TF2 Newbs (Team Fortress 2) Blog

Respawn times are one of those necessary evils of the world, well unless you want a more death match style game, but I don’t think games like Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2 are aiming for that sort of pure dm style. I personally think Valve handled the respawn times pretty well overall. Not everyone agrees with it though, take this recent player for example:

Why is the respawn so long on this server? Just to be annoying?

Unfortunately, its not my sick cruel sense of humor which drives the respawn time to seem ‘so long’. I think I might even put in a trigger where ‘respawn’ and ‘long’ in the same sentence sends a message to the player saying ‘blame valve’.

I don’t blame valve though, I compliment them for the intelligent design of the respawning system. Like all good things, the parts I hate about the respawn waves also are the parts I love about the respawn waves. Generally it all comes down to if I’m doing the dying, or the killing.

Let me do a big massive quote from their blog post:

Respawn waves occur on regular intervals, based on the map settings. Most of our maps use a 10 second respawn wave time. That 10 seconds is then modified by the map state, generally reduced for the team that controls the most capture points. Each team’s respawn wave time is then scaled down if the team has less than 8 players in it, to a minimum of 5 seconds if team has 3 or less players in it. When you die, you are assigned to the respawn wave after the next one. So if the respawn wave time is currently 10 seconds for your team, you’ll respawn somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds from your death.

So, if you kill someone, they have to wait for a little bit, then they get to spawn with other people who died around the same time as them. This allows the soldier/medic combo that got mowed down by a heavy to spawn at the exact same time, and try to get back into the action together.

Now the bad part of this is that if you die RIGHT as a wave happened, you get bumped into the wave AFTER the upcoming one (which could land you with a 20 second respawn) – a portion of this respawn is ate up by the kill cam, but thats a completely different topic.

Very soon after Valve released TF2 the admin mod and sourcemod plugin folks hurried and added options for faster spawn, they accomplish this a variety of ways, either altering the map (or now server mp_) respawnwavetime or subverting the entire wave system and instaspawning, or simulating a delayed spawn (player dies, count 10 seconds and spawn). These servers appear to outweigh the stock servers, at least in popularity. This causes some confusion since the average player does not know the mechanics of the respawn system.

Now, the next question I usually get is ‘well why are they stock on your servers’. On the Newbs 2Fort servers they will likely always be set to stock for 2 reason:

1) Due to our server name, we do attract newer players, I firmly believe that new players should get a feel for the game as it came, and then if they prefer faster times they can find a different server to fit their needs. Its a lot harder to get used to a long wait than a short one.

2) The respawn wave is perfectly timed for 2fort intel runs. You kill a guy in courtyard, grab the intel, he spawns just in time to kill you at the top of spiral/straight. I actually enjoy this on both sides, since I know damn well they’ll be there when I got the intel, and I bank on it when I’m trying to defend as I get a little adrenaline boost while waiting in spawn to run out and set up an sg.

Hopefully that helps explain why the respawns seem so long.

Here is a collection of comments made on one of the servers, over the past 2 months:

Wow thats a long respawn
Why is the respawn so long on this server? Just to be annoying?
long respawn
longest respawn timer ever
man the respawn is WAY too long on this server >.<
nggaaaaaaaaaaa long respawn :oP love it
long ass respawn
jesus - could respawn take a little longer?
long respawn time ftl
damned long respawn times
very long respawn times
respawn is too long
wtf. god dang. this server has long respawn. i dont remeber it being this long.
why the long respawn time?
damn respawns are to long
that was a long respawn, yeesh.
such long respawn time T-T *cry*
long respawn times
these respawns times arnt long enough
respawn time takes too long
holy shit long ass respawn time
dammit david i hate this long respawn time
y does it take so long to respawn
takes too long to respawn
respawn is too long lol
uggg hate this long respawn
damn long respawns
i hate long respawn times
And why is respawn time sudenly so long?
gah! long respawn
Fuck this long-ass respawn >_<

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.