Kill the Committee

This is a well written thread tbh. A lot of times the committee will come up with reworks that have never been mentioned once by the community and almost seemed to be pulled out of their asses. Tons and tons of good reworks and concepts flood these forums yet never get any attention by the committee no matter how popular they are.

 

There needs to be a community representative, someone who isn't associated as a staff member but isn't chosen based on popularity. Someone who can voice the communities opinion on the same level with the CTF staff.

 

Me!

 

My opinion on the committee without even reading the thread is, it is a good thing for the CTF Team scene and general ideas. They do need to discuss more in staff chat as I've been one to complain while I was a committee member and after doing so in the Brawl public discord chickenputty and Lordroke joined the CTF Rep chat (where the committee chats are based) to ensure ideas about general changes to CTF aren't discussed there and it stays purely related to teams.

The CTF Committee doesn't just view CTF from a team perspective and they take into consideration of new players all the time, or players that aren't in the team scene and don't want to be but still want to enjoy and play the game and try to make sure the changes are compatible for both parties. However, I do think CTF Events could be more modified to fit the outside community instead of purely based on the CTF Team scene and CTF Match Events as they can exclude a large portion of the community from the games as they may not understand the rules of basic CTF MMR etc.

I do think some of the committee members do not do much towards anything at all and really don't have the knowledge needed or an open mind to create good decisions on their own and some of these committee members are pointless to have because they literally don't do anything.

I also agree the game design for CTF isn't great but from how I see it, it's a lot better then it could have potentially been in the past with some of the ideas people were coming up with outside of the CTF committee... I think that the game design has become a little too much of a PvP based gamemode and that it was more fun and fair balanced when you didn't have to necessarily be good at PvP to actually do good in the game as you could use strategy and perform well too and it took away a lot of the fun from the game for me and I'm sure others as well. Just gonna post a meme here but at least they didn't add 2 redstone to assassin like it was suggested by an outsider because that would have completely made the class broken.

All these can easily be solved not by removing the committee but having staff members that aren't scared to bring up their own ideas in the #ctf chat in the staff discord to start discussion themselves, people don't have to start the discussion for you guys. You're the ones that have control over talking about ideas and getting them implemented not just the CTF Committee, it's just non of you grow a pair to say anything in the chats and stay silent. As for keeping ideas out of the CTF Rep Chat / Committee Chat @chickenputty and @Lord_Roke can ensure those ideas are not posted there and it is strictly for CTF Teams.

js btw you want a discussion to be taken place before ideas are implemented but then you go and say "

1. Allow @redslime to implement forum suggestions that have significant support, regardless of the Committee’s opinion (unless there are obvious obstacles)." doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of wanting a discussion in the first place if a single person takes control and it defeats the purpose of having a CTF SMod Manager lol?

I think the problem is more with the Staff Team not starting discussions in the chats then the CTF Committee so in general all of these changes are in your own hands to change loooooool.

 

I think the main issue there is is that we're too intransparent with what happens in the chat, so I'll add my few cents here:

The criteria of joining is a) be a Brawl CTF moderator, and b) be a referee for team matches. Any staff can get referee if they are interested and coreffed five matches, to see how the commands work and how the general procedure of a match is. Usually that's no problem, as they have usually been active in the teams scene anyway. Those criteria are the reason why Removers for example got into committee, as he was promoted to moderator and was also a ref. Puhdgy would be added to the committee in that manner as well if she is promoted to moderator (as she is almost a ref already).

"1. The Committee is Exclusionary" It's correct, not a lot of discussion happens in the ctf staff discord, though there is less discussion about gameplay related things that I'd personally like to be honest. I disagree with the line that "if you want to help improve CTF, joining the staff team is a wasted effort", as you can definitely be in the committee if you are a CTF mod, and even if you are not you can suggest stuff just fine (just a few days ago there were a few links to forum threads posted which had some neat ideas). We don't ignore opinions of other staff. In my opinion it's wrong that we don't include everyone - virtually all maps for CTF are made by the community, we decide on which maps are in map waves based on the /y /n votes from everyone, and we even had seperate voting forms for ingame and via the forum, as the forum is mostly used by regulars, while ingame votes are often from casuals.

