Jitspoe, I understand and have been told about the fact that the game was never designed for instant respawns, but from what I've seen in game play, the servers called SPEED servers are usually the most populated by new to middling old players. To completely ignore the fact that gamers who play fps nowadays aren't used to and don't want to put up with respawn times that are close to a minute long like what I've seen in the matching scene is fairly non-productive and makes the game feel stuck in an older time. Also to say that it just isn't part of the games intention is really just a pretty lame dodge. Even if the respawn times were longer than instantaneous, that doesn't stop someone from just sitting there and shooting whoever pops up. A spawn shield may be rough from the perspective of someone who is about to cap a flag but gets shot by an invincible just spawned character, but it is equally annoying to have just spawned knowing someone is about to capture a flag but since they were lining your spawn, you're dead for another 5 seconds if a speed server, or 20 seconds if it isn't. Also accounting for the fact that people like Shockwave exist, they will know when you're going to spawn regardless and murder you. By adding a spawnshield I feel you'd be eliminating two sources of major annoyance and game disruption while not adding them is only really defending against one that doesn't ruin the game outright, but simply calls for maps where spawn isn't exactly on the flag like you said.
Regarding the bots issue, I understand what your intention is with this, but I wasn't commenting on the fact that bots would be stupid, I was commenting on your apparent lack of understanding of what new players want in a game. Yes, populated servers look much more appealing to play in, and if there were realistic bots than we may see some more people stick around, but I sincerely feel that if it was just you and some bots vs a team of bots, you'd likely just leave anyway, since the appeal of facing an actual person isn't there. My criticism was more aimed at the fact that you are spending time and energy adding features to a game that's previous issues still need to be hammered out. Not to mention the fact that I can't imagine too many servers will be willing to implement bots since as you mentioned, the money to fund their resources is coming out of pocket, and to do what you're suggesting would add more processing stress on their servers. I admit to some ignorance in this area so if I'm wrong and the system would be inexpensive from their perspective, then I could see some value in it, but I just don't see a lot of point in developing a feature like that when you could be improving standard gameplay to be more friendly to newcomers.
I do thank you for actually addressing my concerns. I was pretty much waiting for you to say something while trying to put up with all of these people who seem quite content just telling me I'm wrong.
