Features · playing
The lobby, matches and modes
The lobby is a place rather than a menu: you are signed in, you are not on a map, chat and the message buffers work, and enter opens the menu. It is where you stand about with the people you are about to play against and agree on what to play.
A menu is not a safe place to stand
Every list and form in this game runs the world underneath it. Opening your inventory does not suspend anything, does not stop somebody walking up behind you, and does not stop you hearing them do it.
That principle is why the lobby is a place. A menu you sit inside while the game waits for you is a menu that has quietly stopped being part of the game.
Three ways into a match
Create a custom match
Set it up and it sits waiting until you start it, so you can wait for somebody, change the settings, invite people, or start it on your own and walk the map to learn it.
Quick match
Into whatever is open. Anybody waiting is offered whatever has appeared since the last tick, so a match that opens finds the queue immediately rather than when the queue next looks.
The open lobbies
The list of what is running, and it is pushed to you rather than fetched: somebody starting a match, or filling the last slot in one, is visible without backing out and coming in again.
Q opens the lobby of the match you are waiting in, from anywhere, and it is how the host starts a match from inside it. Invitations you have been sent sit at the top of the match menu until you answer them.
Your loadout belongs to the match
Rather than to you. It is set from the create screen and from the waiting room, and some modes decide for you. A match may run a standard loadout, allow power weapons in loadouts, or hand the choice to the map — because some maps were designed around a particular kit and a match cannot offer a different policy without contradicting the map's own design.
When you can join, and when you cannot
The rule is short. A match that has not been started is open to anybody. A match that is being played is not, because arriving in the middle of a round with the score at nineteen is not a game either of you wanted.
There are two exceptions, and they are the ones that cost nobody anything:
- Between rounds, where there is nothing to interrupt.
- When everybody left alive is dead and waiting — on a mode where death is final, the last round of Infection, that is the whole match standing still, and letting somebody in costs nothing.
A host can also allow late joining outright. And a match that will not take you says why rather than simply refusing.
Settings are clamped, never refused
Everything a client sends about a match is clamped rather than validated, because a client that sends nonsense should get a playable match rather than an error. The alternative is a menu that refuses and does not say which field it disliked.
The score limit, the clock, the number of rounds, friendly fire, the respawn delay and late joining are all sent again whenever they change and again when the match starts — so the number somebody is playing to is the number the host set. That used to be sent once, when you joined, which meant setting the limit to fifty in the waiting room left everybody who had already arrived playing to twenty-five.
The modes
| Mode | What it is | Maps |
|---|---|---|
| Slayer | Free for all. First to twenty-five kills. | — |
| Team Slayer | Two teams. First to fifty kills. | — |
| SWAT | No shields, no grenades, precision weapons only. | — |
| Capture the Flag | Take their flag home. Best of three. | — |
| King of the Hill | Hold the hill. It moves every ninety seconds. | — |
| Oddball | Hold the ball. You cannot shoot while you do. | — |
| Infection | One zombie to start. Everybody they kill joins them. | — |
The map count comes from the running server. The map says which modes it is any good for, so a mode never has to know what maps exist — a flag match on a map with one base is not a match.
And the Sprawl, which is not a mode and is not in this list. It is reached by deploying into it from the lobby, because showing it here would say it was the same kind of thing as a game of Slayer — which is exactly the confusion the redesign was about.
What is running now
Asking the server…