Did he just say a case for the 20% upkeep? Is he serious?
Yes, I am serious. I think the 20% maintenance fee for the losing team was a great idea. I think going with a 5% maintenance random penalty for winners or losers is a bad idea and is simply a random money sink.
The reasons why I liked the 20% upkeep are probably the same reasons chadz created the patch in the first place:
1.) Controlled the tincan population
2.) Forced players to work together as a team
3.) Get rid of overpowered players
and partly:
4.) Forced high level wealthy players to care about the outcome.
Recently in another thread I came across this quote:
If you are level 30 and have all your eqiup (with easy upkeep now) it doesn't really matter. At least my motivation to win rounds is like before the patch... I don't care.
And its true, why would a 30 level player with all his equipment care if his team wins or loses? Since the 5% maintenance fee is now random and not linked to winning.
If a 30 level player has all his gear and has reached the level cap, he does not care at all if his team wins or loses since he already has all the experience points he needs and has all the gear that he needs, so he does not care about the gold. The 5X muliplier for xp or gold will sway him not at all. So his motivation to help the team and work as a team is gone.
Also I suspect that the 5% random maintenance fee will not be enough to cut down the population of tincans. Sure it will help a bit, but I believe that most people will wear their plate most of the time now.
A 20% maintenance fee linked to winning or losing makes more sense to me.
1.) It forces the whole team to work together to try to avoid losing.
2.) Forces players to cycle between plate and low level armour thereby cutting down on the tin can population.
The only problem with the 20% maintenance fee was that people started to take off armour when on a losing team to avoid paying maintenance on it. To solve this simply make it so that if a player gets a kill that round even when on a losing team he will not pay maintenance. This will reward skill at arms. And this way people will continue to wear armour and other expensive gear as they will want to get a kill and thereby avoid paying maintenance.
What do you all think?