SERVER Hardcorener

[UDrew]

I've been toying with the idea of something on the opposite side of the spectrum from Casual Corner and a little more hardcore, so I finally decided to just do it! I bring you: Hardcorener! The basic premise of Hardcore Haven is simple:

If you have a low K\D for too long, you're kicked for one hour.

The idea behind it is to add a new competitive environment that's different from what's already out there since I like making things out of the norm It should be fun to see how far you can go or try to be the last man standing!

Server Details (All values subject to change):

• Players need to maintain a K\D of 0.75 or higher for their session or will be kicked for 1 hour.
  • Currently 0.75 to give some leeway to players who are fairly even with everyone else, but should remove anyone underperforming.
  • The Kills and Deaths tracked for this are only tracked for the "current session." If the player is away from the server (voluntarily or not) for an hour or more, these stats will reset.
  • Not to be confused with the "Overall" stats that are tracked for the entirety of the player's time with the server.
  • This is to allow players to be able to come back and give it another shot. Alternatively, this should help prevent players from coasting if they get a particularly high K\D.
  • A warning is only given upon death, to allow players to bring up their K\D.
  • TKs do not count towards kills or deaths.
• Players must get at least one kill every 5 rounds.
  • This is in an effort to keep players engaged and not hide/time waste.
  • Players will receive a warning every 5 rounds that they do not meet either of these criteria. Players will get 2 warnings before they are kicked.
• There is an internal "warning level" to track these warnings. Each warning adds 1 to the player's warning level.
  • Level 0: Criteria has been met, no warnings for player.
  • Level 1: Freebie, no warning issued to player. This is to allow time to adjust to current environment/warmup.
  • Level 2: Warning issued to player.
  • Level 3: Final warning issued to player.
  • Level 4: Player kicked for 1 hour.
  • 1 level will be removed after 20 minutes of no warnings.

Spoiler: Warning Level Example

00:00: Player enters game.
00:30: Player has had a low K\D for 5 rounds. Now Level 1, no warning issued.
00:45: Player maintains a low K\D for 5 more rounds. Now Level 2, warning is issued to player.
01:00: Player now has brought up their K\D for 5 rounds. Remains Level 2, no warning issued.
01:05: Player has not been warned again, downgrade to Level 1, no warning issued.
01:25: Player has not been warned again, downgrade to Level 0, no warning issued. (In the future, Level 1 might be the floor, but for now the warning level can fully reset).
02:00: Player has had a low K\D for 5 rounds. Now Level 1, no warning issued.
[02:15: Player maintains a low K\D for 5 more rounds. Now Level 2, warning is issued to player.
02:30: Player maintains a low K\D for 5 more rounds. Now Level 3, final warning is issued to player.
02:45: Player maintains a low K\D for 5 more rounds. Now Level 4, player is kicked and may not return to server until at least 03:45.
04:00: Player returns, reset to Level 0.

• Overall stats are tracked and ranked into a leaderboard.
  • Players are ranked by Rating (Rating = Overall Kills * Overall K\D).
  • The intent is to reward both those who can stay on the server the longest & grind out kills and those can achieve a high K\D without needing to grind as much. The weighting might need looked at and I might need to add other factors in, but I wanted to give players a chance to catch up if they had a rocky start and to avoid situations where a player maintains a top spot just because they got a high K\D with a relatively low amount of kills, while still keeping K\D important.

Spoiler: Rating Examples

Rank    Kills   K\D     Rating
1.      200     8       1,600
2.      200     5       1,000
3.      90      10      900
4.      400     2       800

So you can see how different combinations can contribute to fairly close Ratings. #3 isn't too far off from the #2 spot, with approximately half the kills, but consistently twice the K\D. Of course though, excelling at both (See rank #1) has a considerable advantage, as I think it should be.

