Tasty 500: FFA Tourney

[plastik]

it also sucks respawning and getting fragged 10x in a row...you cant really call that skill since the person spawning has no way of protecting/defending theirselves.

[{TNP}Dukie]

I think that sucks also, but you should have, after the weeding out game, all the players that aren't going to camp a spwan pad.

We all know that the span pad campers always get more that we want them to, but they rarely ever win

[[BTF] Reflex]

Everything looks kewl to me,

[plastik]

May I suggest city64 for the map?  this map kicks ass, and is plenty big enough for everyone, and wont allow for much of the 'bad' camping. Lots of open space, and plenty of weapons/ammo.

[MaJiKSluG>FAS>]

the larger map u have and the more people hogging bandwidth = more lag.... another good reason for breaking it up into two brackets RANDOMLY CHOSEN.  believe me there is skill involved in going around a map like dm8 and fragging people off the pads in DIFFERENT locations. theres no skill in sitting in the corner by the rocket launcher and aiming left firing and then right firing ad infinitum.  u can play someone good 1 v 1 and he can pick u off 4 or 5 times in completely different locales on a large map- theres skill involved in that.  the skill is flawless movement and map knowledge.  granted there will be more people involved in this thing but whatever.  temporary invuln will definately add time to what already will be an epic.  perhaps u only have 20 people interested - then u could have only one server.  just my opinions.....

[{TNP}Dukie]

listen..to..heem...

[plastik]

why would u think it's skill to frag someone who has no means of defending themselves?  the spawn protect only lasts a few seconds, and im sure they cant reach a weapon by then.  Spawn them off the pad, they may not be equipped or packin' but atleast they have a running chance...and that my friend...could be added skill to hunt them down before they can get equipped.  and added skill for them to try and escape your wrathe! no disrespect intended.

The only skill I can see is that of AIM...knowing the maps is a skill, but, IF someone plans on regularly spawn raping on pads they pass by, it should not be allowed.  Spawn protect will do more good than bad.  If people have fair skills, spawn protection shouldn't matter either way, because then there is added skill in fragging them as soon as it wears off.

[console]

the larger map u have and the more people hogging bandwidth = more lag....

Not to be contrarian, but in my experience the larger the map the fewer lag complaints I hear.  Unless the large map has one giant central room... But what I mean is, I tend to hear more lag complaints with smaller maps where tons of players/entities are crowded into a small space.

Also, the server should have plenty of bandwidth to handle the players...

Regards,

[plastik]

my thoughts exactly quadz, this server can handle it, and I don't believe map size should matter with the bandwidth it uses, also smaller maps may crash/give errors due to make 2 players sending their coordinates as being in the same exact position at the same time if it is crowded, or some other unknown phenomenon in small spaced maps, though, I don't know if that would have any effect on the servers stability, it could be a possibility, maybe not, just talking out of my ass.  As of now we only use 50% of the bandwidth allocated to this servers per month, so we have plenty free bandwidth imo.

[console]

my thoughts exactly quadz, this server can handle it, and I don't believe map size should matter with the bandwidth it uses, also smaller maps may crash/give errors due to make 2 players sending their coordinates as being in the same exact position at the same time if it is crowded, or some other unknown phenomenon in small spaced maps, though, I don't know if that would have any effect on the servers stability, it could be a possibility, maybe not, just talking out of my ass.

It's mostly just the more players potentially visible to each other, the more data the server has to send to each client about all the other clients in visual range.  In other words, if you have only two players in one "room", the server can focus on just making sure each of them knows where the other is moving.  If you have ten players in one room, the server has to send more data to make sure each of the ten is continually updated with the positions of the other nine in visual range (not to mention the additional bullets flying around in the crowded area.)

I'm not meaning to make too big a deal about it - we've seen vanilla handle 32 players fairly frequently, with few problems.  R1Q2 server does a good job managing the load where the older id netcode would have balked.  (More info at http://tastyspleen.net/quake/forums/index.php?topic=1951.0 )

As of now we only use 50% of the bandwidth allocated to this servers per month, so we have plenty free bandwidth imo.

Yes, although it's really the "instantaneous" bandwidth that matters.  We're on a 10mbit uplink to the switch.  But yes, the quake servers are far from saturating that.  If I do a high-speed network transfer between tastyspleen.net and my off-site backup server, and saturate our 10mbps link, then we start to see pings go up in quake2.  (Curently to mitigate this, I cap my network backups at about 500kbytes/sec, leaving enough bandwidth to not affect the q2 servers.  In the long run, I'm looking into a kernel patch which would allow the server to make all the q2 packets highest priority, so I should be able to run backups at max speed without affecting the q2 servers at all.)

