Web_cole wrote:Insurgency is, and has been for a long time, in this odd place where public games tend to be biased towards blufor, but organised games tend to be biased towards Insurgents.
As for whether you blame the players or not, I always tend towards the Valve design philosophy. You read interviews with Valve designers about playtesting HL2 or whatever, and if someone is confused or doesn't know where to go or what to do next they never blame the player. They'll tweak the level design, give visual or audio cues, whatever. The buck should always stop with the design and the designers.
Maybe the player base has gotten stupider, or more likely there are just more newer and inexperienced players around, but the bottom line is design influences player behavior, and when the dynamics of Ins are so hodge-podge and non-sensical, what do you expect?
I realize defending is one of the 'secure' ways of playing insurgents, that is, usually the easiest way to actually do well against a decent BLUFOR team. However, it is REALLY boring. The game mode is utter shit in terms of fun for insurgents if you're gonna play to win, at least on public servers (never played organized INS so can't say). Some people in this thread are calling for huge amounts of downtime, what, 75% of 2 hours ? That's way too much.
It's gotten worse as far as that goes, because BLUFOR now tends to not engage known caches, instead they search for unknown caches. This makes the game unfun for both sides. If I'm playing BLUFOR, I cringe when a SL decides we should look for unknowns, because it's goddamn boring. It's okay to check areas you're passing through while attempting an assault, but to deliberately go out of your way and search remote locations of the map for 30+ minutes is really, really boring. I actually used to do this as a combat engineer, but after getting enough of this cheap thrill of finding an undefended cache, I decided it's more fun to try to sneak into a defended cache.
Same shit goes for playing as insurgents. I used to be the 'defender', sitting for long periods of time with little action, but that's not fun. Instead I decided to start roaming with packs of other insurgents, looking for action. Turns out you can get alot of fun firefights from doing this, but in the end it may not be the best tactic in terms of winning.
Sure there's ambushes, fake caches, raids etc. but that's hard to come by on pubs.
Anyway, I was saying how the search for unknowns sucks for both sides because of the decreased number of fighting going on. This can be reversed with allowing people to spawn on unknowns, but that kinda nullifies the whole point of how the game mode works now. I think it's time to change it a bit.
I don't know exactly how, but you want to rettain the differences in how you play BLUFOR and insurgents while making the game mode dynamic, that is, not boring as hell, and balanced.
What I'm thinking of is something like having preset cache locations - cache locations that are balanced, or at least overall balanced (by 'overall balanced' I mean, for example, having an equal number of caches in remote locations and number of caches in cities). You can also have different layouts for different combinations of preset cache locations to avoid the map becoming stale, or maybe even have it work like AAS - certain caches are always on the map, while others change depending on a random selection between a group of different cache locations.
The point is, both sides know about all the caches, but BLUFOR could only destroy 1 or 2 caches at a time before proceeding to the others. This would basically be an AAS where one side defends. The problem of long downtime would still be present here, though. There could be some kind of objective insurgents can target, or there could be a timer that would force BLUFOR to attack faster (not 4 hours). Maybe make it so each cache destroyed/conquered would add more time to the timer. I'm not even sure if this is doable in terms of engine limitations, and this is just a 'sketch' of the idea, but I think I'm on the right path at least.
Would appreciate if you guys could link any threads and posts that you encountered that have discussed similar ideas of making INS more dynamic. Might even make a thread about it soon if I come up with something better
