This "wish" comes in several parts. They are all meant to be independent of each other but still function well when implemented together. Wall of text incoming. Part 1: Allow the moneyball shield to regenerate if not completely destroyed Reasoning: If a single bot gets through and damages the moneyball shield, it will only take another bot to lower the shields again. Ever. This makes little sense when the shield can go from nil to full in the course of some odd seconds. If a team has proven their little slip-up won't happen again, they should be rewarded. Part numero dos: Display shield status in the moneyball strength indicator at all times. This means if the shield is at half strength, the shield icon will be red until otherwise. On top of that, a display will show how long until the shields regen to the defending team, either in a countdown or a percentage-based format. Reasoning: Just some user-friendly displays. The time remaining helps because the health indicator flashes once when it's taking damage, and then the shield timer is INSTANTLY reset. It helps let the defending team know they're STILL under attack and how long ago they were last hit. It's really frustrating to have a shield that never regenerates and no clue when it will because someone running around hit it with a stray shuriken. Part troix: Give a "damage buffer" to the moneyball so that XXXX amount of damage has to be dealt before the shield timer is reset. Additionally, allow any bots that land on the moneyball to reset this instantly. Make it difficult for any single player to pierce this damage buffer easily. Reasoning: Again on that "stray shuriken" thing. Even a single point of damage makes the moneyball reset shield buildup. A single point. Whether it's an assault rifle bullet with a mile of falloff, a shuriken that bounced off the spawn hallway outside wall and hit the moneyball, whatever. It makes it far too easy for a single player to keep the shields down on a moneyball FOR. EVER. Regardless of whether they're doing any decent damage, the teammates that are spending time building juice probably will. It's a tactic. A strategy. But far too easy to pull off in more than half of the maps without danger, especially with the short respawn times. It also means that players that continue to care for their bots even after breaking the shield get a bonus, even if they can be more effective attacking directly, while teams that refocus their efforts can beat back an unconcentrated attack. It's a team based game, after all. Part D: This is out there, but allow supports to help bring up the moneyball shield in some way. To balance it, it could be only possible after the moneyball has already started bringing up its own shields by a certain percentage. The rate would be capped so the rate would be the same no matter the endorsements and would not stack regardless of the number of supports. While in effect, the indicator in part numero dos would be green to show that someone's doing their job. The support(s) performing this duty also receive $10 for every X seconds they're healing the shields and $10 bonus bucks when the shields finally go up if they helped. OPTIONALLY, JUICED SUPPORTS WOULD BE ABLE TO TRIPLE THE SPEED OF SHIELD RESTORATION - USED IN EMERGENCY. Obviously this part would not be applicable during overtime. Reasoning: Just another method in which the support can put his heal gun to good use and make himself a credit to the team. Potentially unbalancing and doesn't promote as much defense-through-offense as the current setup does. Thoughts/Tweaks/Unprovoked rage/Refined and Classy Critique By Gentlemen For Gentlemen?
The last part is a stretch. That would make much too much turtling. I like how the game discourages turtling. You take care of your base WHILE WORKING OUTSIDE OF IT, or you lose, is a very good game dynamic IMO. The other three do need some work. I think the devs have heard it many times. There are so many cheap ways to keep the moneyball shields down forever. Several classes can do it base-to-base. IMO, the shields should renegerate if one bot hits it but the second doesn't hit it in 30 seconds, and the shields should regenerate if the enemy drops it but doesn't get at least 1 bot to it every 30 seconds afterwards (enemies can damage the moneyball, but can't keep the shield down at all and the shield will go up even with full enemy damage). Maybe for a new color system for the shield icons, silver should mean full health, red should mean 1 bot hit, and it should flash green when it regenerates before turning back silver, and of course it disappears when shields are down (with maybe an outline of a shield). This is of course if and when the devs work on moneyball shield updates.
I would say that your points might be valid for truly competitive play. However, these should be options, not mandatory, not even default. Why? For the simple reason that the typical pub game already results in OT, in my experience. Changes like this being forced would only help to ensure that every pub game painfully crawls along to OT.
1 and 2 are hardly game-changing stalemate enforcers, and most "competitive" communities would shun them because "it makes the game more accessible and it might open up the game to casuals" or something stupid whenever there's an intuitive update. They just correct a few things that don't make sense and make it easier for players to know when their shield is actually going back up. And I've only played 2 games today that have actually gone into overtime, so it's quite possible stalemates are becoming more and more uncommon as more people learn how to play the game. That, or the newbies are giving up on the game... Those two are the only ones I really think the game deserves, and they're not really that big of changes. The third one can be dealt with in most games assuming a team is working together and the fourth is really absurd but I think with some tweaking it could work.
