On assaulting: feasible vs. suicidal.

[I. Kant]

As with pretty much everything I start here, this is going to be concerned with realism, feasibility and gamey things.

It's been on my mind for the past couple of days, and also reading the thread about defence, I've found two quotes I'll allow myself to begin with:

Originally Posted by Basil

I think that in order to get people stay low and defend gamers should have some penalties for dying. When I started playing RO some moths ago I did everything to stay alive, using basic infantry tactics taught in the army, but gradually I noticed that there's no gain that way. You MUST assault all the time, shoot from the hip and relocate constantly because everyone else is doing that also and you'll get overran if you don't do so. This kind of tactics where soldiers are running around shooting everything that moves will give you high scores when cap zones change owners but sometimes you may die 2-3 times in a row. But that's life, right? Wrong, because in the real life most soldiers are doing everything to stay alive, except some few individuals who most likely end up dead but if they survive they become heroes. In games, almost everyone plays like a reckless hero-wannabe. [...]

And, following that:

Originally Posted by BuD_GrimReaper

that would just increase the amount of couch potatos, sitting back, doing jack while they should be trying to attack.

This would work with no reinforcements, but enforcing people to stay alive wil only result in boring maps where absolutely nothing happens because the lines will never fall down enough before they are reinforced.

The map is usually all the enforcement you need to play less like a rambo because frankly if you do, you on't even get close enough to get a kill or grenade in the capzone.

Well, here we have the basic clash: whether to choose a feasible way of assaulting - i.e. you're trying to stay alive, while closing in on the objective (be it slower, if you need to keep your head down, or faster if conditions permit it), you're valuing your life and trying to beat the enemy at the same time - or to go for the zerg way - i.e. "If I don't make it this time, I'm sure I'll make it next time!... or sometime within the next 10 respawns!" and the paradigm of "getting into the capzone".

Let's begin by analyzing the elements constituting the - let's adopt such a name - "realistic" assault.

a) the soldier is going to try to stay alive, while also trying to get the job done. What this entails is less ruch and more planning, more care. What, in consequence, suggests more time for planning, planning-on-the-run, or even pre-planning the assault. And of course, it gives more time for the defenders.
b) Given the above, the soldier nevertheless accepts the risk of facing death, but will not recklessly endanger himself, or fellow soldiers.
c) As mentioned above - the assault would have to have some plan according to which the constituent elements of the unit would behave. Obviously, there are various ways to approach that - sometimes it may be better to trickle in reinforcements for the assault, albeit in a conscious manner (i.e.reinforcements arriving in a purposeful manner, with a clear aim in view), or just wait and gather up and form a formidable fighting force which should be less prone to being taken out with relative ease.
d) Following the plan will involve a lot of derailings and a lot of hangups, while some things the plan relies on cannot be done within the desired time. This may render the purposefulness of planning valueless to someone's point of view.

Now, let me try to brief on the "zerg rush":
a) A player is a participant in an online game given a (limited) ammount of lives. He is given free hand in using up as many of these lives, until the reinforcements run dry.
b) A round in a match runs against time, therefore lack of haste works against you, theoretically diminishing your chance of success if the map happens to be long. Haste is your friend.
c) Cap-zones fixation. Get inside, hold, cap. Better yet, if it's not recappable (nothing personal against locked objectives). Just keep that bar slowly filling up and you're good.
d) Last objective madness. Possibly it's last minutes and suddenly everyone's telling you - just throw yourselves at them, they are out of reinforcements, just push! Who cares what happens even one second after the last objective's been taken? Not the zerg, that's for sure.

