If you really want to make this game the best it can be, remove the mortar from the game. It really serves little purpose, and is mostly a source of frustration for a team that gets thier spawn area pounded with it because someone has practiced it enough to know exactly how to consistently land the rounds in front of a spawn spot from across the map.
It requires no hand-eye skills at all to use this weapon. It cannot be used at closer ranges for effectiveness because the user has no idea exactly where the enemy is concentrating, except for the spawn area. Using the mortar to bombard the spawn is cheap and cheazy because it does not require the player to risk themselves in combat. Furthermore, mortar rounds constantly kill team mates as well as the enemy, and that is counter-productive.
I realize there has been a bit of a trend in war games to include heavier weapons (such as in 1942 with the tanks and planes - one reason I will never buy that game) but this is really not what players enjoy about foot-based games. It’s not much fun to try competing with other people only to get blown up by a team mate’s mortar round when you get 4/5 of the way to the enemy compound and have to wait to spawn and do it all over again.
Sometimes the rounds from team mate’s mortars is so heavy that it makes it difficult for a player to get to an objective or critical area of the map that needs to be defended or dominated - team mates sometimes land mortar rounds heavily exactly where they should NOT be, thereby holding thier team back. Lastly, dropping mortar rounds randomly in the enemy compound only kills team mates as well as enemies, so it cancels any benefit it may have had.
Also, a good player can kill many times as many enemies by being an active part of the battle in closer combat with any other weapon, and 1 good player can often turn the tide in a match in favor of one team by knowing just where and when to hit the enemy. The mortar just takes them out of the fight and makes them a “spawn bombarder” or a “kill anyone anywhere including team mates” player.
Lastly, the mortar opens the possibility of a cheater to play on the team he wants to lose, and drop rounds on a critical area where his “team mates” are entering the enemy compound, killing them as they try to pass into the area. We’ve all seen punks who join the other team so they can stand in doorways to block spawned players from exiting the spawn area. We’ve also seen the punk that joins the team he want to lose and frags guys in numbers with a panzer just after a group of them spawn. I imagine there are those who use the mortar for a similar purpose as well, and I think I have seen this form of cheating a couple of times in the desert map. While this kind of cheating is not all that common, it exists noetheless.
If the maps for games like this one were 4 times larger, I might say that a mortar could be a good thing.
I hope they will fix the download bugs. They are kinda important.
