8 replies to this topic

[1Sascha]

1. Remove ability for the dead to communicate with the living. Having "ghosts" acting as additional scouts for their teams really isn't what this game should be about. A no-brainer, yes .. but there it is.


2. Add an external camera for the dead to make watching/filming matches more exciting. And I'm not referring to that rather lame and restrictive 3rd person-view, but thinking along the lines of the external-cam shots that were used on the launch-event video showcasing battles on Crimson Strait. To prevent abuse, this could be implemented via 3, 4, 5 predefined, fixed external cameras per map which are setup to cover the usual hotspots (bases, cap-points, choke-points).




That is all.


S.

[GrimLeo]

Teamspeak poses a problem. Non TS players already are at a disadvantage. At least with the current system, the Dead are limited to views available to live pilots.

One idea is to have a down pilot view. Unless killed by a headshot, your mechwarrior is alive and has a radio. You can move the camera around on foot. Of course other mechwarriors can stomp, machine gun, flame, or lase you ending the viewpoint.

Edited by GrimLeo, 06 October 2013 - 06:48 AM.

[Wintersdark]

1Sascha, on 06 October 2013 - 06:17 AM, said:

1. Remove ability for the dead to communicate with the living. Having "ghosts" acting as additional scouts for their teams really isn't what this game should be about. A no-brainer, yes .. but there it is.

Not a no-brainer.

There's a cost to this, in that communication and socialisation, already difficult in MWO, would become ever more difficult. Often you can't talk except at the beginning of a match and after you've died, as you're too busy not dying otherwise.

The gains are very minimal too. The only "advantage" that can be gained is that the dead player may elect to stay at the death screen rather than spectating, and have a very limited, uncontrolled view circling his fallen mech. This is really, not particularly helpful 99% of the time, as you don't even have friend/foe identification. The only cases that this is actually helpful would be in organized matches where... yeah, they're all on voice anyways.

Finally, as GrimLeo said, all this does is further punish players without voice comms.

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2. Add an external camera for the dead to make watching/filming matches more exciting. And I'm not referring to that rather lame and restrictive 3rd person-view, but thinking along the lines of the external-cam shots that were used on the launch-event video showcasing battles on Crimson Strait. To prevent abuse, this could be implemented via 3, 4, 5 predefined, fixed external cameras per map which are setup to cover the usual hotspots (bases, cap-points, choke-points).

This is a terrifically bad idea. See above re: voice comms. You'd basically give god-sight to the team who lost a player first. It'd be so advantageous that you'd often be better off having one player suicide immediately to get it. Sure, you could prevent suicide, but you'd still create terrible gameplay as a result.


Far better than your suggestion is enabling telemetry recording so players can replay the match afterwards with full external camera control. That's something on the drawing board already, though obviously it's much lower priority than getting CW completely in the game, so it'll be a while.

[1Sascha]

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There's a cost to this, in that communication and socialisation, already difficult in MWO,

Really? Well, then do what every other shooter has been doing and have a seperate channel on which dead pilots can talk to each other but not to the living.

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See above re: voice comms.

So what? Voice comms will always be a problem, but as long as they're not integrated into the game, there's bound to be a lot of guys not using them.

Besides: TF2 has built-in voice comms and they have external spectator views for dead players. Seems to work fine.


S.

[Corvus Antaka]

you can not remove ability of dead players to type, because TS players would gain an additional advantage.

[1Sascha]

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you can not remove ability of dead players to type, because TS players would gain an additional advantage.

Huh?

TS players will have that advantage, no matter what.

Doing what is the standard in any other game of this type (separate chats for living/dead players) would at least remove one way of abusing one's death. Yeah.. TSers would still be able to do it, but they already can do so now anyway.

One way of leveling the playing-field a bit would be to use pre-defined external cameras for the dead, denying them cockpit-view and at the same time removing all HUD items (friend/foe ID, etc). So once you're dead you'd be able to call out Mech-types and their color-schemes .. but you couldn't tell instantly if that's a friend or foe you're looking at.

