CTF Ideas Council Summary - April 2021

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Hiya CTF community,

it's been 2 months, but we're back again. With the winter update being out for about a month now, we've started working on new things; the details of Season Two are being worked out, a new map wave is approaching and we're going to start looking what we want to have in the next update. For now, let's cover some of the smaller things we've been looking at.

Season Two
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Yes, this is definitely one of the smaller things we have looked at. We've used the feedback we got on Season One to work on Season Two. We've got most plans finalized and we're waiting until mid April to finish up some smaller things such as the map pool and team seedings. For now, the best thing you guys can do to help us is play some official matches to help us with the seeding. The announcement thread for the season should be published sometime in the middle of April too, and the season itself will start early in May, so take this month to get yourselves prepared!

The exact details of the season will be revealed in the season's announcement thread.

Vote suggestions
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We've come to a consensus for some of the suggestions that have been up in the #vote-suggestions channel of the CTF community Discord for a while now, so let's go over those.

CTF classes/projectiles on build
While you can't use actual classes, you can use projectiles on maps if they are toggled on on the map. To toggle them on or off, use /options while at the map. The GUI that opens will let you toggle a variety of things including projectiles. While they don't allow to use the abilities some classes have, it should help simulate what is and isn't possible.

Chemist pot mana
We're going to test a small change to mana sometime in the future. Anything that is not a debuff will no longer be requiring mana, and the mana consumption of damage potions and poison potions will be increased to 50% and 25% respectively. Hopefully that'll be a nice quality of life change.

Different pre-game modes
If you ever wanted to kill your teammates before the game even started, I have good news for you: this will likely be possible in the future. You'll be able to choose between flying around the map, PvP, or just walking around the map like you've always done.

/duels for CTF
This one however is not going to happen. This would not help the actual game as it is more of a KitPvP thing. Unfortunately KitPvP is gone, so we won't be implementing anything like this suggestion.

Playground for CTF classes
Maybe...?

Medic webs
We want to test out allowing medic to have only 2 webs placed at the ground instead of the current 3. You'll still have a maximum of 3 snowballs in your inventory, only the amount of webs that you can have placed on the ground will be affected.

Role-react bot
This was added to the CTF community Discord recently.

PPM announcements
While this could help bring in players to PPMs, it does come with some complications. One of those is that newer players are not very likely to be picked for a PPM if it's picked for balance. Additionally, we'd expect a lot of no-shows if it is a first come first serve, as aside from the announcement said new players would have no clue about the system. Because of this and some other reasons, we've decided to go look at a better announcement for the CTF community Discord instead of announcements for PPMs specifically.
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These aren't all the suggestions we discussed, there's definitely more, but the list would get too long if I put every single one of them here. If you're curious about the verdict on any of the vote suggestions that weren't brought up here, feel free to message me.

Engineer
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Engineer has been brought up a lot since it was reworked. We understand it is strong, but that is what we wanted it to be to give it a proper place in the game, so we don't want to nerf it much. We're going to be testing a small change to the interaction between engineer and medic soon. You'll likely see some quality of life changes for engineer soon too, so stay tuned.

Testing
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When I say "in the future" for a small testing session, I mean... pretty much right now. The changes below can be enabled to test on the match server from this moment on. All you need is a JMOD+ to turn them on. Exact patch notes are as follows:

Medic

• Maximum of 2 webs on the ground at one time instead of the previous 3

Chemist

• Potion mana changed
  • Anything that is not a debuff no longer consumes mana
  • Damage potions consume 50% mana
  • Poison potions consume 25% mana

Engineer

• Speed beacon now has a larger restriction radius around spawn and sponges
• Speed beacon can no longer be placed against walls, only on the ground
• TNT web removal area is now more accurate to the explosion size (5x5x5)
• Engineer can no longer restore steak for teammates who are on restore cooldown from a medic
• Grenade launcher changes which shovel it is based on whether it is loaded or on cooldown (Golden shovel is loaded, wooden shovel is reloading)

And that's all we got for this month. We hope you've been enjoying the update so far. The next map wave should appear soon as well. The voting form for that will appear soon after the testing ends. For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, here's the thread about the map testing: https://www.brawl.com/threads/77526/

Happy capping and recovering!

- The CTF staff team ​