dtdesign

I do not think it is healthy to give "ordinary" players the ability to use those borderline gamebreaking buffs at their own will. You're looking at it solely from the perspective of someone who doesn't want to wait for the commander to initiate something. However, you're missing the point that a commander isn't just a buff machine, but is also someone who coordinates the team. Especially new players heavily benefit from these coordinate actions, they get a sense of what is happening. There is a guiding hand that shows them what is possible, even fulfilling a power fantasy by being part of a mighty rush that steamrolls the other team. Simply by participating in these rushes, they learn about how powerful teamwork is, they learn about the different angles of the map and all other sorts of stuff. If you were ever unlucky enough to play with me being your commander, you would have noticed that I always have encouraging words to say once a rush is over. Regardless of its outcome, I'm always looking into the positive effects and to make people understand that a failed rush is only a minor setback. Yesterday on Arctic Stronghold, we did a doza rush on Barracs but where spotted way too early + MRLS spam. Eventually we all died, but bar was down to 40% perma. This is what I focused on, highlighting that we did good damage and that we can build upon this. Afterwards there was no negativity in team chat left, everyone accepted that this didn't work out, but that it's not the end. A few minutes later we successfully rocket rushed the GDI PP from tib field and pretty much everyone from the failed doza rush was part of it again. This was the nail in the coffin for GDI and we wrapped it up shortly after, the failed bar rush didn't matter. The commander is a really challenging role, you constantly have to evaluate the situation and your CP budget to figure out what would be most effective. What if you see a good opportunity building up, but some players in tunnels or whatever decide its time to blow their own buff? Even worse, having some kind of mini rush could reveal a weakness in the enemies defense that you were about to exploit at a bigger scale. Their mini rush fails and your window of opportunity is gone. How do you expect commanders to work if you take away their tools?

The VP gains are fine, like Syntharn said, they offset the loss in VP caused by standing around and organizing things. You would be surprised how much I stand around as a commander with SBH, simply observing the battlefield and figuring out what should be the next move. I mean yes, VP rewards from landing a nice cruise are a great thing, but at the same time it is a huge investment. Some players can easily snipe the missile and/or tanks could simply back off a bit. Also take into consideration that if the missile does not have a strategic impact, a lot of CP are flused down the drain for nothing. If we're touching support powers, then please remove the damage of cruise missile on GT. It is now frequently abused by commanders to drop an airstrike+cruise on a GT and in 9/10 cases the GT is gone without being able to do anything about it. Oh and double cruise spam on nukes/ions became a thing too…

I really see people suddenly moving like maniac whenever you miss them. This makes it much more difficult for a sniper to get a hit, but I think this is a healthy evolution in terms of game play. Too many times I could barely miss repairs with the silenced snipers and they wouldn't move even a bit. In terms of the actual sound being used, I love it. I absolutely love it. No matter what you're doing right now, it stands out that much that you immediately try to figure out where the shot came from and where to find cover. Bonus points for having a sound that is quite familiar to most people due to the use of (similar) sounds in movies and tv shows. You might have never heard that sound before in Ren X, but the moment it first plays, you instinctively know someone is after you.

I second that, the new sounds are SUPERB! Really eases my life of a tech/hotwire in a heated battle where suppressed sounds go unnoticed.

