Should Gather go from tickets to timer?

Firstly, I considered where to post this thread. If I just made a post in the Gather thread with a poll site, it would likely not be viewed much, and only by those who play Gather a lot. The same would have probably happened (but worse) in the Gather social group. So I thought it would be best to post here so it gets some attention.

Please only answer the poll if you've played Gather at least once, and (if you answer yes), please make sure that you aren't just saying yes for the sake of it.

Obviously, this thread is regarding Gather - and from here, this will just be my opinion. Gather is a place where I go to play some competitive KAG. It's quick (in comparison to other methods) and it's easy and everyone there tries to win. However, with tickets, the game is just who can sit in their tower the most - going offensive is almost always a way to lose and it's incredibly rare to see a flag cap that is independent of tickets (i.e. a team falling back to their flag base due to only having X tickets).

In my opinion, it is not a very fun experience in comparison with a timer game. With a timer game, your life has much less significance. As archer, I can risk climbing over the enemy tower and play about with the enemy knights - because that gives a + of making a distraction and a - of a short respawn time. Now, though, it is a ticket. So I very rarely even climb the enemy tower, and as soon as knights come, I'm outy. The same is true for knights - it's rare to see them bomb jump over a tower unless there is a strong ticket advantage.

Overall, I think a switch to timer is for the best - but I also think that there should be 2 flags to go with it (so you can be at 1-0 and the team with 0 has to go offensive when the timer is low).

 

Timers cause the most anticlimatic ends to games to this day. Yaaay, it's a draw, woohooo...
I like tickets, maybe just because it reminds me of classic and how i used to love last stands and still do with our Gather format now.
I do agree that cames can and will be incredibly tedious to play if/when both teams sit on their ass and dont want to lose tickets, which usually happens when one side is horribly unmatched to the other in terms of knight combat, so they just let them run at their base and throw bombs/water arrows/kegs at them.
I've voted "No" for now because i really want tickets to stay, yet i see how people might see this as boring, so surely, there should be some kind of middle ground, but please, for the love of god, no timers without any other added features, which of course i can't name now because i'm an unimaginative asshole with only an opinion. But yeah, there we go.
+1 tickets
-1 timer

 

2 flags would reduce the amount of draws and anti-climactic endings.

 

2 flags also reduces the amount of time you can spend on either flag, which'll end in either flag having a cover that'd be blown away by 2 bomb arrows or the like, unless you want to have 150 second build phase of course...

 

I like the ideas but imo tickets are what makes gather suspenseful.
Finding out how a match ends is always interesting for me.
However I am leaning way more towards ideas like one match only or an income for players contesting middle.

 

I think it would be better the other way - have timer come after tickets, could be 5 minutes.

At first in the game you play mostly carefully, trying to salvage resources and building up your forts, but if your tickets run out, it's time to give it all to end the enemy and capture the flag before the time runs out. Would create pretty nice pacing.

 

That's just a matter of tweaking map resources and building times. This system promotes early fighting over resources - or flag if you are willing to risk some extra tickets. If you fail that then you'll probably retreat to build shitty shag houses with limited resources or you can continue agressing until you can start turtling.

And if you drop low in tickets while the enemy has much more, you'll start agressing before the timer even goes off. There's a lot of neato strategy involved with this system and you get a metagame too that has a good balance of agressio and defense.

 

Could just make it this.
THE FOLLOWING SCENE IS A FUTURE EVENT

I want to play some gather!
!add use timer

SCENE TWO

I want to play some gather!
!add use tickets

Then its just a vote.

 

I come to gather for tickets, I like how everything plays out but I think if you were to change anything it would be the @kittycity idea if not and someone actually wants to put time into this perhaps make gather it's own game mode.

I recall on gather mumble we mentioned something regarding a machine producing tickets and the goal for the teams was to destroy the machine and cut the tickets of the other team. The team with the highest amount of tickets at the end wins. A simple one round play that can't and shouldn't last long. Although this whole idea would require some dedicated players with time on their hands. But regarding the tickets timer matter I don't think timers would benefit gather as their would likely be many stalemates which is not very "fun".
Apologies for going a bit off topic

 

Yea, I remember that discussion. Was a shame it couldn't continue.
Also, definitely not off-topic.

 

I don't get why there is a flag if there are tickets. Tickets are also stupid because death already have it's cost.

--- Double Post Merged, Feb 3, 2015, Original Post Date: Feb 3, 2015 ---

Also, the idea of gather isn't playing matches with tickets, it's playing matches with people who knows what they are doing!

 

How can I like a post more than once - pls halp.

Therefore removing the only good part of Gather (last stands)?

 

If you play enough you'll see flag caps plenty of times!
To be honest tickets have always been a part of gather, I really don't think it needs to change either.

 

Well, 0 ticket stalemate has always been a thing in classic and nobody whined about it somehow.

 

Maybe because it was classic and not release. People played classic for boring games, people play release for fun exciting games.

 

I think this is about the 50th time this has been brought up, and it always breaks along lines of tickets or timers.

I think nobody has broad consensus on this because both methods have their down sides, which I could bring up for the 51st time, but I'm pretty sure you all know what they are, so I won't.

I haven't played gather, but I have played alpha builds quite a bit, so I am very familiar with the ticket system.

I think that the timer system sucks because it is not influenced at all by players' performance, and the ticket system sucks because it discourages attacking. So, to come up with a truly agreeable solution, you need a plan that:
1.) rewards good play
2.) encourages attacking
3.) penalizes bad play

None of the proposed solutions do all of those, and are just not "outside the box" enough; they propose hybrids of tickets and timers with dubious outcomes.

I don't claim to have the magic solution, but I do know that it will not involve just tickets or just timers. Here's one idea to get the ball rolling:

Combine TTH and CTF into a hybrid for Gather. The flag captures are the win condition, just like normal CTF. You can still win with no halls. The halls could be used as "respawn accelerators". The more halls your team controls, the faster the respawn time. You could still use tickets to make sure the game doesn't drag too badly, but holing up in your last hall will not make for an easy win if your team is waiting on something like 20-30 second respawns.

 

Not even bothering myself to make up a constructive response to that