• Use the !stats command to see your Current Overall Rank, Overall Kills, Overall Deaths, and Overall K\D.
• Use the !leaderboard command to see the top 5 players.
  • The leaderboards will be viewable on the Discord (Will share the same Discord with CC: Join the Casual Corner - MBII Server Discord Server!), but I'd like as much information accessible in game as possible. The top 10 is on the Discord, 10 entries in game seemed like a lot on the screen at once (I recommend reading in the console).
• Both the !stats and !leaderboard commands can also take the "Best" or <class> parameter, to see stats/leaderboards for the best play session or specific classes. Examples:
  • "!stats best" will show you the stats from your best play session on the server. Note a session takes place from when you join the server until 1 hour after you disconnect.
  • "!stats clone" will show you your overall stats as a Clone Trooper.
  • "!leaderboard best" will show the top 5 best play sessions. Note only one entry per player.
  • "!leaderboard clone" will show the top 5 Clone Troopers.

Spoiler: Class Name Parameters (Not case sensitive)

"imperial soldier" or just "imperial" or "imp"
"rebel soldier" or just "rebel" or "reb"
"commander"
"elite trooper" or just "elite"
"sith"
"jedi"
"bounty hunter" or just "bh"
"hero"
"super battle droid" or just "sbd" or "super" or "battle"
"wookiee" or just "wook"
"droideka" or just "deka"
"clone trooper" or just "clone"
"mandalorian" or just "mando"
"arc trooper" or just "arc"

• Being alive on the losing team when the objective is completed will count as a death for those players. Alternatively, all players on the winning team will each be granted a kill.
  • I don't want to ignore the team based nature of this game, so I want there to be some penalties/rewards for ignoring/participating in the objective and not just playing as a death match. Looking at possibly increasing the # of kills/deaths added to give objectives a little more weight, but there are other things that need considered & addressed such as maps that favor one side over the other, number of players playing at that time, etc.
  • I've gone back and forth on the "all players on the winning team" part as opposed to just the alive players on the winning team, but I considered situations where a player sacrifices themselves to stall the enemy team so the objective can be completed and I feel like they would deserve credit for that.
• Switching to spectator or disconnecting (even if reconnecting shortly thereafter) mid round counts as a death.
  • This has been a reason against leaderboards in the past due to some player's exploiting this behavior. Will have to see how much of an issue this is and increase the penalty, if needed, for repeat offenders.
  • Only applies to players who were alive at the time. If you already died, you will not be penalized.
• Map rotation only, no RTV.
  • There is a !votenextmap command to move on to the next map in the rotation.
  • First team to 5 wins to move onto next map.
  • Minimum # of players (See map list below) indicates maps that are automatically skipped if there are currently not enough players on the server to meet the minimum.

Spoiler: Dynamic Map Rotation Example

                    # of Players 
Curr Map           at End of Round     Next Map
mb2_ps_korriban           1            mb2_alderaan (Skipping many 16 player minimum maps)
mb2_alderaan              8            mb2_theed (Skipping mb2_tradefed)
mb2_theed                 8            mb2_kamino (Skipping mb2_dotf & mb2_coruscant_chase)
mb2_kamino               24            mb2_cmp_arena (No skip)
mb2_cmp_arena            24            mb2_cmp_geocanyons (No skip)
mb2_cmp_geocanyons       24            mb2_boc (No skip)
mb2_boc                  24            mb2_rc_hangarC (No skip)
mb2_rc_hangarC            6            mb2_mygeeto (Skipping mb2_jeditemple)

The server checks how many players there are at the end of the round, and sets next map accordingly, if the next map in the rotation needs more players. It's pretty seemless to the player (only thing I've seen is when the next map starts to load, sometimes you'll see the 16 player map loading screen for a second, then it switches to the one that'll actually be played).

• • I still want there to be a variety of maps played, but will trim some out (or possibly add others) if the map is too unbalanced at this level of play.

