about the chugfest thats nonsense.. only nexus wars has this problem that if the game takes a while there are tons and tons of units.
there are several other tugĀ“s that have these uncrntrollable unit waves but they are small and the main priority lies on the hero battles.
Every tug I've ever played has this problem. Same for every footmen clone. If there's a tug that doesn't, then it's a map I haven't been able to get a game started for.
As for saying "well if you don't like it, fix it" - I'd love to. But I'm already devoting all my spare time to improving the Tower Defense genre. I'm sure most everyone here can say the same about their own project. One thing at a time :P
@iiiiiiiiiii: I don't "hate" unit waves which are uncontrollable from a player perspective. I like the idea behind tug maps. When I say "uncontrolled", I mean nothing is in place to keep the number of units on screen from reaching ridiculous numbers. Some system needs to be in place to accomplish that.
A) There's the amateur type mappers (me!) who'll put out a bare map that's very unpolished into battle.net just to try it out and play. Then polish it over time. But due to the devolved battle.net, these mappers can't play their creations so they abandon their maps. Occasionally tho, some of their maps do take off and reach page 1 or 2.
B) Then there's the more 'professional' mappers who spend a lot of time polishing up their maps before release. Mephs, Rodgrio, and the TMA project are the more professional types. Their maps are very polished but their maps are't really getting played. I think this is where Blizzard thinks the true problem lies. They want to release the marketplace so these mappers can 'sell' their maps and have their maps be displayed on page 1.
Because whatever you say about the popularity system, its a great success at getting people to play page 1 maps -whatever they are. And when marketplace comes out, page 1 will be filled with the premium maps made by the more 'professional' type mappers.
But its a numbers game, there are way more amateur mappers than the 'professional' types. And so the chances are, a truly original and creative map will come from the amateur sector. There's probably hundreds of amateur mappers in sc2 and only like what, 3 or 4 'professional' type mappers? But the system is designed to discourage amateur mapping. The potential just isn't there for maps to evolve due to the popularity system.
Genetic lab wars was the best in sc2. It had something different and interesting...overall very nice for some time, but its hard to keep interest in same game for looong and looong.
Core fight? I dont like the overal look of it for some reason, maybe its too dark for my taste (I hate darkness), And gameplay...I dont think it offers much more than nexus wars Its just more complex (I played it like 2 times).
I think genetic lab wars fills the "good tug of war map" slot quite well. In wc3 we had the super good civilization wars, which was even better than any sc2 tug of wars, but it had custom models and lots of other stuff too....
[b]Compiled is a list of things that need to be fixed STILL after 1 year of bnet 2.0 being out officially[/b]
1. Featured maps are rendered invisible on the normal popularity list. If you get featured, no one can see your map on the popularity list unless they filter by "All". This bug has been around for months now, fix it!
2. Featured maps should be at the top of the main list while they're the spotlight for a week or two, whatever Blizzard does to rotate featured maps on a regular basis. Why tuck featured maps away on a hidden list? The old method was great, it made your map easily visible to the entire community. There's literally no point to being featured now, and even more so since Blizzard maps are always at the top of the list. Why not do this with your spotlights?
3. Add more categories. Fun or Not is a complete failure. I want to be able to sort the list by more specific categories to find maps of the type that I like to play. Page 1 is littered with terrible maps (in my opinion) that I refuse to play. Survival, Deception, Defense maps, I have no interest in these. Let me filter by "RPG" or "MOBA" or something more specific.
Not only would #3 help Fun or Not be "fun", but also make more maps visible. If you're on page 1 of a certain category, you're more likely to get people to fill that lobby if they're looking for that kind of map to play. Then maps are less likely to fade into obscurity since lobbies are possible to fill again. Keep the ALL list as usual, but why can I only search for Tug or TD maps? I want to see more arena/MOBA games, and be able to have a chance in hell of the lobby possibly starting.
4. Add a "Volatile" list which makes maps rotate every time they break 20 hours played, back to the bottom. This was a bug that happened for a day when the new features for bnet 2 were released, and it was awesome. Keep the popular list, but why not add this Volatile list as well? More options certainly won't be a detrimental thing.