Oddball and rather "wtf" idea just came to mind Juiced Support can heal the moneyball, but only a Juiced Support
I agree with all but last, and would like to suggest a small tweak to #3 Have the shield generation be a gradual thing. It regenerates its shield at a regular pace, 50hp at a time until full (say 400hp) So early on you can keep the shield down with only minor damage, however the longer you go without damaging the moneyball the more damage it requires to reset to 0
This is another idea I had not too long ago. Basically, my version was that every second of damaging keeps it down for 3 seconds. So, damaging it for 5 seconds straight keeps it down for 15 seconds, damaging it for 10 seconds stright keeps it down for 30, anything over 10 seconds still is only 30, and damaging it for only a second will only add 3 seconds to it's time. Thus, a team would have to sustain attack on it to keep it down.
I competely agree that a complete timer reset for every singlet point of damage to the moneyball is rather harsh. I'd much rather have a system where getting the moneyball shields back up is actually doable against decent opponents.
i can actually agree on this as well, as of now any minor slip up will get your money ball killed waaaay to quickly vs a semi decent team. As it is now you only need to get a single bot wave into the enemy base and then just juicerape the money ball untill you win, there is only such a small chance of actually recovering from this thats its almost a GG right the second your ball drops (no phun intended)
Something does need to be done about the money ball shield timer. It just seems a little off that I can, as a Sniper, can: 1. Run into the enemy's base. 2. Chuck a flak at their downed money ball. 3. Die in the process. 4. Respawn and still have enough time to do the same thing over and over until I finally get intercepted. Now you might say that what the enemy should have obviously done was to intercept me sooner, but this was just me who was rushing the money ball all this time. Quite a few times have I seen good teams, who have every member rushing the ball, and with a 6 v 6 situation, it's just much too hard to prevent each and every single guy from even poking your ball. When you kill an enemy who's attacking your money ball, that guy should not die and still have the security of knowing he can just simply respawn and rush your ball in time anyways and maybe even take a quick detour to the juice bar along the way. If anything, just make the timer reset a number of seconds according to how much damage it recieves. It just ain't right a stray bullet resets the ball a whole 30 seconds.
this could work and i would agree to it as well but i don't really have a problem with the current way of how the shield works coz imo if the enemy team made mistakes that cost them their shields, they deserve to lose that game; vice versa. and that might make games longer? (this may be good or bad, i dunno)
In that case the shields still needs fixed... ...because if it is intended that losing shields is a guranteed loss, then the shield health needs to be set to 1. That way at least you spare that team the annoyance and killfarming that ensues.
Came up with this idea last night... The entire point of Crossfire is to get your bots to the enemy moneyball so they can take down the shields, so why not rig it so that bots are required to keep it down. With a concentrated effort, a team can push back the enemy bots, pushing back enemies is much harder, especially when they have a smart Assassin that runs off cloaked before you can get half their health gone only to lob a shuriken at the ball from another angle, resetting the timer
never did say just saying if their shields are down, means enemies had a better play that round. if they manage to bring their shields back up, the enemy made some mistake and it was good play by the defending team that's how i see it i don't understand. can we have more details?
My interpretation is that a bot is required to reset the shield timer. This means if the enemy does defend properly you've got 20 seconds from the last bot hit to do as much damage as possible. If you can keep bots hitting the ball, the shield stays down. This is actually not a bad mechanic in concept, just don't know how many games it will force into overtime (which is already a common problem)
Your interpretation is correct I'm a bit doubtful that idea will send more games into OT. Most of the games I've seen either one team gets pounded in 5 minutes or it gets pushed into OT anyway Tho I'm of the belief that OT is a bit screwy anyway. One team could be near-dominating the entire round only to lose when OT hits because 1-2 enemies managed to sneak by with Juice
People like say, a juiced assassin who has been waiting by the ball for 5 seconds for it to drop?... Don't know anyone who does that. :roll: I haven't had a game that wasn't a steamroll end before overtime for a while now. It's starting to bore me as it generally means you just **** around for 20 minutes then suicide rush the ball.
Let's stick to topic and not turn this into another long discussion about how sucky overtime can be. ...though, I must agree OT is pretty much a juice bar party now. :lol:
This is actually a really great idea, I would fully support this. I actually had an idea for that, if they added health drain to the moneyballs in overtime, it would pretty much guarantee that if a team with lower moneyball health doesn't really haul ***, they'll end up losing.
