Prizing Commanders + Penalizing team.
PetriFemboy
Join Date: 2012-12-29 Member: 176641Members
Join Date: 2012-12-29 Member: 176641Members
This is an idea i got in a couple of games and was developing it with questions among teams i played with, so far I've notice rather positive feedback about it so I hope it will work in here as well.
Since as Commander we can grant repair/heal grant myst or drop weapons, while also being penalized by team by ejecting the commander. Commander as a lonely player is put in a situation where everyone demands something from him, but he has no way of penalizing insubordinate players nor being prized by anyone. To improve this status of synchronization between commander and subordinates, i thought of an idea.
IDEA:
+ Add a disobedient/commander prize area.
What it does is select a certain room after five seconds displayed on the players hud, each player inside the room will be losing resources and giving it to commander pool. Each 10 seconds of staying in the room will remove percentage of players resource equal to players inside the room, or while exiting the room before the count will reach 3s. How it can be used?
1) First of all as a penalty for not obeying Commander's requests in team play. Often players simply wander off, playing as lone wolfs, but being a solo player doesn't benefit the team unless it encourages everyone to aid commander in making the right decisions.
2) Second usage is prizing the commander with resource from his team. If team enjoys how commander plays, they can prize him or aid him with a certain amount of resources by simply requesting selection of prizing room, where they would give commander enough resources for upgrades, or even save the game due to lack of extractors and res to build them in commanders res pool.
Additional notes:
1) Disobedient/Prize room can not be selected if inside the room is a friendly command center.
2) There is only one Disobedient/Prize room that can be selected by the commander.
3) Area selected as Disobedient/Prize room will be highlighted on red on the map.
4) Disobedient/Prize room will be view as on hud before entering it. As alines it would be red glowing fog inside the room, and for marines, it would be a large black and yellow stripes with a glowing red sign as a hologram on the edge of the room's borders.
Update:
Added "give commander enough resources for upgrades, or even save the game due to lack of extractors and res to build them in commanders res pool." in 2nd reason.
Added updates
Since as Commander we can grant repair/heal grant myst or drop weapons, while also being penalized by team by ejecting the commander. Commander as a lonely player is put in a situation where everyone demands something from him, but he has no way of penalizing insubordinate players nor being prized by anyone. To improve this status of synchronization between commander and subordinates, i thought of an idea.
IDEA:
+ Add a disobedient/commander prize area.
What it does is select a certain room after five seconds displayed on the players hud, each player inside the room will be losing resources and giving it to commander pool. Each 10 seconds of staying in the room will remove percentage of players resource equal to players inside the room, or while exiting the room before the count will reach 3s. How it can be used?
1) First of all as a penalty for not obeying Commander's requests in team play. Often players simply wander off, playing as lone wolfs, but being a solo player doesn't benefit the team unless it encourages everyone to aid commander in making the right decisions.
2) Second usage is prizing the commander with resource from his team. If team enjoys how commander plays, they can prize him or aid him with a certain amount of resources by simply requesting selection of prizing room, where they would give commander enough resources for upgrades, or even save the game due to lack of extractors and res to build them in commanders res pool.
Additional notes:
1) Disobedient/Prize room can not be selected if inside the room is a friendly command center.
2) There is only one Disobedient/Prize room that can be selected by the commander.
3) Area selected as Disobedient/Prize room will be highlighted on red on the map.
4) Disobedient/Prize room will be view as on hud before entering it. As alines it would be red glowing fog inside the room, and for marines, it would be a large black and yellow stripes with a glowing red sign as a hologram on the edge of the room's borders.
Update:
Added "give commander enough resources for upgrades, or even save the game due to lack of extractors and res to build them in commanders res pool." in 2nd reason.
Added updates
Comments
For the sake of basic multiplayer fun, player control over any other players should be as minimal as possible.
don't forget to double the price of the game
This. When playing pubs good players probably look really bad to rookie comms (cause they're running off in 1s or 2s attacking RTs and not building up all the comms lovely new turrets). But also when playing with friends I'll often go comm despite the guys on my team being as good if not better than me. In fact we normally say that the "real commander" is one of the guys on the ground and he calls the shots, the commander in the chair is just to relay intel and get the buildings and upgrades that the field commander asks for.
1. The commanders aren't superior to marines
2. Too easy to abuse. For instance; commander wants resources - just 'prize room' or 'disobedient room' where ever many marines are.
3. Probably for me the most important one: Marines should listen because they want to, not because they fear penalty. It has to be a game and it has to be fun.
