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The single biggest problem with the game that I have is how maddeningly difficult it is to communicate with your team. If I run around a corner and see six guys, only the one that I actually lock shows up on the map; if I want to tell my team that "Jesus, half their team is right here!" I have two options: a), I smash r really rapidly, dance between targets and hope my team notices, or b ) I type a message. Option a isn't very good because I'm then not providing a single sustained lock to friendly LRM boats, and because it doesn't necessarily target all six of the mechs - sometimes it just bounces back and forth between two, meaning that my team does not know how many enemies I'm looking at. Option b isn't very good because, in order to type, for some insane reason I have to completely surrender control of my mech; this means that I walk around a corner, discover half their team, and then stop moving. (Yes, yes, I can aim away, hit a numbad for throttle-lock and then type. Sometimes, for no obvious reason, the throttle-lock comes unstuck when I type. Also, that still has me walking at constant speed in a straight line while I type my message; I've ran off cliffs while doing that, to say nothing of the fact that I'm not dodging or maneuvering at all for the duration.) Option b also requires my team to be reading chat; if they're in a furball somewhere else, they're probably not reading chat. So I have no good way to relay this information to my team.
I can think of a couple of possible solutions to this problem. To me, the most obvious is to enable default-on VOIP; then I could just say "Oh shit, I found their team" without having to relinquish control of anything, and my team could hear me saying that without having to look away from combat to read a chat message. Always-on VOIP is such a huge benefit to team coordination that every Valve game since 2007 has included it; I have no idea why a game where teamwork and information-management are so crucial does not have it.
Failing that, something like chat macros would help. Essentially, give me a button that pops up a menu full of numbered options, like "1: help me! 2: Single enemy here. 3: Multiple contacts here!" When I hit a button, ping the map with my location, and play a sound clip of someone saying the message; that way at least people get an informative message that they hear (as opposed to having to notice it and read it), and I don't have to surrender control of my mech to type a long message.
Even better than chat macros tho is some kind of map ping like some RTSs have. It'd be nifty if, when I've got the map up, I could click it to generate pings my team-mates could see; bonus points if you linked that with some version of the macro system above such that they got specific messages with the ping.
Just my 2C.
Edit: some minor rejiggering. Also, by "always-on VOIP," I don't necessarily mean VOIP that's always transmitting, I mean VOIP that's always receiving, like in TF2. I mean that, instead of making people choose to install and enable C3, which I've never seen anyone do, just integrate it into the goddamn game by default and enable reception so that even people without mics will still here me talking if I've got it on.
Edited by Gleech, 08 March 2014 - 04:42 PM.
