Auto Recall

[laPPen]

Hi guys
didnt read all pages so i dont know if that idea was already brought up:

how about making the autorecall cost more and more everytiime you buy it

doubling its price:

1 for free
2 250 credits
3 500 credits
4 1000 credits
.....

or rising the price like that

1 free
2 500 credits
3 1000 credits
4 1500 credits
...

Numbers here are taken randomly from me and should be tested for the perfect values but i think you get the idea.
this mechanic would make them more valuable.

[Aurion]

I think you're onto something, but I think the price should also lower with either wins or just games where auto recall wasn't used (minimum = original price). With well-tweaked numbers you can keep an incentive to not go rambo because you can't die anyway.

[RoLa]

or a progression like this: 1st starting with 0+100 or 2nd with 50+50
free free
100 100
200 150
300 250
500 400
800 650
1300 1050
2100 1700
3400 2750
5500 4450

[Rogueleader89]

Alright I'm boosting this thread back up because I've been thinking about GW a lot lately (I'll probably post a thread of ideas later but autorecall really needs its own discussion and behold I found the old autorecall thread :p).

Let me start by saying that over time I've slowly been being won over by the victory cost for autorecall argument, but I think it has one great flaw, skilled highly ranked players will always have autorecall when it matters because they can minimize risks by playing against known enemies or lower ranks to get it. I think this will matter a ton if/when higher ranks have good control over larger functions of factions.

So I'm going to propose a new solution. First we raise the autorecall cost to 1000 because 500 is nothing. Second, we only allow the acu to have one equipped item slot which autorecall takes up. Third, we add a new item that takes up that slot which costs 2000 credits and blocks the autorecall of all enemy players from working so long as the player in possession of this equipped item is in the game, if they recall out or are killed the enemy can autorecall again. All players should be given a gui indication showing who has this autorecall blocker equipped. Manual recall is not affected at all. If a player with autorecall dies and is blocked from autorecalling the blocker goes away after the match is over and must be purchased again if you want to use it.

The goal behind this being that autorecall is still a viable thing but not invulnerability, it will be a good boost for keeping lesser skilled players in gw because they will have reasonable safety with it given that it's counter costs more and leaves someone vulnerable to death with a big target on their back, while it still allows people the chance to take that crazy shot at assassinating a valuable higher ranked opponent at great cost. If the enemy immediately recalls manually on sight of this counter its a victory and free credits plus the counter isn't gone. I'm guessing most people will take some risk though and see how the game goes for awhile especially if an important planet is being fought over. We could even keep a small victory cost for autorecall and the blocker if this isn't enough, I don't think we'll need to but it's still an option.

Now regardless of whether or not this sort of counter system is implemented I still think that acus should have a single equipment slot that autorecall takes up as it allows us to potentially add alternative upgrades that increase the likelyhood that someone might forgo autorecall in favor of something else, this is just me giving random probably poor examples here but these could be things like equipment that adds an additional reinforcement group that you can call in, or something that fills out/updates your faction's Intel sheet automatically with your opponent's name, rank, and victory/defeat record, or perhaps some ingame effect like allowing your acu to act as a beacon for reinforcements. Regardless providing rewarding alternatives to autorecall seems like something we should consider regardless of how the problem with it is solved. If we went with doubling the price of autorecall everytime you died (starting at a low cost) over a blocker system these alternative upgrades would become even more desirable over time as autorecall became less practical.

[RoLa]

I really like the "autorecall blocker" idea. But what about my former idea:

Perhaps it would be cool to restrict the autorecall feature only for the highest rank commanders and the retired ones. So only a faction leader and perhaps former leaders are not going to die.

I would do it like this:
- For every promotion you get one autorecall (you can stack them)
- faction leaders and perhaps former leaders get unlimited autorecalls
- very high ranked commanders can buy "autorecall blocker" blocking all autorecalls of foes and friends.

[theManfet]

imho this idea does not fit - I already gave an answer to a similiar idea from IceDreamer here
below is a copy of that post with a new passage at the end
Sorry but I don't think your reasoining does work.
Your fear is that higher ranking people will stop playing because they have a high avatar rank
yes that can happen - on the other side they should not be worrying about that because they should be able to get to that rank quite fast again. In the first few GWs I was able to go rank 4 inside of 48 hours quite often.

your solution is to give high ranking people, that have shown that they can get 30 victories without loosing their commander once, the ability to buy an autorecall every 4-6 victories... So for the statistic they can buy at least 5 autorecall and probably will not loose one in that time frame...
And in that time they will scare off many noobs of Galactic War by destroying them all the time and if once the noobs have found a way to finally kill off an avatar that has been harassing them for quite a long time then that guy will just get autorecalled - wow... as a noob I would stop playing after that.