5. Make Game variants share popularity, and make a collapsable variant lobby builder per map. What's the point of using game variants if no one can use them without crippling their popularity, which right now is so essential to a map being remotely playable!? Even then, if a map's variants all get popular, now you have multiple copies of that map on the list. WHY is this the way it is? I want to have ranked/unranked modes accessible to both pub and hardcore players of my map, but combining variants into a collapsable list of lobbies to join would be fine as long as they share the popularity. My map, even when it was on page 1, was only gaining half of the popularity it could because of this split.
6. Make private lobbies increase popularity. Currently, if your players play mainly in-house games, the map gets no popularity boost unless they hit "open to public" which 99% of players will not know or care about. But to the mappers, this matters. Especially for my map, which has a chat room with 30-40 people at peak hour playing nonstop in-house games. That's HUNDREDS of hours the map does not gain because players form these in-house games and prefer not to pub.
----
Those are my notes. Take them seriously, they are actually solid ideas.
These aren't even based on the welfare of Smashcraft, while partly a reason it has sunk so far in the list, I still wish to be able to add a lot of features that will require the above things in order to make my new project viable. The lack of variant support is the worst thing, and really needs to be addressed ASAP, because in their current state, lobby/game variants are pointless, forcing mappers to resort to in-game voting and workarounds to make sure players can have game options without killing the map's popularity.
right on mephs...its just amazing how blizzard cannot fucking fix the shit they brought uppon us. Is wow still that huge of a deal? It needs constand attention along with COD to make maximum amount of money...Who cares about sc2 we already bought it, so fuck you all mappers
I get these rage seizures...I cannot stop typing...
Eiviyn is the god of the data editor here at sc2mapster. Catalyst,
VoidCraft, PortalCraft...
Lol apparently you've usurped me Eiviyn :*(
I feel like I should be forming a mob and chasing you around with torches and pitchforks ;P
But to the point, most currently released maps are relatively simple. There is nothing wrong with simple, but they are certainly easier to release in a short timeframe. Thus what we are currently experiencing is an influx of short term maps. As a result, these maps have created a false standard of mapping. Anything made after these maps is being compared to them.
The next more complex maps are beginning to emerge, and people aren't looking at them as new maps. They're assuming that these maps were made in response to the currently existing maps. This causes a lot of maps to be completely ignored because they "look" like a map that was released earlier despite being made independently or without any knowledge of these other maps.
Pretty soon the custom content wave will hit where the kind of map doesn't matter as much as the fact that much of the material is custom artwork. This means UIs/Dialogs/Models/Sounds etc. This wave isn't going to have the same problem as the previous wave given that it's fairly difficult to claim "clone" when the artwork is standing right in front of you screaming "I am not a copy!"
Bottom line, the middle wave of maps is being unfairly ignored for no other reason than wanting to go the extra mile, but not going 2 instead.
Why is this happening? Well there are a lot of reasons, but there are some very important reasons that few people address:
1) Blizzard has isolated the mapping community from the gamers who would play their maps
I wouldn't assume this was intentional, but it is a bi-product of B.Net 2.0 and its incredibly restrictive setup. They need to create a team solely dedicated to bridging the gap between mappers and gamers. Whether this will ever happen is unknown, but this is the best option they have outside of completely scrapping 2.0 and revamping B.Net.
2) Mappers aren't utilizing all of the resources available to them
It is surprising how little mappers know about social networking these days. You may have years of experience under your belt, but there is a new medium for reaching gamers: the social network. You can't expect yourself to get lucky with your map and make it to page 1 without any effort on your part, but it important to do the right kind of work. It is easier to expose your map to a wide range of communities than it is to run around hounding people to play it. I'm looking at you Rodrigo. . . Let people advertise your map for you.
The key to ANY successful map is being PREPARED to become popular. You need to ask yourself where you want the map to go and whether or not it's actually feasible for it to get there. A lot of mappers are making one and done maps but expecting an entire community to rise up from the shadows and support their map. These mappers have no one but themselves to blame for not getting anywhere. You need to be honest with yourself: is your map something that could actually support a community? Nexus Wars is perfect example of something that can't.