Class tweaks are usually ideas thrown around that were picked up from normal players, or own ideas or concepts that come into mind. When looking for class reworks, the forums are usually skimmed for ideas (I did that recently for Assassin, for example), and the elements or the entire rework are brought forward and discussed what is doable and what might lead to problems. Necro for example was made from the old old unimplemented concept of WiKi_KiKi, Miskeys necro rework (still a user then) and lasertagfighters necro rework. And yes, bugs reports are vital as well (especially the exploitable ones), they're posted in a bug channel of the Brawl staff chat.

"2. The Committee only views CTF from a Teams Perspective" I disagree, the teams scene if very important for CTF, but a lot of times we're trying to make the game simple to grasp for casuals. That hasn't been the case recently though, as you can see in the loadouts from engineer, necro and elf. That's definitely an aim for the future. There is definitely no intention in making the game more complex to benefit the regulars though.

"3. Poor Game Design" Absolutely agreed. Unfortunately there have been more significant nerfs in the past than buffs to classes. Imo it is easier to nerf a class with a strong ability than to buff several other classes that in turns might make them too strong. That however makes it a downward nerf spiral that doesn't benefit the game. We talked about that recently and kinda want to buff classes more again to make the game more fun, but we're sadly no game designers. The best way that worked was to look up suggestions, try to balance them, push them out to the game and see what the community reaction was, then change accordingly. Luckily we have a dev right now, otherwise that method is quite time consuming. So I agree with your point here.

Another point I'd like to make is that I personally believe discussing changes in a small group is more effective and puts out more content than being in a large group, waiting for everyone to toss a vote, having discussions overlain by other issues that fill up the chat etc. It makes it more time consuming and harder to come to a conclusion. The way McPvP did it, with seperate mod groups for the gamemodes that each worked on their little projects was good (though limited through dev time ofc). On Brawl, all people are put together, and most of the time the mods of the other gamemodes are not much interested in what happens on CTF. I don't contribute much to WarZ or Raid myself, for example. Of course there are exceptions and ideas can freely be discussed in the staff chats.

And a last point I'd like to make is the issue with leaks. It usually affects the staff chats in which all mods are present. CTF is working with a few documents that contain things like a listing of the features of a next update, or the results of the map votings. It's no gamebreaking issue if that gets leaked, but it's a huge deal of distrust if you are working on a trailer for the map wave and suddenly the community knows of the results and starts messaging you about it. A leak of the Necro update document happened that I posted in the staff chat on request, which didn't exactly help in trusting the general staff chat. So keeping things in a smaller group helps in that regard. Keep in mind this happened a while ago, but leaks still happen occasionally.

Jeez, sorry for this wall of text. If anyone has further questions on how the committee works, feel free! Most of it should have been covered here though.

 

I think it would be very beneficial if we could enlarge the CTF commitee and add some people that may not be staff, but have contributed to a lot of things (events, forums, ideas, bugs, etc.). Like that the community can be involved and we get a wider view on the opinions.
And as @Removers said, I agree that we should remove some of the commitee members that are not contributing anything to the chat / forums / ingame. We need only look at the forum messages per month for that.

Now as @Nohox said, I do believe CTF discussions should be contained in a CTF-staff- only (+ regular CTFers with a brain that are active) and not public to all staff. For a few reasons, the first one being that CTF staff have more expertise with CTF, despite some of our mods lacking activity, than any other staff that wasn't part of the McPvP transfer. This does not exclude opinions from old-CTFers that are now mod for a different gamemode or that were once a mod for CTF (aRandombob was recently added to commitee chat for his old experience with CTF and for him sort of having a brain).
Secondly, he mentioned the leaks. Anyone that was around during this shameful occurance remembers how a non-CTF staff member leaked the update and caused an uproar from certain members (@Admiral_Mas0n , necro-loverboy). For this reason, I also do no think we should open the commitee chat / move CTF discussion to general staff chat. However, something that happened recently that I did like, is adding all the upper Staff (Eil, Lord_Roke and chickenputty) to the CTF commitee chat so that they will also verify if the proposed changes can be given green light.

In my opinion this is enough, if we look at the presumed Commitee chat (my ideal version):
- CTF mods that are active ingame, on the forums and/or behind the screens
- Old-CTF-staff that is still active in a way
- A few regular CTf players that have contributed more than others / are active on the forums / have a lot of experience ingame and spent a lot of time on CTF
- upper Brawl Staff

Now as for the rest, I think @Miskey will clarify a bunch on the being intransparent of the commitee.