But anyway... yes, I'm confident we have enough bandwidth to run this tourney.  We'll run out of CPU before bandwidth.


Regards,

quadz

[naymlis]

i had a chance to play q2dm18 in a free for all and i dont really think its the best map choice for this event. one of the reasons is the edge side has alot of flaws like some boxes are bigger than they're supposed to be and glitches on the chaingun stairs. I realized that if we play this map I'm almost certain everyone's going to be on the edge side.. edge is alot easier to rack up kills fast than warehouse and if u plan on winning you're going to want to go to edge and when everyones at edge, whats the reason to go to the other side? i suggest find a better map, ill keep thinkin/lookin

[Punk_FAS]

I personally really like having perhaps 2 qualifier events, then taking the top 5-10 from each of those, and having a final event, which will undoubtedly be filled with better FFA'ers.  This will bring about a bigger challenge at the end, will be more intense, and like in any competitive "sport", you tend to rise to the level of your competition.  So having the top 10-20 Fraggers advance, will ensure a skillful final event.  Also, it has to be a well known map (bringing about the dm1-dm8 suggestions), so it's a map where everybody knows how to get to the weapon of their choice, regardless of where they end up respawning, so there are no advantages in map knowledge.  FFA is about getting a high powered weapon, finding someone else to aim it at ASAP, and puttin em 6 feet under =)  Doing that on a huge map that not everybody is familiar with, is a big detriment to a lot of players I'd imagine.

My suggestions for settings, and why

Weapon Stay - ON - Need to have a weapon to frag

Unlimited Ammo - OFF - Otherwise I'll only use chain =)  Will keep the battles, weapons chosen, varied.

Powerups - Quad/Invuln - OFF - Again, not everybody is a quad-whore master, or has an actualy quad timer, and since this is a tourney, a race to rack up fast frags, a skilled player constantly quadded, is going to make the match one sided.  I would like to see some close scores at the end, and actually encourage a fight till the end, not someone to gain a huge, Insurmountable lead, and discourage further particpation from others.

Falling Damage - ON - Let the 3D parts of the map play a part.  If you chose to fall from a great height to get to the action, you should arrive slightly damaged (ala my good pal Majikslug on DM8 from above hyper spawn, down to lower SS, I hate when he does that =P).  And will penalize people for being totally reckless (though chaos can be good at times in FFA  )

Forced Spawn - OFF - No sense having someone being a constant target on a pad, artificially bloating someone's score.

Spawn Protection - ON - But no penalty for shooting a protected player, FFA is twitchy, react as fast as possible, think later, so no point in penalizing someone for that.  Length of spawn protection should be short, 2 seconds I guess would be short, but long enough to discourage true spawn camping.  Also broken by firing gun.

Armor - ON - All armor, with the exception of a power shield of any variety, should be allowed.  Otherwise too many people will be toting rail only, and getting one shot kills constantly.  Armor is just a minor buffer that may give you that advantage to last long enough to take out a better player.

Weapons - BFG IMO should be disabled.  On maps like DM4 (if DM4 is played), actually on DM8 too, or any map with a BFG and a reasonable number of cells (DM2 would not count for example), the BFG will be over-used.  It will be run into an area, find some actual battles going on, rocket vs rocket, and have someone finish the fight for them with one lameo shot of the BFG.

I'd personally like to eliminate that Grenade Launcher too, to cut down on spam.  Such as someone on top of DM1, just spamming nades into the courtyard, or on DM8, literring them on all 3 levels, effectively altering the map to some extent, creating a mine field.  Now standard nades, they fire at a slow enough pace, and actually have enough skill involved, with it being thrown farther the longer you hold the button (before blowing yourself up), etc., to not be totally obnoxious.

Again, I've never thought of FFA as being a stamina event, more of a speed event.  Though on Mage Warehouse, 20 mins on DM8 can be a tad burdensome.  So I prefer the multi-tiered event, like we've done every tourney before.  Have 2, maybe 3 rounds max.  Keep the numbers per game to a smaller amount, maybe 12 max? as a guess.  Then have a final match of the best players, should be quite a hoot the final one.

[pantaloons]

Punk,

I like your proposed settings and agree with your reasoning . . . [Edit: haha, damn it, i see your final draft has more paragraphs... well i agreed with everything up through the "Armor ON" paragraph!   ]

Well. . . .

[10zx]

Too many players will mean that it is a blaster-fest.

[10zx]

I would like to participate, But I will actually be watching everyone playing, to make sure everything is going smoothly, and take some demo's of others POV.
thanx for the interest!

Regards,

-plastik

everyone needs to record a demo of the fragfest so you can watch them after for any hack possibilities.