Game theory says we shouldn't earn money while juiced.

Yes you should earn money while juiced. Sounds quite stupid if you didn't. When i juice I'll kill 2-3 people and usually destroy a turret if I got no money for doing this it would be stupid. What next not earning money at all from killing pro's and tickle/pillow fights in the middle on every map or only get $ from killing bots?

I rather this than juice chaining assaults sometimes.

The assault needs a nerf somewhere anyway, at least only bots give $ would be an assault nerf.

Oh, but what about a comprimise? How about being penalized half of the money for a kill when you juice? So when you get a pro kill, you only get $10 when juiced, and $15 for a turret kill.

The point is, allowing people to get paid for juice chaining is kind of ridiculous when the enemy isn't able to do anything about it. I would just like to see people who play without juicing constantly for no reason other than a giant k/d pad recieve a reward, because the reward for juicing constantly means that it is the first thing anyone tries in a pub.

When I have juice first priority is turrets. The next is pros. If i see a group of 4 or more people grouped together why not juice them?

You made this post under the guise of understanding game theory, but I have to wonder if you have any idea what you're talking about...

No.

An actual exploit is when a user takes advantage of an unintentional mistake made by the system's designer. Exploits can always be repeated until the programming errors that cause them [bugs] are corrected.

Most modern gamers confuse this with glitching. It's a malapropism that arose in online console games circa 2000. Actual glitches tend to be hardware related and by definition are short-lived. Since they can't be reliably reproduced, they're difficult to correct.

I mention all of this because these words once meant something. Nowadays they're used interchangeably by children who presume they understand game design simply because they play a lot of video games. Juice chaining is not an exploit. It's a problem that stems from Uber's inability to balance MNC.

Many players complained about Juice prior to the Spunky update. Uber's answer was to add a cooldown to the Juice Machines. Due to the nonexistent team balancing, this only made the problem worse. Since one team is generally dominating in public matches, the Juice cooldown has increased the frequency of base camping and Juice chaining.

How to fix this problem:

1. Nerf the Assault class.
2. Put the Juice Machines on a team cooldown.
3. Increase the cost of Juice by 50% each use for the entire team.
4. Add special Juice Machines inside the spawns that are on an individual lockout. If a player is killed by enemy Pros x number of times over a y period, this Juice Machine can be used once for free (unless it's Overtime). This Juice makes the player glow purple. It lasts 50% longer and does 50% more damage against Pros, but it will be deactivated if a player crosses the halfway point on the map.

The leaderboards have always been pointless due to private matches.

Disabling earnings while Juiced is a terrible solution that goes against the spirit of the game.

Not only will this create such a turtle game, but it will also be hard to program. Any team, good or bad, will abuse the free juice on purpose. Team juice costs and cooldown causes griefing, not so much the cooldown as the price increase. One player makes his team unable to afford juice and can blow it on retard stuff.

Thus, the only idea I like is the team cooldown timers.

This is what I mean though:

You have broken through their turrets, their power core has it's shield dropped, they are all in spawn. Do you need juice at this point? No. Just... No.

You have bots at half map, they have no turrets, and you just finished juicing and killing most the enemy team once. Do you need juice again?

You have juiced 3 times, going through killing enemies, but their 2 assassins keep preventing bots from entering. Do you need a 4th juice pillage? NO! FFS, just walk with the bots and bomb the assassins, end the game, quit juicing and killing over and over again.

If you only juice to get rid of a few turrets you need to juice to kill, you won't mind the little missing cash. Right?

Thank god the devs don't listen to the community as much as you state, cause those ideas were just awful. I agree juice cycling is annoying, but without easy access to juice, the ENTIRE metagame has to change. It is IMPOSSIBLE to drop the ball in a private game if you don't coordinate multiple juice rushes with teammates.

Super juice is only effective against Pros in your base. This wouldn't create a turtle game; it would eliminate the team deathmatch mentality and encourage people to push bots.

Why? All of these are simple changes. The Assault could be nerfed on the fly using the title management features for XBLA (Uber even mentioned they would be doing this when the game launched...you sure fooled us, guys!). Juice Machines are an existing asset; just drop one into each spawn and add the correct exceptions for activation.

It would be difficult to abuse since it's only effective on your territory. The x and y values would be set for spawn camping conditions. You're forgetting that deaths give the other team money and add to kill streaks (more money).

That's the whole point. If you're playing with a Juice whore, these changes ruin your team's chances of winning during Overtime. The price of Juice will have skyrocketed. If the kill whores haven't spent their extra cash on turrets, your team will lose.

You should be able set the values to whatever you like in private games. I don't care.

These changes are for public matches; interestingly enough, in response to Juice cyclers like yourself.

