Fivetimes Infinity
Immobile Infantry
1086
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Posted - 2012.12.16 15:49:00 -
[1] - Quote
You can make a friendly fire system intelligent enough that cases of obvious malice get more severely punished than cases where it's likely the person was simply careless. In World of Tanks, another F2P match-based game not unlike Dust, friendly fire is active all the time. The system actually takes several things into account when you shoot an ally however, rather than punishing every instance of friendly fire equally.
For example, if you shoot an ally who is near an enemy, the penalty for that FF is less than if you were to shoot an ally in someplace safe, like your spawn. Similarly, if you shoot an ally one time, the penalty is less, but if you shoot him repeatedly, each successive shot has a greater penalty.
So, the guy who fires a shell at an enemy near you, and you move at the last minute and put yourself in front of your ally's shot, that ally who hit you gets a relatively minor punishment, while if you were to repeatedly shoot an ally at spawn, your punishment would be severe. It is possible to have a degree of malice-detection, then, in a friendly fire system. |
Fivetimes Infinity
Immobile Infantry
1086
|
Posted - 2012.12.17 04:55:00 -
[2] - Quote
Whatever ideas you have for punishing TK'ers, you need to think of something that would matter to a person who creates an alt for the purposes of TK'ing. Or even someone who plays Dust only to TK, with no serious characters they care about. If I just roll out an alt in starter fits and shoot allies in the head from a foot away repeatedly, what would no ISK matter? What would no SP matter? Sorry, but if you're going to have friendly fire, you'd need to have seriously, obviously egregious and persistent instances of TK'ing put a person's entire account at risk. As in, if you kill enough friendlies in a game you get temporarily suspended, and if you do that too many times, you get permanently banned from Dust.
Without limiting temporarily and, eventually, permanently, their ability to access Dust, you really can't prevent TK'ing from being a regular part of the game. And as nobody likes TK'ing, it would be "a bad thing" to leave friendly fire on with your only penalties being WP and ISK -- two things that really don't matter and wouldn't stop people from TK'ing excessively. Without actual supensions/bans resulting from TK'ing, you really can't automatically punish TK'ing enough to remove it from the game while keeping the good parts of friendly fire, and you may as well just disable friendly fire except for corp battles.
Oh, and again, this is an opinion based on seeing the tremendous success of another F2P game, called World of Tanks, which has friendly fire even in random battles, and yet has minimal TK'ing because you risk your account if you shoot friendlies excessively. |