Hey y’all, I’ve been thinking about suggestions for surf & climb. I also have a couple of bugs and typos to report. I went through the forums & some devlogs, spoke with others in the community, and revised this list of useful and fun ideas. I believe these suggestions would improve the experience at BB without affecting the servers fastdl. I hope some of these will be considered, and if there’s any way I can help with the process, let me know. This list is not in any specific order, and everything underlined is clickable. I had to split this post up into ̶t̶w̶o̶ three parts, there’s a link to the next post at the end of each part. Map Revision Spacejam - Stage 4, hit the booster and reset before hitting the floor, and the booster is broken till you hit the floor. Boosters work fine on most other maps, so I’m curious if you can fix these. It sucks to get to stage 4, then forget that I didn't do the booster reset ritual on a good run. Fruits - Why is prespeed clamp not effective on Fruits? You can gain beyond max velocity at the start of the map with the first booster, and it doesn’t disable your time. It’s inconsistent with the rest of the map list and rules. The WR doesn’t do it. The seasonals and all times get stacked with people who spend like 25 minutes getting the prespeed and 1 minute actually surfing the map; It's very annoying to try and compete with those times. Simpsons - Stage 3 booster feels inconsistent. I thought it was broken at first but maybe the placement is just off? On stage 10, players often get stuck in the ceiling. You can skip over the wall straight to the moe sign. I think this is out of bounds because the WR doesn’t use it. Fruits 2 - Stage 15 should be renamed to Apple. In the achievements as well. Omnific - On the later stages, you can get stuck falling from the spawns; sometimes you can escape, but you can often get fully stuck there and can’t continue the run. Would love to see this fixed so I could try for a time there. I’d investigate which stages specifically but I don’t have platinum savestates to do it efficiently. HappyHug - If you teleport or reset yourself back to stage 4, you will spawn stuck in the ground. HUD Alternate Timer Location - I’d like an option to move the run timer and the splits to the mid/lower center of the screen. My eyes stay on the center of the screen when I surf, so I’ve lost a lot of good runs looking to the bottom left to see how I'm doing. In the center above the spectator keys would be perfect. Alt Idea. Hide Hud/Hide watermark(Platinum) - It would be nice to have a command to toggle the Hud visibility, even if it's only through the console. Some other players have asked for no hud, and I would use it for creating content. And platinum members should have the option to disable the watermark in the bottom right. Prestrafe Speed - Print the speed to the console and chat when the timer on your run starts. Toggle through the F1 settings. This is a great idea by Elysian; I’m including this to give it more attention. Surfers can finally learn how to improve their prestrafe, which saves a lot of time, especially on staged maps. No Tips Mode - Either allow the spectator messages to go through no context messages or create a new mode called "No Tips". I don’t need to know about the lottery, /portal, etc. The only context I want is spectator info, race info, and my surf/climb stats. More Platinum Icons - Looks like the functionality might already be there for this, it just needs additions? I was thinking take some of the popular Discord emotes and allow those to be used as platinum badges? If not as icons, then maybe as emotes like <mossman face=smile /> to update the list. Screenshot Mode - A mode that removes the hud, puts you in freespec mode, and freezes the character. This would be a good way to inspect your cosmetics in-game and useful for content creation. And it would be sweet if the character can still do /acts while in this mode. Invisiplayer doesn’t render in the preview menu so it’s hard to see what cosmetics look like with it when the playermodel interrupts. And I have to do the dance act to see what my character looks like from the front or ask someone for a screenshot… Commands !laps - How many total laps completed. Helpful because a lot of players are getting past 5000 laps and can’t use the achievement counter anymore. And if climb is counting completions, there could be commands to tell us how much we climbed and how many were PR’s. !serverinfo surf - I’m curious if the Discord bot could also display the time left on the map? !collected - Same issue with the achievement counter stuck at 5000, and I am unable to see how many items I’ve touched now. Although maybe I’m the only person with this problem lol; anybody else get the Kleptomaniac achievement? Races & Groups It’s been about a couple years since races were introduced to BB and not much has changed with the mechanics. With a wager mode or rewards, I think players would do races more often. It could have cube fees, cooldowns, and/or checks to avoid this system being abused. I like wager mode because it