HB, New Modes, and Normal Mode

[IlPalazzo]

Let's try to get another discussion going about HB, possible new modes, and making normal better, as I think we can all agree the last one was more of a flame war than a decent discussion. Feel free to post any suggestions or questions involving Normal, New Modes, and the removal of HB.

When I have time I'll edit this post with some relevant information from prior threads.

Goals/Questions
- How to make "Normal" more attractive to the majority of players. Is it too slow?
- What is imbalanced in HB - and what can done to remedy these imbalances while keeping the fast-pace it has?

Some Imbalances with HB:

Just to mention some of the most obvious facts:
*You can change Tank/get hulls at a much lower lvl becouse of the additional gold.
*This results in a worse possibilty to use temporal advantages against people waiting for a stronger tank/hull, becouse the length of the advantage-time window is decreased.
*Same argument can be made with porter and the opportunity window with porter against no porter being shorter and any other temporal advantage.
*This implies different early-mid game balance in strategies. For example: artillery shot of the demolisher is way more effective in normal than in hb.
*Total weapon damage in comparison to Creepstats differ from normal mode, neglecting their difference in creeping capacity in hb (and/or shifting it towards different weapons).
*This Gold-to-Creep-stats difference influences all types of playstyles depending on force upgrades, namely: factories, troop command, troop command center, mines (item and demolisher), orbital control and bomb.
*It influences the defensive capacities of towers and barricades as well, making them weaker in general.
*Force Upgrades differ, shifting late game tank balance towards tanks without requirements, especially Frost Robot.
*As the importance of force upgrades decrease, the importance of control points decreases as well.
*Control Point Teleport becomes cheaper in terms of creeps-to-kill, making a more defensive orientated (camping) playstyle more viable.
*Offensive Factories become weaker due to the lower armor upgrades.

Possible Improvements to the old HB:
- Increasing troop strength: To make creeps more balanced in comparison to tanks.
- Increase the interval of upgrades: To make creeps
- Increase the XP rate: To have them scale with the Tanks/Equipment.
- Change the dynamics of Tank Bounty: To lessen the detriment of having newer players on the team who die often.


To prevent the same problem from happening again, let's lay down some rigid rules for both sides:

1 - No personal attacks. - No snide remarks, name-calling, mocking, etc... Calling people "noobs," "homos," "liar," etc. from either side will not be accepted.
2 - No accusation of intent.- Don't pin wrongdoing on anyone. If you think some alternative could have done to achieve the goal in a more fitting way, state it - as it would only be beneficial for the discussion than simply calling someone "evil" or "dishonest."
3 - No arguments or analogies related to real-world politics/history/racism. - Let's avoid a flame war... Everyone should be mature enough to make an argument without diving into this.

Anyone who doesn't follow these rules will have their posts edited (text highlighted in red and dashed out), being moved to off-topic, or deletion. Any post that violates these ground rules, in part or full, WILL be dealt with one of the actions mentioned above. That said, you are free to repost any constructive part of your post on this thread. You are encouraged to dispute a point if you disagree with it (even the ones summarized below), but remember to not violate the rules above.

[Saiyuki]

lemme just throw some ideas/suggestions in here:
# increase control point teleport costs to 200 Gold: reduce cptp's to the needed minimum
# disable some tanks ( trader + exploder ): some tanks are simply too hard to play or get too much of an advantage by the huge gold flow
# enforce tank requirements: high end tanks can't be bought too soon, team needs to get armor level
# enable tanks only after "req. armor level" minutes, if available: move the chance to get a high end tank a bit further away
# add an upgrade ( dummy item ) cooldown of 60 seconds for armor and weapon upgrades: disabling/reducing the fast pace to get higher tanks if ext.req. is active
# towers and troops takes 10% less damage on weapons/skills: a bit harder to get 'easy' creep gold
# increase base hp, dmg and armor by 15% of troops and towers: buffing the creeps
# enable conquest victory: fast chance to win, reducing the base defending part of the enemy team.

