How do deathmatch spawns work?

This question stems from the maps I submitted to 32in24-13, in which I put three spawn points adjacent to each other in the same four locations in the maps to adhere to the minimum requirement of spawnpoints per map so that there would be 12 spawn points in maps that I wanted 4 distinct spawning locations in.

During testing, a few players were able to rack up an outstanding number of kills in a short time by camping behind the spawns with a rocket launcher and lobbing volleys of rockets, killing all the players as they respawn. I didn't get to witness this personally, as I think I was more or less the receiver of the said punishment.

My reasoning behind designing a map that way was that the map would still have the same locations to respawn at, but have a higher number of spawnpoints, without the randomness of being in a totally different spot each respawn. Given the probability, the results would be almost exactly the same as if I had only 4 deathmatch spawns.

So what exactly caused players to be so vulnerable to spawncamping with this method? Did reducing the number of spawns to the original 4 yield the same results, and if not, why?

Doom allowed 4 player games at maximum, so crowded FFA games weren't an issue, obviously. Anyways, the original game spawned players at fixed spawns in a fixed order, then the following spawns depended on the LUT table (afaik) and thus it became pretty much random.

Ports got rid of the determinism at the very beginning, so you could say they're completely random - although they won't spawn you on a blocked spawn unless there's no other option. And this is the dreaded telefuck lock in FFA - there are too many players trying to spawn at the same time, so they block all of them and start telefragging each other, possibly until the fraglimit.

Your scenario avoids this, but presents another problem - you have many spawn points, but still only four (or so) spawn locations. It's just super-easy to control at least one of such locations with a heavy weapon - and given how close the spawns are together, everyone spawning there will eat death. And it's still, say, 25% chance despite there being 16 spawns, you just remove the telefrags. With a player count that produces many respawning players per second, it becomes very rewarding to just spam the hell out of one location.

Oh okay, so if there were only four spawns, random players die and respawn, telefragging each other, thus the kills are kinda distributed to all the random people trying to spawn in the map.

vs.

if there are a bunch of spawns, where players don't telefrag each other, one guy can hog all the kills for himself by dominating the spawn location, seeing as though the players aren't being telefragged, he isn't denied the opportunity to get as many kills from spawn-camping.

Thanks, I hope that made sense, your explanation was kinda tricky to understand at first but I don't think mine is any clearer. I really had a hard time wrapping my head around that the first time without actually watching it happen.

dew said:

... the original game spawned players at fixed spawns in a fixed order ...

How are the initial spawn spots influenced by command line parameters such as -altdeath in vanilla Doom? Any technical explanation of this?