Yeah get rid of mines because mines only serve to be a cheap shot. All mines do is force people to play defusal or deal with getting blown up with no enemies in sight every once in a while. Mines don't add any fun or gameplay value to a game past the occasional ninemine, and only serve to slow the game down and promote non confrontational play. Playing a game where you don't even have to be near an enemy is just not fun.
I hope you have plenty of balls to defend the incoming shitstorm. That or everyone is just going to ignore you.
I'll be the first to dignify this with the response I don't think it deserves, and that response is "cry more". Mines do add value, they allow ways to deal with vehicles other than trying to keep turrets up everywhere. As for your complaint of "Playing a game where you don't even have to be near an enemy" then why are you not whining about artillery? What does artillery add to the game? (No, this is not an invitation to begin an inquiry on artillery. It adds the ability to siege an opponents base and can end an otherwise drawn out game) Additionally, I can honestly not think of a single occasion where I have thought a game was drawn out because of mines. I have seen games drawn out for many reasons: defensive players, a lack of aggression when the enemy team has nothing to their name but their main base, and never-ending tank battles. But not mines. Oh, and yes, they can take out the unaware infantry (which you obviously are, and quite frequently) Let the storm... begin EDIT: Just wanted to say, nice title
First: I actually happen to not like artillery, but at least with artillery you can do shit about it past playing defusal and only walking in bright open areas. Second: I never said they draw out a game, I said they slow it down, no one likes randomly exploding. Third: mines don't create a way to deal with vehicles because everyone in a vehicle is using defusal. My main point is that it restricts you to playing grenadier if you want to drive.
Oh and you can argue with my negative points, but feel free to tell me how they actually improve the game.
Drawing out? You're implying that you don't see the mine until after it's blown you up. Unless you're breaching your 60s, this should not be the case. Slow down your walking pace or stop looking at the skies, it's not like we have aircraft anyways. Most mines are situated in easily avoidable spots. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one spot where mines are unavoidable - BE tower on district. And that's not exactly an argument against them, really. They're just tactical.
omg grenz r overpowerz I absolutely agree with this suggestion. Currently, grenadier is the most overpowered class in the game. We all know that it takes no skill to use the noob tube a.k.a. the "mowtar", for it is too easy to one shot people. Also, the grenadier is by far the deadliest anti-tank entity in the game. Although the game developers attempted to nerf his anti tank abilities from the get-go by only allowing the rpg to fire one shot at a time, some highly intelligent players realized that they could fire the mortar and quickly switch to the rpg to quickly deal nearly double the damage!!! Mines are simply too unintuitive to go around. You could, in theory, hop over them, but sometimes I forget what key I have bound to "jump" and I end up pressing my forward key, thus running over them. Also, mines are simply too hard to see to begin with. I am legally blind and don't really know how to play videogames, but even if I weren't, how would you expect me to see mines on the floor if I'm busy staring straight ahead at the enemy?!? I suppose that you could play a grenadier with defusal, but as I believe the OP has already stated, grenadier is absolutely an overpowered kill-whore class, and I am therefore staunchly opposed to the idea of playing grenadier at all except to troll the opposite team. I thus believe that the best way to deal with this absolutely insane and uncontrollable mine-whoring situation would be to give mines to the most useful member of any team, the rifleman. The rifleman should be given 4 weapon slots, like every other class in the game; currently, he only has 3 which makes him shitty and completely nerfed. The grenadier 4th weapon slot should instead be an "IED" that takes 69 seconds to plant and has a 69% chance of blowing himself up as soon as he plants it. Furthermore, if the grenadier should successfully plant this IED, it would deal 1200 damage to his own team's tanks versus 10 damage to the enemy team to ensure that it does not become a nuisance and grant any further modicum of purported usefulness to the already overpowered grenadier. While we're at the topic of balancing the grenadier, the mortar and the RPG are simply too cheap against early game vehicles. One mortar and one RPG shot can already take out paper LTs and APCs, which is completely unrealistic IMHO. Also, it's absolute bullshit how grenadiers can "bunnyhop" around and stop for 0.1 seconds to fire their mortar while riflemen need to crouch or prone for 0.2 seconds to be accurate at all at long range; I feel that fighting a mortar-wielding grenadier is completely unintuitive. Therefore, to balance the grenadier mortar and RPG, I propose that the RPG be given a 17% chance of backfire every time it is fired, dealing 500 points of damage in a 17m radius around the grenadier, and that the mortar should require a "set up" time of 6969 seconds before it can be fired to deny the grenadier his already insane share of mobility. Hopefully, this long set-up time will discourage people from using the mortar at all, except as a stationary anti-building weapon.