Renegade X experiences a significant influx of new players in the past months, which are absolutely fantastic news. However, this comes with a significant downside in terms of proximity mines. There have been a huge amount of games where new players have randomly placed mines, either overmining or adding mines when not at full mines. First things first, I'm not having any feasible solution whatsoever, this is merely a thread intended to spark some ideas to tackle the problem. If you're playing as a dedicated base miner, there is little to no way to figure out what is happening. Last game was Walls BH (which tbh, is a terrible map w/o GT in public games!) where I did nothing but play tech since the start of the game. I made it absolutely clear that I will take care of all mines and boy, I had an excellent plan for everything. The game ended with me having 14 kills in 20ish minutes, all mine kills, they didn't even once hit a building as long as I had control over the mines, even ramps hat evil hidden mines killing SBH left and right. However, at some point people started placing mines at random places that made no sense and it took me many minutes to either convince them to remove them or have a mining ban pass. At some point I wasn't able to keep up with the mining madness and eventually the enemy team backdoored with 30/30 mines. The problem: There is nothing in the game that I can use to track down WHO placed mines, let alone WHERE they have been placed. I have to manually walk to each place to check if mines are missing to alert the team and then spend time figuring out, where these missing mines are placed. We had 20 ppl in the team and like 10 or so were either new players or not communicating at all. Let me get this out: I'm a big fan of new players, but (a) it should be balanced among teams and (b) we need to find a way to have them play without messing up things. Especially (b) is huge, because they are trying out mines with the absolute best intentions, but are unknowngly messing up stuff, eventually leading to buildings being destroyed. Maybe have two mine limits, like a "core limit" for base mining (not affected by overmining) and a "ffa limit" for mines everywhere else? This would open up the possibility of having proper mines without restricting the system too much. The time to dectect misplaced mines and the time to fix those mines is huge, sometimes taking up to 1 or 2 minutes to get something fixed that was purely an accident, giving the other team a random advantage that is also nearly impossible to defend against. Killing a building should be a reward for sneaking in or having a plan play out, not pure randomness caused by a new player.

Had this crash twice on Steppe in the past few days, running a GTX 970 w/ 32 bit client. Takes quite a lot of time before it happens, I guess about 30 minutes or more. The 64 bit client has its sound bugs, so yeah, tough decision.

The Recon Bike is very strange due to its high velocity combined with its extreme maneuverability, doing a sharp 90 degree is like what, 9g on the driver? It causes homing missiles to be unable to hit it at all, relying on projectile weapons to deal significant damage. Regular missiles already have issues properly tracking a buggy, but the recon bike is much worse than that. Everything about it feels strange in some way, it's a complete outlier when compared to all other vehicles in the game. I guess a more sensible turn rate would be enough to put it in line, on the plus side making it easier for inexperienced players to drive. Oh and also it is way too cheap in regards to its early game power, it can easily 1v1 any MRLS due to the laughable homing rockets. GDI needs some kind of compensation, otherwise this will favor Nod heavily. The maps that implement the purchasable recon bike have been designed with it in mind. Just think of Crashsite with its Titan/Wolverine available in the abandoned WF, the whole map was designed to work well with them. Slapping these or other vehicles on other maps can really break the balance of these maps. Lets face it, most maps in RenX are basically abandoned and contain the same flaws for many years, randomly adding new vehicles without adjusting these maps has the potential of breaking them. And you can't easily roll back that changes without a massive uproar, because you would be taking things away from players.

You are correct. Every. Single. Word. People like MARIUSZ are the reason I do not play in lowplayer games, because some tryhard will abuse every little bit out of the game for the sake of winning. 10vs10 on Field with Nod being base locked? MARIUSZ will happily roll in with 5 buffed mammoths, you simply cannot defend against that if your team is made out of a bunch of randoms. These things become unkillable.

I second that, early building kills are completely game breaking and especially in public games cause a lot of frustration among players. Maps like Volcano, Complex and Canyon are sad candidates for this. It should either be impossible to destroy buildings early on or at least add some kind of logic that will only disable them for like 5 minutes before the come back online with 1% perma. This gives the other team an advantage, while still allowing the affected team to partially recover from the early game.

It may make sense to not explain it. That sounds counterintuitive at first, but the idea is to keep the communication with your team limited to essential commands. You simply tell your team to "PUSH FIELD NOW" while the harvy is rolling out of your base and your spy plane is inbound. Your team is already busy fighting the enemy and getting themselves in position. YOU already thought this through, YOU spend time evaluating the possibilities, YOU saw an opportunity. Tell them only what they need to know to make your dreams happen, keep them focused on their task!

