1. No cheesy voice-chat
Historically, the more “badass” a character/side is in a computer game, the more cheesy his/their voice is. Please don’t do that. Strogg voice chat mustn’t be cheesy/pretensious. I mean, if an indy puzzle game like DROD (http://caravelgames.com) can have disturbingly good quality speech for the Slayer, why not ET:QW ?
2. No crossdressers
No agent/covop tricks based on looking like opposite team’s member. No changing uniforms etc. It didn’t work particularly well in Q3F, and proved only marginally useful in W:ET. Pro players never fall for that. Newbie or pub players keep falling for that… and teamkill you. It doesn’t matter that I spam “I’m a covert op” and don’t move towards friendly spawn. When disguised, I more often die killed by a teammate than enemy.
By the way: my suggestion for Stealth skill: similar to Battle Sense, but you get xp for damaging/killing and NOT taking damage for 30 sec. Pretty intuitive if you ask me, and promotes truly stealthy behaviour.
3. Vegetable detection/handling
By default, all inactive players (for a while) should be kicked to observer. It’s a middle ground between voting for kick (happens quite often) and letting them serve as spawn point decoration.
Inactive players are really really bad for a team. Suppose you have two vegetables in your team, and enemy team has 1 more member. That’s actually 3 player difference, yet at first it looks as if everything is ok balance-wise.
I suggest moving such players to observer first, because that way they save their exp (in case it’s not their fault; big lag can happen to someone)
4. No campaigns longer than 3
Split the maps into more smaller campaigns, but don’t make 6+ map campaigns like most lame servers do. Reasons:
- I believe xp/rank was meant to promote skill/usefulness to team, not patience. I mean, if it was meant to promote only patience, it would be called Diablo. On 6 map camp, General etc no longer impresses anyone. Rank devaluates.
- if you join in a middle of 6+ map campaign, you’re likely to be owned/spammed to hell by everyone else. Small skill/xp differences don’t have huge impact, but if you suddenly face Level4Heavy Level4Light Soldier it’s no longer funny. Maxed-out skills (for a single class) is common for 6+ map campaign.
- I eat. Honestly, I do. 6+ map campaign keeps me from eating for at least twice as long.
5. Do something about medics
<rant>
It may look ok for a long-time player, but something is seriously wrong if 50%+ of a team is medics on regular basis. Because compared to them, Soldiers/Covert Ops are pushovers. Unsuprisingly, Soldiers don’t get any respect in W:ET, because about 1/200 or less panzer shots hit a tank. Flamer is situational at best. Mortar may get you nice amount of kills, but is actually so imprecise that these kills rarely matter. You usually kill ones too stupid to run away anyway.
Mg42 is probably best/most reliable of Soldier’s weapons, but you will probably hit “1 of each weapon” cap which is there to deter panzers.
As for static mg42s (which are actually quite good on maps like Gold Rush or Fuel Dump - some good locations, no ammo limit, you can jump away quickly as opposed to mobile) you’re better of with Engineer or Medic.
Another reason: medic is the only class that lets you play absolutely stupid and ignore stealth/safety altogether. Simplest fix to medic would be disallowing them to pick up their own medikits; after all you don’t have eyes all around your head, so it should be hard to heal yourself properly. Besides, medics already have regeneration.
</rant>
More than 1 weapon + reasons to choose them
90% players use Mp40/Thompson, which is the same weapon, really. No, it’s not fun. Non-thompson light weapons rely on suckiness of other underpowered light weapons to win. And I have yet to see someone using Sten well. Ability to keep disguise rarely works; better accuracy doesn’t matter much: no scope, much lower damage, and Thomp40 is probably better at long distances anyway (you can afford to spray bullets)