SC2Mapster

EU is still sitting on 5.3 @ Veridian.

And last time i played through there i didnt have any trouble on (Original) Mode to get through the game.

Hehe, seems like you can't wait to play it Salmon

Is that happening in 5.5 Karallys ? (The first problem mentioned by you, happens when the player blocks his checkpoint. then the mobs ignore that one and go for the next one)

Hmm, the more games i play with shared income, the more reasons appear to me why i should rather go back to ye good ol individual Income modes ^^

Sorry about this wall of text .... i'll try to summarize it later.

Here's a quick bug tho before i'll continue with the Shared Income modes. If a player leaves the game right at the beginning, his Minerals aren't distributed between his team only, but also given to his opponents ... Instead of giving 5 Minerals to each of the remaining 3 Players in a team, every Player in game recieves 2 Minerals.

-Wall of Text ahead-

It kinda appears to me, that going shared income with strangers or first timers results in a default loss. The idea behind it ... making up for their losses ... does seem fancy, but seeing as how easy people simply quit on you in this game, the good intentions quickly turn into a huge problem for the team and usually results in a default loss.

I'd like to share my thoughts on those 2 new Modes after playing each of them for a few times. Those Comments are made, under the Assumption that there's barely any to no distinction in Mob HP/Shields/Regen between the 2 Modes in a 4 Player game. Top Spawn (Shared Income): While being one of the Top Players, this mode is quite fun ... the first few waves at least ... once you hit a point where you start leaking, you'll always leak, but hey ... that's what the other 2 guys backing you up are good for. As middle or bottom player, this mode seems rather boring for the first X Waves, where X can go up to ... 40/50 or stay below 10 ... depending on how good the Top Players are. Money wise on this Mode, the bottom Defense Zone is rather useless ... instead it would prolly be better to either, work together with the middle Defender and build up a Maze with him, or just send your Money to one of the Top guys, which'll allow them to simply slaughter all waves without leaks. Leavers in this Mode are a 2-Edged Blade so to speak. If they leave early on (within wave 1-5). You can still fix it and end up beating the whole game solo (assuming all 3 other guys leave) since you'll have too many Minerals to even spend them all (this also results in an almost impossible scenario for the other team ... how're they suppsed to win against someone who earns 4 times as much money as each member of the team?), on the other hand ... if one or two people decide to leave during Waves 8 / 9, it'll result in a default loss ... due to the lack of dps on the boss because those guys who've left will pretty much "destroy" the teams Minerals and losing the income of 4/5 Waves pretty much renders your team unable to defeat the boss, which will result in an even bigger loss of Minerals => death-sentence.

Individual Spawns (Shared Income): Those are tricky, they combine the good old spawning of just enough mobs to justify a decrease in the bosses HP according the the amount of people on a team, with the risk of ending the game for one of the teams prematurely if someone decides to leave before the boss wave. Seeing as some people tend to fuck up their maze (if you can call there pile of towers a maze) during the first few waves/games ... having someone in the team who leaves within the first 5/10 waves is ... at least on EU ... pretty common and extremly annoying considering the amount of Minerals they're taking along when they leave.

If i had to sum it up, i'd say the main concern of those Shared Income modes is the fact, that it's easily possible to crash games for people or to feed one Player with Minerals ... which usually results in a quick, dirty and onesided match. After thinking about the problem for a while, i came up with the following possible solution to keep the games fair. Altho i do not know if it's possible to realize all of it.

As for the Top Spawns, instead of Spawning 20 Mobs from each side, i'd rather go for a "NumberOfPlayersInTeam * 10" spawn. This should remove the problem with the one player remaining on a side who get's 4 times as much money as his opponents. Also this'd require the balancing of the mobs according to the amount of people in game (which worked very well in v4).

The other problem, with the leavers who end the game for their team, calls for a way more complex fix. You'd need to keep track of each players Minerals, the value of each Players towers and the teams total Income ... now if the sum of the Values of each (Minerals+Tower)Team Member is lower than the total income of the Team ... then there must've been some Mineral Destruction going on. The main problem here lies in figuring out how to add um selling of towers, retribution kills or nukes into the equation, or maybe you could just get the Value of the Player who left the game and divide it between the remaning team members.

-Short Recap-

Shared Income (with Top Spawn) can lead to an extremly imbalanced game, by either:

- destroying too many Minerals when someone leaves the game shortly before Boss Waves

- giving People too many Minerals, if people leave early on ... like first 5 Waves.

Possible Fixes:

- Adjusting the Number of Mobs spawned to the Number of People in Game

- Returning the "Destroyed" Minerals by Leavers.