Let commanders temporarily possess players like in men of war(or is that men at war?) Cause you know, sometimes all you can think is that if you were right there right now, the problem wouldn't be a problem anymore. Not a very serious suggestion because players would rage at this kind of crap, but still a fun thought.
I would possess JustGoFly. Every. Single. Time. I don't think I would ever use this for any purpose other than further trolling of both myself and my team. Xx_sniperdude_xX won't build my ref? Place walls around him, possess him and build said walls. Hilarious suggestion, but as you said players would rage. Nothing ruins a video game more than taking control away from the player.
Take said persons body but, give him new one at barax with no spawn time... I would still rage though. This could open up the bot argument again too. Have a 2-3 bots. Commander can walk the bot somewhere and tell it to defend area and it just sits there like a mobile turret.
Commander can spawn on a squad leader's location as some sort of mech/supersoldier/whatever with a long delay to do it again. The cooldown could be individually tracked to encourage rage com rotation. Bonus points if com avatar is based on the class of the squad leader (Like a mech for the engineer, a supersoldier for the riflemanz, an invisible assassin like creature or something for scout, a map sized 500000 damage explosion for grenadier.)
I've never tried it, but I'm pretty sure comm can suicide in comm view and someone can go and revive his body. I mean with that method you can teleport and entire team by having one engy with revive at one point and everyone runs into the CV and does this suicide teleport.
but this would fix comm diving after the round too and its the single most important feature in empires - all i ever played for ...
Oh, don't worry. I can just make it so the corpse can't be revived. Then we can remove that exploit *and* keep comm diving! In effect, I'll make it so that if the commander dies in the CV, it'll be the equivalent of "emp_force_kill".
Amusingly, it occurs to me that this actually could be implemented without ruining the game by allowing the comm to take control of empty tanks. It would still be a terrible idea for too many reasons to count, but it would be amusing. Engineer gets out of his vehicle to repair it, comm possesses it and has it zoom away. Priceless. (You know, in an actually-serious comment, it might be cool -- though infeasible and not worth it in Empires -- for the comm to have a way to select a soldier and see what that soldier is seeing, maybe in a little window somewhere on their HUD. I'm not sure what actual use it would be, though. Oooh, maybe if the comm can view your view, and then draw translucent things on it! In theory this would be to give the comm a way to get someone's attention and convey orders, in practice it would be used to draw cocks on people's screens.) ...actually, did anyone else here play Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising? It had a possessing-people trick. Obviously it was a single-player game, but I recall playing it, thinking "man, this is awesome, I wish I could do this in Empires even though it would be a hilariously obviously terrible idea." To get actually-serious, part of the problem comm-oriented games have always had is that most people don't enjoy playing the comm; that's why they ended up not putting a comm in TF2. Obviously possessing players is hilariously terrible, but I partially wonder if deploying some sort of 'commander drone' that gets dropped onto the map from space for limited amounts of time could be a cool idea... for a game that isn't Empires. Especially if the commander drone is accompanied by a giant column of light and heavy map ping to let the rest of your team know that you're calling for a full push at that point (so calling down the command drone becomes a form of actually commanding rather than just ditching it.) And of course the timers would be set up so you can't use the command drone all the time. Anyway, it could be fun for a game that was built around it... that is, a game that is not Empires. But I think it'd make for a way for commanders to have fun and influence the flow of the game directly -- especially if the command drone is some sort of slow-moving, slow-turning giant vehicle (like the Titanfall mechs) which can be powerful but needs to be protected by the team to be of any use.
empires commanding is boring because you cant kill shit except the hobbes way where you put a whole teams success on stake and reduce the game to a feature overkill version of q2 catch the chicken. after all this years in empires i came to the conclusion that the only decent implementation of a RTS FPS blend would be to have every player parttake in every universe you try to meld together and that having the chain of command hardcoded is a bad idea. i dont blame empires for it though, there have not been much similar games to draw conclusions from at its time ...
If a COMM could take control of empty vehicles, it would be cool, but seriously exploited. I'd just have a group move jeeps outside the enemy base, then the COM drives them into the VF until that group takes their whole base down, disallowing them from spawning any vehicles. Or I'd drive an APC around their base spamming UGL while guys spawned and dropped out to kill the base - CONTINUOUSLY with a pez dispensor of vehicles awaiting the COM to take control immediately. Drive one inside the VF, jump in a second and spam UGL. It would quickly depopulate every server. Kinda like how the COM attack exploits do now. When those guys who do that log on, I just log off. You only have a handful of regular PUB COM players who play for the team. We've learned how to handle Hobbes, but it's too easy to scout sticky a COM, wall him in and game over. I still don't think that is what this game is all about. I may have to start ungriefing myself everytime that occurs to re-enforce that I think that tactic takes away from real game play. I think at least an Engie COM while in the COM vehicle should have Enhanced Vision. The fun games are about the team - not one player.
To me, the idea that an administrator would use his powers to try and push a personal view of how the game is supposed to be played is nothing short of terrifying.
Honestly, although an admin exploiting is simply corrupt, an admin trying to force his own view of how a game should be played onto others is straight-up tyrannical in my view.
