Capture the Flag Discussion Thread

I'd still like to see it looked into, as I mentioned earlier, a system that would Auto-Party CTF members when the match starts and Auto-End the Party after the match ends. Not sure if there's any legitimate Cons to this aside from figuring out how to code it, but it seems like one of the easiest ways to avoid some of the simplest issues.

I don't see how auto-party would solve anything really. It would definitely be convenient and useful, so I'm all for it. Otherwise I'm not sure I understand what you think would be solved by making that work.
There's also the next level option of sending calls to your mumble client to put you in the proper channels, but I don't know shit about coding something like that sooooo, here's to dreaming.

I think auto-party would help out new players that aren't savvy with the targeting yet. Even having several targeting hot keys, I still find it useful. It also makes it easier to communicate a strategy in that 60 seconds or so before the match starts...without everyone hearing you.

As is often the case, we're talking about making mechanics changes to deal with a problem that is actually player behavior.
Since it is a problem of player behavior, we have to approach it from that angle.
So what are the reasons someone would team stack in CTF?

I can think of three:
1) It's profitable to team up and win for the platinum
2) It's fun to team up and beat the crap out of people
3) It's fun to play with your friends

The first and the second I can see as motivations that create problems for other players, as there is motivation to refine things to the point where uninvolved players have no chance. The third is fairly innocuous, but also something that doesn't really have to be done in CTF.
The only way I can see to remove the motivations behind both one and two would be to remove the reward and to randomize teams. If you don't remove the reward but do randomize teams, people would naturally be inclined to work together cross-team to make sure the platinum falls in the most efficient way. If you remove the reward but don't randomize the teams, people may still band together because beating the crap out of other people is fun.
The only way to modify these behaviors without fail is to make both number 1 and number 2 not viable at all.

I think that having randomized matches as well as a team league or something is happy compromise, though I wonder how many teams you would actually see interested in league matches.

Teaming up for platinum in CTF is about as effective as group begging on a value for time spent basis.

Teaming up for the win is what makes nearly all team games fun. Losing will happen until you've developed the experience and put in the effort to do well. No one needs elite gear to do well in CTF. It makes it a bit easier but it's not the deciding factor. Communication and determination to be part of the team for the win, is the deciding factor.

Blaming everything on player behavior is a cop-out. Player behavior is nothing you can modify and attempting to do so will only reduce activity, not bolster it.

These are the issues Telamon outlined in his first post.

These are player behaviors. If you don't consider why people are doing these things, you won't be able to come up with satisfactory solutions.
I would imagine that those who have shown up to every CTF and won a good portion of them have made a nice chunk of platinum by now. It may not be as profitable as spawning, but it's also a fairly passive thing. Beating people down is fun too.
If you turn a blind eye to the underlying player behaviors, you're really just aimlessly patching things hoping something works.

I don't see it as aimlessly patching things when we're looking at specific actions that can be prevented through mechanical restrictions. Obviously the Trammel effects of certain maps are an issue. The desire of some to have random teams is another, that has already been stated to be on the road map for the shard.

I'm fairly confident Telamon was not implying he would like suggestions on how to modify player behavior. That's an assumption though, based on the fairly obvious point that you cannot modify player behavior, only ability.
People will always try to break things, as can be seen by attempts to summon pets, ethereal riding, intentional flag holding (not capturing when possible, to prevent other teams from scoring) and cross-team collusion in 4-team matches. There is nothing you can do to stop people from trying to do shitty things in video games. You can only build the game to restrict undesirable actions or allow them and spend countless hours applying policy. I don't really know why people do these things other than some self satisfaction at having demonstrated their ability to find problems and seek attention for doing so, rather than do so in a testing environment.

This shard is a testament to unique systems in UO designed to specifically restrict nefarious or undesirable behaviors. It's not going to change the players' behavior, only what they're capable of doing, be it good or ill. I see behavior as what people do with their abilities, not the abilities themselves (which is what can be controlled on the server side).

