Arena gamemode - the verdict?

What do you think of the Arena Gamemode?

  • Good

    Votes: 37 44.6%

  • Bad

    Votes: 10 12.0%

  • Meh

    Votes: 18 21.7%

  • Haven't tried it

    Votes: 18 21.7%
  • Total voters
    83
PROTIP: In TF2, certain classes are poor against certain other classes in certain situations.
 
I just went off to play a few rounds of an arena gametype, and i've got to say i loved it! Though i was medic the entire time i have to say it keeps you thinking and unless you're new to the game (free weekend...) you should most likely stay alive longer, which of course you might want to think about trying in ctf_2fort for those idiots who just LOVE to run straight into the intel room of the enemy base as a scout and get shot to death by like 3 lvl 3 sentries.
 
Stigmata said:
PROTIP: In TF2, certain classes are poor against certain other classes in certain situations.
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Yes but without medpacks pyros are just dominating. They are the second fastest class ffs.
 
Pretty good fun, really crap with very little players but with more its a decent gamemode to play :D
 
Strange. I only find it bearable with small teams - 2, 3 aside.
 
First, I must note that I have only played Alpine, and not the reworked versions of old maps. That said...

It's pretty meh. The no respawning sucks (I could never get into Counter Strike) and the game is obviously not balanced for it. A team with three medics, heavy, two soldiers, and two pyros is pretty much a 100% chance of victory. A demoman instead of an extra soldier works too.

Engineer is useless on it. Spy is either way overpowered (if you're good) or totally pathetic (if you're bad, in which case you are just a suicide bomb).

Pyro is way, way overpowered.

I just don't like it. Feels like TF2 Light. It would be perfect for a simplier console experience, though.

It definitely needs balancing though. And it's awful being on a 24 person server where 8 people have to sit out and bitch for 3 minutes, frequently.

Although, it is awesome with only a few people. Played a cool round of 4 vs. 4 on it. It was fun to try and communicate what classes to pick. The medic was using voice chat and was the "leader". Eventually we switched between two teams, to confuse the Blue's.

Team 1
Medic
Heavy
Soldier
Pyro

Team 2
Medic
Pyro
Sniper
Demoman

Worked pretty well. The other team was kind of bad at it, though. At first they kept having a team of 2 medics and 2 heavys, so one of us went spy and one went sniper (I was Pyro) and we destroyed them. They soon caught on though. Still they had really lousy selections for the most part. Four scouts? Lol.
 
^Yawn at reckless exaggerators. Pyro is just as OP as Scout, Solly, Demo, Krits medic, ninja Engie, Heavy, Spy, and Sniper. If it gets near you and catches you on fire, that is your fault.

Engies are just so used to camping behind their sentries that they have no clue what to do. Build a dispenser and then keep placing LV.1s in weird spots so you are constantly changing the area that you are denying people of.
 
saratos said:
^Yawn at reckless exaggerators. Pyro is just as OP as Scout, Solly, Demo, Krits medic, ninja Engie, Heavy, Spy, and Sniper. If it gets near you and catches you on fire, that is your fault.
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Prove it.

Anyone who doesn't know how to aim with the 8 other classes will do poor like they're supposed to, but this rule clearly doesn't work with pyro where you're rewarded for w+mouse1'ing.
 
I've had zero problems whatsoever with pyros. If they flank you and ambush you, then yes, of course you're screwed. If you flank them, and stay three or more meters away from them, you're fine.
 
Everyone bitches about classes being overpowered. The classes feel balanced to me, you just suck. Every class has a weakness, find it and use it ffs.
 
Speaking of which, what if someone made a map in which the majority of it was covered in water, and most passage ways were underwater? If only to stop those pricks who scream out "2 MENY OVURPWRED PYROS!!!!!1!!11111eleven!"
 
Then people would complain about scouts or spies being overpowered.
 
I remember, in the beginning, everyone was complaining about scouts with their scattergun being overpowered.
 
In the beginning everyone complained about everything. Mostly because players found out some useful tricks and instead of trying to become better at the game people just complained.
 
Thats because none of you are playing 32 players.

I'm not going to stop visiting such a server just because a certain class is overkill.
 
I can't stand 32 player servers. There is such a thing as too many players.
 
