I think crowd control is also another good alternative concept to play with, but I think damage is a bit more straight forward for implementation and isn't possible to exploit.
I would agree with CC, but damage isn't an option for me. I think it'd be infuriating for the F2W'ers, and trolling/griefing might even be an issue since there's no pay-wall. Unless you also counted any kills or damage as team damage in which someone might just have bad luck and face huge penalties for it.
CC is effectively damage...with kind of a bigger worse/best case scenario for certain situations. At the end of the day its an issue of what feels better.
While it gives enemies more time to damage you, CC won't outright kill you. If 10 orks charge a tactical, one of them with a burna, and the marine shoots the burna tank knocking them all to the ground. He now has 2 more seconds to shoot his bolter at them before they swamp him. But if the explosion did damage, he could potentially have 3 less to deal with or more depending on how tightly packed they are, plus the survivors will be easier to kill giving him the advantage in melee even. But the devs say that 10 orks should rip one space marine's shit easy-peasy, technically even more so if they have a special weapon with them like a burna.
Its hard to sort of plot out the differences between damage and CC but ya, you're not exactly wrong. Experience wise if your criticism is that one is a better experience then another I don't know if thats the case. CC does have time costs that damage doesn't have and if its about uninterrupted play...What feels better dying because the ork beside you died and you died in the fallout or dying because the orc beside you died, and you got shot by someone else? because you were CCed for w/e duration. If you're at low health and the ork beside you blows up and kills you you've got a relatively snappy few chain of events. For getting you into the next spawn. If that interaction costs more time but you're more or less incapable of action Thats not exactly impossible in the damage case because player behavior could trend away from suicidal aggression and more into the knee-high-wall rodeo...but its my hope that Orks can play suicidally and that would be a path that would lead to interesting new gameplay.
It might be fairer if the exploding burna becomes an obstacle for x seconds, rather than a grenade like one off blast effect. An obstacle that if you walk onto, you get set on fire/take damage/get slowed down, but otherwise has no physical effect. This would provide the damage/disrupting effect to a tightly packed group of orks (those behind have to either go around it or take damage), but canny players could use the obstacle as cover for a short time, or use suicidal burnas to block up narrow passageways and slow down enemy reinforcements.
mmhmm its just getting the balance for how strong it should be...and one of the cool things about that is that it can be group size specific. Call it the side effects of WAAAGH!!! energy, and have it group size specific. There are just so many ways to thematically tune it.
I honestly think there will be more than enough firepower targeting Orks to begin with; adding a mechanic to further harm them just because they're standing next to friendlies would just detract from every Ork player's experience. Even if this mechanic was perfectly balanced somehow between damage and CC, its still an immense drawback the player has to walk through when considering equipping that particular weapon. In the end, those weapons will rarely see the battlefield and the whole Ork faction would be affected negatively for it. I remember there was a Q&A in a past livestream, don't remember which one, regarding the instability of Plasma technology. BE answered that the Plasma Gun will have a reflection of the tabletop 'Gets Hot!' special rule (chance for the weapon's user to harm oneself), but this would only happen whenever a player causes this to themselves, not just randomly. I would also use the same logic here. Don't damage/CC others just for being near a player with *exploding equipment*; make the player feel like its their fault for having that equipment rather than a chance occurrence.
I think you're wrong. Servers chug when a lot of people are in one place, if Ork players are clogging places up, then there needs to be a way to solve that problem, this helps against the Ork density clogging up a zone for any long period of time. I don't think you're envisioning how thematic such a mechanic could be made to be. Every Ork out there is going to die. Its inevitable. You go out there you are going to eventually die, it was always going to be inevitable. Play Planetside 2 and try to not die, then to go a place in planetside that's a hotspot and tell me how often you died? It doesn't matter. You're going to die a lot and its going to suck regardless if there's a mechanic that factors into positioning. Lag isn't fun in these games, neither is dying, but you know what I'd rather be doing? Not lagging and then dying.
Well, the devs promised 500 vs 500 battles to run with none gameplay affecting lag. If they can't deliver on that then they went back on their promise, but if this "pikoserver" thing is as good as they say, it shouldn't be an issue. Plus, if the problem is too many people spawning in one area, then you can forbid spawning there for a while. Or add a queue. And honestly, I don't think dying due to getting shot in the face by an enemy and dying to some guy blowing up next to me are the same thing. Perhaps I'm alone in this, but it's just two different things for me. Thats why CC only might work, it's the psychological aspect too. If I die due to my ally killing me, even by accident, then I blame my ally. If I die due some guy on the other team shooting me, even though I was knocked prone by my ally blowing up, I still blame the enemy.
