Project Reality Forums

Don't know if this could work.
1. Should a pilot if brought back to the base, give the team half of the tickets that were lost by the aircraft being destroyed?
2. Should a pilot's parachute be usable only once like a grenade for instance that they won't have to change kits to be extracted as his kit now behaves like a non pilot kit and now can get on the extraction chopper.
3. As a pilot has used his parachute, can he now become a something that once brought back inside DOD, that the team gains those half tickets lost due to destruction of the aircraft back.

The metrics of how much ticket can be gained back can discussed further.
This could encourage more things to do by the jet pilot or attack chopper pilot and the trans pilot for extraction.

Thanks.

I can't find the post now but we did have a topic about this in the dev forums some years ago I made talking about this.

We were talking in regards of giving the pilot kit itself a ticket loss of ~7 tickets (including the normal 2 tickets cost for losing a player) if the player who was using it was killed (with safeguards so the player couldn't drop the kit), which tbh is simpler (especially to code) than your idea of recovering tickets for returning a pilot and makes the whole team value the pilots more, especially the pilot himself. Unfortunately, no one got around to coding it

As for making the parachute a one-use weapon, pretty sure that isn't possible to code?

Anyways I would love to see this happen more, in a few games in the past I've successfully bailed out, evaded and got a ride back to base to get a new aircraft which was some really fun role-playing for everyone involved. But yeah, its uncommon to see as most people don't want to go through the effort, especially most pilots who just kill themselves to quickly get back to base since its only 2 tickets.

Rhino, Instead of punishing pilot loss even further. How about you allow a ticket rebate per recovered pilot? Say 50% of the asset cost? Incentives always work better than punishment.

Example: I'm a cas pilot who loses his chopper. I survive. I make my way back to main and get into a new chopper. My chopper costs 20 tickets. Well now that I've entered a new air vehicle. half that ticket cost is refunded to my team. The same could apply to crewman of vehicles. In order to prevent cheesing and greifing. The rebate only applies to vehicles that have not had crew for over 5 minutes or are newly spawned. And must be entered by the pilot who lost the vehicle. And it's only for the driver not the gunner. If driver leaves the vehicle and dies, but the vehicle is still alive, then this effect does not take hold. In order to make this work you will need to allow pilots to be passengers in air vehicles. If you want to prevent pilots from bailing out and doing impromptu paradrops(which fuck yes I loved doing). Then; have the parachute only activate if the pilot is in a crew seat on the aircraft.

Fast ropes or let pilots sit in non-pilot aircraft seats or both.

dcm wrote:Rhino, Instead of punishing pilot loss even further. How about you allow a ticket rebate per recovered pilot? Say 50% of the asset cost? Incentives always work better than punishment.

I would say for a few reasons.

Tickets are there really to simulate Attrition. In real life, if a pilot is shot down then recovered, your country doesn't actually gain anything, on the contrary, you actually risk losing more through the recovery effort. If successful you simply don't lose anything, mainly not losing a valuable individual that your country has invested millions of dollars in, in training, as well as the moral and political aspects of it as well but those can't be measured so easily.

The exact same thing can be said with how we deal with assets. A Jet has a 10 ticket price tag to it if lost, while in reality that represents a roughly $30 to $130 million price tag (depending a lot on the jet in question). A pilot costs around $5 to $11 million dollars to train. But money is not the only factor to a pilot, it takes a long time to train up a pilot, and in many cases during warfare (most notable the Battle of Britan), pilots are valued far more than the actual aircraft they flew as they could replace aircraft far faster than pilots, the same still holds true today with countries having stockpiles of mothballed old aircraft ready to put into service at short notice, but no pilots to actually fly them. Not to mention the moral and political factors which you can't put a pricetag on.

As for your griefing argument, it's already possible to grief a team by taking a jet, chopper or any other vehicle and crashing it, or blowing it up, then committing suicide with a kit which kinda defeats the point of griefing as those kinds of people want to make other peoples lives a misery and your not really doing that by just removing a few tickets from a team by killing yourself and waiting for a long *** spawn time to do the same again, then to find out you can't get the kit so soon again after your last request. I'm sorry but if players want to grief, they aren't going to care a pilot costs a load of tickets, other than being slightly more satisfying to them for shoot a friendly pilot running for their aircraft in the back but the main "joy" they get from that is already there by killing their fellow teammate...