 

Just going to note that Putty/Roke have been added to the chat for a few weeks now and have the exact same perms in the discord as any committee member. Also note that there has only ever been one case of a jmod becoming CTF committee. CTF Committee is generally given after a CTF staff member has been promoted to global mod and passed ref training.

Ref training involves learning the commands needed to ref a match, becoming familiar with MMR, and co-reffing 5 matches. After that is completed you will become a full ref. Full refs do not have to be ctf staff members however. If you're a staff member and have interest in reffing let us know.

I wouldn't go as far as saying "anything they want", however we do have some freedom to work directly with Redslime. I'd like to use this freedom and get more staff involved in testing updates before they go live for more potential feedback.

This is fairly true up until recently. The past few gameplay related discussions have taken place in the staff chat though. The necro rework was talked about in staff chat actually, which is eventually what ended up getting it leaked and posted on the forums by a community member before it was even close to complete. Elf was brought up multiple times in staff chat and on the forums. You were not staff for a majority of that time period as well, so I think it's a bit ignorant to assume that. The most recent "update" that is being discussed was put completely on the back burner due to map wave testing and planning for the All-Star match and EU vs. US match, which is the main reason there has been little to no discussion on it in either chat.

If you want discussion in the ctf section of the staff chat post your ideas and we'll discuss them. As I said, there's almost no discussion going on at all regarding gameplay at the moment due to the map wave and team related events.

This is completely untrue. Community members were given credit for multiple changes in the E.M.P. update and other specific changes that had happened prior to it. There are countless examples of this.

I always mention that the game should be balanced for both casual and competitive gameplay, not just one of them. The reason a lot of these updates take so long is because we're attempting to balance the game for both.

Regarding player retention I have other plans for the future that I haven't voiced at all yet. I'll be getting my thoughts together and present them in the staff chat when I have time to do so.

This is the part I agree with the most, but I don't agree with the way your presented it. Removing and nerfing abilities/classes is completely okay as long as it's paired with QOL (Quality of life) updates or new intuitive and fun mechanics.

You have to pick a side here. You can't go with the whole "you need to listen to the community 100% of the time" idea and then negatively post a list of changes and nerfs that were mainly based on community suggestions. I'll give my own input on these specific classes below.

• Pyro: I dislike the frenzy change, however reverting pyro at the moment would be an even worse change.
• Soldier: The soldier change is, imo, a great example of a near-perfect change. It barely inhibits gameplay and prevents game breaking exploits that were previously possible.
• Assassin: Assassin just really needs an overall rework. The previous changes were band-aid fixes and should be viewed as such.
• Fashionista: Couple things to note here. The change listed above was a bug, and the class shouldn't have any gameplay advantage if we're marketing it as a "cosmetic" class.
• Ninja: As much as I liked to abuse old 414, ninja is completely fine without it. Ninja's popularity in comparison to other classes has gone up significantly since 414 was removed.
• Necro: I stated on multiple occasions that the necro changes weren't going to "fix" the class, but the rework was in its final stages when I originally got staff. Two small buffs have been made to the class since, but it honestly needs a new mechanic to be viable against any semi-intelligent player.
• Dwarf: Band-aid fix, stalling for an eventual rework.
• Engineer: Band-aid fix, stalling for an eventual rework.

1: We've already been making an attempt to do this.
2: If the discussions are happening in the staff chat, which they have been recently, this suggestion is completely useless.
3: Gameplay will be discussed in the staff chat. To me it makes a lot of sense that the CTF Team Committee is made up of CTF staff members that care about the team scene. If you're not a CTF staff member but care about the team scene then step up and show us that by becoming a ref and actively participating.
4: Just because a suggestion is popular or supported by the community doesn't mean it's a good suggestion. You basically proved this in your previous section. We plan to test a lot of changes in the future, however I think it's important to accompany them with staff discussion. The part you put at the very end doesn't make sense at all if he's able to implement them regardless of our opinions, we'd never even have a chance to point out the aforementioned "obvious obstacles".

Hard disagree.

I have received intel that @Hanatamago_San is planning on killing CTF through her use of the match spreadsheet, so some of us may have bad intentions.

In all seriousness the issue is transparency. The reasons there aren't many CTF updates being discussed at the moment are as follows:

• All-Star Match
• EU vs. US Match
• Map Wave

Once those are all sorted out we plan to have an update and also make significant changes to the rules within the CTF team scene. Now you know.

