60 player limit

[Radeon3]

Didn't want to derail the Team changing topic so created this one. @CampinJeff @Sarah! you already had an input on this matter, please share your opinion/argument here as well. Probably it's going to be a wall of text, so only read further if you are interested in the experience of an oldtimer who returned to the game after around a year. Before all I'd like to state I'm not angry at CT, but being the only server with a steady playerbase it has some global responsibilities. If there were a few other servers with noticable activity I wouldn't mind this issue at all.

First off, more does not equal better. We have seen this with the debatable higher minelimit, increased credit flow, purchasable vehicles after destroyed WF/Strip (the latter two at the start of B4) and now with the 1377 minutes of waiting time for teamchange.

With the increased max player limit everything loses impact on the game. The vehicle limit remained the same while the playercount increased by 50%. Tankers have to deal with significantly more mobs shooting at them instead of focusing on higher priority targets. Sieges are as boring as before but with more people! There's a bigger pool of people who constantly repair buildings under siege, which equalize the higher ranked vehicles with some exceptions (looking at you mammy). It's more convienent to repair buildings after you realize shooting vehicles with low tier units doesn't worth it. You get no VP, neglectable credits compared to repairing the MCT and dying a lot. Rushes aren't as effective as before because on avarage max 7 tanks go against possibly an additional 10 people defending the base. Don't even want to compare how difficult is to organise/build up a full scale rush and what's the chance of (even new) players realizing what is the most convienent thing to do in their base under siege.

Infantry fight with this many people on maps with chokepoints is a mess. It only serves the K/D farmers and their added "value" to the game. If endless/meaningless shooting is your thing then obviously this is your golden age. Even if you shoot well, you can barely advance because you have to deal with higher numbers from the opposing force and their respawning multiply this effect.

 

Small team tactics (SBH C4, stank rushes, fully loaded IonAPC, simultanious nukes to name a few) are less likely to work because there are more people to counter these. Many tactical aspects of the game are toned down which is a huge loss imo. Quantity become favoured instead of quality : (

 

Just to recap, most maps don't even support 40 players. I'd love to play with 60 players or more on maps which were desinged for it but currently many of the maps are outright nightmare for that many people. Increasing the vehicle limit is not a solution as most maps are not suitable to handle more vehicles. Just think about how difficult is to maneuver at the crowded base entrance during sieges and you might realize even the current number of vehicles aren't supported by some maps.

We always say that this game has a steep learning curve and new players should get into it. But what exactly are we talking about? Sure there are the basics and getting know the maps... but currently they don't lose much if that's all they know. I'd really like know what new players think of the game after being besieged for a whole match or trying to achieve something in vain.

Last but not least this impacts the perfomance of the game. Not a serious issue, but to this day we have new players who have weak computers. A few FPS for them is the difference between playable and unplaybe.

 

As I recall, this issue was addressed before and a few developers went against the 60 player idea. How and why did we get to this? What do you think? Do you feel that something is diminishing from the game with so many players in one server or I'm alone with this?

Edited September 18, 2017 by Radeon3
Tpyos ;)

[Schmitzenbergh]

I can only agree with you. The game becomes a total mess with 60 players on certain maps.. I do like the fact that more people can play but i'd prefer to see them split 30-30 over 2 servers.

What I would like to see is that if a server exceeds a certain playercount (Lets say 50 players), the next match the server will be split on 2 servers with 25 players each (either via an automatic vote or something else). I don't know if this is technically possible, but it would even out the playerbase a bit. Id rather see 4 servers with 25 players each than 2 servers with 60 players.

This is my personal opinion ofcourse.

 

[Madkill40]

Players are not inclined to join an empty server for it to fill up but were inclined to complain about the one server always being full.

Some people made suggestions regarding the launcher to have a chat function to help strangers fill an empty server.

[NodSaibot]

2 hours ago, Schmitzenbergh said:

I can only agree with you. The game becomes a total mess with 60 players on certain maps.. I do like the fact that more people can play but i'd prefer to see them split 30-30 over 2 servers.

What I would like to see is that if a server exceeds a certain playercount (Lets say 50 players), the next match the server will be split on 2 servers with 25 players each (either via an automatic vote or something else). I don't know if this is technically possible, but it would even out the playerbase a bit. Id rather see 4 servers with 25 players each than 2 servers with 60 players.

This is my personal opinion ofcourse.

