Leither Yiltron
Molon Labe.
General Tso's Alliance
973
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Posted - 2014.11.03 23:06:00 -
[1] - Quote
CCP Rattati wrote:
Squad Focused Strike - Very high WP, targets the enemy MCC for massive damage, go all out chasing that strike from second one, or turn a clone-out defeat into a narrow victory by lancing the MCC in the last seconds.
Now we also have a fun strategic element, do you progress up to the harder WP Strikes, or "spam" the lower ones. Not having only one choice will provide massive changes in gameplay.
I'd like to weigh in that this particular idea of MCC-targeting warbarge strikes sounds good on paper, but would be really bad for competitive gameplay in practice. I'm talking PC level games here, it's hard to judge the impact of these types of mechanics on pub matches.
Traditionally the team that has the most war points in a game is the team that has the most kills. Your vision of "losing on clones but have the strike to turn it around," is a corner case at best. What's grossly more likely to happen is "losing on MCC but winning on clones" and "losing on MCC but abusing war point mechanics as much as possible". It's not a secret that if you really want to, a team can easily make tons of war points with the right focus on repping heavies.
This inherently gives even more advantage to the team that, for any reason WHATSOEVER, has a higher KDR. Keep in mind that there's the obvious advantage to having a higher KDR for your team- the enemy team spends less time physically on the map in state where they have the ability to project force.
That's a huge advantage, really the only necessary advantage, for having high gun skill. But Dust takes it a step farther with clone count mechanics. The classic argument for why clone count was implemented in the first place was to discourage "human wave" attacks. I've never particularly understood why the original developers were worried that "man, what if 16 players attack the same place FOUR times and die instead of just one?" since that doesn't usually work tactically in the first place, but let's put that aside for the moment. Clone count mechanics do discourage a certain range of tactics.
The thing is nobody does those tactics because they're discouraged. So the overall effect of clone count on competitive battles is to give another edge to the team with higher gun skill, an edge which is independent of tactical and strategic gameplay on behalf of either team, granted that one team or another isn't so terrible that their tactical performance somehow interferes with their ability to point and hold R1.
I'm not a big fan of that, but that's not this thread. The point is that clone count is ALREADY an inherent advantage to the team that kills more people. A strike that did damage to the MCC which would be essentially dependent on number of kills? That would be yet another mechanic which undermines actual tactical play and moves Dust's game modes even more towards the status of one big death match.
It's absurd to imagine a scenario where one team has taken extra losses outmaneuvering their opponents, eeks by an edge on MCC damage, and then still loses because the other team was handed the "I win" button.
On a more general note:
Speculating about strikes is fun, but keep in mind particularly with flux strikes that the current collision mechanics are historically inconsistent. When PC first started off people experimented with the gigantic radius Eve-based flux strikes, but the thing is that the current explosion mechanics behave very oddly with geometry. Uplinks in corners, under tiny roof lips but nearly outdoors, along walls...basically everywhere that normal people put uplinks, those things survived. Also keep in mind that the non-lethality of flux strikes virtually guarantees that if a logistics guy is spawned on his favorite uplink, he's just going to throw down another as soon as his first gets vaporized anyways.
Laser and hybrid ended up eternally more popular for these reasons. Utility was never worth sacrificing lethality, especially factoring in clone count.
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Leither Yiltron
Molon Labe.
General Tso's Alliance
975
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Posted - 2014.11.03 23:44:00 -
[2] - Quote
Jadek Menaheim wrote:Leither Yiltron wrote:The thing is nobody does those tactics because they're discouraged. So the overall effect of clone count on competitive battles is to give another edge to the team with higher gun skill, an edge which is independent of tactical and strategic gameplay on behalf of either team, granted that one team or another isn't so terrible that their tactical performance somehow interferes with their ability to point and hold R1.
I'm not a big fan of that, but that's not this thread. The point is that clone count is ALREADY an inherent advantage to the team that kills more people. A strike that did damage to the MCC which would be essentially dependent on number of kills? That would be yet another mechanic which undermines actual tactical play and moves Dust's game modes even more towards the status of one big death match.
It's absurd to imagine a scenario where one team has taken extra losses outmaneuvering their opponents, eeks by an edge on MCC damage, and then still loses because the other team was handed the "I win" button. Would you feel better if MCC strikes were not connected to a WP amount but instead holding periodically rotating defensive point like a null cannon or special installation for a specific amount of time? That means teams would need to focus on null canons and these rotating objectives in order to secure victory.
I'm always up to entertain ideas for secondary objectives, but I doubt the tech backing for that kind of thing is around.
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