lATENT_c said:
The problem with getting people to advance on assault maps (a problem that I rarely see happening, personally) is a result of the game design/ objective being flawed. People want to win. If they understand how to win, they will do that.
If that involves hiding, they will hide. If that involves advancing in a realistic, team-based, tactical way, they will do that.
Change the system and you change the way people play. Period.
Your conclusion flows from your premise, but your premise is flawed.
You say people want to win, and if they know how, that's what they'll do. That's your premise. I disagree with this.
I think people want to have fun first and foremost. The activities that they find fun, however, may differ from person to person.
For some people, fun = winning first and foremost. Thus, all actions that they take in game will focus on doing what is required for their team to win.
For other people, getting a high score = fun, regardless of who wins or loses. In some games this gets taken to the extreme where people "scorewhore" their way to the top of the list -- repeating whatever action is necessary to get more points. Luckily, the people who like getting points and the people who want their team to win have coinciding mechanisms for acheiving their different goals. You get a high score by helping your team win (capping points, resupplying MGs, killing enemies). You win by doing basically the same thing, but capping points most of all (hence the fact that it gets the most points). If all you want is points, you'll go and cap positions to get them, and your team will win.
For other people, getting kills (not points, just kills) is what they find fun. There's a subset of folks like this who also care primarily about their K/D ratio. For them, the points are incidental. Winning is incidental. ALL that matters is getting a kill (and not dying), or at least that matters to them MORE than other things. The longer you stay alive, the more kills you can get. These are the people who hang back, EVEN WHEN THEY RECOGNIZE that you have to capture points to win. They simply don't care about winning -- they care about killing. The explosion of a tank or a death message is what spurs them on.
Finally, you have the "other" folks. For them, they want to be able to get kills, etc. but want to do it FAST. RO is not fast. It's deliberate. There are moments where things move quickly, but RO's pace is much slower than most other FPS games out there. Then there's the folks who derive fun from ruining other people's games. These are the hackers, cheaters, TKers, etc.
The game already rewards what it takes to win. Get your ass in the cap zone. Kill the enemy. The enemy has a tougher time when you provide covering fire for teammates, and you tend to win more when you work as a team. The thing is, adding in rewards will only work for the people who desire points, or wins. The peopel who just want kills or just want to run around and shoot their guns or throw grenades (without even killing anyone) won't care. Unless you add in something like "Staying within 10m of your commander reduces the effect of suppression and makes your aim more steady", you can't really reward teamwork. Plus, there's always ways people will find to play the game the way you don't want them to play. Let's say they added the "morale boost" thing I mentioned -- what's to stop the commander and everyone else from STILL ramboing around? Or from hanging back on their asses sniping away while the clock ticks down?
Regardless, the point here hasn't been about REWARDS, but rather about PENALTIES. It's fine to add in all manner of rewards. I'm for that, assuming it won't kill game performance. But adding in PENALTIES doesn't equal adding a reward. They're two drastically different things. If you penalize someone, it doesn't encourage them to do something. It DISCOURAGES them from doing the thing they did right before the penalty was imposed.
If your dog sniffs at the trashcan and every time he does you yell "NO!" or whack him with a rolled up newspaper, he won't sniff the trashcan. He will not, however, learn to roll over at the same time. This is why penalties won't solve the problem you have.
The game's point system and reward AND penalty mechanisms are about as good as they can get. There's already a mutator out there that removes death messages. I believe it only lets you see the list of people on the scoreboard, and not the number of points they have, but I may be wrong. These things will help somewhat, but they won't REMOVE the things that tick you off about other folks in-game. The best advice I can give is get used to them and/or play on servers where there's a regular group of folks who get teamwork.