Blaise, I don't know if you know what the word "behavior" means.

Behavior is what people do, motivation is the thing in their mind that causes them to do it. Motivation is the word you are looking for, not behavior.
The things Telamon listed (team stacking, stacking multiple characters in CTF, and cross-teaming) are behaviors. These are the things he's looking for solutions for. They're the things I quoted right there in my post. You can't argue that these aren't the things he's looking to curb.
Without understanding the motivation, there's little hope of changing the behavior. You can absolutely modify player behavior. If people are farming something for a reward and you remove that reward, they will stop farming it. That's modifying player behavior, and that's exactly what I am saying probably needs to happen to stop people from teaming up in CTF.

It is clearly negative expected value in terms of platinum to "stack" in 2 team. If the 6 best players are on the same team, they can only win 3 of the 6 trophies awarded (3 trophies are awarded per team). Generally only two. Most kills usually goes to someone killing random people (in ways that aren't contributing to the objective, like ignoring the flag carrier to fight in the middle). If, instead, the stack was split up into 2 groups of 3 they're probably going to get the caps and heals trophies trophies on both teams AND it is more likely they'll get the most kills trophy due to the available targets to the people in midfield. It is possible that they'll win ALL of the trophies for the event.

4 team is a little more complex. It isn't as straight forward, but I think the EV of splitting to 2 teams is close to 0. Paging Dalavar Mathmage!

Well, what can we agree on to change to start with...?

I say we do away with the following:

• Trammel Push-Through: Make it the Felucca ruleset in Trammel for the next patch.
• Non-Targeting of team mates for damage, including Purple Pots. Remove that.
  • If you see a team mate helping another team, you should be able to tank them.
  • I haven't bothered with Purple Pots yet, but if they don't damage your own team mates, then that is silly and needs to be removed, also. Being able to lay a mine-field of Purple Pots that only damage the other guys is not in the spirit of Felucca.
    • If i'm wrong on that, sorry, its just not an aspect i've played with or needed to play with yet.
• Multiple Players per IP Address
  • This just begs for abuse and should be removed. It has already been abused and admitted to. Just do away with it.
  • It should be 1 player per IP.
  • Special cases can be handled at Chris' discretion. I have no desire to punish legitimate families and friends for playing from the same location.

Some more proposals:

What about having 4 types of matches with 2 variations? A little variety will give more players a chance to find a niche within the system. Also, it'll let us have a slightly different type of fight every day of the week. Just something to consider.

1. Magics and Picking Teams with 2 & 4 team matches.
2. Non-Magics and Picking Teams with 2 & 4 team matches.
3. Magics and Randomized Teams with 2 & 4 team matches.
4. Non-Magics and Randomized Teams with 2 & 4 team matches.

Organized Teams vs. Random Teams:
Some people have tried to frame the discussion around the premise that organizing into teams should be punished, but that ignores the actual issue entirely. The premise should be more along the lines of: Should we have Random Matches and Team Matches? There's different kinds of organization to be taken note of here.

There's the organization of players that work together day in and day out...and...there's the organization of players that meet randomly and unite and fight... I think its really interesting to try to take a group of random people, on the fly, and try to coordinate them and steer them to a common goal. Hence, I think the Random Teams should be an option. Some people value the working together with a specific group over and over to get a well-oiled machine. Both, to me, should be given a shot equally. I do NOT think that Randomized Teams should completely replace Picked Teams...or vice versa. I think that there should be an equal number of both matches with the same rewards throughout all of them because....you shouldn't punish certain niches.

Some variety would just be nice and I think we all need to stop treating everything as an either/or and start looking at the "both" ideas. The either/or mentality just makes someone the enemy instead of them just being someone with a different point of view. It helps nothing by thinking like that. Nothing.

