Team17Modes1v1 (4 worms per player);
Best of 12v2 (2 worms per player);
Best of 1MapsUnedited random maps (any island or cavern preset is generally fine, but highly complex maps with a lot of closed-off areas are preferable, with the double layer cavern preset being by far the most common, although the scheme works on island maps well too;
example1,
example2)
*Any terrain texture is fine. Bridges are great!
RulesNo rope knocking (includes Bungee knocks).*Competitive games are hosted in #PartyTime or via Direct IP to avoid accidental knocks.
No climbing on top of the indestructible border when playing on cavern maps.*Worms Knowledge Base calls this roofing:
http://worms2d.info/RoofingNo skipwalking.*See here for an explanation of what skipwalking and flipwalking are:
http://worms2d.info/SkipwalkingNo bypassing the Longbow and Baseball Bat angle restrictions.*The Open Intermediate League's rules section calls this "bow/bat/rope angle modifications". Worms Knowledge Base refers to it as "Vertical Longbow and Baseball Bat":
http://worms2d.info/Vertical_Longbow_and_Baseball_BatScheme filehttps://www.tus-wa.com/schemes/scheme-1480/Pointers for discussion1. Should Team17 have any hot seat time? Some old schemes used to have 10 seconds of it, Lex for example feels that it's a good idea to have it, but I think that at least since the times of the CL2K league, competitive variants of the scheme have had no hot seat time. I personally like it this way because it gives players who are quick to think (or are able to do the thinking during their opponent's turn) and quick to make their moves (in so doing preventing their opponent from getting a lot of thinking time during them) a deserved advantage. But there's also an argument to be made that T17 is a naturally slow, tactical scheme and that having enough time to think about what to do during your turns, so that you can utilise all 45 seconds of them optimally, may be preferable.
2. Should the starting hazard objects be half oil barrels and half mines instead of all oil barrels like most players are used to today? Half mines and half barrels used to be the case a very long time ago in some people's Team17 schemes, but seems to have fallen out of favour for no particularly good reason. It was supposedly changed to all barrels so that initial placement couldn't screw you over as badly, but I feel that's counterbalanced by the additional skill and decision making when you're faced with the opportunity of going for a Firepunch/Dragonball-onto-mine move early on, sometimes favouring that even over picking up a crate. It makes early games more diverse and cooler to watch; van and I certainly prefer things this way, with half mines and half barrels!
3. Is the water rise rate during sudden death set in stone in competitive play? There used to be a lot of variance between people's Team17 schemes 10+ years ago, but to me it seems that the community has settled on the middle setting (20 pixels) in recent times. I think this is probably fine and doesn't need changing, but there are probably still players out there who have the water set to rise more slowly in their schemes. Anyone care to explain why that would be an improvement?
4. Would making the round time (the time before sudden death hits) slightly longer make Team17 early game more relevant and the endgame more fair and interesting? Would making the round time 12 instead of the current 10 minutes act as a replacement for making the water rise more slowly once sudden death does hit (so that we might keep that at the current setting)? By extending the time before sudden death this way, we would make it more likely for high damage weapons to be picked up in early and mid game, and those are the best motivation for players to attack rather than turtle and hoard homing weapons for sudden death. In the long run, player habits could change to take this into account, and we could be left with cavern Team17 that's more interesting on the whole.
5. For the longest time, crate probability in Team17 was left to the players to deal with as best they could, with every available weapon having equal probability to show up in a crate (super weapon quirks notwithstanding). I think it was in the First Blood league that Mad Cows had their probability lowered from 3 to 2, simply because getting them in batches of 3 made them too destructive. But this was totally fine by me. It's when people started trying to "balance" individual weapons according to their "usefulness" that things went to hell and now nobody knows what sort of distribution of weapons can be expected from crates anymore. Can we just go back to giving all weapons, including things like air strikes, a probability of 3 (and maybe keep 2 for Mad Cows) again? Please?
6. The power of Mortar (currently 3 stars) and Cluster Bomb (currently 1 star) make very little sense. If one isn't overpowered at a power of 3, why does the other have to be nerfed all the way down to power 1? Just because you get 3 Cluster Bombs in every crate? Isn't Team17 supposed to have all the weapons at standard power so that the knowledge players gain from playing this scheme translates well to WA in general and gets them used to the default behaviour of (almost) every weapon in the game? Alternatively, if we want to keep Cluster Bomb power lower than the standard 3, why not at least synchronise it with that of Elite and Intermediate (probably 2 stars of power) then? At least that would be neat and tidy.
7. Longbow power is a hot point of contention. Most Team17 players these days are extremely used to each Longbow arrow doing 50 damage, but to those (newer players included) who see Longbow as more of a utility weapon rather than a high damage one, this is very confusing. Apart from the 5 star Ninja Rope, Longbow is the only thing in the scheme that's grossly overpowered compared to what a reasonable person might naturally expect, so should it be brought in line with everything else and reduced to the standard 15 damage per arrow? Deadcode thinks that would make it too weak and has therefore had it set to 5 stars of power in his Team17 scheme, making each arrow do 30 damage. Now what do we do? I think I'd probably prefer 15 damage (because then every weapon in the scheme could be made the standard 3 stars of power), but I can live with 30 damage as well. Arrows doing 50 damage each definitely feels a bit insane, but it is how it's always been...
