115 replies to this topic

[Zordicron]

NOPE, this is not the thread you think it is.


Got out of a match just a bit ago. Got killed by a desperation shot from a dieing enemy at the end of the match as we won. It was the only dmg the enemy had given my HBK the whole match, and it killed me.

Still reading? Good. I died, because my team mates, specifically some clan mech laser boat durrhurr, stripped ALL my back armor, turned my CT red internals, and side torsos to orange internals, and even managed to turn my front CT armor red. (with some orange and yellow side torso armor)

I asked him to be more careful. Then I complained, then I told him he was an idiot and had nearly killed me.

So, Myself, and many others as per the QQ threads we see periodically, are tired of total idiots or worse, those trolls that end up banned, potentially ruining a match. I would have been at 100% at the end of this match, by careful positioning and focus firing support with my assault pals(I had well over 250 dmg and 8 assist, this was not even that close a match) but instead died to random laser strike from a dead enemy's final trigger pull.

So what then? Friendly fire(FF) is actually an important part of the game, it keeps the actual act of positioning important, basic combat tactics required, and various other vital game functions working. So how does one make FF go from the target being the one that is punished, to the shooter?

Implement 100% dmg reflection for team dmg.

I am pretty sure this has been bandied about the forums before, but I have never chimed in on it, and honestly, never had enough of it happening to think it was worth dev time. NOW however, it is more and more on pug matches, possibly because of an influx of new players, not sure. I do know, that if we are going to go to Steam, there WILL be new players, and new trolls, and IMO having new players shot through the back by new trolls is not likely to be beneficial to the new player XP, much less anyone elses fun.

Dmg reflection does two very important things:

First, it keeps the importance of positioning and all the other things that go along with friendly fire currently in the game alive.

Secondly, it punishes the trigger puller instead of the target.

Turning on my somewhat spiteful mode: when new player, or, more likely bad player, begins being careless with laser fire, he will in turn be damaging his own mech. Now, it is always bad to have friendly fire take away from the overall armor total of your team, BUT in this case, at least it is applying to the guy that can;t aim anyway. it will also either reinforce the idea "hey I should watch where I shoot", or remove the issue from the match. if someone shoots enough team fire to kill themselves, it is more than likely it was not accidental anyway. if it was accidental, well, get gud as they say, learn to pay attention, or uninstall and we will be all the better off for it.

What it will do to trolls goes without saying.

I feel this issue has gotten bad enough in pug land with the prolific laser vomit that it is affecting the fun of the game, and as such the things that go with it including new player experience. it is important to have some anti troll measure in place before Steam release IMO, one that easily doubles as a simple self teaching tool about the importance of where your guns are pointed.

So then, community thoughts on this age old topic? I know there are some immersion concerns, but IMO as the game slider moves closer to CoD and farther from Battletech/mechsim, something like this is becoming more and more needed.

[MysticLink]

I support this!

[FupDup]

The problem with nearly any team damage suggestion in general, including this thread's, is the case of False Positives. Not every infliction of team damage is deliberate, and sometimes it might even be more of the "victim's" fault than the shooter's.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

[Monkey Lover]

One thing that would help a lot is to disable weapons for 5-10 seconds on pug matches when starting.

Just making the powering on animation last longer to make it look normal but allow us to walk.


During a game anyone doing dmg to other mechs should cost them. It should removed a lot of cbills depending on how much dmg you do.

IF you alpha someone for 50dmg you should have to pay for it. i Maybe 100k cbills.
If you spray a machinegun at someone it shouldn't cost you almost anything.

Only time i can see this being bad is when you have a large pin point alpha. If its lasers or anything else you have time to pull your shot.

Edited by Monkey Lover, 24 February 2015 - 09:20 PM.

[Zen Idiot]

that's tricky. what if i'm speeding around in a locust and run into my teammates lasers.. and he dies from it? we just get new trolls who intercept friendly fire so their teammates kill themselves.

[Zordicron]

FupDup, on 24 February 2015 - 09:13 PM, said:

The problem with nearly any team damage suggestion in general, including this thread's, is the case of False Positives. Not every infliction of team damage is deliberate, and sometimes it might even be more of the "victim's" fault than the shooter's.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

This does happen I suppose. I mean people walk in front of me too, but I have yet to alpha someone in the back. Even lasers, if you see you caught someone on the arm or something because they crept into your screen, it isn't hard to move away.

