Safe Zone Time - opinions?

[hallucination]

Revisiting the safe zone time after the 9 hour experiment. Please vote, and state your thoughts below.



I've not put in poll choices for "no safe zones" because Chaos has always had safe zones and lame safe zone play (like J12), and that's not going away. Also when safe zone time was 5 minutes, rather than forcing people back on the field to play as those advocating that short a time had hoped, the targets simply went to spec or left, yielding a lower population. So I've not included that choice either because we've tried it and it didn't work well for anyone.



--15 mins The Retail Release SVS (RR-SVS) setting. My opinion: Something of a balance between "taking a break" and "still playing the game" in that hunters could wait out the 15 minutes.



--45 mins Allows enough time to grab a quick meal. Requested by many people, and when it was put in the feedback was very positive. Did it increase zone population? Not much, but it did not decrease it.



--9 hours Requested with the speculation that it would lead to higher btys which would lead to higher population. Extraordinarily high btys can bring people into the zone to hunt, but they can also skew the Ave and Rating competition through a small number of kills; so it's not all positive. Enough time to go to work or sleep and come back.



To me, there is little difference between 45 mins and 9 hours in terms of game play. Both are ridiculously long periods of time for a real time game; the action comes to a halt longer than any player is willing to actively wait in either case. Did it increase population? Not significantly. Decrease? No. Feedback has been quite positive, with several people changing their minds over the course of the reset from "don't like" to "like."



Downsides of 9 hr safe time (or any long safe time):

First, any exploit possible with a 9 hr safe time is also possible with a 45 min one (or 15 mins for that matter), it's just the effort involved in executing it.



--Streak exploits. Sit in safe with the streak and wait for the zone to get very quiet, then bring in a friend and kill them over and over with no one else around. This is not new, really, and would be dealt with the same ways that are used to keep the integrity of Streaks and of the Reset Winners competition (disqualification, etc.).



--Antiwarp in safe for hours. People speculated at the beginning that this would happen. I thought only occasionally would someone accidentally leave aw on. No one could possibly be a big enough troll to intentionally do this for more than a short period of time (meaning that 3 months from now, no one would be sitting in safe every day to annoy people). Right? Well Mr. Explosion decided to try and be that very troll himself, in order prove that being a troll was possible and would be bad. BAD! Or something. Only a couple of players were upset by his action. The vast majority of people had no problem with him making it clear that he's a troll. There are ways to deal with this (and all trolls), so I don't consider this an issue if we keep long safe times.



--Holding the streak. We saw Gadianton hold the streak an entire day sitting in safe. This is the only real downside I see to long safe times -- not so much that the a personal Streak can be held that long (Gad did nothing wrong here), but that it prevents the Streak from being part of the normal, active conversation during play. If someone is sitting in safe, not playing, there are no announcements of who has the Streak, which is a goal for some of the players. The Streak was conceived as a continuous playing effort, during 15 min safe times, so short breaks were possible. There are solutions for this including going to safe for any length of time ending a streak; or a streak ending after sitting in safe for X amt of time. I'm not fond of these solutions. This still needs consideration.



As always in Chaos, with the various goals that different players have, there will be a variety of opinions ;) Thoughts?



--hallu