There has been a lot of discussion lately about spawn and meat grinders and etc. So, I'd like to take a bit to post some thoughts on this as well as open it up for others. It's a complex issue, no one wants it to simply become a spawn fest with people instantly re-spawning and rushing back into battle, but no on really wants to be sitting around not doing anything while battles rages, or be split from your squad or strikeforce.

My solution: If/when you die you have two options.
Option 1: Wait for the rest of your squad to either die, or decide to regroup (once 50% of the squad is dead, the rest can vote to pull back or not). Once they either die or pull back, then you get the option to deploy again. Deployments of course not being into "spawn points" but rather, drop-off behind the front, with or without vehicle, drop pod or teleport deployments into the thick of battle. This makes for a real feeling of eliminating people instead of the endless spawning and gibbing. In addition it allows for a morale-type effect ("breaking" squads), and a true reinforcement feeling as squads come back.

Option 2: You can choose to abandon your squad and deploy as above into another battlefield, but you are 'locked out' of deploying within a decent distance of where you died. You could hoof it back to the battle, but you might as well have taken option 1 if that was your plan.

Anyhow, there are my thoughts to prevent spawnfests and the meat grinder effect, but still allow for people to get into the game again.

But what would be the state of "pulling back"?
A state proclaimed by the group? then it could be exploited to allow quick reinforcement while on the battle
When they are running away from the battle, or when they are all out of combat? Then it could also be exploited
A verification of when they are X meters/km away from the nearest enemy? Then the enemy could make this its advantage and have a single guy following entire armies to prevent spawn, not to mention the wasted constant checks that the server would need to do

If it is that all of them return to the base then it is not much different from option 2 no?

Re-spawn on commander after X seconds, if commander is dead because he has no team to support him, must start from previous "base" ... this is essentially "falling back".

So:

Option 1- do you advocate that a player who dies should simply wait? How long do you consider acceptable to wait for your squad to either all die or decide to pull back to recover you? Is it good to either a) ask one player to wait for a potentially long time, or b) ask for 4-8 players to stop being effective on the field to run back and recover their ally?


Option 2- How far? 500m? Can I purchase a bike and get back to the fight in 30s? Do we increase the distance to account for the possibility of pulling fast vehicles? If my squad-mate has a teleport homer, could I spawn far away and instantly deep strike to him?


I'm actually very interested in this topic. The meat grinder does have a certain unpalatable flavor to it, but we'd need to find a solution that doesn't prevent players from having fun and isn't immediately negatable by other game features.

Does anyone have any examples of games where respawning feels meaningful and tactical without being a meat-grinder?

LOL no , most games just copy, i'm glad your looking for something different!..

Mini-Puzzle sort of thing, while you wait, that can effect your allies/enemy.. not much thought into this.. yet.. but it would give players some sort of other way to help there team while they wait for spawning... id say in a game of this sort of scale, being dead should have a severe impact on your teams ability to win (if the best player on the team must wait 3 mins to respawn) and NO, you shouldn't be able to get back into the fight within atleast 2 mins...

This just recently came up in the attrition discussion in another thread. Our focus was that spawning should be somehow at the mercy of an attrition or resource system, without the use of any immobile, invincible spawns that can carry a fight far longer than it should go (ie, a meatgrinder.) There were some suggestions as to actually limiting the number of spawns that can be made in a region over time, but I felt that would be unnecessarily vulnerable to the antics of inexperienced or casual players who don't necessarily care about the welfare of the faction.

My solution harkens back to planetside 2, which has very nasty meatgrinders, but only around their static spawns. Even zergs grind to a halt around static spawn points, and set up the incredibly boring spawncamp formations where everybody sits around and farms for 10 minutes until the base flips.

Idea: make every spawn in the game aside from the home base a deployable, destructible and resource heavy construct that can be targeted by other players. This takes off of the planetside Sunderer: a vehicle that allows for mobile spawning near the front, but cannot be deployed within a certain distance of another one and is destructible by a dedicated group or one especially sneaky player with explosives.

Gameplay around sunderers (with a few exceptions) is great - there's a constant ebb and flow as people try to find a balance between placing them as close to the front as possible to remove legwork but also keeping them safe from enemy fire. If there is a big push by the enemy side, the dynamic changes and previously safe sunderers must be moved or are destroyed.

