Reward systems are great for motivating people to play more. But as these players play and earn those points, do they ask why ? To change a map ? To get a reserved slot ? I get my map selection from the filters in the server search function and a reserved slot by clicking "Not full" on the right there. So wtf ?
As far as the features go, i would really appreciate a smart auto-balance system that dosent just randomly move people. The servers could also benefit from team randomization at the beginning of every round. Also there could be class limiters on the servers to avoid useless overcrowding of different classes (50% of the team as engineers ftw!).
In conclusion i think there are enough people in the servers, so its time to stop thinking of quantity and start thinking of quality.
We're continuesly working on the development of our spapoints plugin aswell as the rest of the community. As we're all doing this in our free time and unpaid you cannot expect development to be as quickly as you'd expect with companies and such. If you compare us with other communities i think its pretty save to say we're in the top leading communities who have their own development team inhouse. We build our community on 2 important things, 1; our community members (spa members, regulair players etc) who make it a nice place to play and a place that wants to be played on (hence the reserved slots which are earnable by being one of these regulairs), and that directly covers the second point, our spapoints system which should provide players with that bit more extras they don't recieve on other servers (because i don't know any were you can earn points to spend on reserved slots and map changes).
We're aware of the balance issue. As you can imagen if you want to sort this propperly you require a WHOLE lot of coding and mathical work on a plugin to make this work propperly. To give you a direction, a populair CS balancer took several months and 1500+ lines of code to develop, and this is relatively 'easy' because its on a game with pretty 'easy' game rules for each side (you don't have issue's such as switching a medic could already tip over the balance). We are working on resolving the teambalancing issue, but don't expect anything anytime soon and if it would come to work completely propperly. As with every game, the balancing issue is mostly a case for the players to deal with. As admins we're doing our best to keep things playable, but we can't be watching everything 24/7.
No objections there, great job coding the servers and creating the system in the first place. As i have managed a few software development cases for some addons for host software i know what kind on headache it is, coding, testing....then finding a bug and starting from scratch for some stupid decision that someone made at some point etc
but thats not the issue. I am not here to offer software analytics support. The post was made in response to a series of frustrating experiences that resulted from imbalanced teams, stacking and the bonus point system, especially the ability to change maps. I dont know about you but voting still seems the most democratic way to choose the next map (if at all). I mean i am sure that all of you have had the experience when you are playing a map and looking forward to the next map when someone changes it, and its frustrating, 15 people want to play the next map and less want to change it, and they just do.
And this is not directed to discredit the people that have created the system. It is just a comment, a reference to the negative experiences that the system creates. So when the developers start to analyze the future development directions of their project they can take it into consideration. There are always positive and negative sides to everything, thats inevitable.