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Original post by mrmrcoleman Another thing I probably should have told you is that the players are far more vunerable than in your average FPS.

@Mark
In combination with big gaming worlds, this could be a laaaarge factor of pissing players off. if you walk for 5 minutes, get killed and you have to walk those 5 minutes again, then you start to get pissed off. if you do this, either implement a good respawn system OR set the health points up OR define some no-attack times OR no-attack zones or something like that...but NEVER bore people with long waiting, driving or walking times and absolutely no sign of action around there...

Mady

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Original post by mrmrcoleman I see what you are saying Robert, but in the same way, someone playing capture the flag and defending the base could let people in just for a laugh. You can always have idiots, I assume that's why private 'password' game exist.

That's not the same thing at all. If one memeber of a team (who are all pretty much equals) lets the side down the team, while weakened, can work together to counter that.

A Commander is not an equal team memeber. They are vital to the opperations of the team and if you have a griefer or a noob who gets selected it will ruin the game and all the other players will quickly get bored and leave. Its a great idea that has been done before a didn't work simply because it makes one person responsible for the success/enjoyment of all the others.

While I don't necessarily disagree with Obscure in that one A$$ can spoil the game for everyone else, there's ways to counter that.

One method that might work is voting; the team can vote to boot the guy out of office (and out of the game, if they so prefere)

Another is to make people earn the privilige. You can track global statistics whether success-rates, kill-rates, number of hours played, or something more obscure like a Trust Metric (http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html) to lock down who's elligable for commander.

Even then, becomming a commander shouldn't be a random. Even if I HAVE played long and well, or have a high trust-metric, right now I want to kill someone. I might not be in the mood for playing C&C with recalcitant play-pieces. So you should limit who's available, and give any of them the option to decline the privilige.

One option would be to assign a rating to each player on each team (based on your internal stats), and offer the commander job to the highest ranked player at the start of the round. If they reject it, it's offered to the next one ranked under them, and so on.

On information flow: I believe BF2 extends the commanders role though channeled communication. A squad (4-5 people) can voice-chat internally, but they can't chat with other squads, just with the commander. So any coordinated assaults have to be coordinated through the commander. This maps pretty accuratly to the role of 3C officers in organisations like the marines.

Not that I've played the game (my PC would be coughing blood if I even tried to start it) but they do seem to have put a lot of thought into the whole commander thing.

Allan

Check out the Half-life mod Natural Selection (Site's down at the moment). It's a Marines vs Aliens combat, with a commander on the marine team. They've dealt with a lot of the problems you will encounter with an FPS/RTS hybrid setup, and it's a fairly decent game.

As for the griefer comm, they have a "vote to eject commander" option for the rest of the marines, which seems to work fairly nicely.

Hi,

what about this:

Groups of Players (eg. Clans) can select an Commander befor the game starts.

And players without a clan are put into temporary clans and befor each fight a random commander is choosen, but player can say that they would like to be a command or would not like to be a commander or just don't care.
That would then increase/decrease the likeness of beeing picked as a commander.

I wouldn't make the maps to big, but you could incooperate some sort of missions.

Like:
1. defend this area / capture that area
2. hold this point / conquer that point
3. hold at least 2/3 of all buildings for 5 Minutes
...

I am liking all these ideas... I will be checking out the Halflife mod as I like to idea of booting out your commander. This idea is being developed for a project I plan to start after my project (about 8/12 months time), so there is plenty of time to get it just right.

I think I have decided to keep the map sizes smaller than I had originally intended, so that players don't get bored if they get lost. Also, the idea of having teams able to talk to commander but not each other is awesome.

One other thing, what is the current state of voice communications in online gaming? Is it widely supported, is it feasible for most players these days?

Mark

Yeah, these days voice communication works quite well. It puts a bit of an extra burden on the server, but if the server can handle it then it's definitely worth it.

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Original post by Sneftel What impetus is there for players to listen to anything their commander says? Keep in mind that the commander player may be a stranger to the other players, and may not have demonstrated (or have) any actual command ability.

That's pretty true. I've played commander on BF2 a few times now, it's all too easy to rack up points just by camping at your base and spending the entire time on the command interface.

Dropping supply crates next to your own people, deploying the UAV on enemy spawn points and spamming enemy spawns with artillery could all be considered "noob tactics", but they bring in the points.

Have a vote screen at the beginning of a map that lasts for 15-20 seconds where the players on the team can decide who the commander is. Right before the vote let the players click an opt-out option incase they don't want to be picked, and also allow for switching commanders during the gameplay.

That could be an option that works.

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Original post by ukdeveloper Dropping supply crates next to your own people, deploying the UAV on enemy spawn points and spamming enemy spawns with artillery could all be considered "noob tactics", but they bring in the points.

Well.. I'm sure that the guys getting the supply crates appreciate the attention.

But perhaps that's more a question of 'how do you stop the commander power from breaking the game balance' than any wholesale dismissal of the commander role.

On method might be to use a system similar to Total Annihilation, where a team gain 'energy' or 'gold' from controlling specific points, which can be used to buy things (units, upgrades, etc). A similar concept could easily be extended to a game like battlefield 2, where the commander needs to spend 'gold' to buy airstrikes.

You could also force closer cooperation, where for an artillary strike to go through, you need to plan and cooperate. So the Commander needs to spend points to ready an artillary strike (takes 30secs), but needs a spotter to be able to see the target to drop it. As such, the commander needs to beg/convince/threaten his fellow players into helping him execute strategies. This goes for any type of action that could be broken by having a n00b commander remotely camping the spawn-point.


Allan