Congratulations everyone who were involved in the making of this Vice War
- Advertisers, Graphic Designers & Admissions Crew - look at the stats, you did a damn fine job making a banner, advertising the event and registering everyone. Out of everyone that registered (both Red & Blue; 159 players), 71.7% (114) of them returned to play throughout the 24 hour period. Be damn proud of yourselves
- Developers - look at the graph, I know there is no scale of hours but I can attest that the fall-off point of players was somewhere in the 17 hour period. Outside the remaining 5 hours, the server never fell below 25 people playing, peaking at 47 players at a given moment if I remember correctly. We developed a fine game mode indeed to keep such an interest. Be proud of yourselves too
However there were some challenges that arose that I think needs attention for improvement. Best to get some ideas while our mind is still fresh on this Vice War that occured 4 days ago. Those challenges are:
- Incentives
- Automated Kicks
Now for the incentives, my belief is that players should have been getting paid for capturing bases or driving their securicar home as well as earn points for their team. Maybe I'm just getting rusty but this Vice War was particularly challenging for me to cope with. Of all the Vice Wars I've ever played, this one felt the most limiting in what I could attain to defeat my enemies. aXXo I believe had to come along and gave everyone playing $1000 prior to the server restart at 12 hours. Even if you had a sense of teamwork, if you're doing the damage and someone else is doing the finishes, you find yourself absolutely struggling to attain what you want cuz at the end of the day everyone is selfish with their earned money.
So I'm thinking to both up the competition and to keep players from giving up, we should move to the widespread system of earning cash & points together. So take the Control Centre for example, instead of just earning just 2 points per 2 minutes you can also earn 2 points per 2 minutes and everyone of the team gets $20 every 2 minutes too. Fuel Station? Doubles everything so now 4 points and $40 per 2 minutes, that kinda idea in the next Vice War.
For the automated kicks, aXXo had to remove the scripts in order to keep the server from becoming unstable. But as a result it caused people to question the dignity of the event as admins had to manually kick persons with high ping and/or low fps. At first, admins, including myself, were kicking players once we experienced them in battle. You aren't fighting your teammates, so you can already imagine how this played out as being biased. To mend the issue, some admins had to stop playing and just dedicate their minutes into kicking everyone that had issues. But the feel of biased kicking still persisted with the frame rate kicks as you had to be fighting/seeing the player to know that something is wrong, and many times when the reports go out for someone having low fps, when we check them, their fps had now risen above 20 fps, as such we can't kick them. Loads of further problems and turmoil not mentioned here has been caused and yeah
we have to do something about it, it can't persist in the next iteration, it's the root of a lot of issues currently. I'm no big scripter but we have a year to optimize something that can hold up in a high player count
Post any thoughts, suggestions and comments. This will be the template for the next Vice War
Current Official Changes To Be Made:- Kills - cash only; Bases - cash & points
- Up to 60 FPS; 30 FPS minimum
Possible Additions:- Pizza boys & Skimmers
- Displaying Points as apart of HUD
- Allowing you to keep premium weapons after you die, timeout or leave (gone only when ammo runs out)