[Prog]

Some personal thoughts, which don't reflect any devteam discussion/devteam statement and should be seen as a tentative thesis:

The underlying problem of hb is not the balance, are not the feeder problems, etc. The problem has to be seen from a game developing point of view: The status of hb made it hard (impossible?) for developers to increase the map quality. Why?
It will allways be impossible to balance difference modes in a way creating equal gameplay, therefor in each mode imbalances might (will) occur. Every change to the game will have different impacte on each game mode. By focusing on one mode, namely normal, it's possible to get this mode to a state of balance (from one point of view) which is acceptable, but all other modes won't be taken into consideration - making them what we might call 'funmodes' or 'alternative modes'. The task for those modes is with the focus on normal newly set: They need to exemplify their being as a 'funmode' or 'alternative mode'. They need to express their non-balance. When this doesn't happen problems for the game developers are the result: players playing mostly one of those non-balanced modes complain about gameplay problems in them (you can see that for example here: http://btanks.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=2546). Without knowing which modes who plays and with people playing multiple modes the feedback is given in a way which can hardly be sufficient for developers. This problem is intrinsic in any non-normal mode becoming as popular as hb (it can also be found in the mode refered by the hcl 'pro', tho in a far smaller scale).

It is possible to have bt as a closer to normal balance gamemode, but the problem will still exist. Hb needs a way to exemplify it's non-balance, the 'alternative-mode' essence. There are different ways to react to this problem, the one which had been chosen was found in a democratic way in the devteam discussions and is a viable one, tho not my personal favorite.

[Tom-Ace]

I do like my posted idea of 200% creep bounty and only 100% tank bounty, some may say that is can make creep only weapons to imbalanced, well other then the bow most creep only guns are never used.
Also creep only weapons cannot hit buildings/tanks so if you are against a good team of rushers you're bows will not save you.

On a different note, what is the game speed of bt?

[Althend]

I would rather suggest changing the game speed by making each "round" to 4 min and not 5 min. Creep would spawn faster, money too and it would reduce the game tim from 20% :p

[Battlemaniac]

normal mode is fine

but to make it more fun just speed up the game by:

more cash all around anything you kill
higher bounties
<up to here is what people liked about HB>

<now add this to balance the game>
faster creeps production
more HP and all buildings
Towers should have more damage, a decent enough damage to hurt a Titan

also fix, or widen up even more the in and exit of the control points, people still gets stuck if some one builds a tower or factory there, or even when the Tree guardian sits there.

[IlPalazzo]

Some personal thoughts, which don't reflect any devteam discussion/devteam statement and should be seen as a tentative thesis:

The underlying problem of hb is not the balance, are not the feeder problems, etc. The problem has to be seen from a game developing point of view: The status of hb made it hard (impossible?) for developers to increase the map quality. Why?
It will allways be impossible to balance difference modes in a way creating equal gameplay, therefor in each mode imbalances might (will) occur. Every change to the game will have different impacte on each game mode. By focusing on one mode, namely normal, it's possible to get this mode to a state of balance (from one point of view) which is acceptable, but all other modes won't be taken into consideration - making them what we might call 'funmodes' or 'alternative modes'. The task for those modes is with the focus on normal newly set: They need to exemplify their being as a 'funmode' or 'alternative mode'. They need to express their non-balance. When this doesn't happen problems for the game developers are the result: players playing mostly one of those non-balanced modes complain about gameplay problems in them (you can see that for example here: http://btanks.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=2546). Without knowing which modes who plays and with people playing multiple modes the feedback is given in a way which can hardly be sufficient for developers. This problem is intrinsic in any non-normal mode becoming as popular as hb (it can also be found in the mode refered by the hcl 'pro', tho in a far smaller scale).

It is possible to have bt as a closer to normal balance gamemode, but the problem will still exist. Hb needs a way to exemplify it's non-balance, the 'alternative-mode' essence. There are different ways to react to this problem, the one which had been chosen was found in a democratic way in the devteam discussions and is a viable one, tho not my personal favorite.

