Suggestion Ban gaps in games with 20 players or less

Hot take I know. I've been playing at times when the server is very quiet recently. It's annoying when you really are playing better than the other team with great teamwork and strategy... then someone comes along and jsut because they have a gap against 5 or less players they can win.

Open to the idea that this could be for more/less players.

I appreciate this could also cause problems if a player sets out to craft one when there's 25 people in the game and then that count drops.

I'd honestly go as far as to say 25-30 to be honest. I know gaps aren't end all be all, but when you have 7 players on your team, and only 3-4 are at base, defending against a gap is nigh impossible if you don't have equivalent or better gear on your end. I don't care about potions, This would make potions a lot stronger, and make them meta for off times of the day.

Good elaboration. The current state favours no skill. There could even be some way of preventing teams with a big player disparity from using gaps to balance further. Say red has 8 players and blue has 3, red would not be able to use gaps. Again, this would need some serious ironing out.

Either way, I think something has to change because these quiet times are repetitive and often unbalanced.

I personally dont like the idea of just removing gaps in smaller games. But your certainly on to something much greater.

First of all when will it be decided that a game has less than 20 players? Every game needs 20 players in the lobby to start anyways meaning at some point the game shoud ve had 20 players. But even bigger games can slip under the count of 20 players by
1. Having mutilple teams destroyed
2. Many players leaving after the lost their gear or something else

Now we re coming to the part why this is actual not healthy for the game.
If you would just make it so that gapples cant be eaten but the playercount dropped below 20 the player wasted a lot of effort and has a big disadvantage now since he wasted a lot of ressources.
What if it can not be crafted when the players drop below 20? Than ppl could still use the remaining gaps resulting in an even bigger disadvantage for the other players.
In a situation where ppl are fully into defending and only 2 teams are remaining it would be very easy to take the game hostage and let it last forever.
Those game would be dead games anyways and they should end! Removing gaps means removing the only possibility for the lesser stacked team to end the game and the only way to end a game in many cases.

It sure would be an interesting idea to have different voting options or sub gamemodes in annihilation.
For exmample ppl beeing able to have bleed and 2x nexus damage in the same game, certain classes disabled, smaller maps etc.
But I think shotbow is not supported by a big enough playerbase to support such a system plus is would be too much to handle for newer players.

As far as Enchanted Golden Apples are concerned, there could be a opt in vote for games under 30 players at the start and an opt out vote for games over 30 players.

https://shotbow.net/forum/threads/premium-and-map-selection.415405/
TL;DR Add more voting options to change individual games and have the ability to do so be unlocked with Annihilation Ranks, Premium or Shotbow XP or a combination of the three.

I would argue that, if a game runs into p3 or later with >30 players, then gaps should never be banned, even if the playercount drops below 20 players in that game. In my eyes, this suggestion is saying that, when there's 5-7 players per team, you can't really put the resources into a defence when even 1 enemy can easily overpower anything you have. I've even had 10 people defend against a single Alchemist and our nexus still got destroyed (then we killed them 3 seconds later lol).

It's arguable that people would troll games by pushing the playercount above 30, then leave to keep gaps in the game, but the idea that players would bother to join just to bring gapples into the game is insane. I'm not even sure why I brought it up.