Why do pubbies always build in the front?!

[dg86]

This really pisses me off to no end...why do pub players always build in the freaking front? It more or less makes everybody's towers half as effective since you don't have time for the creeps to do a 2nd pass.

IMO if you want the right to rush someone, you should be playing on their difficulty level if not higher.

Discuss.

[Karawasa]

Countdown timers were prolonged for Normal, and majorly prolonged for Easy and Very Easy. At the very least, this shouldn't be as much of a problem.

[Twilice]

Also countdown timer is short for higher difficulty, are you sure you want it to be based around the highest difficulty they would only rush you even more.

[dg86]

What I mean is if in a pubby if I set it on very hard, I should be able to take my sweet time, not get rushed by someone on very easy mode that puts all his towers at the front choke.

It doesn't matter that there's a 40 second countdown if my very hard strategy in a solo run depends upon using multiple 2-pass strategies if the second wave starts before I get my second pass in.

[holepercent]

playing mixed difficulty more or less requires the VH player to play at the fastest 2-pass placement (meaning numpad IV V), or at most the next fastest (numpad III). The cooldown should be long enough to clear at the 2nd pass at the fastest placement. Don't expect to be able to interest farm as much as single player.

More so in VH random, rushing other players out by creep spamming is part of the game, done by pros by building at the start, switching to the next fastest position, if the elements allow them to do so.

[dg86]

There's a difference if everyone is on VH random and if new players just go "derp I saw people rush front so I'll do it too hurr durr".

I mean in pub games, I select hard difficulty because I know that you can't really play very hard if someone who's simply "seen it done before" selects very easy and masses optimal or elemental grenade towers at 12 o clock.

I'm saying that a player on very easy shouldn't be able to rush someone playing on very hard. It just makes no sense. Considering that the time it takes for a creep to clear the whole maze is a LOT longer than the 5-10 seconds it takes a VE player to clear his wave and the 40 seconds it takes the countdown to count down.

[gwho]

This really pisses me off to no end...why do pub players always build in the freaking front? It more or less makes everybody's towers half as effective since you don't have time for the creeps to do a 2nd pass.

IMO if you want the right to rush someone, you should be playing on their difficulty level if not higher.

Discuss.

ya this drives people who want to play harder more seriously to solo play.

What should be changed is the next wave timer being dependent on the first guy to finish. have it trigger based on like the middle guy to finish.

[holepercent]

Join the Forum Draft Series when it starts...

[dg86]

Okay take an extreme example:

7 players on very easy massing mildew/elemental grenade/jet/frost/water/fire/nameYourAoE towers at 12 o clock.

1 guy on very hard.

This isn't an uncommon scenario.

Once again, you're punishing the player who took on a challenge and awarding the very easy players.

At the least, IMO, there should be varying levels of base interest.

Very easy gets 2%

Easy gets 2.25%

Normal gets 2.5%

Hard gets 2.75%

Very hard gets 3% base interest

IMO by making the countdown start on the first player's wave clear, you're really discouraging players from actually challenging themselves.

[gwho]

Okay take an extreme example:

7 players on very easy massing mildew/elemental grenade/jet/frost/water/fire/nameYourAoE towers at 12 o clock.

1 guy on very hard.

This isn't an uncommon scenario.

Once again, you're punishing the player who took on a challenge and awarding the very easy players.

At the least, IMO, there should be varying levels of base interest.

Very easy gets 2%

Easy gets 2.25%

Normal gets 2.5%

Hard gets 2.75%

Very hard gets 3% base interest

IMO by making the countdown start on the first player's wave clear, you're really discouraging players from actually challenging themselves.

it seems for reason they want all the waves start at all the same time. is there a reason for this? can't it be based individually?

[dg86]

The reason is so that in a high-level competitive game when everyone's on very hard that it is viable to stack the front with optimum grenades and rush people early game, then sell all those and build further back, so you can make them leak in the beginning.

[Karawasa]

The reason is so that in a high-level competitive game when everyone's on very hard that it is viable to stack the front with optimum grenades and rush people early game, then sell all those and build further back, so you can make them leak in the beginning.

Or rush them at anytime in the game...

[dg86]

The reason is so that in a high-level competitive game when everyone's on very hard that it is viable to stack the front with optimum grenades and rush people early game, then sell all those and build further back, so you can make them leak in the beginning.

Or rush them at anytime in the game...

So in order to rush them, shouldn't they be playing the same difficulty as them?

[gwho]

The reason is so that in a high-level competitive game when everyone's on very hard that it is viable to stack the front with optimum grenades and rush people early game, then sell all those and build further back, so you can make them leak in the beginning.

