Wicca wrote:I dont feel accomplishment after capping a flag, i feel acomplishment after nailing 3 guys in muttrah. I feel accomplishment calling cas on a tank on kashan. I feel like the team is in the zone when they are mortaring an enemy fob, and i see bodies flying everywhere. U call it tactical and just "pwning loners". I call it awesome, it is awesome killing people. And hunting for them, looking for them. Trying not to get killed yourself, in a team situation its so much grander.
Its not about capping the flag. Its about killing the people and fighting OVER the flag. You're fighting for an objective. You are taking something away from someone that is valuable to the game. It means they will lose and you will win. Capping the flag is the objective, but being able to do this involves fighting. If theres nobody on the flag then the enemy is just dumb and wouldn't be much of an opponent anyway.
Theres something awesome about an enemy saying "YOU SHALL NOT PASS" like Gandalf and you're all like "I'll be back" and show up on his flank and are totally like "Yippy Kay Yay MOTHAFUCKA!!!!!" and totally kill him and take his flag from him. He fought you for that building or that field, he tried his best and you KILLED HIM, you killed the shit out of him! And you took it. A tangible, valuable thing, visible to everyone in the game. You put your flag on something he died trying to keep and you say "I'm coming for the next one, *****".
That is fun.
Flags are there to create a action frontline. To make sure we have as many players as possible in one part of the map. Its a gamemechanic. Get over it. Its just incentive to meet somewhere. The fact that you lose tickets when you lose a flag, is even more incentive. But its just a gamemechanic. It doesnt have some super high purpose other than just concentrate people on one point. But i think players should have that choice.
You're totally right about that. You totally are. But what choice are you looking for? Most good players would choose to play boring conservative PR, while bad players would play really reckless bad PR and learn to be rewarded for playing conservatively. It would be less exciting than fighting over a flag. It would be walking around trying to find the enemy. It would be trying to figure out where he is, and half the time you'd get ambushed doing this. Without a place to congregate for a fight theres no point to massing whatsoever. With no objectives you don't want to mass unless you're sure the enemy is vulnerable. With everyone spread out trying to find each other, in a wide net, you'd end up with lots of little fire fights, with no coordination and the fight would be over before anyone else could be flown in. You'd be madly running around trying to get to the action and in so doing would be moving without security and thats just a recipe to get ambushed. It would just be smarter to sit in a bush and wait for someone to walk by, shoot him in the back, and slink away knowing you just bought your team another few tickets advantage.
You think you are just going to walk? on a 4k map? And not to mention that players themselfs request to be transported places, why do they have to walk to find eachother? Not to mention my game on CnC on the 128, kashan. I walked from the main. We had so much fun, but we hardly fired a bullet. There was alot of excitment, alot of tension alot of combat, but most of all we the group had fun. And sticked for the next round. You dont need gameplay incentives to get players going, all you need is to show them the enemy, everyone thinks of some sort of short term or long term tactic, to kill him. Either a CQB or long range. Moving into positon, flanking running. Setting the gun to auto, burst. Telling the squad, so they can put fire on him. Why is that so hard to understand? Its fun. Killing players is fun.
CnC is about objectives. Its about incentives. It forces you to build your own flags, defend firebases. Thats no different than capping a flag except its more random. Traditionally CnC has been a real hard sell to the crowd that 'just wants to kill stuff'. If your team is weak on teamplayers then you will lose because nobody will build smart FOBs or they won't defend them properly and will just go looking for bad guys. Using CnC as a comparison is not much help to your argument because it still required a contrived game mechanic to stimulate combat.
As for transportation, I've already said that the best way to lose tickets is to move around looking for combat. Yes you can get a drop here or there but really with no set area for enemies to be in how do you know your LZ is safe? How do you know where to look? You say theres transport but with the need to patrol you're still gonna walk around a lot. And flying in on top of a fire fight is like AA bait. Assets usually go down when they get close to the fight. With no front line you significantly increase the risk to transport assets as there is no way to guess what the 'safe area' is to operate in. Choppers don't like to fly into hell every single time.
If you treat your crowd like idiots, then guess what, thats what they will excell at. If you treat them with respect and consider them intelligent, guess what. They will get better at that. Stop telling the PR community they are idiots. Thats wrong. A squadleader gets the respect he deservers, or people leave the squad. Thats how simple it is.
They are idiots Wicca, until someone leads them. That doesn't mean talk down to them, but most players don't care much for sensible tactics it seems. Most players don't like sitting and defending for more than 5 minutes. Yes a good SL can keep the spirits up with humour and chatter, but they're still just mostly 15 year olds that are horny as hell and desperate for something stimulating that isn't porn.