If your map can't support a community, quit wasting time trying to force one into it. There is nothing wrong with making a fun but short-lived map! It is a mistake to believe that you need only make 1 map and then stick to it until it goes gold.
3) Gamers aren't as easy to convince
It used to be that only a handful of games were released each year and custom content for these games was limited. This made gamers more forgiving of the content and more eager to go out and find it. Surprise! That's not the case anymore. We've got games everywhere! People try to blame gamers by saying "wow, they're so lazy now" when this simply isn't true. Let's think logically for a moment. Why should gamers go out of their way to find good games when they are already being bombarded by games everywhere they go? There are reviewers that can find the games for them!
Thus the important question is not "Where can I find the gamers?" The question is "Where are the gamers going to find games?" Answer this question and THAT is where you should be.
- Add stronger units for the late game instead of many weak units.
is the way I've done.
You propably consider income wars as one of the "bad" tug of wars, but it is successful for one year now. Still polishing it after all this time but i think it is pretty good at the moment. balanced, a lot of possibilities show your skill and do math. I'm always impressed what the grandmasters (internal rank) pull out of my map
in a year? maybe will we finally have a map as addicting as income wars for the majority of players
Every tug I've ever played has this problem. Same for every footmen clone. If there's a tug that doesn't, then it's a map I haven't been able to get a game started for.
try income wars
it has good popularity in eu and us and doesn't have this problem
I just forgot about Income Wars. I used to play it very often when sc2 was launched and I still like it. Right now I only use to play maps in the fun or not system, and I don't know why your map isn't showing over there.
I'm a fan of Tug of War maps, so I use to play and enjoy most of them.
but I'm myself still not completely happy with the flow.
there is a bump at the time when you can start with more expensive units or mass weak units, maybe i have to reduce the number of units limit a bit, but before i can do this, i have to recalculate the income gain and decay
but i personally like this direct system more than the nexus/line wars way, where you build more and more building and can't react properly, because you can't change tec later. you have the live with the first decision you've made
But mass units strategies should be useless against expensive units. From what I remember from Income Wars there was no sense at massing units against Brutalisk.
I'm trying to solve this problem with artillery in my map. This way, in the late game, artillery will end destroying all the buildings in the enemy base.
PD: I feel like there are two independent discussions over this thread. One talking about tug of wars and the other talking about custom map comunity and the popularity system. Both are very interesting ones.
you control 1 hero, a few ways to the enemy base. uncontrollable units are fighting on each of these ways and you and your hero(and all the other heros) are helping/defending these units to reach the other base with them
you get money from unit/hero kills and the units are constantly respawning.
it gets complicated because there are a lot of items/heros/abilities
The thing about tug of war is that not only are they skill-less, their design guarantees that they stay skill-less. The key concept of tug of war games is that you are not allowed to control (micromanage) the units. You only tell the game what units you want, and the game plays itself for you from there.
Just because you can't micro units doesn't mean that it doesn't take skill. Just like saying "A game where your APM is under 30 is stupid". Last time I checked, chess has done fairly well over the ages.
Anyways, Tug of War is not so much who has a faster reaction time, but instead who can counter units the best. That is why in my map, Explodeathon, the way you arrange your structures determines the formation of the units as they spawn. (The spawning system is similar to Desert Strike). There is an attacking and defending army, and if the defending army wins, they die when the reach the end of their path, granting minerals. Every 6 minutes there is a "reset", destroying all units and structures on the map. Along each path is a series of trees that must be destroyed by the attacking player. Each tree awards minerals when destroyed. That way players are not tempted to stash minerals the the beginning, because if they do, the player attacking them will whittle through their defenses. (You can build turrets and what-not on your lane).
