Tf2Quads (4 v 4 ctf)

[lockitup]

I know some people have seen this mentioned in the chat, but I thought I'd give it a bit more formal introduction. Tf2quads is something I got invited to through tf2lobby and something I've recently started enjoying to play. It is NOT for everyone, which is understandable, but from what I've been told this type of gameplay is not new and goes back to some old games like quake and such.

Anyways without boring you too much, here are the rules:
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Description
Offense vs Defense (OvD)
Synopsis - Played on CTF maps with small team sizes. For 10 minutes, one team defends the intel while the opposing team attempts as many captures as possible. After 10 minutes the round ends and the teams switch roles (RED and BLU team must swap on certain maps due to inequalities in the terrain). After both rounds, the team with the most captures wins the match. BLU IS ALWAYS OFFENSIVE FIRST.

Class Limits - NO medics, 2 soldiers, 2 scouts, 1 of each of the remaining classes.

Respawn Times - "Fast Respawn" ( mp_disable_respawn_times 1 )

DON'T WASTE TIME ON OFFENSE! Keep the pressure on the intel and keep it moving upstream!

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If this sounds interesting to you feel free to join the steam group, I try to run a game every night or so but it fills up rather quickly since we don't need many people to get a game started!

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/tf2quads

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Regarding maps, we have yet to find the "perfect" map. We've tested most of the new comp maps, inlcuding stockpile, rippleside, fusion, mercy, and vitalism. The previous maps work well because they are on the smaller side but there has yet to be the perfect map. Stockpile and fusion are a tad too big. Mercy is actually rather too small, not that its necessary a problem but it also has a silly mercy rule. Vitalism and rippleside have fast return times, if that was tweaked they would work well.

With that said if anyone would like to make us a map, we would definitely play it right away, and you could probably modify it and throw it into the 6v6 competition while you were at it. Just a thought.

Let me know if your interested in playing/mapping/whatever. Have a good day folks.

 

[Tapp]

That game-mode sounds an awful lot like A/D capture the flag.

 

[Mr.Blob]

Class Limits - NO medics, 2 soldiers, 2 scouts, 1 of each of the remaining classes.

Doesn't this make more than 4? -> "Tf2Quads (4 v 4 ctf)"

 

[Furex]

Doesn't this make more than 4? -> "Tf2Quads (4 v 4 ctf)"

Thats just the limit of each class :facepalm: I guess you can chose any combination you want as long as you dont exceeds the limit of each class

 

[Mr.Blob]

Thats just the limit of each class :facepalm: I guess you can chose any combination you want as long as you dont exceeds the limit of each class

Ah, So you don't have to have 2 scouts 2 soldiers like comp.

 

[Retroid]

No Medics but an engi is allowed? I know you can take down a sentry without being ubered but in a good spot I can imagine a lot of lives being wasted and what if there's a demo on point with the SR guarding the sentry - surely that's near impossible and spies would be useless on such a small team.

 

[lockitup]

I've posted this several places and the engineer discussion always comes up. So far we have yet to really had a problem with engineers. The maps we pick are really small and if teamwork is used the sentry isn't necessarily a bother. But with that said we have made mutual agreements on some nights that only a heavy or engineer is allowed and not both, and I'm also thinking of using the hidden engineer cvar to make it require more hits to upgrade. All this just requires more testing.

 

[lana]

Ah, So you don't have to have 2 scouts 2 soldiers like comp.

Actually, the only class you absolutely must have in comp play is a medic. You don't need to have 2 scouts and 2 soldiers, and they're typically the only classes swapped out for a utility.

 

[General_Norris]

Ah, So you don't have to have 2 scouts 2 soldiers like comp.

You don't have to have 2 Scouts or 2 Soldiers when playing comp. Most teams run that combination in 5CP maps but you don't have to per rules.

Normally if you want to run other class you change a Scout or a Soldier if the map is poor for Soldiers or you already have to many Heavy classes for the medic (Yukon, for example).