PvtRyan said:
And how do you propose you can have balanced teams without having sit-outs?
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at least make it so you have the largest possible equal teams, rather than have 10 people sit out, just put as many as you can in the game and then have the odd fellow sit out, just make sure it's not the same guy all the time.
 
nipples said:
I can't stand 32 player servers. There is such a thing as too many players.
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this.

I find the optimal to be 8-18 players for normal games, 6-14 for arena. Not that I don't enjoy 24 players, but 32 takes things too far.
 
if you dont like it dont, dont play it, there are many other kinds of gameplay types to play... Everybody says its counter-strike but counter-strike has large tangled maps, tf2 arena is a small arena map and plays out differently, and css doesnt have 9 unique classes last time i checked... Its supposed to be more stealthy and less blow the shit outta everything kinda which is nice for a change...
 
PvtRyan said:
I remember, in the beginning, everyone was complaining about scouts with their scattergun being overpowered.
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I'm 90% certain the Scattergun or the Scout in general has been nerfed somehow since the first public version. You used to be able to dominate everything and this wasn't just because people were new or couldn't aim.

PvtRyan said:
I don't get the people whining about having to spectate, do you have ADD or something? And how else do you propose making a Last Man Standing gamemode without having spectators?
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I think the main issue people have is that they didn't buy the game to have to sit out a round. It's like going to Quasar and having someone tell you that although you paid you're going to have to wait 60 seconds before you're allowed to join your friends in playing. The long respawn times are avoidable with some care, having to sit out because people on your team are shit, or because some random joined the server is just wrong.

---

The good:
- Actually quite fun, but then again I like the added tension of Counter-Strike.
- A gamemode that suits small teams and scales up surprisingly well.
- The team auto-balance system is inspired, and usually works well.
- The maps are all very strong. I can't find any overpowered tactics (probably because the rounds are so short)
- 'Last man standing' spectacles are great to watch, and play.
- Teamwork seems more rewarding when the stakes are so high.

The bad:
- Crits just shouldn't be in this game mode. End of.
- Rounds are too short. The map always ends before you get into it.
- Destroys the already-established, near-perfect balance between the classes.
- I'm still going to say this mode promotes camping, I just don't think enough people have tried it out enough to prove that works.
- I don't play TF2 to sit out of a round because my team lost. Losing is punishment enough.
- All maps need a bit of water near the centre because Pyros can be a bit overpowered in the end game.

In TF2 there are 9 classes that all 'rock-paper-scissors' eachother in a fine-tuned balance. Arena is however balanced for 8 v 8, so it's impossible to have a player as every class on a team. That's the first sign Arena is a bit ill-thought out. One class per team is always never used. The second is that certain classes perform way better than others in this mode. Medics with Soldiers, Heavies and Pyros are all very strong in Arena, moreso than in normal TF2.

Engies are laughable, their level 1 sentries only do chip damage to a good player. Their weapons are averagely powerful and the dispenser is the only advantage, but it's only good if your team's going to camp it out, which makes for a boring spectacle. A Medic is twice any Engy on your team. Teleporters as a feature of the class are totally useless in this game mode.

Spies are very useful until it comes to capping the point. They demolish Snipers and they can remove key targets like Medics and Heavies. But come the final showdown they are as useful as an Engy, maybe less since at least an Engy will probably have full health by this point if he's still alive and can always get more.

I'm not going to say the Sniper is weak in this mode, but it relies heavily on other people doing their job at spychecking and watching your back, and you can almost never count on this in Arena. Theoretically it's very powerful, but you need to know you're in a safe spot if you want to get those headshots. Close-range snapshots don't mean as much if nobody else is backing you up with a pistol or a shotgun. Badlands is the only map where you don't have to rely on this as much, but the spots you can snipe from are usually very quiet so nobody wants to stick around there to watch your back.

The short round times and no respawns thing is a bit of a Catch 22. If the rounds were longer the respawn times would be even longer, but right now you don't really get enough time on the map to get your teeth into the experience. Counter-Strike worked better because it was something you could get into, but I don't think most TF2 players are actually fans of CS's plodding game style.

I was very dubious of this mode but I haven't been totally convinced it's crap. The maps themselves are very good and have massive replayability. It has some flaws but, even if these are ironed out, at the core you still have a watered-down game mode which is too short to be considered a good deathmatch and too deathmatchy to be a good use of TF2's classes. It's a half breed of a game mode. Mixed in with TF2 it's not too bad, but on its own it would be pretty unsatisfying. TF2's other modes prop this up and let it get away with the fact it's not really as entertaining as it should be, coming from Valve.