If the commander is bad, you can always elect a new one, so there already exists a way to solve this issue without introducing new things. Besides that, the commander should be always in charge of the harvester, period. For example, I once was commander for Nod on Field, with Nod being baselocked by GDI tanks. We had a somewhat okayish tunnel presence so I went with a pickle rush on GDI. Assembled everyone and right before we left, I started the harvester. That harvester died horribly and it was intentional. The idea was that having so many players invested in the rush creates a vacuum in our base that GDI can exploit for a counter tank attack. Good luck with your buffed mammoths that get shoved back by a stubborn harvester, eventually buying enough time for players to respawn in our base. Players tend to think of the harvester as a stupid money making machine, but as a commander you can make use it in a strategic way. Even in situations where you are not base locked, but the enemy is partially on the field, you can send out the harvester. Maybe it will die, but it will draw the attention of greedy enemies, while allowing your tanks and infantry to roll out, effectively trading a harvester kill for field control. That's the rationale behind the first "rule" of not interfering with the commander powers. Players sometimes do not see the bigger picture, while you as the commander will spent a considerable amount of time evaluating different strategies. At the end of the day, the harvester is just another tool for you to work with.

A simple approach: If there is a commander: All power to the commander. If there is no commander: If the harvester gets destroyed 3 consecutive times: Harvester idles in the ref bay until eternity. If the harvester is idle in ref bay: Vote option to start the harvster again. If the harvester starts dumping tib at ref: Reset the destruction counter. This requires no changes to existing maps, adds a rather simple counter for each team and introduces one new vote option which effectively clears the counter and starts the harvester. It is possible to refine this idea by adding periodic reminder messages ("Your harvester is secretly wanking in the ref bay, do something!") and to add some sort of dynamic status light at the ref that informs on the harvy state, like a flashing red light with "Harvester is stopped" or something.

Couldn't we just reduce the ridiculous amount of VP it rewards to the ENTIRE team? Especially in lower player games, the impact is huge and getting a vote passed is sometimes near impossible. I've seen too many teams where there was no commander and every player was pretty much ignorant of any votes or (benefit of the doubt) did not notice them. Also, I think we should remove the ability for non commanders to start any custom votes. Votes should either be specific to some objective (map change, kick player) or be started by the commander ("Who's in for a X rush?"). This could improve the situation by turning votes into something that really matters, rather than pointless banter of a bored player. Personally, I have not found players to be generally toxic towards a commander. There are and will always be some lonely jerks that blame others, but putting them aside most players seem to be grateful for someone taking their time to organize things. In the few times I had been commander, players were usually very encouraging, even when my ideas didn't work out. However, in some games it took some real effort to gather enough people for an unknown reason - this could be something worth investigating in terms of improving things.

Honestly, I don't know why you people focus so much on balancing the teams while the game is running. This is by far the most disruptive mechanic and can lead to a lot of frustration, without solving any real issues. Matches are a lot influenced by the early game, early harvester kills are quite important on some maps and immediately give one team or the other the edge. Coupled with the absurd VP reward for killing it, a much stronger team can easily capitalize on the early game advantage and dominate the mid game. The whole idea was to balance the teams at start and deny players from manually switching in the first few minutes. This way teams have a somewhat equal start and it is up to the individual players to make something out of it. If one team comes up on top: Good, they earned it, they worked for it! This is the complete opposite of current games where teams are too often so ridiculously stacked on map start that the other team is extremly unlikely to come out on top regardless of what they do. @Havoc69 MMR is not the perfect metric and has its flaws? Who cares! This isn't about finding the perfect solution for all of life problems, it's simply about trying to find a sufficient way to start with and build upon it. Balancing at start based on MMR should give us enough of an idea of where this is going and if it holds up, without disrupting the game too much.