Each "reset" the target shifts, so you are attacking a different player and a different player is attacking you. The buildings are reset to give you an opportunity to counter whatever your enemy is making, to take away an undesirable luck factor from the game. Upgrades can be purchased as well, and are not reset. They are expensive but are worth it in the long term. Abilities can be researched as well, such as charge and blink. There are a ton of custom abilities in development as well.
To say that Tug of War takes no skill is ridiculous. The types of Tug of War that are on Bnet now don't take a lot of skill, simply because they aren't balanced properly. (Desert Strike mass broods and you win, etc).
In a true Tug of War game, it should be about unit counters. Battlecraft gets close in a way, but it is still like "My enemy builds ghosts, I build _" There isn't that diversity that a good Tug of War game should have.
Also note that the version of Explodeathon currently on Bnet is an old unbalanced incredibly rough copy of the game, and the actual game is still in development.
There is no formula what a good tug of war have to has. In my opinion buildings spawning units are bad. But your solution with the periodic wipe sounds interesting. I fully agree with the counter system. I've put a lot of work into it. If you don't counter, you lose. There are no free win units anymore. You've always a good amount of possible counters.
If you have 6 really good players, you can play the game nearly an hour until one side wins by a fast hard tec switch. I've already added sudden death at 30 minutes, to guarantee shorter funny games.
Two very different super abilities are also helpful. As are well balanced heroes.
And you can always outmacro the other players with well timed units and knowledge about how long you can play a weak unit without hurting yourself.
I think a lot of people are missing the point of Tugs, people play them because they don't want to micro every single unit with complicated manoeuvres. Its why I will probably never get out of the Bronze league even though my income and army size is usually higher than my opponents. It doesn't mean in a tug you don't have to have things to do. Its the actual act of having to micro every unit that annoys me.
I also consider DOTA (player controlling a hero supporting AI creeps) and tugs (player decides what creeps to send) as different categories but maybe thats just me.
Income Wars and CoreFight are 2 very polished tugs. I like to think my map is quite good, though not nearly as polished, and lacks units at the moment.
Many of the problems highlighted here I've tried to address in Genetic Lab Wars. You have defensive units that you can risk in attacks requiring lots of micro, many players choose not too but a good micro player gets a great advantage. Stronger tier units use up 2 weaker units so you also not get the massive chug fests of nexus wars.
Civilization Wars from WC3 was amazing and hopefully one day we will see something like it in SC2.
So, (about tug of war' future) i'll just say look out for "Warlords", even though i am intentionally gift wrapping loads in the same magic pouch..
and i say this out of respect for what i saw...
(even though i got kicked out for "not fitting in" (lol i've never once "fitted in" in anything in my life) after doing my honest candid best to give O my best shot at "contributing/sharing/helping")
...
i only really wanted to address the awesome 1/ and 2/ of ProzaicMuze's post, cause.. , you know:
"getting high suppose to be fun" ("Gridlock" flick reference)
1/ it was intentional, they are never ever ever letting things out of hand intentionally again, if they can help it.
blizz is a bussiness in 2011, the only remnant of the old blizz / old days/times? : we still got our galaxies and we can only be very very thankful for that.. we should all agree on that.
2/ i'll keep saying it and saying it and saying it... the bridge is there already: hosts
hosts: passionate and dedicated individuals who do nothing but host the mod they believe in, day in / day out.
This is what blizz wants, like all the commercial enterprises you've ever seen bloom, a lot is done for free (think movies for instance) or at a ridiculously low rate (read unfair in "low"), for the whole to "look/feel" even better / bigger / more efficient / "more"original / so well thought out / etc)
Mapmakers (majorityof them) seem to be the worst at hosting apparently lol :^p
it takes as much love/commitment as dreaming/creating/polishing a map to host it ... maybe you guys need lessons? Honestly, i don't know what you need .. short of a blizz' stamp on your map (which i think is what most mapmaker's are secretly hoping for, for their own "been working on it for 2 years like hell in secret and must be getting muchuganna/bonkers on it by now" map).
Hope you can show these awesome/passionate mapmakers the light at the end of tunnel muze.., if anyone can, its you.
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Every tug I've ever played has this problem. Same for every footmen clone. If there's a tug that doesn't, then it's a map I haven't been able to get a game started for.