If nothing is done to eliminate spawn camping, MNC will end up like Shadowrun.

So, instead of tryhard k/d padders carrying their team by spawnkilling the enemy...

the tryhard k/d padders instead screw their team into losing by spawnkilling the enemy, but still get their beautiful k/d, and can back out after juice isn't an option anymore.

It goes from the enemy getting screwed by a juice-chainer, to the teammates getting screwed by a juice-chainer.

Your ideas need capped in a lot of places, or just not implemented. A lot of them simply circumvent skill. I don't want skill taken out of the equation, I just want kill farming a bad team to be removed. Best way is to stop rewarding juice so people will play unjuiced whenever possible.

The k/d you get from juice, and the map advantage, are reward enough for juice. They simply don't need $300 to go on top of that.

and then the ball?

The kills aren't earning them money by the way, it's the kill streak bonuses.

I doubt you'd have many tryhards camping bases to boost their k/d if they were at risk of activating a Purple Pro Eater and losing their kill streak bonus.

That's the whole point to these changes. If someone on your team is juice chaining, you're probably going to lose.

My interpretation of Juice is that is was a special bonus that was supposed to be used 2-3 times a game (including Overtime), not every two minutes.

Huh?? Juicing takes no skill. Spawn camping while juiced takes even less.

Disabling earnings while Juiced means players will only use Juice to destroy turrets or protect the Juice machines. I think that will disrupt the metagame even more so.

This all comes down to a difference in philosophy. I want to play this game like C&C: Renegade. Most of you want to treat it like Call of Duty.

Completely different settings resulting in completely different metagames between privates and public games is just a bad idea.

This game will not end up like shadowrun... it will end up much worse. Gaming communities don't grow, they just slowly start dying from launch. This game never had enough of a player base to be worth a damn and enough time has past for it not to much matter what happens from here on out. That's not to say I don't love this game, but at least shadowrun is still played years later and had actual tournaments.

Game theory =/= design & balance. Game theory merely covers decisions any given player will make. On the subject at hand, juice is entirely intended to be extremely powerful. It's a positive feedback system. You are rewarded for doing well with juice (or else invest money to get it, but you kinda have to do things to get money). The juice is very powerful, and you will be even further rewarded for how well you do in that. Juice chaining is essentially the ultimate peak of positive feedback in this game. It's also supposed to feed into a psychological desire to see the strong brutalize the helpless. Mickey Cantor and all the fans love it!

It's just the nature of the game, and games with positive feedback tend to be over in all practicality before it's officially done. Chess is a prime example of this, making a forfeit perfectly acceptable there. Negative feedback, or perpetual comeback, is what you seem to desire. Bro's SF reference is keen on this, actually giving you your best attack (and amping up the damage) as you take damage. Both systems work for different people, and that's fine. As with spawncamping, the balancing factor is simple. Either prevent them from doing it or do it yourself. The game theoretically starts out even (unless a team has more people playing), and it's your actions afterward that swing the balance.

You know what I don't understand? Why does everyone act like Juice is the end-all of the Pro vs Pro metagame? There are plenty of ways a non-Juiced Pro can deal with a Juiced Pro. I'm not going to be a broken record and list all of them again though, if you really want to know, look at my post history about Juice. In general though, Ring Outs are the antithesis to Juice. It doesn't matter how powerful you are if you're falling 3,000 feet into the nearest hovercar intersection.

Good Stuff. We are talking against skill gap of course. You know what though? Grimbar once said, "Better people get better results". As much as I hate juice-chainers, I don't personally have problem with them. I simply wish they wouldn't piss everyone off to the point of leaving.

Thus, my support of stopping their profit from juice.

There's a highlight for juicing 7x in one match...maybe your interpretation is off.

I've got quite a few of those Overdose titles...

This is actually kind of an interesting idea.

This is alot of nothing that doesn't change the fact that players are rewarded twice over while using juice. Everything you said boils down to "that's just the way it is". I didn't read all the comments but, like someone said before, pro sports are full of rules to prevent poor sportsmanship. So yeah, MNC should adopt some too to prevent crap like spawncamping and juice chaining instead of just accepting it as "both teams have equal opportunity to spawn camp thus it's balanced and perfect". Poor sportsmanship follows poor game design.

Also, your argument about Mickey and the fans loving juice chaining is flawed. Besides the fans not liking the other half of your argument (spawn camping being fair), there's plenty of real world examples of pro sports "nerfing" themselves. Like MLB only allows wood bats so it's not as easy to get a homerun. The fans love homeruns but the game is about so much more than that. Just like MNC is about so much more than using juice. Juice chaining eclipses everything else going on...so no thanks.

Also, I'm not sure why you implied people should be proud of themselves for juice chaining.