8. Team17 has historically been played with infinite Girders, but the worst case scenario is pretty ugly with that variant. In competitive play, some players literally Girder blocked every single turn until sudden death, and as their opponent, there really was very little you could do about it. The norm these days does seem to be 7 Girders a side, it feels enough for practically every play style except that single dirty one, still allows for a healthy dose of darksiding and so far, it feels nicely balanced. Since this is a change that was introduced back in 2006 or so, there has been plenty of time to find flaws, but so far, the community seems to agree that 7 is a good number. I would keep it this way for competitive games and allow infinite Girders only in funners.
9. Speaking of Girders, should they perhaps appear in crates as well in the 7 Girder variant of the scheme? This way, a player intent on darksiding could specifically look for them, then carry out the evil darkside plan of blocking almost every turn, but they'd have to get lucky or pick a lot of crates up in order to never run out of Girders. At least they'd have to work for it this way, which is still an improvement over infinite Girders, I guess. Apart from the urge to have all the weapons in the game available from crates in the Team17 scheme, I don't really see a pressing need to introduce this change, but it might be interesting to try anyway. Realistically though, people would probably just rage whenever they picked up Girders from a crate.
10. Why is Kamikaze not part of the Team17 scheme as a weapon that you can collect from crates? Should it be? What's the worst that could happen? Again, adding it would mostly only satisfy the requirement that every weapon should be available from crates in this scheme, but I guess Kamikaze would also be a really powerful finisher during sudden death. We definitely lack those in cavern map Team17...
11. Should stockpiling perhaps be set so that you keep your weapons (and get a set of new ones, including the 5 star Ninja Rope and 7 fresh Girders) between rounds and in case of a draw? Team17 is a single round scheme, sure, but in competition where draws are handled by playing a new round instead of reporting the draw, this positive stockpiling could change things a great deal and certainly speed the potential second round after draws up a lot, plus perhaps be more fair because your good crate collecting habits from the previous round would carry over and give you an edge in the rematch. On the other hand, some players might feel that if the first round was a draw, the rematch should reset everything and be played as a completely new game, no advantage to either player.
12. Does anyone still want to argue in favour of reintroducing Worm Select into the Team17 scheme as a utility that you start with? The old variant of the scheme (called 1Percent) gave each player two Worm Selects, which obviously made sudden death very different. But apart from Ropa, I don't think I've seen anyone else show genuine signs of interest in going back to this in recent years...
13. Does the floating weapon glitch need to be forbidden in Elite, Intermediate and possibly also Team17? The way I see it, it's not really a glitch, it's just one of the instances where players have figured out how to place weapons that normally explode on impact on top of a worm so gently that it doesn't count as a heavy enough collision to cause them to explode. If it happened by accident under different circumstances, would it still count as breaking scheme rules? It's a pretty tricky situation.
14. Does jumping after using Pneumatic Drill and Teleport (during the game, not when initially placing your worms) really have to be forbidden in Elite/Intermediate/Team17? I never really thought of it as a glitch, it's just that the game gives you 0.02s of retreat time after using them, and by mashing a jump key hard, you can get it to sometimes happen. It's probably true that cheaters could write a script that would help them do it more easily, but such cheating is obviously against the rules of any self-respecting competition, so should we really let that spoil this difficult to achieve trick for the rest of us? I really kinda like that it's there.
15. There are probably at least a few players out there who perhaps feel that rope and/or bungee knocking wouldn't be such a bad idea in Team17. While I personally feel that it's unlikely that this change would get wide enough acceptance now to make it into a standard variation of the scheme, it's a good idea to keep our options open, so I'm adding this bullet point here anyway.
16. As it turns out, almost every modern Team17 scheme I come across these days has Blow Torch and Pneumatic Drill power set to 5 stars. Although I'm not sure, I think this may have its origins in either the 1Percent scheme that the #Team17 channel on WWP's WormNET used, or in some kind of official tournament scheme that Team17 (the company) had settled on around the time official rankings were taken down on WA... which then must have made sense for future leagues to keep, possibly because they liked the idea of these two utilities doing a bit more damage in situations where no useful weapons had yet been collected from crates. But I feel like there's a big problem with this, namely that the higher power setting makes both Torch and Drill knock a worm harder (farther away) than their 3 star counterparts, which in practice quite often means that the target worm gets damaged
fewer times as a result, especially when torching. This is already weird enough on flat, open terrain and on slopes. But when you consider that it also makes it (almost?) impossible to trap a worm inside the torch tunnel that you're digging, which is otherwise a flashy play in other ground schemes such as Elite and Intermediate, I fear that there may just be too little logic and too many downsides to having the two F7 tools set to a power different to what players might be used to from other schemes. So, should we "standardise" their power to 3 stars, where all the rest of the weapons in the scheme are, and keep their knock power consistent with Elite and Intermediate? Back when I was first uploading these scheme proposals to TUS, I didn't even realise I may have been breaking tradition by having them at 3 stars, because that's just how my T17 scheme always was, it's what made sense to me. Am I alone in that? Hmmm.
17. Holy crap, there's so much to try and agree on regarding Team17. Here's a relatively short summary of a long IRC discussion from a while back, in case anyone wants to get into the individual reasons behind coste's/Deadcode's/van's/my opinions on some of these proposed changes:
http://krd.clansfx.co.uk/dump/189761deb541c04408f974973bb6e79d/00000061.txt
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