 

I do know transferring people between servers is possible, at least I remember something like that happening before. I am a strong proponent of this, as it would probably end up with a higher player count. A few things to keep in mind:

1. Would people want to be changed? Maybe they only joined because of the 50+ players. (Very few, probably)
2. If people were with friends? It's possible they wouldn't be on the same server. A small inconvenience.
3. It was something good, but I forgot. Possible edit later.

 

3 hours ago, Radeon3 said:

Didn't want to derail the Team changing topic so created this one. @CampinJeff @Sarah! you already had an input on this matter, please share your opinion/argument here as well. Probably it's going to be a wall of text, so only read further if you are interested in the experience of an oldtimer who returned to the game after around a year. Before all I'd like to state I'm not angry at CT, but being the only server with a steady playerbase it has some global responsibilities. If there were a few other servers with noticable activity I wouldn't mind this issue at all.

First off, more does not equal better. We have seen this with the debatable higher minelimit, increased credit flow, purchasable vehicles after destroyed WF/Strip (the latter two at the start of B4) and now with the 1377 minutes of waiting time for teamchange.

With the increased max player limit everything loses impact on the game. The vehicle limit remained the same while the playercount increased by 50%. Tankers have to deal with significantly more mobs shooting at them instead of focusing on higher priority targets. Sieges are as boring as before but with more people! There's a bigger pool of people who constantly repair buildings under siege, which equalize the higher ranked vehicles with some exceptions (looking at you mammy). It's more convienent to repair buildings after you realize shooting vehicles with low tier units doesn't worth it. You get no VP, neglectable credits compared to repairing the MCT and dying a lot. Rushes aren't as effective as before because on avarage max 7 tanks go against possibly an additional 10 people defending the base. Don't even want to compare how difficult is to organise/build up a full scale rush and what's the chance of (even new) players realizing what is the most convienent thing to do in their base under siege.

Infantry fight with this many people on maps with chokepoints is a mess. It only serves the K/D farmers and their added "value" to the game. If endless/meaningless shooting is your thing then obviously this is your golden age. Even if you shoot well, you can barely advance because you have to deal with higher numbers from the opposing force and their respawning multiply this effect.

 

Small team tactics (SBH C4, stank rushes, fully loaded IonAPC, simultanious nukes to name a few) are less likely to work because there are more people to counter these. Many tactical aspects of the game are toned down which is a huge loss imo. Quantity become favoured instead of quality : (

 

Just to recap, most maps don't even support 40 players. I'd love to play with 60 players or more on maps which were desinged for it but currently many of the maps are outright nightmare for that many people. Increasing the vehicle limit is not a solution as most maps are not suitable to handle more vehicles. Just think about how difficult is to maneuver at the crowded base entrance during sieges and you might realize even the current number of vehicles aren't supported by some maps.

We always say that this game has a steep learning curve and new players should get into it. But what exactly are we talking about? Sure there are the basics and getting know the maps... but currently they don't lose much if that's all they know. I'd really like know what new players think of the game after being besieged for a whole match or trying to achieve something in vain.

Last but not least this impacts the perfomance of the game. Not a serious issue, but to this day we have new players who have weak computers. A few FPS for them is the difference between playable and unplaybe.

 

As I recall, this issue was addressed before and a few developers went against the 60 player idea. How and why did we get to this? What do you think? Do you feel that something is diminishing from the game with so many players in one server or I'm alone with this?

Emphasis on the underlined part, I think this applies specifically to my map as well. There is no way it can hold 60 people.

 

Anyways, I am only a proponent of higher player count until we can get something like automatic server switching, as described above by Schmitz. While it does ruin some aspects of the game, I don't think having a 40/40 server during the high-times would allow as many people to enjoy the game. This might lead people to not even starting the launcher or even bothering to check, which I wouldn't like.

[Madkill40]

Until other implementations have been made to get more servers filled I think the 60 slot is here to stay, temporarily.

 

The 60 slot does not stop other servers from filling up.  Just putting that out there.

[NodSaibot]

1 hour ago, Madkill40 said:

The 60 slot does not stop other servers from filling up.  Just putting that out there.

The 0 players do 

[Madkill40]

1 hour ago, Sarah! said:

The 0 players do 

Or the 1/60 just isn't enough for some people.

People should join a server if they see one person in it, that is how a server fills up.