Some maps are more open to off-clasing that others, specially AD and CTF maps. The only reason why the cookie cutter setup seems so widespread is that 5CP maps are more often played, Turbine is only being recently played in the US and Gravelpit was a for a long time the only really played AD map.

 

[owly-oop]

I just finished a game of it. It isn't that great. Much less organized than 6v6, it just feels like a DM without any progress being made on your kills

 

[lockitup]

I just finished a game of it. It isn't that great. Much less organized than 6v6, it just feels like a DM without any progress being made on your kills

YOU were supersandvich? Did not know that.

I think one thing people don't realize until a couple rounds in, is that the game is less about kd ratio and how many people you can kill then it is about the main goal of capturing the intel.

There are a wide array of scenerios that can occur which is why it makes this game so unique. For example if they have a demo stickying the flag, we need to use a pyro and a soldier to come in and airblast the stickies/gunboat jump in and out real fast with intel and it has to happen at the same time. If they have a heavy guarding the point we need a spy to wait until hes distracted to backstab or a scout to stun the heavy. All of these things need to happen instantaneously which is why it requires some good teamwork. Otherwise, you are right, it can turn into a DM when you lack strategy.

I'd encourage you to give it another shot, but I like I said its not for everybody. You get what you put into it, when you have all teammates willing to communicate and work together it makes any game a lot more fun/easier to play.

 

[lockitup]

not sure how to embed...

[nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H01n5FFrbb8"]YouTube- TF2Quads 4v4 OvD CTF Promo[/nomedia]

 

[lana]

That video could be a whole lot better if you fixed the missing viewmodels, rendered in higher quality graphics, and fixed the color of the arms being the wrong team.

 

[lockitup]

Yeah, sure. I do think it could afford to be less about cool kills and deaths and more about the actual gameplay but it is what it is , i didnt make it.

 

[Vilepickle]

Regarding maps, we have yet to find the "perfect" map. We've tested most of the new comp maps, inlcuding stockpile, rippleside, fusion, mercy, and vitalism. The previous maps work well because they are on the smaller side but there has yet to be the perfect map. Stockpile and fusion are a tad too big. Mercy is actually rather too small, not that its necessary a problem but it also has a silly mercy rule. Vitalism and rippleside have fast return times, if that was tweaked they would work well.

With that said if anyone would like to make us a map, we would definitely play it right away, and you could probably modify it and throw it into the 6v6 competition while you were at it. Just a thought.

Let me know if your interested in playing/mapping/whatever. Have a good day folks.

I see you use several of my maps for this which is nice. Feedback on mercy and the mercy rule in particular is appreciated in my map's thread on the contest forum: http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?ltr=M&t=11561

Most of my questions are along the lines of... is 5 caps too small of a cap disparity to come into effect? Too big? From matches I've watched it does make a difference to keep the game in control and not go into too big of a blowout fest like CTF maps sometimes do. People seem to have comments about maps but never post them somewhere where the author sees them, in which case it won't ever get changed. It looks like this is a good testing bed for some faster CTF maps so it'd help if some suggestions/feedback came out of it (and of course demos)

 

[lockitup]

Mercy is definitely one of our most played maps just for the fact that it is tiny. In fact it may even be too tiny for 4 v 4, so we only 'resort' to playing mercy when we can only find 6 people.

With that said playing Mercy 3 v 3, there's not a whole lot I have a problem with. The gameplay is quick, theres plenty of passages in and out of the base, but not too many, no real good sentry spots. I mean you definitely have made your fair share of maps by now so you know how it works better than most of us do. The only problem I have with Mercy is that it is way too small for 6 v 6, even 4 v 4 it gets a bit crazy and I would prefer something a bit more spacey to be honest.

So there you have it, the reason why I've not really provided much feedback on your thread. That's the downside of making a good map, no feedback. But like I said, if you perhaps expanded the map length just a bit that could be interesting at least in my opinion.

I will say however I wasn't a real fan of ctf_chaos when we played. Please don't model mercy after chaos .

