The Issues with CTF in general

Spoiler: Disclaimer

This part of the post has been solely made for the purpose of safety in case this thread is taken down. This post is not meant to become tangled in a legal mess, only to prevent it from being unlawfully removed.

The terms of service for using the brawl forums states in the highlighted text that the staff reserve the right to remove any context submitted for any reason without explanation. This means that regardless of whether you've broken any of the forum rules, the staff can still remove your post. They can remove it for any reason, from breaking every rule, to you being critical of brawl, to even them not liking you, they can remove your post, and not even give you an explanation for why they removed it. This is borderline censorship, but more importantly it's not even legal. As an American company brawl is bound by the US constitution. I'm not an expert on American law, but after asking @gamren about it, it's clear that this phrasing violates the US constitution:


This means that the way that this is phrased violates the first amendment of the constitution, which means that the way this is phrased needs to be changed and then adhered to. I realise that brawl is also international, and that there are customers worldwide. As such I've also researched and found out that this also violates the freedom of expression ideology of UNESCO:

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/commun...ternet-and-social-media-action-line-c9-media/


UNESCO is an international organisation with hundreds of member countries, including America, The vast majority of Europe and Australia. Given America signed up to this ideology as well, then brawl are also bound by it as well. This phrasing violates that ideology and so, again, needs to be changed. On a personal note I think it should also be changed because freedom of expression allowed the community to help better the server by criticising poor decisions and offering solutions to that. In the long run this means that the server will benefit due to this freedom of expression, and so it's in the best interests of everyone that it be changed.

To that end, another section of it, stating:
"These terms may be changed at any time without notice"
also sounds unfair. Whilst not violating any laws, it seems rather unscrupulous to have the ability to change the terms of use, which people agree to when making a forum account, without even notifying them, let alone whether they agree to the updates or not. It's quite within the realm of possibility that an update to these terms of service might not be agreeable to people, whereas before they were perfectly willing to accept them. This means they're effectively agreeing to something that you haven't even told them about, let alone whether they agree to it. I think a sensible change would be to make sure any future updates to the terms of service are notified so that at the very least the community has the opportunity to read and understand the changes.

Spoiler: Introduction

I've been putting off making a thread like this simply because I had hoped CTF wouldn't get into a situation in which I'd have to. As time has passed, things only seem to be getting worse, and it's now gotten to a point where I feel I have to say something otherwise it'll never be said. I'm sure everyone's sick and tired of this type of thread too, as I'm certainly not the first to write one. Given how many of these threads have been locked and deleted for being unconstructive criticism I think I need to take the time to explain each one of the points, as well as come up with solutions. That means that this is going to be a very long post without a "too lazy to read" section, so brace yourselves. Before I start I also want to make clear that I'm not writing this because I hate everything and anyone in particular, especially because I'm going to be naming names. I'm doing this because I love the gamemode, and I want to provide some constructive criticism in order to keep it running. With that said, given this is going to be a thread based on criticism, there's a very real chance that this thread could be locked and deleted quickly (which is one of the problems I will address in this post) and so I've taken the liberty of also copying this information into a document so that everyone can read it. This way, irrespective of whether or not the thread is deleted, the message and criticisms will still be spread.

Spoiler: Listening to public opinion

CTF used to be an incredibly popular gamemode. Youtubers used to endorse it, the chat would be alive with multiple different conversations, and generally everyone had a good time. This clearly isn't the case anymore. The popularity has vastly shrunk, and the game chat has become utterly toxic (not exactly helped by me, as I'm sure a lot of you are aware). Nevertheless that popularity is down to the changing interests of public opinion. This is totally normal, and games do come and go from the public eye. However, various games and gamemodes tend to be able to stay relevant and popular despite this by adapting, updating and changing aspects of the game to meet consumer demand. Despite not being quite as popular as they were at their peak, they're still around have a large movement following them, like for example Pokemon. This isn't the case with CTF, and part of the reason this is the case is because the staff simply don't do enough to keep the consumer fanbase happy. As people get bored of waiting for an update which solves the major concerns they have, they leave the game, finding other more relevant things to do. The problem is, as more people leave because the staff refuse to give them what they want, there are also less people to purchase items from the shop, and/or donate. With less of this, come less revenue for brawl, and ultimately profit turns into loss. Simple economics tells us that unless the staff begin to listen to the playerbase, the gamemode will eventually die and be shut down. The problem currently is, there simply isn't enough evidence to suggest that the staff are actually listening to the community. I'll explain using an example:

