Is sudden death on commander maps fun? When both teams have zero tickets on a commander map, after 5 minutes, the commander is vulnerable to instant death when taking damage. During this time since teams ran out of tickets, nobody can spawn and that typically forces squads to organize and do revives until enough people die so that one team gets map control and ends the enemy commander at 5 minutes. Is this fun? How can it be improved?
This. Also, it's often a watershed moment for many new players in which they actually learn about squads. I know I learnt this way. I used to be a huge advocate of removing tickets. I felt they stopped people playing as aggressively as possible and just took the potential away from the game. But now, I realise that's not really the case. It just increases the strategical element of it, especially as you get to the late-game. But yeah, sudden death tension is amazingly awesome. It's very rare that someone can't get a squad revive, and at worst it's then 5 minutes. But it's a really special game moment that comes pretty rarely, so I savour the moment when it does.
it's very rare that you can't get a revive but obviously during this time teams shrink. you can make that kind of excitement more consistently available if you had a pretty long respawn time like 15-30 seconds. consider the general game population. teams get smaller and less people are involved in the action, no matter how intense it is for the people still alive. usually it turns into a goofy chase that's fun for only the commanders and the winning team. ideally you want to maximize fun for people so they keep playing instead of ducking out of a really long game that went to sudden death where players were dead for some time (some teams run out of tickets before others)
My problem with sudden death isn't the tickets as much as the whole sudden death of the comm part. Sometimes you'll have the fun ones like today when Zeke kept Harryhoot squad hidden for two straight minutes on slaughtered so he could kill the BE comm, but most of the time it's a scout on his belly crawling for five minutes with sticky stuns. And even then when it is a more coordinated effort, I still feel like its a bit cheap. A full blown squad ninja, I can understand, but one or two guys running hidden and winning with a single shot doesn't feel right to me.
but its tickets that are responsible for the existance of sudden death. to me they are just a remainder of battlefield (emp started as bf42 mod) where bleeding tickets to 0 is the victory condition. i think individual spawn penalties based on respawns (not deaths so reviving still pays off or actually would be encouraged) would fit empires best. but whatever - old discussion is old - i know that noone wants that so i shut up before i really start
zero tickets should be a win condition but if you fight hard enough you should be able to get back from it in my version of sudden death, getting the enemy team to zero is a major advantage, but if t hey get you to zero, they can come back in full force
and if its 1:0? does the team who had the one player spawn instead of waiting for (squad)revive deserve to be punished as a whole? if tickets reach low amounts and the game tends to go into sudden death empires shows its ugly face - yelling, cursing, flaming newbies, enforcing unobvious gameplay - its a shit design element. even ending it when the first team reaches 0 would be better.
that's how it is no anyway but if you have wave spawning instead of no spawning, you'd have people still in the game fighting (the other team more than each other)
If people leave their teams during sudden death, it means that they either have to go, don't know about revives (which, after a few hours, they should) or the round is almost over as there is no way to get them back in the game (no engineers or no points). Either way, no matter the reason, they should stay for this little while longer and maybe have a chance to bite back and win sudden death or start a new round - which should happen shortly. And if you can't wait a minute for more people to die for a fullish squadrev, are you sure you're playing the right (not exactly casual) game? @Candles: Scout with enhanced senses on patrol from 100 seconds left denies that
Instead of making the comm die to something tiny like a single shot out of nowhere, the CV should progressively lose plates of armour and then eventually hull integrity down to the point where a single explosive blow would end the game. during the sudden death counter healing the CV would be disabled. This still allows for sneakery but also opens up the option to making well timed pushes of tank/infantry waves. The team with the most resources would be encouraged to push early as possible but if their push failed there would be the possibility of a counter attack by the weaker opposition, or for them to get a rogue engineer behind the lines for a gren squad rev, etc. This combined with a trickle of tickets for each team.
We rarely have a match that gets to the point of sudden death. Very rarely. When we do, it is usually to the point where the game needs to end anyways and people are burnt out. However, I think it is an exciting time where the teams actually stop jerking off and pull together and use good teamwork whether they win or not. Then when the next map loads, everyone sits in spec and leaves the game one at a time and the server dies
So it was changed from the original implementation of an infantry bullet could kill it? I like AZK's suggestion
It's actually a pretty good idea. I was thinking something similar, but more like, you just can't repair the CV at that time...yours is probably better. As always I feel about the same as flasche about tickets. We had a lot of discussions on these boards and quite good suggestions on how to deal with it, but maybe it's not the right time to do that, until we get kill-spawning removed as a fairly useful mechanic and get some kind of respawning-relocate feature instead, probably based around barracks. I do feel that there is room to make small changes in respawning though, as a way of testing it out. 10 seconds is a fairly short time, as is 15 and 20 seconds in the scheme of things, so it wouldn't be too hard to make after 10 tickets a 15s respawn and after 20, a 20s respawn. Waiting 30s to respawn at 30 tickets used wouldn't seem unfair to anyone - on the contrary it'd probably make someone completely detrimental to the game be less of a factor, likewise, 20 tickets is something only about 10-20% of a server hit in most games and in theory wouldn't hurt gameplay at all. Erm...yeah I digressed.
Ikalx, as I am a proud user of the "run at enemy and fire in good hopes" tactic, I must oppose to the idea of increasing respawn time based on the amount of used tickets. The suggestion would be primarily used to reduce polak power.
