Spunky Cola Arena - LOOK AT IT

lemme ask the developers something, do you play the arenas trying to kill the other teams money ball or do you play the arenas trying to go team death match on each other and ignoring bots, turrets, and the money ball?

This right here is awesome. I hadn't even considered that you could have the map itself spawn pro-killing bots. That opens up alot of cool ideas for future maps.

This is a good question.

Us Uber devs tend to play as a team, trying to win the game by pushing bots and taking down the Moneyball. But we often bring in friends, relatives and outside people who play in every way.

The reason I ask is because you need to play test it with the team death match mentality to find out how to better design a level to discourage that play style. You know, like the way you would bring in an ex-con/thief as a security consultant to help improve your security. Because what you see as a useful bot pushing device becomes a choke point for someone interested in just killing/griefing and not accomplishing the main goals of the game.

I just said we play with people like that all the time.
It's basically impossible to have a competitive game that some people won't play it like a death match.

Do you have a game in mind that does this?

I could sure go for a Spunky Cola now! *pop*

Settle down there hoss. Why are you so combative? I was just commenting. I don't have a in mind that doesn't do this as the only online shooter I play is MNC and a little RDR stronghold only to find out people don't play with objectives in mind but k/d. And I was thinking a loud so to speak about how much of that you use and to explain my comments to anyone who thought I was mindlessly attacking Uber.

That wasn't not intended to be combative. To be honest, I was hoping you have a game that players play to do the objective instead of death match because I'd love to see how they did it.

I know its not the same game style, but i would say Dark Age of Camelot and the PvP battles they had. Ill simplify it for a two player game

Two teams start on different sides of the map, they need to take control of the center fort, its a neutral base. In order to take the base you need to obviously assault the other team while take control(cant remember the inside i played a good guard).
The reason for this in a game like MNC, in order to spawn bots for your team you would need control of the center. then you could take down the enemy money ball, i would say only a few turrets would be needed to cover your team base, but also offer a few in the center at the neutral base as well, where your not defending your money ball, but your chance to win, and your only source of robot army.
Just an idea.....take it how you want, i guess its like an extreme king of the hill/territories game

Just an idea but why not reward players with money for completing objectives instead of giving them excessive amounts for maintaining a kill streak? As it stands now you can get $100 per kill just by attaining an 11+ kill streak. This alone allows players to Juice Chain and promotes killing Pros (and indirectly spawn camping) over completing objectives. You could reward teams for finishing a game quickly, give them bonus money for dropping the moneyball and even more for keeping it down for a set amonut of time. Give the defending team a bonus for getting their moneyball back up and a bonus for taking down the opposing team's moneyball after theirs was saved. There are lots of ways to reward players, and teams!, for completing objectives instead of rewarding them excessively for kills.

In MNC it all comes down to earning money, so make the money do the talking.

EDIT: You could give bonuses for killing X Slims/Blackjacks in a game. A combo bonus for killing/assisting a turret destruction and dropping the moneyball within a set amount of time. There are a lot of ways to promote completing the objectives of the game but rewarding kill streaks, on a per kill basis, is not one of them (give them a small bonus for attaining the next kill streak tier and be done with it). That player that earns $6,000+ in a game is not getting it from completing the objective.

Heh... Almost hit edit again!

Ok, I'm going to shock the world right now.

I agree with you Hiero Glyph!
The only issue, and the only reason we haven't done it, to give more bonuses at this point would mean rebalancing the entire economy and that's a scary, scary proposition for a shipped title.

To start could you simply change the kill streak mechanic to reward a bonus at 3 (Hot), 7 (Mega), 11 (Ultra) and 25 kills (Uber) instead of rewarding them for every kill after hitting that tier. This would open up alternative methods to earn money by slowing down the money gained from simply killing other Pros.

Rewarding players for bot kills would also provide incentive to build turrets more frequently. This seems to be the biggest change in style for MNC currently as turrets are often forgotten due to Juice being so effective against them.

I agree that the premise of overhauling the game is scary but you can start small and build upon that change. You have done a fantastic job of supporting the community so far so I believe you can manage this task if you feel it will improve the game.

Hiero Glyph, you have hit the nail on the head for how to fix the K/D mentality in this game.

Scathis, you rock for acknowledging it.

I would love to see this change and think it would drastically improve the gameplay experience for everyone involved.

If you look at the money players earn, killing bots and picking up what they drop can be a bigger boon than player kills, especially on the new Spunky map when you guys get it. Players also get $100 per minute just for being in the game. ($50 every 30 seconds)

The kill rewards only come every other kill after a certain point, not every kill, so it's not quite as powerful as it seems. But there is also the idea that players want to kill other players, so there are these mechanics to award that. But yes, some mechanics to award the objective could be made stronger. That's also why turret and Jackbot kills come up with a dollar amount on them. Heck, doing a single point of damage to a Jackbot will net you $65 when it dies. But maybe adding in extra money for bot multi-kills could reward players better... I like that idea.

The scariest part of doing changes is that we can only release updates every few months. With the time it takes to get changes through certification, one mistake is something we're living with for a substantial time.

*Juice full health glitch face*

Poster Child for this!

i figure if you did something that completely didn't track k/d, and some how punished k/d while missing objectives. I don't know how to accomplish that though.

no, its a defeat-their-base-defences-and-they-get-10-minutes-of-death-streaks map... kinda like c&c_hourglass was on renegade, lose your base defences and the enemy comes rolling down the hill and pouring out the tunnels to kill you as soon as you get outside a building (and fire some rockets into windows to hope to catch something inside the spawn by luck)

but it also seems to focus on bot-pushing and bot-killing. if you dont play objectively from the beginning of the game to the end, and go after kills instead, it sounds like bouncers are going to kill supports, and then the moneyball. you at least have to deal with the enemy bot-spawn and perhaps turrents before you can have a shot at the enemy pros.

...which is how every game is half-way already, but current maps can still be won with an outrageous amount of pro-killing. this one probably wont be...

When is everyone going to admit they play Crossfire for the chance to KILL OTHER PLAYERS? If you only cared about bots you'd only play Blitz. Part of a successful bot push is KILLING THE OTHER PLAYERS so that they CANT KILL YOUR BOTS.

In other games with objective modes, how exactly do you complete them? There are not bots in MW2, or Halo Reach. What do you do? GASP! Kill players! In fact, the 2 players that focus exclusively on killing players on a four person team will be contributing just as much, if not more, to the team effort of capturing a flag, planting a bomb, capturing territories, what have you. MNC is one of the rare games where the way to complete the objective is to escort AI constructs to it, so that you can damage it. Its a different kind of game mode, and 100% player killing by all plaers is going to hinder you as your bots will just grind against theirs for eternity.

This is what the "no deathmatch" argument seems to me to be: "I don't want other people playing deathmatch because I want to be the one playing deathmatch." I've had several games as Assassin that I held their bots off midfield, but my team was still pinned in the base. As much as I "killed bots" the other team not only killed our bots but played almost exclusively deathmatch since the bots are easily taken care of by two players: One per lane. Seriously. 4 people get to deathmatch while two control the lines.

Deathmatch is part of the versus experience and has been since DOOM. My advice is this: If nobody on your team is pushing bots, that means you're nobody too. Get busy.

With so many bots in a single lane, snipers will definately be raking in money.