Hawkei wrote:Limiting the options for ACU enhancements as higher level unlocks adds value to having a high level avatar. It is part of the trade off and a reward for protecting your Avatar. Those senior level avatars (ranks 5, 6, and 7) represented a huge investment of time and skill. They were a major asset to their team because of their ability to buy T3 RF. So loosing one is a serious blow to your team, and they need to be protected. This aspect of the meta-game encouraged highly defensive play once you reached the higher levels. So much so that these players would rarely engage in risky battles, and almost never without an AR.
And like I said those avatar are the same as dead then if they do not engage anymore because they have no incoming credit flow.
The noobs only get an advantage if the other guy is going for autorecall.
As you may remember I played with you in UEF and know the meta there quite good too. And as you may remember a lot of the noobs did not listen to your prayers and chose autorecall anyway.
In my opinion this will happen: the good players with skill will ditch the autorecall and choose one of the other upgrades and rely on big amounts of incoming drops and normal recall if they see the situation as lost (they will have rank quite fast), the noobs will fight themselves to rank and then try to keep it with autorecall (giving the good players even more credits), it is true that there is going to be a lot of noobs not reaching the rank for autorecall but their advantage of choosing another upgrade is lost as the pros will never choose autorecall anyway and have big drops as added advantage.
And in between t2 on a starting acu is going to be super strong. Just build an early tml and secure it with a t2 pd. Then shoot the other guys factory which is going t2 and watch him loosing his units against your t2 pd giving you even more mass. And if he even uses his acu to try and kil the tml and t2 pd you can and does not make it (which is likely) then you can kill him off with tml when he is recalling and can not move anymore.
and you forgot to address the stupid high complexity level your solution delivers to the gameplay.
I sincerely think that you make an elephant out of the mouse small problem of people not playing with high rank avatar. The number is way smaller than you think. Imho less than 5% will stop playing because they are scared of loosing their ranked avatar but more will stop playing because of too high complexity or because GW lost it's unique playstyle.
Imho it would be better to actually have a discussion if autorecall is needed. I think we never had one and Zep just pust in that feature because some people complained.
