"Good Grief"

[Squick]

Originally Posted by TheRagingGerbil

In all honesty, don't you all fell that they could actually do away with the grief system?

No... Go read Liquidtide's post again. He has weapon lock right now for being careless... That means he can not shoot me in the back while mindlessly spamming grenades. Did he learn his lesson? No... But the system will keep him in line even though he didn't learn it.

[Liquidtide]

Maybe grief should be tunred off in battles. The only time grief needs to be an issue is waiting for that 15 minute hack to go through. During a battle friendly fire is a given, this is a war game afterall. I wouldn't want to write the code but if a friendly dies from friendly fire within say 50m of a enemy death, no grief becasue it was probably coincidental, where as if there are no enemy deaths in the area, grief is awarded.

Just a thought,

~Tide

[Madcow]

I used to play the Pounder quite a lot. I've never had grief over 100, and can count on one hand the number of times I probably should have just TK'd somebody because they were stupid and putting me in danger. I used to stand on the tops of the stairs in towers spamming the bouncing nades with audio amp on, and was able to not come anywhere near weapon's lock. Grief points even in battle don't accumulate fast enough to matter unless you're so careless you should have weapons lock.

[Liquidtide]

Ok Ok, call me careless, but also call the idiot who runs in front of me careless too.

[TheRagingGerbil]

Good points, I like the Marx brothers reference ZjinPS...

Ok, how about this. The devs have already developed an enemy density system, which we see currently when there are enemies in a friendly SOI. What if the grief system was based on the number of enemies in a given area.

With that, grief would be higher in a large enemy force and low in a massive enemy force.

[Squick]

TheRagingGerbil, you are assuming that the grief system is put in place to only stop grief killing. Spork mentioned plenty of times both in beta and out that it is not only for stopping grief killing, but also for making people watch their fire and not be careless.

[InfiniteStorm]

As a VS grief is almost as bad as a pounder when lasher orbs are flying everywhere. In a big tower fight when everyone is shooting orbs, you are most likely gonna get lashed or hit. There are times that I have fired on someone, but the orbs moved so slow that somebody has had enough time to dart in front of them. I don't care about grief, I don't care if in a big battle I get killed by a teamate. He was probably doing the same thing I was, trying to kill the surging NC jackhammer guy who was bolting up the stairs. I am also the kind of guy who rushes into a battle and past the enemies. Yea I get hit by friendly fire sometimes, but I can make 7 people on a stairwell all turn to shoot at me for about 3 seconds while my comrades in arms open fire on all of them. So you get +3 grief. If you have 1000 grief just from people running in front of you, you are doing something wrong or have been playing for 24 hours straight. Either way, it is just an annoyance you got that 6 grief. Life goes on. You can continue to kill people and the game moves on. You can't just tell people to stay back while I lob my plasma nades down there. You will never kill enough people that way. You need to penetrate or they will just keep coming.

[Phaden]

i think it would be interesting with no grief, but aside from all the previously mentioned ideas, my outfit practices against each other sometimes. We set up in a platoon and go to a friendly unused base, and practice / screw around on base techniques. We do hotdrops and basic cc subdual as well as courtyard practices. If the overhead notice goes into PS we would all look like HUGE TKers. I dont know if anyone else outfit has ever done this type of thing before but i know it can be fun when noone is around to fight. I can see this happening at Outfit basses even more. Another thing about the "police" squads. I usually agree and let people know when they overly grief me continuously, and put an end to it. But in one of the said practices, 2 guys cam in and just started killing my team off as we where firing on friendlies. They wouldnt take the hint to leave but we finally disuaded them by TKing them many a time (after mnay a tells from both sides)

[Happy lil Elf]

Grief works fine the way it is. People who don't know when to check their fire or who TK intentionally are punished. Nothing else to add other than puns are the spawn of Satan and you're going to the firey bowels of Hell for using one.

[BadAsh]

It seems to me that the grief system is doing it�s job well. I rarely see bored players just TKing everyone in site like I do in other games. As far as the war of knuckleheads� the ones that don�t check their fire and the ones that dash into friendly fire� I don�t think there is much you can do about that.

One thing that can be done is to revaluate the way experience point reward system is handled. Both of the above actions are mainly caused by players that are vying for a position to get the killing shot. Because, it�s the killing shot that reaps the experience reward.

Let�s briefly analyze:

Why think before you shoot? If you nail a few friendly troops you get a few temporary grief points, so what? If you manage a few enemy kills in the process you gain a few hundred experience points while the �fodder� is taking the majority of enemy fire AND your fire. The benefits for this behavior outweigh the consequences.

Why think before you run into a line of fire of friendly troops? If they kill you, they get grief points and you get no experience points. If they manage to damage the enemy and maybe even you, but you still land the kill shot you get the experience reward. So really you can�t lose here. You either break even or benefit, so people go for the benefit.

Currently the experience benefit system promotes moronic game play and does not encourage team play.

Things that could be done to foster a better team play environment:

Reward experience for kills to every friendly player in the area of the kill (i.e. those in the battle area) not just squad mates.

Reward experience points for players who provide support such as a medic who patches up a wounded player and an engineer that fixes up that armor or vehicle. I�d only reward this to players healing/repairing others, not themselves, while enemy troops are in the local area. This would help curb abuse by helping to ensure only people that help each other while in battle or under enemy pressure get rewarded. Also the person getting patched up should get an experience reward too. Why you ask? To give the player incentive try teamwork. Why let someone patch you up, especially if you are low on ammo? Just rush the enemy, die, respawn, and get shiny new gear and a full ammo load. Again, the moronic and �unrealistic� action is encouraged.

On that note, I�d give the Engineers tools a 3rd function� slowly loading ammo� I mean if you are nano-fabricating, why stop at armor patches?

BadAsh