As for saying "well if you don't like it, fix it" - I'd love to. But I'm already devoting all my spare time to improving the Tower Defense genre. I'm sure most everyone here can say the same about their own project. One thing at a time :P
@iiiiiiiiiii: I don't "hate" unit waves which are uncontrollable from a player perspective. I like the idea behind tug maps. When I say "uncontrolled", I mean nothing is in place to keep the number of units on screen from reaching ridiculous numbers. Some system needs to be in place to accomplish that.
This was an interesting discussion, but I don't understand anymore wtf everybody is talking about now. What changed?
The way I see it, there are two types of mappers.
A) There's the amateur type mappers (me!) who'll put out a bare map that's very unpolished into battle.net just to try it out and play. Then polish it over time. But due to the devolved battle.net, these mappers can't play their creations so they abandon their maps. Occasionally tho, some of their maps do take off and reach page 1 or 2.
B) Then there's the more 'professional' mappers who spend a lot of time polishing up their maps before release. Mephs, Rodgrio, and the TMA project are the more professional types. Their maps are very polished but their maps are't really getting played. I think this is where Blizzard thinks the true problem lies. They want to release the marketplace so these mappers can 'sell' their maps and have their maps be displayed on page 1.
Because whatever you say about the popularity system, its a great success at getting people to play page 1 maps -whatever they are. And when marketplace comes out, page 1 will be filled with the premium maps made by the more 'professional' type mappers.
But its a numbers game, there are way more amateur mappers than the 'professional' types. And so the chances are, a truly original and creative map will come from the amateur sector. There's probably hundreds of amateur mappers in sc2 and only like what, 3 or 4 'professional' type mappers? But the system is designed to discourage amateur mapping. The potential just isn't there for maps to evolve due to the popularity system.
well if we talk about tug of war maps...
Genetic lab wars was the best in sc2. It had something different and interesting...overall very nice for some time, but its hard to keep interest in same game for looong and looong.
Core fight? I dont like the overal look of it for some reason, maybe its too dark for my taste (I hate darkness), And gameplay...I dont think it offers much more than nexus wars Its just more complex (I played it like 2 times).
I think genetic lab wars fills the "good tug of war map" slot quite well. In wc3 we had the super good civilization wars, which was even better than any sc2 tug of wars, but it had custom models and lots of other stuff too....
thats it for now. random rambling
Cross posted:
[b]Compiled is a list of things that need to be fixed STILL after 1 year of bnet 2.0 being out officially[/b]
1. Featured maps are rendered invisible on the normal popularity list. If you get featured, no one can see your map on the popularity list unless they filter by "All". This bug has been around for months now, fix it!
2. Featured maps should be at the top of the main list while they're the spotlight for a week or two, whatever Blizzard does to rotate featured maps on a regular basis. Why tuck featured maps away on a hidden list? The old method was great, it made your map easily visible to the entire community. There's literally no point to being featured now, and even more so since Blizzard maps are always at the top of the list. Why not do this with your spotlights?
3. Add more categories. Fun or Not is a complete failure. I want to be able to sort the list by more specific categories to find maps of the type that I like to play. Page 1 is littered with terrible maps (in my opinion) that I refuse to play. Survival, Deception, Defense maps, I have no interest in these. Let me filter by "RPG" or "MOBA" or something more specific.
Not only would #3 help Fun or Not be "fun", but also make more maps visible. If you're on page 1 of a certain category, you're more likely to get people to fill that lobby if they're looking for that kind of map to play. Then maps are less likely to fade into obscurity since lobbies are possible to fill again. Keep the ALL list as usual, but why can I only search for Tug or TD maps? I want to see more arena/MOBA games, and be able to have a chance in hell of the lobby possibly starting.
4. Add a "Volatile" list which makes maps rotate every time they break 20 hours played, back to the bottom. This was a bug that happened for a day when the new features for bnet 2 were released, and it was awesome. Keep the popular list, but why not add this Volatile list as well? More options certainly won't be a detrimental thing.