[OTT]

Glad you went into more details about this than I ever did @ Radeon3

I already voiced my concerns about this matter here and on the CT forums.I can understand both arguments,but I also believe there are other solutions.Since the idea of splitting players into 2 servers(when they are above 50) is not happening any time soon,make all the servers' player limit at 30,and when the first server fills up,mods switch to another server and try to fill it,filling a 30 player server should be easier,at least that 's what I used to do when I was a mod,but I can understand there were more players playing the game back then,I don't know if its possible right now,we could try it for a few days at least,I'm willing to help fill the second server.

 

[Calvin]

15 hours ago, Schmitzenbergh said:

I can only agree with you. The game becomes a total mess with 60 players on certain maps.. I do like the fact that more people can play but i'd prefer to see them split 30-30 over 2 servers.

What I would like to see is that if a server exceeds a certain playercount (Lets say 50 players), the next match the server will be split on 2 servers with 25 players each (either via an automatic vote or something else). I don't know if this is technically possible, but it would even out the playerbase a bit. Id rather see 4 servers with 25 players each than 2 servers with 60 players.

This is my personal opinion ofcourse.

 

25 people in 1 server is terrible, the higher playercount makes sneaking less of a problem. I wouldn´t touch the player count tbh.. I wasn´t really a fan of it myself but now i got used to it and it feels a lot better, i remember having low populated servers, the servers constantly died out when a building got taken down by someone sneaking or nobody wanted to buy tanks, with the 60 playerlimit theres always 10/10 vehs - rushes look amazing like the RenX trailer showed. I must say that some maps aren´t really good for it but i never see anyone say anything about it anymore in the chat,  I would keep this it´s not even always 30v30 and when it is it´s usually for a few games and people leave to do other stuff. 

[Radeon3]

9 hours ago, poi said:

25 people in 1 server is terrible, the higher playercount makes sneaking less of a problem. I wouldn´t touch the player count tbh.. I wasn´t really a fan of it myself but now i got used to it and it feels a lot better, i remember having low populated servers, the servers constantly died out when a building got taken down by someone sneaking or nobody wanted to buy tanks, with the 60 playerlimit theres always 10/10 vehs - rushes look amazing like the RenX trailer showed. I must say that some maps aren´t really good for it but i never see anyone say anything about it anymore in the chat,  I would keep this it´s not even always 30v30 and when it is it´s usually for a few games and people leave to do other stuff. 

I can fully understand why do you think that 25 players are terrible on one server, it's your golden age after all. Don't really have to care about standard tank rushes, infilrators or small team tactics which might blow up the Hon/Bar; only to focus on killing.. and there are plenty of targets. If you got used to the 60 player limit, I'm sure you'll manage with 40 once again.

Probably you weren't around in the times when we had clan wars. Regardless of who won, both sides agreed on that RenX is best played between 12v12 and 15v15 players. Maps didn't feel crowded and there was a nice balance between tanks, offensive infantry, support infantry and defenders. It did matter which role you took, which unfortunatelly I can't say nowadays. No wonder that so far others suggested that the 25-30 limit would be optimal. On a sidenote just take a look at what kind of server the oldie Dragon Clan is running.

Sneaking has always been a core element of the game and yes, that tactic would be viable once again with 40 players. If you really concerned about it, you can always do team orinted things like, defending the base against those pesky guys. But feel free to open a new discussion about infiltration, I'm open to clear things up about it.

Btw, what trailers are you referring to? You do realize that 35 players were the max, but mostly around 30. With that many players rushes were sure something fearsome and spectacular.

[Calvin]

12 minutes ago, Radeon3 said:

I can fully understand why do you think that 25 players are terrible on one server, it's your golden age after all. Don't really have to care about standard tank rushes, infilrators or small team tactics which might blow up the Hon/Bar; only to focus on killing.. and there are plenty of targets. If you got used to the 60 player limit, I'm sure you'll manage with 40 once again.

Probably you weren't around in the times when we had clan wars. Regardless of who won, both sides agreed on that RenX is best played between 12v12 and 15v15 players. Maps didn't feel crowded and there was a nice balance between tanks, offensive infantry, support infantry and defenders. It did matter which role you took, which unfortunatelly I can't say nowadays. No wonder that so far others suggested that the 25-30 limit would be optimal. On a sidenote just take a look at what kind of server the oldie Dragon Clan is running.

Btw, what trailers are you referring to? You do realize that 35 players were the max, but mostly around 30. With that many players rushes were sure something fearsome and spectacular.

