The lack of strategy features in PR

[TheLean]

Great subject and idea farks!

Giving 20 tickets when a captured flag is held for 5 mins and lose 20 tickets when it is lost for 5 minutes seems good to me.

On the subject of rewards,we can reward a team capturing a flag with more firebases, or even better, more assets to the firebases, such as a placeable antitank gun or similiar.

[Robbi]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]Rhino

Ye but that is also mainly down to gamemodes with AAS v3 (random flags), we wouldn't have funny flag names and odd locations if it wasn't for random flags

Well look into AAS v4 then , ie no flag names just control areas that spawn when needed...

[[R-DEV]fuzzhead]

Good discussion.

Heres a counterpoint to this old argument about objectives/strategy.

Right now we have in PR that the MOST IMPORTANT objective personally, is to stay alive. I think this is a key thing to note, and is absent in most every other multiplayer FPS that has respawn.

It does affect a players mentality I think, and I think encourages player to play more realistically (sometimes but not always). When your players life/vehicle is precious and a big factor in overall victory, I think you see players behavior to be a bit more slower paced/cautious, and a bit more realistic. If the objective is MORE important than your own life, then you will often rush to it, and try at all costs to get this objective, sacrificing your own life if need be in order to do it, because you know if the objective is yours, victory will be too, regardless of if you died in the process a couple dozen times or not

Although this is very noble of you to sacrifice yourself for "the greater good" lol, its also not creating a very good behavior in players, when they care more about taking objective than saving their own life they willing to take more risks and do some pretty stupid stuff all in the name of "capping teh flag!!!!".

I think to me, some of my most memorable rounds were when I had 0 deaths or close to it, and I think alot of other players can agree with that as well. Not saying that is the only way to enjoy PR, but certainly a slower paced game is a goal of PR's development, where rushing to objectives does not give successful results, but careful planning, tactics and strategy is key to victory.

I think vast majority of FPS players (this includes PR players) have a natural tendency to attack no matter what, there needs to be very little if any incentives built into the game in order to get players to attack. Majority if not all players will simply do this naturally, its usually the other way around, you have to BEG and PLEAD with them to stay and defend, as soon as an area is clear they are itching to move on and attack the next objective, regardless of whether its walking into a slaughter or not they often are heading to the next objective before they even capture the current one. It's just a natural instinct of most FPS gamers and I think that needs to be acknowledged in this discussion because you have to acknowledge natural player behaviors when developing gameplay with your "carrots and sticks".

Encouraging players to have even MORE aggressive behavior I don't think is going to help things in PR. We have tried our best to slow the pacing of the game down as much as possible, and reward defense and smart positioning as much as we can over just sheer aggressiveness and player "skill". However PR is still a game about rushing to places as fast as possible, moving out to attack as quickly as possible and generally doing things very aggressively, sometimes it works sometimes it don't but key point is, this behavior is deeply imbeded into the psyche of the FPS player, we dont need to tell players "hey, go attack", they will do it on their own, even if there is no objective to attack and ZERO strategic bonus to doing so!

Now talking about ticket bleed, the classic problem of ticket bleed I think is that once the enemy have started a ticket bleed, strategically there is little to no incentive to move forward (even though players will do this anyways). Whats worse though, is that once your team HAS a bleed, there is virtually NO incentive to defend, as its a losing battle. So essentially ticket bleed enforces an extremely aggressive strategy to be used most of the battle, with very little thought to defense. We hope that by introducing a ton of things in PR that defense would be more fun/interesting/useful, by adding all the deployables, the logistics system, etc. Adding a bleed negates most of that I think, and turns maps into slugfests between the 2 flags that induce the bleed, and the rest of the map/CP's are of little to no concern since by the time you get there, the ticket bleed will be heavy and one team will clearly be close to victory anyways.

Anyways that's a counterpoint to some of the arguments here, but I think the idea of adding ticket loss when enemy fully captures one of your CPs in AAS is a good one. Lets say for example 20 tickets lost each time the enemy fully captures one of your CPs. Adding ticket gain I think might drag on the battles for a long time, and I dont think the loss/gain should be large, as it does take away from what I mentioned earlier, the fact that STAYING ALIVE in PR right now is your #1 priority. That enables player behavior to be more realistic, player take less chances and dont act with a sort of suicide bombers mentality as much

Either way, I think its clear that AAS is very constricted because of the flags, and doesnt really offer a large strategy. I think youll see with newer versions we try to get away from AAS as much as possible and further develop the CNC mode, as thats what can offer true "strategy" to teams that are disciplined enough to follow a chain of command.

