Hello, The watercooler chat is a new blog series which will give members of the community an insight into our development process and discus future community changes. We seldom include members into community changes so now is your chance. In the first entry of watercooler chat, we'll be talking about Trouble In Terrorist Town. Before we begin, I'm going to lay down some ground rules to keep things respectful.

1. Respect the opinion of others. Discussing is fine, flaming isn't.
2. The sole purpose of these Watercooler chats is to gather feedback from members. These threads are in no shape or form a commitment, no promises are being made!
3. Keep on topic

Since the return of Suricruise (Here), the main focus of management has been restoring all of our servers back to their prime. One of the biggest things we've been reviewing and changing is Trouble In Terrorist town. When looking at a server like Trouble In Terrorist Town, we need to be super careful. One of the biggest suggestions we get, is to add more custom content to our servers. Recently, in the latest server patch the grappling hook was removed. It seemed the community had split reaction to this. A lot of people were happy it was gone and some weren't. When looking at the decision of removing it, we looked at the gameplay effects the grappling hook had. It was a weapon bought from the weapon menu and didn't assist the round in anyways. You simply used it to spider-man around the map. It also made killing the players much more difficulty, as they weren't running around but instead flying around the map. In addition to having harder targets, the grappling hook also invited players to exploit into unreachable spots. When we came to the decision of the grappling hook; We could have done a few things.

1. Nerf the Grappling Hook, Make it usable only every five seconds. This prevents people from flying around the entire map, but still leaves the door to exploitation open. This could be combated by promoting more active members to patrol the server.
2. Make the grappling hook have limited uses and non-transferable.
3. Remove it outright.

However, we had another option. Make a counter to the grappling hook.

1. Tracking missile, one ammo and follows the target you're looking at.
2. Gravity weapon, think of the T-Virus but instead of turning the player into a zombie it slows them down. This could work for non-grappling hooker players as well.

When we reviewed our options, we decided it was a good idea to remove the grappling hook and bring it back when we had a plan to balance it. As it stands, we do have plans to bring back the grappling hook to one of our servers but we're brainstorming on how to properly balance it. Upon reviewing both the servers and since the removal of the grappling hook, we came to the conclusion that both the servers are exactly the same and traditionally we've always had two unique servers. We thought about how we could bring that feel of uniqueness back and customization and haste mode came to mind. We have the idea of turning one server into more tactical and the other more active paced fun. How would you guys react into turning one server into a haste mode? Below are some ideas we have.

Proposed Change #1

Enable haste mode on Custom Server and add more custom weapons (Grappling Hook, C4 Plantable on players back, etc). The idea of this server would to encourage quick play and more action.

The second server would remain vanilla in the sense of keeping it 10 minute rounds and having custom weapons but still keeping that regular feeling of TTT.

Proposed Change #2

Complete opposite of first idea, add all the new custom content into the vanilla gamemode server and making the haste mode server somewhat vanilla.

We aren't completely sold on either idea yet and wanting to hear the communitys feedback on changes to Trouble in Terrorist Town. We feel the map rotation is pretty solid, but again feedback is key. Let us know how you feel about the proposed changes below.

Sounds all good. TTT really needs more custom things such as weapons and menu items. PS shop could use a few more models. But map rotation... even though we have RTV and a pretty good map rotation we still play pretty much the same core maps, which can get VERY boring.... So pretty much more custom things and change how going to maps works?

Originally Posted by Ghosty

Not saying that Rdm is a big problem although sometimes when there is over 13 people it gets hard to see if who killed you is a traitor.So possibly a function that tells you if another innocent killed you.

So something along the line of, "[innocent] Mostly Harmless killed [innocent] Ghost" whenever you die?

Originally Posted by Mostly Harmless

So something along the line of, "[innocent] Mostly Harmless killed [innocent] Ghost" whenever you die?

We already have that however it's restricted for CA's + to use (the console command). However at the end of each round I believe everyone has to ability to look at who killed who, including Server Admins.

Hopefully this upcoming changes to TTT and other changes we plan to announce later will better TTT and the Community!

Like others have mentioned, I'd like to see a message in chat telling us if we were killed by an innocent or traitor, would make RDMers easier to find.

I'm for proposal 1.

Couple of points i'd like to make from playing on TTT for years now,
1) Haste mode does exactly the opposite of what the title says, the only case when it makes the rounds shorter if all the T's are idiots and don't kill anyone. However a lot of the time it's just 1 idiot, and killing over 10 people (I think can't remember what the start time is, since every kill adds 30 seconds) Makes the match longer than 10 minutes in total, so players end up waiting to play a lot longer.

However although I don't like haste mode I have noticed almost all the popular servers use it.

2) I forgot what my second point was... Oh yeah who killed who scenario, all of the popular servers I've played on have some function in chat where when you died it displays the message - You were killed by a [INNOCENT]/[TRAITOR]/[DETECTIVE], in their respected colours so for the player its much easier to see if they were RDM'd or not instead of the admins having to track down every possible kill that could have been RDM.

3) custom content, lots of custom content. Everyone loves custom content even if it's pointless crap that actually hinders the user more than helps, giving people options to explore wonderous deaths and murders is great fun. Also everyone loves explosives.

4) Map rotation - I'm not 100% sure if we have this in our server or not but every other server I've played on at the end of the round a map vote is initiated and recently played maps (About 3 maps ago) are greyed out. Keeps the scenery looking nice.

But as well all know some maps are better at attracting players than others as such if you want to attract players you'll want these maps playing almost all of the time, best way is to get something like 67th way or minecraft on as your first map in the rotation (That way any server restarts will always be one of those playing first which from my experience attracts the most players).

There ya go, there's my thoughts!

I'm voting for proposal 1 TTT needs more weapons anything would be fine . Another thing we need to remove some of the broken maps , fix the Map rotation problem we are having and restrict the recently played maps if we haven't allready.