Posted 15 August 2017 - 04:54 PM
Not sure about the idea of infinite respawns.
Finite respawns via dropdeck is a better idea, like War Thunder and War Robots.
War Thunder, you can burn through a deck of three to five vehicles in less than 15 minutes, depending on how aggressive the play is. This is in Arcade mode, which is actually, the most aggressive of all the game modes in War Thunder.
War Robots, every game has a max timer of 10 minutes, and you can burn through 4 to 5 mechs with that. Often games can last shorter either due to rushing the objectives or the other team "meching out" too quickly. Meching out is the WR game culture term for leaving the game early or running out of mechs in your deck. Only a small minority of games are won via total attrition (total death of the enemy team). The primary mode of the game is domination, though WR has added beacon rush. When the game hits the 10 minute mark, the team with the most points wins.
Recently the game has added a new mode, Beacon Rush, where you can select from which point you can spawn into, which strategizes points capture. If a point is captured, you can spawn your mechs on a forward position (this mode has been suggested even by members of this forum, ironic to see it happen there instead). This mode makes the game even more aggressive and dynamic, to what is already an extremely aggressive and dynamic game. Furthermore, the game doesn't exhibit meatballing and murderballing.
Is it possible for Battlemechs to play a War Robots kind of game mode --- Beacon Domination and Beacon Rush. This is confined to a small map, with five points, two closer to each side, and one point in the center for open contention. You got 10 minutes and four to five mechs to capture the points. One problem on this for MWO is the large maps. If the maps were smaller, there would be less searching and less travel to the engagement areas. In other words, WR is pretty much tailored from map to mech for its particular game modes, and everything works in high synergy for that purpose. Adding new game modes to MWO maybe like adding an inelegant and ill fitting hack to established game mechanics not suited for it. I would think the biggest obstacle to respawns on MWO might be the maps themselves, along with the voting mechanic, and time sink animations. If you respawn, there is excessive travel from the spawn to the engagement area, which players may mind doing it repeatedly. Which is why I would think confining the map would help. For this, I got the old Forest Valley, Frost City, and River City in mind, using an 8 vs. 8 format with 4 respawns.
It should be added that War Thunder Ground Forces Arcade manages to do 3 tank respawns on fairly large maps. But they have a well distributed spawn system that brings the spawns closest to the engagement zones, and the players can choose which spawn point they want to drop in. Once again, and in other words, doing the game mode you have to execute all the details from top to bottom, not adding a piece to an existing infrastructure.
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SmoothCriminal, on 15 August 2017 - 08:27 AM, said:
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