Bug #1254

Setting Hotzone to spawn more than 1 objective simultaneously breaks many things

Status:	Open
Priority:	Critical
Added by:	nighthowlerstudios on March 1, '26
Assigned to:	Unassigned
Due date:
Reported for:	Release 1.0 - Season 1.0

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create a custom lobby, and select the normal Hotzone mode
2. Go into the mode's Advanced Settings
3. Set Max Points to Activate to 2 or more
4. Set Points on Capture to 1 (optional)
5. Set Group Capture Points to 3 (or whatever bonus you want)
6. Set Tick Points to 0, so that captures are required to score.
7. Set the Score Limit to something reasonable such as 30.
8. Play the mode after choosing a map
9. Observe all bot misbehaviours, point selection oversights, and broken rendering

Explanation

In a Custom game, if you set Hotzone to spawn 3 points instead of 1, several issues occur.

Firstly, the texture for the hotzone change alerts is completely missing. It renders as default magenta.

Secondly, bots will refuse to pathfind to any of the other hotzones besides one that they choose at the beginning of the hotzone's alive time. This causes them to group up on that point even after it's done being captured, instead of choosing a new point to capture like they would in Domination mode.

Thirdly, the icons for the points are entirely incorrect like this. The game seems to be assuming it's some sort of Domination mode active even though it's hotzone, so it gets confused and keeps all the diamond icons solid white in the world, but not in the UI, and assigns letters to them based on their group.

Fourthly, you cannot get hotzone to spawn more points than what exists in a single group (multiple groups is impossible, which is rather disappointing, but also interesting for gameplay)

And lastly, the game will be stuck using the same group of hotzones over and over once it reaches "Group C", and only rarely does it revert to "Group B", but never goes to "Group A".

Additionally though less important, Inferno and Sanctum maps are missing group assignments for their Hotzone locations, so this version of the mode does not work on those maps, but it does on Glacier etcetera (any map that was updated for Arena Royale), because groups were given to those maps for the Hotzone event during Arena Royale.

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