descentchampions.org

By generating a "longest spawn point away from my spew or the current enemy" you are guaranteeing I know where you are. You don't want that. I, as the respawner, have the advantage--I can see when my opponent passes by my spew. Exercise discretion; don't spawn right away, watch for your enemy to go by and know exactly where they are no matter if you spawn near them or not. This is the equality: He/she doesn't know where you will be, you can know where they are--They have the guns.

My biggest suggestion to quell is problem is this: don't die. Seriously, if you don't die a lot, you will have a lot less issue with this problem.

Additionally skill being defined as being able to make the right decision is moot if skill does not involve the ability to carry out that decision at a higher level and rate than the opponent. If you both make the right decision every time, in that definition, that game would either be 0-0 or 20-20. Skill is being able to carry out your plan, your decisions (right or wrong), better than the other guy. Period. This includes spawns, because your skill doesn't determine my placement, my movement, where I will sit, when I will charge, how I will approach your approach and everything I do is just as--if not more--variable than the spawn point.

I'll tell you what I tell my baseball players: Control what you can control--you can control you.
This means that you can control WHEN you spawn, WHERE you go, HOW you move, WHY you do whatever it is you do. Ultimately, you can influence how your opponent acts, but cannot "control" it--that is one reason this game is so intense and amazing... You can only control you, I am against letting anyone else control me (only God should control me, no one else--but that's another discussion) and, therefore, against having any time a spawn point is a set location.

It doesn't necessarily have to be the spawn point furthest away, just not ones super close. Or at least lower the odds of spawning near them.

And "don't die" isn't really an argument fyi.

You're right, it's not an argument--its a goal. Do it, and you wont have this problem (fyi)!

TBH, to achieve your goal here (to what I can interpret it) you should ask the level builders to put in a ton more spawn points... That increases your chances (somewhat) of not spawning near where you died or your opponent is...

Just out of curiosity, could the game be changed so that spawn locations were in any cube the ship can move through? It would add a lot more random places to spawn, at the expense of a longer "where am I?" moment. I'm not saying I would like this, but it would mean the living pilot wouldn't have any idea where the dead pilot will be. My opinion is that I am perfectly fine with how it currently works. And I say that after having spawned right on a smart during my recent match with roncli, which happened after a 25-30 second mini-break while dead. You're never safe, which is a good thing to remember. I am fairly confident that the current system has worked to my favor as often as it has worked to my detriment. I know there are times when I have spawned with my enemies back to me, so I can get a few hits in, grab my weapons, and run away. Or kill them outright. RNG is not a bad thing.

RNG is most definitely an Objectively bad thing. RNG has no place in a proper, well-designed, and competitive game. (Please don't try to argue this. I could write books about how RNG is garbage and mostly just lazy design.)

When randomness begins to dominate something, the game becomes much more about managing the odds to whatever extent you can, and the expectation of the better player winning gets muddied quite a bit. Poker demonstrates that as far as I'm familiar, and a board game I've played called BattleTech is also pretty similar - freak accidents often happen, and have a good chance of deciding a game outright when they do.

Descent doesn't seem to be that way. There are a few things that are random, if often exhibiting partially predictable distributions - the locations weapons will spawn in, and of course the locations players will spawn in. Maybe I've just been playing this game for way too long, but neither phenomenon bugged me - the ability to deal with them well is a skill in its own right. I can't speak for people who have picked the game up more recently though.

From a more philosophical perspective, though, thanks to chaos theory, I'm not sure the parts of Descent that actually are spat out of a pseudo-random number generator (like the above two features) are intrinsically much different from the situations players will work themselves into over the course of a game. You get good spawns and bad spawns, but also can find yourself in good or bad situations through other means as well. Randomness mainly annoys me when it's used to institute grinding; but nothing in Descent 1v1 comes close to that.