I know this topic has been discussed quite a few times, but i believe that we should be able to share our armor and weapon status with friendlies ingame.
Knowing the total armor percentage of a friendly mech is too vague. I have been in countless situations where i needed to know if a friendly mech armor part is critical, so that i can plan my next action.
A friendly mech with 80% could have his rear torso open, could have his side torso open or he could be damaged all over. or he could have been critted and lost weapons. There are so many different mech armor distributions.
In a premade 12man team this is easily fixed by sharing info over teamspeak when needed.(and it's still too much noise) In "pugs" and after the new launch module is released which will allow only 1group per team, knowing your teamates armor status and weapons status will be a valuable asset that can only make our game experience better. And lets be frank, 12man premades are rare. it will be up to 4man group and "pugs".
I believe that using our default targeting mode "R" to target friendlies will make things worse. There are lots of times where friendlies and enemies are clustered or a friendly blocks your line of sight to the enemy and vice versa. For the same reason, just hovering target over a friendly won't work either.
What would work, is to have a separate key for friendly targeting. I believe "E" is currently unbound and would make a great default choice for friendly mechs. "E" for friendlies. "R" for enemies.
We will be displaying 1 mech at a time. Hit "E" to display a team mech if we need/want to, then hit R again to lock enemy target as usual.
To have a delayed friendly target information or not,(like we have on enemies) is up to you i guess.
I know that this suggestion is not something to do on-the-fly but it's fairly easy to do and considering the fact that we don't have an ingame voice chat, random solo drops will be so much improved....The same target mechanism that is used to target enemies can be used.
We will be able to see armor and weapon loadout of the guy sitting next to us. there's not much else to say.
O7
Edit. added poll and some clarification.
Edited by Eldan, 28 March 2014 - 01:53 PM.