That's why it gets a 'meh' from me.
 
Crispy said:
- I don't play TF2 to sit out of a round because my team lost. Losing is punishment enough.
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It's a necessary evil when used for balancing teams but silly when it's teams of 6 and there are 24 players on the server.

Engies are laughable, their level 1 sentries only do chip damage to a good player. Their weapons are averagely powerful and the dispenser is the only advantage, but it's only good if your team's going to camp it out, which makes for a boring spectacle.
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Engies are definitely weaker due to lack of setup time in Arena but I don't think they are useless. It's true that Build then Wrench + Mouse 1 Engies will nearly always fail in Arena. However smarter Engies who use their sentry as a diversion, trap or extra player to augment their own underestimated shotgun can be quite powerful.

Having said that Engies are very map dependant. I only find Engies useful on Granary and Badlands as they have spots at or near the cp, otherwise you only get a few surprise kills which generally you don't get in the next round.

As for dispencers, I probably wouldn't bother with them if you couldn't place one for 'free' at the ammo right outside spawn that all the maps have.
 
Warbie said:
It's like someone took the most annoying thing about TF2 (sudden death) and made a gametype out of it.

It's shite :sniper:
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This.

I much prefer the objective based gameplay of the other game modes over this one. Arena feels like CS with a medic to me.
 
Operational said:
It's a necessary evil when used for balancing teams but silly when it's teams of 6 and there are 24 players on the server.
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Server-side plugins fix this but still force someone to sit out even when it's 11 versus 10 and the extra man probably isn't going to make a massive difference.

I was on a server with only 3 v 4 people the other day and nobody joined the server for about 30 minutes. That means between our team we spent 30 minutes watching rounds, at an average of 5 minutes per person (because the other team had a Medic-Pyro combination that was dominating us round after round so we didn't win many rounds). That to me is just bad game design, I don't accept that it's a 'necessary evil' to stop players from playing the game they choose to play.

You boot up the game to play, not to watch. If you want to watch that is what spectator mode is for. Nobody wants to watch. That's the simple truth behind the system. It's forcing the player to do something they don't like doing, which is be a 'non-player'.

I think there are alternatives to this system, like letting the first person on the one-man-down team to die respawn (or a randomly selected person from the first 5 deaths, or something). That's just a crazy idea I came up with in 30 seconds, with months to plan this mode I'm sure there are better alternatives that could work better.

The best alternative would be creating a team autobalance system that actually works based on stats, instead of randomly assigning players to other teams.
Example:
- Count the points per-death-per-round for all players.
- Add them up for both teams.
- Calculate the average PpDpR for each team.
- Move half the difference in players over to the team with less players.
- The PpDpR for the player(s) to be moved must equal half or less of the team difference in average PpDpR.

E.g. There are two teams, BLU has 11 players with 55 points between them for this round, RED has 9 players with 60 points between them for this round, which they just won. The smaller team is obviously the more powerful. Normally TF2 will do some crazy shit like choose a random player to join the team with less players, regardless of how important they are to the team. In this scenario (which is not uncommon), the second or third best player on the 11 man side is switched to the 9 man side which were already winning. This is a broken autobalance system.

In my version you'd get the following:
- Count the points per-death-per-round for all players.
- Add them up for both teams. (= 55 vs 60)
- Calculate the average PpDpR for each team. (= 5 vs 6.66)
- Move half the difference in players over to the team with less players. (i.e. 1 BLU go RED)
- The PpDpR for the player(s) to be moved must equal half or less of the team difference in average PpDpR. (i.e. the player with the least PpDpR from BLU will move to RED)

This way the teams are balanced in numbers and the actual skill difference isn't too major.

There you go, that's my slightly-less-rushed alternative to having to sit out a round because of odd teams. Not perfect, but neither is having to watch instead of playing.
 
Cavalry said:
Its going to suck, being that its on TF2.

And TF2 sucks.
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Oh man, then I guess it doesn't matter that you'll be paying for your console update!

After all, you're probably not even playing it.
 
i'll stick to objectives
i'll go play CS when i don't want to respawn
 
I've played it a couple times. I'm never going near it again. I didn't think it would ever be possible to have so little fun in TF2.
 
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