This is the current status of the CTF server ideas section:

As you can see, at the time of me writing this post there are 887 different threads in this section, including new map submissions. This means that there are more threads in this server ideas section than:
minecraft party (595 threads)

hardcore games (709 threads)
minecraftbuild and kitbrawl combined (462 threads combined)

That's truly some staggering numbers of ideas to help change and improve the gamemode. Obviously not all of these ideas are unique, and some are obviously aren't going to be useful. That still gives a vast amount of threads for unique and useful different gameplay changes which could keep the gamemode popular and relevant. However, despite all this we've had 1 major update over CTF's time on brawl, along with some smaller tweaks to classes. The major change affected pyro, and chemist with some smaller changes to soldier and mage. We've also had a couple of map waves, but all of the maps from the first wave were so bad they were removed by the time the second rolled out. The second wave has also been heavily criticised. To put this into context, the majority of the community thinks that ship battle is a terrible map, and yet archers and engineers still like the map enough to keep it in rotation longer than the maps from the first map wave. That truly is a testament to how little these maps are liked. This is because the brawl staff have decided to prioritise the aesthetics of the map, despite the majority of the community wanting the maps to be gameplay based. The updates completely neglected to affect dwarf and necro until very recently, and even then these are tweak updates. This is legitimately a joke, as it hasn't stopped dwarf from being a defensive monster, or necro being nothing more than a weaker heavy. The staff clearly haven't addressed what the community has wanted through these updates, despite them being heavily featured in the server ideas section, as well as the main CTF section in general on other complaint threads. These complaints have been clearly stated a number of times, which begs the question "why hasn't anything been done about it?"

My solution to this situation is simple, the staff need to work harder to actually listen to the community and to implement the ideas that the community want. I suggest that these changes are clearly posted as they are now, along with references to the people who suggested the ideas, as well as what's been changed from the original (if the idea has been hybridised). This will help the community to feel as if it's actually helping to make decisions for it's own benefit, and that we're actually being listened to. To that end, more updates would also be beneficial in order to keep the game relevant and entertaining. I suggested at one point to @Canoodle about having some sort of community council where ideas could be discussed. Whether you think this is a good idea or not, as of right now nothing has been done involve the community more in decision making, suggesting the aim of this has been ignored anyway. Testing of maps and new class changes on the match servers would also be beneficial in order to see if the changes are usable and balanced. Getting that kind of information from the people that play the game well would be invaluable. Additional advertisements to the forums to have your opinion on the class changes would also be invaluable to get opinions from CTFers who don't necessarily play as often. All of this will keep the community involved, and help to build a game that people actually want to play. The alternative is, if this doesn't happen, there's a very real chance people will leave, gamemode will stop making a profit and CTF will inevitably shut down.

Spoiler: Updates

Similar to the last point, but no less important. It's not just the lack of updates that have been problematic, but also the ones that have been introduced. I've already mentioned that the CTF maps that have been introduced on the latest map waves have been removed due to being horrible for gameplay. Equally speaking some of the changes made to classes have not been popular or solved the problems they were designed to solve. For example, the latest pyro tweak meant that you had to double click in order to activate frenzy. Whilst this did solve the issue surrounding accidentally using frenzy, it caused a new one, not clicking enough to activate it. Many people widely thought that this wasn't tested properly, and other ideas such as a frenzy toggle in another slot would be more appropriate. Thankfully this is going to be corrected, but my argument is that it never should have happened in the first place. Forethought and care would have meant this would have never happened, and instead people have had to deal with this ridiculous double click for the time being. Whilst a solution was wanted, this solution caused more problems than it solved. Another example would be necro gaining knockback on it's pickaxe. I understand that there wasn't the ability to make massive changes at that time, but my argument to that would be necro should have been one of the high priorities on the list to be changed given that currently it is so underpowered it's useless in every single role. It should have been a priority on the update that removed pyro's instakill. Necro needed a total rehaul, not simply adding knockback on the pickaxe. This wasn't an update that fixed necro, it's still ridiculously underpowered and broken. The only difference between then and now is that now the knockback makes it take slightly longer to inevitably kill the necro (which nobody uses because it's broken anyway). If anything this just makes it longer and more boring to inevitably kill the necro. It's not got any extra power, so it's still as easy to kill, it just takes longer. Additionally, it's an utter joke to give it an update which doesn't solve any problems with it when it's fundamentally broken and has been for a year, it needs a complete overhaul, not something to delay it's inevitable death.

