Idea Class Locking

Casual can be quite hellish in a number of ways, but one theme always persists with the annoyances: It's the same people over and over (if they don't get farmed to the point of rage quitting). A common defense for these people is that they just deeply enjoy playing one class for its abilities, so I'm proposing a somewhat healthy remedy for this that could also help new players actually figure out how to play.

Basically, after a certain period of time, you are forced off of the class you've been playing. This lock stays in place for x amount of time, and can only be evaded in the match servers. This may sound annoying for regs that are trying to grind /avs, but I speak from experience in saying that people can get absorbed in this game at a concerning level. 2019 Forleb killed people on casual for 8 hours a day as Chemist and pretty much did nothing else - an extreme case, but still representative of a number of players in some way. It's not healthy for the offender or the game itself. Class locking would still affect new players far more than regs, since most of us either wait for PPMs or just don't play casual that often. It's pretty much the only thing I can think of right now that achieves a similar affect to class limits without fully restricting people.

Feel free to discuss below what timings you think would be best for this, or if you disagree with the concept then tell me why.

 

It isn't necessarily a punishment for practice; This is more geared towards people who are already okay enough to hold their ground. The thing is that a majority of these new players at this level have the mentality that cheesing stats is a good way to compensate for actual skill. "If I can just oneshot people whenever I want with my bow, what's the point of pvp?" "If that naked class is a 3 shot, why should I fight the other ones?" They are unintentionally holding themselves back from learning how to play the game properly, by both refusing to expand their knowledge of other classes and playing in ways that make them bigger targets for regs. I agree that people should be able to practice to their heart's content, but it should also be considered that playing this game too much under any circumstance becomes more counterproductive the deeper in you are. I didn't state the timings of this concept myself because there will always be a too little and a too much in somebody's eyes, but surely there exists a balance where real practice can be achieved by the people that want it, and the stat cheesers aren't able to sit around for their entire session making 0 progress on game sense & isolating themselves in the process.

 

Not trying to be rude, but this would accomplish about as much as yelling at a forest fire to cool down. People are going to do what they want unless something out of their power stops them.

Like I said with the POV quotes in my last reply, a lot of people will cheese something as long as they can if it makes them the kind of progress they want. There are 8 official teams left that are not full, and more people will continue to transition to seasonal or leave entirely by nature; When you have maybe 1 or 2 new players attempting to join teams every month, you can see how we got here when literally 3 months ago there were 10 full teams.

Correction: There are a few classes that are noob friendly and get in the way of normal gameplay in the hands of these players. Whether it be Archer armies, Mages with terminator programming, or Assassins that haven't seen the word "roam" in their lives, it is people not playing objectively that disrupts games so that they get their way. You might not realize it, but the skill floor is miles below any other gamemode anywhere else because the meta of casual encourages these players to keep doing the same thing over and over. There are literally people logging on that don't know how to press W and click at the same time who can get killstreaks with the classes I listed above; Obviously not many people stay at that level, but you get my point.



New players take one of two routes: Figure out how to cheese stats and deal with regs, or log off because the challenge is too great. Very rarely, they will take a third route of toughing it out and eventually getting into a team, and I'm pretty sure I can count with my fingers how many times that's happened in the last year. What's scary is that the team scene is still decaying even with my team's effort to get as many randoms as we can onto the team and at least aware of what competitive CTF is like. The only way CTF is going to survive the next few years is if some process is implemented to improve player retention and skill building significantly. Casual can last forever as it is, but it will only stagnate the team scene if nothing changes; Inconveniencing some people will be necessary to continue making progress.

 

The team scene was born from people that wanted some kind of order in CTF. "Casual" was the entirety of CTF until like 7 or 8 years ago, but that's also when MCPVP and Brawl were relevant servers; There were far more people joining and staying back then compared to now, which is why like 90% of all players currently in a team are old players. Other games don't need rules because they are designed to restrict players in ways that force mostly balanced gameplay - not true for all of them, but CTF is absolutely more sandbox than most other games, rules aside. The reason I'm so geared toward competitive CTF is because there's no hope of restarting it if it dies off and casual stays the same. The social environment has remained the same for several years now. You have to realize that a lot of these players are going to graduate high school or college this year and will be moving on to other things in life; That process is going to strip away massive chunks of current team members every year after this, meaning that the only way to preserve teams is to get new players on them ASAP. If that doesn't happen, CTF will pretty much revert to a 2012 state with nothing to show for it except achievements.

So, to answer your question: Make casual CTF more like competitive CTF. This game unfortunately was not designed to function well without rules and regulations, which is partially due to the way Minecraft works in general. Casual at face value is just survival with classes in adventure mode. You can go steal that cool rectangle over there if you want, but nothing is stopping you from using those classes in scummy ways to stop the people that actually want to capture. Games like bed wars have some key differences that make them naturally competitive: CTF has 14 classes, bed wars has none; CTF can have anywhere from 6 to 50 players at once, bed wars needs 11-16; CTF is just capturing the flag, while bed wars has concepts like final kills, progressive income, and more advanced routing. The rules of comp are there to generate a similar atmosphere to naturally competitive games. The mistake in all of this is hiding comp away from new players unless they know a reg or join the Discord, which automatically makes them assume that they should stick to casual and learn its broken meta instead of having the immediate option of casual OR comp.

I'm not saying this idea has to be the solution or it's all over, but some form of change needs to happen quickly to minimize the long-term consequences of casual's wildness.

 

The credit system is designed with comp in mind. The difference between your average solo capper in casual and an organized offense in a PPM is exponential, and thus defense earns the reward of being able to take down those pushes in PPMs and beyond. You also have to keep in mind that casual is not always chaotic; There are several hours a day where 10-15 people are on and a few regs just farms caps for hundreds of credits. You're correct in saying that most regs have 0 desire for the credits themselves, as achievements are pretty much the only reason we play casual anymore. There definitely are some people that wet themselves over kdr and damage, but as a result they also gain a reputation for not playing as objectively as they can, which slims their chances of being rostered in some cases. CTF is pretty much revolving around comp right now, so it would make little sense to revert everything back to a casual environment when years of work have been dedicated to turn this game into something that's actually competitive and skill based.