rewards being consistent under pressure; it’s a fair alternative for players to spend cubes and earn them with skill. If not that, then maybe it could payout with a small amount of cubes or a chance to drop an item? Could have an item pool dedicated to only race items or the current season? Or race achievement items are always nice. I like open event type races; easier to get players to opt into a race and autostart on a timer. Also, I want to use team chat as a group chat, or a command similar to /pm. Races in climb would also be very fun. Expanding the race info box and adding timers to everyone instead of repeating the stage would be good too. Different modes like best lap within 5-10 minutes and a way to track victories. I think these contributions would make race mode more appealing and improve competition. »»Part 2««
For my responses below the structure and flow will change a bit as some things can be answered collectively and other bits and bobs should be answered directly Maps: When it comes to boosters, there's not a huge amount we can do here generally speaking as mappers tend to implement boosts differently and the way source implements them means that under various conditions, without a map recompile we can't even make appropriate adjustments (Spacejam / Simpsons). Fruits is an interesting one because these times were generally set before we even had the notion of clamping and in the case of Fruits, it requires additional support (think surf_tendies). I'm not opposed to going back and fixing this and resetting the records, however there's a question of is it worth the time / effort at this moment in time? I'd probably defer to the mapping committee for this in honesty. Omnific I've tried a bunch of different fixes and I was never happy with any of them. I'll probably revisit this one in the near future because it's just an all-round bad experience. For the remaining issues, I'll get those sorted. HUD: Some of these features are already live or have been recently implemented. The "no tips" feature is already a thing and additionally you may also want to disable context messages (https://files.teddi.dev/71e80a1b-2c20-42d7-86ee-d5ac906201acn-IntelligentAcouchi.png). We do have extra (unused) icons so I'll let @Kaiden chime in if he wants these added. The system (that lets you select a title) doesn't really have support for aliased icons but it wouldn't be impossible to add I suppose. Hiding the HUD signature is unlikely to happen (even for Plat). We don't really advertise and we try to keep much of this out of your way so it's our one (selfish) addition to say "this is who we are and this is where it was made". Additionally it's helped us identify footage and bad actors in the past and I don't really want to have to implement HUD based steganography. Plus it's kinda neat seeing what content people have made on our servers (with certainty). There are components to screenshot mode we could probably add but this is one of those things that's immediately unlikely to be done. It's also something that will likely clash with every gamemode (not just Surf) so it's a huge logistical issue for potentially not much gain. I do however hear the concern of being able to preview items and the like better on your character so maybe we can improve the preview in the store somehow. Commands: Stat based commands I think aren't unreasonable and to be honest we can probably do a better job of revealing stats overall. I might see if we can have a 'statistics' tab similar to the achievements tab that lets you browse numerous ones. For serverinfo, the short answer is no. The longer answer is the serverinfo system just queries the server (think like the server browser) for information using a standard Source Engine Query. If we had a mechanism the able to edit what data was potentially returned then I suppose we could (but at time of writing, we don't). For races; while we're happy with the initial implementation I do think more could be done with them in a fairly major way (with various enhancements as you've suggested). That said I'm not sure how I feel with the idea of the wager system; it's not one that's ever really sat well with me albeit I probably need to introspect with myself as why that's the case.
So I think keeping Plat represented is somewhat important, you see the same thing on the scoreboard, on donate, in chat etc. I suppose they don't have to be a [P], easy enough to add more, although will need to have a think about what.
Thanks for responding, I appreciate hearing your perspective on this. I agree on Fruits, I'll get more opinions from the mapping committee. Just a note, I have Chat Ticker disabled with plat and the /tryplat message keeps popping up. A statistics tab would be excellent. This post is also worth reviewing. Since most achievement items are now in the eternal crate, I feel like jars should be applicable to the cosmetics I listed. Plus it adds more value to the market Going forward, I'll use the forums and discord to get thoughts on my ideas then submit a request on github; I think that will be most effective.