Idea to lower the problems of roofcamping

[Joker86]

Hi there!

Some days ago I observed a special situation while being in spectator mode.

One team was losing, and had only three men left: two archers on a rooftop and a single cavalryman. The other team had like 10 heavy infantry left, and two cavalrymen.

The rooftop where the archers (and of course no ladder) were was about in the middle of the (desert) map, while the cavalryman was riding around in a corner, chased by both enemy cavalrymen. The infantry was gathering around the house with both archers on it, trying to find some cover or dodge the projectiles while waiting for them to come down. As there was still a cavalryman left, the admin couldn't order them to get down, and so they were able to shoot two more infantrymen before the cavalryman went down, and even then the admin had to use his red text to order them down, and they followed... after shooting another time...

To me this seems absolutely retarded, so that I present you...

My Idea:

As soon as the population of a team goes down to a certain percentage, I would suggest something between 10 and 20%, something like a servermessage on the screen pops up, saying something like

The battle is appraoching its end!

All fighters engage in a last charge, and all archers abandon their safe positions.

As soon as this message pops up (or has popped up, respectively, in case the ladder gets destroyed afterwards), all archers know that they have to jump off unaccessable roofs. The enemy gets a message in the chat like "The enemy force is close to being routed", so they know the enemy archers have to come down. I think it is important that it is a message on the screen for the concerned team (unlike the enemy team, where a chat message is perfectly enough), as most archers will have tunnel vision and would simply overlook a chat message. Just something similar to the "Your team has won the round!" message.

With this feature you wouldn't have such RETARDED situations any more like the one I described above, where players exceed the phrasing of a certain rule to its maximum. I think both kills for those archers were completely undeserved, as I see no reason why they should have been "immortal" to the infantry until the cavalryman at the other end of the map went down.

And finally I don't think such a feature would be difficult to implement for the dev team.

[Fluffy_Muffin]

I dont see how this would change anything, they would just ignore the message and remain on the roofs

[Joker86]

Ignore = kick.

The point in this suggestion is to give a clearly recognizable point when an archer has to come down. Common sense would say they have to get down when there are no reasonable targets around for enemy melee fighters (a horse archer for example is no reasonable target for an infantryman), but when do you have such a situation and when don't you have? To decide this is always difficult, and if the admins would decide by their personal judgment we would have a lot more "admin abooze"-topics around here.

The idea is to allow archers to be targeted by infantrymen a bit BEFORE there is no other way to finish the round.

[ArchonAlarion]

Officially looking text is enough to deter many people, and those who aren't deterred wouldn't have an excuse. It's something to at least try, I think.

[B3RS3RK]

Yes.Totally.

Do it or you are gay, Devs!

[Duke]

I don't think the message would help much, I'd rather 'Master of the field' began sooner.
That already has a message and more importantly gives an objective for the infantry to win.

[Zerran]

Not sure exactly how you could get this to be an automated message. In a case of a couple archers left vs. a large number of infantry it would be easy. But take the other side of the coin, a large number of archers on a roof vs. only a few infantry. I love the idea of a message popping up in the middle of the screen, but I think it would be necessary to make it something that an admin has to activate.

[Joker86]

But that's exactly where the problem is, which I try to eliminate: WHEN would an admin have to activate this message? How does he decide this?

I want to give a fixed, undisputable point when the roofcamping has to come to an end, so that chances for survival are about equal for all classes, and not having the archers decide 80% of the ending rounds.

In that situation I described above I asked the admin "Why don't you tell them to come down?" and he answered "I can't, rule says they are allowed to roofcamp as long as teammates have their feet on the ground.", and with my suggestion we wouldn't even have this perverted situation.

It's just a supporting "tool" to help the admins administrating the servers. Instead of the current undisputable moment for archers to come down (everyone else on the ground being dead) we have a new moment, when the battle is coming to an end and only 20% of the team are still alive. As this is determined by the game itself and not by a human admin, noone could complain about any bias or other unfair behaviour. It's just the moment when your "immune against melee"-armour loses its magical abilities...

[Joker86]

A little *bump*

[Grumpy_Nic]

I usually dont mind roofcamping as long as its not half of the team. Infantry that cannot reach roofcampers and dont have any other targets should have the patience to simply wait for the flag (I know thats hard....). But I think it would work in the long term, its also boring for an archer not to see any enemies for a minute.
Maybe we need to be able to tear down houses with mauls and axes... would be fun to see roofcampers buried in a crashed house. Or set fire to houses with torches... Burning house makes 30 fire damage per second vs players...  Archer BBQ

Patience is probably the best thing and you dont need to add anything in the game.

[Joker86]

I usually dont mind roofcamping as long as its not half of the team. Infantry that cannot reach roofcampers and dont have any other targets should have the patience to simply wait for the flag (I know thats hard....). But I think it would work in the long term, its also boring for an archer not to see any enemies for a minute.

I would love to see more patience in the game, especially as appearently 90% of all cRPG players are literally unable to release the [W]-key, but it has simply the disadvantage of all players in specator mode having even less time to play. The infantry hiding somewhere doesn't really play either, and only the archers, who in most cases find some targets anyway, are allowed to shoot people and thus having fun by actually fighting, and even better, they are completely immune to all melee attacks while doing so! To me this sounds like a severe imbalance of "fun" in the game. And I don't see any reason for this.

[Grumpy_Nic]

The waiting for respawn is not so bad most of the times, I can go get something to eat/drink or take a piss, when I die at the very beginning I can even take a sh*t. I can clean the kitchen, cut my fingernails and do lots of other stuff.
Sometimes its boring yes, but in general the respawn time is ok, you just have to use it wisely instead of raging in front of the screen. Maybe the game should spawn ladders in the middle of the map after 80% of the players died? 

[Joker86]

That would be another suggestion I could live with 

[Grumpy_Nic]

Add a vote option for Spectators: "Submit a poll - Teleport to ground - Choose player" with a minimum of 70% (?) yes votes

[Tomas]

How about...

Once 1 team is down to 5 players or 20% of their team (whichever is higher), all ranged weapons are disabled.

So if its 50 vs 50 then ranged weapons will be disabled for both teams as soon as 1 team hits 10 players.

This means there is no point camping a roof after that point, you won't be able to do anything and if you all camp a roof playing for a draw then you are scum and deserved a ban.