As for PRT etc.... I think it would be wise to adopt CNC as its main game mode as soon as the game mode reaches a point of maturity enough so that exploits are not as big an issue. AAS for competitive play I think is severely limiting and will always have that limit because of the nature of "flag capping". Other than the fact that currently there is not many CNC maps avaliable, I see no reason in the future that PRT should not drop AAS completely, in favour of the game modes that involve more deep strategy, planning and organization. As far as I see it, AAS is PR's "noob game mode", and hopefully when the more advanced game modes reach maturity we will see them played equally if not MORE than AAS.

As for mongol, I think your points brought up is a different discussion entirely, fitting the topic of strategy on maps but not really in the same way as the OP's point. Your gripe bout random AAS and what flags is relevant and what not also ties into making CNC and open style game modes more widely accepted and used instead of the "on-the-rails" AAS system that's been a mainstay at PR since beginning. The main objective for random AAS was to mix up maps and not have the action of each map focus on the same areas each time, thus keeping new/old maps fresh for much longer as you cant approach it the same way each time. It's not a perfect system but I think it has its merits, although yes a true open ended game mode would obviously be more desired than the AAS flag system.

I think alot of effort has been made to make insurgency both fun and strategically viable, and its been for the most part, hugely successful and popular. The game mode has nothing to do with flags yet it still remains strategic and tactically enjoyable. Hopefully in the future we can develop some more open ended game modes that involve conventional forces and don't involve "flag capping", for the more advanced players who are ready to evolve the gameplay further and organize entire teams with platoon wide tactics and strategy.

[Robbi]

I have always been a big advocate for CnC and Ins in the PRT using all layers available...

Really have no idea why it wasnt implemented really.

Yes its buggy, but what isnt

[Danolboy]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]fuzzhead

Right now we have in PR that the MOST IMPORTANT objective personally, is to stay alive..

I have to disagree with you here. The only reason a soldier is placed on the battlefield in the first place is to achieve an objective. Secondary to being on the battlefield to achieve that objective is staying alive whilst trying to complete it.

I would much rather die 10 times trying to complete an objective with my team mates than prance around on the map doing next to nothing so that I preserve my precious K/D ratio.

A balance between objective based gameplay and K/D ratio is the way forward.

[Jonny]

Instead of simply removing tickets, why not make it a little more interesting?

Why not have a bunch of tickets associated with each flag, 150 for east ejod for example. When the flag is neutral, no one gets the tickets. When one team has control of the flag, they have all the tickets. Now, when you cap a flag you see the effect on your tickets immediately.

When you loose a flag, it hurts a lot, for the east ejod example you would loose 150 if you lost the flag. You can see your ticket count tumbling down, and your vehicles no longer being available. Hows that for incentive to defend? I cant see it getting much more important that litteraly being unable to afford to loose a flag, by having fewer tickets than loosing it would take from you.

Now have a whole load of flags like this, so the total ticket count is double the tickets from flags, and you have something quite interesting. Now you can 'loan' tickets from flags if you control them. Apply the same thing to FOs in C&C mode, and they become more important still.

[Robbi]

Anyway a round can be won when a team reaches a certain amount of tickets...

ie each flag is worth x amount and once Team 1 reaches 1000 tickets say it ends the round...

[Zimmer]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]Rhino

I dunno if this is exactly what you mean or not but that got me thinking of may (probably not for AAS but anouther game mode) you can have flags that need to be captured, and once captured and held for a period of time by a team, they then disappear after held for 15mins or something, thou if they where captured by team 1, then team 2 over ran the point and captured it before the 15min timer was up, then it would reset etc. The team to be able to capture it and hold it for the full time could then be rewarded or the enemy team could loose tickets etc. Then after that anouther flag pops up or something.

Just thinking out loud here but ye, could be an interesting concept, maybe not that realistic to simply be able to fully ditch a point after its been capped and held but could be for some scenarios.

Could be an idea if its possible with random scenarios in aas and cnc gamemodes

[Rudd]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]fuzzhead

Right now we have in PR that the MOST IMPORTANT objective personally, is to stay alive. I think this is a key thing to note, and is absent in most every other multiplayer FPS that has respawn.

agreed, but we have to avoid the idea that 'doing nothing' is the same as staying alive, each player can be doing something conducive to victory, but not necessarily so with current flag arrangements, e.g. alot fo AASv3 turns in to King of the hill over one flag, where the only pre-requisite is to have more men in the cap radius than the enemy, which VASTLY decreases strategic options. AASv3 has very little options for either attackers or defenders. e.g. Barracuda you can land anywhere, sure, but the flags exist. The flags dictate movement. You might build a FB in the best location ever, but if its not near a flag, its useless. So either you need MORE flags or NO flags, CnC gives us NO flags, which I love. But on maps like Fools Road it means you are gonna have a 3hr long match, lots of baseraping and confusion over Firebase stuff, as well as firebases being build in rediculous locations just to satisfy the victory condition. (i.e. on the edges/corners of maps)

I think vast majority of FPS players (this includes PR players) have a natural tendency to attack no matter what, there needs to be very little if any incentives built into the game in order to get players to attack.

