Finally Flipped

xane

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
1,695
Last weekend I was suffering from a bad cold and was not too happy, this probably compounded the situation.

Basically, I went on a Jolt Server with teamkill turned on and a at some point couple of idiots from the same clan decided to make fun by camping their own bases, i.e. teamkilling until they got autokicked (at around -10 I think it was), and then simply rejoining.

After swapping teams a bit to get away from them, I got mildly pissed off, having wanted to play on a teamkill server for a while, I actually prefer them, especially when the id tags are set to close range :) Abandoned the server entirely in the end.

Later on, I encountered a server late at night which was not fully populated and unfortunately had the auto-balance deactivated, so several games got wildly unbalanced teams after a while, sometimes to a margin of 2:1. I started making a habit of looking at the teams and swapping, trying to encourage others to do so. The team balance usually became immediately obvious when one side started to rapidly lose all its flags.

The extreme case is when one team is left with one (uncappable) spawn point and less players, and the other team starts to "extreme spawncamp", for example by driving tanks into the spawn or just saturating it with artillery or aircraft fire. This is utterly pointless unless you badly need to raise your personal score.

Iwo Jima it happened again to the American side, the boats got sunk and we are left with the beach flag, two bastards had driven their tanks down to the beach and a few more were wandering up and down killing everyone who spawns instantly, this was in addition to the MG nests covering the beach.

It was at this point I flipped out.

I swapped sides and started to block one of the tanks by jumping up and down front of it, forcing him to move and lose his peachy spawncamping position, giving the newly spawned a chance. Incidently it was a player who poo-poo'ed my suggestion that the spawn camping was getting a bit irritating, I could see he was gunning for a 100 score, he was at around 40 or so.

It was so lame on my part to do it, maybe I should have just left instead, this is what I will do next time.

On reflection, I considered what happened in the previous situation, where lamers were teamkilling for kicks. The fact is they did so at the expense of ruining a game for others. In this respect I think extreme spawn camping a single spawn point by a numerically superior side is probably just as imposing on player enjoyment, for both teams actually, unless you're the one in the tank on the beach.

Discuss ?
 

throdgrain

FH is my second home
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
7,197
As of today I am (i believe) a admin for the Jolt Battlefield servers.
This will happen a lot less I hope :)
 

Darthshearer

Can't get enough of FH
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
1,585
Nice one Throddy :)

I hate playing on any servers where people will not llok at the teams and think Hmmm they need a player I will join and help them.

Its the same in CS I always press autojoin. on a map like Azzy or Italy, you will always getting some nub joining T's even though it could be well stacked!

Does my head in :(
 

adams901

Can't get enough of FH
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
430
All of what you have mentioned is covered in the jolt *server rules, like you I prefer Friendly Fire Servers on with Tag Distance set to low, for me this makes things more challenging and prevents a server full of people running round with no tactics and shooting anything that moves (unless they are a Team Killer).

On the Jolt Battlefield: Vietnam servers I'm sure you will be pleased to know that I have set them so Friendly tags can be seen from a view distance of 200 and enemy tags can be seen from a view distance of 100. What this means is, the enemy can actually hide behind something without their name tag showing through it miles away, and friendly units will be seen before an enemy unit is (as it should be).

Auto Balance can be annoying, specially if new players join and you are the one who ends up being kicked over to the other side, I personally think they should make it so the newest players are auto swapped. We currently have Smart Balance on, if a team gets more than 3 players extra then the server will turn on auto balance, even the teams and then turn itself off again, it seems to have worked quite well so far.

Spawn Camping is a topic that seems to be brought up a lot and can never be agreed on, some people complain when you camp a capturable spawn points, others think its perfectly acceptable to camp uncapturable spawn points. Some consider sitting in a vehicle on one side of the map and continuously bombarding the enemy base as camping (even though this is a perfectly valid tactic), the best compromise we can come up with is to say, Capturable Spawn points CAN be camped, uncapturable spawn points shouldn't be entered with land vehicles (foot and aircraft are ok)

You know how to get hold of an admin on Jolt, and you know all of us from BW, it wont take 5 mins for us to jump on a server have a look then do what needs to be done.



*While playing on our servers we ask that you follow the rules below, failure to do so could result in your removal from the server.

1 - Do not purposely destroy friendly vehicles

2 - Do not spam chat or radio messages.

3 - Do not use abusive or racist names.

