Island Defense: New Rule discussion

[Telsa]

Players love to milk games where they are doing really well, and this isn't really specific to ID. Island Defense is a game with a lot of dynamics and variables, and one of those is that early obstacles can occur for builders. There may be games where you have an instant death and golding won't happen without extreme coordination or clever mid harass forcing the mini to leave mid and roam, and there may be games where as titan you can't find jack shit for feed on the map and can't justify leaving mid so need to rely on tricks to catch a builder. "I need 500 gold and the titan needs to be hitting back to back fruit tree locations" shouldn't be the only form of ID that players consider to be a good game. There ARE Options for players to gold and kill or at least scare minis from mid, but nobody wants to deal with them. Players want games where they are a level 6 tauren, and if an early death prevents them from doing that, rather than accepting that as a dynamic shift in a game, they consider it a bad one, and I don't think this is a mindset that should be facilitated.

If Titan players operated by this same logic, just picking and choosing games where they get back to back feed spots so they are fed enough to break any base, who the fuck would even learn how to item jump or ward trap? If Titan games could be so reliably experienced upon fed games the same way a lot of players expect to experience it, you would see less variety in titan play styles surface. For me not only is this a super frustrating / unfair thing to do to titan players, considering how much an observer can hurt your feed / the late game variety, but it's also cheapening the growth of the game.

1 Observer is more than 1 observer. Especially if it's a core base builder and the team has a sat, a mage, and a demo, it's more than a 10th of your feed, and that can often make or break a game. Builder's don't care how many people are on their team as long as they can get their base up and maybe have a support with them - It's not necessarily a team game but more of a solo / coop game happening within a team for most players, so the number of builders in a match doesn't always affect their play experience - it always does for the titan. As a consistent titan player, I understand this is very bias, but I feel like the opinion of Titan players need to be considered more heavily than builders for this.

TLDR; leavers suck for titans, don't reward builders for being greedy. Punishment for builder leavers suggested / approved.

[spidle]

This sounds like a good rule. Many games are ruined or end quickly by builders chain leaving.

[Panopticon]

If it can be polished, it'll be even better. But even then, I'd stand for it.

[Ben_T]

I would like to add in on the fact that there are people such as index who consistently go obs and I feel this ruins games. Why would you join game after game just to watch when someone else wants to play? Another person that comes to mind is broccoli who consistently joined games and stayed obs criticizing people while they played. As this annoyed me, I strongly agree with banning people for going obs 3 games or more within a small period of time. For builder leaving after many kills, I find that it's become a strategy to let builders live so that people don't think it's gg. I remember a game where I played titan, killed 5 people before 3 minutes and then everyone else left and 2 people double based and I was left with no feed, a low lvl titan, and low lvl minis. This is a problem, however good titans (not me) can strategically not kill people to continue feeding off of them and to keep people from leaving

[Hash]

If Island Defense still had ELO I would probably be in favor of banning observers, but since ELO was removed from the game, I think the vibe went from competitive to relaxed with more players observing rather than playing, considering that I don't see a need to ban observers since its supposed to a chill game.

[Schnuts]

Just gonna grab some quotes from previous builder-leaver discussions -

Just for clarification, generally speaking it's not hard to win if u get an early enough mini that builders start leaving in a common pub game. It just means there are less builders to track down. But it is significantly more boring if you don't get that early minion due to insufficient builders on the map to start with.

In a worst case scenario where all builders start leaving and 3 builders stay behind to Tb, then we'd have to start chain banning builders, which would be detrimental for the island defense community because too many people will be banned; leaving after a mini has always been a tradition amongst ID pubs that it's going to be hard for them to change just like that, resulting in multiple possible bans.

-Burn

He's still correct. The workload that moderators will be given in the ID community will shift greatly if such a rule goes through and looking at how we're on page 4 of unprocessed ban requests in this era, it's not exactly ideal.

More-so on the point that builder leaving is a chain effect and I do agree that pubs will not change so easily.

You guys shouldn't forget that ENT (the mods) does not ban for leaving. The system takes care of that (autobanx). So the question is more like whether ENT should ban for leaving in general or not - this will also affect those of you who yolo-suicide and then are obs after 2 minutes and leave.

This is also another factor to consider. Manually banning for leaving can be done but it most likely won't be if such a rule is passed therefor autoban comes into play and in the history of ID, autoban for the most part hasn't been activated. For it to go under a transition as big as that will result in appeals.. many of them.

He's also correct on "This will also affect those of you who yolo-suicide" => There's factors like these where someone dies and they leave because their time is over in that game but will still end up autobanned.

TL;DR there's too many factors both in-game and not for this rule to take place, and even if it does the transition alone will result in a lot of unnecessary mod work/builder bans which will lessen the population.

Note: The quotes above are from years ago and while they haven't changed in perspective, the map has. Such as - Feed rate adjustments which didn't exist back then. Word from @IAmDragon that the feed rate will go higher then it currently is to help deal with such a problem internally.

[IAmDragon]

Additionally, throwing this out there, we might want to consider starting another bot for competitive Island Defense games as we're starting to get more and more players. Warcraft 3 Remastered is almost definitely in the works and with an influx or players we can have serious games where if you leave you *are* banned for a couple days (from the competitive Island Defense games) which might help set some at ease

[osug]

@Av1oN
I don't think that Burn can speak for the whole community here.
I might also add that these quotations are quiet old.

If we're speaking about rules (and this is indeed a general rule! see:

Do not leave before the game has certainly ended, especially if no other player has left.

) we shouldn't think about the workload for mods.
The best for mods is not always the best for this community (at least not in this specific case) - otherwise we could get rid of all rules so that no mods would be needed anymore and the workload is null.
So, it might result in extra work (but it hasn't to - we cannot predict what's going to happen) but anyway, it could improve the community play as well.

I agree that autobans are indeed bad decisions - manually banning however is not.

[aRt)Y]

The rule you quoted is a general rule covered by the autoban-system. No mod is enforcing the general rule "do not leave" manually as it is forbidden by policy to do so as moderator.

Island Defense has genre-specific rules which overrule the general ones in this instance.

Given ID is a TD (more or less), autobanning will not be applied more broadly.