Trickster I hate to point this out but you are the worst empires player, if we followed the logic that 'trickster might abuse it' then we might as well strip out everything up to and including the ability to join any team other than spectator. And even then you'd probably ban people to win the micspam wars. In fact I'm pretty sure I've seen you ban people in order to do that. Point is, 'retarded people might grief the game with it' is not a valid criticism.
I don't think that's abuse. If it means that his team wins, then the com has done his job. And who would even be hurt by this "abuse?" A few noobs on the bottom of the scoureboard? A noob would rather win with few points than lose with more points. Everybody has a good time when you win.
I don't, actually. I hated playing with HSM as commander because he never shut the fuck up, had to listen to him whine and whine and whine, and it's not even like you can mute him because in between the whining you get useful information, certainly ruins the game though, regardless of the fact that we often won with him as commander (although usually because the other team had almost nobody competent on it). Likewise, I hate winning by steamroll or APC rush or comm ninja, winning a game isn't fun, because winning the game means you have to stop playing, which if the game is fun, you don't want to do. Playing the game with a good amount of equipment and resources available is fun, and this is usually concurrent with the process of winning, but the actual winning part? Feh. Don't care for it. There are few better ways to ruin an otherwise enjoyable game by having some asshole being an asshole to everyone because he's an asshole.
I'm explaining it in a slightly less specific way than I should do. To be specific, it would probably involve a lot of favouritism and very few people on the team are going to benefit from it. People aren't going to "build that ref" purely because they might get 10 points given to them by them comm for it. All it will be used for is for the commander to give the points to people he likes, often in reward for stacking his team. Seriously, I know the "commander could grief it" blah blah not a real argument blah, but at the moment, there isn't a great number of ways in which a commander can grief his team without getting banned, but when we get into the realms of allowing him to push players out of the way for buildings, or slay them, or give resources to specific players, and stuff like that, it's things a commander can be a dick about without getting himself kicked off the server. It's about avoiding that middle ground, where he can be a dick, piss off his team a lot, but not actually get in trouble for it.
The entire act of server administration is subjective though. If you annoy the hell out of your team, then I would ban you for it, because you're making the game not fun, maybe you wouldn't, but you have to make that decision constantly. I mean, the very act of commanding is variably annoying. Say the comm forgets to drop a ref, or dies while boomtanking arguably neccesarily, or is a bit slow to react, or pursues an unorthodox strategy, or doesn't know a particular map, or chooses odd research to make the game a bit interesting, or is simply very annoying on the mic. There are a HUGE number of ways to be subjectively annoying as a commander, because the very act of being a 'good' commander is a subjective thing. Some people hate commanders who are assholes but get results, some people hate commanders who do risky things but get results, some people hate commanders who play according to their own idea of fun, some people just want to play the same game over and over with the same research approach because it works. The problem is kind of unavoidable, you really just have to use your own personal discretion, or tell players to just deal with it or find another server, which is generally your approach, isn't it?
Yeaaah...i'm never going to agree to that. Actually I have like 8 months of experience when we were pre-testing 2.0 that shows otherwise. Pretty much everyone had fun whether they won or lost in those games because the gameplay was fun and the community liked playing together. The accentuation on winning is what brings most of the games down, because if it's that, you almost always have 50% of the server not enjoying themselves.
Yeah but from everything I've ever read about 2.0 testing times, there were so many vets playing that it was just like having a pug every night, so the level of play was probably higher than anything we've ever seen in a pub match. Because I usually have fun even when we lose in a pug.
Winning (and losing) provides context to your actions and, subsequently, immersion . It sounds petty, but it's the same reason that story is important in video games, context.
The more important thing was the level of play was even - where people knew what they were doing. You can take the level of a pubber who knows what to do (but can't do it well), and if you apply that to the whole server, you'll have a good game. The reason we don't have good games is we have people not knowing what to do, and we have people who are too damn good at doing what they should, all on at the same time. Not that i'm saying everyone should be good at the same time, but the more we eliminate...well, ignorance, then the more fun the games are. Or alternatively, the more newbies that listen to the commander (when the commander knows what to do) the more fun it is. The testing was fun pretty much because play was even, imo. And that people had competitive good-humoured bitching, as opposed to the aggressive "I-want-to-cut-you" stuff we have more often now.
I can abuse the living shit out of you as Commander, and I doubt you could get me banned for it, the moment you would say it, I could just stop for say a half minute, then continue it again when nobody is watching. You do have to take the griefing effect into everything, just like we do in maps, we do place invisible walls at places we don't want the players to walk in to, not because we like having invisible walls.
Correction, you could abuse the living shit out of me as a commander if we are on a server I am not adminning, and the admins are fairly forgiving. If we were on a server I was adminning, I would just ban you for being annoying, preferably after you'd finished the game so that I can get some use out of you. That's the point, what constitutes griefing is an administrative decision, not a game balance decision for the most part. Unless you can make the entire game grief proof, and you can't, then adding in ways to intentionally grief it for a position who already has a million ways to do so doesn't make any difference. If your server allows a certain kind of assholery as commander, then your server will have commanders who are kind of an asshole. If your server doesn't allow it, your server won't have asshole commanders. Of course your server might also not have any players either, but it's still an administrative decision, not a design one.
Chris, the issue is the grey area. You can piss off players without it necessarily being classed as griefing, or at least to the point of warranting a ban. A commander picking on one player usually won't result in an admin doing anything, especially given that banning the commander on one team usually means they'll end up losing, when they might be winning but picking on one single player.
