Silv

Rate of answers isn't a factor in the decision. The duration of the vote is just as long as most other votes: 30 seconds. The rules are: for a map vote to pass at least 20% of the players have to vote for it within 30 seconds and for everyone who votes against it someone else has to additionally vote yes.

Can't say I disagree with you. Unfortunately chat platform like Discord add the most value to those most "chatty" in a project and that naturally brings the focus of discussions there. Using a forum is nice for long term archived discussions but for quick back and forth discussions chat platforms have a much superior user experience. And gamers in particular are used to have everything on Discord.

Being a meaningful part of a well organized team.

As to why such votes don't exist, usually it's one of two reasons: none of the programmers considers it to be a good use of their free time (remember we're all volunteers) or it was discussed internally and the team thinks it's not a good idea. In this case it seems like a nice idea but as usual the devil is in the detail. Say there's a vote to turn off building damage. The server empties and new people come in who didn't see the vote. Buildings are still indestructible. People post bug reports. Devs waste time figuring out what's going on. Not desirable. Say there's a mitigation that says "Buildings are indestructible", people who aren't experienced with the game still won't know how to turn it off, still generating support requests. But this already makes the change more complicated (sending a message is easy, but it would need to be sent only every so often and not when a building just happens to be in the line of fire, good luck getting it right). Say the mitigation explains how to do votes in sufficient detail for anyone not familiar with the game to find the voting menu. This requires very careful phrasing and a substantial potion of new players would probably still both find it to be too confusing and be annoyed by it. I know for every objection there's an answer but these kinds of things tend to become sufficiently complex with all the consequences and mitigations that people just go "forget about it". Also the people who are actually good at these kinds of changes have quite a bit of work on their plate already seeing that Firestorm is still in development and the team is really rather eager to get it released (I know it may look from the outside that nothing is happening, from the inside it's a very different matter). Compare this to the alternative: social pressure and kick votes which don't require any code change.

Regarding beacons that can be set by server owners. If a beacon limit is configured the game will only allow buying beacons once enough players have connected (though they remain available even after players drop again). This is not enabled on the public TA servers but anyone hosting their own server can use it.

Early game harvester kills don't give that much VP. The VPs gained by killing harvester is 2 x the number of trips the harv has taken (including the current one) since its last destruction, up to a maximum of 40. Killing the harv on its first trip gives 2 VP to all team members. It's nice but 2 VP is something you can also get just by repping a tank for a few seconds and is but1/50th of the VPs you need to level to veteran. The much bigger impact of killing the harv early is economy denial. In particular the first harv dump is necessary for a team to get access to heavier classes and vehicles. Delaying that harv dump while having it yourself creates an imbalance in strength which can be used to gain map control and set the stage for further economy denial. Protecting the harv is pretty easy if you have a halfway competent team, the harv is pretty easy to rep (gives good cover to reps) and it's closer to your base than the enemy's so it's easy to send reinforcements to protect the harv but any attacker that goes down will be out of the fight for much longer. In the early game taking an economical lead is one of the primary objectives along with gaining map control. You're supposed to take out the enemy harv and protect your own. If your team ignores the harv and instead goes straight to fighting the enemy or their base and gets their economy harmed that's the logical consequence of a badly chosen strategy. At the same time even without harvester dumps a team still gets economy and teams can and do fight back from such a position all the time.

Pubs are inherently unbalanceable. When you join a pub you hope to end up in a nice match but there are no guarantees. Match making is an extremely hard problem that AAA games producers struggle with. Pugs are kinda balanced but it's a very different way to play (you get told what team you're on, what your role is, there's a commander from the start, and you are very much expected to listen to the commander). The game however isn't about individual player abilities as much as it may seem so when you get your head shot off for the umpteened time because of some super sniper. I've seen teams that seem to have better players lose plenty of times. On the other hand I can count on one hand the times teams were so utterly unbalanced that the game wasn't winnable for the losing side. If you look at why teams win it's generally a combination of two things: coordination and morale. Teams that act like a team rather than a collection of individuals, supporting each other and making coordinated attacks (e.g. rushes), have a massive force multiplier. On the other hand teams where half the people have already decided they're at a disadvantage are pretty much guaranteed to lose, internal chatter about imbalance often does more than any enemy action. These things can't be caught in code. Kills, repairs, etc can but are a pretty crappy indicator when it comes down to it. Someone who sits in base all game but prevents three sneak attacks that would have destroyed a building will have a lousy score and VP but probably did more to win the game than a frontline tanker. Regarding the specific suggestions: Moving people to a special team is one of those things that sounds easy but it would probably require a lot of effort due to all kinds of internal dependencies and consequences. Just to highlight one: with the current player screen you can't see spectators so doing this would lead to server slots being occupied without that being visible from inside the game. I didn't really understand the point about player allocation and server settings play a role here anyway (there are several different algorithms that a server owner can choose) but as a general point having a new player assigned to you doesn't need to be an advantage. It happens all the time that a team is behind on players, a few unknown players come in filling it back up and then a known strong player gets assigned to the other side. Using the average of both teams would mean that someone joining later into a team that's behind on points will have more VP than the average player who earned it "the hard way". Is that fair? Furthermore it's not uncommon for a team that's behind in overall game state to be ahead in VP so this might actually be counterproductive. A typical reason for such an effect is that a vehicle factory or air strip was destroyed causing the team to kill tanks but not have their own tanks killed, tanks are great sources of VP. (Just to be clear, I may have a TA staff tag but I don't work on these kinds of things so my opinion is worth as much as that of an average player here.)

Try installing this and then launch again.

The issue with selecting a new folder might well be choosing a folder which already has data in it like "C:\Program Files". The launcher needs an empty folder, one can be made from the open folder dialog. With the default location the launcher will handle creating the folder itself so that works.

The preset folder shouldn't be a temp folder. It should install under AppData\Local but that's not a temp folder (AppData\Local\Temp is but that's one directory deeper). AppData\Local is a folder under which a lot of stuff gets installed that's big but only for a specific user.

If you mean downloading on one computer and copying those files over to the others and then running launcher it will verify the files but unless something went wrong with copying the files or a new patch has been released in the meantime it shouldn't need to download anything. Providing the UE3 redist is a good idea as the current version of the launcher doesn't automatically install it, the next version will but it's not out yet.

The launcher should handle it, it will update the game before it lets you join a server.

I like how the effect of all those base defenses combined is that at match start you really only have your half and the central area where you can semi safely move around in. Then you kill a turret or the sentry and new paths open up. On the other side it becomes a narrative of ever increasing vulnerability. Now that the pier is nerfed I wonder if the CC is enough to draw action there. The CC is very exposed, even compared to things like silo on field. Now I don't know the exact range of a sniper but if it's long enough you could very comfortably snipe at the CC from the walls of your own base. It just feels like a suicide run for me to capture it, especially without the usual trick of driving or parachuting in.

If the server kicks you out that means the server was actually at full capacity. Sometimes it fills up quite fast in the time between starting the game and the game actually getting around to connecting to the server. Did you maybe wait a minute between clicking the Renegade X tab and connecting to the server? The launcher doesn't automatically refresh the server list so in that case the 50/64 would not reflect the current situation. That the server list inside the game is broken is a known issue.