Idea: Allow reviving dead players in GW at huge risk?

[nine2]

Edit for clarity: This is a mid match thing. You can recover your team mates corpse mid-match via reclaiming it, and it gets resurrected after the match, in which case he is still in GW but out of the match. You might die trying. Failure to recover fallen allies before ending the match results in their permadeath. This feature is intended to result in slightly less severe permadeath but also increased excitement.

I read a great sci fi series once where although humanity can clone people's bodies, they cannot replicate memories and personalities. So whilst alive their memories get recorded into a crystal memory lattice ... if the person ever dies a new body is built for them and the crystal lattice gives their personality back. Crystals can not be backed up. People can live forever, so long as their crystal is always found. Permanent death still happens, but it requires a hugely violent act.

In GW, would be cool if, once your acu dies, he leaves behind his memory crystal in the wreckage?

That way, if your allies manage to reclaim the crystal, you get resurrected the next day (after the match is complete).

This reduces a bit the black and white permanent death thing. However death is still a huge risk and will usually be permanent.

But what it does is gives really good nice tangible emotional things to fight over... when a player falls in battle, where a survivor can be a hero, stop retreating, go back in, recover his fallen mate, and get killed trying.

I think it would add a really nice element. The more exciting casts involve tight matches that involve turn arounds, near misses, risky actions. This would add more of that.

The losing team can get crystal and then retreat, in which case mate is reborn ... or retreat without getting the crystal ... in which case their mate dies forever.

The winning team gets prompted at the end of the match "automatically gather allied memory crystals?" and if you don't like your team mate you can select no to kill them forever

Hmm I dont know... maybe winners could obtain enemy crystals somehow and enslave them or something... get the memories which gets intelligence? I don't know. It would be nice if there was a reward for it but I can't think of one. Definitely though you should not be able to tamper with the enemy memory crystal until match is won. Also, crystal should have a long capture time. A strategy could be once you kill a player just retreat and start building TML because you know the enemy acu is about to sit there for a while.

[nine2]

edit: title

[Resin_Smoker]

edit: title

4DC allows for unit resurrection for the Seraphim faction.

Resin

[nine2]

this is totally different

[Rogueleader89]

I am not entirely clear on the mechanic you are trying to outline (I'd suggest putting it more in terms of game mechanics than in terms of general idea), that said, the description raises a few questions:

1) If you die do you still immediately get a new avatar and begin again from the first rank until/unless someone can revive your old avatar?

2) If the first is true, can you revive yourself?

3) What do you have to do exactly to recover these crystals? Win a battle? Retrieve some in-game object and evac with it?

4) What sort of time window are we looking at for recovery to be possible? Presumably it can't be infinite or even fairly long or we'll have the battlefield littered with the things, also consider that long times increase the possibility that whoever is recovered won't care due to progress with their new avatar (if you do revive with another in the meantime that is).

5) Reading over your post one more time, I get the feeling you may be speaking of this being a mid-match thing, so if you die mid-match in a teamgame your crystal can be recovered?

Anyway, bearing in mind that I likely don't have a complete idea of what your proposal here is... I'll address some of my concerns with what I think you are proposing. First, I'm going to assume the answer to my 5th question is true and that you can only revive if a teammate somehow saves you mid-match since tracking past avatar information and possibly requiring players to pick and choose between multiple avatars when one is revived seems overly complicated. So first, I'd suggest if this idea is gone through with you don't give enemies any more reward for "capturing" a crystal than credits or just permanently killing an avatar (which honestly is a great reward anyway, though if an intel system is implemented an intel reward would be neat) because things like enslavement produce numbers issues which are already a problem that needs to be solved in galactic war. Second, implementing this system makes teamgames considerably safer to play in galactic war than 1v1 games, I don't know what effect this will have on GW or if it will be good or bad or not matter at all but its definitely something that should be taken into account (at worst it could make it a whole lot more difficult to get 1v1 games in GW). Third I'm basically assuming this would be a replacement for autorecall, under that condition this is not a terrible idea, but if autorecall continues to exist while this is in place then this idea becomes redundant to it or at worst may provide too much protection to people (already a problem with autorecall by itself). Lastly, I highly suggest you separate out the mechanics of this idea from the lore of it that you are presenting here; I do not claim to know supcom lore well but I'm fairly sure some people will take issue with this if you try to sell lore along with it, the important thing to consider here is whether or not the mechanics involved would improve GW on the whole; the lore can be anything really, it could be that when you get an acu to 0 health it spawns a sort of disabled wreck after the explosion you can save the driver from, or it could be faction specific, maybe cybran brains can be downloaded out if you can spend enough time near them to access them, lots of lore possibilities, but only the mechanics matter for this discussion.

