Currently the most successful flagtag battles are almost always played well past primetime when Europe is sleeping, as most levels accommodate a maximum of 5-10 players, great levels rarely more than 20.
Some problems:
- Lag
- Orgies (flag stuck in a spot (usually a dead end) because players want to stay to get short bits of time accumulated)
- Flag is given to a random player when carrier dies
- You can steal during death delay
- In bigger levs flag gets out of bounds of small maps
- Camping
- Designing good levels is time-consuming
Lag is not much of a problem for most northern Europeans, but for others it's clearly not fair, as there's only one server you can play flagtag on. Publicly available server software could be one solution. No-one could justifiably complain about lag, and anyone could set up battles in any old level for any group of players. This would also be awesome for LAN parties.
When flag carrier dies, the flag could be given by some other basis than RNG. It could be the one with most time in his timer (though this would encourage camping (could be dealt with by some anticamp measure)), the one nearest/farthest from the previous carrier, the one with least/most time accumulated, or something else. Ideas? Flag could also be dropped to ground, though this would become a new problem in some levels: rescuing the flag from an orgy by escing or dying wouldn't work anymore. Of course in ideal levels there are no dead ends or orgies, but...
Designers can't always be arsed to spend a good half an hour designing a good level. Partly because it's not allowed to play your own battles, and partly because there is no afterbattle and you're not allowed to restart. These points have been discussed in Flag Tag battle rules without conclusion.
Camping and orgies could be eliminated at once by e.g. setting a minimum speed for being able to carry the flag. Another possible measure could be getting killed if you stay within some area for a longer time than x. I don't know how this area could be declared, maybe a special nonphysical polygon or something automatic. Ideas?
Other small improvements include an arrow pointed in flag's direction and the possibility to spy the flagcarrier.
Share ideas and thoughts!