Alternative to rienforcements

[smokeythebear]

One thing I think is an issue in RO is part of the reinforcement mechanic. While it does build some great tension it is limited to the final few minutes of the game. In pubs there is no sense of how bad a situation your team is in when only a few players grasp that the team may have to fall back and make every life count because they can estimate how soon reinforcements will drop.

I think a defending team should be punished in a meaningful way for losing too many troops in a short amount of time. Similiar too the 'rienforcements are depleted' messages, you get a warning that you are 'the last of your squad', meaning that spawn times will be much longer the usual following the message. While you could punish players for dying too much individually, this instead rewards those who can hold thier ground against the odds, and would create even more of those tense moments of being outnumbered.

In the end the rienforcement pool will stay the same, but this way a team actually has to fight to stay alive all game.

 

[Zetsumei]

remember that by limiting reinforcements you would not punish anyone really. If the system is clearly implemented people would interpret it as lives. Resulting that people will adapt their play to stay alive. Even in arcade games like quake, return to castle wolfenstein and ut, people generally didn't run out of lives on limited live servers but rather adapted their play to live longer.

This generally results in players playing differently if they are close running out just so they won't run out for sure. And in the few cases someone does run out similarly to countdown players shouldn't start with all their lives from the get go but should get lives slowly spread over the duration of a map.

Its a natural behaviour of people if you are running out of things, you'll use them more sparingly. The issue is that is that people do not use shared pools carefully if they do not know and trust each other.

Put a big pile of money in a square and the first 10 will grab it all, using the redenation that if they wouldn't grab it all someone else would.

 

[smokeythebear]

The point is that if you die carelessly you have to wait much longer then usual, but not as long as the entire round end. If you a limited number of lives per person some people would be out in the first half of the game. With this way you put a stopgap on people dying to much while making it harder for defenders to actually hold the objectives.

I don't like the idea of a very limited life pool, like in the new countdown mode, because you end up in these situations where the last people left on offense and defense are both camping.

 

[Zetsumei]

Again there are multiple methods that can be used to achieve the same.

Basically making your spawn time longer or shorter based on performance is pretty much the same but then rather than you yourself having the chance to take a step back the system does it. That would do for me as well.

But in general I think that the chance of having longer spawns when doing bad are pretty slim which is why I'm aiming for individual reinf.

But in general i just want it all to become more accessible and easier for the public players. As of now the entire reinf system is pretty much unused which is a waste and often more annoying than fun.

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Remember that what i suggested was a reset of lives every objective so every player gets like 3 or 4 lives for capturing the next objective. Aka even if you didn't die once you cannot stockpile your unused lives. You would simply get a completely new set of x lives after every objective.

This limits that one player at the end got 16 lives while another got 0. And allows mappers to change the reinf on a per cap basis. So a harder cap you can have more and an easier cap you can have liss.

With individual reinforcements you can make it so that team killers get punished by basically letting the person they tked spawn out of the tk- ers individual pool.

And to promote giving your own life to a player without lives you could get a score bonus.

 

[Slyk]

Should be merged with Zets topic in General Discussion...

1. Add penalty time to the guy who dies to quickly, figure out a scale where the faster you die the more time is added to the next spawn wave for you. Figure a normal life span, for example: two minutes, then increment down from there, as an example: 1:30-2:00= 1 sec; 1:00-1:29= 3 sec; :30-:59= 5 sec; :15-:29 = 7 sec; :01-:14-=:10 sec.

2. Limited spawns per objective. Could be a neat alternative for the level designer to simulate a forward position etc. versus the timed spawn use we had in RO. Sort of a reinforcement based version of 'Countdown'.

3. Also as I mentioned in the other thread, limited spawns by role. Use up all of your portable MG lives and tough luck to the team. Variant: Limit each player to X spawns per non-rifleman role.

4. Show the remaining reinforcements as a percentage AND as a whole number... ex: 74% (57) or something like that.

 

[Zetsumei]

3. Also as I mentioned in the other thread, limited spawns by role. Use up all of your portable MG lives and tough luck to the team. Variant: Limit each player to X spawns per non-rifleman role.
.

If one single person with the MG wastes all the MG's the entire team is ****ed, because of one persons action. Dunno if that is desirable. I would rather in that case have the bad performing MG replaced by someone else on the team, than punishing the entire team for something only one person is responsible for.

 

[Reise]

You might not think it's so stale when servers are running MP campaigns and manpower is dynamic and could be limited depending on the situation.

In fact I think it would cover most of what you're looking for.

 

[Zetsumei]

You might not think it's so stale when servers are running MP campaigns and manpower is dynamic and could be limited depending on the situation.

In fact I think it would cover most of what you're looking for.

The thing that might differ in the campaign is starting conditions when you play a map. But you will still have some reinforcements when you start or not. If reinforcements would transfer over multiple maps actually the issue would actually become bigger more complicated and especially more distant from the player, and the more a need would arise to make it clear what is happening with possibly some sort of feedback control.

But especially in campaign when you are for instance low on reinforcements, you'll need to conserve reinforcements. If you just see a percentage like 100% you got no clue how many reinforcements there actually are.

With individual lives a player can easily see direct feedback from dying too much. Which makes the system stable and easy.

The entire discussion is to as much as possible solve the issue that generally nobody bothers with reinforcements till its already too late. A part of that is in the information supply, the other part is lack of feedback control.

 

[dogbadger]

I haven't really looked into the new squad ideas and what that could mean for reinforcments in HoS tbh, but based on RO i liked the idea of a reinforcment counter.

It's like a waiting room for reinforcments to enter the game, starting at 1 when the game commences and shortly building up to a maximum of lets say 5.

Any repawns are taken from this pool, which refills from the total reinforcments - meaning as people respawn these reserves have to build up again to ensure up to 5 ppl can jump straignt back in - a catastropic loss of 5+ ppl in an instant will obviously penalise the team, with no reserves available for a period of time.

They could refill at different rates so you get your 1st standby solder after a few secs, but the wait to aquire your 2nd 3rd etc up to 5th takes longer each time.

This doesn't discriminate between players however, but it does at least penalise on the whole against losing troops too recklessly (or seen the other way reward the other team for making decisive breakthroughs or effective defenses)

 

[FlyXwire]

So when casualties are necessarily high when taking a well defended objective like (5+), you want to penalize respawns?

So if players are dieing at the hands of a really good sniper or a well emplaced MG crew on an objective, or maybe they're just unlucky and a whole squad gets knocked out in an artillery barrage, the suggestion is that players should have to sit on their thumbs?

Maybe when we die in a game we could make it all better if we could "beg for forgiveness".