Turtling:
Personally, I think Turtling is a viable playstyle. Sure, its not the big long passes down the field sorta playstyle, but whats wrong with a defensive struggle...? Why does the match options have to be limited in that regard...? Is a very low score that bad of a thing...? Really...?

Rewards:
Have them be the same for every match of every type. Picking and choosing what types of matches to reward and not reward should never happen. Either the same for all, or none at all. Either way, the rewards do not matter to me so long as they are the same.

AFK'ing:
Hit them with the AFK Gump if they've been inactive for a certain amount of time and give them the exact set of increasing punishments as AFK Resource Gatherers. Boot'em to jail and remove them from the team. Sure, people could fill up a team and just all drop. If that happens, deal with it accordingly so that they never do it again.

In addition to that, as some will just keep answering the AFK Gump and do nothing, put in some movement code with it. If they never move, just boot them to jail regardless of whether they answer the AFK Gumps.

Rules:
I keep hearing a lot about coding rules and enforcement of rules. It gets me rather frustrated, to be honest, as not everything has to be a line of code. Granted, a line of code is a sure thing and I believe that is ultimately the best path to choose for making "rules" for CTF, but there are other paths to take.

Let's face it, Speed Limit Signs and Laws in real life don't always stop everyone from speeding...obviously. They do, however, curb the most blatant abuse of those laws and encourage people to act in an orderly fashion. Like in real life, the "police" on the shard can't monitor everything with code, but they can have a rule/sign to encourage people to not blatantly ignore a rule that may or may not be needed. Just because it cannot be coded, does not mean that a rule cannot be stated. Just because it is hard to police, does not mean that having the rule is useless. Most people want to do the right thing. Sometimes you just have to plainly tell them what "the right thing" is.

Summation:
In the end, I do not think things need to be removed. I do not think things need to be one way, or the other way. I think we should just pursue more variety and tweak what we already have to make the best system possible.

Currently, I like more things about the system than I dislike. That does not mean I will stop speaking up about the things I do disagree with. I think Chris has come up with a very good system, overall. I'd like to see it built upon such that there is more variety and that it is automated...so that Chris can play that game that we refer to as real life a bit more.

Let's focus on improving things and coming together on things instead of all this divisiveness that we've been seeing. I think a good way to do that is to put in more variety.

Surprisingly, to me anyway, I agree with almost your entire post.

I don't think anyone likes the trammel pushthrough.

I agree with this too. In addition to the purples, Trammel sometimes blocks you from performing actions that are beneficial but considered aggressive. For example, buff/debuffing a teammate because they are getting MB spammed.

Obvious answer is obvious.

I think 1 & 4 is enough. Given the reasons people want random teams, I don't really get 2 & especially don't get 3. Also, how about a 3 team map? For random matches, maybe even choose the map by the number of participants. 9 people? 3 team it is. For #4 just auto-gm everything. I like my baseball bat. Everyone can then use the same equipment for both.

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I think turtling should be allowed. I think AFK should be handled similarly to resource gathering. I don't care about trophy plat value, but I think the winning team trophies should be labeled and hued differently.

Behavior is the manner in which people do things, not the motivation or the resultant action of a behavior or pattern of behavior. Doing everything possible, even if obviously nefarious, to "win" is a behavior. This cannot be changed and the control is entirely limited to what players are allowed to do. We can't expect the gaming public to work on an honor system, unfortunately.

I'm only really interested in #3, cause I like random teams and want to use my leet weps and armor.

AFK gump sounds great.

Afk gumps, trammel push through, and purple pots not hitting friendlies is definitely items I agree with. Also, one player per IP. I will say, on a couple occasions lately I have jumped on a random team with people I've never played with before and we went against another group that almost always plays ctf together, and wins nearly every time. We came within 7 points of winning and probably would have had I not made a critical mistake at the end. On another occasion we played a 2 team ctf and again i was with people I never play with and we won. Point is, it is definitely possible to have "random players" compete against organized teams. It's just a matter of people having a good understanding of strategy which only comes with experience.

