Vice War 8: Renegade's Strife has finally set sail, travelled its course and reached its termination point. Congratulations to the Red Team for winning this year's Vice War, and very well played Blue Team, for doing your best against the odds.
Thanks to everyone who participated, we had 135 of our 198 approved registrees returning, 278 registrations overall.
Now we close the curtains on another year end's event. Some things to note and improve upon:
- When I had created this map, I had aimed for some symmetry, but that didn't work out as the mountains are asymmetric, so to balance that I had made the shorter paths ridiculously harder to climb i.e. Red had some of the shittiest slopes you could make for a game. It worked to some degree, to balance the time it would take to reach the bases, however, the oversight was traversing on foot.
Unlike vehicles, your running speed is unaffected by any angle of altitude so the condition is, you can either run up the mountain or you can't. Added to the complication that I couldn't map the default vehicles at spawn, it made a natural imbalance in favour of Red to the following bases:
- Airport (quicker for Red on foot, equal length of time with a vehicle)
- Cargo Ship (quicker for Red on foot, equal length of time with a vehicle)
Blue had the advantage to only the Mining Sites.
By how much? Roughly 20 to 30 seconds Red on Blue and vice versa. Wouldn't be much of a problem if the bases had an even distribution of Capture Points but this was not the case, Cargo Ship carried the most weight, Airport the least. So while we all had our fun, I will admit to that honest mistake regarding topological balance.
- The jitter system, works as intended, however, an oversight from ever since Vice War 7 with it is that it does not quite account for WiFi users. Most people that were affected really just needed a wired connection as WiFi is unreliable where ping is concerned, but does it cause the huge problems that a similar spiking on wired would cause? That was the debate between me and the staff. We agree that its a needed system in general, but the severity of WiFi unreliability remains to be properly tested.
Also of note was how to deal with the jitter system when it comes to vehicles, you can stop driving a land vehicle and keep it still, how to handle boats and worse of all helicopters and planes? I think most kicks happened to people already in a helicopter blasting helicannon or the Rustler spitting out bombs.
- The forced /help command, it was a good idea with a not so good implementation. Telling the player through the main chat how to exit the mode after they've finished reading was very foolish of us, so many complaints on how to exit. It wasn't a bad thing for such a new system, but things we would've liked to do like actively show vehicles, prep images and sprites and so on, time wouldn't allow.
- Vehicular Points was probably the most underused of all the Resource Points. And in general, I felt that the option to also buy the vehicles via cash would've been a good option to employ, especially in the dire situations where one team has a bunch of Planes and Sea Sparrows controlling the sky. This Vice War gave out a lot of money, so if that was implemented, the pace could've kept up that much stronger.
- Let's say I made a base to give to the community, of a jungle style, I would redo this base as a flatland, I think that would've worked out a lot better in terms of true dynamics of hiding in the bushes, guerilla tactics to bases, shooting out Planes and Sea Sparrows with a lot more cover etc. This Vice War showed the possibility to make something worthwhile in that sense, and change the thought process of the VC:MP playerbase somewhat from the linear style we've been using for years now.
But all in all I liked the dynamic and flow. Whilst getting killed by a bunch of Sea Sparrows was kinda annoying, I liked the balancing act of it where one team would dominate the sky and the base for a moment then it flips to the other team after we destroyed all air vehicles and it switches again after sometime etc. At no point did a team truly dominated the Airport in that fashion. Although I didn't record much footage, it was fun bombing you all, watching a team of people run in and then just drop my bomb with a quick airstrike, fighting other Sea Sparrows in the air taking them down to secure bases, watching all the RPGs flying across my face, it was very interesting indeed.
As you know or should know by now, I'm stepping down as Director, Mapper and Artist of any further Vice Wars, and in general any further works in VC:MP. I've done Vice War 5, 6, 7 and now 8. What gonna happen?
Welcome your new Director WiLsOn. He will be handling the concept, scripting, artwork, progression and launch of Vice War 9. What's it gonna be like? We'll see.
The Portal, once improved will continue as the new hub where registration will occur, though it will not have as much requirements as this Vice War did. The Portal is aimed to be a centralized zone you can visit anytime for every Vice Wars we've ever released, just not fully realized yet. Some improvements we hope to make are:
- Better handling of requirements
- Better handling of announcements, player status and so on via private messaging the forum accounts of participants
- More control to the participant where it regards to changing teams or nickname at will (so no more change nick / team topic to post in)
We going into 2020. Let's at least make it easier for ourselves.
Thank you all so much for participating and thank you, every member of my staff for helping me get this project done and actualized. Out with a bang
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