Declined Cinema removal/complete overhaul, the morbidly obese elephant in the room

[Keres]

Okay, as VSH balancer along with Zeke, I have noticed a gigantic problem with VSH_cinema when gathering live-damage data for balancing purposes
One: it’s abnormal room layout skews with damage data as it requires a completely different play style than almost all maps, that being a LITERAL 2FORT INTEL-ESQUE ENGINEER FORTRESS SET UP IN “THE FUNNY ROOM” which means I have to completely avoid using data from there when making decisions about weapon stats because it’s either 6x higher than it’s usual average or 6x lower when I’m using it on cinema compared to other maps.
(On the airstrike for example I scored 2 7K dmg games on cinema whereas my average was approximately 1.2K on other maps, before anyone says this was skewed because of Crits, It was using the latest config of the airstrike that did not include the game-breaking crits-mid-air stat.
Two: Its winrate appears to be skewed significantly towards the red team, which normally always win via a ridiculous amount Telefrags or getting hale stuck in either the cinema door or the ticket line.
Some may say as hale this is easy to counter: To a new player, IT IS NOT. I’ve seen new hales do pretty well on certain occasions, only to be denied victory when they were forced to go into the funny room and die to a telefrag, voiding all their work.
There once was a match where almost 75% of the damage on hale was commited by telefrags, that’s almost 5 INDIVIDUAL FRAGS IN ONE ROUND.

Cinema needs to either be:
A: completely reworked or removed so the map is actually playable for new/semi-experienced hales, also so I can start collecting data from it.
B: have the funny room removed/modified so telefrags aren’t 75% of the damage in a single round.

Afternote: I am considering commissioning a map maker to completely redo VSH_cinema to make it playable, however I still need to actually find a map maker that does commissions.

 

[Whurr]

just remove the map entirely. skial losing the portion of their "playerbase" that only plays on cinema isn't the biggest loss in the world.
cinema, like military and 2fortdesk can demolish new hales and the only advice they're given on military and 2fortdesk is to either "get good" or to rush engies and medics. with cinema, there is no "get good", you let red set up in the projection room which they WILL do without fail, since they're given time to get to that room and get a quick telefrag setup installed. and your only option (if you picked saxton, CBS, vagineer, or gentlespy and not HHHjr) is to tank a telefrag going into the room. and if they somehow unlock the second half of the map, you need to know how to access said second part of the map to stop potential backcappers. (which you again, won't do if it's your first time playing hale, because whoever made the map had the smart idea of letting scouts cap the point in 4 seconds) the only reason the map remains "popular" is because people play on it to farm wins as red, and by extension, rank points.

+1 for A.

 

[DanishSoup]

https://www.skial.com/threads/remove-vsh_cinema-from-the-vsh-map-rotation.89694/We already tried to remove Cinema from the map pool. It has a shitton of +1's yet it all comes down to map stats.
Still though, +1 this map is the most unfun unbalanced map in the map pool

 

[Percilius]

+1
Remove cinema entirely, its the worst map on the server by a mile.
The only reason the map's popular is because of how red sided it is and most boss balancing gets thrown out the window unless you're pretty good at playing boss.
In the case of ff2, unless the boss has a really good rage (gabe, chaddiger, etc), the boss is pretty much going to lose.

 

[s9491]

The most logical solution is to spin off a a 24/7 cinema. If a 24/7 reservoir server with trash framerate can consistently support players, I can't see how a cinema wouldn't. The same people come to play it every. single. day.

