2 replies to this topic

[Khalcruth]

I love siege. It is absolutely my favorite.

However, it really loses some fun when one side always attacks and the other side always defends, for long stretches at a time. There really needs to be a way to change that. Ideally, it'd be random, or alternate as to which side attacks and which side defends. In other words, there would be no set attacker and set defender.

If that's not possible, it occurs to me there may be another solution. Right now, the story mode seems to be divided into roughly 3 sections of 8 hours each. Why does it have to be that way, though?

Example of how it works now - Draconis Combine vs Jade Falcon. For 24 hours divided into 3 8 hour segments, Draconis Combine always attacks, while Jade Falcon always defends.

Proposed change - conflicts last 1 hour.
Midnight to 1am - Draconis Combine vs Jade Falcon
1am - 2am - Jade Falcon vs Draconis Combine
2am - 3am - Draconis Combine vs Jade Falcon
3am - 4am - Jade Falcon vs Draconis Combine

etc. etc. for 24 hours. Then start again, say Smoke Jaguar vs Wolf, and do that for 24 hours. That way both sides have roughly equal chances to attack and defend.

The way I understand it, this would not actually require any new coding, just a bit of manual intervention. If the allowed queue of upcoming conflicts is big enough, you could have one person set the conflicts a week or two in advance. I could also see setting it up as random - let the server randomly pick two sides, and generate the next 24 hours of conflicts. If you feel really generous, make it so the server can't pick a side twice until all the sides have been picked once, and then reset the pool to pick from. If you went that route, it would probably be a good idea to open up the allowed "picks" - let the Lyran Commonwealth and Federated Suns fight each other, instead of always be allied.

If neither of the above is possible, then it really would be nice to include other modes besides siege. Don't get rid of siege, but supplement it with the other modes. Variety really is important. If we had 15 different siege maps, that would be one thing, but we don't. We have 5. So if we can't have variety in who attacks and who defends, let's at least have some variety in game types (which also brings variety in maps).

[Bowelhacker]

"Manual intervention". They can't even manage to run a spellchecker over the conflict descriptions, so how do you think that's going to go?

[Khalcruth]

If you've got a better idea that requires little to no coding, I'm all ears.

Apparently they only have something like one week a year that they'll spend on MWO coding, and it's looking like that budget already got spent.