Need some help from a creative mind!

If you care to read, prepare yourself for a long read. I'm going to try to explain things as best as possible so it might take many words.

I'm going to try to keep the background "story" short but some background is needed to understand what I am asking for. Recently a friend and I have created Smashball. The map has been released but so many changes have been made to it because of unforeseen problems with the goal/scoring system. This goal/scoring system set up is something that is really tricky to make right.

At first I simply had a goal with mines in it. When the ball went into the goal it would blow up the mines, the explosion from those mines would knock another ball that was set to a stock pile goal ontop of a flag. When the collection timer ran down the flag would be collected and that is how the game keeps track of score. However the first full playtest ran into a big problem. Weapons are able to trigger mines(dead bodies don't for some reason). So if someone got killed in front of the goal their golf club could fly into the goal and trigger the mines/scoring system.

Eventually we came out with an update that used golf balls(since the soccer ball has a bug for some reason) and tin cups. Since the golf balls are magnetic to the tin cups, as in if the gold ball gets close to the green it has a magnetic like feature that forces the ball to roll inside the cup. Doing that allowed us to fix the weapons triggering mines problem because we put a single mine on the edge of the tin cup and the ball was the only thing that was able to roll into that mine.

All problems solved right? Wrong. We then ran into the problem of the ball bouncing out of the goal if hit hard enough at certain angles. It would bounce off the back of the goal and just come right out. We tried man cannons to push the ball down into the scoring system when it went into the goal. Still a problem. Sometimes, when hit hard enough the ball would bounce off of certain parts of the man cannon and pop out of the goal.

The following update is where we are now. To stop the ball from popping out of the goal we simply moved the back of the goal further back to make the goal deeper. So it would be physically impossible for the ball to bounce back that far and out of the goal. So far, no problems. But with all these changes a BIG sacrifice is being made. With every change, the time between when the ball goes into the goal and activates the scoring system is getting longer. That is because we keep having to make the goal bigger to prevent the ball from popping out and to prevent golf clubs from hitting the mine to trigger the system. So lets say you shoot the ball really hard into the goal, it will go all the way into the back and will need to roll down, into the tin cup and hit the mine. Sometimes this may take 5 seconds!

That time is not a HUGE deal but it's something that can be very frustrating...Let's say you score a goal in the last seconds of the game but you don't get a point because the ball didn't have enough time to activate the scoring system. It kind of takes away from the game a bit. So this is where I am needing all those creative minds out there. I'm trying to find out if anyone out there has any ideas or methods on making this goal/scoring system faster without losing any reliability.

Here is what you need to remember:
-Weapons are able to trigger mines. When you get killed by a golf club, your club can go pretty far.
-The only thing that should trigger the scoring system is the golf ball going into the goal.
-When hit hard enough at certain angles a ball may pop back out of the goal is the goal is small enough.

Essentially what I am looking for is any ideas you may have that can decrease that time between when the ball goes into the goal and when the scoring system triggers. My mind is constantly on it and so far every idea I get ends up leading to another problem. Currently my mind is on an idea that actually doesn't use mines.

If you want a better visual as to what the goal/scoring system looks like you can just head to my file share and download the map and check it out on forge. It would be extremely helpful!

Please help a fellow forger out! If you come up with an idea that gets used in our map, I will make sure you get credit for it.

 

I could try it but I doubt that would work. The golf ball doesn't move fast into the tin cup. Once it hits the green of the cup it actually moves rather slowly. The mine works because as long as something touches it, it explodes. So I wouldn't just be able to replace the land mine with a fusion coil. Some other changes would need to be done. I'm definitely not ruling out making some major changes. So many changes already have been made so we are used to changing the system around a lot.

 

Yyeah that would have made things soo much easier if weapons couldn't go through shield doors. lol But then if weapons couldn't, the ball probably wouldn't have been able to. I use a one way shield door on my goals so players can't go into the goal but the ball can.