Squad Leader Archive

With the new attention of Community Relations realy forwarding at least some of our concerns and bringing a DEV here, I would like to sort and discuss out some ideas I have been watching floating around on the squad leader forum, as well as some other forums, mainly the GCW forum.

Still Im going to limit this first here since the GCW forum is currently not realy in a state to discuss things on a reasonable scale, because different opinions get flamed rather than exchanged, viewed upon from a different perspective and discussed.

Here we go:

During the existance of the squad leader profession there has been several calls to give the squad leader the ability:

• to control more faction pets
• call and control NPC reinforcements
• call airstrikes down upon an opponent.

Although these ideas certainly would improve the feel of being a squad leader, there is currently a stronger feeling, at least along the squad leader forum community, that squad leaders should be more focused on leading players and rather than NPCs (like the CH), while the majority of non-SL believe that especially this abilitiy would make squad leaders more attractive to them.

Having mixed feeling on this, being one of the squad leaders who would like to focus the squad leader profession on leading, guiding, organicing and communicating players, I still can understand the interest of the ppl to lead more than just one faction trooper, as well as to have those other abilities.

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In my personal opinion ...

... I think the abilties to lead more NPCs, as well as to call reinforcements and airstrikes, although on a cursorily point of view seem to fit the squad leader profession very well, do not suit into the squad leader profession.

I think the error we make here, is that most of us follow the path of the military and thus factional squad leader, who is at the same time an officer in this faction.

Going back and forth on this, I dont see an ingame reason why an (although rare) non factional squad leader should have these abilities.

Following the overall concept of the GCW there are currently only two factions warring each other on a larger scale, the rebel and the imperial. IMHO these abilities should be tied to the faction rank of the character and not to the profession.

The different ranks currently have no meaning in the game besides being able to carry more fp and to have a better delegation ratio, which leads to everybody becoming a Col.. Currently there is no benefit to keep certain ranks.

I think that each rank should have a certain ablitiy tied to it giving each rank a different usage. Higher ranks can either include certain abilities from lower ranks (and maby improve them) but should also be excluded from some abilities to differ the purpose and the usage of certain factional ranks.

Im still brainstorming on the overal concept as well the different abilities, but I felt the need to bring the attention of the squad leader community on whats currently going on in my mind.

These are my very raw first suggestions, and I dont have realy put much thought into the different ranks yet but I felt the urge to share my thoughts with the squad leader community to get more input on this.

Sergeant : Minimum rank requiered to place and or donate turrets or minefields.
Warrant Officer II - this rank allows you to see ally base vulnerable timers, also immune to ally faction searchs, due to officer rank: Minimum rank requiered to place a forward outpost.
Second Lieutenant : Minimum rank requiered to place a field hospital.
Captain : Minimum rank requiered to place a tactical center.
Lieutenant Colonel : Minimum rank requiered to place a Det. HQ. .

As you can see I didnt placed the three mentioned abilities at all since Im personally not very fond of them (the more factional pet and controlable thing would seriously harm CH in my eyes as well as I think airstrikes might be to unbalancing) but you all are free to share your opinions and points of views on this matter .

There you go

Discuss


EDIT: on a side note, I want to see what squad leader think about these abilties and not discuss ranks, since this is already done in the GCW forum Ranks and Military Careers

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Message Edited by _scout_ on 08-19-2005 12:28 PM

I whole-heartedly agree. An air strike, no matter how cool, would lead EVERYONE to SL,it could even flare up trouble between SL and BH of opposing faction. Much like Jedi vs. BH. That's one fight I'd sooner avoid. I have enough problems getting people to listen let alone people getting mad because I chose the profession. As for the CH conundrum, I agree as well. 1) all CH's could go to SL to control npc people. 2) Even when I started almost a year ago, I though leading a group of friends into battle would be cool. If I wanted an npc squad, I would've gone CH instead.

As for Rank, well, at that, maybe even add in an additional NPC/rank. After all, a General has more people under their command than say a Sergeant. But that's just me.

Message Edited by AlienEntity on 08-19-2005 05:38 AM

Sound ideas

Hmm, i didn't fully get it at first, i still am not getting it this time. Would the abilities you gain add up with your factional rank? That would mean, each and any of the hundreds of colonels in the game would be able to use them all?

Or should some abilities be reserved for higher ranks and others for lower ranks? This is what i would actually like, but only under one condition: remove the limits of factional standing and costs for delegating factional standing for lower ranks.

I personally would have loved to stay at a mid-level rank, but the current system of faction point cap and delegation forces you to become colonel within limited time.

Point to ponder, what about the non factional SLs who always keep enough faction to switch from one to another? They won't ever be able to be high up in factional rank, but might be switchable to slice bases for hire. (I have often contemplated this) What if any consideration would you want to give them?

Merc for hire? Yea, i at the start also wanted to play that, but it's exhausting under the current system.

I see it that each rank has its seperate skills/abilities/perks/traits/limitiations, some overlap (Warrant officers, Lt. Colonel - Colonel) but no rank can do everything. There is already a interesting and not yet totally destroyed thread about this in the GCW forum (hard to read but sometimes there is still something interesting there).

What I wanted to clear and discuss is how other squad leaders see the distiction between squad leader and rank since a lot of players mix them all in one and I still see the need to seperate between them, especially so neutral squad leaders can play their character as they want.

