Do life pods work backwards from a gameplay perspective?

Compellor · Post by **Compellor** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 8:32 am

I've been playing League of Legends lately, and one thing I noticed about that game is that the higher level you are, the longer it takes for you to respawn when killed. Long respawn times are boring and can lead to one side gaining a big advantage early on, so having a fast respawn at low levels is better. At endgame, however, long respawn times make it easier for otherwise evenly-matched teams to end a game before they completely run out of stuff to buy - if one side is down a few players because a fight went a little one-sided, then the other team has an advantage that lasts long enough to exploit.

Lifepods are, at least sometimes, completely the opposite. In the early game, if you take your scout out four or five sectors from your garrison to scout the map and drop probes, but get podded, there generally aren't any good opportunities to kill yourself to get back in the game, and you could easily end up with a 3 to 5 minute float time if no one comes to pick you up. On the other hand, once the enemy team gets mini3, you've got at least an even chance of being killed purely by accident, and a bunch of ints turtling in their last sector hasn't got much float time to speak of.

Pods are a lot more complicated than a simple timer, since there's BIOS ripping pods, various rescue probes, rescuing pods as an element of teamwork, and the question of preserving killbonus. Still, I can't help but feel like the game would be improved if it was easier for every faction to get home or get killed early in the game, and then either the lifepod just has high hitpoints in the late game, or if you get killed you spend more time waiting to respawn.

I guess you could come up with gimmicks to do this in a core, like making every probe a rescue probe until you build a techbase, but I was just wondering if anyone else thought this was a problem, or wanted to make a specific code change.

Heyoka · Post by **Heyoka** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 9:33 am

Just bring a rescue probe. Sorta solves the problem.

Or when you scout, fly with shields down and missiles in cargo, and don't get spotted.

I remember a SG where we had a scout in the enemy homesec for about 70% of the game. It eyed where the miners were going, where the bases were going and basically gave us a really massive advantage. When you scout, be invisible, otherwise you're not a scout.

DonKarnage · Post by **DonKarnage** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 9:46 am

We did a conquest game with life pods off.

everybody agreed that it was far more fun

HSharp · Post by **HSharp** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 12:49 pm

I would say go the other way and put limited lives on, becomes much more interesting when you are struggling for survival in your little pod while the enemy hunts you down.

Dorjan · Post by **Dorjan** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 1:31 pm

The real question here is this:

How much skill do we want to take away from alleg?

ATM the game requires sensible use of your brain or you will be punished. Stray too far from base and you have an upto 5 minute walk ahead of you.

I can imagine having pods off for PuGs is actually a "good" thing, but here we come to the crunch. Who for? Certainly not for vets who actually want to have to make the decision to walk back to or kill themselves, or to roll on from a underdog position.

Switching pods off will only help the dominating team, if you have high tech you will continue to dominate.

Pushing cons against higher tech will be near impossible since they can just charge ram your con and instantly die and do it again and again and again (depending on the position of their reinforcement point).

The idea here would be maybe, now this is just a wild idea, having set game mechanics depending on the game type.

"Rookie Mode" means no re-spawn and small maps, less options when it comes to HE etc designed to allow anyone to $#@! about without screwing the settings (so that any newbie can just hit go and most games will be similar in nature for them to grasp or at least have a good attempt at commanding). The games will be quicker too.

"Squad Mode" Can only be created by someone with a rank of x and above maybe or a squad tag. Designed for vets who cba playing "Easy mode" alleg even in their pugs, unlocks most settings pretty much as it is now.

If rookie mode is the default when new guys come to the game, they'd play a game and get used to the way things work, then getting into a squad won't hurt their experience much as now they should have the ability to grasp the new rule set i.e ("HE rocks no longer have a set value, they can change like so:", "If you die, you get podded, it's a good idea to stay nearer your bases or take your RPs etc"). It'll be the squads job to teach their newbies how to play in the big boy league.

Now this hurts some factions but not by a HUGE amount, at least, not to the point it'll matter to rookies.

TL:DR?
Make it so there is a simpler game on by default which is faster to start, faster to finish and less daunting for new commanders to just try out.

Thoughts?

Spunkmeyer · Post by **Spunkmeyer** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 11:28 pm

Compellor isn't asking for a "retard" mode without pods. What he posted is interesting, but we are getting off topic.

Let me attempt to sum up what he is suggesting - please correct me if I'm wrong:

1-Find a way to implement longer respawn/pod times for the more powerful side and vice versa.
2-Eliminate accidental kills w/mg3.
3-Increase respawn/pod time for defense.

They all seem to make sense, but I don't think they have priority over a lot more serious problems with the game. Not all of them have clean solutions either.
#2 Makes immediate sense to me - a damage cap on pods would do it.
#1 Yeah, but how?
#3 This could be a very significant gameplay change and would definitely make defense harder. We probably don't want to go anywhere near at this time.

Having a simple-mode Alleg where there aren't many settings to $#@! up is an interesting topic but a whole different discussion. It's also another one of those ideas which wouldn't matter much with the current tiny player base.

Dorjan · Post by **Dorjan** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 11:53 pm

Spunkmeyer wrote:QUOTE (Spunkmeyer @ Mar 15 2012, 11:28 PM) Compellor isn't asking for a "retard" mode without pods. What he posted is interesting, but we are getting off topic.

Well I was going for smaller faster games but you can call that retarded if you like.

Spunkmeyer wrote:QUOTE (Spunkmeyer @ Mar 15 2012, 11:28 PM) Let me attempt to sum up what he is suggesting - please correct me if I'm wrong:

1-Find a way to implement longer respawn/pod times for the more powerful side and vice versa.
2-Eliminate accidental kills w/mg3.
3-Increase respawn/pod time for defense.

They all seem to make sense, but I don't think they have priority over a lot more serious problems with the game. Not all of them have clean solutions either.
#2 Makes immediate sense to me - a damage cap on pods would do it.
#1 Yeah, but how?
#3 This could be a very significant gameplay change and would definitely make defense harder. We probably don't want to go anywhere near at this time.

Having a simple-mode Alleg where there aren't many settings to $#@! up is an interesting topic but a whole different discussion. It's also another one of those ideas which wouldn't matter much with the current tiny player base.

I agree I mis-undersood some of his points (was skim reading at work) and I guess I knee jerked with my scratched reply, and I agree with what he's saying but I also pointed out a different take on the whole thing, nothing more and hardly off-topic because it's about the same problem.

Adept · Post by **Adept** » Fri Mar 16, 2012 12:07 am

Spunky, what do you mean with retard mode?

Spunkmeyer · Post by **Spunkmeyer** » Fri Mar 16, 2012 12:13 am

Retard mode=pods off specifically, not faster games.

The game is too dependent on pods to turn them off and still make an enjoyable, "real" game IMHO.

Dorjan · Post by **Dorjan** » Fri Mar 16, 2012 12:15 am

Spunkmeyer wrote:QUOTE (Spunkmeyer @ Mar 16 2012, 12:13 AM) Retard mode=pods off specifically, not faster games.

The game is too dependent on pods to turn them off and still make an enjoyable, "real" game IMHO.

Yeah I agree. I was mostly just throwing out ideas. I still think locking in small games with limited options is the way to go for PuGs in general, the exact details is ofc up in the air.