Then finally from the coding POV, I already mentioned the "ticket loss" system is much easier for someone to code, as the bare bones of the system are already there, it just needs to be adapted to factor in kits. The "recoverable tickets" idea would be something that would need to be coded from scratch and would be a hell of a lot harder to code and has all sorts of problems as defining what accounts for the actual "recovery area" is (you can't use the DOD btw, python can't read that last time I checked) and does that correspond with all maps etc.

Your point about having pilots being able to ride in choppers as passengers is a valid one that I did come in in the previous discussion on this, sucks I can't find that topic as it had a lot of good points in it. It also isn't possible to limit how the parachute is used ingame so for your example, it could only be used from the jet seat, not without totally replacing the BF2 parchute system with a python driven one but that has all sorts of problems.


Anyways at the end of the day, the biggest obstacle in the way of getting this ingame is really finding someone with time to code it as it's pretty low priority but as I said before, if done right I think it could add a really nice side mission to the game of the pilot valuing his life much more than he does, as well as the rest of the team and leading to some awesome scenarios and role playing.

Rhino wrote:I can't find the post now but we did have a topic about this in the dev forums some years ago I made talking about this.

I remember seeing this. I think a way to encourage this would be essentially making the vehicles worthless ticket wise but the kit worth the 20 tickets or however many a chopper or jet is worth to encourage both teams to look for the pilot. To increase the instances of the pilot rescue scenario playing out, you would also need to adjust the helicopter damage parameters. IRL I assume chopper pilots are much more likely to crash land than parachute out, so make the chopper lose just about all functionality at the point it currently does, but make it indestructible to terrain damage so that it and the pilot survive the crash landing. Then maybe only leave it to blow up after 5 mins of being abandoned but immediately spawn after it blows up, like its normal spawn delay. That way if the team wishes to drive a logi to repair the chopper in the field, they can. Also if you really want to increase the instances of this playing out, at the point the chopper pilot loses control, also make it the chopper pretty much indestructible to weapon damage from the enemy.

Losing the asset is enough of a disadvantage to the team already and I would put the likelihood of a pilot making it back to base alive somewhere around 30-60% depending on team skill, just off my own bullshit assumptions. The time it takes to get back to main base is also a disadvantage, so making it possible for a shot down pilot to cost no tickets really wouldn't be an overpowered mechanic, but could make all the difference at the end of the game. On Muttrah, with normal skill pilots and an attentive MEC team, 4-6 choppers will go down throughout the game, and at 10-15 tickets each(?) if none of the pilots die, thats upwards of 60 tickets saved.


I love side missions that help the team in any PR match such as hunting down enemy mortars, driving a logi to repair a tank, or disarming mines. This would be a welcome addition.

If you actually start caring about your KD you will bail out your vehicle in time and get extracted and trans would probably like that mission. Sometimes you dont need to change the game just your mindset.

I'd say don't worry about the parachute because no one should be wasting kits to paradrop if the kit is worth more. Should be asset waste on servers to see anyone using them offensively.

Also just make them limited to the amount of pilot seats and/or pick up kits. If you know there is a time to recover the "pilot" (kit) as well after losing it, it will also give more thought to recovering it so there is no time delay between the asset respawn and the kit or less of one. Also make the kits specific to cas and trans (std and alt) so there's no fighting over them.

Should do something similar for crewman as no one ever RTBs either. Std for Tanks Alt for APCs.

Only request able from said assets so there is no accidental requests too.

Wouldn't this be more like a VIP game mode scenario?

I remember seeing BlueDrak42 post a video where they did a VIP thing and they had to try to move/escort 1 person from one place to another.

It's not a good idea to increase pilot ticket costs.

People will never use it.
Look how many vehicles get abandoned in the field and they cost also tickets when the enemy destroying it.

What about teleporting the pilot that dies with the jet into a prison vehicle/container/dummy (without minimap icon etc) and he cant exit it without help?

Lot of things don't work unless they are made a server rule: No one would listen to squad leaders if it wasn't a server rule. No one would honor asset claims or not waste assets. IMHO this change would be grouped into the asset waste rules. The way I propose to do it with limited or pickup kits, if pilots didn't do it, they would be the ones paying the price just waiting for a kit longer. Perhaps a mix of limited and non-respawning pickup "reserve" kits. The payoff of an extraction being that you can save your reserve kits for later in the game when you might need them quicker you can use them up and not have them for later. Still make the kit cost slightly more as well but split the difference between team and personal penalty like a civi kill.

Different factions could even play asymmetrically where maybe one side has more pilot reserves and another side has more armor reserves so they are both more likely to try to recover those pilots/crewman. Have the reserve kits listed next to the assets in the asset layout so it's known.