I'm not even sure if there would be a "shield" equivalent in this game. I seem to recall Space Marine having them, but then again they ARE wearing Power Armour. However, not all races have Power Armour or equivalents, and therefor I don't expect them all to have shields if at all. Even so, I think the idea of forgoing squad and/or faction benefits for a certain duration of time depending on high your rate of friendly fire is, is a good idea. Like if you splash some accidental damage on four firends it shouldn't be such a big deal, but if you actually kill a team mate then you should suffer this penalty with a timer, and the timer would not only reset bu extend in duration if the player keeps messing up like this. Also, there should probably be a "history" to each player that keeps track of this and determines if the player is doing this regularly, or just occasionally (i.e. accidentally). If it is determined that they are regularly doing this on purpose, then I insist that the court-martialing idea (in style of LoL) is kinda cool and immersive, making even game balancing elements into a minigame of sort. The players who would be doing the court-martialing would be higher-ranking players that have signed up for judging, and if the accused were in the friend list of any judge then he would immediately get excluded from being chosen to judge. Moderators would of course be welcome to participate in this, but simply as another judge, out of a court of maybe 4 judges, an in order to make a sentence, at least 3 of them would have to agree.
Unintentional friendly fire happens, and it sucks. Homed in with my sniper rifle, just getting a bead on someone, and a friendly steps right in front of me as I squeeze the trigger. Headshot. Son of a! It should do something else, such as, slowing your rate of fire (giving you more time to control your fire instead of spraying full auto into melee.....) to the point that it locks your weapons for a time. While the slow should wear off fairly quickly (but enough for you to really 'feel' it), the cooldown on the flag that you did FF should be much longer. As an example: 1st hit: Warning message flashes (cooldown on FF flag of 30 seconds) 2nd hit: Warning message flashes bigger (cooldown of FF flag 1 minute from this hit) 3rd: Warning and weapon locked for 2 seconds (cooldown of FF flag 1 minute from this hit) 4th: Warning and weapon locked for 5 seconds (cooldown of FF flag 2 minutes from this hit) 5th: Warning and weapon locked for 30 seconds (cooldown of FF flag 5 minutes) 6th: Warning and weapon locked for 1 minute (cooldown 10 minutes) etc An optional method (though kind of silly) would be that FF hits hurt yourself, or hurt yourself equally.
What if it simply didn't let you shoot directly at your team-mates? I honestly don't know how well this would work but I know games like vegas 6 (which are very diff. from this game i know) it works very well. It makes you feel tactical and professional. Ex: lowering your gun when your partner runs in front of you. I know grenades would tell a different story and i'm not sure how it would work, I assume it would take maybe half of the damage it would deal to your enemy or something like it. I also think due to a large scale battle, being a Devestator or something not being able to fire into a cluster F**k because you have teammates flasing in front of your cross hairs every other second would get frustrating and promote people to just throw grenades into a crowd.
First of all, dislexic people are going to a a wonderful time with your profile name xD. Second, I actually think that could be a very good alternative, having your character lower his weapon when having friendlies in the line of fire. But then again, it kind of takes away the skill from the game, like imagine you have a Bolter and just want to mow down all Orks fighting your Space Marine buddies, you just hold down the trigger and sweep the area, firing only when an Ork is in the crosshair. So maybe it might not be such a good idea for a game that's focused around offering a realistic skill-based war scenario (realistic in terms of gameplay). But what you say also rises the topic of how friendly fire will be handled for grenades and other AoE weapons. Probably the same but with less harsh penalties, seeing as how it will probably be more difficult to avoid firends with AoE weapons.
I think we had most of the answers to this question in that thread here already http://forum.eternalcrusade.com/threads/going-rogue-a-bad-thing-or-a-good-thing.2488/
Something i'm scared off is grenades... imagine you with friends playing as an assault squad holding a choke point in a huge melee killing orks left and right.... until xXxyoLoSwaG360NoscOpeXxX a friendly tactical marine comes and say"lol nade spam noobs"...
Reminds me of War of the Roses and just fucking cleaving into the melee with your longsword or pollaxe not giving a single DAMN about who gets in your way. Yeah, I'm fairly sure there needs to be friendly fire, otherwise the game will be a total mess of stupidity. "Hey, I need help in this melee! Toss your grenades at me!" No thanks.
Friendly fire makes for immersion. The more immersed I am in the 40k universe, the more I'm inclined to spend my time in it. From what I heard, combat is supposed to last roughly 7 seconds in 1v1 combat. This means that a single person can take a few stray shots here and there and shrug it off with no penalty. When in the thick of it, friendly fire would wreak havoc. I love the thought of a massive war's chaos taking victims indiscriminately. When massive ordnance is launched and detonated, I don't want to see Ork boyz walking out freely with mangled Chaos Eldar and Space Marines bodies littering the field. I believe that special weapons should be used for unique targets and not for experience / leaderboard fluff. While the odd player (or maybe the majority) calls down orbital strikes on the front lines, I anticipate that a significant number of uses would be on enemy sniper, reinforcement, and vehicle locations under orders by organized groups. I hope that friendly fire will be implemented but I won't be disappointed with a lack thereof. If Ork Nobz could execute low hp F2P users, that would be hilarious ^_^
If not I would had been kinda sad, it is important to keep it real.... Also hopefully this will prevent blocking of your allies
