You must know it wouldn’t play out that way. Players, especially new to this type of game and likely coming off the back of CoD, will see staying alive as a main goal. Medics won’t be putting themselves in harms way to pick up the engie and attack classes will be loathe to lead the wedge into a choke point. Anything that encourages this type of selfish play should be discouraged. It doesn’t add depth, it will just screw up teamplay. When I’m leading the charge to a point with medics behind I want to know they’re going to pick me up - not go through an internal dialogue as to whether the risk is worth messing up their revive streak (there’s enough trouble on publics with ppl worrying about messing up their k/d as it is!) If that starts happening people would stop leading the charge - maybe even start hiding and working on their kill streaks. Oh look - suddenly we have a game playing out like every other current teambased fps - i.e. no teamplay.
How often do you use selfkill?
Just staying alive isn’t what’s being rewarded though and COD doesn’t do that either… It’s staying alive and doing your job. As a medic you’d fill your streak with healing and reviving and to a lesser extend killing and taking a few hits. You’d have to expose yourself to get that streak, if you don’t then you might as well just sacrifice yourself or selfkill because there would be nothing to waste, no matter how long you manage to stay alive.
But the point is, making decisions based on your streak or something similar, which is pretty much guaranteed to be what people will do, is not something that should be encouraged. Whenever I play as a med, I see my role as primarily to get revives and gibs in. I’ll try to stick to a specific person or group, and if they go down then i’ll try to pick them up instantly, expecting to die in the process, whilst simultaneously hoping and praying I won’t. I want the guys i’m supporting to know that they’ll be up as quick as they go down, so that they’re ready to fight as soon as the revive comes in. That’s a medics job, and it shouldn’t be influenced by thoughts about whether or not you’ll ruin a streak or whether you should fight instead of revive, etc. At this point it’s starting to digress so i’ll back out, but reiterate, the needs of the individual should be secondary to the needs of the team
Well it’s not supposed to be that black and white. The point is to make these decisions harder, not easier. That’s why it happens gradually. Your effort-investment is nil at the start, which makes life/death situations easy, but as your grow the stakes get higher, both for you and your enemy.
What’s even better in this context is that the whole thing is asymmetrical. An attacker with the main priority of saving his skin at all times is simply going to lose. No amount of incentives are going to change the fact that attackers need to keep pushing if they want to win.