On a more minor note to what I assume was an offhand idea, reviving allies should never be an optional choice when you most definitively can do so, we want people to play GW, not start hating their team and leave it.

All of this said, I don't have strong opinions either way on this yet, clarify the mechanics of the system and we can start addressing its potential impact better, but as you do so bear in mind how the idea will affect GW on the whole and not just individual battles, I definitely think this could add some excitement to battles, but I worry about adding more protections from avatar death and giving incentive to play one game style over another scaring off some players. In essence I'm looking at this as an argument for an auto-recall replacement, please inform me if I'm wrong about the intention here; and as an auto-recall replacement I do appreciate that it attempts to add a more grey area of survivability and has an interesting tactical game mechanic to go with it, I'm just uncertain as to exactly what issues it may bring up on its own and, perhaps more importantly, whether it truly solves whatever it is we want auto-recall to accomplish; for me that is to give a bit of a safety net to low ranking players, but I've also seen it argued that it allows higher ranked players more safety and confidence in their attacks so that they will play more tactical games; in the case of your idea you cover a fairly broad field that in some ways hits on what I want to accomplish since the enemy is less likely to waste time trying to permanently kill off a low ranking player but you also provide no protection at all for 1v1 players..

Well that was a lot longer post than I thought I'd be making, glad to hear a new idea addressing perma-death though and looking forward to seeing some clarified mechanics regarding it.

[nine2]

This is a mid match thing. You can recover your team mates corpse mid-match but it doesn't get resurrected until after the match. The player is still in GW but out of the match.

In a single match if you die your corpse sits there.

Your ally can recover your corpse if he walks to it with his acu and reclaims it. You are not brought back alive instantly. You are not brought back into the match. Your ally simply has your corpse in his possession and if he manages to survive the match himself, he takes your corpse home with him and you are resurrected into the GW universe immediately after the match.

