point system. A league got as requirement that you play every team within the league. In a ladder that requirement doesn't exist, similarly in a ladder you can play the same team multiple times.

If you use a league system for a ladder, it ends up that everybody will try to play the weakest clans as much as possible. I mean if you can choose your opponent why would you risk the chance of losing if you would get the same reward for winning against a strong and a weak team .

Leagues got as advantage that to find out who's best you can use a very simple system that everybody will understand, that is very sound statistically. The disadvantage is that you must limit the amount of teams (as you need to play every team), that you're forced to commit a certain activity, and that you cannot regulate how skillful your opponents are yourself.

Personally I think that a league structure for the top x clans is often a good method to use. Where the bottom group of league get replaced by the top group of a ladder every time a league ends. Or even staged leagues. Where the top 4 of a league go to the next tier so to say. But at least for newer clans the commitment can be a difficult thing to attain.

Originally Posted by LFO

Player Count -> When a clan doesn`t have enough players for one day it must be possible to play like 8vs8 or 5vs5 and so on. I hope you know what I mean. I´m with you thinking that no clan will have 32 or more players for a match every week.

The issue in general is that often tactics are build highly around the player amounts. Just as with football you build your tactics around a team of 11 players. If suddenly one team could turn up with 5 players and then force the other team to play with 5 players, all tactics training and positions for 11 players would become invalid. At the least there should be time to prepare for whatever player amount you're going to end up playing with. If both teams agree then of course sure increase or decrease the player amount to your hearth's content.

@ apske here are my personal thoughts about the 5 points you put forward
1) Stamina in general does not matter much for the dynamics of gameplay (it merely makes things quicker, which could require more skill of reflexes of players though), dynamics are regarding possible changes that can occur and surprises. Not so much the pace at which the changes happen. Chess is for instance a very dynamic game, but before a new move is made it can take quite a while.

2) Skill is important, in the sense of ability by training and hard work to get better at the game in multiple facets. For me the key to obtaining something like that is in general taking out randomnity as much as possible. And even though possibly difficult allow players to practise to get better.

Think of for instance free-aim instead of cone of fire, with practise you can learn to make pretty accurate shots using free aim. While with cone of fire it would always remain a roll of dice.

Or think of the recoil/sway, with some practise you can keep your guns right on target (even in ost for that matter), in comparison to again something like a cone of fire/inaccuracy in weaponry.

3) In terms of end results there are always 2 things imo that play a big role. Matches should not last longer than roughly 1.5 hours. So while you would obtain more accurate results if you let 2 teams play for 5 hours, most people find 1.5 already quite long.

As maps are often unbalanced in RO you generally want people to play for both sides, to make the chances for both sides equal.

Secondly ideally you have a scoring system that as accurately as possible describes how 2 teams match up against each other. So if 2 teams play where one is 75% better you would want to see a result of 75%, if two teams are even in strength you want to see a result of 50%. However it is very difficult and often dubious to create a point system that results in that.

For instance even though a map might have 4 capzones in countdown, you cannot say that if a team only caps 1 capzone that the result is then that they have a 25% victory. As obtaining the first cap is much easier than say obtaining the last cap.

4) While spawn killing can be seen as lame, if you know it can happen its often quite easy to defend yourself against it, as long as you know whether or not it is considered a valid tactic. If you have clear rules, that say that it is your own responsibility to keep your spawn secure, then if anything I think it adds another dimension to gameplay.

(example: In the RO mod there was a map called warsaw, that map was very small and had very long respawn times, where you pretty much spawned out of a single street. This meant that if you killed the entire enemy team you could easily set up and lock them in spawn.

As teams knew this was a possible issue, they started taking special notice to the scoreboard looking at deaths to know when to retreat to actually defend your spawn, with some teams even having a special guy defending their entry points. The change in flow from attacking to quickly going over to defensive mode, made it one of my favourite maps for competitive play (while it was a pretty bad map for public play).

Similarly koitos from the mod, had 4 capzones open at all times. In public games people just run around capping objectives in circles. While with competitive play you would choose to push or defend certain capzones. Koitos has always been one of my favourite maps for competitive play for that reason. While I hated playing it in public.