I agree that the game should be balanced around one mode, because attempting to balance multiple modes simultaneously would be a nightmare if not impossible to solve when modes have different attributes required to be balanced. However, I still disagree that popular fun modes are necessarily an intrinsic bad thing for the community or even bad for it’s developers. To the contrary, I think they're essential to increasing map quality and understanding of what players are looking for.

Over the past year new tanks and weapons have been pushed out the hooplah – and still are. Yet at the same time, the gold flow into the game has remained the same. Some players were simply sick of playing the same set of tanks and using the same set of weapons in normal, when some of the upper tier equipment was sitting on the shelf waiting to be used. A wide reach of strategies are seldom touched upon in a typical normal game because the low gold influx and the limited gametime (which is another issue) which simply didn’t permit them to come into play for a majority of players. The only time I see a tier 4 tank in normal is when a game runs near or past 1:00. I haven’t seen a Swarm of Chaos or Frost Lasers yet. With the game set-up now, only a handful of good pub games and a niche of pro games ever reach this point. With the drive to shorten up the gametime – this number will go down.

HB, even if it was imbalanced, showed that some players’ desired a gameplay shift. HB shouldn’t have been taken as a bad sign of where the community was going, but a valuable indicator on how the game should continue evolving to become better. If the proper changes were made to make normal more attractive for these players, but left HB in – “High Bounty” would have become ‘too much bounty’ just like 10k/30k feels like too much starting gold to the average player now. It would still be played, yes, but the mode would slip into obscurity like any other fun mode.

With High Bounty (even though it’s gone now), we least we now know what is unintentially changing when we increase gold flow… Creeps become weaker, player skill level becomes more important, breakers/nets/teleporters are easier to obtain, etc. We would not have that luxury, had HB not been in game and if players merely said “this game feels too slow.” We would have likely found these problems anyway, but by taking steps in the dark with normal mode. So it's not all bad.

[scron2]

I think the developers took a step in the right direction by nerfing HB and calling it alternative. There is no real way to test this "new HB" otherwise because if the old HB existed nobody would play (and test) the new mode. Now that we can get some reasonable feedback, this can help us to understand the concepts of HB that needed to be tweaked for optimal performance. Or "HB elements" that can be safely tweaked into ALT mode...

The tank bounties, as I mentioned before needed scaling, and the new system seems to fit that decently. However as many people have mentioned around here the creep bounties are still relatively low, I'd guess maybe a 30% buff on normal mode as it is currently for ALT mode. This makes for a more even paced game that is closer to the normal mode. Perhaps upping the creep gold slightly and a minor adjustment to tank bounty would suffice to the players who want more gold into the game.

As for towers and stuff: Yes they are cheaper and weaker because the players have more access to gold. About the only solution I can think of here is to increase the buy-back cost if it is too easy to buy them back in HB. Or give lane/base towers natural regen of some sort, like 10-20 hp/sec.

I don't think that CP-TP should cost any gold really. That's kind of a non-issue for me.

My final issue with this game is the 5-min gold as we are all aware of this, I think that players need to be rewarded for their actions. The gold compensations for the 2 marines that spawn should be counted as gold for the team that captures the CP, as in for each marine that didn't spawn against them, they get the gold and the XP distributed every 5 mins (that I'm ok with). What I'm not interested in is when your creeps kill a unit, you should not recover that gold in any manner whatsoever unless a hero unit or tower is destroyed and if either of the 2 are destroyed, the gold should be immediately distributed among the team or given to the tank that made the next-to-last hit. A good play should be immediately rewarded because the gold means more now than it does 4 mins from the time an event occurs.

These are just a few things I thought that were necessary to mention here and it's good to see a topic like this.

[Tom-Ace]

Will there be any changes to game modes in the next version, or do you not have enough time to implement any into 8.68?

[Paladon]

There will be changes.

[karate_kid_x]

Here's a suggestion:

Read the articles at sirlin.net so that you can realize that there was nothing wrong with the old hb to begin with.

and then bring it back.

[mooneye]

Bring HB back

[Paladon]

This is really over.
I closed this topic.