Spawn timer balance

[protest boy]

Was playing as the red side on a 1v1 TBD on hills. I and my opponent killed each other simultaneously and he spawned about 2-3 seconds before I did. Then we killed each other again at the exact same time and he spawned 2-3 seconds before me a second time.

I'm not really that clear on how spawn times are figured but this is a pretty huge imbalance especially on such a small map. I'm guessing it's not supposed to be uneven like that.

note: this was prior to the last patch.

[DiogenesDog]

Was someone on your team but just watching? The spawn timers adjust if there's a team imbalance...

[Snowsickle]

The game is on a "spawn wave" system, kind of like Team Fortress 2 has.

There is a 'wave' of people that spawn every 5 seconds. When you die, you're put on the wave after next. So essentially you have a chance of having a spawn timer anywhere from 5 to 10 seconds long.

This is a very elegant system in team games since people spawn together and therefore team play is encouraged. Sucks for 1v1 but in my opinion the benefits far outweigh any cons.

Seems strange that you died simultaneously and were at different parts of the wave though, I would think the waves would be synchronized between the two teams to prevent this.

[protest boy]

There were no observers and this was a brand new game that had started. Would the bots dead or alive have affected it at all?

I like the team spawn, but it doesn't appear to be synchronized.

[lamster]

I should probably disable wave spawns for 1v1, since they don't make any sense there anyways. On the more general point, a synchronization issue like the one you described sounds unusual to me, but could occur if a bunch of bots joined the same team at the start of the game (this bot issue will be fixed in the next patch). Otherwise, wave times can become desynchronized over the course of play if one side has more players than the other since the team with fewer players has faster waves (I'll add a resynch condition when all players are alive, but in general there's no consistent way to ensure the waves do not drift some of the time when teams are uneven).

Even with perfectly synched wave spawns, there are some inescapable anomalies, for example: red player dies 0.1 sec before wave, blue player dies 0.1 sec after wave -> red player spawns one wave (5 seconds) earlier than blue even though their deaths were only 0.2 seconds apart. As for whether the upside (spawning teammates together to encourage teamplay) outweighs these discontinuities -- I think it does, but there are so few big team games with our limited testing pool that it's hard to be 100% sure.