I'm not "always" sniping or doing infantry i use a tank a lot aswel and i been playing this game for a long time and the old renegade, it's not my "golden age" i'm just having way more fun with this many players it feels actually like war, like the old renegade had always 60+ players sometimes it was so much fun and it felt very action pact, i understand that some people can't really deal with having so many targets at once infront of them. And i agree the tanking can be very frustrating on maps like snow, but small maps can be changed or removed, and for the mappers i would suggest to start mapping bigger maps like lakeside or Eyes because these maps are actually very "very" fun with 60 players. IDK where im going with this i just feel like if you make it 40 players nobody wants to do 10v10 so they probably just don't join any server and wait until they can join or just not play.. when people see the tank combat they expect very actionpact (atleast i do whenever i tank) 

  

Edited September 19, 2017 by poi

[Henk]

Smaller maps are good for lower playercounts, big maps for high playercounts. Easy as that.

The downside with big maps, especially the ones with a lot of buildings to defend, is that it becomes hard to manage when you're playing with smaller teams. Way more chance for a sneaker to infiltrate and solo nukes to work, which is frustrating and sometimes can make you feel helpless like you're having to defend all alone.

But both big and small sizes can be very fun to play imo. 

[ex_member]

...

Edited September 22, 2018 by ex_member

[j0g32]

Or along aimilar lines, how about "dynamic" mapsize, based on player count.

Inspired by Battlefield 2 maps, where the same level could be played in mode for 16, 32, and 64 players.

Gulf of Oman

The Combat zone (=playable area) would be different as well as the number and positioning of CapturePoints and Vehicle Spawners to cater the amount of players.

Though it would not change during the match based on player count, but rather offer the server host to load specific map layouts.

 

Now, imagine e.g. below say 16 players, the second, outer vehicle route on field would become unaccesible, the mappers would have to place some sort of dynamic map boundary boxes.

Visually this could also be supported by spawning (or unhiding) barbed wires and tnak blockers.

Analougausly, currently cluster-f#@&ed maps could receive an overhaul with additonal routes.

That way all maps would stay in rotation, but remain playable with various amounts of players...

Just a random idea

[Henk]

The problem with that is that every existing map would have to be changed a lot if they want to have a dynamic size. I agree with @dr.schrott, the idea has been mentioned before and I think it would work good. 

 

[j0g32]

11 minutes ago, Henk said:

The problem with that is that every existing map would have to be changed a lot if they want to have a dynamic size. I agree with @dr.schrott, the idea has been mentioned before and I think it would work good. 

 

Yeah, perhaps we should encourage players to simply VOTE for a (smaller/bigger) map, whichever is recommended for the current player amount. Maybe by broadcasting server messages, whenever the player count deviates substantially from the recommended number of players for a specific match.

Ad dynamic map size:

I dont know if that is much "extra" work: I was deliberately presenting Field as an example, since it has been revamped with additional paths for tanks/sneaking.

As mentioned many times before, I believe that the reasons for why rushes & stalements don't work and are not enjoyable, is because of map design and limited choices.

If a map is not enjoyable because of bottlenecks, then open up new paths.

However, instead of making this a permanent change to the map layout, we could make some of those new paths "optional", because with fewer players there might be too many choices and it becomes too easy to attack, and impossible to defend. And it would be more fun to have a simplified, more manageable battlefield...

 

And i think it would be rather easy for mappers/designers (disregarding any technical issues) to temporarily close up some paths.

Another example - Lakeside:

with less then 10 players, the infantry path and the wide vehicle path up the mountain would be closed, as well as the Tiberium tunnel connecting the two battlefields. Instead, a bridge could be spawned between the two infantry paths/sniper spots. The canyon and this new path would be the only two paths between the bases, where the forest in the canyon also provides good cover to engage eith vehicles.

I am not saying THIS is THE solution, just trying to communicate another approach to map design

 

 

[Madkill40]

There is a recommended players in the map settings, map vote rotation options could just be based on this?

If player count is less than 32, CNC-Canyon appears, if player count is more than 32, CNC-Canyon_Ext appears. (Ext = Extended)

Or with dynamic maps, just block extended areas off with destructible objects which are only destructible should the player count be sufficient before map selection at the end of the previous game.

