On tickets in CTF

I always thought that tickets are cancer, but a recent post by Vidar made me realise, that tickets had good sides too. I made a comparison of classic, ticket based CTF, and Beta, ticketless CTF.

Classic CTF:

✗ Fucking campfest
✗ Fucktards waste all tickets
✓ Fucking epic last stands
? Implicit match time limit​

Beta CTF:

✓ Offensive gameplay
✓ Scrubs cant fuck your team up by dying a lot
✗ No fucking epic last stands
? No match time limit by default​

These are just the issues that came to my mind, post your own if i missed something. Time limit is an arguable advantage, i like long matches so dont think it is, but many players think otherwise.

Then i started to think how to combine advantages of both modes and avoid their disadvantages. One idea is to make tickets gradually decrease, but not based on player deaths. Instead, make it decrease based on ground control. The less ground you control, the faster you lose. Ground control should be determined by number of flags capped (or you could extend this idea to TTH with halls capped). This has another major advantage: it makes all flags equally valuable, so fortifying forward flag finally makes sense. Right now you just make a fucking slab around hardest to get flag, and screw all others.

This way promotes offensive tactics and penalize camping. Suiciding retards dont affect your team besides being useless and blocking a slot. And it makes for epic last stands when one team runs out of tickets.

Post your other ideas.

 

but i dont want to link tickets to respawns, because scrubs would waste all tickets by dying is stupid ways. lets make tickets completely unrelated to dying. like losing 1 ticket every 10s with all flags, and 1 ticket every 9s with one flag capped (rough idea, numbers would have to be balanced)

 

If I'm reading this right:

norill - Tickets don't replenish, but you lose tickets based on how many flags you hold.

Hypothetical endgame:

Blue hold 3 flags while red holds 1. Blue's counter drops very slowly, while reds is in free fall. (more or less).

Blue strategy would be to hold mid and kill off the remaining soldiers, or break through for the final red flag.
Red strategy would be to turtle and kill off blue soldiers as the Blue counter slowly diminishes. Red wouldn't have a shot in hell with a bottomed out counter to go for all three of blues flags at this point. If it was a 1 flag game maybe. But 3, no way in hell. So camping would be the only viable solution.

* Is defense at all something we want as a viable strategy in order to win a game? How strong should it be? I think this idea is really good, but it requires more incentive to be offensive. (Resources for midfield control).


Beef - Tickets replenish, but you lose replenishing power for every flag you team has lost.

Hypothetical endgame:

Blue holds 3 flags while red holds 1. Blues counter is amazing, the counter never really gets that low because of the replenish rate. Red's counter is shot, it barely gives back lives.

Blues strategy would be to hold mid and turtle up, prepare for the final onslaught. Plenty of resources, midfield advantage, high soldier refresh rate. Red has retreated at this point because lives are dwindling and they can't make them up fast enough.
Red strategy would be one last final push for mid control and the blue flags. They can't win turtling against a maxed out life replenisher. They would have to kamikaze out the front gates, take mid, then take 2 flags, with a dwindling life replenisher and a probably maxed out blue barrage right there the whole way.

*I like parts of it. Only problem I have with this is I don't think the losing team has a chance in hell past a certain point, if 2 of your flags are gone your doomed mostly, people figure "we know how this ends" and just want to next map. Endgame defense for the losing team would never be a real option.


How powerful is camping in beta? How do we mitigate it's damage to the tempo and fairness of the game without making defense a non viable option? If lives are going to matter and are precious, at some point in the match the losing team will begin to play more conservatively. Being cautious about the life counter should be a viable strategy, but attacking has to have a superior advantage, especially in endgame. I think the remedy to this particular problem will come down to map design.

There has to be a glimmer of hope, up until the end, for the losing team for it to stay interesting. It should have that feeling in most cases for the losing team. "We still have a chance!"

At the same time turtling/camping all game has to be discouraged, so does running into battle without a thought for how many soldiers you have in your ranks. Dying has to mean something, and if your wasteful with your lives there has to be a price to pay.