Most of the people who have replied have had some genuine criticism for your idea. I tend to agree that it would give too much control to commanders who may not know what they're doing as well as more experienced troops.
Maybe I should start a thread asking for a way to force inexperienced commanders to do what I want or they get placed in a penalty box.
Oh wait, that would be wrong for a variety of reasons... Hmm, makes you think, or maybe just angrily defensive.
Rather than be annoyed by the subsequent posts that make light of it, why not respond to the legitimate points that have been made literally in the first reply to your OP? The first reply pretty much hit thenail on the head.
Also, why so serious?
The most experienced person on a team is not always going to be the commander.
This is the single reason why your idea is fundamentally flawed. In essence, your idea boils down to nothing more than "commander rage control"
My personal preference is to ignore it when inexperienced comms use a strategy that I know will fail and thus they can learn from it. Yes, the team will likely lose as a result but that's the price of admission when new people hold a make-or-break position in the team.
It's futile to even try and convince them otherwise sometimes.
One example from mineshaft: Alien's spawn @ cave, marines @ repair. Comm insisted on an ARC rush. Whole team complained but ignored him and ultimately it failed (no surprise). Your system would be an outlet for the comm's frustration at their strategy not working.
I would not go as far as saying that marine commanders have to wipe their teams butts, but they have one of the strongest support roles in the game. As such they should react to what happens on the battlefield more than trying to act on themselves. I am not that experienced as a comm, but I try to create a natural synergy between my actions and what the team does, trying to keep an eye on one main front while occasionally looking around what the rest of the team is doing. The rest is done by my team using voice chat to yell at me for support/structures/beacons.
You've mention something important. Mainly talking about abusing the system. To fight against it beside ejecting the commander/hive mother by the team; commander himself can place only one room on map, which as i mentioned will be created after five seconds of display on hud to everyone on their team that are in that zone, and will take resources only after 3 seconds limit is crossed. That means that an average player alien/human team, will have clear 8 seconds to leave the room and get his mind straight instead of camping in place that brings no benefit for team. Further more i think it's worth mentioning that to balance creation of Punish/Prize room (thinking of shorter name for it), there should be a cooldown, perhaps half a minute or whole, between placement of this area and switching it to another place. This area can be taken away as well, and never exist in a well working together team. Never the less, this room shouldn't be mainly use as penalty. Purpose of it's existence is also to gain resources in case all extractors are down and team even thought fought back the enemy, can not place further extractors because of lack of resources. Commander/Hive Mother can in that case place this area on map and volunteers can donate some of their resources.
The 3rd problem that you refer to has a misleading statement. Which is "It has to be a game and it has to be fun." which leads to thinking that this game is only a Shooter. And it's not, if i could give you a home work, it would be playing as a commander, since you clearly have a lacking in experience as playing one. But adding a serious note here, please read my respond to mrmoo2002, at the bottom of this text.
You depend on average subordinates because they have a different point of view, and that's correct, but never the less they should depend on you as well, since you're point of view shouldn't be belittled. Lonely players wandering off to god knows where, while you clearly see their heading toward their doom, isn't worth repeating. I've lost dozen players because they don't communicate and about ten players can die in the same place while Commander is trying his best to keep them alive, protecting from their own lack of awareness. Surely it's better to throw in an armory, phase gate or even sentries instead of dropping on their heads countless amount of supplies and hoping that it will win the game. In the end it's the commander/hive mother who makes these decisions, and whether team obeys or not, it will always be him who'll be penalized for wrong commanding. One player takes the responsibility of being the commander and he has no way of turning game around if team doesn't want to win. He can't do a single thing but wrong economical choices only because the team insists on gathering in a room where they all die, instead of getting free extractors while they still have time. I've got experience in commanding then playing as an average field human/alien trooper, and the only thing that bugs me so far is lack of team awareness of their goals, lack of reasoning behind the idea of everyone going in the same corridor and dying, while a single enemy is taking out our most important building just behind their backs.
Because respect can be gained and lost, and if this person want's to be taken seriously, then he or she should stop acting like a drama queen and write what's wrong, instead of making a big fuss.
I take no pleasure responding to someone who doesn't give a damn about my answer, but attempts to rise a riot. Moving on, making wrong assumptions as if in OP i've mention of something that doesn't exist, even further makes me less and less interested in responding. Put your mind together and give me something worth clearing, otherwise it's just hate mail/troll/flaming or whatever you want to call it.