Or rush them at anytime in the game...

So in order to rush them, shouldn't they be playing the same difficulty as them?

hah yeah, true. the whole point of "the first to kill starts the timer for everyone else" is for competing.

not having same difficulty is a big plothole, game hole, w/e hole.

should we have another button for "competetive mode"?

[Karawasa]

I'm kind of intrigued by the base interest idea. I'm considering the 2/2.25/2.5/2.75/3 numbers mentioned by dg86. What do you guys think? It's like a bounty increase but doesn't reward you by default.

[dg86]

I mean jesus christ, is it so hard to understand? If you want to compete with me, then play the same game as I do! What's the point of you front-loading a crapton of towers on very easy mode and say "oh look I beat someone on very hard lawlz I'm so good".

Furthermore, what constitutes as "winning"? In order to "win" this competition, wouldn't you also have to survive to the fruit of death as well? So what's the point in going with an all-in rush by building elemental towers at 12 o clock to clear as many early waves while you can, and then end up dying on the later levels anyway? I mean it seems that it's more or less impossible to survive if your build relies on only having one wave in your queue at a time and using both sides of a bunch of massed basic grenade towers and someone's building fungus towers at 12 o clock. That happened to me last game. Yeah, I died before I could get a single triple up, but said rush-the-front bastard died horribly on flame queens.

After all, if nobody makes it to wave 60, everyone receives the "sorry, but nobody made it this time, better luck next time" screen. Which effectively says "you ALL suck! You ALL lose!"

But that's going off on a bit of a tangent.

Essentially, why is there nothing to discourage building in the front when that means certain death later on in the game, but at the same time, gives someone a ridiculous chance to rush someone who's planning on surviving to the end of the game?

[Karawasa]

Essentially, why is there nothing to discourage building in the front when that means certain death later on in the game, but at the same time, gives someone a ridiculous chance to rush someone who's planning on surviving to the end of the game?

What type of things could you do to discourage this behavior? I mean putting aside difficulty, how could we punish building in the front?

Also, yes you're right. Getting the most fruit points is the only way to actually win the game. Any other scenario results in defeat.

[Nachoraver]

I see where the guy is coming from, playing on VH and having VE players push waves through is annoying - but also playing with friends and punching waves through to make them go out first is amazingly fun. Also increasing interest for higher modes seems silly - It's VH for a reason. The only thing I can think of here is to make it so the first VH player that pushes a wave through is what starts the counter OR whatever the highest mode being played at the time ends the wave starts the counter... and then possibly making an interest handicap for people trying to abuse the mechanic.

Does any of that rambling make sense?

[Karawasa]

Does any of that rambling make sense?

Yes, it does. The idea of only allowing the highest difficulty present to start the timer has been mentioned before. I wouldn't mind going in that direction, but part of me wonders if there is something between here and there? The flipside is that we could reduce the timers again so that games on lower difficulties don't take forever to play.

[Nachoraver]

Does any of that rambling make sense?

Yes, it does. The idea of only allowing the highest difficulty present to start the timer has been mentioned before. I wouldn't mind going in that direction, but part of me wonders if there is something between here and there? The flipside is that we could reduce the timers again so that games on lower difficulties don't take forever to play.

Every play Mineralz? There's not a mode in ele td that takes "forever"

[dg86]

Essentially, why is there nothing to discourage building in the front when that means certain death later on in the game, but at the same time, gives someone a ridiculous chance to rush someone who's planning on surviving to the end of the game?

What type of things could you do to discourage this behavior? I mean putting aside difficulty, how could we punish building in the front?

Also, yes you're right. Getting the most fruit points is the only way to actually win the game. Any other scenario results in defeat.

How do you discourage rushing from the front in a pub game? Think about the converse.

How do you discourage someone from killing an entire wave besides 2-3 creeps, selling all of his towers, then leaking 80% of their lives but getting so much money that they never leak again? By making other players start the countdown.

Let's apply this thinking in reverse.

How do you stop a single player from ruining the game by building at 12 o clock in a suicidal fashion? By not giving him sole power to start the countdown.

One extreme (highest difficulty level) has the degenerate situation that if only one surviving player is sitting at the top, they can do the degenerate "leak one creep x40" and farm LOL amounts of interest (so would everyone else, but the game would get very boring very fast--especially if he was building massive amounts of life/eternal towers to that point). The other extreme results in very hard not being feasible in a regular bnet game because some very easy douchebag can build fire/mildew/other AoE towers at 12 o clock and spawn kill everything, even though that would never ever fly on harder difficulty levels.