I could imagine a couple things like this for Eternal Crusade, with some modifications to make them better. For the space marines it's a drop pod beacon, for the eldar a webway gate, for the orks a rokk landa, etc. These buildings are either immobile or have limited mobility, and take a LOT of resources to spawn, and while they have a lot of health dedicated player effort can take them down. And these player deployable points are the only places other than the faction home base where players can spawn - zero static spawns anywhere. And trying to buy too many of them at once drains a regional resource allotment, so over time they become so prohibitively expensive to deploy that the frontline must retreat.

Bases suddenly become useful because they are good defensive locations to hide a spawn in and launch an assault from, not because they are invincible fountains of troops. Players gets to the front quickly, but are subject to the risks that the spawn will be destroyed and the line pushed back. The spawn must be at the core of a friendly assault or it will be annihilated and the resources squandered. The entire system is subject to resource attrition. Everybody wins.


EDIT: a little note on the squad based stuff: it probably would be nice for squads to be able to regroup on each other if taken down. Maybe if they retreated to a certain distance of a spawn, their dead players could spawn on them rather than having to find them again?

I like your idea so far, ill think more about it. Who can buy spawns with resources? not everyone!! if spawn is destroyed, and funds still available, what stops them instantly rebuilding that spawn, timer?, need a new person with ability to do it, as you can only build one?

thanks

This all really depends on how resources are managed. In ps2, resources come out of a personal pool which refills depending on the total land ownership of your faction. Additionally, players can only afford to deploy 1 sunderer (the durable, resource heavy deployment vehicle) every hour or so because of a cooldown timer, so they tend to be extremely protective of it (even paranoid) because they receive rewards from everyone who spawns on it. They want people to spawn on theirs, so they try to park it close to the front, but they don't want it to get blown up, so it isn't that close. And you also have to pay beforehand for the ability to order one of these vehicles at all.

If this was subject to some subregional resource attrition, commanders, and individual equipment costs, it could get even better logistically. A regional commander looking down on the battle could deploy spawns without the massive personal cost in resources, but his goal is the overall success of his front, not personal gain. And 40k already has a system for equipment costs - point values. If people want to spawn a wraithlord, it takes out of their personal resource pool, which is maybe supplied periodically by the regional one. If a commander wants to spawn a wraithlord for one of his troops because he needs it on the battlefield, or a tank or whatever, it gets called out of the regional pool directly.

Thanks to Psychopski and Stovebolt for a lot of these resources ideas. The attrition thread is pretty in depth on this topic, go check it out.

The mini-game for players who are waiting after dying is a good idea. Perhaps, if the rest of the squad can manage to stay alive long enough, then the squadmate (who was a part of the squad when he died, thus no squad hopping and keeping a 'respawn squad' in the back) would be able to re-deploy on them directly.

Ideally, it should be more desirable to wait for a chance to go back in with your squad, than to respawn and walk, so.. an immediate respawn with or without vehicle should be a long way away. Essentially letting you go to another battlefield, but resigning from the one you died in.

An option, if nothing else can be come up with, would be an increasing wait time when you die. First death, come back in 10 seconds, second death, 1 minute, 3rd death, 5 minutes, 4th death, 10; etc. This wouldn't give as smooth a reinforcement feeling of entire squads breaking from combat and coming back full strength but would prevent hours-long meat-grinder scenarios.

Ideally, people shouldn't be spawning solo. A single soldier is simply not combat effective when you are talking about things on a battle-field scale. Okay, there are some exceptions such as snipers, but even they work in teams, and a squad of them is much more effective than a single one.

People don't really have a problem waiting in games like Counterstrike, so I don't see why a short wait for your squad would be a problem.

I agree only 12 year old kids with ADD cant wait 5 mins.. in fact it gives me time to be old, stretch a little, have a cig, and a cuppa, make man noises and then go back to battle after the servitors have reinstalled my old brain into a new corpse (mini game? - optional, can decrease the wait to re-spawn lol)

I like the idea of individual and commander/leader recourse pool BTW. How about the commanders pool IS the combined resources of all the Squad, that they have collected... or something