5. Make Game variants share popularity, and make a collapsable variant lobby builder per map. What's the point of using game variants if no one can use them without crippling their popularity, which right now is so essential to a map being remotely playable!? Even then, if a map's variants all get popular, now you have multiple copies of that map on the list. WHY is this the way it is? I want to have ranked/unranked modes accessible to both pub and hardcore players of my map, but combining variants into a collapsable list of lobbies to join would be fine as long as they share the popularity. My map, even when it was on page 1, was only gaining half of the popularity it could because of this split.
6. Make private lobbies increase popularity. Currently, if your players play mainly in-house games, the map gets no popularity boost unless they hit "open to public" which 99% of players will not know or care about. But to the mappers, this matters. Especially for my map, which has a chat room with 30-40 people at peak hour playing nonstop in-house games. That's HUNDREDS of hours the map does not gain because players form these in-house games and prefer not to pub.
----Those are my notes. Take them seriously, they are actually solid ideas.
These aren't even based on the welfare of Smashcraft, while partly a reason it has sunk so far in the list, I still wish to be able to add a lot of features that will require the above things in order to make my new project viable. The lack of variant support is the worst thing, and really needs to be addressed ASAP, because in their current state, lobby/game variants are pointless, forcing mappers to resort to in-game voting and workarounds to make sure players can have game options without killing the map's popularity.
right on mephs...its just amazing how blizzard cannot fucking fix the shit they brought uppon us. Is wow still that huge of a deal? It needs constand attention along with COD to make maximum amount of money...Who cares about sc2 we already bought it, so fuck you all mappers
I get these rage seizures...I cannot stop typing...
Lol apparently you've usurped me Eiviyn :*(
I feel like I should be forming a mob and chasing you around with torches and pitchforks ;P
But to the point, most currently released maps are relatively simple. There is nothing wrong with simple, but they are certainly easier to release in a short timeframe. Thus what we are currently experiencing is an influx of short term maps. As a result, these maps have created a false standard of mapping. Anything made after these maps is being compared to them.
The next more complex maps are beginning to emerge, and people aren't looking at them as new maps. They're assuming that these maps were made in response to the currently existing maps. This causes a lot of maps to be completely ignored because they "look" like a map that was released earlier despite being made independently or without any knowledge of these other maps.
Pretty soon the custom content wave will hit where the kind of map doesn't matter as much as the fact that much of the material is custom artwork. This means UIs/Dialogs/Models/Sounds etc. This wave isn't going to have the same problem as the previous wave given that it's fairly difficult to claim "clone" when the artwork is standing right in front of you screaming "I am not a copy!"
Bottom line, the middle wave of maps is being unfairly ignored for no other reason than wanting to go the extra mile, but not going 2 instead.
Why is this happening? Well there are a lot of reasons, but there are some very important reasons that few people address:
1) Blizzard has isolated the mapping community from the gamers who would play their maps
I wouldn't assume this was intentional, but it is a bi-product of B.Net 2.0 and its incredibly restrictive setup. They need to create a team solely dedicated to bridging the gap between mappers and gamers. Whether this will ever happen is unknown, but this is the best option they have outside of completely scrapping 2.0 and revamping B.Net.
2) Mappers aren't utilizing all of the resources available to them
It is surprising how little mappers know about social networking these days. You may have years of experience under your belt, but there is a new medium for reaching gamers: the social network. You can't expect yourself to get lucky with your map and make it to page 1 without any effort on your part, but it important to do the right kind of work. It is easier to expose your map to a wide range of communities than it is to run around hounding people to play it. I'm looking at you Rodrigo. . . Let people advertise your map for you.
The key to ANY successful map is being PREPARED to become popular. You need to ask yourself where you want the map to go and whether or not it's actually feasible for it to get there. A lot of mappers are making one and done maps but expecting an entire community to rise up from the shadows and support their map. These mappers have no one but themselves to blame for not getting anywhere. You need to be honest with yourself: is your map something that could actually support a community? Nexus Wars is perfect example of something that can't.
