So anyone who plays siege has been on defense and cursed the spawnpoints (me included) especially when they spawn away from the flag when its contested.
When I started making maps, I found out why this happens, so I thought I'd share...
---------------------------------------------------
HOW SPAWNS WORK IN SIEGE MODE---------------------------------------------------
When a mapper makes a map they place defense spawn points (entry points 0-31) throughout the castle where they want defenders to spawn.
However, which spawn is chosen by the system is not random nor proximity to flag, its based around a couple parameters:
Here are the parameters:- Proximity to Entry Point 0 (what I call Defense Center)
- Proximity from attackers (it wants to spawn you AWAY from enemies)
- Proximity to other defenders (it wants to spawn you CLOSE to other allies)(listed order is the weight order of the parameters)
Here's what this means.When attackers get in and get close to the flag, the system is going to try to spawn you (defender) AWAY from those attackers, so EVEN if Entry Point 0 is near the flag, it will likely NOT spawn you near there.Map makers COULD put ALL the defense spawn points near the flag, thus NOT ALLOWING the system to spawn defenders anywhere else - but have fun with that map, lol.
----
The system uses some thresholds to determine how to follow the parameters and therefore, where to spawn defenders
at any given time But these thresholds are not easy to understand or implement exactly - so it becomes a "guess and check" basically for map makers.
So most map makers do the following:
- Place defense spawns how you think it will be best, put it up on server to "test" (we don't have any other way really to test with many players)
- Watch the results and/or gather feedback (community is so helpful and constructive with this, of course
)
- Make small changes (as to not knee jerk react)
- Re-upload
- Watch again...
---------------------
Hope that helps explain why defense spawn points work the way they do. It was something I was shocked to find out myself.
They are basically a shifting field of spawn possibilities depending on distance from Defense Center and enemy players/allied players.
It is not a bad system necessarily, but unfortunately hard to control.
(NOTE - offense isnt really effected by this, since offense spawns are all clustered around Entry Point 32 (offense center) and defenders are not usually close anyhow. Even if defense got close, there is no where else to spawn so they would spawn there anyhow)