Who ever is attacking has the initiative. there are 2 kinds of attacking in PR.

1) Blind attacking, which is when you walk straight to a flag killing whatever is in your way <- popular choice in gaming, with room for using advantageous routes.

2) Planned attacking, Mestia is a good map for this. Go along an advantegeous route, find the defending enemy. Identify all his positions without engaing if possible. Back off, device suitable plan. (usually, one squad keep shooting, other squad assaults, then swap.

Defenders can not generally beat that, defenders only win if they have everyone covering properly, i.e a SL has gone "X cover this bit, Y cover that enterance" and that the SMs are disciplined enough to stay still, which isn't that common these days.

Now talking about ticket bleed, the classic problem of ticket bleed I think is that once the enemy have started a ticket bleed, strategically there is little to no incentive to move forward (even though players will do this anyways).

I don't get it, you want people to defend rather than attack, but then then you don't want to reward people for taking the advantageous postion and holding?

What is needed is more choice, Muttrah is a good example. East and West city center is a great fight because to attack one you must weaken the other, strategy. I love multiple big cap radii like Mestia. I recon one, am I capping? No, move to the other. Cap other, come back.



Either way, I think its clear that AAS is very constricted because of the flags, and doesnt really offer a large strategy. I think youll see with newer versions we try to get away from AAS as much as possible and further develop the CNC mode, as thats what can offer true "strategy" to teams that are disciplined enough to follow a chain of command.

good news

I think alot of effort has been made to make insurgency both fun and strategically viable, and its been for the most part, hugely successful and popular. The game mode has nothing to do with flags yet it still remains strategic and tactically enjoyable.
I would say Korengal has shown that flags can be used in an interesting way without destroying the game.

1) They provide something to do when Intel is required, fight there, get intel, leave it, tali cap it, destroy cache. need intel? back to outpost. VCP fulfils a similar role on Basrah. IMO VCP should be a flag, if Brits hold it they get Lynx/merlin or Intel over time. If INS hold it they get 2 ro 3 more bombcars (since...they have control of the Vehicle checkpoint )

There are lots of more interesting ways you guys could use flags imo.

But on a side note, another strategy killer on the Blufor side is that the Repair bays are in locked positions. On Jabal its not so bad, but Barracuda and Muttrah aren't good. Barra in particular messes up gameplay, on the 64 version imo it should be removed since Hueys can do the job. On Muttrah it should be moved in to the Docks area itself.

[[R-MOD]Mongolian_dude]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]fuzzhead

As for PRT etc.... I think it would be wise to adopt CNC as its main game mode as soon as the game mode reaches a point of maturity enough so that exploits are not as big an issue. AAS for competitive play I think is severely limiting and will always have that limit because of the nature of "flag capping". Other than the fact that currently there is not many CNC maps avaliable, I see no reason in the future that PRT should not drop AAS completely, in favour of the game modes that involve more deep strategy, planning and organization. As far as I see it, AAS is PR's "noob game mode", and hopefully when the more advanced game modes reach maturity we will see them played equally if not MORE than AAS.

As for mongol, I think your points brought up is a different discussion entirely, fitting the topic of strategy on maps but not really in the same way as the OP's point. Your gripe bout random AAS and what flags is relevant and what not also ties into making CNC and open style game modes more widely accepted and used instead of the "on-the-rails" AAS system that's been a mainstay at PR since beginning. The main objective for random AAS was to mix up maps and not have the action of each map focus on the same areas each time, thus keeping new/old maps fresh for much longer as you cant approach it the same way each time. It's not a perfect system but I think it has its merits, although yes a true open ended game mode would obviously be more desired than the AAS flag system.

I think alot of effort has been made to make insurgency both fun and strategically viable, and its been for the most part, hugely successful and popular. The game mode has nothing to do with flags yet it still remains strategic and tactically enjoyable. Hopefully in the future we can develop some more open ended game modes that involve conventional forces and don't involve "flag capping", for the more advanced players who are ready to evolve the gameplay further and organize entire teams with platoon wide tactics and strategy.

Word the street, y'all! CnC is in the house! This very much eases my very soul to know.
Im just tiered of playing 'AAS-The rail shooter". Im sure there'd be much more incentive to command when you actually have any reason to do so, other than dropping an area attack every 1/2 - 1 Hours.

Originally Posted by Dr2B Rudd

the Repair bays are in locked positions. On Jabal its not so bad, but Barracuda and Muttrah aren't good. Barra in particular messes up gameplay, on the 64 version imo it should be removed since Hueys can do the job. On Muttrah it should be moved in to the Docks area itself.

Perhaps, for an invading force as such, a repair station could be a commander placeable, authorised by the CO.
Good knows, Amphibious Landing craft could serve as these repair stations.


...mongol...