4 - Do not abuse or verbally attack anyone.

5 - Do not camp within an enemy uncappable base.

6 - Do not purposely team kill or team wound.

7 - Do not cheat or use game specific exploits.

8 - Do not impersonate an admin.
 

xane

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
1,695
The teamkilling was on a Jolt server, the extreme spawn camping was not.

How do you define an "uncapturable" spawn point ? On Omaha and Iwo Jima the beach flag is capturable but only once by the Allies, so does that count ?

I'm okay with regular "spawn camping", I think that is a legitimate tactic, after all on Iwo Jima the beach is deliberately covered to excess by a few MG points plus the Coastal Gun as well, but stuff like running a tank onto it is definitely not on.
 

xane

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
1,695
As far as auto-balancing priority is concerned, I'd think that the player with the highest score should go over. After all he is most often the one benefitting from the imbalance in the first place !
 

Cask

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 27, 2003
Messages
653
Makes me sad that the BW subs servers didn't work out because you prolly wouldn't get stuff like that going on there. Scores are just a pain in the ass, I wish you could disable your own score in games just to be free from the stigma of having a crappy ratio at the end of the map. Might help pubs be a little less business like and let more people be silly and have some fun.

Online games getting more populark now so clowns (no offense Clown) on servers are just gonna be more common. Solution is to give more people like me kick/ban powers and let us sort it out :D
 

Athan

Resident Freddy
Joined
Dec 24, 2003
Messages
1,063
On Iwo Jima I consider the beach spawn fair game. If a team hasn't managed to defend the carrier well, they get what they deserve. The US carrier even has *GOOD* field of view on the AA guns.

Sure I posted all this before, but anyway.... I'm generally against *ANY* camping of totally (has the 'no' icon overload) spawnpoints. That includes using artillery to fire within the fencing/area of the base. Occasional flyovers are ok I guess, especially if the 'hit' team isn't using the air so your own planes have fuck all to do (again like the carrier, it's the team's own fault). Sniping into it is *NOT* allowed in my book either btw.
For any spawn point that is captureable *ANYTHING* goes. Even sitting in it with tanks but not taking the flag. Again, if that's your only spawn left, you've 'earnt' getting pounded.

To sum up, uncappable bases are off limits. Anything else is fair game in any way.

Btw, that Jolt rule about not destroying friendly vehicles on purpose... what if I blow up a friendly *empty* one that is near as damn it dead, when I can't see any engineers close and know someone might want the respawn of it ? I do that :p.

-Ath
 

Paradroid

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Jan 2, 2004
Messages
645
Last week, I was on an EAUK server and the omaha map restarted (for the second time) and loads of our red team left, leaving the teams 10v20. After numerous shouts from us to balance the teams, one response we got from one of the top blue players was "But they deserted the battlefield!".

heh

:D


It went on like that for the brief 5 mins it took for them to finish the game. What peeps didn't even notice was that out of our remaining 10 players, half were furiously typing "TEAMS!!!" for the entire game, making it 5v20 in reality.

*sigh*

:m00:
 

xane

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
1,695
Athan said:
On Iwo Jima I consider the beach spawn fair game. If a team hasn't managed to defend the carrier well, they get what they deserve. The US carrier even has *GOOD* field of view on the AA guns.

I think you missed my point, it is not about spawn camping per se, but also when the team is badly unbalanced. I totally agree that the Iwo Jima and Omaha beachs are _supposed_ to be spawn camped.

So, if you are Axis on Iwo Jima, and the beach flag is the only Allied one left and you have too many people, do you (a) swap sides or (b) grab a tank and head for the beach to join in ? The latter IMO is abusing the game and raising your own tally to the expense of others enjoyment.

Don't get me wrong, on Omaha as Axis I'm straight into the left hand Coastal Gun and I know exactly where to aim to hit the ship, it's their bloody fault if they don't move, but I wouldn't do it when Axis have more players, I'd swap.
 

Athan

Resident Freddy
Joined
Dec 24, 2003
Messages
1,063
Oh yes, agreed, if the teams are unbalanced, people need to swap.

Although don't get fooled into thinking XvY has to have X == Y to be balanced. There's some maps that benefit from a slight imbalance in the teams. Like DC's The Lost Village is better with slightly less on Opposition (else it's too easy to SAM the incoming helis lots). Omaha Beach could use a few less on Axis than Allies too on vanilla bf.

-Ath
 

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