Posted 16 August 2017 - 01:37 AM
If you ask me, I would not mind a continuous respawn mode.. I would not mind if FP worked like that either..
To make it work, the following needs to be achieved and secured:
1) Each player can drop any mech from a selected dropdeck of 4, and can drop it as many times as wanted. The dropdecks MUST contain one mech of each weight class, but cannot have more than one (so no 2 heavies or 2 assaults)
2) Spawn camping is discouraged by a simple mechanic: If enemy mechs are inside a friendly drop point, a dropship is diverted to a safe one. If all drop points have enemy mechs in them, the dropship fires as normal. Also, faction play walls are a thing. And turrets.
3) The game lasts until the objectives are achieved. The objectives are tougher to achieve, as in o-gens have more hitpoints, you need to cap more resources and such.
4) Random objectives - During the game, a random objective can appear - these include a VIP that needs to be escorted, a mobile field base that needs to be captured or destroyed, a ECM tower that can be captured or destroyed, or a random building in the city that becomes a supply depot to be captured. Each gives bonuses and/or penalties to the teams that complete or fail them. These MUST be random for every match.
5) Rewards gained from the match are tallied based on the things that a player has done. Each dropped mech's damage, kills, and usual rewards are all added together, so if you did 2000 damage with 2 mechs, or with 6, the rewards are the same. Effectiveness is what counts. Also, the WIN reward should be massive, as well as rewards for achieving objectives (like killing turrets, mobile field bases, o-gens and such).
Also, there needs to be an additional reward or a reward multiplier based on amount of mechs used, and amount of time used. You should be rewarded more for using less mechs and completing the objective faster. My suggestion for this is to double the win reward if achieved in under 20 minutes, and triple it if achieved in under 10 minutes. If longer than 20 minutes, no additional multiplier.
For mech usage, if a win is achieved, multiply the total tally of cbill rewards by 4 if only 1 mech used, by 3 if only 2, by 2 if only 3 and do not multiply if 4 or more mechs were used. If the game was a loss, but it lasted more than 20 minutes, half those multipliers. (so 2 if only one mech was used to defend for more than 20 minutes, and none if 3 mechs were used).
6) If a player disconnects, and does nor reconnect within 3 minutes, give control of that player's dropdecked mechs to an A.I., and drop them in sequence from assault to light. Their behavior can be as simple as walking to the objective and shooting at nearest enemies along the way, and the objective if reached. Give the A.I. controlled player's mech an A.I. tag in it's name, so it can be identified.
If that player reconnects, put him back in the cockpit of the currently dropped mech.
If all this is implemented, I think FP would be thoroughly better, would be played more, AND it would shake up the current strategies, since the snowball effect would not matter as much (no more set number of waves).
There is however an issue with this idea in terms of lore.. cose' it would be silly to just keep throwing mechs away at a single objective, but I'm willing to overlook that for the scale of the battle.