- Miskey​

 

From when I was in it, I don't agree with the thread - however, in order for it to work, there needs to be complete transparency and communication (within & outside of staff channels). They must not only rely heavily on community opinion but they must create discussion. Tbh I haven't been seeing much of this lately, so it's something to improve. I'll edit this/write more later.

EDIT: I agree a lot with the administration of poor game design. This (nerf-to-balance ideology) started long ago and we've just been following its footsteps rather than reverse it. And it's great that CTF related gameplay discussion will now just be made in the staff CTF discord channel rather than in the Committee channel to get even more broader opinions; however, I remember it being extremely easy for ideas and text to get lost or hidden away by a constant barrage of discussion/arguments and spam in staff chats - so maybe even pinning every single idea no matter how small (until properly discussed/voted upon to have further community discussion) will be the best way to get as many perspectives and opinions on every brought up matter. Keep in mind a CTF mod may have better understanding in the gamemode than a WarZ mod, but when many other staff agree on a different option, especially with the backing of community members, perhaps that's where a better solution, inspiration, and/or compromise can be made.

 

Oh look, someone bringing up the necro leak again. Fun

First of all it was a rework that received zero community input and was largely based on a thing posted on mcpvp forums several years ago (because apparently, no one could find any better ideas). Second the leak occurred from a ctf staff member who was blocked from being part of the committee. And third it only happened because that staff member was also upset with the complete lack of transparency - at the time. And to address Miskey's point, no it was not in the "early stages", the released rework was identical to what was leaked.

Obviously leaking the document was not the right thing to do (for a number of reasons, least of all trust) but the mental process of why it happened isn't hard to understand

No, it doesn't. There is nothing the committee is discussing that cannot be shared with a larger group. This could also make leaks less likely since there would already be more transparency as to what ctf staff are doing.

This is not a reason to dissolve a committee that, frankly, has no reason to exist.

That said I don't think its fair to bash the committee or current CTF staff for lack of transparency now. The elf rework, most recent necro update, the map waves, and the EMP update all had megathreads for people to give feedback on - before any of those changes were implemented. And a lot of community suggestions were added for each of those updates. With that in mind this thread seems a bit late, especially since a number of issues that were evident 2 years ago (when the necro doc was leaked) aren't really a thing anymore.

as @Miskey said, a lot of the recent changes were literally based on community feedback and ideas. I don't like most of the changes (elf 'rework' and EMP update don't go nearly far enough imo) but it isn't fair to complain about transparency issues and then complain about bad updates. What I would like to see is some community members whitelisted on a test server with staff to test various updates. Of course there would be trust issues there so I don't know how that would work, but it'd be a better way to see how proposed changes would actually work versus putting them down on paper and trying to visualize it hypothetically. If community members are already involved in the testing it could allow them to give better feedback from the start.

 

I'm seeing a general view being thrown out here a lot in the discussions on this topic, and I want to address it before I directly respond to other points. That being, staff members could bring up topics of discussion in the CTF chat (on the staff slack) since... I was an SMOD god knows how long ago. Having more discussion in that channel ain't going to do anything. Ultimately, other staff members need to be involved with making the decisions for the direction of CTF... not the discussions. It's easy to get lost in your little bubble of a world, which the CTF Committee has done countless times with their "balances". Bringing other people into the decision-making process is how any change will legitimately occur. That's the other problem with the CTF committee, as a community member for 5+ years, I don't know who makes the decisions for CTF. Is it a majority of the committee? Is it one person on the committee? How does this unelected body work? I have no idea.

Also, I see a lot of discussion about the role of the staff team in changes... but I think it's important to talk about possibly adding the community into decisions about CTF. If the CTF Committee isn't abolished, it should be made public to the community in some form. Some quick ideas I have:

• Make the discord chat public, keep some things private.
• Add trusted community members to the Committee (like the Player Council on HP)
• Post the minutes of every important discussion.

Now, I'd like to use @Nohox and @Miskey to show how they directly made each other look bad
Nohox:

Hm. Maybe if you added more people to the Committee, you would have the workforce to work on both aspects of CTF at once!

Miskey (who did it to himself):

It looks like you aren't balancing casual and competitive, but rather letting competitive take up all of your time. Just understand, without the player base behind CTF Competitive, the number of Official Teams will go down from 7 to 4.

