Gota wrote:Interesting.Do they get played?I don't remember ever encountering one.
If these exist It would be cool to have the Lobbies visually show the room has an upper rank limit so new players are more exposed to this concept and learn of it.
[fi]Autohost4 i believe. its played pretty often, but theres usually one smurf that screws the balance each game
Convince moderators smurfing should be against the rules officially.
Sure not all smurfs will be caught but if its against the rules and smurfs get punished once in a while there will be much much less smurfing.
Spring IS a sandbox. Smart people come and make some cool new features, they get bored or stop having enough time to work on Spring. rinse, repeat. Nothing more can be expected, Spring is just a hobby.
As great as RTS's as many of Springs mods and games are, it is for this reason that there will never be a big competitive community. Spring just doesn't have the organization needed for this. The kind of organization you'd need probably isn't even appropriate for a open source game.
DavetheBrave wrote:Spring IS a sandbox. Smart people come and make some cool new features, they get bored or stop having enough time to work on Spring. rinse, repeat. Nothing more can be expected, Spring is just a hobby.
Neddie wrote:We can do it on a small scale game by game, but this is not something which will or should be addressed at the level of the engine.
It can and should be addressed at the level of the lobby system... If there was some simple button to play a ladder game, or something like that, could help a bit. Having so many games under the same lobby makes it kinda hard to promote anything.
And kinda hard to make a big competitive community from small scale up. If you don't have a competitive playerbase then competitive players usually aren't interested.
competition has nothing to do with the type of game. Spring has almost everything u need for a good competitive game.
all its lacking is some form of ranking system and easy to setup ladder.
it could also do with some form of structured spectating system, which allows only one person to draw on the map and do commentary etc.
also, the casual community is always bigger than the competitive communities, and spring has a fairly small community so the competition is naturally small aswell.
thelawenforcer wrote:competition has nothing to do with the type of game. Spring has almost everything u need for a good competitive game.
Sure the engine has but dunno how well a lot of the games would fare as they are - main issue is a lot of game devs trying to tone down significance of micro (ok mostly they are kinda unsuccesful but anyway)
Responding to the original topic I think Spring has exploits that will be shamelessly exploited in a really competitive environment. I'm sure no game wants to be turned into exploit wars.
By Spring I mean Spring as the engine, any game made with Spring will have trouble plugging all the exploits. (Or they will have to use a cut-down set of Spring's features).
For example with no external lua a player can deduce if a dot that has just entered radar coverage is the same unit as any unit that has entered radar coverage previously. An attack order can be placed on every unit to enter radar, this order is visible on that specific unit even if it leaves and enters radar.
The above example can be solved by not using Spring's radar system and may not even be called an exploit. There are others though which would all have to be fixed or redefined as features.
So what? Just like TA, once the games become competitive, exploit will be embraced as part of the gameplay.
Nano-shielding, sparkling, line bombing, pelican immunity to missile, hawk dancing, multi-reclaiming, and that's only from the top of my head: These are clearly engine bugs (or script bug or 3do bugs...). They were not intended as part of the balance by Cavedog developpers. Yet, because they were never patched, people learn to use them, to build strategy around them, and they are now such an integrate part of TA gameplay that the competitive online gaming crowd would uprise if you'd fix them.
Trying to fix every exploit is the wrong approach. What is needed for competitive play is a stable game, where bugs remains unfixed. The exploit will actually add depth to the game, making it more hard-core and more appealing to the competitive players, what nub call unfair exploits, the elite players will consider advanced technics, requiries skills, and the use of which makes all the different between casu and PR0.
Of course, you need your game to be rich enough that not a single exploit dominate everything. But even if one exploit completly throw askew the balance, does not mean it's a bad thing. For instance, a bug in the engine (or in the 3do) make it so that in TA, guided missiles always miss swimming pelican. That make pelican the best naval units. That completly re-arrange the sea balance of TA, making pels the dominant sea unit, which it was never meant to be. And yet, sea battles remains interesting, highly technical, a true test of skills in TA, which complex balancing interaction between crusies, pels, skeets, ... Line bombing means a good player can end the game in the first minutes with his first bomber. Yes, it's that powerful. Yet people learn to live with, to counter it, to recover from it, to protect against it, and now it just is one of the classic TA opening. Hawk dancing is pretty much unstoppable. Nothing can resist the volley of a screen-full of hawks, turrets are blown up before getting a chance to aim. Yet, it just become one possible game ender against many, a viable strategy in certain conditions, that is not always the best or fastest route.
Bugs are not a problem... Do you track units like that often, how useful has it proven? Widgets available freely is a much bigger problem if you want to list things which might hamper competitiveness. I don't think anyone would mind though if you no longer could see ground deformation outside los, thats the only kind of problematic thing that doesnt involve widgets.
I don't think it's clear at all if most of those things zw listed can be considered bugs anyway... It's not a bug just because the designer didn't think about the subject.
And illegal games on the server doesn't make it harder to promote things, unless you yourself get too stuck thinking about the subject.
