LucThaz Posted February 20, 2015 Share Posted February 20, 2015 Hey guys. Long shot here. So I’ve been playing RX a lot the last few weeks, and what was bothering me was the lack of teamwork and coordinated tactics. I find myself in a team, which just keeps on going like they did for the past 30 minutes or so, and not changing strategies or tactics. At the moment the only way of starting some kind of rush, or a tactic in general, is by spamming the chat window or even putting up a vote. I find this rather annoying than useful, but for now it’s the only way… Back in 2007 I used to play Battlefield 2142, which had this “commander” feature. One person on each team could apply for commander status, which would be randomly assigned to one of the applying players, within a few minutes. This commander player now had abilities to support ‘his’ ground troops and squads (sub teams). Things he could do were things such as dropping medical support crates, spotting enemies, accepting airstrike requests, assigning main targets and so on. While I was thinking about how this game is based on a RPG viewed in 1st person, I missed the ‘eyes form the sky’, one player keeping things organized. So I was thinking, maybe this could be a great idea for RX. I’ve made a simple proof of concept to give you guys a better idea of what I was thinking about. Here is the concept explained Squads - Max 4 squads - Max 10 players in a squad - Has a private chat window for everyone in that squad. (good for discussing rushes and so on) - Can see and set targets from and for the commander - Can request certain support tools form the commander, such as vehicle repair and building defense. - Can see his squad mates at all times Commander - Is randomly chosen form those who applied in the first 3 minutes of each game. - Accesses commander menu form purchase terminal - Sees the map from above - Sees all enemies that are seen by ground troops. (does not see sbh when still cloaked) - Has certain ‘troop support’ abilities he can use. (Time limited off Corse) - Can chat with all squads at once or to particular squads using @ - Can set priorities (which are shown in all players HUD) - Can not go afk for more than 1 minute - Can be dropped by a team trough voting. The commander must be helping the team and trying to coordinate trough rough fights. Its abilities should not be overpowered in any way. And eventually only players who enjoy playing as a team will apply for it. I don’t know if this is possible in any way whatsoever, but I wanted to share the idea and hear what you guys think of it. Despite the fact of it being possible or not. I’m sorry for my grammar mistakes, LucThaz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ryz Posted February 21, 2015 Share Posted February 21, 2015 I love your idea cause I am also bothered by the lack of teamplay during various games, but I think one of the problems is that most new players do no read nor know the game. Even a commander would have troubles passing out orders cause people simply don't possess the skill to understand them or react on it. The solution lies in both a commander mode and a forced tutorial or another way to check if people who join the match at least have the basic skills, which includes reading... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vleessjuu Posted February 21, 2015 Share Posted February 21, 2015 A commander could be very cool and there are a few examples of it working very well. Natural Selection also combined shooter gameplay with an RTS element in the form of a commander and it can lead to really intense gameplay. However, it typically comes with it's own set of problems as well, since a bad commander can easily lose you the game all by himself. If Renegade X were to go down the commander route, I strongly suggest that the commander role should be highly optional and playing without a commander should still be possible. He shouldn't have very powerful/crucial abilities at his disposal other than being able to have a battlefield overview and being able to direct his team. Maybe some moderately useful support abilities, but not more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LucThaz Posted February 21, 2015 Author Share Posted February 21, 2015 I strongly suggest that the commander role should be highly optional and playing without a commander should still be possible. He shouldn't have very powerful/crucial abilities at his disposal other than being able to have a battlefield overview and being able to direct his team. Maybe some moderately useful support abilities, but not more. That is exactly what i was aiming for. It should only be used to assist the team, without it becoming a crucial and necessary factor to play the game. Seeing the current topics and Beta 4 change list, it seems renegade X is starting to concentrate on individual strength of characters and vehicles. But forgets to enhance the teamwork possibilities. Soon we will have more and more people working together in smaller groups and that will destroy the most enjoyable aspect of the game: teamwork. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RypeL Posted February 21, 2015 Share Posted February 21, 2015 Not considering it. A commander mode would take too much work for us to implement in the foreseeable future. Maybe someday modders would be willing to consider it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lunesta Posted February 21, 2015 Share Posted February 21, 2015 I've been thinking about the problem with teamwork lately. Either it takes too long to write everything or you happen to miss stuff. I have an idea of a soloution which might be considered more Renegade-ish. I'd been tinkering around with it in my head but after reading this post I got some influence. Instead of having a single commander who'd be in RTS mode. You'd have squads. You enter a squad from the terminal, the squads could be called whatever, as in a player can create a squad thus the name would help telling what their plan was. It might be SBH's for joint sbh warfare or Tanks or something. Anyway in each squad there'd be the option of selecting a leader. The leaders of each squad would be in another chat, the leader squad. Normal squads would have green letters and leader squad would have blue text in the messaging system. Further more uppon joining a squad you'd be activating voice convo. So those players not in squads would e free of listening to other players speak/rant but in squads where people are all in for the teamwork they'd be given the option to work together with out fkn writing everything. The result of this could be a waaay better teamworking and more complex planning then flame rush or med rush would be open since communicating would be a hell of a lot easier. The only reason for why we see complex and awesome planning almost never coming up is due to the fact that players simply cant write such long plots and expect players to work together. The only way to successfully pull of a good teamwork with more than 4 players is through spamming chat and you obviously cant spam a tactic that involves more than 2 aspects. In theory it'd go like this. Squad speak amongst them self what they are trying to do. F.x. infiltrating gdi with sbhs. The leader would tell other leaders in the leader group about it and the tanks might try to rush in the mean time. Seeing as they could speak in that squad we could end up with organized artys covering long range while stanks sneak in. Nukes'd be planted and flamers would rush in. with such a amount of teamwork the only thing that could stop them would be an even better teamwork through similar measures of the other team. THIS WOULD BE AMAZING TO PULL OFF. Another side bonus is we could have planting mines limited to those in a defense squad to a degree. F.x. Each player not in the defense squad could plant a maximum of 6 mines each and every new mine would delete a former of his. This way we'd probably have solved the teamhampering problem of overmining. but having 6 mines to place means that players who are attacking and strategically placing mines in enemy base to protect f.x. nukes or ion would still be possible. All that this idea would really be doing is aiding the players in communication. Increasing possibilities for teamwork is the thing I want most of all when playing right now. TL;DR Howbout few squads with voice conversations active? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Totem Arts Staff yosh56 Posted February 21, 2015 Totem Arts Staff Share Posted February 21, 2015 Not considering it. A commander mode would take too much work for us to implement in the foreseeable future. Maybe someday modders would be willing to consider it. Think i posted a topic before about trying something that seems like it'd be much simpler to code. Idea revolved around scrapping any complicated maps/commands, and simply giving 1 (maybe 2, 1 for field 1 for tunnels) people the ability to be 'commanders'. Simply having them have access to certain commands that were built back in OldRen (!Blockharv forinstance), and perhaps give them a few more options when they hold down spot with Q (E.G -destroy that vehicle-, which would actually add a more noticeable marker to the vehicle targeted, visually communicating to even those who don't read that they should be focusing down THAT vehicle). From what I can tell, you guys already have methods to, A) Make particular messages show up in noticeably different text B) Draw symbols over things when spotted that only show up to particular players. Mentioned in the last topic I posted about it that most of the ideas presented about commanders always get blown out of proportion. Why not try to make something simpler 1st that isn't stretching too far from what we already have. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SFJake Posted February 21, 2015 Share Posted February 21, 2015 I actually completely disagree with squad features. You're splitting the team in a bunch of little group, with private chats? Why? Thats terrible. If a squad is going to do anything I want to be in on it, and if I want to join them I can, no matter the player count, no matter the commanders... This isn't a game about commanders. In fact, I don't actually see the point of it at all. Can we use more features? Like an overhead map and ways to more accurately propose plans to teammates? Yes. But commanders and squads splitting the team up are way out of proportion for this game. I'm also against special "commander abilities" like support drops and such. Its not Renegade, and Renegade never had a "leader", and its the way it should stay. Whatever is added is available to everyone. Add a map, add a way to draw over it and people can check a person's plan. Whatever you can think of, it shouldn't be for "one" individual. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheOlsenTwins Posted February 21, 2015 Share Posted February 21, 2015 Maybe a bit of a solution would be some customizable chat commands or more options for quick chat maybe also building ok, or mines gone in building "x" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lunesta Posted February 21, 2015 Share Posted February 21, 2015 Just adding voice chat. Where people enable/disable it for teams would be plenty... Its really all a bout communication. I feel that if there is a "commander" he must be stationed and playing like every1 else. But adding native voice chat would be enough. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SFJake Posted February 21, 2015 Share Posted February 21, 2015 Just adding voice chat. Where people enable/disable it for teams would be plenty...Its really all a bout communication. I feel that if there is a "commander" he must be stationed and playing like every1 else. But adding native voice chat would be enough. Oh god please no voice chat. Too many games have been ruined by that. Now nobody will actually write down anything and even less will listen. Voice chat is probably the most ridiculously overrated features for public games. People that want voice chat bother going in teamspeak, the others don't want to hear stupid non-sense all day long. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lunesta Posted February 21, 2015 Share Posted February 21, 2015 Just adding voice chat. Where people enable/disable it for teams would be plenty...Its really all a bout communication. I feel that if there is a "commander" he must be stationed and playing like every1 else. But adding native voice chat would be enough. Oh god please no voice chat. Too many games have been ruined by that. Now nobody will actually write down anything and even less will listen. Voice chat is probably the most ridiculously overrated features for public games. People that want voice chat bother going in teamspeak, the others don't want to hear stupid non-sense all day long. If you were to read my text again you'd see that I proposed it with the fact that you have to enable it.. meaning those uninterested would never be bothered. But teamspeak is viable but there aren't enough number of players using it. Therefor it doesn't really fix the communication problem. Still the times when my team wins through great teamplay is so much more rewarding than anything else. Its just too hard to get enough people to work together. Making any advanced plans like used in real rts is next to impossible. All you get is FLAME RUUSH and such. Never more than just one type. At least we can agree that we need something superior to the normal chat for real teamplay... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vleessjuu Posted February 23, 2015 Share Posted February 23, 2015 Oh god please no voice chat. Too many games have been ruined by that. Now nobody will actually write down anything and even less will listen. Voice chat is probably the most ridiculously overrated features for public games. People that want voice chat bother going in teamspeak, the others don't want to hear stupid non-sense all day long. I never got this complaint. I've literally (yes, literally literally) never seen games getting destroyed due to voicechat and I've played plenty of pubgames that were greatly enhanced by it. If anything, it's programs like teamspeak/mumble that are ridiculously overrated if you ask me. Yeah, sure, they're nice for competitive play, but for pubs it doesn't make any sense having to use a separate program for communication. And for people who don't want to hear voicechat, all you need is a simple mute option. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ryz Posted February 23, 2015 Share Posted February 23, 2015 Yesterday we had a comwar WITH voicechat. Results: building had c4 on mct which was just placed. Defend the strip! Five people around, 0 response... Later or earlier (don't remember) we organized a rush and it went smooth... It took us five (!) minutes to get five Orca's together and even the request for second pilots didn't work. We lost 3 out of 4 games cause we've been waiting forever for eachother and didn't anticipate on the enemy. There was voicechat all the time. But communication isn't only about sending, it's also about receiving and it lacked on that part. So voice won't solve the problem I guess... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LucThaz Posted February 26, 2015 Author Share Posted February 26, 2015 Simply having them have access to certain commands that were built back in OldRen (!Blockharv forinstance), and perhaps give them a few more options when they hold down spot with Q (E.G -destroy that vehicle-, which would actually add a more noticeable marker to the vehicle targeted, visually communicating to even those who don't read that they should be focusing down THAT vehicle). From what I can tell, you guys already have methods to, A) Make particular messages show up in noticeably different text B) Draw symbols over things when spotted that only show up to particular players. Just to get back on topic a bit. what Josh wrote here gives a good indication of what i and, i think, others been aiming for. its not about adding different features, giving some people more abilities than others, or splitting the team in smaller groups( now that i think about it from a different angle i got to agree with Jake, it does pull a team apart). All that its about is giving those players out in the fields a better perspective of what the team is doing, and what to focus on. Rather its drawing symbols over objects and enemies, enabling voice comm. or just using different colours for text messages and Q messages. i would be warmly embrace any additional teamwork feature to this amazing game. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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