HOWEVER with that said, quads is not the best model for that ctf contest. The ctf contest is for regular ctf, 20 minutes each team trying to get each other's flags. Quads is all about 1 team "turtling" and the other team trying to get the flag, or in more polite terms, offense vs defense ctf. So therefore the only reason I termed the mercy rule as silly was because it was unnecessary in this game mode. It actually slows things down while we want to keep things fast paced. We mainly play all these other maps just because there weren't, and still aren't, many quad maps out there. It would be nice though to see quad maps become more publicly known, especially after boojum has figured out a way for the entities to work.

Lastly, I'd suggest joining the steam group if you were really interested in the best way to get feedback. I like to run maps for mapmakers because I completely understand how hard it can be to get feedback. However I do like to see the mapmakers out there working to get the feedback as well, not having it fed to them on a dinner plate. Kind of first come, first serve.

 

[Vilepickle]

Mercy is definitely one of our most played maps just for the fact that it is tiny. In fact it may even be too tiny for 4 v 4, so we only 'resort' to playing mercy when we can only find 6 people.

With that said playing Mercy 3 v 3, there's not a whole lot I have a problem with. The gameplay is quick, theres plenty of passages in and out of the base, but not too many, no real good sentry spots. I mean you definitely have made your fair share of maps by now so you know how it works better than most of us do. The only problem I have with Mercy is that it is way too small for 6 v 6, even 4 v 4 it gets a bit crazy and I would prefer something a bit more spacey to be honest.

So there you have it, the reason why I've not really provided much feedback on your thread. That's the downside of making a good map, no feedback. But like I said, if you perhaps expanded the map length just a bit that could be interesting at least in my opinion.

I will say however I wasn't a real fan of ctf_chaos when we played. Please don't model mercy after chaos .

HOWEVER with that said, quads is not the best model for that ctf contest. The ctf contest is for regular ctf, 20 minutes each team trying to get each other's flags. Quads is all about 1 team "turtling" and the other team trying to get the flag, or in more polite terms, offense vs defense ctf. We mainly play all these other maps just because there weren't, and still aren't, many quad maps out there. It would be nice though to see quad maps become more publicly known, especially after boojum has figured out a way for the entities to work.

Lastly, I'd suggest joining the steam group if you were really interested in the best way to get feedback. I like to run maps for mapmakers because I completely understand how hard it can be to get feedback. However I do like to see the mapmakers out there working to get the feedback as well, not having it fed to them on a dinner plate. Kind of first come, first serve.

Interesting. I know some people feel strongly about the map's size, though I can assure that it was intentional. The dimensions are roughly identical to Mach4, which turned out to be one of the more popular maps I made. I've seen some advantages to the small size... short travel time, fast gameplay, mid map defenses, much much less mid camping (one of the problems with CTF, whoever owns mid owns the map), etc. I've debated adding a few feet to the length every now and then, but sometimes I just see great things happen on the map and figure it's ok based on my original dimensions. One thing that IS different is that the flag is located further up in the base than Mach so it seems a lot smaller. I think if I tweaked anything it might be the flag location.

I've joined the group and I've been talking with Kibbles about the map too. I'll probably have a button in each spawn in one of the next versions that both teams need to shoot to disable the mercy rule since it slows down your O v D matches a bit.

 

[lockitup]

That would be great, and this goes for anybody. I'm willing (I say this like I made it, which is not the case, Boojum did) to release the o/d ctf entity configuration for anyone who wants it. This is seen in my map I recently made, dedicated to quad matches.

http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=12634

 

[Vilepickle]

That would be great, and this goes for anybody. I'm willing (I say this like I made it, which is not the case, Boojum did) to release the o/d ctf entity configuration for anyone who wants it. This is seen in my map I recently made, dedicated to quad matches.

http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=12634

Interesting. What does the entity set do exactly? You could probably put it up in the DL section here and write up a solid description of it and it might get used more if it's unobtrusive.

 

[lockitup]

Here is the download:
http://forums.tf2maps.net/downloads.php?do=file&id=3584