No replies to this topic

[Threat Doc]

Russ,

Last night's Town Hall Meeting was extremely well-done, a lot of great news delivered well, and you actually have me interested in returning to play, again. However, there's one point where I believe you missed the boat: the impending Assault Game Mode changes. I missed the second hour almost entirely, last night, because I was having a long talk with my landlord, so I had to go back and listen, this morning.

What you described last night seems great, expressing that there would be ECM towers, UAV towers, weapon towers, Air Traffic Control, and a DropShip coming in every so often, and all of that is, likewise, to the good. You also said it was the beginning of potential changes and that, also, seems very good. However, it also sounded to me like you were missing the boat a little on many of the suggestions and general desire of your community.

I would like to take a moment to remind you of why the turrets in Assault did not work out last time, and it's something that you've pretty obviously failed to take into account, here. Last time, players stopped messing with turrets and turned Assault into a smaller-mapped version of Skirmish, and it was because the turrets slowed players down entirely too much to make capturing the base a truly worthy objective. From the proposal I heard, last night, it sounds to me like you're doing the same thing all over, again, just turning it into a much deeper version of the previous Assault fiasco.

Even if you have layers of security, much like they did in MechCommander 2, where you had a tower that would go off and alert the enemy if your 'Mech got too close and failed to destroy that tower, and then other layers, such as UAVs, weapons, and ECM, you're still making the objective not worthwhile enough to capture, and you have that smaller-mapped version of Skirmish, all over again. I understand the goal you have, but it sounds to me like all of your assets would be too close to base, not spread out in layers away from the base.

My proposal, which I actually outlined here, in November last year, would have it so the map is set up to automatically place a certain number of objectives to fight over across the map, taking the combat potentially all over the map. By way of generic example, if you have a map with 75 accessible grid squares to it, there could be up to 25 spawn points made available for these objectives, whether they're destruction, capture, escort, extraction, or intel gathering (like you have for the Scouting game mode in FW. Of these 25 points, for our example, the game would select between 3 and 7 of them, no closer than 2 or 3 grid squares from any other spawned objective, and preferably spread far and wide, that Lances or Companies could go after to gain points. First team to so many points -as in Conquest- wins, even if they kill the whole enemy team -as in Domination.

If you have a destructible objective, and it gets destroyed, another one could spawn while game-play is in effect, away from anyone else. This would give your scouts a reason to scout, would give your medium 'Mechs a reason to hold the line, your heavies a reason to move as quickly as possible to other objectives while mowing down the competition, and your assaults could be responsible for finding and destroying the enemy.

Please consider this an elevator proposal, of sorts, and look into the viability of it? Thank you.