Miskey Question 1:

Why not just share it with the community?

Miskey Question 2:

So... this is your logic:

Nerf is made to Pyro, making the class weak -> Bad
No one likes it -> Bad
Removing the nerf -> Also bad

How does that make any sense? When you break something, fix it. The fix here is just removing what broke it.

Some of us didn't spend the past 5+ years trying to break the game. If it barely inhibits gameplay, why was it added in the first place?

(quote refers to assassin) Unless I'm wrong, the last change for assassin was dropping redstone and sugar by one. This happened in like 2014. That's a pretty tough bandaid to stay on for 4 years for something that wasn't much of a problem.

Where is the evidence for this? I have not used Ninja since it was nerfed. It's only good now for high skill/luck players who really try hard to recover.

 

This post is extraordinarily detailed with bows of "rightness." This is the kind of post of been looking for, someone to agree with me. Thank you for sharing this with the community!

 

Going to state my thoughts on these issues. These are my thoughts, and aren't endorsed by staff or committee, and there are no guarantees anything here will be implemented, just want to make sure of that. From my perspective there has been two major problems recently that cause all this:

1: As been stated thousands of times, lack of communication/transparency.
2: Lack of discussion concerning CTF.

The first problem is two fold, one more obvious than the other. The first part is that there has been lack of communication between staff/committee and the players. The second is the lack of communication between committee and the rest of staff. I agree with Rhos said in the op concerning what the committee is for. It is for managing ctf teams: coordinating tournaments, handling restrctions/strikes, and although not a part of ctf teams, handling map waves.

Now map waves are interesting. While they are handled by the committee, from what I've seen, the players and staff have given positive feedback to how we handle it. The process is known, we make sure the community is involved as much as possible, and no bias can occur in setting up the new map wave. I believe how we handle the map wave is a good example of how updates should be done. We should all, players and staff, discuss, throw around, and improve ideas. Now from my perspective this hasn't been really happening, and quite frankly, I'm very ashamed of that. I'm a CTF mod, and I'm not actively participating in gameplay discussions. To be honest, these past couple threads that have been posted somehow gave me motivation to change that, and as rhos said, discussions are starting to happen. Anyhow, after these ideas have been well developed, then the staff team, not the committee alone, compiles the ideas, perhaps discard those that would clearly not work (too complicated, can't be coded, gamebreaking, etc) and then have devslime code them up, have staff test for bugs, and then have a public announcement of a testing session(s) and what's being tested. Of course after that players will give feedback of the ideas, and perhaps contribute more ideas or changes to the ideas tested to make them better, and then the staff team decides based on that feedback which idea, if any, should be implemented, and then finish off with a good trailer, an update thread, and the new idea being released, perhaps coupled with some very minor changes (similar to that of medics being able to see if a player is fully healed or not).

I believe this model is one that has been proven to work for us: it's been consistently good when applied to map waves, and I think it'll work great with gameplay updates. I personally believe that process, or something similar would work wonders. Once again these are just my thoughts and is a possible solution to the problems I mentioned above, but if nothing else, we the committee and we the staff should be communicating more with players, and also we as players should continuously discuss ideas with one another and bring them up to staff.

 

i totally agree with ur post but to highlight a point regarding testing sessions that i might have slightly misunderstood since the subject of the phrase has to be assumed and "developed" can have a few meanings....

....if the "developed idea" is highly viable & desired by many (not just by all the staff in charge ;D), then id 100% agree.
ik @Miskey says a lot that staff can often take matters into their own hands even if not favored by the majority of the community, and although this is true and can be beneficial, the same may apply vice versa which must also be understood

To iterate, regarding ur suggested update model (like based off of map waves), id personally rather if we (both community and staff - not just staff nor just community) focused 1st/more so on theoretical ideas and gameplay discussion rather than 1st coding in some1's developed suggestion, testing it, and then coming up with feedback, just bc itd save work (thus also money) - but then again, i feel like it might benefit more ppl for giving them a better sense of the change if they saw it and played w/ it 1st in person

maybe i got a bit of the wrong sense, bc if u just combine those 2 ideas for updates (brainstorm/developed theoretical discussion & testing of these highly viable and desired ideas) it can defin help bring in lots more beneficial updates while encouraging an extremely active & engaged community with the game dev itself which would be perfect



(P.S. i edited my initial post above in the thread like a day l8er in case any1 curious missed it xd)