With that being said I wouldn't mind having two types of ctf, and running them once each per day. Match one would be organized teams in which players can select their team, and match 2 would just have everyone sign up and when the match begins all players are randomly organized into 2 or 4 randomly assorted teams.

I am proposing a few things to help alleviate the growing issues with the event’s system. This is mainly targeted at the CTF. First of all my opinion on the whole pvp event system is that it shouldn’t exist period. It’s destroyed the re-playability on other servers and it’s very quickly getting to that point here. What I mean is that people will eventually just log on to play the CTF match or whatever is going on and then they will promptly log off with their winnings. A system that rewards people who log on for 10 minutes and doesn’t really have any impact on the in game society shouldn’t exist. So to elaborate more on that since people want to keep the CTF the common ground would be to eliminate the plat reward via a trophy. Either get rid of the trophy or make it so it couldn’t be turned in for a reward. Since the inception of the matches this has been exploited by many. Second thing I would recommend is randomization of the teams and removing the trammel affects. What I mean by that is if you are on a team you should be able to kill your teammate if you so choose, however not without penalty. What is happening in the events is the rewards are team based therefore two teams are teaming up and we all know who you are and it’s not fair. This is why the teams should be randomized if you are to keep the 4 team ctf. With that by removing the trammel effects and allowing people to kill each other with say a “Purple pot” this would be employing more of the worlds rule set to the game.

Two more things before I end this are as follows. Remove magic’s entirely… I don’t need to go into why... we all know why. And last but not least. There should be some system implemented on the entire server with regard to the users and using multiple accounts in a CTF. What I would propose is maybe setting the system to only allow 1 IP matching 1 Email account. What this will do is if someone is using another account on a proxy the game will only allow one of the 3 accounts because the email address is already registered. Banning by using just the same IP doesn’t work. We have tied our three accounts to the same Email address therefore I believe it should be utilized.

I know these options I proposed will get a lot of flak. However, I only foresee the people who have been exploiting the system will provide their objections.

Well said...I wholly agree with your first point and I don't believe anyone has ever brought it up. The uo we played back then didn't have instanced scheduled trammelized pvp events. That's what wow has. UO had spontaneous world pvp. And the people on wow servers spend a lot of time saying they wish there was spontaneous world pvp. We may be cheating ourselves out of one of the things that made UO so memorable.

It seems a precedence has been set on these runUO servers to create these instanced events. It's a shame. I don't see it changing however.

I disagree on this one. Dexxer's with gm weapons are laughable. If we remove magics, expect very little dexxer participation. I like that the current ctf is viable to so many different builds, and that is only because of magic weapons.



Also this plays off of Tuco's experience in ctf... and honestly UO in general.....

There is something extremely magical to be said about the JOURNEY in which we go from having nothing but a 50/50 character with starter equiptment in occlo, to scratching together enough gold for your first house, and so on. To me, there is nothing finer then the journey in UO. When new players ask for hand outs I always refuse simply because it would be taking away IMO the best part of the game from them, the journey.
CTF is similar in that it has its own journey. I am confident that new players enjoy upgrading their CTF armor from GM to fort to invul. They enjoy having something to look forward to, their first +25 vanq, or runic. There is really only 1 runic that is out of touch of the common man, valorite. This is the END GAME part of the journey in terms of weapons you can get for CTF, and take it from someone who uses a valorite weapon, the differences in dmg between the largely unattainable (valorite runics) and the attainable (agapite or verite), are largely menial, largely status symbols. This idea is strengthened by the fact that most of the people dominating in CTF's do not have them.
TLDR: The journey is what makes UO magical. Magic equipment is what makes CTF a journey.

Honestly this is why Factions was created. I would support whole heartedly any server that removes events and tries to employ world pvp. I think our time and energy should be placed into making factions more fun for everyone.

Mes, I am glad you are with me on this one.

I would agree with Phuzzylogic if the population was the same than it was back there.