Yea give me shit for saying that they're not geniuses. But I've learned that most people are idiots, and the few that aren't tend to either avoid them or have to deal with them. It was hard enough getting people to be mature and play together in the PRT when you had a 100% chance of action and killing in any given battle. It was hard enough to get respect with good humour and lots of that directed management you talk about. Some players are great, many are. But most are still numpties. Its easy to cut that down in organized play where you can just kick them off the team or server, but in a public game when the smart guys are at school or just having dinner, you can have some real useless players. All your recipes for good squad leading I use and more and yet there are times its utterly pointless trying to get anything going.
People are people. Most are boring and unimaginative. It takes a good leader to make them into useful players. Sometimes its hard to make it happen. I believe that an aimless game system, while sometimes good, would by and large lead to boredom and lack of motivation. Often the best way to keep people in it is to describe what the squad goal is. If you spend 25 minutes walking around saying "We're gonna crest this ridge and look for baddies. We're gonna go over there and look for bad guys." and on and on it gets boring.
I dont remember anyone saying that. People talk about how to defend the T-Shaped, or how they had a 6 kill streak. Or how they took down a chopper with a tank. I remember times when things were going off everywhere, people were in the zone and it was awesome. But that happens on a regular basis.
Thats your perception. But I somehow believe that both of us perceive this game in such different ways that anecdotal statements like this will basically cancel out.
Because instead of relying on flags to assault. You rely on people to assault. What is so great about attacking an empty flag? That happens. Or taking down an unknown cache? Is that an epic assault for you? You think all PR is is just, flags flags flags?
I think PR is about accomplishing objectives and doing it with teamwork. Its easy to mass a team around an objective with a complicated nature to it. Whats so fun about endless minor contacts in the forest? You ever see how fast 3 squads will converge around a cache marker? LAVs move into range and start pounding it, mortars start falling, and CAS is salivating at the opportunity?
Everything you love happens around objectives like that. Flags, caches, FOBs in the forest on CnC. Its all about clear objectives. Wishy washy objectives just make for questionable purpose.
You know that thing they say in war? If you can't destroy it bypass it? If you don't need to kill it to achieve your objective avoid it? Some of my most intense experiences have been sneaking around, AVOIDING combat just to get into a flag radius, call in mortars from an excellent spotting position, and just take a flag from an enemy through pure ninja skills. Where does that come into play in a game with no objectives?
Wake up guys, we think kills are cool. We like seeing our enemy bleed, we enjoy watching them fall from the sky and end up in a large chunk of metal. Why do we think flags are so awesome? They were there in Battlefield 1942, vietnam, bf2 and hell they are still there in bf3. Why cant PR steer away from that, and be more about actual combat movement. Rather then everyone focusing on capping flags and holding them?
Because combat has always been about objectives. It always will be. Modern war is constantly about fighting enemies to GET SOMEWHERE, to TAKE SOMETHING, or to DESTROY SOMETHING that they're guarding. In the First Gulf War special forces were sent deep into enemy lines to destroy scud sites. On D-Day thousands landed on beaches to take cities while thousands more landed behind the lines to capture bridges and crossroads. They all had OBJECTIVES to take.
I like killing too. I hate it when I go forever without a kill. But its not the end all be all. Why would I play a tactical realism game and look for them to eliminate the objectives just so I can kill stuff more? If I wanted that I'd go play CoD.
I am the exact opposite of you Wicca. I don't care about killing by and large. I care about achieving an objective and I see killing as not even required if I can achieve my objective in doing it. I started playing
Resistance and Liberation this week after a long time. This game has flag cap zones and realistic mechanics. But whats really interesting is that it has no stats recording at all. You don't know if you have 5 kills or 10. You don't even have to worry about dying alot and making you look bad. You can cap flags and never see a soul, but guess what, you always end up in intense firefights for objectives because thats where the enemy is. They try their best to keep you off that flag, out of that building, and dying in those streets. I've had some of the most fun non stop killing action in a game that doesn't record kill counts and requires you to cap flags constantly, like an objective they'd give you: "Take that farm house" then it becomes a spawner point that you can use to attack a city from. Approach that famous Normandy Cafe at the entrance to Carentan and receive sniper fire, pop smoke, move in on the flanks, try and take the top floor of a building, put some enfilading fire on the suckers, open the doors for the next wave. That kind of combat is pretty hard to replicate in a totally spread out and uncoordinated map. I don't see that happening without a flag to force you to assault a hard objective and have that rush from actually cracking it.
Wall of text even larger. One up me Wicca! Lets build sky scrapers out of this argument!
(i use ts so you could always use that as a reference) 
