Change the respawn mechanics when beaten by player
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So I've recently removed a player with intent of letting the timer run out and then make a claim/reservation of his room. To my surprise not day later he was back in the exact same location with 20k worth of newbie protection, and as it goes within the 20k ticks he got his walls and turret up with rather entrenched setup (as expected).
As I still want that room I will be removing him again, what else to do, but my worry here is about whether it will actually be possible to remove him permanently from the room. To be very specific, did some numbers crunching on the issue:
Time before he can respawn again in the same room since spawn = 3 days, or 86400 ticks (more or less)
Newbie protection: 20000 ticks.
Time for clock out from RC4: 55000 ticks.
Which means that you must stop any sort of RC upgrading within 11,400 ticks from the newbie protection drop in order to even have a chance to reserve the room before he can respawn in it again and restart the clocks.
This window of course can be expanded by using attackController creeps, but that will come with whooping minimal cost of 6 energy per smallest creep that will reduce this clock by only 1 tick/tick. That means that in order to cut the counter in half you will have to spend about 165k energy.
So I am suggesting that we don't allow people who were removed by a player to re spawn in the same room for some substantial amount of time since last spawn has fallen. My reasons are that, as it is, this mechanic allows for someone who games the system to be almost unremovable (and in some rooms there is no almost there) and at the same time that it doesn't really add any value to the game.
I mean if someone clears you out of the room, and he just lives in some uncrushable bunker (let's leave the nuclear option out of this ;)) then what sort of gaming experience it creates for that person anyway? I struggle to see anyone doing that for reasons other than either being misguided about how the game works, or outright griefing. And in both cases moving them to, hopefully, more peaceful space would be a better result for everyone around.
What do you guys think? Am I missing something obvious. or not obvious, or maybe I am just complete bonkers on this?
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This actually sounds like a bug- as it stands you aren't allowed to respawn in the same room for a few days, so that really should be a bug.
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@tedivm I thought so, so my first reaction was to open a support ticket and Artem there confirmed that this is how it works - that the 3 days timer starts from when you've spawned, not from where you were removed, and that then you are granted the 20k ticks newbie protection.
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So if I were to lose all my rooms I could start back up in them immediately, as they're all older than three days? I'm not a fan of that mechanic.
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Well, in just one room but yea. Potentially you could even keep your old walls, minus the ones that were dismantled by the enemy during the breach, which makes it even bigger problem when you are racing against the clock.
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So would you be ok if the respawn time would be increased to like 5 days, so you have >2 days to attack?
I think it's nice to respawn immediately once (e.g. if I die because of a bug in my code and could otherwise hold my ground). But respawning in the same room over and over isn't really fun for anyone.
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The change to the RCL decay levels feels right. It does help quite a bit.
But it doesn't really cover the other two issues, this being one of them. Same guy respawns in the same exact room, because apparently, the timer starts from when he starts, not when he dies.
The other issue is newbies choosing to spawn in a room where a battle recently ended. I have literally had a newbie spawn in a room where I had soldiers who had killed the players spawn minutes ago. Player in question immediately released control of the room to restart, and before my soldiers expired and before my claim creep could even spawn let alone move to the room, a newbie claimed the room. There really needs to be a cool down period here to prevent this kind of madness.
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A 5k countdown that kicks in whenever a player respawns seems reasonable.
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So, simply put, if I understand you correctly, your point is that 11k ticks is not enough to wipe out a newbie player RCL4 room with 1 tower?
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That would be too much of a simplification, because when you code in the attack to launch it automatically when he re-spawns you can do it just fine (well, depends on how good is his code and room layout it may actually be very hard task).
But that is a symptom of a problem I see with this mechanic as it is now. While it has substantial griefing potential (and there are/will be people who will use it just to ape someone who has beaten them, ignoring that they don't progress/benefit from it in any way), I struggle to see what good it brings to the game. In other words, what would be the benefit for this player to respawn in his exact old location instead of in a new one, potentially far away from the guy who purged him?
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I agree with Pucieck. It's something we've all discussed somewhat on Slack. There are really two issues here. The first Puciek has outlined in that the counter for respawn starts at the wrong time. I view this issue as a bug plain and simple. The countdown for restarting from scratch in the exact same room, should start counting when you restart, not from when you first claimed the room.
