Unvanquished Forum

I will use this thread to respond to criticism that came up by kangz in the developer area of the forum so we can keep the discussion in one (public) place.

kangz wrote:

What about gameplay? […] Of course Viech has been testing the confidence system but I feel that 1) it is a hackish way to manipulate the players behaviour 2) it is impossible to explain it to new players 3) it is a very limited change and feels like a Tremulous mod. […]

Regarding (1), I'd like to refer to the section On problems with the confidence system in this post.

Regarding (2), I have been thinking about that criticism a lot (you were not the first to verbalize it) and I came to the conclusion that this really isn't an issue of the confidence system but of the visualization thereof. As soon as we moved to librocket and the redesign of our HUDs takes place I will propose a charge bar for displaying the confidence which has markers for stage thresholds on it. Think of an arcade game where you charge up some form of score multiplier or attempt to fill a bar that unlocks a special ability. Confidence generating events are already visible to the players that are responsible for them and adding more precise information is possible (not sure if desirable). Keep in mind that Tremulous' measurement of staging up wasn't much easier to understand. The thresholds were shifting, too, and the fact that a teams total of credits earned didn't decrease over time didn't make it any easier to foresee or understand the moment of a stageup. I think confidence is as artificial and hacky as any resource (credits/evos, build points) in Tremulous.

Regarding (3), I can't argue about the fact that it feels like a Tremulous mod, since such a system could've been introduced on a modded server. I don't think this is important as we will be making more changes in the future so that Unvanquished will become increasingly different from Trem over time. We had some recent discussions about the degree in which we want to differentiate from Tremulous and I came to the conclusion that we should (for now) stick to the overall composite that makes up the game but attempt a redesign of every individual aspect, such as how buildables are paid for, how stages are reached and whether there will be something as fixed stages at all (tech trees have been discussed a lot). Confidence really isn't limited but a very flexible way to measure a teams' pace for any purpose and any definition of progress and recession. No matter how we will (re)define stages later on, confidence should be able to unlock them.

kangz wrote:

Confidence […] just changes a little bit the pace of the game and changed the behaviour of players. And I'm not sure about the latter, most dev games are played between Tremulous pros that would have rushed anyway; that also explains why it was fun, almost like a scrim.

I'm not sure how little or huge the actual impact is but I agree that our development game player base is biased. I setup a statistics facility so we can have a more objective perspective on how things work out in different matches. As soon as we have botless matches with inexperienced players, the graphs should tell us what's going on. Here's a quick analysis of the last dev games.

Just wondering, killing players doesn't contribute to confidence? Doesn't this increase the need for builders too much?

Currently, killing players only yields confidence when the killed player is inside its own main base (close to OM/RC). The main source of confidence is destroying buildables. When your enemy turtles and your team can't destroy structures at a sufficient rate, you can resort to expanding over the map (building close to other buildables yields less confidence). Otherwise I don't think more than a single builder per team would be necessary. The current initial mine rate is set so that a single builder can build continuously, as long as the degree of expansion is high enough to get a decent mine rate. Two builders expanding in different directions will already compete for build points, since they share both the pool of initial build points and the resource generators in their main base. While expanding in a single direction already is a risk (your enemy can quickly stage up if they manage to push you back), defending two fronts with two of your teammates being unarmed against an enemy that can strike with full force at a single point should be even harder.