These are two opposite ends of a scale. Usually, you'll have a mixture of some. When I began RO not long ago, I was extremelly excited to have lasted five minutes - not only to have survived, crawling around in the mud, but also to have engaged targets and (rare as it may have been) taking them out. But, as Basil nicely put it, it just did not pay off enough. Because in the end I ended contributing little to the team - or so it seemed.
Soon after the initial shock passed, I started selling my life cheap - just because I could.
Then there was the stage of getting more accustomed with the game, but - I have to admit this, sadly - I did not revert much. I still all to often sell my life to cheap, for anyone willing to take it. However, recently I am trying to get real, so to say, and while tanking I will stop often and scout for targets, to spot them as soon as possible. On foot, I will try to scout the situation ahead and try to find a good way of solving it. I'm trying not to be in a rush. I'm trying to survive. I'm finding that it's not the default approach in this game. Well, just a little rant. Comments, questions, dirty jokes?

[Feldwebel Horst]

you are totally right, the lack of fear of death make nearly everyone to "zerg".
for me personally, i always try to do best for my team, lookin for some cover, flanking the enemy and ambushing. too sadly that i´m mostly alone there, it could be much better if someone would join in. that would also improve my and his lifetime on the battlefield.

[Solo4114]

It's not simply lack of fear of death. It's that there's a time limit and the clock is ticking. Any game with respawns is not going to have "fear of death." Even a game WITH NO respawns will still not have TRUE fear of death, so in that sense "fear of death" is some mythical shangri-la concept that gamers have concocted. As far as the more realistic "video game" version of "fear of death" (which is more just excitement and immersion coupled with semi-realistic tactics), that's a matter of preference for gamers.

At the moment, I think RO's game design appropriately "punishes" people who are foolish in terms of how they play. BUT THIS MAY NOT MEAN WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS.

By that I mean people who literally just charge blindly, who don't use their weapon to its advantages, etc., those people tend to get killed relatively quickly, even if they manage to take one or two people with them. You can't, however, expect them NOT to at least get a couple guys sometimes. Everyone gets lucky (or unlucky) now and then.

So, that lunatic "run 'n' gunner" with the SMG who appears to have charged blindly lobbing grenades in on the way only to spray and pray and manage to kill you while clearing out the objective? Maybe he's not as dumb as you think. That's EXACTLY what I'd do were I in the same position. I might aim a bit more, but aiming in RO is not like aiming in real life. Depending on how close I was, though, I'd just spray and pray.

Actually, the guys I think are the MOST suicidal are the people who DON'T think about their weapon and who simply charge in. So, pretty much, the SMGers "run 'n' gun" tactics are what you'd want to do, given that the SMG is most deadly up close. But the riflemen who charge in, those guys are the real lunatics to me.


Anyway, I generally play cautiously. I run from cover to cover, I'll stop to regain my breath here and there, but I'll also do the banzai charge if the situation dictates it (IE: my team needs reinforcing NOW; the map's about to end and we have one more cap zone to take; etc.). But honestly, I think the clock is your biggest enemy when talking about the "zerg assault."

[Funker42]

Originally Posted by Solo4114

Any game with respawns is not going to have "fear of death." Even a game WITH NO respawns will still not have TRUE fear of death, so in that sense "fear of death" is some mythical shangri-la concept that gamers have concocted. As far as the more realistic "video game" version of "fear of death" (which is more just excitement and immersion coupled with semi-realistic tactics), that's a matter of preference for gamers.

I take it you have never played WWIIOL? Or ran through an Ultima Online dungeon with 20k of gold in your backpack when you have run out of mana while 9 hell hounds have just spawned on top of you?

Fear of death can be pulled off... Usually painfully so in MMO some games with "virtual worlds" because of long term gains and losses.

I think the 15 minute down time trip to the front in WWII Online really got annoying sometimes especially when you got killed by someone you didn't even see, but fear of death was there and made you not play so recklessly.

With RO, I don't think it can be simulated by a risk reward system simply because it is very hard to simulate a punishment system even with something as painful as WWIIOL.

However, you could simulate fear of death in the computer side of things. Perhaps a "Fear of Death" meter in which the more you see your team mates die, get shot at, or simply surrounded by the enemy will cause you to "freeze up" like people do in real life.

Many people will argue "but I want to have my guy do as my controls do!".

