Nice that people are giving so many thoughts to this game :).
I can totally see your system working out as well, no doubt about that. It also may have some benefits here and there, but I will just tell you some of my concerns about it.
- Gibing, and estimating the spawntimer of the enemy, is what you allways had to do. It was a team effort tho to figure out how they may spawn, and sometimes a lot of pain and sometimes a little joy came from it when you guess it right
- The spawntimers and maybe possible spawns will need serious rebalancing with your system. Otherwise the attackers will just kamikaze in, kill 2 guys and rush in with the next group of people (even if they had to selfkill the first one) benefiting from the much higher defender spawn time.
- Tactical decissions about supplies (ammo/health) or specific class needs, will be made almost irrelevant. You will have to wait until someone dies, until you can respawn without geting a full respawn timer. Probably you don´t want to respawn tho, if your defense is weakened allready. Maybe this could be belanced somehow too, but how? Making the first “selfkill” respawn timer just 50% would be a possible way, but it allready offers too much ways to abuse it, and also would make the whole system even more complicated.
- The more I think about it, the more I doubt this will be easier to follow then the steady ticking spawn timers. I think people will be rather more confused, of the spawntimer not going down until someone dies (prolly will take some time until they figure it out^^), and then seeing it counting down… then if it just counts down all the time.
- Possibly too many people on the map at the same time in pub. Pub is unorganized, that´s the only way we can play pub and competitive plays as well on the same map. If you make the spawn timers like you want them, it will get organized by force and maybe too much for the maps too handle.
These are just from top of my head. To be honest, I can see all of them working the other way too, and maybe beeing actually beneficial, especially the last one can create an interesting feeling of being rushed or running into a wall of deffenders ;). However, for me it adds more complication for the viewer, takes away some tactical moves (while still giving options of course!), and will need more work to balance it propperly.
And as much as I apreciate everyones oppinion on those forums, and allways just try to state my oppinion, knowing it can be wrong, I must disagree on ET/ET:QW being simillar to other FPS. First of all, people who played past SD games, have played enough of other games as well, prolly most of the games you have posted (even if not for 1000 hours), so it´s not like you can make up experience that easily. Of course, every FPS is simillar somehow, after all it´s all about shooting with guns, but small differences in gameplay, make the game itself, and how it feels really different. It´s what you say as well, that this game is great, but can become awesome, with some small changes. It´s these small changes, that matter. And even if you could argue about the “objective based game” being flexible, and can be done like CS (whats objective too, with instakilling weapons while having huge recoil and no movement while fighting), SD also mentioned they want this to be a “FAST PACED objective based game”. There is no way, a game will be fast paced, while having mechanics like CS or even CoD for that matter. Still interesting to spectate and maybe great to play, but prolly without any chances on the market and for sure not fast paced.
EDIT: I hope I am not to harsh or offend anyone. English, like you prolly can sea anyways, isn´t my native language what makes it tough for me to find a gentle way to describe my oppinion without almost flaming others 