Hm... I can't really say how they "improve" the game as opposed to a game without mines. As far as I see it, mines are a relatively integral mechanic of the game that I have come to know and love/hate with all my being. I can really only say that they are part of the game, and that without them it wouldn't be the same game I know. My apologies, though I don't really see how they slow down a game, either.
My point exactly you are a genius you've pointed out my whole argument thanks for making my point for me I was struggling to get it across.
Fine, then I'll dignify this with an actual response. It is not difficult at all to avoid mines, unless you're mentally challenged, blind, staring at the sky (see mentally challenged), or completely new to this game. Even then, after you play this game long enough, you begin to know common places where people place mines, i.e. in doorways, on stairs (because the stairs can block view of the mines somewhat), in dark areas, etc. Furthermore, if someone mines up the rax, you can take advantage of your spawn protection to blow up the mine, unless you're on a server with 0 seconds spawn protection. Also, I'm guessing from your post that you have probably not played more than 15 seconds of grenadier in your life so I'll tell you this: A. With grenadier, you can now see hovering yellow icons over the other team's mines so it's even more pathetic if you get blown up with a mine now and B. With the advent of limited ammo, it becomes more and more difficult to drive a tank as a grenadier and C. You can deal with mines not place in a stack as an engineer by driving over one mine, repairing your tank, driving onto another mine, repairing your tank, etc Furthermore, I have never heard of this argument that "mines slow down gameplay" If anything, walls and level 3 turrets and armories slow down gameplay more than mines, but you don't see people really begging for their removal. If you honestly feel that people are not pushing because of mines, then you are either so mentally challenged that you believe mines to be an actual deterrent to pushing up in the game, or so subject to belief bias that you believe mines to be an actual deterrent to pushing up in the game, or (likely) an amalgamation of both. As I believe Destroyer has already said, mines are heavily avoidable, except for the the little air vent on the third BE flag in district. Even on the stairways of the flags in district, it's possible to crouch jump over mines; if you can't do even that, you deserve to be killed by a mine, or there are simply so many mines on the flag that it took the grenadier 5-8 seconds to set them all up anyways and he deserves the kill. In a classic commander map, mines are made even more avoidable; certainly, a grenadier could stack 8 mines on top of each other just to ensure the death of one heavy tank, but all of the grenadier mines would be concentrated in one area anyways, meaning he wouldn't be denying anyone else movement in an area, and a grenadier intelligent enough to do that is better off being in a tank rather than wasting the 10 seconds or so it takes to place those 8 mines in a safe location.
I agree that it's pretty easy to avoid mines but that's not the point. When you do get blown up by a mine it is in every way a cheap shot, you get killed instantly and no one is even there to have killed you. Mines don't promote interaction between players, they don't do anything positive, and all they are is a cheap shot.
And by mines slowing down gameplay I don't mean on they make games last longer, I mean they slow it down for the individual who steps on them and makes them wait on a timer and redo everything without even having an enemy there.
O.K. By your logic, we should remove level three turrets from Empires because they legitimately slow down gameplay and you don't necessarily need to have an enemy near them to be killed by them, if you're not careful. I know you attempted to counter this argument earlier, but we should also remove artillery; it's far easier to jump over a mine/defuse it than run behind enemy lines to attempt to take out an artillery tank. We should also remove nukes because they're mostly used to mass kill infantry, who really have no counter against nukes. Edit: Furthermore, if you do in fact remove mines from the grenadier, what do you propose that they receive instead? I don't think you actually realize how integral mines are to Empires; hell, ninjaing would become a lot harder if someone were in fact to remove mines.
Mines work pretty well in their anti vehicle capacity. I think urethra is mostly irritated by their uncanny anti infantry abilities. Yes, you can look down all the time. And you can turn your flashlight on in dark corridors. And that all works pretty well, but then you're not looking at the enemy. That's not as easy as people like to say it is. So I think we all understand that there are strategies that overcome mines. But I genuinely believe that there is always a strategy to overcome and overpowered game mechanic. When that strategy is so unintuitive or difficult, we call the mechanic overpowered. Fundamentally, I don't like that the anti vehicle class has incredible anti infantry capabilities (and vice versa for rifleman's nade to a lesser extent). This stunts the need for teamwork. But like wages, this dogmatic community enjoys their broken game too much to let it get fixed. And I honestly can't expect any community to want to change their currently enjoyed game into something they might not like as much.
But level 3s ARE unavailable on the maps where they would be most potent. And it's not uncommon to hear a pub com say something like, "should we get arty and end this?" Look at money, that used to be a turtle-then-arty map, but many players think that's unfun, so they typically have prisoner's dilemma-esque gentleman's agreements. I don't think nukes are quite as bad as the other two, but I still hear a lot of, "they have nukes, game over" on pubs. They are more of a mercy kill to a vehicle-less team than an overpowered vehicle v. vehicle weapon.