Ok boys and girls, I wish to make another rant but this time it has a Poll!! check out the pretty buttons.

The Gist of this thread is this: I think we're a bit soft and I want us to be hard! (in a non innuendo kind of way). Therefore I am advocating that perhaps some people like me would like to see one (just one) of the official map servers be changed to a long play server, thus giving us all the flavours of the TF2 rainbow all under one fuzzy and warm Hampshire HEavies roof (i.e. long play, short play, custom, and 24/7 whoaaa! check out that portfolio of FuN!).

I think we're soft because we play lots of quick games, with lots of quick spawn times, and when we play matches we'll be playing full length spawn. While this leads to people seeing a lot of quantity of play time, I am suggesting that perhaps it is not of intense quality as the game designers may have intended.

The major thing people are commenting about on the new hydro maps and on the practice we had, was the slower respawns. But rather that being annoyed just because you had to wait longer, the main complaint was that it forced people to work together more instead of rushing off solo and people were getting annoyed at other people who couldn't see that and weren't helping them with the group effort. I think that as we play more on long play servers as a community, people will start sticking together more through positive feedback (you rush you die, you have mates you win. over and over and over again), and we'll basically get better and better.

Now the reason I think long play is important, is when we travel out from the confines and boundaries of the HH community to visit other scoundrals so we can challenge them to the right of calling each other weenies, we must be prepared inside and out to regular old vanilla flavoured TF2, where the spawn times can be upto 30 seconds. But during those 30 seconds there is plenty to do: check out your other team mates and figure out where on the map you need to get to when alive, try and skin up as quickly as possible without getting any green stuck in your keyboard, scratch, fart, and general touching of one's self. Its aaaall win win win as far as i can see? *grin*

And also i believe that these maps have been specifically balanced by the game designers to have these spawn times. They spent a lot of time on it. It is no coincidence that on granary if you're pushed back you have a 30 second spawn time and if your winning you have 18s or so. The game designers WANTed to see progressive game play, not annoying stalemates and quagmires.

And then as for having longer server rotations I think you need that hand in hand with the longer spawn times for a couple of reasons:
A> If you're dead a lot you want to have a chance to play more on a map and show the other team what you're worth.
B> more progressive play will probably mean more completed victories on dustbowl and hydro, and people would like the chance to play both sides to thier finish (i know im not alone in loving the final section of dustbowl. SOO hard to Push, SOO fun to defend, but all a good laugh).

Now with longer server rotations comes a problem: boredom. And it's true, I agree. Things can become a bit stale after a while. So i have a couple of suggestions I think we can implement to sort that out:
A> We make sure to implement a rockthevote thing so that if people are unhappy we can change map (i know its working on the servers now but i think that needs to be tweeked a bit cause of strange custom servers and the like) but we should make sure most people want to change rather than half that it is now. Perhaps 2/3 to succeed?
B> Have a voted shuffle? Sometimes one team might completely dominate another, and while people might claim stacking, I dont think it's that easy to imply that one person or another is more responsibil for the win/loss of a team etc. Now i know there is a command on the admin mod we use that can shuffle the teams. I think we could set that up so everyone could vote for it to happen and hopefully give different results to the new game play. I think this is possible with our current mod but really need to ask people more familiar with the admin mod we're using


Ok so what do people think; shall we change one of the normal servers to a longplay (well normal play really) server?

Please vote on the pole, and comment on the thread with your ideas.

Thanks,

Innocent

/end_rant

I like the idea and enjoy both long and short spawns on different maps (depending on my mood). I strongly suggest, though, that we keep at least one server with fast spawn as that seems to be something that pulls in the average player, not everyone has such refined taste and alot of people simply want a quick 'TF2 fix'.

On the lines of fair teams, this is something that has been bothering me quite a bit. As mentioned in the HH commandments, when i enter a game, if one team is heavily dominating the other, I will pluck for the lesser team and usually get my ass kicked as a result. So some kind of shuffle for when things are getting REALLY out of hand would be welcome (like after several maps with one team totally dominating). I think too many people log on and sit and wait for a place in the winning team. Maybe its just in my nature to help the underdog but if we can all try to balance the teams just a little it makes the game an actual game and not just a massacre, which isnt really fun for anyone. Indeed you cant blame the odd 1 or 2 good players working together on a team but when I see an entire side made up of people with clan tags and the other side avatarless no scorers it gets a bit depressing- especially in the HH where fair play is paramount.

So all in all im in agreement Innocent... just caught the Ranting bug from ya!

oh, and here here!

bumping this as we have like 30 odd views and only 13 votes.

VOTE VOTE VOTE ya bastaards!

I voted

I voted too

"Rock the vote"

Voting is fun.

Has this already happened on one of the servers? People only seemed to notice the long map times and noone commented on the long spawns (though I did fins it tricky to adjust, it might have just been the map being Well I think- tricky once one team is in the lead to pull back)...

It varies it a bit and makes things interestiing so I am all up for that.

cool...so basically the one person we had who said no (i dont know who you are but i'll find you!!! muahaahhhahah) seems to have changed their mind and it all looks pretty positive.

Gonna ask minty and gimpster if we can set up a trail period on one of the servers and also (if you two are reading this) can we change the name to have [Long play] or something in the server name, just so people know which type of server they're playing on and can make their mind up of what they like playing.

Longer spawn times = Yes. This will add more importance and demand to some classes who shine less on fast respawn servers. I'm also all for longer map rotations. I really hate Granary though.