Seriona, on 08 September 2012 - 11:37 AM, said:
Mech Repair bays are always been a role in MechWarrior series. Lets say you do not add them at all. Do you know what kind of games you are going to have if it is 8 vs 8 with lives? You will get matches where players will get attacked and a player will win but the other player will be injured and will not be able to fight back effectively. Remember, you must think realistically on how players will work together. Simply, they won't. Majority of players will not communicate nor will follow anybody or take orders unless you truly get a (gaming clan) vs another clan. Or tournament based matches.
Then, to paraphrase the tagline of another mech game, the players will have to "hunt like a pack or die like dogs".
Recall, one of MWO's "pillars" is Role Warfare (described in
Dev Blog 03,
Dev Blog 04, and
Dev Q&A 04) - a large part of which involves each member of taking on one (or more) of several specific roles (scouts, assaulters, defenders, commanders) and working with the other members of the team to accomplish the objective (destroy all enemy 'Mechs, capture the enemy base, defend one's own base).
With
built-in voice communications, third-party voice communications (Teamspeak, Skype, etc), and text-chat (of course there would be text chat, right?), there is no good reason/excuse to have (m)any members of a company, "pubbies" or no, "going Leroy Jenkins" with any regularity.
If anything, the lack of a repair center will force a smarter, higher level of gameplay to become more commonplace since players would not be able to either 1.) camp around the repair center to have it heal every paint-scratch or 2.) act in an overly reckless manner while counting on a repair center to erase the consequences of their recklessness and mistakes.
And, yes, it is still a viable and valid tactic, when facing certain defeat, to ensure that one does not go down without trying to inflict crippling (or nearly so) damage on one's opponent...