guys don't make bushi angry
you see what's going on here?
this is zen
i can't be mad, cause this is the zennest drama topic of
all timelook at all this insight that's flying around. i mean, holy stuff, it's
everywhereLOOK AT ALL THIS loving INSIGHT HOLY stuffif i made a map full of trenches and barbed wire designed for TDMs would anyone use it?
if you're talking about 'for trench TDMs,' you'll probably just open another can of worms by having nobody use anything but your trench map, which will just swap the problem from 'boring-ass zero effort low quality maps' from 'less boring initially but eventually as boring somewhat-higher-quality-maps
that someone else made'unless you're not talking about TDMs, and just want to make a map? there's nothing wrong with that
Another thing is that people try to make a completely broken game work, but it almost never fixes anything, and if it does, the gameplay is still so horribly wrong that it wasn't even worth fixing. For example, before V21, there were so many dogfights on the exact same map: slopes. after awhile the same map got very boring, no matter how "unique" the bases were. another thing that bothered me about these was that the same vehicles were used every time(biplane, jeep, tank), and there was no objective, so many people who had just joined would fly around aimlessly and then leave moments later because the direction of the enemy base was unclear. The weapon choices also bothered me, mainly because although different every time, in dogfights specifically i found that people always used the most random selection of weapons, and it just bothers me that instead of using a certain theme that fits the objective of the server, they just throw out whatever weapons they currently have on their server. The only dogfights i ever really appreciated were Heedicalking's. Especially his build lands tdm, which was over a large map, and the balance between the teams weapons and vehicles was the closest i have ever seen while still being different. The team with the horses and recurved bow were so evenly balanced against the tanks, because the custom tanks Heed had made did not have some over powered turret, so players were forced to jump out of their vehicle, and the speed of the horses very well contradicted the guns the second team had. Also, i realize this is technically not a "dogfight". i suppose by saying dogfight i meant a terrain based tdm with a large map, and easy ways to get across it. Many dogfights suffered the problem of having such a large battlefield, the player would get bored just trying to get to the enemy base/objective.
the issue with blockland dogfights is that they try to apply on-foot deathmatch conventions to vehicular combat. infantry weapons (you know, normal man-portable guns) are given to players in vehicles that not only are unable to subscribe to even vaguely similar rules (besides basic 'guns shoot bullets and if you shoot things they die') to the point that you have to write an entirely new set of rules for them explicitly
hold on i explained that really weird
the issue with blockland dogfights is that nobody has decided to make a dogfight explicitly designed to be a dogfight. you can sort of compare the situation to trying to use a rake as a shovel: i mean, yes, i suppose it does work, and it gets the job done (to some extent) but it's not efficient or elegant
because it wasn't designed to do the job you're trying to get it to do. the way people typically go about making dogfights (heed, specifically) is less about plane-to-plane combat (
dogfighting) and more like militaristic road-trips: the only reason you get in a plane (or any vehicle really) is so you can get to the enemy base and forget them up (and then start
spawnkilling them, which is another bit of bad design in and of itself)
what's worse is that, while dogfights are i guess 'constantly changing', it's not in any sort of
positive way- the only thing anyone ever really 'changes' is the bases and the weapons, but not toward any real endpoint: they aren't made easier-to-use or even adapted to the situation, they're only changed up a bit so they still maintain that same illusion of being 'fresh' and 'unique'. they're basically repainting the same gold-painted stuff polka dots and rainbow every few months so more people join the server
but back to that first point, the thing about dogfights is that nobody really cares about what a dogfight is or how it can be re-imagined (beyond 'exactly the way it is now', but that's mostly because they're too lazy or are too happy with player count to actually make it any better)- and as such nobody even tries to change them, even though plane combat (which is what dogfighting is
all about in the first place) is ludicrously clunky due to weapons that aren't designed for dogfights, the ranges they entail or the targets at which they're supposed to be aiming at being dodgy forgets (which is fine, because they're planes and this is their schtick) and as such the entire server is composed of small convoys (literally one-plane-per-unit) flying to the enemy base and then trying- and failing- to defeat an endless onslaught of troops (not fun, very monotonous and not at all interesting) or trying and succeeding to defeat an endless onslaught of troops (not fun, very monotonous and not at all interesting
x9999). this could be easily fixed by simply adding aircraft-only weapons or designing weapons to be used in planes (raycast machine guns? flak cannons? vehicle-targeting homing missiles?) or simply removing the aircraft element entirely, causing the game to simply be a deathmatch
so either you do dogfights right or you've just got a needlessly convoluted team deathmatch that will end with one side completely swamping the other side or at an endless stalemate
not hyperbole