Well many people want their characters to have perfect auto aim with crosshairs and run at "the Flash" speeds and jump in the air like Superman, but that doesn't make it realistic and you don't see those things in RO.

I've said this before... RO treats the virtual characters as they were high on PCP with no long term reactions to pain, exhaustion, or fear of death.

If you were an 18 year old bavarian farmer and you just saw all your squad mates blow up due to an arty shell... You'd sit there and cry and crap your pants without much self control.

On the other hand... If you were a hardened veteran then you could be surrounded by the enemy and still fight to the death.

The only way I could think you could "simulate" this would be to a timer on the player that gains them rank depending on how long they have been alive. Say you go from "Green" to "Seen combat" in 3 minutes and "Battle Hardened" and "Vetern" at 12 and maybe "Fanatical" at 15. I dunno...

But in order to simulate reality you must have some type of involuntary morale system. I doubt TWI is going to do that any time soon, but a game that actually decides to use such a system in a multi-player game might be revolutionary. (or might fail horribly).

So... You are right... The carrot and stick approach will not work to get people to play in such a way to not be fearless suicidal commandos, but rather enforce it like you do with Iron sights and stamina.

[LordKhaine]

If you want fear of death to the extreme, play eve online! You can lose painful amounts in that game. Easy to lose weeks, or even months of money in a single death.

Anyway. As mentioned above suicidal to one is feasible to another. I've played this game long enough to know what's doable, but I'm sure many times to others I've appeared suicidal charging across that open space throwing grenades. I never charge into a situation that is literally suicide, but I've regularly thrown myself into a situation where survival is unlikely, but still very much possible. And I'm sure the same goes for most people.

Outside of placing RO in a mmo enviroment, I don't think you can change that mentality. All ideas I've seen to stop it so far have had huge drawbacks. And don't get me started on how bad an idea it would be to remove scores

[Solo4114]

None of what you guys have described, is actual "fear of death." No one is afraid of dying in a video game. They're afraid of negative consequences in the game, sure, but that's not actual fear of death.

When people talk about wanting "fear of death" I view it as code for one of two things. At the most basic level, it means "I want the game to be exciting and I want my adrenaline pumping when I'm playing." RO's already got that. I've had plenty of experiences in-game like the ones you guys have mentioned, where I'm racing to get to a cap zone and we've almost got it. I've had similar experiences in other games where I came around the corner and had an "OH CRAP!!" moment because I just ran into [insert surprising and powerful badguy here].

I think people also use "fear of death" as shorthand for "I want the game to be immersive and feel realistic in terms of what I think is realism." And that's where the problems come in because my sense of what's realistic is not your sense of what's realistic, and neither party's sense of realism is actual objective realism. No matter what is coded as "realistic", it's going to be someone's perception of that. Thus, ANY attempt at "realism" in a video game is necessarily colored by what a particular person thinks is "realistic."

When it comes to things like impacting how the avatar operates, psychological factors such as "fear" are a mistake to implement. I mean, let's say they did implement "fear" in the game. Are they going to implement "rage", too? How about "confusion"?

"Fear" hits people differently in different circumstances and is extremely dependent upon both the situation and the person. For example, I could see my buddy in a foxhole not 15 feet from mine get blown into a fine red mist by a mortar round. What happens next? Am I crazed with fear or suddenly suicidally brave because I want revenge? When I'm crazed with fear, do I stay frozen in one spot, or completely lose control of my senses and start running the hell away? When I'm suicidally brave, does my aim shake because there's so much adrenaline pumping through me that I can't hold still, or am I so out of myself that I become a perfect killing machine? Or are there other behaviors that you'd see from someone under those same circumstances that I haven't listed here?

Any answer you give is simply YOUR perception of what would happen, and is likely colored by your own experiences and psychological makeup, and may not be the same as someone else's answer. And NONE of that should be represented by videogame mechanics. On the other hand, physiological effects (IE: being dazed by an artillery shell that goes off near you) are different. Getting winded, that's legitimate. Slowing down because a bullet grazed your leg and now you're limping a bit, that's legitimate too. But fear and other psychological factors should stay out of video games and be left to the players and their own experiences.