 

[Whurr]

The most logical solution is to spin off a a 24/7 cinema. If a 24/7 reservoir server with trash framerate can consistently support players, I can't see how a cinema wouldn't. The same people come to play it every. single. day.

do this, and remove it from the map pool. if you want to play cinema, you can go play on the 24/7 cinema server.

editing this to add onto my previous post about why cinema is dog doo-doo:
i have frequently seen sessions of cinema where hale has not won more than 3 rounds, while red has won 10+ rounds. hell, i've seen an extended cinema that went 0-18. ZERO. WINS. FOR. HALE. and it's not "oh they just need to learn how to play hale" like what keres said, new hales just end up eating shit here because red abuses glaringly obvious bad map design to take wins out from under hale. rush projection room? red sets up a telefrag on the spot that the teleporter in the projection room takes you to. so if you didn't get fragged on the way in, you almost definitely get fragged on the way out. and if they have a medic or two with uber ready, it's game over. you have lost before a minute has even passed. vsh_toys_b2 has the exact same problem with map teleports where red can just build a setup that ensures hale gets trapped in a building/player and is forced to tank over 10k+ damage before the chance to escape even presents itself. the only difference between cinema and toys is that unlike cinema, hale can just not use the teleporters at red's spawn in any of the three arenas at all. and i'm just going to re-iterate this: unlike with the rest of the red-sided maps, you will not at any point when you lose on cinema, say to yourself "well at least i did better that time" like you could with say, military area or 2fort desk. if you aren't playing a very specific strategy on cinema that counters all the possible cheese strats that red has employed, you WILL lose.

a big TL;DR is that this map is awful for statistic gathering on both red weapon balancing and hale winrates. i'd go as far as to say cinema is the map with the most wins for RED by a long shot. with maybe miltary and 2fort desk being close behind. at least new hales can actually win on those maps unlike cinema.

 

[s9491]

I know this is already declined but since balancing data was the crux of the argument I just wanted to throw in that if this is important then another thing you would want to fix is AFK bosses. I won't claim to know what percentage of bosses go AFK but it seems like enough to make a difference. Some maps it seems you can have as many as 3 or 4 in that half hour. It's always annoying when you're doing so well #1 on the leaderboard and then half the team discovers AFK boss and then you're suddenly like #8 after they all farm like 8-15k damage 🤣

that can't be good for purity of data either obviously.

 

[Bottiger]

There's already an afk kick for bosses. If they don't move in time the round automatically ends in a draw.

We cannot do anything more complicated than that without risking kicking someone that is not actually afk.

 

[s9491]

There's already an afk kick for bosses. If they don't move in time the round automatically ends in a draw.

We cannot do anything more complicated than that without risking kicking someone that is not actually afk.

Interesting. In the hundreds of AFK boss rounds I've seen I don't think I've ever seen that happen. They are probably 95% dead within about 45 seconds. If a couple did get kicked I probably thought they left I guess. Obviously the balancing data isn't a big concern of mine and I admittedly enjoy beating the shit out of an AFK boss so not something I care much if it's changed. I think ideally a round would start like MVM where you have a longer start timer like 60 seconds and then hale can "check in" then the timer goes straight to 5 or 10. Since you get multiple warnings that you're going to be hale it would seem fair to AFK kick or slay them after 60.

There is also "AFK baiters" that do piss people off. They pretend to AFK and let everyone beat on them until they have most of the team in stun range and then rage and take out as many as possible. Particularly effective with Vagineer haste, they can take out more than a quarter of the reds at least sometimes. But if they are a regular they get a rep for baiting and it gets less effective and called a bitch regularly. 🤣

 

[Whurr]

There's already an afk kick for bosses. If they don't move in time the round automatically ends in a draw.

We cannot do anything more complicated than that without risking kicking someone that is not actually afk.

this has literally not worked at all for around 6+ months. originally it ended the round 5 seconds after the round started if the boss did not move, but now it takes way too long to the point of them dying before the AFK "kick" happens.

speaking of this, an old, now dead (circa 2015) VSH community had it so that if hale did not want to play as hale, someone else could volunteer to play as hale. when a player's hale round came up, they had a yes/no confirmation for if they wanted to play as hale, if they said no or didn't answer, the system would look for some volunteers, and after around 10 seconds, it would pick a random person who opted to volunteer to play as hale. if no one volunteered, the round ended in a draw. hale was also invincible during this period and shortly after someone got picked to be the replacement player so red couldn't just set up in front of hale for free damage.