As this is my first post on these forums, I would like to start off by saying how appreciative I am of all the effort Tripwire has put into this game. It is refreshing to play a title like Red Orchestra, which seems untouched by the influences of corporate business models and marketing hype. It's just an extremely artistic and well developed game that sells itself on quality alone.
Now for the topic of my post.... One of the things that always frustrates me about the gameplay of Red Orchestra is the widespread disregard for conserving reinforcements. On maps such as Konigsplatz, Odessa, and StalingradKessel, it seems that unless the defending team is completely whipping the opposing force, they will usually lose the battle by running out their reinforcements. Even on servers with experienced players, despite admonitions to "watch reinforcements", the common impulse of most defenders is to run themselves into the meat grinder in an attempt to kill the enemy. Obviously that's one way to win, but when the number of reinforcements are stacked against you, a better strategy is to hang on and hold objectives.
Why do people always do this? It's because there's no real penalty for dying. You'd think players would be more careful in a game where a single bullet can kill you, but when it feels like you can keep on spawning an infinite number of times (and it usually happens within 5-10 seconds), why use caution? After all, points are awarded for kills and captures. Deaths do not affect one's score at all. RO gamers love to make fun of the arcade style of Counterstrike, but in that game, if you died, that was it. No respawn, you had to sit out until the next round. And that made people careful. I suppose the incentive to not dying in RO is the short wait and walk before you make it back to the battle. Some maps, like Berezina are so big that you definitely don't want to die, cause it takes like 5 minutes to travel back to the front, and longer if there are no halftracks around. However most maps are so small that dying is never a big deal, and you'll be back in the fight almost instantly. If someone killed you from a hiding spot, chances are you can just run back and nade him 20 seconds later.
I think a possible solution to this would be to factor deaths into the score. I'm not saying we should have an outright kill-death column like most FPS games, but deaths should definitely have an impact, maybe something like -1 points or something. Then teamkilling would be -3 (i think it's currently -2). With this change, people will be motivated to be a bit more careful. On assault/defend maps, the attacking team has more reinforcements so they are supposed to charge. Thus the -1 penalty should be only for the defending team.
I guess this was kind of a long post, so thanks for reading
Now for the topic of my post.... One of the things that always frustrates me about the gameplay of Red Orchestra is the widespread disregard for conserving reinforcements. On maps such as Konigsplatz, Odessa, and StalingradKessel, it seems that unless the defending team is completely whipping the opposing force, they will usually lose the battle by running out their reinforcements. Even on servers with experienced players, despite admonitions to "watch reinforcements", the common impulse of most defenders is to run themselves into the meat grinder in an attempt to kill the enemy. Obviously that's one way to win, but when the number of reinforcements are stacked against you, a better strategy is to hang on and hold objectives.
Why do people always do this? It's because there's no real penalty for dying. You'd think players would be more careful in a game where a single bullet can kill you, but when it feels like you can keep on spawning an infinite number of times (and it usually happens within 5-10 seconds), why use caution? After all, points are awarded for kills and captures. Deaths do not affect one's score at all. RO gamers love to make fun of the arcade style of Counterstrike, but in that game, if you died, that was it. No respawn, you had to sit out until the next round. And that made people careful. I suppose the incentive to not dying in RO is the short wait and walk before you make it back to the battle. Some maps, like Berezina are so big that you definitely don't want to die, cause it takes like 5 minutes to travel back to the front, and longer if there are no halftracks around. However most maps are so small that dying is never a big deal, and you'll be back in the fight almost instantly. If someone killed you from a hiding spot, chances are you can just run back and nade him 20 seconds later.
I think a possible solution to this would be to factor deaths into the score. I'm not saying we should have an outright kill-death column like most FPS games, but deaths should definitely have an impact, maybe something like -1 points or something. Then teamkilling would be -3 (i think it's currently -2). With this change, people will be motivated to be a bit more careful. On assault/defend maps, the attacking team has more reinforcements so they are supposed to charge. Thus the -1 penalty should be only for the defending team.
I guess this was kind of a long post, so thanks for reading