The corpse only exists for a single match. If your team recalls or dies without recovering your corpse, it is gone forever and you suffer permadeath. There is no returning to the map later to recover bodies.

~~~~~~~~~~~

I have absolutely no opinion on auto recall because I was not aware of it before your post, I never followed or played GW.

I think this idea would add a lot of pressure to games. If I was playing with ZLO and he fell in combat, there would be a massive amount of pressure for me to get his corpse, since his avatar is so valuable. However, at the same time, because ZLO just fell my chances of surviving that are very low - I needed him and his army to win and the fact that they are gone makes me think I should be recalling immediately. So now I have a nice situation where I am strongly tempted to do something very dangerous. And that is very exciting.

You could have a game where you kill ZLO and then his three team mates could have recalled but all died trying to rescue him.
Or where the noob team mate rescues him under heavy fire and recalls immediately.

If you get sniped in your base then the chance of getting recovered is very high. If you die out in the middle then the chances of recovery are less.

This mechanism reduces permadeath some, increases it a little bit, but still keeps it as a very serious thing.

As for the rest of your post ... yes, sounds good.

[nine2]

I guess I like this idea so much because it gives you something real to fight for. Fighting for yet another planet in GW? Who cares it's very day to day. But fighting for whether or not ZLO's avatar exists or not? It's a real accomplishment if you pull it off.

[Rogueleader89]

I guess I like this idea so much because it gives you something real to fight for. Fighting for yet another planet in GW? Who cares it's very day to day. But fighting for whether or not ZLO's avatar exists or not? It's a real accomplishment if you pull it off.

I definitely agree with you on this point, it adds a really nice tactical element to the game, and if implemented as part of a replacement for auto-recall it ties it nicely to both the tactical and strategic levels. Even if you accept auto-recall as a necessary part of the game, it always felt a bit cheap at the end of a tactical game to know that there was nothing you could do to stop it, no way to get that final kill, this offers a nice tactical level counter to a strategic level mechanic. All of this said, the same thing you cite in your example could be accomplished by simply removing auto-recall entirely or providing a direct counter to it, giving you that same real accomplishment without implementing a new facet in tactical play.

However, having heard your mechanical explanation, most of the points I outlined previously stand, but I like this route of thinking through a replacement to auto-recall (or rather another solution to some of the problems autorecall attempts to solve as well as potentially a few other things that haven't been fully addressed). I think the largest points that would need to be addressed is its uselessness in 1v1s and the exact mechanics of where it sits on the strategic front.

I don't have any fantastic suggestions to offer toward solving these points, but I'll throw out a couple of things I've come up with while thinking this over in the hopes someone can either find a way to address my concerns or propose better alterations (since I think neither of these ideas work fully).

On the 1v1 subject the only thing I've been able to come up with is to make the ACU wreck essentially a structure or non-mobile unit that has a 2-5 minute timer before it auto-recalls itself out, allies could assist it to go faster but it would still be a viable thing in a 1v1 if you can protect it from your opponent long enough to get out; however, I dislike this idea because it means the player in question has control of their units for another 2-5 minutes after death which kills a lot of the strength of sniping an enemy player in much the same way that full share does, albeit a bit less so given the time limit.

On the idea of where it would sit in the strategic game: on one hand I feel it has a clear strategic place as an upgrade to replace auto-recall, but, on the other hand, assuming there are no alternatives available to take the acu slot I'd like auto-recall to fall under, it is something everyone would want to get and there I'm of the opinion lower ranking players need more of this protection than higher ranking ones so just making it the default death state instead of gating it behind a credit wall lower ranks will have trouble getting past regularly has some appeal (would probably make it something you get for ranking up then since there is no reason to save rank 1 avatars and draw out games fighting over their remains). But then, if the aim is to offer those unique situations where you break from the day to day of tactical, making this a thing that happens regularly very much defeats that purpose so maybe it is better to lock this behind a wall that only higher ranked players can get through (or reserving it for faction leaders and their chosen cabinet, which would also make it possible to identify these people through tactical games and inform you when a match you are playing against an otherwise normal opponent may actually be a hugely influential strike against an enemy leader, would also offer some additional protection for these important positions and make it something you earn through helping your team and participating fully in the war rather than some amount of money you saved or some number of battles won, plus the 1v1 issue goes away since this doesn't affect everyone in all of GW then, actually if this doesn't serve as an auto-recall replacement at all and ends up being something aimed solely at creating unique experiences for players I really like this sort of idea a lot), making each time it activates truly be an event in its own right.


The more I think on this; I think the real reason I like this idea in spite of its flaws is that it does have the potential to offer an interesting new tactical change from the norm. Ze_Pilot spoke of incorporating the civilian defense mod into galactic war for what I assume would be much the same purpose, but I think your line of thinking here works better for this purpose because it ties the action to an actual player, someone people can relate to and whose salvation or loss will likely have a larger impact on their faction than some variation on tactical play that helps you hold or take a planet and is something that can create much more interesting spontaneous moments of play that feel less like planned out variation. Of course for this idea to accomplish that it would have to not be done as an across the board replacement for autorecall... Regardless, I hope to see more ideas like it aimed at accomplishing this goal of breaking from the norm of tactical play.

[nine2]

I hear your concerns but dont think they are show stoppers/. Sure, 1v1 is way more dangerous. I agree, accept that and think its awesome. We don't have to fix that. In fact, its better this way. Now there are 'real' reasons not to defend certain maps.