Intelligence Mission Concern

(Nail) #21

nah, would give even an average team a huge advantage, especially on first objective, imo

(SockDog) #22

But the point is to break the stalemates, I don’t think it would be something that even triggered unless a team was being held and other obvious triggers were going off.

(Auzner) #23

I remember reading about this in the compendium. I’d like to know details.
How often these can occur during a match?
If the person who received the mission decides quit anyways does it get passed to someone else?
If it doesn’t get passed to someone else, can the mission be granted again in a few minutes to another player?
Are your team mates only aware the mission was activated once you pick up the item?

This dynamic allows another opportunity for grieving.

(Cankor) #24

[QUOTE=SockDog;261770]Not sure I’d like the option and the drama that would come from it but it probably is the most practical of solutions if SD wasn’t prepared or capable of tweaking it after release.
[/QUOTE]

No more drama than turning it off completely.

You can’t really classify not accepting an opportunity as griefing. Denying another an opportnity, maybe. Somehow I doubt someone is going to suck really bad on purpose just so they can get offered a mission and refuse it in order to hurt their team. Most of the time the team won’t be doing badly enough for the mission to kick in in the first place, so they could spend all that time sucking for nothing. Griefing this isn’t going to happen.

As far as how it works, a good guess is it’s not going to kick in unless the mission objective hasn’t been done in x minutes, and maybe some other requirements have to be met as well (really lopsided kills, XP, etc.). If I have it correct, in ETQW some spawn timers will adjust if an objective hasn’t been capped in 5 minutes, so they already tried something similar.

The thing is, the game timers are now objective specific, and it sounds like most objectives only take 5 minutes anyway, so assuming it resets after the objective is capped it probably won’t be in effect very long either.

(Herandar) #25

The subtle difference is that this doesn’t knock off the guy on top. It lets the guy and team in the back catch up, but if that team is as outclassed as they imply, the winning team should usually be able to handle it.

More like the Lightning Block than the Blue Shell.

(Exedore) #26

Unfortunately, Intel missions are something that have been left on the cutting room floor. We still like the idea of what they were trying to accomplish, but for all the reasons mentioned here we simply didn’t feel like they were going to work well enough to keep in the game.

(AnthonyDa) #27

What’s awkward, is that you have to stick next to the carried item when it’s on the ground and keep pressing action for 4/5 sec to return it where you would only have to run onto it on classic CTF-like mod.
Slow gameplay ftw?

(DarkangelUK) #28

Everyone knowing where the item is on the map instead of reset, rinse, repeat would speed things up I would’ve thought. More intense having to guard and return the item rather than just walk over it… requires team work as apposed to a Rambo suicide run to return it.

But not that there’s much wrong with that either. Docs laying wide open for all to see outside on Beach in RtCW and everyone fighting over it was intense as well.

(Cankor) #29

[QUOTE=AnthonyDa;261881]What’s awkward, is that you have to stick next to the carried item when it’s on the ground and keep pressing action for 4/5 sec to return it where you would only have to run onto it on classic CTF-like mod.
Slow gameplay ftw?[/QUOTE]

Where are you getting that? In an old gameplay video the intelligence was picked from interrigating a guy, how do you know it doesn’t just disappear when the guy carrying it is killed?

And assuming you do drop it, which would make it like a carry objective right in the middle of another objective, how do you know just running over it doesn’t automatically pick it up?

And even if it doesn’t, why wouldn’t it act like any other objective where pressing the use key within a certain distance pulls you to it and you pick it up right when you get to it?

(3Suns) #30

Way late to this party, but I wasn’t in the brain space to give it the attention it deserves until now.

I am glad “Intel” was left on the cutting floor. “Rubberbanding”/“Blue turtle shells” need to stay in Mario Kart. In fact, it took Valve about 2 years to patch TF2 on the 360, but as soon as they offered a toggle switch for “critical hits”, they were gone in all games we played in/hosted. Randomizing results are one of those things that seems like a good idea at the time, but in practice, serve to grieve more than they console.

There are things that can be done, however, to minimize the pain of disparity in skill levels between players/teams.

  1. Reward gamers for things that help their team which involve things other than any one specific skill (e.g., precision shooting). Giving points for handing out ammo, syringes, escorting the cart, “spotting out enemies”, etc. will make it so that gamers without l33t skillz can still feel like they are contributing to the greater effort.

  2. Make it easy to change teams, reward gamers for doing so when they switch from a winning to a losing team (all of this within reason). This is especially important for the console versions where many gamers are loathe to switch to the losing team.

  3. Auto-balancing toggle switch. Sometimes it is nice to have a server with auto-balance on.

  4. Make the matches shorter. No one minds losing if they quickly get a fresh chance at winning. As a negative example, many BF:BC2 Conquest matches are abandoned because one team dominates, but the losing side still has 150+ tickets left. It takes a long time to wear those down. Rather than offering a rubberband solution of allowing the losers to spawn behind enemy lines (which is a proposed solution I have read about), DICE should make it so that the match is declared if one team controls all the flags uncontested for xx number of seconds, even if there are tickets left. It is “Conquest” is it not? Consider it a blitzkreig win.

