Apocalypse In Action :: Planet MoFo

[Atomic Rooster]

Apologies if this is the wrong place for this question. How does the Genocide flag work on this map? several times now I've been killed by a player carrying a team flag and it was recorded as a Genocide kill. How does this happen?

Is there something I'm missing?

[optic delusion]

It's team flag genocide. The key innovation of Apocalypse! There is no genocide flag.
Long ago some of us got tired of players passing by their own team flag and not playing defense with it. So we gave your team flag some value beyond saving your team. If you carry your team flag and shoot a player from another team, It first checks to see if you are still alive, and if you are, the other team is geno'd.
There are other rules as well, if you get killed by team flag genocide, and your kill/death ratio is lower than a certain threshold, you are considered Geno BAIT, meaning you die but your team does not. In this way, newbs only kill their team once or maybe twice.
And that leads to the Master Baiter flag, if you carry that flag and get shot by team flag geno, the genocide effect is reversed.
Then there is the Revenge Geno flag. Carry that flag and shoot the other team's flag carrier, and they get geno'd.
And don't forget the geno penalty box, you probably already figured that one out.

Very many things are very different on Apocalypse. We currently run 24 server plugins. Coming soon: Time/Space Manipulator!

[Atomic Rooster]

Love Apocolypse. Now that makes sense too me - thanks.

AR

[boomercore]

And yet players still pass by their own flag.

OD: a nice innovation to encourage more CTF on the map would be to also reward the rest of the team with a few points when the team successfully caps.

[playerStr]

I'd worry points would start to lose meaning.

It can already feel a bit silly when almost every player has a positive score. Being able to gain points so indirectly might be the tipping point that crashes the points economy.

A separate suggestion: players sometimes leave to balance/unbalance the roster before a cap, which can feel a bit sleazy. Maybe something like a 30s grace period for team unbalance detection could be nice?

[optic delusion]

I have been looking to revamp the capture bonuses for a long time. Hopefully I get to it someday soon.

At one point in the past we had that thirty second delay like is suggested (I think it was 15 sec), but that can lead to other problems so we removed that and went with a different plan. It is supposed to give you the points team player number based on when you PICKED UP the team flag, not made the actual capture. Unfortunately, that one is buggy, i think it works like the first five or ten captures after server startup, then stops working.

I don't think players know this, but I don't do C++ programming. I can almost make sense of it when I read the code, but I'm not skilled enough to create it. This means I rely on others to do this part of server maintenance, and my usual guys have been for whatever reason unwilling to help lately. Meaning, if you're a good C++ programmer, and willing to help, please contact me.

[Zehra]

Some extended context/knowledge:

There is at very least 3 plug-ins which have existed for capture bounties in BZFlag: captureBonus, ctfOverSeer, and ctfManager.

CtfManager did take into account players on flag grab, but the server where it was run on did crash unexpectly from time to time.(I don't think it was run on Apoc.)

CaptureBonus is superseded by ctfOverseer.

CtfOverseer doesn't have any of the hard coded limitations of ctfManager and uses a different algorithm to grant points.

Ironically enough, I feel like I'll jinx myself if I say I can do it.

[Tux]

WTH is a time/space manipulator?

[Moroni]

As far as I know, it's a fancy way of describing a flag that does nothing, but wastes your time to punish flag surfing.

[vitt]

Guys and ladies, apparently I got banned, as i see upon login that must be due to my breaking-out during the last evening (06/13), shall you please unban me?
I wanted to respond to teams switch request back then, only to realize a moment later i was on a short team. Is it now an enforced rule that F12 shall be punished, at last?

Best wishes,
vitt

[Zehra]

The easiest way to avoid being banned by F12 is to be dead before switching teams.

-Zehra

[optic delusion]

The neutral zones were a successful experiment, players adapted fairly quickly and seem to enjoy the paradigm shift. This concept will be taken further. In an effort to keep things fresh, I should soon have ready the first big change to the map layout since Apocalypse' inception.

Further means the length of the platform on which the bases sits will be doubled in length. I was calling it LongNeck, but now it's JyeRaff. It will be a long and difficult drive to get to and from the bases.
The radar pic below shows the new layout. Neutral zones are also visible. Flag spawns will be unaffected but there are all-new player spawn zones (shown in purple). Players will not spawn on the neck. I'm thinking about adding new zones that will double the likelihood of player spawn in certain areas. New teleporters will be added as well. Wings suddenly is extra valuable, but the neutral zone can be used with any flag, and wings may be disallowed over the neck. The center wings flag is definitely going away. Airstrike... we'll see what happens there.

Hope this doesn't make it too hard to capture. Please don't hate it before you try it.

[KnottyMan [ILF]]

The center WG is a nice last ditch counter to someone running the flag in though. Used to be SW just under the base on the tidbit. Having a countermeasure, just like flags/anti flags helps keep balance.

Can team flag bonus points be either removed, or better, a 3sec window or made sticky similar to how RG works? Tons of players being cheap/childish and dropping team flag at the last second before a perfectly strategic kill.