Regarding mercs and smugglers and delegations faction, smugglers should be able to have a trade pool for faction points and they should be able to buy faction from both sides (though if they are factional bound much expensiver than from their own side). The delegate ration should be set to 1:1 and the amount of faction points you can hold should only differ very lightly between different ranks, if at all.

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Squad Leaders are not NPC Handlers.

Squad Leader isnt meant to raise or lead a bunch of NPCs, this argument has been up before, wasnt to well supported last time I checked.

Raising a NPC isnt what SL is all about imho. If I wanted to do that id ask to be an Instructor of some sort. Having SL become a NPC handler isnt what we are about. We are to lead PCs in battle.

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Short_Timer wrote:

How many of us group with a pet/droid when playing solo so that we can get access to our SL abilitites? Isnt that more or less the same thing, just on a smaller and more convenience based scale?

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Yepp I do, but the thing is that we can pull only one pet/droid/faction NPC just like everybody else (and we pull pets and droids, since factional NPCs are not worth their faction. I wouldnt mind that if they would not randomly spawn different races everytime, but with each time having a different skin but the same name, its not even possible to use them for RP purposes at all!).

The point is most ppl are asking to be able to control more than one factional NPC and if you look closesly those are in 99% of all cases imperial players since they want to have their honor Stormtrooper guards, since they cant convince real players to do the boring job, just following them, as well as that a lot of ppl are not able to afford faction armor since they are still so expensive (faction and credit wise).

Those players of imperials characters usually say : "I want to have my guards as high ranking officer and squad leader, so I should be able to pull three pet or even 3 AT ST or even an AT AT or have 10 guards around me.... and well the rebels can have something similar."

Now where does pulling guards fits into the immersion of star wars as a rebel colonel ? It doesnt.

And where does "something similar" as an AT-ST or AT AT fits into the immersion of that too?

Simply: It doesnt.

These concept of having more guards/AT ST/AT AT or even airstrikes are only suitable for the immersion of imperial players.

The problem of this lies deeply within the game concept of the Galactic Civil war, and that is that both factions are in fact the same faction using the same game mechanics, and as we can see in the current state of the GCW they never were finished to be released, but they had to release something and that is what we got now.

Properly done both factions should have a very different feel to them, with as default having the imperials holding the galaxy and the rebels beeing the sneaky underdog. These concepts have been discussed in auroborons threads the Imperial dreams and
Dreams of the rebellion but have been lost in the jedi flood.
Now that both sides just use their jedi to PvP and to fight within the GCW, the GCW as an immersive factor with SWG is dead. PvP is changing to jedi only and its more a jedi war. There is nothing else to do besides random PvP or random base destructions defended or undefended and in both cases jedi is the class to go (just take a base buster on follow to slice the base).

As long as GCW = PvP the predominant alpha class will dominate the battlefield.
Only when you start assigned different tasks to different profession you will see more profession on the battlefiedl, but this means : excluding certain profession from certain content, what in fact is good (though the jedi will complaing about it but in fact THEY GET AN ALT FOR FREE!).

We are currently already excluding all non BH from hunting jedi, so this argumeant is jst an outright lie and a slap in the face to all other profession, especially the smugglers.

Smugglers should be the only ones who can smuggle.
Commandos should be the perfect profession to destroy turrets, doctors should heal in med centers and cantinas should be filled with ATK entertainers, rifleman should be the nukers on the field, carbines the chargers, pistoleers the tactical template, applying meaning full stats with REAL crowd control, but the jedi fear crowd control since in a group it would be possible to kill them (and certainly this should be the case, since a single crowd control profession would only be able to force a stalemate!).

I started to rant sorry, the fact is that most of the ppl on the forum arent capable of analysing anything, so they just see the symptoms but nobody sees the cause behind it. Especially the GCW forum is a parade example of that.

Everybody complains about the jedi power, BUT its their NUMBERS not their power. Or take the jedi forum for another example: They feared last ditch spreading rumors over rumors but never knew how last ditch realy worked, they are afraid that pistoleers would be able to crowdcontrol since they wouldnt be able to attack/move/regain action but at the same time jedi is the profession who can apply ALL stats too and do decent damage (they can KD, dizzy, root, stun, blind, snare, and they dont have seperate stat recovery, they have one to recover from all of them).

Oh well I better stop.

To get back on topic:
Everything what is related to the GCW and factional troopers or functions (if it must be more NPCs (what just would nerf the CHs) or even airstrikes, dont talk about balanceing and reasoning this for rebels) tie this to the currently meaningless rank.

It doesnt belong into the squad leader profession and that is my humble opinion. I know others disagree, but thats good, different ppl different opinions ......



p.s.
I usually dont rant like this but as being used to analyse problems and their cause and looking for solutions it hurts me how this game is run without any real direction to a certain vision. And even if there is a vision for the content of the game as cruel it might be with all the EP 1-3 stuff in here, the mistakes and errors that are done continiously from the DEV department as well as the managers with the focus of their attention and time, its hard to constrain myself from ranting on the forum.
I stopped contributing good ideas solving the causes of all these problems than just trying to hotfix and listen to the whining masses, since the usually get lost in all flame or whine threads, but today it slipped me, sorry, I didnt had the strength to edit this post and delete all the rant, so sorry if I had to vent here.
It just hurts ....

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