Tarvin

This topic brings back memories of abusing the hell out of mines (when it was allowed of course). Yes, I was one of 'those' players that would get bored with how a match was going and would recruit others on the team to proxy mine harvesters and any vehicle that went out of the base. Often it was for defensive purposes only, honest. But there is a downside to doing this. For every vehicle covered in proxies there's that many fewer mines to defend a base. When the enemy team started mining their own vehicles we just switched to rushing undefended corridors while ours were mined again. It's all in how players go about things. I think a transport chopper was rigged once to clear the intended LZ. Think of an exploding rock dropping out of the sky. Anyway, there is always the chance for players to abuse game mechanics. Even without proxies rushes can be done against expensive vehicles. Just load up a vehicle with free engineers with C4 already equipped. Rush the expensive target like a Mammoth Tank, and when the cheap delivery vehicle explodes everyone rushes and throws C4 on the tank. They die, the delivery vehicle is destroyed, but that tank is probably toast. The hardest part of figuring out what to do about mechanics being tested by players like with C4 Rams is to do it in a way that doesn't break what they are supposed to do or more 'legitimate' uses like defending a harvester against walkers. I've got to say, fixing this one is tough and may involve something like if two vehicles have proxies on them, one from each side, the proxies exploding on both will partly cancel each other out. Think of it as a reactive defense system against rams. In effect, make a C4 Ram to protect against a C4 ram. Either that or have free meat shield characters move out in front of expensive vehicles to create a protective barrier. Or an even better solution. Give tank rounds the ability to detonate C4 mines located on other vehicles. One shot from a tank at a charging C4 Ram will cause the ram to go up in smoke. Rams are defeated and mines aren't nerfed. Personally, I think things are fine the way they are. A-symmetric warfare is one of the things Nod does. Rig up dirty tactics to use against the superior arms of GDI. Why not let the spirit of Nod's tactics be reflected in RenegadeX or allow GDI to simply throw it right back with tactics of their own?

True. Thinking about it some, implementation would require a bit of a match finding server to hold peoples' positions while they wait for enough other players to populate a game server. On the bright side it wouldn't require near as much power as a game server. Still, having this would help energize the player base because they wouldn't be waiting for a map on the server list to populate before they join. It would just happen. Game servers would have to be tweaked to talk with the Match Finder system though. They would need to output the match settings to determine if they are a match for each player as well as what the current population of the server vs. the max, and if the match is already in progress or waiting to start. Most of that is already communicated by each server and shown on the server screen. The only thing missing is something to inform a Match Finder of which games are already in progress and if certain milestones have been reached like if buildings are destroyed or there is only 5 minutes left. If a match is already won before a server receives a population boost through the Match Finder or there is only a short amount of time left before it ends people will just leave and defeat the purpose of the finder. This could be solved by the finder only dumping groups of people into matches that have just started or haven't begun yet. Otherwise, it could just dump small groups like 4 people at a time into any available server so even a low population server would get enough boost to make the match more fun and worth staying in.

I'm a long term fan of both Command and Conquer and Renegade and am about to leap into my first game of RenegadeX. Of course this might make you wonder, 'why is someone that hasn't played yet posting a suggestion?' The reason is because I've been trying to learn more about how the game is different from Renegade and was playing through the single player Renegade to get used to the feel of the game again before jumping in. Yes, I happen to enjoy most everything about the game. No, I'm not insane, I'm a game designer. We like to punish ourselves. Anyway, enough of the rambling introduction and to the point. I've been watching the server screen to get an idea of how many people play so i can judge what will happen if I join an underpopulated server. The top populated server(s) stays populated while the others languish. When the population on any top server dips down it instantly refills in seconds leading me to believe there's a fair number of people watching to join the more intense battles on full servers. ============================================================ The actual suggestion! ============================================================ Why not introduce a match finder system? Players can either go the usual route of going directly for a server they want or they can set preferred settings for servers and they will be added to a game que. When the que is filled to a minimum level everyone waiting for similar games will be dumped into a server and people can stop waiting in the shadows for a match that looks good.