About your second dilemma; ignoring wrong choices, supports them. If You're permitting a wrong scenario to take place, you're also responsible for it, and no amount of "noob commander" statements in chat will fix it. And that my friend is another reason why my idea is good. In your theory you're a lonely wolf that doesn't care about their race or what commander requests, you're joining a game to shoot something, and not work as a team. That is why giving the option to someone that needs your help to put your kd in risk due literally being mind afk, frightens you. It disturbs you to a point that you're belittling the existence of commander. And that's wrong, you're having a wrong view of the game. It's not quake or any other shooter, this game is about playing as a team, expanding and making the right choices, only half of it is shooting down the bad guys.
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I chose most frequent mentioned questions and dilemmas, if you think that i should also answer your question, please repeat it.
So far giving answers to those above, should clear the view for most of the others that form their questions a little differently while still referring to the subject.
1) The commander is knows best. He doesn't. Best player on my team is nearly always on the field not in the comm chair.
2) That the players must obey the commander. They don't. Yes it's preferable but like others have said, sometime having one guy disobey and run off alone is exactly what your team needs.
3) That the players who really don't play as a good team member will change their behavior from this idea. They won't. The lame morons who just want to run and gun and think there name is Rambo will continue to do so. They will either run right through the penalty zone cause there happy with the LMG or they'll just run to another area all alone.
Also something you haven't yet considered. Good teams will exploit this massively! 6 players donating their 20 starting res to the commander for fast upgrades and expansion is going to nearly always be preferable to them holding on to that res for themselves. Even if they go 15 res for mines and just give the remaining 5 to the comm that's a nice boost!
If you have idiots on your team who refuse to listen and play as a team chances are you've lost. There is no game mechanic that's going to fix that. Try to teach them how to play properly and if they don't want to listen switch servers. There's plenty of servers out there with decent regular players who listen and talk to each other. Find those players and let those who don't want to work as a team play NS2 rambo edition with each other.
With time newbies will smarten up and stick to their team instead, noobs will continue acting like turds. If you want players to act like disciplined and well organized task forces that listen to all your orders, open up a server for U.S. marines only.
Definatly ! We have enough of a hard working day not to get into a game with penalties when you don't do this or that.
Let me clear up few things. I'm not assuming wrongly that Commander is making the decisions. You're just belittling the fact that he has to take the right choice and team that prefers to die doesn't benefit in wining. But first of all, commander isn't someone random, if you'll end up with one which you fail to understand, then perhaps just eject him and that's all there is to it. If You didn't then it your fault, but look on the game play from his side, he has you on his team, someone who plays alone and thinks that team benefits from your deaths, or lack of team work. What else can he do in a situation where two other guys are constantly dying under overwhelming odds of 3 v 2 battles. Do you honestly think it's fair that a good commander can't do anything when team refuses to participate in game? Do you really think it's fair? In my understanding you're delusional.
About the mentioned abuse with donating res to commander, i see nothing over powered in it team being generous and acting like a firm organize. If You see it, then again it put's my believes in doubt, that NS2 a game that focuses on team work, is the right game for you my friend.
I doubt that sacrificing a game for the purpose of someone learning on their mistakes is common to see. People are arrogant and blind when it comes to finding the weak spot in their already meaningless strategy which doesn't even exist. They'll blame the commander and look what happens next, one person rising a riot, and everyone can join, simply type 'eject commander' and most people do it. Commander in your understanding is treated like a lower class, class which shouldn't even exist, and best if replaced with a bot. With obedient team and few gutsy decisions made in the right moment, i can turn every game around, but like i said, nothing bugs me more then five players going mind afk while we're losing precious resources.
If it slipped your attention, you're already being penalized by own stupidity, but because of it, you're unable to notice that simple fact.
Punish/Prize rooms are to snap you out of that mirage, and get your attention back from wherever it was. If You haven't notice, or perhaps didn't had experience playing NS, commander's communication with team, is limited to microphone or pings on map. But with people ignoring both, it's hard to blame commander yet very likely to take place from players that don't understand that they are at fault for playing selfishly.
Instead of sending marines out to cap nodes, you just prize the starting room, and get level 3 weapons up by the 3rd minute.
Yes, but team benefits from their lack of competency. Each time they disobey they enter the zone and get penalized with a little donation to the team. And the more people do it the higher the donation. That means that Commander even without team that focuses on defending extractors that are constantly at risk, can still be a functional member of the team and keep the team safe from their own suicidal mission. This Punish/Prize idea doesn't prevent disobedience nor promote it, it simply aids commander/hive mother with a little help in case team doesn't want to focus.