If your map can't support a community, quit wasting time trying to force one into it. There is nothing wrong with making a fun but short-lived map! It is a mistake to believe that you need only make 1 map and then stick to it until it goes gold.
3) Gamers aren't as easy to convince
It used to be that only a handful of games were released each year and custom content for these games was limited. This made gamers more forgiving of the content and more eager to go out and find it. Surprise! That's not the case anymore. We've got games everywhere! People try to blame gamers by saying "wow, they're so lazy now" when this simply isn't true. Let's think logically for a moment. Why should gamers go out of their way to find good games when they are already being bombarded by games everywhere they go? There are reviewers that can find the games for them!
Thus the important question is not "Where can I find the gamers?" The question is "Where are the gamers going to find games?" Answer this question and THAT is where you should be.
is the way I've done.
You propably consider income wars as one of the "bad" tug of wars, but it is successful for one year now. Still polishing it after all this time but i think it is pretty good at the moment. balanced, a lot of possibilities show your skill and do math. I'm always impressed what the grandmasters (internal rank) pull out of my map
in a year? maybe will we finally have a map as addicting as income wars for the majority of players
try income wars
it has good popularity in eu and us and doesn't have this problem
I just forgot about Income Wars. I used to play it very often when sc2 was launched and I still like it. Right now I only use to play maps in the fun or not system, and I don't know why your map isn't showing over there.
I'm a fan of Tug of War maps, so I use to play and enjoy most of them.
but I'm myself still not completely happy with the flow.
there is a bump at the time when you can start with more expensive units or mass weak units, maybe i have to reduce the number of units limit a bit, but before i can do this, i have to recalculate the income gain and decay
but i personally like this direct system more than the nexus/line wars way, where you build more and more building and can't react properly, because you can't change tec later. you have the live with the first decision you've made
But mass units strategies should be useless against expensive units. From what I remember from Income Wars there was no sense at massing units against Brutalisk.
I'm trying to solve this problem with artillery in my map. This way, in the late game, artillery will end destroying all the buildings in the enemy base.
PD: I feel like there are two independent discussions over this thread. One talking about tug of wars and the other talking about custom map comunity and the popularity system. Both are very interesting ones.
Hmm I think I asked this somewhere else but I have forgetten, so it looks like I am going to have to make myself look like an idiot again...
So, what is DOTA? (Yes, I know, Defense of the Ancients. I know what it stands for, but like what do you do? What is the gameplay?)
And don't say "It is like League of Legends", because I have never played...
Great to be back and part of the community again!
you control 1 hero, a few ways to the enemy base. uncontrollable units are fighting on each of these ways and you and your hero(and all the other heros) are helping/defending these units to reach the other base with them
you get money from unit/hero kills and the units are constantly respawning.
it gets complicated because there are a lot of items/heros/abilities
@Eiviyn: Go
The thing about tug of war is that not only are they skill-less, their design guarantees that they stay skill-less. The key concept of tug of war games is that you are not allowed to control (micromanage) the units. You only tell the game what units you want, and the game plays itself for you from there.
@shardfenix: Go
Just because you can't micro units doesn't mean that it doesn't take skill. Just like saying "A game where your APM is under 30 is stupid". Last time I checked, chess has done fairly well over the ages.
Anyways, Tug of War is not so much who has a faster reaction time, but instead who can counter units the best. That is why in my map, Explodeathon, the way you arrange your structures determines the formation of the units as they spawn. (The spawning system is similar to Desert Strike). There is an attacking and defending army, and if the defending army wins, they die when the reach the end of their path, granting minerals. Every 6 minutes there is a "reset", destroying all units and structures on the map. Along each path is a series of trees that must be destroyed by the attacking player. Each tree awards minerals when destroyed. That way players are not tempted to stash minerals the the beginning, because if they do, the player attacking them will whittle through their defenses. (You can build turrets and what-not on your lane).