[The_Cook]

Only way you can put "fear of death" into anygame is to attach electrodes to the players genitals. I guarantee you after the first shock the player will either never play with the electrodes on, or play much more carefully.

Just be warned there are some out there that might grow to enjoy death.

Now if I can get this mouse to hold still long enough I can staple those antlers onto him!

[Colt .45 killer]

i was the other way around, coming from twitch shooters to RO, i started by getting in there and getting dirty zerg style and quickly mooved to a more reserved player. guaranteed i am still ready to rush the cap when necessary, but when i can i prefer to take my time getting there;however, war dosent always allow for the best way. what ticks me off is the zerg only players who rush all the time....

[Coolicus]

Just to add to what some people have already said, how many of you would be willing to see more realistic reactions to the combat enviroment which is gauged by the time you have been on the battlefield for (prehaps for one game, or even one life) eg when you first spawn at the start various ranks are given diffrent levels of battle experience. So you could expect the highest ranks to act more methodical and calculated IE if a machine gun opens up they are not automatically diving for cover as a riflemen conscript would. To make the system pay dividence, I theorise that the lower ranks in real life would recieve more combat experience over time so that eventually they can attain a greater amount of "battle experience" or at least gain it quicker so that by the end of a game you have the lower ranks being able to ignore the instinct to go for cover or freeze with fear. I dont believe that this will be implemented but just on a theoretical level who would enjoy this system?

3rd post be nice!

[NightriderAOF]

I try to zerg as little as possible. First of all, with every zerging, you will probably run out of reinforcements fairly quickly. Secondly, I enjoy trying to stay alive and getting as many kills as I can. That said, you should always remember that you're just another grunt in the battle, so if you should die, it's not that big of a deal. But on the other side of the coin, you can be the one to possibly determine whether or not your team wins the round, in whatever manner that may be.

[Reacz]

The biggest problem is not the run and gunners, but the muppets who assault in a group with about 4 of them less than a foot apart.

1 grenade = 4 very dead soldiers.

[Phoenix-D]

Originally Posted by Feldwebel Horst

you are totally right, the lack of fear of death make nearly everyone to "zerg".
for me personally, i always try to do best for my team, lookin for some cover, flanking the enemy and ambushing. too sadly that i´m mostly alone there, it could be much better if someone would join in. that would also improve my and his lifetime on the battlefield.

RO maps simply don't have enough time for this kind of approach, with rare exceptions. If its done RIGHT, it can work, but its rarely done right.

More often you get the "cowardly" people that spend 99% of time hunched behind cover and/or crawling, even when doing so is a bad idea. They hang back and plink, even when not equipped for it. This isn't caution; its just bad tactics.

[kapulA]

Well the thing is,there always needs to be more bodies in the cap,so I always charge with my rifle,hoping that the SMGs get grenaded by me or my teammates or a comrade SMG takes care of them.Bolt riflemen and and semi-auto riflemen(the latter to some extent) I can take care of in CQC.
Killing an SMG with a rifle is rare though,but that makes it more fun when you finally do,doesn't it?

[_MB_]

Diminishing reinforcements are the penalty for suicidal charging. If you can get a few people to retreat (amongst the inevitable spamming of "no retreat" should you suggest it might be an idea to withdraw) and play smarter then you're doing OK. Works most often on Berezina but you see it on other maps too - its how soviets win on Ponyri

[Naoghen]

You can't add "Fear of Death" to this game, It's not impossible but it would take a lot of time due to engine limitation.
What you have to do is simple: change your mind, you can play ANY game tactically, roleplaying as a real soldier, if you want, and if you have fun doing it.
I do this all the time, people call me a noob, but I'm having a lot of fun, so I don't care.

[Bandiitti]

Hi everyone! Im new to this forum but have been playing RO some 6 months now.
I agree with you guys. There´s no Fear of Death in this game and Im not going to start repeating your good arguments. You don´t have to play RO for a long time to be able to see that points are the most important thing to most gamers. Higer -MY- name is on the list the better.