Honestly both are really good ideas and all of this is speculation on my part. I'm just thinking out loud and none of this is gospel. Testing is going to be the most important part of seeing which of these ideas are viable and which are better left behind.

 

https://forum.kag2d.com/threads/new-gamemode-epic-kag-classice.14358/#post-251582

Coughity, Cough Cough...

General idea in that thread is to bring back Classic CTF as a gamemode separate from the current CTF.



Just had to add a little humor

 

I think asymmetric game modes are really the way to go to solve the camping problem. No matter what you do with symmetrical game mode, defense will always have an advantage just by the nature of KAG's mechanics.

A simple example could be that blue has a limited number of tickets where red does not, but if the timer goes out, blue wins.

 

Unless it was tested during closed beta I don't think things like tickets have even been tried in the current versions of KAG...so who knows how different it could result with how much the game has changed. Heck, things like long ranged archers and easily portable outposts are vital things that caused ye old camping to death, so things certainly could be a lot different now.
Trying to assault a bunch of campers is much more entertaining than endless standoffs imo. So even if camping became a thing it wouldn't be so bad.

I do like the idea of number of halls and flags causing the tickets to replenish at higher rates. This would mean the start of the game wouldn't cause worries but the end of a game would. Also it would mean even with one flag left and very low numbers of tickets there is still hope as instead of being completely out of tickets you just have to be more careful until they refill enough to do large pushes on your enemy.

Also I've been debating designing maps around asymmetric design...One team having more flags but the other having more things like gold or just a better position. I'll experiment with this later on. (For now I have to reupload all my maps again because a certain someone decided it would be a genius idea to revert the whole thing that made the resource section good for maps...)

In the end experimenting and testing is the only way we are going to prove what system works the best, and which should be added or not.

 

I think a time limit isn't ever going to be needed if a ticket system were to be re-implemented.

And this is why:

Classic and Beta are two completely different games. You can see how classic influenced where beta has gone, but it really doesn't have an actual physical presence in the game anymore.

First off, the battle mechanics are completely different. In differences from classic to beta are as follows: More maneuverability from classes. More damage from siege. Smaller maps. Less resources. Bigger booms (Keg, Mine, etc.)

In classic, the reason why there were so many end game "Camp Fests" was because you would get huge stone structures, with the only way to destroy them being a builder on your team slowly breaking it down. I don't think I even need to mention how annoying it was to actually get someone to go builder, let alone, make it across the field alive. Bombs are constantly blowing up your team from the campers. Every bomb they threw got them more than the amount of gold needed to buy another bomb.

You can only climb 3 blocks as knight and 2 as the other classes, leaving out archer arrows. Stone structures were typically 20 times that height. Following that was a 30 block across spike pits. Then on the other side was a, thicker, taller stone wall. And it was always made from stone because that was all you could use!

Think of putting those structures from classic in beta. Oh wait. You can't. There are building height restrictions in beta. And even that you can double bomb jump over.

Oh yeah. Classic only a few players actually could pull off a bomb jump, let alone a double bomb jump successfully. So that was out of the question in Classic.

Sorry if that got a little rant-ish at the end. But you will see why.

Now, taking in all that I said, do you really think that there would be "camp fests" at the end of a game? No. The answer is No. Well, maybe in some cases yes. But with catapults, kegs, explosive bolts, mines, double bomb jumping, bomb arrows, fire arrows, drills, etc. Do you think they would hold out long enough to win?

No.

They would lose. Really fast too. Which is how the game should be played. One team is better, one is worse. The worse team should lose. Simple. If the game is going to last a hour with people spamming votes to skip the map and people are leaving the game because it has gotten too boring, with the worse team still losing, why not allow them to lose sooner.

Yeah, those who are losing will complain, but they already do. Even more so now because you have people who are on the winning team complaining about how long the game is going.

There would still be epic last stands. Ones that wouldn't take forever to finish, but still be just as epic.

But after all that I still think there should be two different game modes. One CTF with tickets, one without. Keep it simple and separated.