The ideal solution would of course be built-in voice-comms with seperate channels for the living and dead (plus company and lance-channels). But even then, people could simply not use the built-in ones and stick with TS instead.

Should we take this as an excuse to not ever try and fix obvious flaws in the existing chat-system? I don't think so.




S.

[Gaan Cathal]

1Sascha, on 07 October 2013 - 03:17 AM, said:

Doing what is the standard in any other game of this type (separate chats for living/dead players) would at least remove one way of abusing one's death.

Examples?


I'm not really sure what you're after here to be honest, on the one hand you want to remove (dead) chat in order to prevent dead players giving intelligence. On the other, you want to implement a way to make it monumentally easier for dead players to give intelligence.



Like..4/10 for the replies, I guess.

Edited by Gaan Cathal, 07 October 2013 - 04:11 AM.

[1Sascha]

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Examples?

CounterStrike, Team Fortress 2. IIRC it's an option with those two, but I've never played any servers that didn't have this option activated.

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on the one hand you want to remove (dead) chat

Not quite. Just restrict dead-chat to a "dead" channel.

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On the other, you want to implement a way to make it monumentally easier for dead players to give intelligence.

How so? Fixed external views from predefined "cameras" with no HUD info given to dead players is hardly what I'd call a good source of info.

One of the reasons I'm suggesting this is that I've had numerous matches in which people would call out the last surviving Mech of their team to the other side, giving exact locations - even though the guys clearly weren't hiding/afk/disco. I guess they did it because they were bored or something. Happened to a TS-buddy of mine who does actually turn battles around in his 2ERLLAS Raven. He's was quite unhappy with the guy who kept calling out his location on chat.

Another example of this happened to our entire lance on Terra Therma (we were the last four alive). We were powered down and hiding near our base, with one of us standing in the open as bait, planning to surprise the inevitable base-rushers. And then some kind soul from our own team decided to call us out on open chat.

S.

[Wintersdark]

1Sascha, on 07 October 2013 - 08:34 AM, said:

One of the reasons I'm suggesting this is that I've had numerous matches in which people would call out the last surviving Mech of their team to the other side, giving exact locations - even though the guys clearly weren't hiding/afk/disco. I guess they did it because they were bored or something. Happened to a TS-buddy of mine who does actually turn battles around in his 2ERLLAS Raven. He's was quite unhappy with the guy who kept calling out his location on chat.

This doesn't need a "fix". It's directly against the Mechwarrior Code of Conduct and is a bannable offense. If someone is doing that, report them, and say goodbye.

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Another example of this happened to our entire lance on Terra Therma (we were the last four alive). We were powered down and hiding near our base, with one of us standing in the open as bait, planning to surprise the inevitable base-rushers. And then some kind soul from our own team decided to call us out on open chat.

Yeah, report this.

That said, while I've seen people call out players who've run off and powered down to hide (oh gerd, their KDR!) I think I've seen someone do it undeservedly maybe half a dozen times in thousands of drops. It's really not a major problem, and already has avenues to address it. Giving intelligence to the enemy is up there with teamkilling on the "You can get banned for this {Scrap}" chart.

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Huh?

TS players will have that advantage, no matter what.

It's balanced by the other player's ability to type the same information. If you remove the ability to discuss it in chat, you make the advantage VOIP players have significantly better.

We really, REALLY don't need that. It's already bad enough for PUG players in a match with players with voice comms. Penalizing the players without voice comms even more is just profoundly stupid.

Anyways, please be clear: What's you're issue here?

1) That players, when dead, can give away intellegence of their teammates, to the enemy?

or

2) That players, when dead, can act as limited scouts for their own team against the enemy?


If it's #1, as I said above that's an actionable offense, so just report it.

If it's #2... Well, that's an extremely limited "advantage" and not entirely unbelievable. If the pilot survived the wrecking of his mech, he may well be able to communicate what happens immediately around his mech afterwards anyways. And the camera view on the destroyed mech screen is extremely limited and cannot be controlled.