Spoiler: Current Map List

mb2_enclave (No minimum players)
mb2_ps_korriban (16 players minimum)
mb2_korriban (16 players minimum)
mb2_republiccruiser (16 players minimum)
mb2_dxun (16 players minimum)
mb2_corellia (8 players minimum)
mb2_alderaan (No minimum players)
mb2_tradefed (16 players minimum)
mb2_theed (No minimum players)
mb2_dotf (16 players minimum)
mb2_coruscant_chase (16 players minimum)
mb2_kamino (8 players minimum)
mb2_cmp_arena (No minimum players)
mb2_cmp_geocanyons (8 players minimum)
mb2_boc (16 players minimum)
mb2_rc_hangarC (No minimum players)
mb2_jeditemple (8 players minimum)
mb2_mygeeto (No minimum players)
mb2_mustafar (No minimum players)
mb2_tatooine (8 players minimum)
mb2_lunarbase (8 players minimum)
mb2_scarif (No minimum players)
mb2_citadel (8 players minimum)
mb2_tantiveIV (16 players minimum)
mb2_deathstar (8 players minimum)
mb2_echobase (8 players minimum)
mb2_smuggler (No minimum players)
mb2_cloudcity (16 players minimum)
mb2_SDestroyer (16 players minimum)
mb2_jabba (No minimum players)
uM_SarlaccBarge (No minimum players)
mb2_cmp_endor (8 players minimum)
mb2_commtower (8 players minimum)
MB2_yavinassault (16 players minimum)
mb2_ps_desert (16 players minimum)
mb2_jakku (No minimum players)
mb2_eravana (16 players minimum)
mb2_starkiller_base (16 players minimum)
mb2_duel_starkiller_base (No minimum players)

As mentioned above, pretty much everything is subject to change depending on how it goes. I feel like a lot of these values aren't as strict as they probably could be, but are a good starting point to see how things go and adjust from there or they could be fine and that's where the "top X% of players" server idea (see below) comes into play. I'm open to ideas, suggestions, and feedback so you're welcome to leave that here or on the Discord!

Potential future ideas if this gains traction or I just get bored:

• Another server that only allows the top X% of players from this server for an additional level of competitiveness. Possibly with stricter rules.
• Smaller map rotation pools (maybe 5-ish maps?), but have those map pools change week to week.
• Periodic leaderboard resets.
• Clan Leaderboards - Can track stats based on the player's clan tag and aggregate them into a leaderboard.
• Clan Events - In addition to leaderboards, can have certain days/weekends where only clans can compete. Maybe similar to the teams idea below.

The server is live now, so I hope you guys give it a shot and have fun!

Thanks!

 

[qwerty]

lol

 

[Fluffy |>]

Speaking from experience of managing a kd based clan rank system, 0.75 is way too high and the server will lose population and die very quickly

Would be a cool one off event but as a server concept it just doesn't work

Maybe instead of this make a copy of the team based elo server for eu?

 

[UDrew]

Thanks for the feedback! You could be right, and like I mentioned, I'm totally open to tweaking things if needed. Keep in mind that it's not a perm ban (only an hour) and it's just the K/D of your current play session that gets checked against that 0.75 K\D. You don't have to maintain 0.75 K\D for your whole time with the server. Once you leave the server for an hour (voluntary or not), you're back at square one, your current session K\D is reset and you've basically got at least 15 rounds before the next temp ban.

I was able to play some this morning for about an hour and no one got kicked, but there was 1 warning. Granted that's a very small sample size, but if the temp bans are about that far spaced out, I think there's plenty of room for people to filter in and out without half the game suddenly being kicked. But again, will definitely keep an eye on it and change if needed!

Right now everything is still hosted on one server, so there's nothing to really swap out for an EU server, but for sure if demand is there, I'd be happy to host in EU. I used to have a Casual Corner hosted in EU over the holidays when pops were higher and it did pretty well for a while. Since that's coming up again and another Mandalorian season coming up, might be good timing