If you want to give higher ranks a reason to still play you should think about something else then punishing the lower rated people.
maybe the higher ranks should only get credits through winning and not by waiting but instead will even gain a small amount of credits even if they loose. or just gain when winning.

the bigger problem why higher rated people did not play is the buying an attack thing that gets higher cost with every rank.
The idea behind that was that it would make higher rated player work together with lower rated players.
in my opinion it did not help much. I think a better idea would be that people would get a higher amount of credits if they played together with lower rated players. Playing should not be punished. The target should be to get the highest possible amount of games going.

I still think that autorecall is bad idea. Galatic War had such a nice different playstyle compared to normal FA games. Why would we want to loose that. Imho autorecall does not have any advantages that can compensate for loosing the diversity in playstyle.

[D4E_Omit]

Yeah I agree with manfet, I am really a fan of the galactic war playstyle and I think that autorecall kinda ruined it. If it ever comes back I think it should just be deleted or be really, really nerfed. I always liked the way that even pro players could be beaten because you had to be so careful.. And yeah, autorecall kinda got rid of the careful gameplay, because you had nothing to lose anyway. Also another big problem was that even the biggest noobs (600 rated) were rank 7's, so it was just a total reinforcement spamfest.. Every game had like 10 titans/loyals/harbs/othuums called in, which really ruined gameplay and made it dull. At that point the only reason I still played was because of the random map & random opponent feature. You never knew who you were up against, which is an epic feature.

And like manfet also said, you shouldn't punish lower rated players. I'm sure most high rated players wouldn't really care too bad if they don't get autorecall anymore, and it'll be way more fun for the lower rated when they once kill that precious rank 7 commander, it's a really cool feeling of accomplishment, and it's also yet another thing auto recall took away.

Anyways I'd love for galactic war to return soon even with autorecall and the old buggish version I still loved it.

[Rogueleader89]

The only reason I don't advocate getting rid of autorecall completely is that it can be a benefit to lower ranked players, part of why I would want something like a signal jammer that blocks autorecall to cost more than autorecall itself is so that people new to galactic war can have a bit of a safety net, they can get up to rank 2 or 3, have the opportunity to play with reinforcements in their battles and recall out safely without having to worry too much about losing all their progress at any moment, but if they start getting to the point they did in the last galactic war its only a matter of time until someone counters them somewhere; the only big catch to this is that if our goal with autorecall is to provide this safety net to lower ranks, we really should remove the increased income the enemy gets from forcing a player to autorecall (which honestly wasn't communicated very well in the first place and seemed to be no real deterrent to anyone). That said, yeah in the last galactic war it was just terrible to have high ranks with tons of money able to spam reinforcements constantly because they could always be assured of survival and if autorecall does not go it does definitely need a counter of some sort.

As to rebalancing costs and income (which we should make another thread on if we are going to talk in depth about it since this is nicely autorecall focused), as it relates to autorecall, the loss of autorecall would definitely help a bit with the problem of people getting tons of money and building up insane reinforcement piles, I honestly don't know if increased attack costs per rank made higher ranked players play more with lower ranked players (since we could just give attacks to higher ranked groups anyway, and uef seemed to not have any issue with pairing people of any rank together, even when we had higher ranked players paying for attacks for lower ranked ones due to lack of funds ). The only thing I'd worry about without autorecall around is the possibility that lesser skilled players might reach a mid-range rank (or just take 0 chances in combat at all and slowly grind their way up) and then sit there spending money on defenses and giving reinforcements to other people instead of playing and then eventually quit galactic war or that new GW players might get up to rank 2 or 3 and die constantly, discouraging them from playing GW more over normal games, but with autorecall and a counter to it in place they can hover around rank 3 if they want to play reasonably safely and this problem largely goes away; though another way to solve at least one of these problems would be to just decrease the income gained over time to be a lot less (which really is only needed now because attack costs increase so heavily from rank to rank). Anyway, I have a fair bit of time this morning and a ton of GW stuff drawn up so I'll get that all onto the computer and try to get a different topic on costs going.

[WinterShade]

I don't have much to add to this conversation besides agreeing with Rogue, the idea of having an Auto-Recall blocker is a good one. While still keeping auto-recall in, it also brings back that old GW playstyle of protecting your avatar. Also the idea of an item slot is really good, because players wouldn't be able to use both Auto-Recall and Auto-Recall blocker at the same time making it balanced somewhat.

[Teralitha]

Why create a counter for something you can simply do without. Just leave auto-recalling out of the game. Its lame. Lower ranked players do not need a crutch.