So this is my proposal: assign a difficulty variable to each player (1-5 seems fair enough for VE-VH), which is 0 if they haven't finished their wave, or that value (1-5) if it is. The total of the completed variables will also be stored.

So, say you have 1 very easy, 3 easy, 2 normal, 1 hard, 1 very hard, and go with my 1-5 assignment.

Your total is 1*1+3*2+2*3+1*4+1*5=1+6+6+4+5=22.

Now in a 1v1 competitive game, you want rushing to be a viable strategy. At the same time, you don't want to make it too easy for a couple of easy difficulty players to make playing very hard not viable.

So, my solution is this: the threshold to start the countdown will be half of the total difficulty total, minus what mathematicians like to call "epsilon", and what anyone else simply says to sound smart, aka the smallest value greater than zero. In this case, we'll just say .00001.

So, when enough players complete the wave to make this difficulty counter go to 11 or higher, the countdown starts. The countdown will be based off of the lowest difficulty level completed to start the countdown. So, going back to my example. Say you had all the easy/very easy players complete the wave, and 2 of the normals. That's 1+7+4=11, which starts the countdown. But what timer do you use? The very easy countdown, once again, to discourage suicide massing on any difficulty.

Of course, there's also the problem of what happens for example, if there is only a very easy, an easy, and a very hard player surviving, and one player has more difficulty points than the rest of the players combined. This can potentially happen, so at that point, you'd make a case for "either the threshold is met, or all but one player has finished".

From personal experience being new to the game, I don't think people build in the front out of malice or wanting to rush someone down, but because they're impatient. The faster they can kill their wave, the faster they start the next one, and the faster they kill that one, the faster they can reach the next one, and so on and so forth so they're not rushing other players, but rushing the waves so they can simply complete the game faster.

What they don't seem to realize is that 12 o clock is one of the utterly worst places in the game to build your towers, because if you're having trouble with your last wave and someone starts up a new one, your 12 o clock towers will target the new wave rather than the old and you'll get absolutely hosed.

So...that was a wall of text, but essentially, the idea in a nutshell is to keep from one player affecting the game in either direction--either by slowing it way down, or by speeding it way up to a point that's no good for anyone, including themselves (less interest!).

So, here's some pseudocode:

difficultyVectorExample<-(ve,ve,e,e,n,n,h,vh)

difficultyValueExample<-new vector of numbers that takes above and substitutes ve with 1, e with 2, n with 3, h with 4, vh with 5.

difficultyTotal<-sum of difficultyValueExample.

waveCompletionVector<-0 for each player at start of wave, takes corresponding value when they finish their wave.

completionSum<-sum of waveCompletionVector

totalSurvivingPlayers<-some number (1-8)

completedBooleanVector<-0 for each player at start of wave, 1 for that player once they finish

completedBooleanSum<-sum of completedBooleanVector

if(completionSum>=difficultyTotal/2 OR(totalSurvivingPlayers-completedBooleanSum<=1 AND there is more than one surviving player)){

....start countdown, using countdown for the easiest difficulty in completionSum or completedPlayers #dots for indentation for if statement

}

[gwho]

tldr

"So, my solution is this: the threshold to start the countdown will be half of the total difficulty total"

loosely speaking, the middle guy to finish.

i was inspired by your OP here and came up with a similar idea, but less rigorous

https://forums.eletd.com/Next-Wave-Starting...gger-t2520.html

[dg86]

tldr

"So, my solution is this: the threshold to start the countdown will be half of the total difficulty total"

loosely speaking, the middle guy to finish. we seem to be thinking alike. (not first not last)

That's a simplified way of putting it.

Consider this: 7 VEs and a VH.

7*1+1*5=12.

In order to start the countdown, you'll need to have 6 of 8 players finish. Not 4. Big difference in some edge cases.

You start to think like that when you code for a living.

[gwho]

watashi shi comprende...

what's the point of weighting by difficulty?

we could do it by time, or any other variable.

[Karawasa]

I like where this is going. But, we must maintain the competitive aspect. The problem with the "guy in the middle" or the more precise version of it is that this competitive aspect is lost to a great extent.

So, I propose building off of dg86's idea. Players get a weight from 1-5. But instead of the threshold being half of the total, the threshold is simply the average. Therefore in a non-mixed difficulty game, the countdown still starts upon first person finishing. In the extreme example of 7 VE and 1 VH, you would have 12/8 = 1.5. Meaning two VE people would be needed to start the countdown. Is that optimal in the extreme case? Perhaps not. But it's better than it is now and we maintain the competitive aspect.

Another question is how to convey this information to the player if we do go this route. Some people might scratch their heads as to when the timer will start...