The solution to this problem is the same as the first. Updates need to be more frequent and actually concern the community. If the community had been listened to, I think that necro would have been on the list of things that changed in the pyro update. If anything, it's probably more important to have changed necro than pyro. Pyro was clearly an issue, but necro was so criminally underpowered it was broken. It should have been done first, and yet a year on and it's still utterly useless. Listening to the community would have helped correct this issue much sooner. Additionally, talking to the community will allow the staff to see exactly what they want, and so make it easier to come up with updates people actually like. Simply listening to the community both makes the community feel happier that they're being listened to, and gives the staff valuable ideas about how to improve the game and keep the server running. It's a win-win situation, and I'm amazed it's not being done already as it's incredibly simple to accomplish.

Spoiler: On Mods

This is probably one of the more serious issues I'd like to address, and hopefully also one that won't be hard to correct. Firstly, I've already explained that the mods aren't listening to players enough. I can understand in part why. It's now gotten to the point where so many people have complained that mods don't really want to bother listening to anything that's said on those threads anymore, as the likelihood is they'll just be further insulted by what they read. That's why I'm trying to be as civil as I can with this thread, so that mods can understand I'm not trying to sound insulting, or attempting to flame them in order to get what I want. I'm trying instead to be civil in order to make the staff understand what needs to be done in order to save the gamemode. I know this also doesn't concern every mod, for example, one of our former mods @Xelia_ came up with:

A frankly fantastic idea of compiling ideas from the server section together in order to discuss them and see whether they could be implemented. Sadly I believe this hasn't yet been discussed, highlighting what I discussed earlier. The staff really should start looking at these complaint threads again. The reason being, whilst they can involve insults (which I thoroughly condemn, posts like this still have to follow certain rules, and if you feel they are too insulting then they should be at the very least have these insults removed), they also provide useful information about the community opinion on the matter in addition to flagging new issues and solving existing ones. I'd also suggest getting this file of all the useful ideas from the server ideas section so that they can be discussed and hopefully implemented in the near future, as I'm sure a lot of these show some real promise, whether hybridised, or good as they are. I know @NomNuggetNom has a tendency to use ideas given to him by @Quarrelt and a lot of the time these are perfectly acceptable. However, not all of these are good, and there's always value in listening to the ideas of others, and in most cases there's always someone with an even better/more popular idea.

If you want to have a look at the document itself, @Xelia_ has kindly given me the link so you can all see it and make up your own minds about the ideas: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V8KYozz3mSaxKDdZNVvJDOXbi0I0CgqF8ktnnm5_ugs/edit

Spoiler: Lag

I wanted to make this a separate issue on it's own simply because it's causing so many problems for people. Lag issues aren't exactly new to CTF, they've existed pretty much ever since it started on Mcpvp. However, it's become clear that these lag spikes have been becoming a lot more common, especially in bigger games. I can understand better servers clearly cost more money, and that there has to be a tradeoff at some point. However, EU players already have to deal with over 100ms, Australians over 300, and so it doesn't help anyone that the servers are so bad gamespeed dramatically drops as soon as the player numbers increase. I would go as far as saying that the servers aren't designed to handle the 50 players they are able to accommodate, which is ridiculous. That's the normal situation, and doesn't consider additional lag, which seems to occur more frequently than it once did. All the while, brawl is still handing out prizes and competitions like nothing is wrong. I think the best solution to this would be changing the way money is spent so that the servers can actually handle the 50 players they say they can. Alternatively, the player size on the matches should be reduced so that they can, again, handle the strain. Testing updates on the match servers before full release would again help this situation to see whether or not the updates cause too much lag or not. With this, I can understand lag will still occur to an extent, but at the very least the reduction will make it bearable.