The argument that 11k ticks is enough time to kill a newbie player is just nuts to me. Is it possible? You are expecting an awful lot out of a newbie, but sure, that's possible. But It's also irrelevant to me.
Here's a much better question. Give me even one scenario where this mechanic is of real value to a player who is not being a griefer. Because I will be perfectly honest with you, I cannot think of a single one. When you die, you restart somewhere else. You do not restart in the same area, or worse in the very same room you just died in. There is just no rational reason to be starting over in the same place except to grief someone.
So please change this mechanic to what it should have been in the first place. a cooldown period after death to prevent players from re-spawning just to grief the guy who just killed them. Deny players the ability to re-spawn in the same newbie grid (15 rooms) for 3 days AFTER death. They are free to re-spawn anywhere else.
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Now for my second gripe on a very similar subject. The issue with an unrelated player jumping in on top of a room you just fought over. If it had not already happened to me half a dozen or more times regarding only two rooms during newbie protection, I might be willing to tolerate this quirk. But as it stands, and as often as this issue occurs, I find it maddening. Here is a summary of the last straw. The one that really made me angry.
I killed the spawn.
I watched the owner release the room.
I cut and pasted my reserve creep into the console.
And someone unrelated claimed the room before my creep even finished spawning.
We're talking a timeline measured in seconds here. That's just not right.
There really needs to be a cooldown period after conflicts to prevent this sort of nonsense. My suggestion would be to have the cooldown start after the RCL drops to zero. The cooldown should again be 72 hours, and should prevent anybody other than the attacker(s) / defender from claiming, reserving, or starting in the room.
If the defender wants to send in an army for a last minute fight over the room to reclaim it, that seems perfectly reasonable to me. But there is no good reason why a new player should be able to start there unexpectedly the second control drops.
And one last thought again to prevent blatant grief play. If the defender chooses to click release control of the room than he should forfeit his right to claim / reserve the room for 72 hours. Othewise this would be easily abuseable to effectively hold a room endlessly at little or no cost.
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I actually think that if a player gets wiped out they should have to respawn in an entirely new quad. No ghosts!
I also think that the decay time for RCL is insane. I knocked out a RCL 7 room last week that is still RCL 4. It is that player's only spawn and that player is idle.
When you lose your last spawn, RCL should be set to 0 instantly. The arguments that I have heard against this all address edge cases that never happen in my experience.
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The countdown for restarting from scratch in the exact same room, should start counting when you restart, not from when you first claimed the room.
By the moment you are clicking the Respawn button you may have more than one room. Which one should be marked as unavailable? All of them?
I actually think that if a player gets wiped out they should have to respawn in an entirely new quad. No ghosts!
@shedletsky: The funny thing is that now you happen to be in this situation yourself, where you can benefit from this mechanics and get rebuilt by a friend while having no spawns to do that on your own. If controllers were reset, you’d need to respawn and start from the scratch again.
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@Artem, I actually did propose to shedletsky to rebuild his spawns. He unfortunately refused as he felt Bovius had enough power projection to destroy any attempt at reconstruction.
Interesting point about multiple rooms. I think nobody considered that possibility yet. Although it is likely to be similar to shedletsky's case. If you have had all your rooms taken down, you will likely need to restart in a completely new area to avoid continuous destruction. So the easy answer would be to say all your previous rooms would be unavailable for selection when you respawn.
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Plus one. As it stands, it's not fair to either player. The defender is almost guaranteed to get defeated again and the attacker has to deal with the room multiple times.
As for the suggestion of a cooldown preventing anyone from claiming/reserving other than attacker/defender, I don't think that's a good idea. Maybe a 1 hr no spawn window if you want to be really nice, but I'd probably leave it at that.
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This is much worse then stated above:
As the respawning player's controller upgrades to level four, they will gain three extra uses of safe mode (one for each update). If they use even one of these, this extends the time of the cycle by 20,000 ticks, meaning that no matter how fast you attack, they will still be able to respawn before their controller fully decays, with an overlap of more than 9000 ticks.