And that is the whole purpose of this idea, helping commander getting a grasp of resources even when team can't provide enough will to put back the only obtained extractor spot. With all extractors down, and enemy team backing up, additional commander having not enough res to put it back on, normally the game would be doomed, my idea gives a chance to stand back up. How many times have you fought with pro players doing alien rush on spawn, and forcing marines to lose everything, how many times have you played against teams that shoot so well that you couldn't help your alien troopers in defending the hive, and losing all cists connecting to precious supplies. Remember that this room can also help team and not ruin the game for troopers.
Considering how the donation works, i don't think your plan would fit. But following your logic, let's assume that we have 6 players, 1 is the commander and 5 of them stand in the P/P zone, after 10 seconds they lose 5% of their whole res, which is exactly 1 res from all of them. If we want to make that quicker, we ask them to enter the zone and stay for 4 seconds, then leave and do it again. Doing it again gives 0.95 res doing it again decreases it for 0.9475. So as You see, it will lower and lower based on percentage. And early on it's more useful to focus on building stuff instead of wait outside of the base to donate their res. That's why P/P zone works best later on when there is bigger anarchy going on, when everyone is confuse what's happening. When everyone has bigger pools of owned res, and it is more likely to disobey. Perhaps P/P zone is a little under powered with the percentage lose so it would be wise to limit the minimum res donated to 1, but i wouldn't argue about that particular aspect. Never the less, i want to outline that it takes too much time to gain enough resources from donation early on, to actually feel like a God. It helps only in situations when team is either stubborn at being disobedient, or they need quick res for a certain res pool to match expected requests of upgrades faster or put extractors back in running in case of lacking all of them.
Like i said, P/P zone doesn't take that much to be offended and you're entering it out of your own free will. Yes, placing it in a wrong spot might anger troopers and that is why bad commanders should be ejected. But as we all know, rampaging around the map doesn't support bonding with team and a single offended lone wolf doesn't put a commander at risk of being ejected. If team would work together and commander would work against them, i, myself would eject that commander.
Bad Commanders get ejected. Bad troopers can still be bad and spam their requests for ammo and health back on the other side of the map.
So far being a Commander is a lot more stressful then being a trooper, that's why rarely someone want's to be him.
I love people who always are open to listen and learn. But as we both know they are not the case we're focusing in here.
We're focusing on stubborn insubordinate selfish free loaders, those that can't be reason with, those that are first to judge others and never themselves, those that work as a team only when they can throw a rock at someone from their team, those back stabbing good for nothing players that think they are the center of the world. Those are the kind of players, that made this idea add Punishment aside to Commander Prize Zone.
Commanders just need to become better players and learn that their greatest ally is confidence in their commands when speaking to the other players. If the players disagree in their head but the commander sounds confident in the decision from times that I've seen.. they follow through with the order anyways.
That's ok. Looks like I screwed up the quoting in my last post anyway.
Now this is a bit different. You've changed the goal from "make people do as the comm says" to "salvage the best of a bad situation". This still has issues but it's more feasible. One bad player on the team and trying to do something about it is different to a whole team of bad players.
Issue with any zone and timer ideas like this is the rambos will learn to run through it fast enough, or go around it. I don't think you need a zone, if this idea is seen as only helping against 1 or 2 bad players just allow the comm to directly select those players. Give a verbal warning that there not helping out at all and so their pres is being redirected to the team effort. Limit it to only one person at a time, and it's harder to abuse.
Yes for one person something like this might work, they're either going to suffer the res loss, start helping or leave the server. If a majority of the team are bad players then it's better for you to leave the server. Also see above about not using zones.
Oh holy hell is comm stressful! No one is going to disagree with that. It's also be massively rewarding, it's wonderful when your back in the ready room and the whole teams going "good job comm!".
Yes so if were focusing on making the best of one (maybe two in larger servers) bad player(s), then this idea might just have some merit.
Perhaps i wasn't using the right words, excuse me if that's my fault, never the less i'm happy it was finally cleared out. But i'm still gone insist on placing a zone instead of penalizing a single player. If i would penalize a single player, it would take too much time for the rest of the team to notice what's wrong, while they insist to follow the footsteps of someone else. That is why limiting res donations to percentage, rather then a static number, fits better as a balance mechanic since the more people are in p/p zone the faster they notice their mistake.
Additionally to limit the amount of abuse this option could provide by placing it whenever commander wants. Using this ability could cost 2 res, and keeping it for a minute will take away 1 res from the last time the zone was infiltrated by team member. This is only a speculation but i want to open everyone's eyes on the possibility of nerfing the idea instead or rejecting it.