So why don´t we give some bonus to those players who survive. Let´s say You have managed to stay alive for 3 minutes. Your score for a kill would be 1x3=3 or It could be 1x1,5 or something else -you got the point. We can´t change human nature so why dont we try to gain our natural greed
Capzones.....
PS. Sorry if this has been discussed earlier. Im new here, remember..

[Hyperion2010]

Honestly over time I get the feeling that a no scoreboard mutator and no DM mutator combined really help people play more realistically because their only real reward is not having to wait for respawn.

[arnold]

when i play on a public server, its allways the same. defenders attack to much while attacker sit back and plink. there are too many people that play exactly the same when they are in the attacking team or in the defending team. it happens too often that the defenders leave a great defenceposition just to get kills before the other teammates get them. i have seen this very often: im the mg in a great defence position, and there is absolute no need to move up, but there are allways idiots that ran trough my field of fire, or charge to get the kills i could get very easily just to get killed.

if u wanna help gameplay, than punish the dying defender, but not the dying attacker. punish the attacker for dying would kill public play!

mfg Arnold

[BuD_GrimReaper]

Originally Posted by arnold

when i play on a public server, its allways the same. defenders attack to much while attacker sit back and plink. there are too many people that play exactly the same when they are in the attacking team or in the defending team. it happens too often that the defenders leave a great defenceposition just to get kills before the other teammates get them. i have seen this very often: im the mg in a great defence position, and there is absolute no need to move up, but there are allways idiots that ran trough my field of fire, or charge to get the kills i could get very easily just to get killed.

if u wanna help gameplay, than punish the dying defender, but not the dying attacker. punish the attacker for dying would kill public play!

mfg Arnold

²

@ OP, you misunderstood my post mate. Never did I incline or enforce the mindless gameplay. I was just pointing out that any kind of punishment will cripple any game.
Take basovka for instance. If you punish the attackers for dieing, hell, germans wouldn't be able to do anything BUT to sit back and take potshots because the risk of dieing is so great. The point is the only way to win basovka is to do a big charge with atleast 70% of your team, most will die but its about the only way to get a foothold in the AT gun position when your playing against a good team of russians.

All i'm saying is that you NEED people to build up a charge. You're talkin pubs here. Its hard to coordinate a bunch of people that dont have VOIP so the only way to get things done most of the time is to give general instructions and give the example untill more and more people are enticed by your plan and participate. You can't expect a feasible attack when the defenders arent feasible either, thats where the bigger problem is. Defenders will be reinforced quicker than you can feasibly approach and cap and if you die in that careful approach you've lost more time than its worth. Sometimes the only way to actually cap a zone is to get as much bodies in it as you can because the defense is just reinforced too quickly to make any kind of 'stealthy' approach, useless. It just won't work on pubs.

personally i run from cover to cover when going for a cap zone, but I do it relatively quick, I don't hang back 5 minutes to take potshots at the enemy while i'm of much greater value up front (I usually play SL or semi though). ofcourse all of this depends on the situation, you need flankers, you need riflemen that can hit targets from the back but most of all you need your men to be on the move, a static attack is no attack at all. You can stall an attack and then make an opportunity to attack by either smoke or destroying the enemy tank but at that moment you need MOST of your team ro react quickly and charge up, even with the risk of dieing, thats war for ya.

[UncleDrax]

Originally Posted by arnold

when i play on a public server, its allways the same. defenders attack to much while attacker sit back and plink. there are too many people that play exactly the same when they are in the attacking team or in the defending team.

you know what they say.. the best defense is a good offense.. *shrug*

Lets face it.. RO is a game.. alot of people don't consider sitting in one spot laying down, waiting for the enemy to walk into your field of fire 'fun'..

(Don't get me wrong.. I don't mind it.. and I do believe some of the offical RO maps are setup with some great kill zones when actually used (the back tunnel in Danzig comes to mind..)