I agree that 20-40 is a good goal, but that range should be qualified: 20-40 minutes given balanced teams of an appropriate size.
Further questions: how should game lengths outside the ideal be handled? Should there be a hard minimum ("spawns can't be killed for the first 5 minutes") or a hard maximum? If there is a hard limit of some kind, should players be able to extend it somehow?
norfenstein wrote:Further questions: how should game lengths outside the ideal be handled?
Probably by making it gradually easier in some way(s) to win.
Should there be a hard minimum ("spawns can't be killed for the first 5 minutes") or a hard maximum?
I'd not say hard minimum, although preventing spawnkill isn't a bad idea. Hard maximum is configurable as is, and we should keep that; it's more a matter of what should be default.
If there is a hard limit of some kind, should players be able to extend it somehow?
Yes, and we have that already.
Debian and Ubuntu packages (squeeze, wheezy, sid; 12.04, 12.10, 13.04) may work on derivatives
OFFEND! … no, that's not right… ATTACK!
I don't see the issue with spawn killing. In my view if you are in that position you have already lost. The other person is just a douchebag for not ending it. And, if as a result of his spawn camping, he ends up dying, he just lost an opportunity to win. it is his loss.
Games shorter than 10 minutes are boring. Games longer than 30 minutes can be potentially interesting, assuming that the teams are not locked into some sort of camping trench war. The reason that long games are so hated is solely because there is so much camping.
I think the sweet spot is probably 15-25 minutes.
Anomalous wrote:I think that it's fine as is, given SD.
I disagree. I think the fact that sudden death is considered part of the game (and not just some kind of "emergency brake") shows that the game itself doesn't manage to produce a winner. So my statement was "As long as we have any form of suden death, games should always end before it happens.".
If there was no sudden death I'd still say 20-30 minutes is a good average duration. Let there be 5 minutes of base building, 10-15 minutes fighting about resources and positioning and another 10 minutes of coordinated base attacks, where the team with more resources and better forward baseshas the advantage but doesn't automatically/always win.
Sudden death was discussed in this topic, and it sounds like everyone pretty much wants matches to naturally resolve somehow instead of ever being forced to end artificially. I think discussion of how that should happen falls under the much broader topic of pacing, for which I started a new thread.
30 minutes is nice. Less for small teams. More for large teams. Server side tickbox for choice.
It sounds like there's a consensus for 20-40 minutes being ideal (irrespective of the inclusion or omission of sudden death). Realize what this is saying is that if we find in playtesting that most games end before 20 minutes then the right course of action is probably to restructure the early game to be slower paced.
If you don't agree with this answer speak up, otherwise we'll consider this question "answered" and start using its answer to inform other questions.
I agree with the consensus of 20-40 minutes. If absolutely nobody objects to this, then I can lock the thread and label the question as being solved.
Okay. Thread tagged resolved and locked. Prod me on IRC if it needs to be reopened for any reason.