I thought about this as I was writing the OP, and decided i would rather have reflection anyway. if I accidentally blast myself because someone snuck in, well, at least I was in control of the trigger.

I dunno, i guess also if people start getting sick of taking self inflicted dmg because the crowd is too thick, maybe it will also inadvertantly start deturing the butthumping that goes on in pinch points.

Monkey Lover, on 24 February 2015 - 09:18 PM, said:

One thing that would help a lot is to disable weapons for 5-10 seconds on pug matches when starting.

Just making the powering on animation last longer to make it look normal but allow us to walk.


During a game anyone doing dmg to other mechs should cost them. It should removed a lot of cbills depending on how much dmg you do.

IF you alpha someone for 50dmg you should have to pay for it. i Maybe 100k cbills.
If you spray a machinegun at someone it shouldn't cost you almost anything.

Only time i can see this being bad is when you have a large pin point alpha. If its lasers or anything else you have time to pull your shot.

This might be another alternative, although IMO it won't stop troll accounts, what do they care if they are going to delete the account, they have a cadet bonus worth of FF they can do. Still, it might be a step in the right direction for "normal" FF.

[Navy Sixes]

FupDup, on 24 February 2015 - 09:13 PM, said:

sometimes it might even be more of the "victim's" fault than the shooter's.

This. I've been playing for a while, now. I've lost count of how many times I've been laying into an enemy and someone just as oblivious, clueless, and/or myopic as the clown who shot out the OP's backside has herp-a-derped right in front of me to get at a kill. Sometimes I've been able to pull my guns up and away in time. Sometimes I'm just not fast enough, especially if I'm zoomed in.

I shouldn't be punished for this.

FF sucks, but sh+t happens. Play long enough and you'll find yourself on both ends of it, giving and receiving, at one point or another. Best thing we as a community can do is be good sports about it: apologize to our teammates when we're in the wrong, and accept those apologies and not cherish a grudge about it through the match when we're the victim.

[Zen Idiot]

reflection or not, what if the crosshair turned green when you hit a friendly? that could be handy.

[Void Angel]

There does need to be consequences for team damage. Iit could be a warning system, backed up with an administrative headshot from the system, or it could be a c-bill penalty for every point of damage. I lean toward the latter, if I have to pick, because it's more forgiving in the moment, but still gives players an incentive to stop shooting at the fracking target box instead of checking your line of fire. It's not just teammates - I've seen landscapes across the Inner Sphere earn the apparently random ire of Mechwarriors trying to shoot at the target box when they can't see a target. You could also implement a banning system for repeated instances of serious amounts of team damage that would lock out mechs and players into a penalty box, automatically creating short-term, temporary "bans" to get their attention and flagging them for GM attention.

It would also help to remove the fracking film grain and increase graphical fidelity on a few maps. I understand fog of war, and smoke, and mist (I actually miss the mist on Veridian Bog,) but I should be able to distinguish a bright red 'mech from the background on Forest Colony without advanced zoom, yet the film grain prevents that from happening on that map's color palette (at least on my monitor.)

In any case, remember: griefers are going to grief. The whole point for a griefer or troll is to play a meta-game against you - they don't care about winning as much (if at all) as causing other people annoyance in order to feed their own egos. They're the hipsters of the internet. The only way to deal with them is to report them and move on; don't give them free rent in your head. But, while the jerks ye shall always have with ye, it would be very useful to have some way to discourage the simply careless and greedy from blasting away the armor of their team through incompetence.

In short, if you have friendly fire, there needs to be a personal consequence for damaging your own team, even (or perhaps especially) if you don't kill them.

Edited by Void Angel, 26 February 2015 - 04:24 PM.

[Lexx]

I can see it now, remove the ability to do team damage and instead of firing at the ground for the first minute of the match everyone will be firing on their teammates.

It's not always team damage, there have been times I thought teammates were shooting me in the back only to later see that sneaky little ER large laser light mech that flanked around behind us. It's not always the fault of the players behind you either if you constantly run in front of them to take your shots.

[Ecrof]

Don't run in front of people or my dire whale might one shot you. When I run in front of other player I expect them to shoot me.

Edited by Ecrof, 25 February 2015 - 07:54 AM.

[Mystere]

Eldagore, on 24 February 2015 - 09:09 PM, said:

Implement 100% dmg reflection for team dmg.

