Trakel, on November 20 2012 - 09:24 PM, said:
Beemann, on November 20 2012 - 09:18 PM, said:
Ruzhyo, on November 20 2012 - 08:57 PM, said:
Why was this changed_ It made sense before and didn't feel especially unbalanced.
It would have been at higher end play. The way it was before was a good snowballing countermeasure, but with even teams it would have just been spammy and annoying. Matches could easily boil down to "who misses their item spam more often" given how powerful some of those items are
A good example of the "missing spam" part would be the grenades, or H.E. Charges. All it took was one rocket hit, a grenade hit, and some bullets and the target was dead. But therein lies the problem with regenerating items, this is still possible.
However, as far as spam goes that was only if you were focused entirely on killing, not just surviving since once you used your items they were gone. I, for instance, only used my items when I knew I would need them like when I engadged a mech in front of me and another one showed up behind me.
But generally I feel like nothing was really wrong with the way it was before. I'd like to consider myself a pretty good player at the game, and I never just spammed my items. The only people I really saw spamming items were the people with the most deaths, and even now it's still possible to do that as dying resets all of your cooldowns.
It really just boils down to how people play, I think.
Again though, you're playing pub matches
In a comp game, people are going to abuse everything. Nobody's going to care about deaths if it means gaining an advantage (see: Tribes and the acceptance of suiciding as a repositioning function)
It also doesn't matter how long you make respawns. You push forward, wipe the other team or whittle them down to one or two people, then the guys on your end resupply and come back
When you can force a teamfight (which pretty much always happens in a team-based competitive game) the team that spams first and hardest wins. It's not a prolonged fight like some of the duels we've seen in pub matches, nor is it a battle of attrition. The faster you can get rid of people, the better, and if there's no suitable reason to not throw everything at the enemy (and there really isn't, at best we'd see staggered EMP blasts to try to keep maximum uptime, which takes about as much skill as distracting a cat with a piece of string)
Dying with virtually no drawback and with the promise of absurdly powerful items = controlled death becomes the optimal strat
In addition, it's not hard to get kills when you're abusing items. It's not hard to hit an EMP, and even a missed HE nade provides some temporary enemy shifting. You can toss an HE nade and then shoot at the target after they dodge with some focused fire from your team, or just EMP a chokepoint and then alpha strike the fuzzy bunny out of the enemy team
Edited by Beemann, November 20 2012 - 09:43 PM.