To that end, the bug which also turns CTF into a a blank flat map has also occurred more often recently, and so it might also be worth working out what causes this bug, and putting measures into place which can help to stop this happening in the future. I'm not sure what the cause is, but prevention is better than waiting for it to happen and then fixing it.

Spoiler: On Teams

This is probably the most difficult part thing for me to talk about, because I love the team system and so talking about this is inevitably going to upset me. The simple truth is:

Some people on the CTF ref committee are corrupt.

The simple fact is there are mods in the committee who clearly make decisions prioritising their own opinion over what is deemed to be reasonable. CTF refs have also been known to overstep their boundaries in a number of situations, and deliver punishments outside their own jurisdiction. It's well known that a couple members of the committee tend to dominate, but this also moves into their activities, and they can go too far. This means that they let their own opinions of the people in question affect the decisions they make, and punishments they give. Bias is inevitable, as clearly a decision is going to be affected by personal opinions. There are however limits to this, and I believe that certain members of committee have crossed this line, leading to corruption. There are a couple of incidents I'd like to use as examples of this:


I'd first like to take into account Incidents involving Skarm and Chxmot. Chxmot was a player previously on TeamTeamTeam who originally broke rules by harassing a player in game by targeting them. This is a clear violation of team rules as stated in this thread (harassment) and this is on the severe end of this rule break as clearly stated:
https://www.brawl.com/threads/56691/
Despite this clear and heavy violation of this harassment rule, @aRandomBob157 ignored giving him a player strike and instead warned him without giving him any punishment for it. After being reported for this harassment, he continued regardless. This means despite breaking the rule in the most severe way possible, chxmot was allowed to go after a stern talking to. On the other end of the scale @Skarm was given not one but two strikes for allegedly violating another rule, that of having an alt on another team. Now irrespective of whether or not you believe @Skarm violated this rule (and many people debate on both sides of that argument) the fact remains he received one strike for the rule break, and another for the rule break being the same reason as the first strike he received. I'll explain why having 2 strikes for one incident is completely unjustified in another incident later, but I'd like to compare the 2 incidents I've already explained. One broke a rule involving being on 2 teams at once, and received 2 strikes for it (which meant he was banned from CTF teams as a result). The other severely broke a harassment rule, to the point where it could even be considered cyberbullying, continuing even after being reported and warned once, and is allowed to walk away with no strike at all. The only potential reason why this would happen is because Skarm was disliked by the ref committee and Chxmot, as one of the members of TTT and as a result under the leadership of one of those refs, was liked. The harassment is clearly more severe (which if you don't believe me I'll add a couple screenshots at the end of this section) and yet isn't punished as a pose to simply being on two teams at once. This is clear evidence of mod bias towards different players depending on their standings with the committee. If this were a standalone incident, it could probably be forgiven, after all everyone suffers from poor judgement sometimes. However, there have been a number of incidents of mod bias.

The case of NorthXtreme is another good contrast to @Skarm. North also managed to get himself banned from CTF teams. His first two strikes were for disrespect. Following the trend, Nortxtreme should have received 2 strikes for his second offense, being the same as the first. However, he did not receive that second strike. He was allowed to continue with 2 strikes until he received a third for having an alt on another team. Striking players twice for 1 incident firstly counteracts the reason the three strike system was set up- so that people would have two chances before being stopped from playing in teams. Striking them twice removes one of those opportunities to change and stop breaking rules. However, more importantly there is nothing on the strike thread (already linked above) to suggest that striking a player twice for the same incident is acceptable. However irrespective of which one is in the wrong, both players broke a particular rule twice in a row. One of those players was striked twice, the other three times. Disrespect is a slightly less serious version of harassment, but I'd still consider it to be more serious than simply having an alternate account on another team. Despite this, the team alt is the situation which resulted in 2 strikes for the same incident. This double standard clearly proves that it depends on your standing with the committee as to the punishment you receive for rule breaks, and could be taken further to suggest mods are letting their own opinions affect the decisions they make. In either case it's an example of an unjust committee system, and that needs to be changed.