[MrLebanon]

voted for 5v5/8v8 realism/classic territory/countdown as I can see it being easier to field and organize

[Sensemann]

Countdown / Realism / 5v5 - 8v8 (imo most close to Search&Destroy in other games)
is the way to go

[Schreq]

Countdown is horrible. The only positive about it was that it allowed 6v6 games.
The reason for it being horrible is how it plays. With just one capzone the defenders will play hide and seek because all they need to do is to not die. It really is way too campy without any options.
That wouldn't be much of a problem in ostfront because camping (the act of literally sitting in a corner with iron sights up) was totally ineffective in high level play. In hos on the other hand the skill ceiling was totally pulled down by making hip shooting horrible and making ads the only option, resulting in the described act becoming the norm of how the game is being played.

I see the comparison with search&destroy but it totally isn't anywhere near it with just one capzone. Why s&d works and why it allows for great tactics is because of the 2 bomb places AND the bomb placing/defusing mechanic. Remove one of the bomplaces in s&d and gameplay will become boring, repetitive and campy just as countdown.

The problem with TE is that the 32 player versions of the maps are even too big for 8v8, while the versions sized for 16 players are too small already. Best you can do is 5v5 on the 16 player versions of the maps. Only problem which would remain then is that the maps are horrible in general compared to ostfront.

Best competitive format in RO would actually be small team sizes, more or less symmetric maps (BaksanValley) with a reinforcements limit that can be hit on 5v5 in a reasonable time. Unfortunately tripwire doesn't understand much about comp.

[apske]

+10!!!! all true, especially last part (sad enough)

Originally Posted by Schreq

Countdown is horrible. The only positive about it was that it allowed 6v6 games.
The reason for it being horrible is how it plays. With just one capzone the defenders will play hide and seek because all they need to do is to not die. It really is way too campy without any options.
That wouldn't be much of a problem in ostfront because camping (the act of literally sitting in a corner with iron sights up) was totally ineffective in high level play. In hos on the other hand the skill ceiling was totally pulled down by making hip shooting horrible and making ads the only option, resulting in the described act becoming the norm of how the game is being played.

I see the comparison with search&destroy but it totally isn't anywhere near it with just one capzone. Why s&d works and why it allows for great tactics is because of the 2 bomb places AND the bomb placing/defusing mechanic. Remove one of the bomplaces in s&d and gameplay will become boring, repetitive and campy just as countdown.

The problem with TE is that the 32 player versions of the maps are even too big for 8v8, while the versions sized for 16 players are too small already. Best you can do is 5v5 on the 16 player versions of the maps. Only problem which would remain then is that the maps are horrible in general compared to ostfront.

Best competitive format in RO would actually be small team sizes, more or less symmetric maps (BaksanValley) with a reinforcements limit that can be hit on 5v5 in a reasonable time. Unfortunately tripwire doesn't understand much about comp.

[Tormentor(Dittler)inruB]

6vs6 up to 8vs8 are the only player sizes tht fit, in both, CD and TE.
I would like to play only TE.
Atm most active clans just play CD.
And one of the boring/annoying things in CD is the fact, (as mentioned)
tht defending players just need run around in the Cap and hide until time
runs out. Also its get boring after playing many matches with all the
standard positions and moves, there is not much difference between the matches at all, cause you allways defend just one Cap at one time
and everyone knows the common spots.

[Zetsumei]

Ideally for competitive play what I would personally like (which probably a lot of people disagree on with me).

Would be a mix between countdown and territory.

Basically territory map, but without a set timer for the respawns. Instead both teams get a pool of force respawns say attackers 10 respawns and defenders 5 respawns (logically the number would need to be tweaked), and the commander of both sides can choose when to reinforce.

That would add some more tension to territory as the lives are limited, and require tactics to use the reinforcements wise. While you do not have the quick restart after an objective has been capped with the ability to fight for more caps at the same time.

[Snuffeldjuret]

Zets, on one or specific maps in the Insurgency mod it actually worked almost just like that most of the times. It was a great thrill to play for objectives territory style, but to really have to think about not wasting your life just like in countdown. At least I liked it a lot =).