Each "reset" the target shifts, so you are attacking a different player and a different player is attacking you. The buildings are reset to give you an opportunity to counter whatever your enemy is making, to take away an undesirable luck factor from the game. Upgrades can be purchased as well, and are not reset. They are expensive but are worth it in the long term. Abilities can be researched as well, such as charge and blink. There are a ton of custom abilities in development as well.
To say that Tug of War takes no skill is ridiculous. The types of Tug of War that are on Bnet now don't take a lot of skill, simply because they aren't balanced properly. (Desert Strike mass broods and you win, etc).
In a true Tug of War game, it should be about unit counters. Battlecraft gets close in a way, but it is still like "My enemy builds ghosts, I build _" There isn't that diversity that a good Tug of War game should have.
Also note that the version of Explodeathon currently on Bnet is an old unbalanced incredibly rough copy of the game, and the actual game is still in development.
Great to be back and part of the community again!
There is no formula what a good tug of war have to has. In my opinion buildings spawning units are bad. But your solution with the periodic wipe sounds interesting. I fully agree with the counter system. I've put a lot of work into it. If you don't counter, you lose. There are no free win units anymore. You've always a good amount of possible counters.
If you have 6 really good players, you can play the game nearly an hour until one side wins by a fast hard tec switch. I've already added sudden death at 30 minutes, to guarantee shorter funny games.
Two very different super abilities are also helpful. As are well balanced heroes.
And you can always outmacro the other players with well timed units and knowledge about how long you can play a weak unit without hurting yourself.
I think a lot of people are missing the point of Tugs, people play them because they don't want to micro every single unit with complicated manoeuvres. Its why I will probably never get out of the Bronze league even though my income and army size is usually higher than my opponents. It doesn't mean in a tug you don't have to have things to do. Its the actual act of having to micro every unit that annoys me.
I also consider DOTA (player controlling a hero supporting AI creeps) and tugs (player decides what creeps to send) as different categories but maybe thats just me.
Income Wars and CoreFight are 2 very polished tugs. I like to think my map is quite good, though not nearly as polished, and lacks units at the moment.
Many of the problems highlighted here I've tried to address in Genetic Lab Wars. You have defensive units that you can risk in attacks requiring lots of micro, many players choose not too but a good micro player gets a great advantage. Stronger tier units use up 2 weaker units so you also not get the massive chug fests of nexus wars.
Civilization Wars from WC3 was amazing and hopefully one day we will see something like it in SC2.
lol so much tug of war i feel off topic...
So, (about tug of war' future) i'll just say look out for "Warlords", even though i am intentionally gift wrapping loads in the same magic pouch..
and i say this out of respect for what i saw...
(even though i got kicked out for "not fitting in" (lol i've never once "fitted in" in anything in my life) after doing my honest candid best to give O my best shot at "contributing/sharing/helping")
...
i only really wanted to address the awesome 1/ and 2/ of ProzaicMuze's post, cause.. , you know:
"getting high suppose to be fun" ("Gridlock" flick reference)
1/ it was intentional, they are never ever ever letting things out of hand intentionally again, if they can help it.
blizz is a bussiness in 2011, the only remnant of the old blizz / old days/times? : we still got our galaxies and we can only be very very thankful for that.. we should all agree on that.
2/ i'll keep saying it and saying it and saying it... the bridge is there already: hosts
hosts: passionate and dedicated individuals who do nothing but host the mod they believe in, day in / day out.
This is what blizz wants, like all the commercial enterprises you've ever seen bloom, a lot is done for free (think movies for instance) or at a ridiculously low rate (read unfair in "low"), for the whole to "look/feel" even better / bigger / more efficient / "more"original / so well thought out / etc)
Mapmakers (majorityof them) seem to be the worst at hosting apparently lol :^p
it takes as much love/commitment as dreaming/creating/polishing a map to host it ... maybe you guys need lessons? Honestly, i don't know what you need .. short of a blizz' stamp on your map (which i think is what most mapmaker's are secretly hoping for, for their own "been working on it for 2 years like hell in secret and must be getting muchuganna/bonkers on it by now" map).
Hope you can show these awesome/passionate mapmakers the light at the end of tunnel muze.., if anyone can, its you.