There are a number of other questionable incidents that could be talked about here, for example the reason why the video proof of @epeek hacking was never publically released, despite another video by @Xelasi at the same time showing otherwise, but nevertheless these incidents are not isolated. They prove a fairly deep running trend that members of the committee are clearly corrupted, overstepping their mark and striking people for rules that don't exist, or at the very least left unwritten. It would also seem that these biased committee members are also the ones dominating the committee, otherwise these poor decisions wouldn't be allowed to happen in the first place. Last week I personally reported two players for harassment, the same kind of situation as chxmot, and so far I haven't received any word of any punishment either of them will face. This kind of incident is almost constantly happening, irrespective of the evidence put forward, and it's now gotten to the point where it's becoming hard for me to rely on the mod committee, because I can't tell whether or not any legitimate complaint will be listened to, or equally someone is going to be punished for doing absolutely nothing wrong.

Sadly, the solution to this problem isn't quite as simple as the other issues I've raised. A good start would be to allow the rest of the committee to have a proper say in decision making, not overstep the mark and to enforce the rules properly. Unfortunately, it's reached the point where some have become disillusioned by the committee, and can't rely on them to justly punish someone for the rules they break. Some have taken matters into their own hands, openly talking about the rule violations in the wider community, as well as openly criticising the committee for not effectively resolving the concerns raised. It's going to take a lot of time and effort in order to reassure this section of the community that the staff are both reliable, and working fairly for everyone. I believe it's definitely possible to do, but will not be a short term solution.

These are some of the screenshots concerning chxmot. I have more screenshots than this, but I decided to include 3 of the best. I've also blacked out cursing in order to avoid breaking any rules involving adult content.

Spoiler: On Criticism

At the beginning of this long post, I created a disclaimer stating why they couldn't fairly remove this post without there being a valid reason. To that end, I've also tried to keep this post civil, and constructively critical, suggesting ways throughout to try and improve the current situation. The reason I've written this post in this way is because most of the points have raised are nothing new. The vast majority of the ideas have actually been talked about once if not several times before. The problem is that this criticism hasn't been responded to and acted on, and I think there are a couple reasons why:

The first is due to the tone of many of the criticism threads posted has violated rules, or is simply phrased in a way to look massively negative and angry. I don't blame moderators for not wanting to read many of the posts that have been written because of the insulting nature of many of them, and equally I can understand why some of the threads have been deleted due to the same reason. I think that the blame has to partially be placed on the community, as our insulting tone has in part lead to mods getting less involved with us to try improve CTF as a whole.

The second is down to the whole ethos of brawl. Criticism is certainly not encouraged at brawl, and threads have a habit of being deleted and locked instead of being edited so that the criticism can still be heard in a more useful way. I think it partially comes from this part of the terms of service, where they're effectively allowed to remove any post for any reason. That any reason could even simply be being critical of brawl, and the greatest injustice being no explanation is needed to be given. This is simply borderline censorship, and it's given the ability to staff to ignore all kinds of criticism. The problem with this is partially to do with freedom of expression, which I've already talked about in the disclaimer, but also that it's good to have an opposing argument. Not every decision made is going to be the right one, and having an opposing argument allows for a debate which helps to make the correct decision. Right now, the removal of many of these critical posts means that there is very little criticism around. This in part leads to a disconnect between the staff and the community, but also leads some of these poor decisions because that debate doesn't exist when all the critical posts are removed!

