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Ahoy magma. Not sure what the status of the next patch is, but I'd like to reopen the topic of suggestions for change. I have a few ideas I think are worth consideration.

1. been saying this one for a long time: checkered contested flag. the traditional gray too often matches a player's color and prematurely ends games.

2. more intuitive unit formations. for example: when your bowmen line becomes out of formation, and you try to reform them into a staggered line... the units should logically move to the closest spot to them in the formation. however, this rarely happens. instead you usually see this happening:

with one (or more) unit(s) going from one end of the previous line to the other end. surely there is a way to fix this!

3. this one is currently being discussed in the MWC forums:

an extra bowman/soulless attack. would be cool to have the option to launch arrows/spears as a volley, instead of all attacking the same ground location (ctrl-click). perhaps this could be done using ctrl-double click, similar to the way in which mellee can target a single units using that command. perhaps the volley could be launched in accordance with the current formation, like this:


That's all I've got for now... would love to hear others' thoughts and suggestions.

I agree with both of those, pending how to confront the debacle of the gray contesting flag. Checkered with obvious colors might be cool, to make it obvious, but I feel as if that is just part of the game you need to adapt to. The map clearly indicates when the flag is and isn't being contested. Sometimes, however, in a lmoth sudden death, if the flag is left by only one team contesting, it might not say "Flag Captured," and will keep saying "Flag Contested" only when someone steps off and then contests it again.

The second one I agree with. It is very annoying, and is just a welcome sign for opposing units to start pushing. Once bowmen get out of formation and clumped up, its hard to recover from that from a string of bowmen already in a spaced, neat line and altering attacks.

The third one, I feel as if it would have too much impact on the current gameplay of the game itself. It would alter too much, and I don't think the same would apply to 3rd party plugins, and the units would altogether need changed. There are prototype bowmen out there that do various functions, but its part of a different tagset. As far as soulless go, you could give each one a paralyzing spear. But what they really need, as do all other units that don't currently have one, is to issue them a taunting feature. Spiders too.

Platinum wrote:...Checkered with obvious colors might be cool, to make it obvious, but I feel as if that is just part of the game you need to adapt to.

The problem is that some players choose *GRAY* as their primary color so if you are looking at the flag to see if it's contested YOU CAN'T TELL. This isn't something you can 'adapt' to, it basically an exploit that players can use to get an unfair advantage.

Platinum wrote:The third one, I feel as if it would have too much impact on the current gameplay of the game itself. It would alter too much, and I don't think the same would apply to 3rd party plugins, and the units would altogether need changed.

You can already 'shoot a volley' if your arcs are within range of an enemy they will fire - if you want to synchronize them select them all then hold them or turn them slightly then point them back facing the enemy and they'll all start shooting. If an arc in a long line or back row is out of range it won't shoot at the same time as the others but it wouldn't with this new attack either because the units you click on are too far away - the arc is going to move up to get in range, wrecking an already fragile formation.

Actually given the number of complaints I've been seeing lately about arcs and formations and their behavior in battle, any conversation about changing archer attacks should include a thorough discussion of how said change would effect archer formations. As is, pretty much as soon you click on a target for your archers you've wrecked the formation - unless you are micromanaging them or the enemy is rushing you. In all other cases, as soon as the target enemy moves out of range your arcs start following, ruining your formation(s).

If a player checks the overhead map they can tell if its contested or not or even the game narration/subtitles, but yeah some people still don't notice any of that and don't catch it in time.

in a closely contested overtime LMotH dance where each contester has only a unit or two - probably already wounded - when a second's inattention can be the difference between your last unit dying or living to contest/take the flag, there's no time to glance over at the overhead. also, in a game with many flags (terries) the game will say "flag contested" but if you are dancing around a flag and your opponent is gray you can't tell if it's YOUR flag that is contested or one somewhere else on the map without looking at the overhead. So you might not re-tag a flag that your gray opponent tagged because you think it's contested - but it's not so the game ends when you could have contested if you had the normal visual cue that the flag was tagged.

maybe it's just me getting caught up in a single aspect of the game instead of keeping aware of the big picture but do either of you (pyro/platinum) who don't think gray is an issue play regularly with anyone who uses gray as their primary color? i do (hi frum!) and i feel there have been sudden-death flag-contested games that ended sooner than they would have if the color of the contested flag hadn't been identical to that of one of the players contesting the flag. not a LOT of games, but some. and i am not saying i would have WON any of those games, obviously if the other player won they were there contesting till the end. and it's not a HUGE advantage for the gray player, it's marginal at best - but it does exist.

Despite what might seem like a rant, I don't think there's anything underhanded with using grey as a player color, I think color choosing is part of Myth strategy. Pick gray and once in a blue moon you get a slight edge in contested flag games because another player thinks the flag is contested when it's not. Pick green or brown and your units don't show up quite as clearly on a FFA opponent's overhead map. Smart strategy. It's all good, but it would be better if the playing field were level for all colors.

What about a FULL HUE change to Black (or some other color) when flag is contested... not just the "flag" part but the whole bitmap. I think this would be easier to do then a checkered flag and would require only code change with no change to the actual collection.

Maybe my wording was too "ridiculously manipulative" or some such. I didn't say it couldn't be confusing for distracted players, just that it isn't impossible to spot by using a quick glance or listening to the game.

I just tend to not depend on the flag color to know if its contested or not. I simply assume its controlled by someone even if it is actually contested.

Oz, it might not need a collection tag change, could be something hardcoded. Maybe the flag could just be transparent rather than gray when contested if something like checkered pattern can't be hardcoded easily.

While we're on the subject, can we implement a schema to assist players who are colorblind in telling apart two teams which appear nearly identical?

£N wrote:While we're on the subject, can we implement a schema to assist players who are colorblind in telling apart two teams which appear nearly identical?

That might be difficult. Do you have any ideas?

I can think of a way to make it easier to tell team colors apart - by reducing the number of player colors to a more easily discernable subset - 64 or 32 would be good for most people but you could reduce it to 16 since there are never more than number in a game.

But there are so many different kinds of colorblindness I don't know how you could do this for colorblindness. Autofloyning any player color that has more than a specific R or G value in their RGB color could reduce the problem for red-green colorblindness (the most common) - not sure how you could handle the rest.

A team symbol floating above their heads?

Well yes, I guess I was trying to think of ways that hopefully wouldn't change much or require much coding.

How about ... the ability to join games that are running if there's an empty slot (you're assigned to a team) - would need a host option to allow it.

Additionally, the ability to request the next map on an autohost so its not stuck at an unpopular one no-one wants to play.

With those 2 things in place the chance of actually getting into a game when you join mnet would be a lot higher than it is now. Nothing more discouraging than seeing a few red games with weird plugins, a Koth proving grounds, and 12 people in the lobby waiting for the mayan calendar to reset.

I'd just like to see a higher res splash screen. I'm pretty sick of seeing that crow the size of a postage stamp on my screen.

Jestrel wrote:I'd just like to see a higher res splash screen. I'm pretty sick of seeing that crow the size of a postage stamp on my screen.

I already tried to lobby for this and was shot down. Compared to doing other things like new map scripting additions, the devs don't feel that any UI changes are worth doing. Sorry.