Having a cynical view on players exploiting a game's resources in order to gain an unfair advantage, I want to know what precaution there will be that will prevent 2 SM's deciding one day that one of them should create an Ork character, and have the other come over to a small outpost and capture it, and then have the Ork capture it, and then the SM, ect. A. Do both characters continually gain the same xp from this seesaw? B. Do both factions gain a sudden bonus of resources on point capture, are the resources stolen from whomever previously owned the objective, or is capturing an objective like turning on a faucet that factions put their Requisition bucket under? Also, what about trade killing? What would happen if a SM sat around killing his friend (the Ork) on an objective just to scale his xp and requisition faster than he may earn in the field of battle? What of the Ork being a drain of resources on his faction? Do players have a resource loss rock bottom where they no longer cost the faction to spawn in case of: A. A really heavy conflict that could potentially grind them out? B. Players that "feed" resources into enemy factions like the Ork example above. Should the rest of the faction pay that penalty? What if a whole SM guild makes Ork characters (Nobs even) and does nothing but run them into the fire of SM players all day? I actually was hoping that spawning would not be a direct drain on faction resources, but rather on personal allowances players get from the faction's resource pool. Die, or kill yourself and the only resources you drain are your own. When you hit the bottom of your requisition pool, you can still spawn, but you can't bring your best toys to the fight. Any thoughts?
Well, that's why it's important that you're only able to capture front-line bases and it helps to have some kind of "supply line"/Advance And Secure/lattice system to provide a structured cap sequence. With those mechanics in place, attempting to "trade caps" like that is likely to draw the attention of one or more team's zergs, and next thing you know you're in a real fight. Though of course, it is important that overall a real fight is more rewarding than just capping by itself (though having the fight should also increase the value of the actual cap), in order to make sure there's not an incentive for entire Strike Forces to deliberately avoid fighting each other and just cap.
On the token of making bases in enemy territory unconquerable, what would be the point of doing high risk / high reward operations behind enemy lines? Not that they should be conquerable, but I love infiltration missions... my favorite thing to do in WoW when I played it was to drink invisibility potions on my warlock with 2 rogues walking into Stormwind and then summon a whole army of horde players (like 3-4 raid group's worth) and just watch the alliance cry havoc in Stormwind and Ironforge. I'd hope that in EC, this type of organization and strategy would be rewarded... Chaos would probably do it all the time against the SM's.
Well, presumably the point would be to preemptively blow up deployed spawn points before the base is actually attacked (so when they see on the map they're losing a base, they realize they can't spawn in and have to walk/drive), take out AA emplacements, disrupt incoming reinforcements, things like that.
I'd say the problem proposed in the OP is most easily solved by friendly fire, have the traitor executed by his own faction...
The whole issue of friendly fire abuse is something that can really only be solved by GM intervention as you can't make a mechanic that does it for you.
You'd have to have a lot of GMs to cover dozens of thousands of players or more, I'm not saying they're useless, cos they aren't but you could have some simple game mechanics limiting friendly fire. The first ff victim on your side - warning, the second - you lose XXX requsisition points, the third - you lose XXX requisition points + temporary ban.
I dunno, what if you are wielding a Plasma Cannon to fire at a foe and the The Three Stooges jump at that enemy just as you fire. Would suck to be banned cause someone is unaware (or stupid) enough to not see whats happening.
Well, sometimes there's a price for stupidity, next time you'll be much, much more aware, little ban never killed nobody . I'm afraid that if we have ff such drastic measures will be neccessary as there will be hundreds of trolls who will deliberately try to ruin other team mates experience by team killing, if there's no possibility to stop them it will be very frustrating for normal players. That's why I don't like the idea of ff too much, not in this kind of game, there'll be issues, no doubt about that.
