Official forums for BZFlag.org

For those of you who have been living under a rock the last few days, this week is The Week of the Rabbit Hunt at Planet MoFo. We are featuring rabbit mode exclusively on our flagship server the entire week, in all submodes available.

We would like to continue to plan special events in the future, in order to add variety to our normal offering of Free-For-All on our most popular server. As a team that thrives on player feedback, we are eager to hear everyone's input on the current event so far.

-The Planet MoFo Team

I was looking foward to the Week of the Rabbit hunt for a good part of the summer. To tell you the truth, I was a little dissapointed with how things turned out. Sure it was fun at the beginning stages, and even in the testing stages. These were times when the vibe and the publicity hadn't really caught onto the BZFlag community yet. There were about 11 players at one time on average. The problems arise when, and I am fairly sure others have noticed this effect too, there are many (25-30) players on the map and it becomes hard to hunt a single player. Hunters are mixed up in a mess of team killing and not being able to really improve their scores due to the amount of different people killing the rabbit each time. The result is one or two players getting obscenely good scores from being the rabbit all the time and the rest of the group has similarily mediocre or low scores.

Granted, the administrators have done a wonderful job preparing and administering the Week of the Rabbit Hunt. The basic premise behind the Week of the Rabbit Hunt is very fun and promising. The only flaw is with the map. It just wasn't designed for a rabbit hunt. One of the reasons for this is that the map is too small. Another reason is that there are no places to hide. I guess people will have different opinions about whether that is a good thing or not, but I say not because what usually happens is the rabbit stays the rabbit for about three seconds and then they are killed and the process repeats. This is supposed to be a rabbit hunt not rabbit slaughtering farm.

It's hard to kill the rabbit, so you want to make the map bigger so he has more space to evade the hunters and you want to add places to hide so it's even harder to find the rabbit...?

Well it's really not hard to kill the rabbit, it's staying alive long enough in the spray to get a good shot. Rabbit works best when it is more of a 1-4 against the rabbit, and spreading it out by making the map bigger could help foster that effect. A few more obstacles could do it too. Take Island hopping for example, the big map and the water tend to separate the combatants more. When there are only 2 or 3 people firing on the rabbit, it is much easier to dodge the errant bullets, than dodging the bullets from 12 noobs who unload on the rabbit from all sides, no matter the rabbits elevation.

Is it possible to have multiple rabbits? You could have the 15th player join as a second rabbit, to divide the map into two major battles.

Joe-Schmoe wrote:Is it possible to have multiple rabbits? You could have the 15th player join as a second rabbit, to divide the map into two major battles.

No, it's not possible, unfortunately. Only one rabbit per map.

My feeling was that it was a bit un-mofo. You join, and you don't have to do anything (unless you see the rabbit). You can curl up in a corner and go to sleep as a hunter because no one is shooting at you. The ffa mofo (and the ctf as well) give you no rest. That is what I took to be mofo's signature.

The impossible scenario of multiple rabbits would create real mayhem. *That* would be mofo.

gnu-sense

gnu-sense wrote:My feeling was that it was a bit un-mofo. You join, and you don't have to do anything (unless you see the rabbit). You can curl up in a corner and go to sleep as a hunter because no one is shooting at you. The ffa mofo (and the ctf as well) give you no rest. That is what I took to be mofo's signature.

The impossible scenario of multiple rabbits would create real mayhem. *That* would be mofo.

gnu-sense

Word around the campfire is the API in 2.2 is going to allow for a lot of funky stuff and new game modes. Never say never. And you are right about that - Multiple rabbits would be great. Great way of putting it. Thanks fo rthe input.

I myself felt about the same as A Distraction. I thought that it would be great but in the end it wasn't nearly as good as I'd hoped. I just like Planet MoFo: The Passion of the Free For All.

The progressive flag mode was cool but it turned out to be kind of a bummer because it benifited the better players too much.

Now I know that this isn't about the CTF Fridays but I thought those were great and I'm looking forward to a possible return of a random CTF Friday.