Yes, that is why i added a timer of 3 seconds, basically almost every room takes 2-7 seconds to cross. That of course can be adjusted, but so far that's the most reasonable way to respect players mistake in crossing the line of that room, and knowing when someone intends to cross the whole room. Maybe even instead of selecting a room, pick a zone which size would be big enough to tick punishment option to whoever wishes to go against restrictions and be a total ass.
And i permitted myself to answer on your proposition with selecting a certain player instead of a zone, the answer is above the quote. But let me just add that an alterantive way of punishing players that don't synchronize with team, would be vote kicking, so far they didn't implement it and i'm happy for it. But instead of kicking or selecting a single person which sounds more like bulling if done by a commander that team doesn't want to eject, that's why i'd prefer to stick with a P/P zone.
Well, not always people are bad because they want to. In few cases they are just blind and can't see what commander sees. They wander off and shepherd can't always keep all of his sheeps at safe. Those zones help him aid those lost souls and direct them where their existence would not be put to waste, show them the right path and i start to feel awkwardly funny in where i'm going with this thought. The fact is that pings that often annoy players and they stop reacting to them, even your own voice can annoy them and they stop reacting. Zones are a visual way to show which path is wrong, penalty for going in those areas are not big if you go alone, but if you drag more people in them then normally commander would have a problem with your escapades, but with those wonderful p/p zones now Commander can benefit from Your insubordination equally as if you were a team player. Just like you phrase it so well "salvage the best of a bad situation".
I'm glad you share my point of view. Would appreciate if you could aid me with more questions that i could answer or answer a couple of them from other people since i truly believe that this idea might work well for NS2, and the more people are willing to ask questions and share ideas, the better the P/P zone suggestion would be balanced, hopefully to a point of being publicly accepted.
Players failing to obey orders and pursue a commander's strategic decisions is always a failure of leadership on the part of that commander. The only exception to this is if a team willfully conspired en masse to disobey a commander for troll lol's, which is obviously an irrelevant edge case.
The only solution for commanders wishing to get players to more reliably pursue their strategic vision and orders is to provide better leadership. Punitive sanctions such as resource stripping is not better leadership. A discussion of how to provide such leadership is beyond the scope of this thread.
not always, hugh. some people just down right refuse to listen to ANYONE. and unless one is commanding a team of 11/12, that's a significant loss unless hes doing some useful rambo stuff like constantly attacking resource towers, going upgradehunting, or in rare cases, taking out as many whips as possible so that if the need arises in the future, you can rush the base without need to worry about people getting rooted to corridorwhips. ;/.
So anyway, my point, is that, not all situations when players refuse to follow orders are entirely your fault. people hear 'base rush' and just grunt and walk off, people hear me shouting and grunt and walk off (TRUFACT, i'm on the mutosphear for many aussies ;D
Anyway anyway, i would like a sort of reward for following orders, maybe just a one time you-can-get-res-whilst-you-are-dead-because-you-followed-orders bonus, but an e-peen engorgement would help too (Score)
The internet is for score! SCORE SCORE!
The only way I can see a scenario where the Comm should have this type of control is if he/she is the most experienced and best person on the team. It rarely happens though. Even then, the smartest commander's strategies still fail if the marines do not have the skill to fulfill the given tasks. Forcing marines to do exactly what the commander wants would ruin the whole harmony of the comm/marine relationship.
And when I point out that a commander is not doing a good job at commanding, that he is sitting on plenty of resources, not using drifters or scans or keeps dropping the same unprotected RT even though it's instantly taken out, they often turn into jerks immediately and take everything as personal attack.
Then they are like "do it better, a******", keep whining for the entire next round under your command what an awful commander you are [regardless of how well you are actually doing and even while winning] and by the time you have actually won the match, they already ragequitted in shame.
Or worse...
Commander, I need ammo.I need some ammo over here.I need ammo.Hey, I need some ammo over here.Medpack.Medpack.Medpack.I need a medpack stat!Commander, I need ammo.I need some ammo over here.I need ammo.Hey, I need some ammo over here.Medpack.Medpack.Medpack.I need a medpack stat!Commander, I need ammo.I need some ammo over here.I need ammo.Hey, I need some ammo over here.Medpack.Medpack.Medpack.I need a medpack stat!Commander, I need ammo.I need some ammo over here.I need ammo.Hey, I need some ammo over here.Medpack.Medpack.Medpack.I need a medpack stat!