CTF Ideas Council Summary - January 2021

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Heya CTFers!

First off, happy new year! I hope you all had some wonderful holidays and CTF matches the past month.
Our main focus this month has been finishing up changes to some classes, so we can hopefully get an update out soon. For everyone who hasn't heard it yet, the testing is live now, so hop on and see how you like it if you have time!
Alright, here we go.

Update when??
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You probably guessed it because of the testing; there is not a set date yet, but the next update should be rolling out soon. We'll need to finalize some things based on the feedback we get from the testing, but other than that, we've got pretty much everything done for this one.
If this update comes out before Season One is over, the match server will not be affected by this update until it ends.

Our plan for the final touches on things right now are as follows:

Chemist

• We're pretty confident the changes to the potions will be fine as they are right now.

Engineer

• We want to see how the testing session goes, but we're happy about how it's looking right now. Depending on how that turns out small changes may be made, but it will definitely be part of the next update as no major changes should be necessary anymore.

Scout and Ninja

• We didn't decide yet what exactly we want to change about these classes, which is why we are testing some changes now. We'll make a final verdict on what exactly will change based on how this testing goes.

Mage

• We're pretty confident the freeze cooldown change to 6.5 seconds and the heal spell change will be fine as they are right now.

The dwarf rework will most likely not make it into this update yet as we still have to discuss some things about that one, but we're still working on it. Sit tight for that one.

Reasoning
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We want to make it easier for community & staff to discuss the changes we made in the testing period together. For that, we think it helps if the community understands our reasoning behind all the changes we made. So, I'm going to go over the reasoning behind all changes we made here.

Chemist​

• Merge Fire Resistance, Strength & Speed pots with 3:00 time (5 potions)
  • This was done to open up a slot in the hotbar to make passing the flag to another player as chemist easier and less risky to do. We also decided to keep the strength for now as we didn't want to hit defense too hard considering some defensive classes are already being changed.

• Fire Resistance, Strength & Speed pot doesn't take any mana
  • This is a quality of life change since there is no reason buffing should take up mana

Engineer​

• Heal Aura
  • We want engineer to be viable as an offensive support, and right now being a viable offensive support means you need some kind of restore ability. We want it to be a more utility-focused support, so the healing is weaker in comparison to medic and is instead of single target an area of effect thing.

• Speed Beacon
  • Speed pad was changed into this and made throwable to make it more reliable on offense, also helping engineer to fit the area of effect support role.

• Misc
  • TNT destroys enemy webs
    • This is a response to the complaint of defensive medic webs being too strong.
  • Change pickaxe for equivalent sword
    • This is to ensure it will not be hard-countered by assassin.
  • Reduce TNT cooldown by 1s
    • Quality of life change as we felt the cooldown was a little too long.
  • Leather armor has Prot II
    • This is to make it slightly more reliable in combat.
  • Can see steak/instant heal pot count of teammates and enemies
    • This will allow it to know when to use the heal aura to restore steak for a teammate. It can also see the steak count of enemies for the sake of consistency.

Mage​

• Cooldown on Mage freeze spell reduced 8 seconds >> 6.5 seconds
  • The cooldown increase time was overkill, so we partly reverted it.

• Left click: Mage health potion instantly breaks inside the mage, Right click: Regen spell is thrown like normal
  • Quality of life change to allow to mage to be able to heal themselves properly mid-combat while keeping the option of throwing the spell.

Medic​

• Teammates can only destroy a Medic web by right clicking
  • This is to allow teammates to attack webbed enemies without the worry of accidentally breaking the web. This was now changed to shift + left-click to prevent pyro from activating frenzy when removing a web. This was intended as a quality of life change, though unfortunately it's proving hard to figure out a proper way of doing it. This likely won't be included in the update if we can't find a proper way.

Ninja​

• Pearl cooldown for 1.5 seconds activates starting when you throw the pearl
  • This is to give missing short-distance pearling (mostly aggro pearling) some kind of punishment, so you'll have to think about short-distance pearling a little instead of just spamming it.

• Egg mana does not refill while the ninja is invisible
  • This is to make ninja be a little less annoying to deal with, specifically 414 eggspam.

• Medic cannot apply regen for 8 seconds after ninja spawns
  • This was added because we want ninja to have some sort of punishment for dying. Ninja can still catch up to people this way, however not with full health and regeneration V in about 5 seconds after dying.

Scout​

• Swap Mana
  • Similarly to ninja pearl, we want to make missing swaps have some kind of punishment so you don't just spam it until you hit it. This is also why hitting a target with the swap, even someone on cooldown, instantly restores the swapper mana.

• Scout can see swap cooldown above heads of players
  • Quality of life change so you don't have to throw your swapper at someone just to see how long the remaining cooldown of that specific person is.

• Death tag effect becomes irremovable but is 8 seconds
  • This is to make death tag more of a threat in stalemates instead of it being immediately removed by a necro.

• Amplifier on carrier increases from 1.2x -> 1.75x over 5 minutes of the scout's flag being gone
  • This is to help ending stalemates quickly by making it harder to survive the longer the stalemate goes on. Overall buffs to offense means more stalemates and this is to ensure that those stalemates will likely not last much longer than 5 minutes.

• 1.2x for non-carriers
  • This it to make death tag less prominent on defense while together with the amplifier increasing on carriers keeping it worthwhile on recovery.

• Removed thorns
  • Because there is no reason it should have thorns.

For the exact list of patch notes, please go to this thread instead. Any feedback on the changes should also be put on that thread and not this one so we have everything in one place; this is just our reasoning behind the changes so the community understands where we are coming from.

Roadmap
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This won't be a very in-depth roadmap, I'll be going over the main, large topics of future CTF updates with this one and talk a little bit about these topics. None of these have an estimated date of release as of now.

Class Tweaks​

This will be the next update, it's the one that has to do with the changes that are currently being tested. It will be mostly changes to classes, nothing extremely special - we already had a good part of this one done so we wanted to finish it up before going to the next big topic. I don't have anything else to say about this one as you should have heard most about it in other places by now.

Player Retention​

After the upcoming class tweaks, our next big effort will be on increasing our player retention. We've already got some ideas for making CTF more friendly to newer players, such as death message tooltips, among other good stuff that will be revealed later on.
In regards to this, the "Brawl Pass" is also something that is currently in the workings. While it won't be exclusive to CTF, instead being network-wide, it should certainly help increase retention.
Since player retention will be our next major topic, this is a good time to drop ideas on it. If you have suggestions for things we could do to increase player retention, please leave them on this thread!

Clans​

This is still on the planner. I don't have a lot to say about this one currently, but know we haven't forgotten about it.
We've been hearing a lot of suggestions regarding team tags. This is something that we hope to fulfill in a more customizable sense in the future with the release of clans.

1.16​

We will most likely look into updating CTF to 1.16 in the future, too. First let this be clear though: I am NOT confirming that we will update to 1.16. There is currently too many uncertainties and questions that have to be answered, an important one being if we can emulate 1.8 pvp in 1.16, before we can give an answer to the question "Will we update CTF to 1.16?" confidently.
Even if it will happen, it's far out currently, so don't get too excited for this one yet.

Keep in mind all of these are plans. We'll aim to get this done as listed here, but plans can change because unexpected things can happen. If something does change I will include it in the CIC thread following the change.


That's all we got for this month. It's not a lot because we've been focusing on finishing the class tweaks for the most part this month, as well as holidays. We hope you'll enjoy that update. As always, feel free to ask questions on this thread, or shoot me a message. Enjoy the start of 2021 and I will see you all again in February!

Happy capping and recovering!
-The CTF Staff Team