Quite a few simple solutions will fix this problem. The first is changing the phrasing in the terms of service so that it doesn't encourage censorship. This at the very least will mean constructive criticism is more likely to survive, which means that there'll be an opposition to ideas, and therefore the better ideas are likely to be implemented. This would also be helped by editing insulting material out of critical posts rather than deleting the thread as a whole would help to achieve that. Additionally, reading the threads, and acting upon them would lead to a less insulting tone in critical posts. Many writing critical posts are angry because of the perception the staff have been ignoring them for a long time now, and it's getting to the point where they're tired of waiting to be listened to. Listening and response would reassure the community that the staff do care about the criticism, and so the next time they'll likely be less annoyed, and therefore less insulting.


Given the blame is partially the community's, it's also up to the community to pull their weight. As much as the staff need to listen, the community also need to be respectful, and come up with reasonable and constructively critical threads. If the community becomes more reasonable and respectful towards the staff, it's much more likely that the staff will reach out, listen and attempt to help the situation. It's a 2 way system, and if both sides respect each other, the system will be much more likely to work out for the benefit of everyone.

Spoiler: Conclusion

This is already probably the longest post I've ever written on any forum, but I think it's been worth doing. With all of this, I hope that I've managed to go into some thorough detail about the major problems affecting CTF in general. I was additionally going to go into detail about each of the issues specifically gameplay-wise, but I fear if I had included those issues, this post would have been longer than 10,000 words. I did however want to finish this off properly.

A lot of the solutions that I have suggested throughout this post aren't going to be quick fixes. The reality is that it's going to take time, mainly because parts of the community now consider the staff to be unreliable. Changing the policy is one thing, but changing the standing isn't quick or easy to do. However, a lot of the things that can be done to correct this are very minor, and just require persistence to see through. The effect these small changes will have though is gigantic. They could change an ailing and failing gamemode back into a relevant, ever changing and fun place to be. I fear if most of these things aren't acted upon quickly, the likelihood is CTF will die within months. The player base is already beginning to dwindle, which will clearly be affecting revenues. If this continues, CTF won't be popular enough to stay running. I still think it's possible to save CTF, but something has to be done soon, before it's too late.

I've tried to be as thorough as I can, adding as much detail and evidence as I can to explain my standing on all of this. I can however understand that not everyone is going to agree with everything that I've written in all of this, so I'd quite like to use the discussion to talk about what everyone makes of everything here, revolving around these three things:


1-Problems with general CTF that I missed - I'm not an expert and the likelihood is I've missed something, so It'd be interesting to see what I've forgotten
2-What you agree/disagree with - I'm sure what I've said will resonate with some and not others. Encouraging a discussion about what you think would help the mods to gain a better understanding of the community position

3-Solutions to the problems I've discussed- I'm sure the solutions I've explained aren't the only ones, and maybe you have a better idea. Constructive criticism is going to be the best way to help the staff implement the changes the community are unhappy with. As I've said in this very long post, this is about civil discussion, not a hate post about the staff, and so CONSTRUCTIVE criticism about some of the problems I've raised as well as your own would help achieve the aim of this post too.

Hopefully by provoking some civil discussion on the subject we can get the mods to try and solve these problems, and hopefully change CTF for the better.

Finally (which I'm sure you're all deeply glad about), I'd like to reaffirm that this isn't a hate post. I've written all of this because I care about the gamemode, and I want to see it successful in the future. Lately what I've been seeing is CTF in it's worst state for a long time, due to the reasons I've written about above. By writing this in such detail, I hope I've managed to explain exactly what the problems are, and offering some constructive criticism about how it can be solved. Hopefully if it doesn't solve the problems, it will at the very least cause people to start talking about them.

Spoiler: My Thanks

I'd like to say thanks to everyone who allowed me to use their situation as part of this post. I'd particularly like to thank @Xelia_ and @gamren for helping me out with sections of this massive post, as well as your opinions on the matter. I'd also like to thank @CrystaliteKokoro for talking to me and keeping me sane whilst I wrote all of this, I think I might have died otherwise! Oh and the post is over 5700 words long so if you got this far, congratulations, and thanks for reading!

 

yes, but I would also argue that whilst mods in the committee don't ref their own matches, they could still influence decisions involving player/team strikes. That makes this solution possibly worth exploring