Anyway, the most important is #1, and Splash Damage may understand this better than any developer out there (though DICE is pretty awesome!)

(LyndonL) #31

To be fair in Conquest in BC2 when a team holds all the flags, the enemy’s tickets drop at a rapid rate even without anyone being killed. Join an empty server with a friend and one side cap all and see.

A reward for swapping to a losing team is good but sometimes isn’t achievable when one team is significantly unbalanced in terms of skill but is full of players. It happens all the time in lots of games. A reward if possible though should be given after say 5 mins of being on the losing team’s side.

(SockDog) #32

Problem I see is that a big reward for players is winning. This defeats XP bribes, means players are less likely to move to balance teams out if they’ll lose or worse be on the end of a serious beating too. And the whole team shuffle stuff is IMO is worse than introducing a handicap for a team that is clearly outclassing the opposition.

(Atavax) #33

i think even if your team is winning, if you are the worse player on the server, you’re not going to have fun. I think a league system built into the server system would be cool. if servers were marked as either casual, intermediate, or hardcore. (or something to that effect) and then if you were a casual player, you could play in casual servers and you would be more likely to be playing against people of your own skill set. Yes, because you choose which server you join, there will be good, hardcore, players playing in the casual servers and crushing, but i don’t think that would be a big problem, especially if you made it easy to votekick people off the vanilla server, if someone was dominating a casual server, you could just kick them or if a casual player was completely useless playing in a hardcore server, you could kick them.

i know in tf2 its a pain finding new servers to play on, if everything looks right on the menu and i join, 98% of the time the server is full of extremely casual players that i can destroy.

(3Suns) #34

Edit: I wrote this while SockDog and Atavax were writing.

To Lyndon’s post: I disagree with the relative speediness at which those tickets count down. When the outcome is inevitable, even just 5 minutes is too long. Often times, because the losing team is able to actually sneak out and take the odd flag, it extends closer to 10 or 15 minutes. The game is dragged out, but the conclusion is inevitable, especially when players start quitting. The winning team has no one to kill, the losing team has no one to take and hold the flags. Declare winner if one team grabs and holds all flags without contestation for 30 seconds. Why not? It would actually make the game far more dynamic, and the first couple of minutes far more consequential.

I agree about the rewards for swapping sides. I don’t really have any ideas as to how that might be implemented, or if it is even possible. Having played on both PC and the 360, I know, however, that PC gamers are far more willing to balance the teams themselves.

One of the reasons might be that while both may have communities/groups of gamers who want to play together, PC gamers have far more control over their servers. Even as clients, PC gamers have better server browsers. In BF:BC2, 360 gamers have only the choice of gametype and map - even though EA provides dedicated servers for both communities. I think that some of the fundamental problems would be eliminated if they gave console gamers the same server browsers. This is moot point for Brink, however, as it will be client hosting for the console gamers.

(Apples) #35

The problem in enticing players to switch lies in the teams theirselves, as usual. If one team is uber dominated I dont see why I or whoever on the winning side should have to switch just to get dominated again, I’m not the type of player who can rebalance a team all by myself, and usually I like to have fun and fair games, so when my team dominate too much I usually switch server, except if I’m playing with friends.

The team balance is IMO a thing that cant be achieved except with good admins, because its too much relying on gamers “good heart” which they havent :wink: When I’m having fun in a team, I dont see the point to switch to get pwned by the dominating side, I’m not masochist yet, and I guess it’s everyone’s feeling about that, except if you really are that good that you can make a difference by yourself.

I would rather see a huuuuge malus for people who switch to winning side, as it happens often enough to be a grief, and I really think it’s lamish as hell.

Peace

(Atavax) #36

if you have 8 people of comparable skill on both teams, one team is not going to dominate. If one team has one less player, they’re probably not going to be dominated if team skill is comparable. Teams get dominated when there’s a significant disparity in skill. The problem is not people are unwilling to switch, the problem is that some of the players have no place playing on the same server as other players. Also a simple auto-switch feature when one team has more then 1 player more then the other team would fix any numerical problem.

(madoule) #37

well that numerical issue should be fixed by bots. i wonder on what setting the average online brink bot on semi-pro servers will settle… medium difficult?

(Atavax) #38

if you don’t mind playing in bots, why don’t you just play single-player?

(madoule) #39

sorry, did i offend you mate? what’s with the attitude, dude?
i was just indicating that any numerical (dis-)advantages will be covered by a bot and wondered what the average online bot difficulty setting will be…

and you just go and nag-nag-nag-u-don’t-have-to-play-online. i just came home from my job as kindergarten-teacher and zang i have to deal with the same ol’ bitchin i had all morning… pfff, seriously…

:wink:

(H0RSE) #40

Because sometimes when you play online, the server isn’t full and/or is empty?..I would rather play with bots and let humans fill their spots as the connect, then not have anyone at all to play with.