With less people and the same map, it's quite hard to find anyone to interact with compared to OSI.

Also, I'm not quite sure why it's a bad thing if some people would log in just for CTF. The same person would probably not log at all if there was no match going, right ? And there's a chance to attract a wider pvp community.


My best UO memories are when they Tested siege perilious with the Abyss Test Server. It was like factions but X10. Constant fighting, could not run 10 steps without bumping into enemies.
CTF system is very close to what fun i could have over there.

The players on the other side of the argument can simply state that only people consistently losing CTFs provide their objectives to how the system currently works, but we're not, because we are trying to be constructive.

You and Lighsthade have on several occasions accused my team and (insert any other team here) of colluding to smash CTF's. I've provided screenshots to dispel this theory and they fall on deaf ears because it serves no purpose to your own agendas. Instead the two of you would rather complain to Telamon and cast suspicion on us of gaming the system. So, let me provide those screenshots, again, with timestamps that prove that we were never colluding with another team.

Secondly. I want the two of you guys to really, really, think for a moment and explain to me (because I just don't see it) as to what the benefit is to either team in colluding to allow my team to always win? Why would we ask anyone to help us beat two other teams down? Why would anyone agree to purposefully lose in order to help us win? We have no personal gripe with anyone that's been playing CTF.. This just doesn't make sense. Why would I bother to join a CTF just to be a sore loser/winner and help another team win while ensuring my own lost (Unless I'm Mes or SmellyTuna)





I also agree that CTF was not available in era and it takes traditional PvP away from the field. However, this isn't an era accurate server, if it were we wouldn't have hundreds of the things we have here and we'd be plagued by the way this era actually was implemented.

Some people like CTF for what is is, Capture The Flag. I've played hundreds of games in my life and I've always enjoyed CTF type games, DOTA type games, etc.. The fact that I can get the best of both worlds on this server is a big reason why I, and many others, play here. I'm not saying removing CTF will remove me from the server but I can't say the same for others who actually look forward to CTF on a daily basis, both who are consistent winners and not.

Could CTF use some tweaking? Sure, and I don't think anyone on either side of the debate here has contested that a little change would be welcome.

1) Purple pots should remain the same or removed completely. Harming your own team is NOT the answer.
2) Ability to kill own team mates is NOT the answer. A vote kick option is! A team vote kick would allow the player to join another team. In the case of two team CTF or 4 successful vote kicks is the only issue I see and haven't thought of a solution for this issue.
3) Removing rewards is something I'm not a fan of. I don't do much of anything in this game without some sort of reward. Sure, I play for fun, for fun of whatever reward I will eventually receive. Even plain ol' PvP on the field can net me the reward of looting my opponent. Trophies in CTF give players something to strive for instead of just letting the rest of your team do the work. It get's players to participate and give it their all instead of just participating to participate. I'm not putting anyone down for coming to CTF to just simply have fun and damn getting a reward or not. But you shouldn't condemn me because I put aside an hour every night to be online with my team and try to get an all-around win. If you want to create a league (team orientated) CTF with trophies and create a randomized CTF without trophies I would not complain in the least.

This whole accusation that we're conspiring with other teams needs to stop though. It may seem sometimes that we aren't killing a certain team but that's because we're not playing CTF to get random kills. If anyone has been paying attention I used to exclusively play my dexxer in CTFs and compete against Bart for top kills. It became obvious that something was lacking and we could be playing CTF a little cleaner and more efficiently. I changed to playing my mage and all of us changed gears on how we play the game in general. If you were to actually pay attention you would see that our kills our low, our heals are high, and we cap whatever flag we can get our hands on. We concentrate on killing the enemy FC only if possible and we'll hold flags of opposing teams until the 2nd flag runner can get to the base for an instant pickup. These are basic CTF strategies and anyone can do it. If we're ingnoring a team it's because they pose no threat to us at that time, not because we're friends.