I say "No! Hell no!", for one very obvious reason:

Eldagore, on 24 February 2015 - 09:09 PM, said:

What it will do to trolls goes without saying.

Besides, I find having magic reflection spells a bit odd in a Mechwarrior game.

Edited by Mystere, 24 February 2015 - 09:55 PM.

[Impyrium]

Personally I don't think reflection is the answer. I think there just needs to be more feedback when you do slice through a friendly. Right now, you have zero indication, and IMO 95% of FF is just because players get lazy when they're hunting for a kill. Intentional team damage is another problem entirely.

I think the best way to discourage this is just to make doing it a nuisance. Not just feedback, but annoying feedback. So when you slice your weapons across a friendly, this might come up:

[Beld]

Its amazing how often people will try and shoot through you to get a kill or assist, sometimes its a genuine mistake from you moving into their line of fire, or them simply not seeing you are in the way, but too often they just don't care, it is surprising there aren't penalties for doing team damage, you can leg someone on your team and still get full pay.

[LordNothing]

FupDup, on 24 February 2015 - 09:13 PM, said:

The problem with nearly any team damage suggestion in general, including this thread's, is the case of False Positives. Not every infliction of team damage is deliberate, and sometimes it might even be more of the "victim's" fault than the shooter's.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

have to agree here. the reason everyone fires their weapons at the start of the match (other than to show off their firepower), is to test each weapon group's heat generation on that map. i want to know if tapping 1 will put me to 20% or 80% heat. this is a very opportune time for some idiot to cut you off or dart across your screen. i check the radar and give a good glance around before i do heat tests, but someone still manages to get in front of my gun ports every now and again. especially with assault mechs you can be completely out of my field of view and still be right in front of a gun. also pgi's spawn points are way too close together, so its a good idea to spread out abit before you start messing around with your guns.

tldr: dont grope your temmates

Edited by LordNothing, 24 February 2015 - 10:22 PM.

[Kassatsu]

FupDup, on 24 February 2015 - 09:13 PM, said:

The problem with nearly any team damage suggestion in general, including this thread's, is the case of False Positives. Not every infliction of team damage is deliberate, and sometimes it might even be more of the "victim's" fault than the shooter's.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

Yep. A change such as this will do one thing: Make it that much more annoying when a teammate decides to sprint in front of you on a corner desperately trying for the kill shot. Now you're shooting yourself instead of the idiot teammate and you both still die.

I do however think you should be penalized for team damage at a 1:1 ratio of damage dealt to enemies. It should also be quite possible to lose money from a match if you decide to grief your team and wind up dead.

Optional, most likely not used additions could also be some kind of revenge thing, where if someone deals 20% HP damage to you, you can do 20% to them without penalty... Though that opens up a whole new can of worms I would not want to deal with.

Edited by Kassatsu, 24 February 2015 - 10:23 PM.

[Kjudoon]

A part of me wants to support this, then I realize I can teamkill AND look the victim this way by timing my rushes. So no.

[Levi Porphyrogenitus]

Deduct 500 cbills per point of team damage. Most players who do mad amounts of team damage are poor earners already, and losing thousands of cbills, maybe tens of thousands, would certainly discourage such behavior going forward. Have the penalty show up in large red numbers, just like Team Kill results.

Edited by Levi Porphyrogenitus, 24 February 2015 - 10:33 PM.

[LordKnightFandragon]

FupDup, on 24 February 2015 - 09:13 PM, said:

The problem with nearly any team damage suggestion in general, including this thread's, is the case of False Positives. Not every infliction of team damage is deliberate, and sometimes it might even be more of the "victim's" fault than the shooter's.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

Well, the players need a massive lesson in situational awareness in general.

So, 100% reflection for FF will result in both sides of the house paying more attention to their Friendly fire. Players will move better, or get shot and others will aim better, and be more careful with their placement. Its a win win really....

[Cyborne Elemental]

Always annoying when you've got a shot lined up and are either pulling the trigger or just about to, and sombody pushes themselves right in your path, and you end up taking most of the damage as your teamate is just going derp de derp derp, not even noticing the enemy ripping off his torso and now yours too.

The worst part is when some freaked out panicking light, just flies in front of you from your blind side while you're completely focused on a farther away enemy, and you happen to pull the trigger.

I would rather not be punished for these kind of mistakes.

In both cases, if I'm firing and it happens, I either aim up or sweep to a side if possible to minimize the damage, but man.. sometimes its near impossible to avoid.