[Radeon3]

Thank you for all your input to address this issue, let me summarize your ideas so far:

Middle road
Currently there are barely any map which supports 60 players but many which don't even support 40. Set the limit back to 40 so smaller maps become a bit less chaotic and the majority of the maps become more closer to amount of players they can handle.

Automatic server switching
If servers exceeds a certain playercount, the next match players will be split into two servers. The endgame vote would be the deciding factor how to split the players. The two most popular maps would determine who goes where, this way friends could stay together, people who don't vote randomly get distributed. Additionally this could result in more happy people when there's a 11-10 vote for Under vs Walls. Technically this looks complex, as many factors needs to be considered like how and to which servers should be used in the mitigation. On the other hand this solution could help to populate the servers on the long run.

Launcher organizing
The launcher could have built in chat capabilities or IRC so we could organize server "revivals". While not as reliable as an automatic system, still it'd be something to work with. Lately a few people expressed that they'd like to see this feature to reach other reneragers in real time; it would would be a nice tool to the community.

Leave as is
Everthing is fine, 60 players is the way to go.

Dynamic map rotation
Every map would have a classification based on the "Recommended number of players" attribute. Could be small (>15), medium (16-30), large (31-45) and huge (45-60). Map rotation selection only shows maps which are eligible for the actual player base.

Dynamic mapsize
Maps would have different size variations for different amount of players (eg. S, M,L). After voting, the server loads the proper version of the map which suits the actual number of players. Areas could be blocked with obstacles which are only destructible if the playercount hit a certain number before map seletion. The problem with this method, that many maps would need rework and smaller maps can't be scaled up to hold more players (because the creator would have done it like that at the first place).

Some solutions are compatible with another. Feel free to correct me, if I missed something.

Edited September 20, 2017 by Radeon3

[JoeBrogan7]

I signed up just to respond to this thread. I'm an old Renegade player that has easily put hundreds of hours into the original game, so I was very excited to come across this version a few weeks ago and start playing again. So I thought I'd throw in my two cents here. 

I personally enjoy the 50-60 player games. Before I learned that the server tends to fill up on the weekends, I played a bunch of smaller games (mainly 20-30 players) and most of these were not very fun because there were some very skilled people who would tend to dominate games and end them within 10 minutes of starting. Now I get that this isn't necessarily a bad thing, however I have two comments about this:

First, the server in question is a marathon server. Long, drawn-out battles with a ton of players is intentional. It makes every aspect of the battle more intense--sniping, sieges, rushes, etc--and it makes winning all the more gratifying when it finally happens. When marathon servers first started popping up in the original Renegade, they were usually 50+ players and often lasted longer than an hour. People tended to gravitate towards these marathon servers because it was a nice change from the standard 40 player servers whose games usually only lasted 15-20 minutes. And the reason marathon servers had more players than normal is because higher player counts tend to balance teams out and prevent any single player from dominating, which in turn makes "teamwork" the most important factor in winning vs losing; which brings me to my second point...

This game is really, really old to some players--and really new to others-- so there will tend to be a drastic difference in skill level between the best players and the worst players in any given server. This makes it easy for a small group of experienced players to work together and easily bring down 1 or 2 buildings in the first few minutes, which only tends to frustrate newer players and cause them to ragequit (for lack of a better term). So having 25-30 people on each team instead of 15 or 20 really helps to balance things out and usually prevents a minority of players from dominating games and making them frustrating to play. I saw this very thing happen a couple Sundays ago when about 6 or 7 games in a row were ended within 10 minutes because the teams were so one-sided. Every time a new map loaded, a few more players would quit (because no one was having fun) until about the 7th game when there were less than 12 players in the server. That's when I decided to leave. 

My last point: this would essentially be a non-issue if there were more people playing this game. Ideally, the people who enjoy 60-player marathon servers would join those, and the people who enjoy smaller, non-marathon servers would join those. I think the only reason this is even being talked about is because there's only really 1 server that ever has players in it, and it happens to be a marathon server. I might just be remembering incorrectly, but I don't think there were ever any issues in the original Renegade with 50-player marathon servers because the people who didn't like playing those games simply avoided the marathon servers. I think the dynamic map size and other suggestions are simply solutions in search of a problem. So to me the real problem is,, how do we get more people interested in playing this game???

Anyway, I'll stop rambling and end with a very positive note that overall I've really been enjoying Renegade-X and I'm very happy to be able to relive some of my favorite gaming years playing the original Renegade and having tons of fun.